Why an apology? Not one, of course, in the sense of an excuse or an exculpation, for a man’s faith, if he is responsible, ought not to call for that. But one in the sense of a defense, needed today because conservatives in the academic world are a pitiful minority and their views are dismissed, sight unseen, as hopelessly in error. It is for this reason that any one who holds the views I hold, against the overwhelming majority of his academic colleagues, feels that a defense of them is called for. They, the others, need not apologize for their faith; theirs is the overwhelming current orthodoxy. It is the heretic who must defend his deviation from the opinions of his contemporaries.
And why a defense of my faith? Probably the majority of contemporary philosophers, men who, as a group, tend toward agnosticism, hold that faith is unworthy of a philosopher, who has no business holding a doctrine unless he has made reasonably certain that it is true by subjecting it to tests appropriate to it. But “faith” is a polysemic term, and in any case no one can livefor long as an adult in a dynamic society without taking as valid a vast tissue of propositions that he cannot test. Many of his opinions, most of them, perhaps, and some of them indispensable to his welfare, he simply accepts and has to accept without thorough testing. Were he to answer honestly the question as to why he accepts them, the answer would be that in the process of living and reflecting on his experience—reflecting on what he has seen and has heard from others and read, on what he has felt, and on what he takes to be the inferences and entailments of these experiences—he has decided that it is this and not that that seems to him to be the best interpretation he can put on his experience.
I am a conservative and admit frankly that I hold my views chiefly as faith, but not in any theological sense of the term, but in the sense that they are the reflective, more or less examined, precipitate of my experience; or put differently, confronted with the doctrinal alternatives available to a reflective man today, the conservative alternative seems to me to be the one that comes closer to allowing me to make sense of my life—given, that is, my notion of the meaning of my endeavors.
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Let me begin my apology with three silly stories. I’ll follow them with a bit of dictionary work, before sketching the difference, as I view it, between a conservative’s conception of man and that of his socialist opponent. For it is on their view of human nature that conservatives and socialists ultimately disagree.
The first silly story is this: my wife and I know acouple who are liberals—I would say, who are, of course, liberals, except that the husband is not an academic man and the majority of the members of his profession are not liberals. I shall call them the Smiths, and call the husband Chuck and the wife Karen. Now for a long time after meeting them we were uncomfortable with ourselves because we liked them and felt they liked us, but we felt that wewere not being honest towards them. We had been playing possum and had not told them where we stood politically. My wife and I discussed this problem and decided we had to come clean, since we could not carry on a friendship on a false basis. So we invited them to dinner and after dinner we brought the subject around to our views. “I ought to tell you,” I said to Karen and Chuck, “that we are conservatives.” Karen turned pale and speechless. Chuck said, “But Eliseo, you don’t have hard hearts,” The point of thestory is of course quite obvious.
The second story requires a preface. It is an indisputable fact that teachers in American universities today are overwhelmingly liberal. It is less known, perhaps, that the majority of academic people today are more or less consciously empiricists. We tend—and for good reasons—to reject intuitionism as a means of knowledge. We also reject “the high priori road” and believe that to have tenable knowledge we must submit it to critical examination. What that examination consists of is something on which experts disagree. But there is a large consensus to the effect that experience—with one exception—is the sole source of knowledge. And, by the way, with what wemay call pompously “the epistemic orthodoxy of our day” I happen to be in agreement. Whether academic men are social scientists, English professors or teachers of any other discipline, they hold more or less critically that experience is the sole source of knowledge.
Now, before it became known that I was a conservative (a matter I succeeded in keeping quiet for quite some time after I became one) a good many of my colleagues at the institution in which I was doing time were friendly and many were on socially friendly terms with my wife and me. Some seemed to respect me. After all I had come to the institution on an invitation that was quite honorary: to occupy one of the two oldest endowed chairs of the university. I mention that not in praise but because it is quite pertinent to my story.
But when the friends and acquaintances, who had earlier expressed a friendly feeling and who were empiricists, found out that I was a conservative, they let me know—a few in a rather unpleasant way—that they disapproved of me. Some had a hard time greeting me on campus and a few cut me outright. Ofthose who kept up the acquaintance not one, not a single one of them, asked me why I held what I knew theyconsidered outrageous views. All wereempiricists. But on a priori grounds they knew my views were outrageously erroneous.There is, then, apparently, one substantiveproposition that is somehow axiomatic andtherefore exempt from examination:“Anyone who is a conservative is wrong . . . is . . . what is he anyhow?” Not only wrong politically, that goes without saying; hiscondition goes deeper. A man holdingsuch outrageous views, setting out to oppose the consensus of his community, is a moral leper and it is useless to ask a moral leper why he enjoys the odious disease he has willfully contracted. In the Middle Ages—in some countries as late as the nineteenth century—when a healthy man heard the bell of the leprous beggar, he ran. Leprosy was taken to be a quickly communicable disease. The kind of illness evinced by being a conservative is at least as bad as leprosy. It was not until I went on a year’s visit to the University of North Carolina last year that the wife of a young instructor there asked me why I held such convictions.
