by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
What is required here is a measure of social and intellectual discipline, the capacity for keeping one’s various interests distinct and in a hierarchy of importance. Furthermore, we must recognize that at least in a democratic society politics has built-in—and in the long run, desirable—limitations. It may be possible through legislation to remove some of the socioeconomic causes of alienation but it is not possible through politics to cope directly with that seething cluster of emotions we call alienation; it may be possible through legislation to improve the conditions under which men work but it is not possible through politics to cope with the growing uncertainties men have as to work and leisure.
That in a society so beset as ours with ideological noise and cultural clatter we should expect the necessary discipline—give unto the ballot box its due, and leave for your life-style what your taste requires—seems all but utopian. But if we lack that discipline, we will pay heavily.
The caution against this caution: There are limits to common sense and pragmatism, which those who favor these qualities ought to be the first to recognize. The Fabian course to which democratic socialists in the United States are, by and large, committed, seems to me the closest we can come to political realism; but precisely for that reason we ought to recognize the points at which it fails to stir the imagination or speak to the troubles and passions of many people. Such a politics offers a possible way of improving and extending the welfare state, which is about as much as one can hope for in the immediate future, but it has little to say about problems that the welfare state is barely equipped to cope with. A politics of limitation, of coalition, of step-by-step change is desirable; the alternatives are neither real nor attractive; yet we must not allow strategy to blot out vision.
So let us be ready to acknowledge to others and ourselves that between the politics we see as necessary and the imaginative-expressive needs we have as men living in this time, there are likely to be notable gaps. The chaotic but profoundly significant urges and passions that sweep through modern society—at once innocent and nihilistic, aspiring and gloom-ridden, chiliastic and despairing—must touch us as well as those with whom we have political quarrels. How could it be otherwise? Who, looking upon the experience of our century, does not feel repeated surges of nausea, a deep persuasion that the very course of civilization has gone wrong? Who, elbowing his way past the wastes of our cities, does not feel revulsion against the very stones and glass, the brick and towers, all the debris of inhumaneness? Who, thinking of our bombs and our pollution, does not wish, at least on occasion, to join in the jeremiads against all that we are and have?
What we must do is recognize the distance, perhaps the necessary distance, between political strategy and existential response. We are saying that many things requiring remedy are open to social-political solution (provided intelligence and will are present). We are also saying that we live at a moment when problems beyond the reach of politics—problems that should be beyond the reach of politics—have come to seem especially urgent and disturbing. We have learned that the effort to force men into utopia leads to barbarism, but we also know that to live without the image of utopia is to risk the death of imagination. Is there a path for us, a crooked path for men of disciplined hope?
A Postscript
To say “No” as one’s answer to the question at the end of the above paper would be neither hard nor even foolish. By reasoning alone, or the appearance of it, one can readily conclude that the future humanity can expect, say, fifty or sixty years from now is, mostly, to live in a low-charged authoritarian state, very advanced in technology and somewhat decadent in culture, in which there will be little terror and not much freedom, in which most men will eat fairly well and only a few suffer despair over their condition, and in which order, control, efficiency will coexist with tolerated areas of their opposites.
The famous theory of convergence—which sees the major forms of modern society gradually coming closer to one another, in a kind of eclectic elitism that satisfies none of the traditional social outlooks—has far more defenders than is commonly recognized. It is a theory that easily allows, though it does not necessarily require, a certain bland disdain for political freedom. To believe in such a theory—according to which the trend toward economic collectivism inherent in modern technological conditions comes together with the trend toward authoritarianism inherent either in the sheer complexity of things or the sheer recalcitrance of human nature—it is simply necessary to float with “the given,” to accept the effectiveness but not the claims of ideology, and to rid oneself of old-fashioned liberal “illusions.”
It hardly seems necessary to elaborate the many ways in which the conditions of modern society militate against the survival or growth of freedom. That technology becomes increasingly complicated, the province of a highly trained elite, and thereby less and less open to democratic controls or social arrangements premised on a high degree of popular participation; that modern urban life tends to create large masses of semi-educated men, vulnerable to the newest modes of manipulation and essentially passive in their responses to political decision; that the steadily exacerbated division between industrialized and backward nations encourages charismatic desperadoes and deracinated intellectuals toward “revolutionary” coups which, whatever else they fail to do, do not fail to destroy all liberties; that the heritage of totalitarian ideology weighs heavily upon us, a poison long settled in the minds of men; that fierce new apocalyptic moods, recklessly blending politics and religion, arise throughout the world, though perhaps most notably in the industrialized nations—all this is by now familiar, commonplace, requiring no detail.
