Intellectual decadence.

Paul Hollander Discontents: Postmodern and Postcommunist. Transaction, 395 pages, $39.95

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. ...