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My third silly story is this: Years ago (long before I came to Northwestern) a colleague called suddenly to ask my wife and me to drop in to meet his sister, who had arrived unexpectedly from Washington on a brief visit. The young woman occupied, even then, an important position in the permanent bureaucracy of the Federal Government. And we had heard about her intelligence, her interesting experience in government, and personal qualities; and we had expressed an eager wish, should opportunity arise, to meet her. During the conversation that followed the usual preliminaries, the young lady stated, asif itwere a truism, that no one could love his country. Such a feeling was unintelligible to her. She herself loved her job, she said, and liked many of the people in the office; she liked Washington and loved New York. Further she could understand how one could love some areas of the country: the mountains, the San Francisco Bay area; even Columbus, Ohio, she was willing to concede. One certainly could love Paris and some places in Mexico. But the United States, the whole of it? That, she asserted with warmth, that was too large a continent to love,
I tried to make her see what the phrase “love of country” means but soon gave up. It was futile. And yet this young lady had a Ph.D. from an American university and not only had a position of responsibility in government but evidently she lived well. Above all, she was outspoken in her political opinions. And it took no superior acuity to see that she was not a person who was used to being pushed around. I have frequently thought about this experience, because this young woman, so obviously able and so obviously enjoying broad opportunities to use her ability, would have been quite a different person had not her parents come to the United States from Russia or Poland. In the country of her parents’ origin the numerous advantages that had made her a socially useful person beyond the home would have been inconceivable. In a small town in Russia or Poland she would have lived a life restricted to home, small business, and temple. Education beyond the grades would have been out of the question. And as for freedom of thought and expression and the right to vote—a people living under the threat of pogroms, as her ancestors had in their land of origin, such luxuries were not even dreamed about. And yet, a country in which she had had opportunities her grandparents had not even dreamed of was too big a continent to love.
These are the three silly stories. And I tell them here because it is high time someone made clear that today’s real rebels are the conservatives. The rebels are not those who march on the White House to protest the bombing of the Viet Cong supply lines. Nor are they the unilateralists or the neo-Munichers. The rebels are the conservatives. The others, who think of themselves as rebels, are doing nothing but carrying to their logical conclusion and applying universally and without qualifications views expressed by the President and seriously believed by the Vice President. In the university world at least—and that is the only world I can speak of with any authority, for it is the only world I know—the rebels today are the conservatives. They are the men who, aware of the frightful erosion of values that is taking place in our world, would slow it up wherever possible. The large academic majority are not rebels, nor are the marchers and sitters and protesters and neo-Munichers, rebels. They express in a consistent manner the solid orthodoxy of our day. Why the orthodoxy is so solid is a pretty question to which we do not yet have a satisfactory answer. That it is—that from the academic world it has spread, that it has even begun to reach the world of industry and finance—seems an undeniable fact. And any one who opposes the orthodoxy of the world in which he lives is a rebel. And he is one by definition.
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We conservative rebels see the fabric of our values being eroded by the inevitable dynamism of contemporary history and by the deliberate activity of reformers, progressives, liberals, all of whom are socialists and bleeding hearts. We seethe men who should be the guardians of our heritage betray it and we rebel against them. We see the need, at this moment, to conserve what is truly valuable in our culture; the others are more or less consistently intent on destroying it. Many of them do not know what they are doing. Some do. They think that they can replace the old structure with a better one. But whatever their motives, what they are doing is helping to destroy our values, whereas we rebels would preserve, repair, salvage, maintain.
This brings me to a bit of dictionary work, which is essential if I am to make clear in what sense I call myself a conservative. To do so it is necessary to distinguish among three kinds of conservatives because two kinds are, in my opinion, hopelessly wrong.
But notice, first, that I do not mention as among conservatives Nazis and Fascists. They are not men of the right. Men of the right have a vision of a good society. Nazis or Fascists are wreckers. Their ranks are made up of men embittered through and through; men in whom the process of alienation has totally changed their psyches; men whose hearts are full of hatred, whose minds are soggy with odious racist and other kinds of stupid nonsense; men who as misanthropes hate themselves and turn their hatred on their fellow-beings; men who are incapable of humaneness or pity. Liberals call them rightists, and objectively this tactic must be interpreted as an effort—successful as most of their efforts are today—in condemning us by association.