We know that a society which tolerates extreme inequalities of wealth and income runs the risk of revolt that can endanger liberties. But we also know that a society which insists upon enforcing an absolute egalitarianism can do so only by destroying liberties.
We know that a society in which the masses of men, drugged by affluence and the mass media, become passive and inert is one in which liberties may slowly erode. But we also know that a society shaken by the tremors of pseudomessianism, in which willful idealistic minorities seek to impose their vision upon sluggish majorities, is one in which liberties may be quickly undone.
We know that a society trapped in economic primitivism and clannishness, traditionalist or premodern casts of thought, is not likely to be one in which liberties can flourish. But we also know that it is entirely possible for political tyranny to coexist with an advanced economy.
If, then, we can specify certain conditions—a measure of affluence, the absence of extreme inequalities, a coherent political structure, a high level of education, and perhaps most crucial, a tradition of belief in freedom—which make possible or encourage the survival of liberties, these are at best necessary and not sufficient conditions. In truth, we can only guess at the optimum conditions for the survival and growth of liberties. I think it would be a social democratic society, in which a certain proportion of the central means of production would be socialized, that is, democratically owned and controlled; extremes of inequality in wealth, and thereby, ultimately in power, would be evened out; and liberties, extending from the political to the socioeconomic areas of life, would flourish.
Whether such a society can in fact ever be achieved is an open question: I cannot have the simple faith of my socialist forbears of a century ago. For, as I now see it, such a society would require not merely certain structures of economic relationships and political power—that, by comparison, is almost easy to envisage—but also certain structures of shared values, bringing together restraint and cooperativeness, discipline and social initiative. Nor can one believe any longer, as radicals once did, that the mere establishment of the envisaged economic and political structures will necessarily create the required values. I still think it reasonable to suppose that they would enable men to create those values, but there is no certainty whatever. For we have learned in recent years that a society can b
e threatened not merely by external assault or economic breakdown but by something harder to specify yet at least as insidious in effect: namely, the disintegration of those tacit and binding beliefs which enable men to live together. This disintegration, which affects the sons of the bourgeoisie in the West and the sons of the party leadership in the East, can have curiously mixed implications: it can be against gross injustice and contemptuous of liberal values, it can be outraged by unjust wars and prone to a mystique of violence. At least at this point, Schumpeter seems to have been a better prophet than Marx.
The question that must then follow, and which it would be foolish to try to answer, is this: can a reasonably decent society, liberal in its political style and egalitarian in its socioeconomic outlook, survive in the conditions likely to exist during the next fifty or sixty years? Apart from the factors I have listed a page or two earlier that militate against such a survival, and apart from others that could be added, there is a problem here of the gravest difficulty though one that has come to seem acute only recently. Such a liberal or social democratic society may well provide the best conditions for human beings to live in; but insofar as it comes closer to realization, it may not provide spiritual or psychic goals that will satisfy the people who live in it, at least those most inclined to sentience and restlessness.
To raise this speculation at a moment when most human beings on this globe live in societies that do not satisfy their minimal physical needs and, furthermore, hold them in authoritarian subjection may seem idle. But it is not. For while intelligent socialists have always said that “the good society” would for the first time make it possible for men to confront freely and with adequate consciousness their metaphysical problems, they hardly could have foreseen the ferocity with which at least some people would try to attack these problems even before reaching, and indeed in the name of reaching, “the good society.” If there is in reality a deep, though not always manifest, religious hunger in human beings, or at least the intellectually and spiritually aware minority; if this hunger fails in the twentieth century to find outlets through adequate religious institutions, ceremonies, and doctrines; and if it then turns, with a kind of self-alienated violence, into a secular expression, at once apocalyptic, messianic, and fanatic—then we may suppose that the closer we approach “the good society,” or the more single-mindedly we become preoccupied with approaching it, the more severe the problem will become. The values of a liberal society may indeed be in conflict, immediate or potential, with the religious or quasi-religious impulses among human beings that seem to break out recurrently with varying degrees of passion and force. And insofar as such a society clears away the gross troubles of survival that have afflicted most human beings throughout history, it leaves the way open to what we might call the risks and terrors of the metaphysical.
