by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.
What’s the Trouble? Social Crisis, Crisis of Civilization, or Both
{1971}
We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines.
—SAUL BELLOW, Herzog
The rhetoric of apocalypse haunts the air and naturally fools rush in to use it. Some of it is indeed “mere junk from fashionable magazines,” and even those of us who know that we have lived through a terrible century can become impatient with the newest modes in fin du mondisme. Yet people who are anything but fools seem also to yield themselves to visions of gloom, as if through a surrender of rationality and will they might find a kind of peace. And there is a feeling abroad, which I partly share, that even if our cities were to be rebuilt and our racial conflicts to be eased, we would still be left with a heavy burden of trouble, a trouble not merely personal or social but having to do with some deep if ill-located regions of experience. To be sure, if we could solve social problems of the magnitude I have just mentioned, our sense of the remaining troubles would come to seem less ominous. But they would still be there. They would be symptoms of a crisis of civilization through which Western society has been moving for at least a century and a half.
A social crisis signifies a breakdown in the functioning of a society: it fails to feed the poor, it cannot settle disputes among constituent groups, it drags the country into an endless war. If local, a social crisis calls for reform; if extensive, for deep changes in the relationships of power. Yet both those defending and those attacking the society may well be speaking with complete sincerity in behalf of a common heritage of values. Even a major social change doesn’t necessarily lead to a radical disruption of the civilization in which it occurs. The American Revolution did not. By contrast, the Russian Revolution not only overturned social arrangements, it also signified a deep rent within the fabric of civilization—or so it seemed only a few decades ago, though today, with the increasing “bourgeoisification” of Russia, we can no longer be certain. Romantic writers like Pilnyak and Pasternak looked upon the Revolution less as a step to proletarian power than as an upheaval within the depths of their country that would force it toward a destiny sharply different from that of the West. Trotsky attacked these writers for this heresy, but in retrospect it does not seem that they were quite as foolish as he made out. They were talking about a crisis of civilization.
Though it may coincide with a social crisis and thereby exacerbate its effects, a crisis of civilization has to do not so much with the workings of the economy or the rightness of social arrangements as it does with the transmission of values, those tacit but deeply lodged assumptions by means of which men try to regulate their conduct. At least in principle, a social crisis is open to solutions by legislation and reform, that is, public policy. But a crisis of civilization, though it can be muted or its effects postponed by the relief of social problems, cannot as a rule be dissolved through acts of public policy. It has more to do with the experience of communities and generations than with the resolution of social conflict. It works itself out in ways we don’t readily understand and sometimes, far from working itself out, it continues to fester. A social crisis raises difficulties, a crisis of civilization dilemmas. A social crisis is expressed mainly through public struggle, a crisis of civilization mainly through incoherence of behavior.
To speak of a crisis of civilization is not, of course, to suggest that our civilization is coming to an end: it may be but we have no way of knowing. Nor is it to suggest that every change taking place at the deeper and more obscure levels of our experience should immediately be submitted to moral judgment. There are many things about which we simply cannot know. We can only say that developments occur which occupy a longer time span and are more deeply lodged in the intangibles of conduct than is true for the issues of a given moment.
II
Let us now turn abruptly away from our present concerns and move backward to a point some 75 or 80 years ago, in order to see how an English left-laborite or German Social Democrat might have felt about the experience of his time.1*
The main historical fact about the nineteenth century—and for socialists, one of the greatest facts in all history—is that the masses, dumb through the centuries, began to enter public life. A Berlin worker had heard August Bebel speak; he was struck by the thought that, for all his limitations of status, he might help shape public policy; and indeed, he might even form or join his “own” party. He would, in the jargon of our day, become a subject of history rather than its object. What the worker came dimly to realize was not merely that history could be made, the lesson of the French Revolution, but that he himself might make it, the message of socialism.
The whole tragic experience of our century demonstrates this to be one of the few unalterable commandments of socialism: the participation of the workers, the masses of human beings, as self-conscious men preparing to enter the arena of history. Without that, or some qualified version of it, socialism is nothing but a mockery, a swindle of bureaucrats and intellectuals reaching out for power. With it, socialism could still be the greatest of human visions. This belief in the autonomous potential of the masses lay at the heart of early Marxism, in what we may now be inclined to regard as its most attractive period: the years in which European social democracy gradually emerged as a popular movement.
Meanwhile there had flowered in England the theory and practice of classical liberalism. By classical liberalism I have in mind not a particular economic doctrine, as the term has come to be understood in Europe, but rather a commitment to political openness, the values of tolerance, liberties such as were embodied in the American Bill of Rights, and that most revolutionary of innovations, the multi-party system. Among Marxists the significance of this liberal outlook was far from appreciated, and in the Marxist tradition there has undoubtedly been a line of opinion systematically hostile to liberal values. In time that would be one source of the Marxist disaster. So, unless he were the kind of laborite or social democrat who had become a bit skeptical of his received orthodoxies, our observer of 1895 wasn’t likely to grasp the revolutionary implications of the liberal premise, or to see it as part of a large encompassing democratic transformation that ideally would link the bourgeois and socialist revolutions.
