Rob Riemen
Nobility of Spirit:
A Forgotten Ideal.
Yale University Press, 160 pages, $22

History shows innumerable examples of intellectuals whose political judgments turned out to be misdirected, misguided, and just plain mistaken. To borrow an old line, there are propositions so bizarre that only an educated person could believe them. Cleon pointed out as much during the heated Mytilenian debate of 427 B.C., when he urged the common folk of Athens to ignore the intellectuals and continue the war against Sparta.

Which they did, at least until the Battle of Amphipolis in 422, when the Athenians were defeated and Cleon was killed. In truth, throughout history, the eggheads, longhairs, and bluestockings have often been wrong—but that doesn’t necessarily make the people right, particularly when there are vicious demagogues such as Cleon to urge them on.

“In a democracy that does not respect intellectual life and is not guided by it,” Thomas Mann wrote in his 1938 The Coming Victory of Democracy, “demagogy has free rein, and the level of the national life is lowered to that of the ignorant and uncultivated. But this cannot happen if the principle of education is allowed to dominate and if the tendencies prevail to raise the lower classes to an appreciation of culture and to accept the leadership of the better elements.” Mann did not think that aristocracy and democracy were necessarily incompatible. An aristocracy of the spirit and the mind was, in his opinion, the best safeguard of democracy: Democracy is true to itself only when it is ennobled by humanistic principles.

Sound good? Or, at least, sound interesting? Well, that’s about as favorable a reading as it is possible to give Rob Riemen’s recent book, Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal. The founder of a center-left think-tank in Holland called the Nexus Institute, Riemen has written a series of personal reflections on the notion of the nobility of spirit and the role of intellectuals as the guardians of civilization. The result is, in the end, an unserious book with half a serious truth lurking within it.

The unserious portion looks like this: People with noble spirits could save us from the horrors of nihilism, if only we would let them. But the awful turn toward egalitarianism in early modern times produced nihilism in late modern times, and now everything has gone sour. You’d think that this means we should obey the authority of our elites, but it turns out that, for Rieman, the archetypal bad guys are Nazis and Catholics, because they teach obedience to authority. Looks like a contradiction in Nobility of Spirit, yes? Ah, but the Nazis and Catholics—conveniently combined by Rieman in the imaginary figure of a priest with a swastika, standing in an Italian jail browbeating a prisoner—want obedience even from intellectuals. And intellectuals must be absolutely free, or they won’t be able to keep up their noble spirit, which is what requires obedience from the rest of us.

To which, about all one can say is: Bah. Still, Rieman actually has something like a genuine idea kicking around the edges of his book. Every time it looks as though Nobility of Spirit is going to let the idea take center stage, it gets shoved into the wings so Reiman can trot out his flea-bitten dog-and-pony show of brave humanists beaten down by oppressive forces. But let’s pretend the author had actually had the sense to focus on his one interesting thought. In that case, Nobility of Spirit would be a book that at least has the sense to raise the question of why culture is necessary to preserve civilization.

Riemen’s hero is the German novelist Thomas Mann, who, more than anyone else in Riemen’s judgment, fit the ideal of the intellectual of noble spirit. “When Thomas Mann met President Roosevelt,” George Steiner notes in his foreword to the book, “he was introduced as the ‘incarnation of European civilization.’” Mann was born in 1875, which means that he was fully shaped before the beginning of the First World War—the war that put an end to the old epoch of European culture. Mann did not involve himself in supporting any ideological movement. In 1918 he published his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, which defends “essential values” but warns that “culture can degenerate into barbarism when sociopolitical developments are ignored.” As Riemen puts it, “It is a conservative book, albeit on behalf of the future and not the past.”

By the time Mann moved to the United States in 1938, the political scene had changed: Nazism, Fascism, and Bolshevism overshadowed his earlier concerns. Nazism was evil, but Mann became disappointed with “the cynicism of the Western democracies,” which could put up with Nazism and Fascism to prevent the spread of Bolshevism. During the early 1950s the FBI opened a file on Mann and his children. The FBI saw in Mann’s earlier political views a “premature anti-Fascism.” As Riemen interprets it, this means “resistance to Fascism before America declared war on Germany” —which is to say that even a democratic government proves incapable of suffering true independence of thought.

Riemen begins Nobility of Spirit not with Mann himself, but with Mann’s youngest daughter, Elisabeth, who was Riemen’s personal acquaintance. If Thomas Mann was a man of the nineteenth century, his daughter “was a true embodiment of the twentieth century.” Elisabeth was born in 1918 and in 1938 moved to the United States with her parents. Later, she married a well-known anti-Fascist, Giuseppe Borgese. She was a social activist, a professor at Dalhousie University in Canada, and the only female founding member of the Club of Rome. She spent the last years of her life in New York, where she experienced the attacks of September 11, the discussion of which Riemen interweaves with anecdotes from her personal life in New York.

For Riemen, September 11 forces us to face the idea of civilization. It was, he notes, the eighteenth-century French writer Condorcet who defined the term civilization to mean a society “that needs no violence to introduce political change.” Some such definition is what allows us to condemn political violence and to call acts of such violence barbaric—for they are, by their nature, uncivilized. Both the Nazis and the Fascists were barbarians, in this sense, and we have no difficulty condemning them.

Yet many intellectuals these days blame the victims, rather than the perpetrators, for the attacks of September 11. Take Dario Fo, for example. Shortly after the attacks, the Italian Nobel Prize-winning author contrasted the small number of victims in New York with the millions of people dying from poverty. Since America is to blame for world poverty, the American victims were (indirectly) to blame for the fact that they were murdered.

One can go on and on, quoting the intellectuals who insisted that September 11 was America’s fault. And it seems obvious enough that the error lies with those intellectuals. And even if Riemen can’t quite bring himself to admit the error, he does see that something in the intellectual life has gone badly wrong: “When millions of people can ‘believe’ in nihilism, the guardians of the cultural heritage have failed or, worse, have committed treason. They lament capitalism, commercialism, and superficiality, yet support these ways of life by continuing their chatter that nothing is timeless or universal because everything is relative.”

“Where I am, there is German culture,” Mann once said. He intended not to boast but to say that he retained within himself a deep awareness of what was best in European civilization. Perhaps Riemen would have gotten further if he had asked how many present-day intellectuals could say about themselves what Mann said. Who among the American intellectuals can actually say: “Where I am, there is American culture”?

And yet, simply to blame intellectuals would be too easy. There is also the possibility that Thomas Mann’s hope for ennobling democracy by the “leadership by the finest and the best” is futile. Why should we assume that Cleon is unrepresentative of democratic leadership? Without much grasp of why common people rush to embrace egalitarianism whenever it’s offered it to them, Reimen has only half the problem in view.

Still, even that half is enough to be unsettling. “If the discrepancy between politics and people on the one hand and the intellectual elite on the other—‘guardians of civilization,’ as Socrates called them—is so huge as to be irreconcilable,” as Nobility of Spirit rightly notes, “then the ideal of civilization, whatever it may be, is in deep trouble.”