At this point in our speculations, the intellectuals as a group come straight to center stage. One might hope that they, in the turmoil of a civilization beset by inner doubts and a confusion between political and religious goals, would be the most unyielding, even “unreasonable,” in their defense of liberties. Intellectuals, after all, are the single group in society that would seem to have the highest stake in freedom; it is their minimal requirement for professional existence; it is the very element that makes it possible to be an intellectual. But of course, the history of intellectuals in the twentieth century is, not least of all, a history of betrayal and self-betrayal, a history of repeated surrenders to authoritarian and totalitarian ideology and power. The value of freedom stirs only some intellectuals, or it stirs them only at moments when it least needs defense. For this, there are a great many reasons, and I do not pretend to know them all; but let me cite a few. By their very outlook and vocation, intellectuals are peculiarly susceptible to ideological melodrama: it is their form of faith. The grandiosity of the abstract, the willfulness of schemes of perfection imposed through iron and blood, the feeling that anything short of a total measure is “boring,” the refusal to examine the possibility that intertwined with utopian visions can be coarse yearnings for power, the infatuation with charismatic figures who represent decisiveness, rapidity, daring, intuitive authority—these are some of the elements in the experience of intellectuals that make them susceptible to authoritarian movements.
There are also mundane considerations. Modern bureaucratic societies, formally structured as one-party dictatorships, have great need for intellectuals—at least for their skills, if not their vocation. If we take enormous pride in those intellectuals who rebel in the name of freedom, men like Djilas, Solzhenitsyn, and Kolakowski, we must also recognize that at least some of those who persecute them are also intellectuals of a sort. And for intellectuals in the underdeveloped countries, dispossessed and estranged, deracinated and unemployed, the prospect of an authoritarian regime resting on ideology signifies a future of prestige, power, and privilege. At a certain cost, to be sure. It is therefore silly to expect that in the coming decades the intellectuals as a class will be unconditional defenders of freedom—indeed, it is a notion so silly that only intellectuals could entertain it.
Yet freedom remains our signature. We may know and have to say that many other things are needed if freedom is to exist—a society that satisfies the material and social needs of human beings, a society that gives people a sense of participation and opportunity, a society that does not kill off its young in ghastly wars, etc. But it is freedom that remains the fundament of the intellectual’s vocation: he honors or betrays, but he cannot avoid it.
Yet we may ask, what is the historical sanction for this commitment to freedom? what forces in history, what laws of development, what dynamic of the society or the economy?
No doubt, at various points in the future there will be some historical forces enabling or smoothing the way for those persons or groups who will speak in defense of basic liberties. No doubt, it is of the greatest importance to try to estimate the nature and range of those forces, whether they be “impersonal” elements of the social structure or collective movements of classes and groups. But that is not what I propose to do here, partly because I do not feel competent to do it.
I want, instead, to assume that we cannot be “certain,” as many of us were in the past, that there is an ineluctable motion within history toward a progressive culmination. I want to discard any faith in the necessary movement of History—even in its much-advertised cunning. Not that I would create instead a gnostic melodrama in which man stands forever pitted against his own history, a promethean loneliness against the runaway of civilization. I simply want to put the question aside, and then to say: the obligation to defend and extend freedom in its simplest and most fundamental aspects is the sacred task of the intellectual, the one task he must not compromise even when his posture seems intractable, or unreasonable, or hopeless, or even when it means standing alone against fashionable shibboleths like Revolution and The Third World.
I am aware that to offer this liberal/social democratic truism as a central idea for the future will not excite many sensibilities or set many hearts beating. Precisely that fact reinforces my conviction that, just as in the perspective of the past two centuries it is the liberal idea that now seems the most permanently revolutionary, so in the world as we know it and are likely to know it the idea of freedom, always perilous, remains the most urgent and therefore the most problematic.
I take as my model Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It seems clear that since publishing his great novels, The First Circle and The Cancer Ward, Solzhenitsyn has moved to a kind of elemental Christianity, for which there is of course a great tradition in Russia going back to and beyond Tolstoy. This tradition is not mine, though I understand how revolutionary it can be in relation to a total state. But in the Solzhenitsyn novels there is a steady commitment to the idea of freedom, not because it is seen as the logical consequence of history, nor as an unquenchable desire arising from our natures; there is too much evidence against both these views. Solzhenitsyn bring
s to bear no determinist argument in behalf of freedom. He simply suggests that freedom is the only condition under which people like ourselves can breathe; that freedom is required, as well, by all human beings insofar as they would pursue their particular interests, as groups or classes; that freedom is, for modern man, a supreme good. Let us say—and surely at least a few will still be saying it seventy-five years from now—that it is the name of our desire.
Notes
1* The central idea for this section was suggested to me by Max Shachtman, though I cannot say whether he would have approved of the way in which I develop it.
2* In 1948, writing on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of The Communist Manifesto, Jean Vannier, one of Trotsky’s close associates, remarked about the working class that
It has shown itself capable of outbursts of heroism, during which it sacrifices itself without a thought, and develops a power so strong as to shake society to its very foundations. It can rid itself in an instant of the most inveterate prejudices, while there seems to be no limit to its audacity. But by and by, whatever the consequences of its action, whether victory or defeat, it is finally caught up in the sluggish, quotidian flow of things.