Our socialist observer might also have noted, in the somewhat reductive terms prevalent on the Left, that science was triumphant and religion in decay. He would surely not have suspected that the weakening of religious belief, a development to which he had contributed, might bring unexpected difficulties to the lives of skeptics. Nor would he have paid attention to the views of, say, Dostoevsky on this matter, for as a rule he felt comfortable in the self-contained world that, together with an ideology proclaiming competence in almost all branches of knowledge, socialism had created for itself.
Finally, he might have become aware of certain trends in Western culture, such as the fierce hostility to bourgeois life shown by almost all writers and artists, including the reactionary ones, and the rapidity of change, indeed the absolute triumph of the principle of change, within European culture. A new sense of time, as Daniel Bell has remarked, came to dominate the arts, and the result would be that thrust toward restlessness and hunger for novelty, that obsession with progress as an end in itself, which has since characterized much of modern culture.
Let us now propose a brutal exaggeration, yet one that has its analytic uses: by the time the nineteenth century comes to an end, at a point usually agreed to be 1914, the basic direction of world politics starts to be reversed. The First World War—as it reveals not only the hypocrisies of the Europ
ean states, including the liberal bourgeois states, but the inability of the social democrats to prevent a global bloodbath—proves to be a terrible blow to the inherited attitudes of the earlier age of progress. If the nineteenth century promised, roughly speaking, an ever-increasing movement toward democracy and liberality, then the twentieth, even while exploiting the catchwords and passions of the nineteenth, would be marked by an overwhelming drift toward various kinds of authoritarianism. This would not of course be the only direction of political change in the twentieth century; vast popular movements, some burned out in defeat and others twisted into betrayals, would also appear in Europe and Asia. But if we remember that ours has been the century of Hitler and Stalin, then my “brutal exaggeration” about the main political drift may not seem . . . well, quite so brutal. The self-activity of the working class, that essential fulcrum of socialist power, would now be replaced in all too many instances by an authoritarian manipulation of plebeian energies (Communism in all its forms) or by an accommodation to the limited goals of the existing society (social democracy in most of its forms). Liberalism as both idea and value came under fierce attack. The expected benefits of Reason were scorned, as being either deceptive or unneeded. Modern culture was recruited as an authority in the assault upon liberal styles of feeling. What I propose to assert is that we have been living not—certainly not merely—in the Age of Revolution about which Trotsky spoke but in an Age of Counterrevolution that has assailed mankind from Right and Left. This, I know, is a view distasteful to what passes today for orthodox Marxism, and so I mean it to be.
The central expectation of Marxism—that by its own efforts the working class could transform history—was called into question. Every political tendency on the Left had to face the question: if the working class turns out not to be the revolutionary force that Marxists had supposed, what then? The spectrum of nominated substitutes, from union bureaucracies to insurgent kindergartens, from technocratic experts to soulful drop-outs, has not been reassuring.
It is still too soon to speak with certainty. Has the vision of the self-activization of the masses, a vision democratic in its essence, proved to be false? Premature? Or merely delayed by historical interruptions and accidents?2* I shall not try to answer this question, in part because I am not certain how to answer it, except to note the cogency of a remark attributed to Cournot: “The fact that we repeatedly fail in some venture merely because of chance is perhaps the best proof that chance is not the cause of our failure.” In any case, for us this failure is the central problem of modern political experience, and it helps explain—even while being far from the sole explanation for—the fact that every mode of politics in our century succumbs in varying degrees to authoritarianism.
People employing another set of categories will no doubt see the politics of this century in other terms; but other terms can often veil similar perceptions. What seems likely is that all who share the view that democratic norms are essential to a tolerable life would be ready to grant some credit to the sketch that has been drawn here.
III
How are we now to relate the two lines of speculation I have thus far advanced—first, that we are experiencing the repercussions of a crisis of civilization (a few signs of which will shortly be noted) and second, that we are living through the consequences of the failure of socialism? Perhaps by a third line of speculation: that it is precisely the recurrent political-social difficulties of Western capitalism, significantly eased but not removed by the welfare state, which create a fertile ground for the emerging symptoms of a long-festering crisis of civilization. The social-political problems of the moment and the deeper crisis of civilization have, so to say, a habit of collaboration; they even maliciously assume the guise of one another. There follows a terrible confusion in which problems open to public solution become encumbered with metaphysical and quasi-religious issues while efforts are vainly made to bring into the political arena metaphysical and quasi-religious issues beyond the capacity of politics to cope with.