Among those who can legitimately be called conservatives, reactionaries are men who believe that “the clock can be turned back.” Such a dream is, plainly speaking, utter nonsense. It is impossible to go back to a previous historical period, and if we look at the matter carefully, it will be seen that it is also undesirable. Let me cite at least two reasons for the impossibility of reviving a past period. The first is that we know much today that the period to which we would return did not know and part of what we know is how it changed and what has happened between then and now. Our knowledge has more or less consciously transformed our sensibility and altered our values. And we cannot by an act of conscious go back to the relative state of nescience of the past. The second reason is that our understanding of the past and of the present is at best limited and we cannot very well give up a complex condition and go back to another, when we do not fully understand what makes ours what it is and the other what it was. The rearing of a society is not something that can be accomplished at will. What can be done at will is the wrecking of one. The erecting of another society upon the ruins of the wrecked one is not altogether within the deliberate powers of men.
But, you say, the reactionary does not want to recreate the past as a whole, what he wants to do is to revive an old institution that he considers desirable and that flourished satisfactorily once upon a time: Not the whole of industrial England in the nineteenth Century or pre-World War I America, but only a selected aspect of it is what he is interested in reviving. And why should this not be possible? The reason is that a society is not a machine whose parts are standardized and replaceable. If the carburetor of a car goes wrong, a new one from the stockroom can be installed, and this is truefor any part of it and holds for any machine. This is obvious. What does not seem to be obvious but should be—at least to conservatives—is that society is not a machine. It is more like an organism than a machine; it is not an organism in a literal sense, but it is more like one than a machine. A successful transplantation of parts or organs is not any easier for society than for an animal. So far as my reading goes the experts know very little about the possibility of borrowing institutions from one culture to another. That diffusion goes on is an obvious and a well known fact. But what “laws” control the borrowing? And what happens when an institution is transplanted from one society to another? Japan copied Western ways in a short time and its transformation from a “feudal” society to a modern industrial one resulted in a viable way of living. But can any people do it? Can any people borrow anything it wants to borrow? We simply do not know. Can a culture borrow a dead institution of its own? It is easy to answer “yes.” But when was it done, by what people, under what circumstances? And what institution was revived successfully and reintegrated into the culture? The reactionary bases his case on hope, and against hope there is no argument. But not because there is no argument against that which the man who hopes believes but because it is futile to argue against the man who believes because he wants to believe.
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The stand-patter does not want to revive dead institutions; he just does not want any change whatever. He is happy with things as they are, he is used to them, he dreads having to face new conditions. But to freeze contemporary society is not possible. There may have been great civilizations in the past that were relatively static. But ours is essentially dynamic and we cannot freeze it. To freeze it we would have to put a moratorium on science and technology and that, leaving all other considerations aside, would be to invite the Russians or the Chinese to take us over. For men today—for all men but a few tribes in far off valleys and deserts—history is dynamic. We are condemned to change, endless change, until we wreck ourselves—or, accidentally, become angels. The reactionary proposes reforms the possible successof which is doubtful but not clearly impossible. The stand-patter desires a condition of affairs that is clearly impossible.
What is possible and to me seems desirable is to retard the dynamism of our society and guide it more wisely than is done today. Socialists, liberals, would speed it up towards ends destructive of our world. They not only know what is wrong—as do the majority of us—they know how to correct it. And many among them seem to believe in change for the sake of change. Change has primacy in their scheme of values. The conservative is in favor of slowing up change and of directing it towards the preservation of our world, not its destruction. He isnot in favor of slowing up all change. That would commit him to the belief that the present state of our world is perfect and all change would be for the worse; and that is plain nonsense. There are some values that are not worth preserving. And some of the changes now taking place seem desirable. For instance, in a technological, urban society, progress towards universal literacy is desirable. Universal literacy is a value not because a large majority of the citizens are going to give up idiot-boxes and turn to Shakespeare or Milton but because reading and writing are indispensable skills in our world at the purely practical level. Another instance of a desirable change is the slowly spreading recognition in our society of the supreme value of the person. What it means to be a person is not generally understood in its full significance. But the increasing recognition that respect is due men because they possess intrinsic dignity as men is an inestimable moral advance.
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Why does the conservative want to slow the rate of change? The liberal psychoanalyzes his opponent: the conservative is dead to the challenge of the day, he is hardhearted. This is part of the liberal mythology and it is both a false and odious imputation. No single class of men has a monopoly on the humane attitude and no single group possesses all the meanness and hardness of heart. This is not to say that there is no difference between conservatives and liberals. There is a difference and it is a most decisive one. But it is not one to be defined in terms of moral qualities possessed or lacking by the individuals who make up the group. The difference consists in the conflicting places given specific values in the tables of values taken by the groups to be constitutive of the good life. Ultimately the difference lies in two opposed conceptions of the true worth of the individual and of his destiny. Otherwise stated, there is a difference but the difference is a metaphysical one and not, as the liberal would have it, a moral one.
