Intellect is not wisdom. Therefore, we should not be surprised when an intellectual says something profoundly unwise. While we owe a lot of human progress to all the intellectuals who came before us, it would not be unfair to say that sometimes they have gone horribly wrong.
Let’s talk about five such instances when intellectuals made some egregious errors. (Caution: they can hurt your intellect!)
Aristotle on women
In his book Politics, Aristotle saw women as subject to men, but as higher than slaves (thank you for this), lacking authority; he believed the husband should exert political rule over the wife. His exact words:
The relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled.
Further, he writes in History of Animals:
Wherefore women are more compassionate and more readily made to weep, more jealous and querulous, fonder of railing, and more contentious. The female also is more subject to depression of spirits and despair than the male. She is also more shameless and false, more readily deceived, and more mindful of injury, more watchful, more idle, and on the whole less excitable than the male.
Clearly, this is going to hurt modern sensibilities!
Marx, Engels and intellectual racism
Karl Marx’s anti-semitic views, though not a secret, are rarely discussed. In 1844, he published an essay titled On the Jewish Question. He wrote that the worldly religion of Jews was “huckstering” and that the Jew’s god was “money.” Further, he said that Jews could only become an emancipated ethnicity or culture when they no longer exist. This sounds like a step before the genocide, isn’t it?
Karl Marx’s co-author (The Communist Manifesto) Friedrich Engels was no different when it came to talking about African people. This is what he wrote about a man of African descent who was trying to get into politics:
Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.
Bertrand Russell and disarmament
Bertrand Russell argued in the 1930s for the complete disarmament of Britain, even as Hitler was gearing up for war.
Russell opposed the rearming of Britain against Nazi Germany, suggesting instead that, in order to avoid all-out war, if the Germans invaded England, they should be “treated as visitors and invited to dine with the prime minister.”
Russell’s argument would have spelled disaster if it had been acted upon. Thank god, it hadn’t!
Paul Erlic’s dystopian vision
Environmentalist Paul R. Ehrlich said in 1968:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines, hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death, in spite of any crash program embarked upon now.
Yet, after that decade, and in later decades that have come and gone, not only that nothing of this sort has happened, a growing problem in a growing number of countries is obesity and unsaleable aggricultural surpluses.
Ralph Nader’s fear of Corvair
Ralph Nader first became a major public figure with the 1965 publication of his book Unsafe at Any Speed. The book depicted the American cars in general and Corvair in particular as accident prone. But, despite the fact that empirical studies have shown the Corvair to be at least as safe as the other cars of its day, Nader not only continued to have credibility, but aquired a reputation for idealism and insight that made him something of a secular saint among the intellectuals.
Reference books:
Kalampedia 