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In Intellectual Morons, Daniel J. Flynn ridicules the irrationality and dogmatism of many major intellectual figures. Although it is mainly leftist "intellectuals" such as Peter Singer and Howard Zinn who catch Flynn's flak (in the face of our overwhelmingly liberal institutions of higher learning, he could hardly have done otherwise), the author is equally acerbic in his treatment of Ayn Rand's "Objectivist Collective" and the neoconservatives who inspired the Iraq campaign. The author meticulously illuminates the depths of lunacy and hypocrisy, beginning with the communist Herbert Marcuse, who preached that "freedom is totalitarianism, education is indoctrination, violence is nonviolence and fiction is truth." Flynn discredits the "homosexual, wife-swapper, sadomasochist" Alfred Kinsey, who believed that there were "only three kinds of sexual abnormalities: abstinence, celibacy, and delayed marriage." Flynn shows that Kinsey's research and statistics were riddled with methodological errors and over-sampling, resulting in a ludicrous picture of American sex life. For example, approximately 20% of the men surveyed for Sexual Behavior of the Human Male were gay. Flynn applies a scalpel to two icons of the environmental movement, Paul Ehrlich and animal-rights/eugenics zealot Peter Singer (who believes parents should be allowed to kill their children within 28 days of birth), followed by author Rigoberta Menchu, the Zinn-Chomsky-Vidal axis of America-hating historical revisionism, W.E.B. DuBois, and Jacques Derrida. Intellectual Morons is not a book written to persuade. It is hard to imagine any leftists being turned away from the dark side by this book because the author has his own preconceptions, and because most of his targets are longtime lightning rods for conservatives. However, with more than 900 footnotes, Flynn's arguments are difficult to dispute. The book illuminates how truly fraudulent as well as wrong many apostles of liberalism actually were. When Intellectual Morons does not inform, it amuses, thanks to the sheer silliness of what the Enlightened espouse. The book ends with a discussion of crop circles. Even though mysterious circles of flattened crops in Britain were debunked as the work of a couple of youthful pranksters copied by dozens of others, there are still people who insist that, in spite of all evidence, crop circles were caused by aliens. Such are intellectual morons. When the subject is something as mundane as a teenage prank, it is amusing; but when intellectual morons have shaped national policies based on disproven theories and in the face of all evidence to the contrary, someone has to show appropriate outrage. (Crown Publishing NY, 2004, 284 pages, $14.95) |
His thesis is not that intellectual morons are leftists (even if it seems that way) but that fervent ideology clouds reason ad absurdum, even if the ideologue in question is an otherwise intelligent academic.