First, then, as to the hierarchy of values, I shall broach the subject in an autobiographical way. Up to, say, the end of the thirties, I used to believe that our social system was wrong. It institutionalized, I held, grievous iniquities that were easily corrigible. Let men of good will, us liberals, finish the job of taking over and judicial murders like that of Sacco and Vanzetti, or outrageous miscarriages of justice like the Scottsboro case, would no longer be possible. Depressions and hunger would vanish from the land. The workers, powerful in their unions, and we intellectuals cooperating with them would prevent iniquity at home and abroad. We would sweep off the stage of history ignorance, prejudice, superstition, evil. In philosophy positivistic naturalism would spread. It was in our hands, in short, if we only but wanted it, to begin the rearing of Utopia—or rather, to further the job, for it had already begun.
It is interesting to notice—if I may be permitted the digression—that I never examined with detachment and thoroughness the facts of public issues in respect to which I took the liberal side. But I knew, knew with passionate conviction and fervor, that the Italian anarchists were victims of injustice. I knew that because I had read it in the Nation and the New Republic. That the men who were manipulating my feelings were sincere was no excuse for what they did. They were using me and others as tools, for the purposes of their passions, while claiming that they had a monopoly on the espousal of the value of human dignity. Proclaiming their liberalism, they had no respect, or at least no more respect than any one else, for the individuals they transformed into a mob. And thus, throughout the country, by innumerable means of propaganda, the opinions of men who thought they were thinking men were polarized, and the names of two Italians—one of whom, it turned out decades later, was a murderer—took their place in the liberal hagiography. It is now possible for me to see the reaction to the Sacco-Vanzetti case as one of mass dementia. And it is also possible for me today (it has been possible since I gave up my liberal faith) to see similar cases of mass dementia, of the polarization of opinion by manipulation, and of the self-righteousness and intransigence to which it leads.
As I began to see through the liberal hoax I began to perceive that my commitments were grounded on my philosophical beliefs. The naturalist faith, the then-reigning orthodoxy in philosophy (still reigning today) I came to perceive, involved a conception of human destiny that was an insult to human nature. At a socio-political level I was deceived; at a philosophical level I was wrong. How this realization came about is a complex story of the development of a mind in its progress towards truth—an effort, not at all pleasant, to discard self-deception, falsehood, and above all to see, in its stark reality, the consequences of commitments and loyalties to which it had been passionately pledged since it had begun to think. In any case the change took place, and the upshot was that by the end of the thirties Ihad begun to perceive with a modicum of clarity that my past beliefs and activities could fairly be expressed in a simple formula: What I had been engaged in up to then was the more or less conscious effort to destroy my culture. To the measure of my ability, in my own small way (fortunately, in only a small way) I had to share responsibility with my fellow liberals for the catastrophe that confronted us suddenly when the surrender of Munich occurred, when the Russian-Nazi pact was signed, when the Germans turned on France and overwhelmed it. What the catastrophe revealed wasthe inner crumbling of a people—the French—because they had been corrupted by the liberal ethos. Liberals could see the fall of France as the result of the moral disintegration of the French people: the corruption of the press, thestupidity and corruption of the army, the divisiveness and bad faith of its politicians.What they did not see because they did not want to see and do not want yet to see is that the whole of our Western culture is suffering from the corruption they disseminate. This is why I was responsible for the fall of France. Not directly, of course.Butbecause what had brought France down was a movement in which I, as teacher and writer, had eagerly cooperated. I stoodconvicted before my conscience: as a liberal I was responsible for the destruction of my culture.
At the same time I began to notice, more or less confusedly at first, but gradually more and more clearly, that the socialist and the liberal were two peas from the same pod if not the same pea under two different names. And at the same time I came to seewhat accounted for the ideology and activities of these people. They were men who had no trace left of the piety for their culture that they may once have acquired as children. I saw then, clearly, that what had made me identify myself with the liberals was that I was one of the many excellent instances of the brainwashing that my generation had cheerfully submitted to under the belief that it was being liberated. My sense of guilt went deep because not only had I cheerfully allowed myself to be brainwashed but when I became a teacher I had myself assiduously undertaken the brainwashing of my students. The ideology I had picked up had covered the piety I felt towards my culture; or, changing the image, the ideology had choked the springs of my piety.
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Before I go any further, a brief linguistic explanation is called for, I use the term “piety” in the ancient Roman sense: a pious man is not a merely religious man—though Romans would have held an a-religious man to be an impious man—but more: a pious man is one who has gratitude and reverence for the sources of his being, reverence and gratitude for parents, ancestors, country or people, earth, universe. Religion, which includes piety and reverence towards the final source of our being—the ultimate mystery men think of as God—has in our day come to be thought of as the sphere of activity in which piety isexclusively expressed. In any case, as I use the term, piety is gratitude and reverence for the sources, immediate and mediate, of our being.
