[This is Chapter Two of Murphey’s
book Socialist Thought.]
My studies have led me to a
conclusion that will not surprise many students of modern history and the
history of ideas, but that may startle the average person, whose everyday life
does not cause him to think in these terms.
It is this: That there is perhaps no fact more important to
understanding modern civilization than the "alienation of the
intellectual.”
After the shattering of the medieval
consensus, the secular civilization that ensued was almost certainly headed
into a long existential quest to "find itself." No dependable models
were handed down from the past. It would seem, however, that the neurotic
self-laceration and angry divisions -- which have permeated our thinking to the
extent of having become comprehensive hostile systems that see life in widely
divergent ways -- have gone far beyond a normal existential seeking. The process could have been far less fevered.
It would have been if the modern intellectual had been fundamentally at peace
with the West’s predominant culture.
The rise of modern socialism in its
many varieties has been a major result of these divisions. The alienation of
the intellectual and the intellectuals’ resulting quest for an alliance with
the unassimilated elements in every society have been
at the heart of the rise of socialism. I doubt whether there would have been a
massive socialist thrust in
This alienation was the main topic
in the first book in this series, Understanding the Modern Predicament. What was said there is important to
understanding socialism:
“The alienation of the modern
intellectual from the great middle class -- the ‘bourgeoisie’ -- …has been of
particular importance during the past two and a half centuries, if we date it
from Rousseau. There has been an
enormous tension between the intellectual subculture and the predominant type
of man within the larger culture. This
tension must be understood if we are to grasp the competing value systems and
‘systems of interpretation’ within our society.
“There is, of course, some
embarrassment when we are asked to define the word ‘intellectual,’ even though
this term is central to ‘the alienation of the intellectual.’ Nor is there absolute clarity in speaking of
the ‘bourgeoisie.’
“We will have to bear with these
embarrassments and avoid any attempt at precise definition. The historic phenomenon with which I will be
concerned is palpable enough that we need not delineate it closely at the
edges. I will often refer to the
‘intellectual’ in a sympathetic sense as the ‘thoughtful and sensitive’ man,
the man of ‘tender conscience’ in Emerson’s phrase, whose life involves an
emphasis on contemplation and theory and a sincere concern for ideas. This is the man of books and words, often the
academic man, who is removed from active life within the cloister of a
protected, cerebral existence. And I
will use the term in a broad sense to include a variety of men and not just the
giants of thought (who in their independence are probably less involved in the
mass alienation than are lesser intellectuals).
In doing so, I will be departing from Aquinas’ usage.
“It is also worth noting that when I
will speak of the ‘alienation of the intellectual’ I will be making a
generalization that has had many exceptions.
By no means have all modern intellectuals shared the alienation. Many have devoted their lives to opposing it,
although for many years these have been in the minority…
“Still further, there is a problem
from the snobbery inherent in the work ‘intellectual.’ It is not just the bookish man who
thinks. Intelligent businessmen
sometimes take offence at the entire concept of an ‘alienated intellectuality,’
since they are not willing to concede that the alienated group has a corner on
intellectuality. Ayn
Rand has championed this viewpoint by stressing the extent to which the acting
man brings intelligence to bear on reality.
“I agree with this criticism, but in
another sense I demur from it. We need
some term to reflect the difference between someone who devotes himself to
ideas and sensibilities and others who do not.
Each deserves credit, but they are not the same. If we can use ‘intellectual’ without
belittling others, it seems the appropriate term to connote sustained effort in
abstract ideas.
“Even after these qualifications, we
come to yet another difficulty. When
intellectuality goes beyond individual effort and becomes a group phenomenon,
the ‘intelligentsia’ becomes a subculture.
But many who assume the lifestyle and accoutrements of that subculture
are in no real sense ‘intellectuals’ in the more favorable
meaning of that term. Some are mere camp
followers. Not everyone in
“As to the concept of the
‘bourgeoisie,’ I have already mentioned the difficulty that comes from the fact
that the intellectual actually seems to have been alienated from the entire
spectrum of contemporary men. Even where
he has allied with the have-nots, he intends their ultimate reformation. The word ‘bourgeoisie’ is too narrow to
denote the true object of the alienation. If it serves at all, it must be to
mean everyone who stands within the predominant culture. It will not do, at
least in this century, to narrow the meaning to a smaller group with specific
characteristics. Even the substitute term 'middle class' isn't fully adequate,
since the alienation also runs against any so-called 'upper class' and reaches
in the other direction to include, say, the blue collar worker. The alienation
has been so extensive that it is an alienation against
modern Western civilization itself. But we will be justified in speaking of the
alienation as being against the middle class or bourgeoisie -- both to remain
consistent with the usual way in which it is expressed and because the 'middle
class' is so broad today as virtually to cover our entire society anyway. The
ideology expressing the alienation has cast itself in anti-capitalist terms,
stressing its conflict especially with the bourgeoisie…
"It would take quite an
enormous book to illustrate adequately the full range of alienation in modern
European thought. The reader will need to understand that my references here
are the barest sample.
"Julien
Benda's well known book The Betrayal of the
Intellectuals…has much to say about the alienation and neuroses within modern
intellectuality. ‘For twenty centuries,’
he says, 'the "clerks" preached to the world that the State should be
just; now they proclaim that the State should be strong and should care nothing
about being just... This denunciation of liberalism, notably by the
vast majority of contemporary men of letters, will be one of the things in
this age most astonishing to History, especially on the part of the French.'
