Reappraisals
Page 3
But above all, the twentieth century saw the emergence of a new intellectual type: the rootless “voyager in the century.” Typically such persons had passed from political or ideological commitment in the wake of the Russian Revolution into a world-weary skepticism: compatible with a sort of disabused, pessimistic liberalism but at a tangent to national or ideological allegiances. Many of these representative twentieth-century intellectuals were Jewish (though few remained practicing Jews and fewer still became active Zionists), overwhelmingly from the Jewish communities of Eastern and Central Europe: “chance survivors of a deluge” in Hannah Arendt’s words. Many, too, came from cities and provinces that for all their cultural cosmopolitanism, were geographically peripheral: Königsberg, Cernovitz, Vilna, Sarajevo, Alexandria, Calcutta, or Algiers. Most were exiled in one way or another and would have shared, on their own terms, Edward Said’s bewilderment at the appeal of patriotism: “I still have not been able to understand what it means to love a country.”
Taken all in all, these men and women constituted a twentieth-century “Republic of Letters”: a virtual community of conversation and argument whose influence reflected and illuminated the tragic choices of the age. Some of them are represented in the essays in this book. Of these, Arendt and Albert Camus may be the only names still familiar to a broad audience. Primo Levi is of course widely read today, but not, perhaps, in ways he might have wished. Manès Sperber is sadly forgotten, though his distinctively Jewish trajectory is perhaps the most emblematic of them all. Arthur Koestler, whose life, allegiances, and writings established him for many decades as the intellectual archetype of the age, is no longer a household name. There was a time when every college student had read—or wanted to read—Darkness at Noon. Today, Koestler’s best-selling novel of the Moscow show trials is an acquired, minority taste.
If young readers find Koestler’s themes alien and his concerns exotic, this is because we have lost touch not only with the great intellectuals of the past century but also with the ideas and ideals that moved them. Outside North Korea, no one under the age of forty today has an adult memory of life in a Communist society.5 It is now so long since a self-confident “Marxism” was the conventional ideological reference point of the intellectual Left that it is quite difficult to convey to a younger generation what it stood for and why it aroused such passionate sentiments for and against. There is much to be said for consigning defunct dogmas to the dustbin of history, particularly when they have been responsible for so much suffering. But we pay a price: The allegiances of the past— and thus the past itself—become utterly incomprehensible.
If we are to understand the world whence we have just emerged, we need to remind ourselves of the power of ideas. And we need to recall the remarkable grip exercised by the Marxist idea in particular upon the imagination of the twentieth century. Many of the most interesting minds of the age were drawn to it, if only for a while: on its own account or because the collapse of liberalism and the challenge of Fascism offered no apparent alternative. Many others, some of whom were never in the least tempted by the mirage of Revolution, nevertheless devoted much of their lives to engaging and combating Marxism. They took its challenge very seriously indeed and often understood it better than its acolytes.
The Jewish intellectuals of interwar and postwar Central Europe were especially drawn to Marxism: in part by the Promethean ambition of the project, but also thanks to the complete collapse of their world, the impossibility of returning to the past or continuing in the old ways, the seeming inevitability of building an utterly different, new world. “Žydokommuna” (“Judeo-Communism”) may be an anti-Semitic term of abuse in Polish nationalist circles, but for a few crucial years it also described a reality. The remarkable Jewish contribution to the history of modern Eastern Europe cannot be disentangled from the unique attraction to Central European Jewish intellectuals of the Marxist project. In retrospect, of course, the intellectual and personal enthusiasms and engagements of the age seem tragically out of proportion to the gray, grim outcome. But that is not how things seemed at the time.
Because all this passion now appears spent, and the counter-passions it aroused accordingly redundant, commentators today are inclined to dismiss the ideological “culture wars” of the twentieth century, the doctrinal challenges and counter-challenges, as a closed book. Communism confronted capitalism (or liberalism): It lost, both in the terrain of ideas and on the ground, and is thus behind us. But in dismissing the failed promises and false prophets of the past, we are also a little too quick to underestimate—or simply to forget—their appeal. Why, after all, were so many talented minds (not to speak of many millions of voters and activists) attracted to these promises and those prophets? Because of the horrors and fears of the age? Perhaps. But were the circumstances of the twentieth century really so unusual, so unique and unrepeatable that we can be sure that whatever propelled men and women toward the grand narratives of revolution and renewal will not come again? Are the sunlit uplands of “peace, democracy, and the free market” truly here to stay?6
WE ARE PREDISPOSED today to look back upon the twentieth century as an age of political extremes, of tragic mistakes and wrongheaded choices; an age of delusion from which we have now, thankfully, emerged. But are we not just as deluded? In our newfound worship of the private sector and the market have we not simply inverted the faith of an earlier generation in “public ownership” and “the state,” or in “planning”? Nothing is more ideological, after all, than the proposition that all affairs and policies, private and public, must turn upon the globalizing economy, its unavoidable laws, and its insatiable demands. Indeed, this worship of economic necessity and its iron laws was also a core premise of Marxism. In transiting from the twentieth century to the twenty-first, have we not just abandoned one nineteenth-century belief system and substituted another in its place?
