Twenty years ago, I made a brief study of the Acknowledgments sections of cook books. Even the great and otherwise restrained Elizabeth David could not resist thanking “countless” other cookery writers for their help in one book. And so does practically every other cookery writer. After “countless,” the next most frequent word in such acknowledgments is “secrets.” The author thanks the countless other cooks for sharing their secrets though, after this mass and repeated orgy of dissemination, “secrets” seems an odd word to use. Authors also thank their families too in hyperbolic terms and, do you know, not a single cookbook would have been possible without the Herculean labors of the typist.

I thought I was the only person who had noticed this particular source of disgustingly effusive gratitude until I read Discontents. Paul Hollander has a whole, hilarious chapter on them. It’s a new and entirely happy world in which writing is something only possible through spouses who are unfailingly supportive and loving, students who deluge their professors with insights, children who have selflessly put up with neglect, and publishers and secretaries who have been angels. Paul Hollander is very funny and very cheerful, the very opposite of discontent. His book is a collection of previously published essays on intellectuals and Communism. Both are deeply depressing subjects, but Hollander, while being analytically incisive and damning about them, still retains his good humor. That’s a rare and very powerful combination.

The chapters on Communism’s toll of 100 million victims describe the horrid details of the crimes and leave no escape routes for apologists and evaders, but he never descends to rant. And he has an eye for the hilarious. Describing the visit of one western “political pilgrim” to North Korea, he quotes the “deluded” traveller: “Kim Il Sung whom we did not meet … sent personal greetings… . He was no Stalinist. He seemed friendly to religion, regularly visited farms … and was frequently in touch with the ordinary people… . Some of those we met interpreted him as benevolent … more like a patriarchal father who makes final decisions… . [He] was respected, admired, even venerated … the people liked and believed in him.” This visitor saw no tanks and armaments. But in South Korea he was most indignant about “the huge concrete wall initiated by the US military.”

Hollander’s analysis of the liberal-left intellectual in America is complex. The puzzle is why intelligent people in a rich, healthy America have so many “discontents.” Why do they hate their own, very good, society so much? Some dislike modernity itself and are especially resentful of science. Hollander talks of their loss of sense of meaning and purpose. Others feel modern society does not value them enough. Their ambitions and amour propre are frustrated. Then there is the cult of victimhood. “On the campuses and in liberal high-income communities few would question any charge of racism, sexism, homophobia, elitism… . Every opportunity is taken to engage in collective self-flagellation… . Scepticism about … charges is treated as the self-evident proof of the racism (sexism, etc.) of the sceptic.”

There is the proliferation of sectional rights which turns both politics and academe into a war of interest groups in which ideology masks and serves self-interest. This allied to a weakness for exculpating determinisms initiates a hunt for systems and interest groups to blame and condemn. In this view, crime, poverty, and educational failure are caused by the moral failure of society or oppressive groups within it, never by individual failure. There’s the intellectualist hunger for coherence and neatness. Intellectuals “need to find meaning and coherence in life.” They are people with “a chronically unappeased appetite for meaning, justice, and moral truths constantly on the look out for plausible belief systems.” In a modern world, “a society in which nothing is sacred and therefore, nothing forbidden,” this hunger is constantly and promiscuously titillated. “Such a society is a fertile ground for confusion, alienation, vague longings, and discontents, which give rise to political pilgrimages and other quests for meaning.”

Bizarrely coexisting with the search for neatness is the acceptance of contradiction: noticeably the contradiction between the demands of relativism and anti-elitism—that no culture be judged better than any other—and the demands of anti-Westernism that ridicule Western culture and patriarchy together with political correctness. This is even further complicated by arbitrarily contrived judgments of moral equivalence between societies such as the former Communist societies and the United States that are in no way equivalent. It would take an especially brave man today, says Hollander, to declare as one anthropologist did in 1965 that to accord all cultures equal dignity is “not only nonsense but sentimental nonsense … an absurdity to assert that cannibalism, slavery, … and killing the aged should be accorded the same dignity as old age security and scientific medicine.”

There is the curious way in which the unphysical intellectual is attracted to force in such Communist societies and the even more curious way in which the well-trained mind can suspend critical faculties and indulge in sentimentalism. “Being an intellectual … does not provide a protection against fundamentally wrongheaded political judgments, against the urge to submit to unworthy political impulses, against confusing what is with what one would like to be… . [The popularity of] multiculturalism, deconstructionism, radical feminism and postmodernism all linked together by an intense aversion to Western culture … demonstrate (once more) that intellectuals are capable of suspending their critical faculties, and do so with ease and relish when propelled by what they consider a good cause, or lofty ideals.”

There is the attraction of therapy, the hunger for spirituality, and, particularly in political pilgrimages, “the process of enchantment.” Hollander quotes Malcolm Muggeridge: “You are frustrated revolu- tionaries, and the spectacle of a revolu- tionary government in actual existence so intoxicates you that you fall on your knees, senses swooning in awed worship… . You who for so long had to be content with spinning your ideas into words, see in it the possibility of translating them suddenly into deeds.”

This is a formidable and fascinating list. One might want to add to it the loss of moral vocabulary, of character anchored in stable family and social class and the elevation of expertise and intellectual fashion over wisdom. Hollander does not really try to tidy up this list of symptoms, diseases, and causes into a theory. He is probably right, for to do so is to give into the temptation of neatness. To my mind he does not actually sort out whether there is too much or too little rationalism in the current treachery of intellectuals. The closest he comes to an overall explanation is in the repeated use of “decadence” to describe it.

And there is the key question: Is Western society decadent or is the decadence limited to a small intellectual part of it and a passing couple of generations? The word decadence is well chosen. Though many Americans, steeped in a spirit of optimism and progress, will instinctively shrink from words such as “decadence” and “decline,” they are essentially what the debate is about. Discontents is a fascinating, erudite, and good-natured book, a book for our time.