The liberal intellectuals of our world, as a group, are almost entirely devoid of piety. And that is why, as a group, they think that they can, with a few reforms, do better than their ancestors and improve the social structure they inherited. That the structure is perfect no one in his senses would assert. That it can be made perfect or nearly so is something liberal intellectuals believe. They have shifted their reverence and gratitude from the sources of their being to a future heaven that they are confident they will be able to create. The past—that is darkness, error, superstition, iniquity, shame and remorse. (Have you ever heard a French fellow-traveller employ the word “feudal”?) The future, the product of liberal effort and kindheartedness, beckons irresistibly; it is the world of goodness and justice and truth. And how has this come about? In contemporary terminology, very fashionable today, the liberal intellectual is a man with a profound sense of alienation. I was inquiring from a colleague in the University of North Carolina about a teacher of philosophy he knows well and I know only by name. My colleague said that for this man if a person isnot alienated he is not acceptable. Alienation is a kind of moral shibboleth. By his alienation ye shall know him. The Hebrews of the Old Testament had their circumcision. Today’s intellectuals have their alienation, and the alienated man is a man who has given up the ignorant mob’s piety.
We all know that the notion of alienation comes to us from Hegel via Marx. The phenomenon itself has deep roots in our modern history, and expresses itself in a double face: estrangement from one’s self and estrangement from society. It is not possible here to go into details, but what these estrangements add up to is hatred or resentment of one’s self and one’s world, a kind of generalized ill-will which leads those who share it to make strenuous efforts to prove to others—thus proving to themselves —that they are not ordinary men but belong to the liberated elite. It is the mob for whom notions like flag, patriotism, family, home, still retain emotive power. The sophisticated man is above feeling of loyalty for so artificial a symbol as the flag, so accidental a tie as the family, so fortuitous a relationship as country of birth; the foci of his loyalty are humanity, mankind, the proletariat, the victims of colonialism, the world, life, happiness. But these abstractions stand fornothing concrete; they merely serve to cover a man’s inability to love.
There are alienations that are understandable and may even be said to be justifiable. James Baldwin’s, for instance. Consider what is public knowledge about him. He glorifies homosexual relations in his novels. The words “homosexual” and “heterosexual,” he says, mean nothing to him. And yet he is a man endowed with a most unusual sensibility and an extraordinary talent. He is an intelligent and a perceptive man, thoroughly aware that he has enjoyed opportunities denied to the majority of his own people. He seems to question the accepted sexual patterns, thus belonging to a minority that is generally morally despised. It is unrealistic to expect that a man such as Baldwin should have piety towards our civilization, although it was that civilization that gave him the advantages he possesses over his own people and over most of us. He is an outsider whose soul smoulders with hatred. He cannot love. He writes about love, but ifwhat he asseverates in desperation deceives him and his friends and admirers, it cannot deceive the rest of us.
Alienation is a condition from which members of other civilizations must have suffered but which in our world has attained epidemic proportions. The causes for the condition are not fully understood; the fact itself is undeniable and not difficult to detect. It arises from complex psychic and social causes and this accounts, perhaps, for the lack of correlation between the class an alienated man belongs to or rises from and the depth of his estrangement. It also accounts for the large number of ways in which it finds expression. A man may wish to destroy his world because an ancestor of his committed what in terms of our liberal ethos is an unexpiable crime. Averell Harriman is reported to have told a group of labor leaders visiting his estate that he has often been called a socialist and is proud of it. Are we to infer that he is trying to expiate for the crime of being a descendant of one of the “Robber Barons”? Surely he must have heard that these men created not only the opportunities that he enjoys but opportunities every one today enjoys, and not in the United States alone, and that he, the heir, with his simplistic ideology and misplaced social guilt, would destroy.
But class has little to do with alienation. The son of a Morgan partner or of a railroad man may be as profoundly alienated as the son of a Harlem preacher. This is a subject on which we do not possess much understanding. But whatever the source of alienation, we can with confidence assert that it destroys or weakens the sense of the self. The monad is not only a windowless substance, but it is a simple one. Pure subjectivity—a philosophic rationalization of pure autism—is utter vacuity. Autism is loneliness, desperation and inability to love. The alienated man, lacking the support others find in a world of fellow beings, finds it imperative to assert aggressively his selfhood; his is a desperate but futile effort to fill the inward emptiness with asseverations of a reality he knows he lacks, fighting with himself to be something at any price except the price he would have to pay to be someone—to learn to love. Cut your ties, embrace pure subjectivity and you have renounced the concrete self and with the sense of the self (for the self cannot be renounced) the sense of the Person is gone. The monad, the radical individualist, is a sick man. He is empty, vacuous, unreliable, resentful, incoherent and self-deceived. He cannot know what it is to be a fully developed person. He worships his inward vacuity.A developed person serves a constellation of values he knows to be higher than himself. The radical subjectivist says: My valuesbelong to me. The assertion is a sign of immaturity. The mature man knows that he belongs to his values. He knows that he is, as Socrates put it, the chattel of the gods. In this servitude consists his pride, his self respect, his peace, and his fulfillment.