We are no less confused, it seems, in the moral lessons we claim to have drawn from the past century. Modern secular society has long been uncomfortable with the idea of “evil.” Liberals are embarrassed by its uncompromising ethical absolutism and religious overtones. The great political religions of the twentieth century preferred more rationalistic, instrumental accounts of good and bad, right and wrong. But in the wake of World War II, the Nazi destruction of the Jews, and a growing international awareness of the scale of Communist crimes, “evil” crept slowly back into moral and even political discourse. Hannah Arendt was perhapsthe first to recognize this, when she wrote in 1945 that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe”; but it is Leszek Kołakowski, a very different sort of philosopher working in an avowedly religious tradition, who has put the matter best: “The Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously. Evil, I contend, is not contingent, it is not the absence, or deformation, or the subversion of virtue (or whatever else we may think of as its opposite), but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.”
But now that the concept of “evil” has reentered discursive usage, we don’t know what to do with it. In Western usage today the word is deployed primarily to denote the “unique” evil of Hitler and the Nazis. But here we become confused. Sometimes the genocide of the Jews—the “Holocaust”—is presented as a singular crime, the twentieth-century incarnation of an evil never matched before or since, an example and a warning: “Never again.” But at other times we are all too ready to invoke that same evil for comparative purposes, finding genocidal intentions, “axes of evil” and “Hitlers” everywhere from Iraq to North Korea, and warning of an impending repeat of the unique and unrepeatable every time someone smears anti-Semitic graffiti on a synagogue wall or expresses nostalgia for Stalin. In all this we have lost sight of what it was about twentieth-century radical ideologies that proved so seductive and thus truly diabolical. Sixty years ago Arendt feared that we would not know how to speak of evil and would thus never grasp its significanc
e. Today we speak of it all the time—with the same result.
Much the same confusion attends our contemporary obsession with “terror,” “terrorism,” and “terrorists.” To state what should be obvious, there is nothing new about terrorism and it is hard to know what to make of a historian who can claim that terrorism is a “post-Cold War phenomenon” (see Chapter XXI). Even if we exclude assassinations or attempted assassinations of presidents and monarchs and confine ourselves to those who kill unarmed civilians in pursuit of a political objective, terrorists have been with us for well over a hundred years. There have been Russian terrorists, Indian terrorists, Arab terrorists, Basque terrorists, Malay terrorists, and dozens of others besides. There have been and still are Christian terrorists, Jewish terrorists, and Muslim terrorists. There were Yugoslav (“partisan”) terrorists settling scores in World War II; Zionist terrorists blowing up Arab marketplaces in Palestine before 1948; American-financed Irish terrorists in Margaret Thatcher’s London; U.S.-armed mujahaddin terrorists in 1980s Afghanistan, and so on.
No one who has lived in Spain, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Japan, the UK, or France, not to speak of more habitually violent lands, could have failed to notice the omnipresence of terrorists—using guns, knives, bombs, chemicals, cars, trains, planes, and much else—over the course of the twentieth century right up to and beyond the year 2000. The only—only—thing that has changed is the September 2001 unleashing of homicidal terrorism within the United States. Even that is not wholly unprecedented: The means are new and the carnage horrifying, but terrorism on U.S. soil was not unknown in the early years of the twentieth century.
But whereas in our reiterated invocation and abuse of the idea of “evil” we have imprudently trivialized the concept, with terrorism we have made the opposite mistake. We have raised an otherwise mundane act of politically motivated murder into a moral category, an ideological abstraction, and a global foe. We should not be surprised to find that this has once again been achieved by the ill-informed invocation of inappropriate twentieth-century analogies. “We” are not merely at war with terrorists; we are engaged in a worldwide civilizational struggle—“a global enterprise of uncertain duration,” according to the Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy—with “Islamo-Fascism.”
There is a double confusion here. The first, of course, consists of simplifying the motives of the anti-Fascist movements of the 1930s, while lumping together the widely varying Fascisms of early-twentieth-century Europe with the very different resentments, demands, and strategies of the (equally varied) Muslim movements and insurgencies of our own time. Familiarity with recent history might help correct these errors. But the more serious mistake consists of taking the form for the content: defining all the various terrorists and terrorisms, with their contrasting and often conflicting objectives, by their actions alone. It would be rather as though one were to lump together Italian Red Brigades, the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the Provisional IRA, the Basque ETA, Switzerland’s Jura Separatists, and the National Front for the Liberation of Corsica, call the resulting amalgam “European Extremism” . . . and then declare war against the phenomenon of political violence in Europe.
