The Intelligentsia Only Deal with Abstract People

Abstract people have an immortality which flesh-and-blood people have yet to achieve.  Thus, a historian writing about the newly-created state of Czechoslovakia after the First World War, said that its policies regarding the ethnic groups within it were designed “to correct social injustice” and to “put right the historic wrongs of the seventeenth century” - despite the fact that the actual flesh-and-blood people from the seventeenth century had died long before, putting the redressing of their wrongs beyond the reach of human power.

Much the same kind of reasoning has continued to be ideologically powerful among the intelligentsia in twenty-first century America, who speak of “whites” and “blacks” as intertemporal abstractions with centuries-old issues to be redressed, rather than as flesh-and-blood individuals who take their sins and their sufferings with them to the grave.  There is surely no more profound difference between human beings than the difference between the dead and the living.  Yet even that difference is glided over verbally when speaking of races as intertemporal abstractions, of whom the current living generation is just the latest embodiment.

Unlike real people, abstract people can be sent “back” to places where they have never been.  Thus millions of descendants of German families who had lived for centuries in parts of Eastern Europe and the Balkans were sent “back” to Germany after the Second World War, as the majority populations of these regions reacted bitterly to having been mistreated during Nazi occupation by imposing a massive ethnic cleansing of Germans from their midst after the war.  Many of these flesh-and-blood individuals of German ancestry had never laid eyes on Germany, to which they were being sent “back.”  Only as intertemporal abstractions had they come from Germany.

It was much the same story with so-called Indian Tamils in Sri Lanka who, in the 1960s, were sent “back” to India, from which their ancestors had emigrated in the nineteenth century.  Similarly, when people of Indian and Pakistani heritage were expelled from Uganda in the 1970s, most of them had been born in Uganda and more of them resettled in Britain than in India or Pakistan.  Perhaps the most persistent efforts to repatriate intertemporal abstractions were nineteenth-century American proposals to free the slaves and then send them “back to Africa” - a continent which in most cases neither they nor their grandparents had ever seen.

Intertemporal abstractions are especially useful to those intellectuals who tend to conceive of social issues in terms which allow the intelligentsia to be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.  When intellectuals are unable to find enough contemporary grievances to suit their vision or agenda, they can mine the past for harm inflicted by some on others.  By conceiving of those involved in the past as members of intertemporal abstractions, the intelligentsia can polarize contemporary descendants of those involved in past acts.  The kind of society to which that leads is one in which a newborn baby enters the world supplied with prepackaged grievances against other babies born the same day.

It is hard to imagine anything more conducive to unending internal strife and a weakening of the bonds that hold a society together.  The tragic history of territorial irredentism offers little reason for optimism about moral irredentism.


Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, p.126-127