Our grasp of the illness of alienation goes wrong from the start if we conceive it as an either-or condition, dividing living men into those who suffer from it and those who do not. Men are not either healthy or sick—at least not psychologically. There is no living human being who is free from frustration, who is altogether free from resentment against institutions which deny him the satisfaction of his wishes. The author of Civilization and Its Discontents was right even if, by putting emphasis on the negative factors of living in society, he overstated his case by ignoring the satisfactions of living. The frustrations are always there, for all of us, and are undeniably fertile seeds of estrangement. But the greatest majority of men seem to live lives that they find on the whole satisfactory, and this seems to be true of men living at any level of society. But such is the crazy tilt of our world that it is the Baldwins who furnish us with the criteria by which we judge it.
Because the alienated man lacks piety he is easily sold on perfectionistic schemers. Because he rejects his world, it is easy to convince him that Utopia is around the corner. Whether you call it the classless state, The New Frontier or the Great Society, he is ready to accept any nostrum any quack offers him. However, when you ask the specific account of what heaven on earth is going to be like you cannot get it. Turn to the last pages of Lenisn’s The State and Revolution and ask yourself what does Lenin take the classless society to be? To this question there is no answer in the book. The state will wither away, and in its place we shall find a classless society in which each will give according to his ability and each will receive according to his need. And for this promise we are invited to go through the Red Terror, the Civil War, the days—no the years of Stalin—and the paranoid madness and the gentle ministrations of the man who bangs the heel of his shoe on the desk of an assembly of nations.
But why have I dealt at such length on the phenomenon of alienation? I am proposing that liberalism or socialism is the product of alienation. Since man craves for something towards which to show loyalty and since he is a religious animal, ifhe turns on his world and knocks down his god he must put substitutes in their places. Our world is evil, our god is false, cries the estranged man. Down therefore they must go. In their place, however, he puts abstract idols: Mankind, the proletariat, the underdeveloped nations, the victims of colonialism.
But isn’t culture another abstraction? It is not, for the word stands for a number of concrete things that can be valued: a way of life and the satisfaction it makes possible and the promise of success it holds out, institutions, customs, possible moral achievements, in short a very concrete world made possible and sustained by parents, ancestors, traditions, to which one’s own individual contribution is minimal. It is true that living in a vertiginous dynamic period, the concrete institutions and goals that make up the culture lose their outline and seem to lose their reality. And, as a consequence, it is more difficult for us today than it was for men living in slower-moving ages to have a clear sense of the social instrumentalities to which weowe our being. But they are there and give us our character as the men we are and to them we owe piety.
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Here, then, lies the difference between the liberal or socialist and the conservative. The liberal or socialist sees little else than the evils of his world; because he does not see them against the background of the enormous achievements that his culture represents they loom larger than they are; and because he does not grasp the present in terms of the past, he gets the illusion that they are completely remediable and that the remedy is ready at hand in his blueprint for a utopia. The conservative is not indifferent to evil, his heart is not harder than the socialist’s, but looking at man today in mid-twentieth century against the perspective of history he is less sanguine than the socialist. And that is the reason he would slow the erosion and would preserve those means—those institutions, traditions and values—to which he owes his being.
I have clearly stated that the conservative does not wish to preserve his civilization intact. What values then does he wish to preserve? Among the many that deserve conservation I shall discuss only one, because it seems to me the most important and the one as regards which the greatest misunderstanding exists in the minds of men of good will. The liberal has succeeded in floating the canard that he has a monopoly on the love of man. Ina word of which the liberal is very fond at the moment, the conservative is altogether lacking in compassion. But it will be found on examination of this simplistic picture that what is at issue is not a manichean either-or division of men into virtuous liberals and vicious conservatives but something considerably more complex which has nothing to do with the coefficient of hardness of men’s hearts but rather with two opposed conceptions of man’s nature and his destiny. To the exploration of these views we now turn.