Why we should be experiencing this confusion of realms is a question to which the answers are either too easy or too hard. Let us not rehearse them at length. The atom bomb has made us aware that the very future of the race hangs on political decision. The Nazi and Stalinist concentration camps have raised questions as to the nature of our nature: is there an inherent bestiality in mankind beyond the correction of collective activity? The Vietnam war, in a more recent moment, has been felt by segments of the young as an international trauma, serving to break ties of loyalty with both society and earlier generations. In the West a generation has arisen accustomed to affluence and therefore able to devote itself to problems of life, sometimes merely life-style, as against the problems of making a living. Higher education on a mass scale is becoming a reality in Western society, yet no one quite knows what its purpose, content, or outcome is or should be. A counter society, half-real and half-myth, has appeared as the Third World, imbued by its admirers with a mixture of utopianism and authoritarianism, revolution and primitive nobility: all arising from a revulsion against advanced society. Such are the reasons that might be given for a situation in which the crisis of modern civilization, recurrent for at least a century and a half, is again felt as immediate and pressing; but what we do not really know is the relative weights to assign to these reasons, and that means we do not know very much.
The difficulty—let us say, one difficulty—of living at this moment in history is that we experience, both as simultaneity and contradiction, the problems of three stages of modern society. Or to be more modest we experience problems that in our thought we have assigned to three stages of society: precapitalist (race, illiteracy, backwardness); capitalist (class conflict, economic crisis, distribution of wealth); and postcapitalist (quandaries concerning work, leisure, morality, and style, such as are sometimes described as “existential,” a term meant to indicate significant imprecision). But it is crucial to note that we experience these three orders of difficulty within the context of an advanced or “late” capitalism. Problems therefore suddenly appear in this late capitalist society that we had supposed would emerge only under socialism—problems not to be described merely or mainly in terms of social class but rather as pertaining to all human beings. (It ought to be said that the more intelligent socialists had foreseen the possibility that by liberating men from material want socialism might impose upon them a severe crisis of civilization, though impose it under circumstances more favorable to the human imagination than had been possible in the past.)
In the industrialized countries capitalism has entered a phase of unprecedented affluence, not justly distributed yet still reaching almost every class in society. Many people, especially those drawn from the upper and middle classes, have thereby come to experience a certain freedom to see their lives in generalized or abstract “human” terms. In the long run this is surely what one hopes for all humanity—that men should free themselves, to the extent that they can, from the tyranny of circumstances and confront their essential being. In the short run, however, this occurs, to the extent that it does occur, within a social context that distorts and frustrates the newly acquired sense of the human. For it occurs within a context of class domination and social snobbism, as well as at a historical moment forcing upon the young ghastly dilemmas. At one and the same time, a young person of middle-class origin can feel free to experiment with his life, yet must also live under the shadow of a war perceived to be unjust and even criminal. He can feel himself free to abandon the norms of bourgeois society, yet in doing so he will often unwittingly reinstate them as self-alienating masks and phantasms.
I am aware here of a possible criticism: that in speaking of these three stages of recent history as they had been thought of by socialists, I am referring not to objective realities but to conceptions nurtured, perhaps mistakenly, by people on the Left, and that there is nothing inherent in modern history which requires that certain problems be correlated with early capi
talism or others with socialism. I accept this criticism in advance, but would only add that all of us see, as we must see, historical developments through the lens of our assumptions, and that those who reject socialist categories may come to similar conclusions through their own terms about the mixture of problems I have been discussing. We might, for example, choose to say that during the past decade we have become aware that the religious disputes of the nineteenth and the social anxieties of the twentieth century are related—with the issues that obsessed the nineteenth century, issues that had to do with the desanctification of the cosmos, surviving into our own moment in surprisingly powerful ways. For what should interest us here is not the “rightness” of a particular intellectual vocabulary or tradition, but a cluster of insights that might be reached through different vocabularies and traditions.
In any case, the jumble of interests and needs I have been associating with various stages of modern history could also be regarded as distinctive elements—elements of conflict and tension—within the welfare state. It is in the very nature of the welfare state that through its formal, ideological claims it should arouse steadily increasing expectations which as an economic system still geared mainly to a maximization of profit it does not always or sufficiently satisfy. The welfare state systematically creates appetites beyond its capacity to appease—that, so to say, is the principle of dynamism which keeps it both in motion and off-balance. The welfare state cannot count upon those fierce sentiments of national loyalty which, precisely insofar as it has come to dominate the industrialized portion of the world, it replaces with an array of group and sectional interests—that much-vaunted pluralism of interests often concealing an imbalance of opportunity. The welfare state has small attraction as an end or ideal in its own right, and little gift for inspiring the loyalties of the young. It is a social arrangement sufficiently stable, thus far, to all but eliminate the prospect of revolution in the advanced countries; but it is also a social arrangement unstable enough to encourage the militant arousal of previously silent groups, the intensification of political discontents, and the reappearance, if in new and strange forms, of those tormenting “ultimate questions” with which modern man has beset himself for a century and a half. These “ultimate questions” as to man’s place in the universe, the meaning of his existence, the nature of his destiny—that they now come to us in rather modish or foolish ways is cause for impatience and polemic. But we would be dooming ourselves to a philistine narrowness if we denied that such questions do beset human beings, that they are significant questions, and that in our moment there are peculiarly urgent reasons for coming back to them.