The danger of abstracting “terrorism” from its different contexts, setting it upon a pedestal as the greatest threat to Western civilization, or democracy, or “our way of life,” and targeting it for an indefinite war is that we shall neglect the many other challenges of the age. On this, too, the illusions and errors of the cold war years might have something to teach us about ideological tunnel vision. Hannah Arendt, once again: “The greatest danger of recognizing totalitarianism as the curse of the century would be an obsession with it to the extent of becoming blind to the numerous small and not so small evils with which the road to hell is paved.”7
But of all our contemporary illusions, the most dangerous is the one that underpins and accounts for all the others. And that is the idea that we live in a time without precedent: that what is happening to us is new and irreversible and that the past has nothing to teach us . . . except when it comes to ransacking it for serviceable precedents. To take but one example: Only a quite astonishing indifference to the past could lead an American secretary of state to discourage outside efforts to end Israel’s calamitous 2006 war in Lebanon (itself an ill-fated replay of an equally calamitous invasion twenty-five years before) by describing the unfolding disaster as “the birth-pangs of a new Middle East.” The modern history of the Middle East is drenched in the blood of serial political miscarriages. The last thing the region needs is yet another incompetent foreign midwife.8
Such foolhardiness is perhaps easier to sell in a country like the United States—which venerates its own past but pays the history of the rest of humankind insufficient attention—than in Europe, where the cost of past mistakes and the visible evidence of their consequences were until recently quite hard to miss. But even in Europe a younger generation of citizens and politicians is increasingly oblivious to history: Ironically, this is especially the case in the former Communist lands of Central Europe, where “building capitalism” and “getting rich” are the new collective goals, while democracy is taken for granted and even regarded in some quarters as an impediment.9
But even “capitalism” has a history. The last time the capitalist world passed through a period of unprecedented expansion and great private wealth creation, during the “globalization” avant le mot of the world economy in the decades preceding World War I, there was a widespread assumption in imperial Britain—much as there is in the U.S. and Western Europe today—that this was the threshold of a truly unprecedented age of indefinite peace and prosperity. Anyone seeking an account of this confidence—and what became of it—can do no better than read the magisterial opening paragraphs of John Maynard Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace : a summary of the hubristic illusions of a world on the edge of catastrophe, written in the aftermath of the war that was to put an end to all such irenic fancies for the next fifty years.10
It was Keynes, too, who anticipated and helped prepare for the “craving for security” that Europeans would feel after three decades of war and economic collapse. As I have suggested above, it was in large measure thanks to the precautionary services and safety nets incorporated into their postwar systems of governance that the citizens of the advanced countries lost the gnawing sentiment of insecurity and fear which had dominated political life between 1914 and 1945.
Until now. For there are reasons to believe that this may be about to change. Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one’s daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.
Few democratic governments can resist the temptation to turn this sentiment of fear to political advantage. Some have already done so. In which case we should not be surprised to see the revival of pressure groups, political parties, and political programs based upon fear: fear of foreigners; fear of change; fear of open frontiers and open communications; fear of the free exchange of unwelcome opinions. In recent years such people and parties have done well in a number of impeccably democratic countries—Belgium, Switzerland, and Israel, as well as more vulnerable republics like Russia, Poland, and Venezuela—and the challenge they present has tempted mainstream parties in the U.S., Denmark, Holland, France, and the United Kingdom to take a harsher line with visitors, “aliens,” illegal immigrants, and cultural or religious minorities. We can expect more along these lines in years to come, probably aimed at restricting the flow of “threatening” goods and ideas as well as people. The politics of insecurity are contagious.
/> In that case we might do well to take a second glance at the way our twentieth-century predecessors responded to what were, in many respects, comparable dilemmas. We may discover, as they did, that the collective provision of social services and some restriction upon inequalities of income and wealth are important economic variables in themselves, furnishing the necessary public cohesion and political confidence for a sustained prosperity—and that only the state has the resources and the authority actively to underwrite those services and provisions and limitations in our collective name.
We may find that a healthy democracy, far from being threatened by the regulatory state, actually depends upon it: that in a world increasingly polarized between isolated, insecure individuals and unregulated global forces, the legitimate authority of the democratic state may be the best kind of intermediate institution we can devise. What, after all, is the alternative? Our contemporary cult of economic freedom, combined with a heightened sense of fear and insecurity, could lead to reduced social provision and minimal economic regulation, but accompanied by extensive governmental oversight of communication, movement, and opinion. “Chinese” capitalism, as it were, Western-style.
What, then, are the limits of the democratic state? What is the proper balance of private initiative and public interest, of liberty and equality? What are the manageable objectives of social policy, and what constitutes interference and overreach? Where exactly should we situate the inevitable compromise between maximized private wealth and minimized social friction? What are the appropriate boundaries of political and religious communities, and how best should we minimize frictions across them? How should we police those conflicts (both within states and between them) that cannot be negotiated? And so forth.
These are the challenges of the coming century. They were also the challenges that faced the last century, which is why they will sound at least a little familiar to some. They are a reminder that the simple nostrums of today’s ideologues of “freedom” are no more help to us in a complex world than were those of their predecessors on the other side of the twentieth-century ideological chasm; a reminder, too, that yesterday’s Left and today’s Right share among other things an overconfident propensity to deny the relevance of past experience to present problems. We think we have learned enough from the past to know that many of the old answers don’t work, and that may be true. But what the past can truly help us understand is the perennial complexity of the questions.