Fortunately for us these views were thoroughly explored by Dostoevsky in the greatest of his great novels. I shall confine my comments to Chapter III, IV and V of Book V of The Brothers Karamazov, entitled respectively, “The Brothers Make Friends,” “Rebellion,” and “The Grand Inquisitor.” But before undertaking an exposition of what is interesting for our problem in these chapters two prefatory remarks are called for. The first is that the depth of Dostoevsky’s view cannot be discovered in this skimpy selection of his conception of man. To grasp fully what Dostoevsky took man to be wewould have to follow the contrast between the Karamazovs and the Elder, Father Zossima. But such a task is beyond the scope of an essay, and far more beyond the scope of the remainder of this essay. The second remark is that Dostoevsky, one of the profoundest intellects of our Western world, has his imperfections and one of these is seriously embarrassing to at least one of his admirers. He suffered from a sort of psychological leprosy that in any man isdeplorable but in a great man is all the more deplorable. Dostoevsky was antisemitic and anti-Roman Catholic. The first fault casts no shadow on our discussion, the second does. For Dostoevsky carries on the exploration of the two concepts of man in Ivan Karamazov’s famous poem, “The Grand Inquisitor,” in terms of a contrast between socialism, which he identifies with the Church of Rome and Jesus. The assumption is that socialism is the continuation—or development or outcome, it is not clear exactly what he takes the relations to be between them—of Roman Catholicism. But while the dramatic terms he chose to explore the contrast are inadmissible, the substance of the contrast remains unimpaired, aswill be seen in the sequel.
Chapters IV and V of Book V of The Brothers tell us of a conversation between Ivan Karamazov and his younger brother, Alyosha. I shall have to compress brutally the content of these chapters. In the first of them, Ivan tells Alyosha that he accepts God and His wisdom and His purpose but that he cannot accept His world. And this is the cause of Ivan’s despair. Why can’theaccept God’s world? The answer is to be found in Chapter IV, entitled “Rebellion,” in which Ivan exhibits to his brother hisreaction—outrage would not be an inadequate term—at the wanton, iniquitous cruelty of which he has evidence. The cruelty is in Ivan’s opinion utterly unjustified and of course puts God’s providence in question.
Few readers will need to be reminded that “the problem of evil,” on which Ivan broods, has challenged the theist’s mind since the days of the writer of the Book of Job. Students of the history of philosophy are well acquainted with the classical solutions of the problem. This is said to emphasize that Ivan’s outrage is not factitious. The theist holds that God is omnipotent and presidential, but evil puts in question one or the other of the two terms. The theist therefore has to show that evil is compatible with both terms taken together. Ivan broaches the subject by telling Alyosha a number of stories he has read in newspapers of wanton, unspeakable, outrageous cruelty to children. His account ends with the story of the General who threw his dogs at the serf child who had committed a very minor offense. The dogs tore the child apart in the mother’s presence. Ivan tells Alyosha that he “took the case of the children only to make [his] case clear. Of other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its centre, [he will] say nothing.” Adults, after all, have eaten of the apple. And the apologists can always muddle the issue by saying that the adults are being punished for their sins. But the case of the children isunanswerably clear. Ivan finishes his stories with these words: “It is not God I do not accept, Alyosha, only I must respectfully return his ticket.”
It is against Ivan’s dossier against God as background that we must understand the following Chapter, in which Ivan tells Alyosha of a “poem” he has composed called “The Grand Inquisitor.” It is indeed, let me iterate, against the whole vast panorama of The Brothers that we must understand the poem. And I repeat the remark because there are separate editions of “The Grand Inquisitor” and I know of at least one professor of Philosophy who used to teach it (he may still be doing so) without reference to Ivan’s dossier, or the account of Father Zossima’s conversion and monastic life.
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Taken in its narrower compass, what is the meaning of “The Grand Inquisitor”? Laid in seventeenth-century Seville, in the terrible times of the Inquisition, as Ivan puts it, the “poem” tells how Jesus returned the day after nearly a hundred heretics “had, ad majorem Gloria Dei, been burnt by the cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, in a magnificent” auto de fe. As Jesus walks in front of the Cathedral the people of Seville recognize Him, and a mother asks Him to raise her child from the dead. He does so and the Grand Inquisitor, who sees the act, orders Jesus arrested and visits Him that night in prison. The Inquisitor addresses Jesus, who does not utter a single word during the visit.
The Inquisitor upbraids Jesus for offering men freedom instead of happiness, for freedom is too heavy a burden for men to bear. “Feed us,” men cry, “make us your slaves but feed us.” Had Jesus answered men’s plea He could have satisfied their hunger for worship. But by choosing what men cannot bear to accept, He acted as if He did not love men. “The wise and dread Spirit” talked to Jesus in the wilderness, in what the books call “the temptations”; but Jesus rejected the “wise and dread Spirit” because He, Jesus, craved for men’s free love and not for a love based on miracle. The error, says the Inquisitor, consisted in Jesus’ over-estimation of men. “But Thou didst think too highly of men . . . for they are slaves, of course, though rebellious by nature . . . I swear, man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him. . . . By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him.”
Upbraiding Jesusfor coming back to meddle in the Church’s work, the Inquisitor tells Him that the Church has corrected His work and has founded its teaching upon miracle, mystery and authority. “Exactly eight centuries ago wetook from [the dread Spirit] what you rejected with scorn, the last gift he offered you . . . we took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar and proclaimed ourselves the rulers of the earth, the sole rulers, though to this day we have not succeeded in bringing our work to total completion.” Had Jesus accepted the counsel of the dread Spirit He would have accomplished all that man seeks on earth—”that is, some one to worship, some one to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous harmonious ant-heap.”
In his words to Jesus the Inquisitor makes clear that he does not suffer from men’s delusion, he does not believe in immortality. Amid in the discussion that follows the narrative, the brothers agree that the Inquisitor does not believe in God. Alyosha deeply agitated tells Ivan that the poem is in praise, not in dispraise, of Jesus.
The conflict between the Inquisitor and Jesus does not call for extended comment. Clearly it is Jesus who has the highest esteem and respect for man. The Inquisitor may pity man but holds him in contempt because of his weakness and baseness and because of his goal. For, as stated, according to the Inquisitor what man seeks is union with his fellows “in a harmonious ant-heap.” Since man is a mere animal and since the meaning of his life is to be realized in purely secular terms here on earth or it cannot be realized at all; since man has no metaphysical dimension—it is only common sense to give him what he wants: miracle, mystery and authority. Let man find his happiness where it can be found, in a universal ant-heap. Let those who can carry the burden of freedom carry it for the benefit of miserable man.
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Dostoevsky’s intention need not be expatiated on. If he is wrong in his identification of the Roman Catholic Church with the socialism of his day, and a fortiori, of ours, he is not wrong in his grasp of the meaning of socialism, whether in its contemporary “liberal” variety in the democracies of the West or on the other side of the Curtain. For what is the essence of socialism but the claim—whether by a democratically-elected legislature or by a Politburo—that it knows what men want and is ready to give it to them? “Miracle, mystery, and authority” are not terms the socialist ever used. But the Inquisitor’s view of man is the socialist’s. The socialist will take up the burden of freedom and will give man the bread he cries for. Men cry, “Make us your slaves, but feed us,” and the socialist answers, “I’ll feed you and freeyou, too, because you are not free if you are hungry and anxious about your future and remain in ignorance and in rebellion.”
The meaning of the poem, I said, needs no lengthy commentary. But two remarks seem desirable. One is that the Inquisitor and the socialist accept man as he is, at their lowest conception of him, as if he had no concern whatever for anything but miracle, mystery, and the need to submit to authority. By contrast, Jesus asks men to be that which they are not but can be, and in the effort to become it manage to add an inch or two to their statures. Jesus would have them carry the burden of freedom. It is a heavy burden. But the alternative is the ant-heap of the Chinese or the Russians or our own ant-heap, the Great Society. The Inquisitor says to Jesus, “Receiving bread from us, they will see clearly that we take bread made by their hands from them, to give it to them without any miracle.” But since what the socialist takes is taxes he avoids the risk that the Inquisitor ran, that one of his slaves might not only discover but object to the trick. Thus today’s ant-heap isan improvement on that of Ivan’s poem.
The second comment follows directly from, the first. Human history—not in all societies, because some have been almost rigidly static after their leap into humanity—has been an expression of a struggle between what at any time man has been and what at that time and place he sought to become. Exception fait of some isolated, very primitive societies that appear to have remained static since man discovered the use of stone and a few other tools, human history has been Faustian and men in a bewildering variety of ways have sought to fulfill their destiny through effort to realize potentialities rather than merely remain satisfied being what they already are. The upshot has been the great civilizations. They cost, it must be acknowledged, not only sweat but blood. And the sweat they cost also soaks the earth from the crust to the center. But the socialist will keep men fed, happy, and taken care of, because what he wants them to be is slaves.
But the price? asks the socialist. The price, replies the conservative, is indeed high. Make no mistake: we conservatives are not unaware of that. We know how frightfully high is the price. The price is the earth soaked with tears from the crust to the center; it is Ivan’s dossier, and that is a very small sample of the evil which the exercise of freedom produces. But it is, alas, the ineluctable and frightful choice, for it is a matter of our dignity, and ifyou take that from us you take our humanity from us and turn us into ants and our social world into an ant-heap.
This, then, is the issue between us and the liberals or socialists. They think men are slaves and are prepared to treat them as such. We think men have a metaphysical dimension, of which freedom is a component, and we are prepared to pay the price freedom exacts, lest we turn men into cattle. We know the price is high. But the alternative, to deny men freedom for the sake of reducing their miseries, isin our eyes anenormity we cannot commit.
What, then, must we conserve? We must conserve our dignity, and our dignity we cannot retain unless weface the frightful price of our freedom. And why must we conserve it? Because the dynamism of history is pushing us into socialism, and that is the nullification of our humanity and our conversion into well-fed cattle.