(Emphasis added) In
the modern intellectual 'the soul or
"In The Open Society and Its
Enemies, Karl Popper discussed important parts of this alienation. Picking
up a phrase from Schopenhauer, he referred to an 'age of dishonesty.' It was Hegel, he said, who mainly originated
the mentality 'controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power
of jargon.' Hegel 'became the first
official philosopher of Prussianism.' From Hegel came a left wing that 'replaces
the war of nations which appears in Hegel's historicist scheme by a war of
classes' and an extreme right wing that 'replaces it by the war of the races.'
Popper further illustrated the point Benda made about
an anti-liberal exaltation of power when he quoted Hegel to the effect that
'the State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth... We must therefore
worship the State...' This led Hegel to
juridical positivism -- 'the doctrine that might is right.'
"It is far too superficial to
assign the tendencies of an age to just one man, but in Hegel we see an
intellectual root for the totalitarianisms that have so greatly embodied the
intellectual and social pathologies of the nineteenth and ninetieth centuries.
And, too, there are important inputs into Nazism in Nietzsche's writing,
despite many insights scattered like gems within his writing. Nietzsche
denounced liberalism as mere 'herd-animalization' and saw democracy as a ‘form
of decline in organizing power.' He
spoke of 'the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of shopkeepers,
Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats.' He exalted the 'will to power' and in The
Antichrist he defined as good 'everything that heightens the feeling of
power in man, the will to power, power itself' and as bad 'everything that is
born of weakness.’ He exposed the depth
of his alienation when he wrote that 'there are days when I am afflicted with a
feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy -- contempt of man. And to leave no doubt concerning what I
despise: it is the man of today.' (His emphasis) He was passionately aristocratic, and
affirmed 'the order of castes, the order of rank,' which he said, merely
formulates the highest-law of life.'
"Nietzsche’s work contains many
valuable insights; the open-minded John Stuart Mill would certainly have
acknowledged that Nietzsche knew his own corners of the truth. But there should be little trouble in recognizing
the monstrous nihilism Nietzsche also represented. Although many authors downplay the notion, I
see little reason to hesitate in confirming the connection between his thought
and that that later moved Hitler.
"In Mein
Kampf, Hitler echoed the anti-bourgeois
alienation: 'As a young scamp in my wild years, nothing had so grieved me as
having been born at a time which obviously erected its Halls of Fame only to
shopkeepers and government officials... This development seemed not only to
endure but was expected in time (as was universally recommended) to remodel the
whole world into one big department store in whose vestibules the busts of the
shrewdest profiteers and the most lamblike administrative officials would be
garnered for all eternity... Why couldn't I have been born a hundred years
earlier? Say at the time of the Wars of
Liberation when a man, even without a 'business,' was really worth
something?! Thus I had often indulged in
angry thoughts concerning my earthly pilgrimage.'
“In
“Aris next
tells us of de Maistre, who ‘lost himself in mystical
speculation and in a passionate attempt to re-establish the superiority of the
highest medieval power in
“Aris’
narrative is a good one, but the unavoidable redundancy of its subject matter
is apparent as he goes on to Adam Muller, who again was ‘carried away by an
unbridled mysticism, in which the State becomes the “totality of life.”’ This
constantly reiterated theme shows that modern European thought experienced an explosion
of philosophies hostile to the main body of the civilization. The thinkers have often been mystical,
aristocratic, statist; and their writing has run like
rivulets into later thought which has continued the hostility. From a distance it is difficult to tell the
mystical and aristocratic views from much socialist thought, except that the
various socialist models, both Left and Right, have differed from a purely
aristocratic view by seeking mass support.
All of them have been profoundly alienated.”1
These passages from Understanding
the Modern Predicament demonstrate that alienation was a major phenomenon
and show how widespread it was among intellectuals in general. There were notable exceptions, to be sure;
not all intellectuals formed anti-bourgeois ideologies. But the overwhelming thrust, which is both
tragic and ironic, is that at the very same time that the West was emerging
from the Age of Kings, feudalism and towering religion into a secular age of economic
expansion, Industrial Revolution, individual enterprise, religious tolerance,
political freedom, rationalism and science, these developments were bitterly
opposed by intellectuals of many persuasions.
It
will be important for us to understand how fundamental this alienation has been
to the rise of modern socialism. There
would be considerable advantage in quoting the alienated comments of socialist
authors at length at this juncture, so that the reader will sense the
continuity and weight of it all. This
book will be long, though, even without doing that. The rest of this book will speak for itself
on the subject of alienation, and by the time the reader has finished he will
have had ample opportunity to observe the many expressions of alienation. The chapter-headings themselves point toward
the relevance of alienation to socialist thought: “Continuities from Medieval Values… “The intellectual and the Have-Nots”… “European Exportation of Alienation”… “The Focus on
Attack”… “Rejection of Bourgeois Liberalism”… “Relativism as a Means of
Attack”… “The Worldview of the Left: A
Perspective From Down Under”… “Theories
of Exploitation”…and the like.
In
Understanding the Modern Predicament I made a systematic analysis of the
causes and consequences the alienation that I won't want to repeat here. The
chapters of that book that pertain to such an overall understanding are
valuable as an underpinning for our discussion of socialist thought.
In
the rest of this chapter I will be content to discuss a number of separate
points that will allow me to share the information I have gathered through
reading socialist literature. They will supplement my discussion in Understanding
the Modern Predicament and will begin to create a mosaic that will bring
together the various threads for the reader who has not studied that book.
1.
Among those who are not thoroughly familiar with socialism or who are
preoccupied with the specific economic and ideological content of socialism's
appeal to the have-nots, there is a naive impression that socialism is the
ideology of the poor. It comes as a surprise to such a person that socialist
thinkers have virtually all come from the middle class or higher. These
thinkers have not themselves been proletarians, even though they have presumed
to speak for the proletariat. Norman
Thomas says "the leaders in the development of socialism were almost all
rebels from the upper and intellectual classes."2
It
is tempting to think that in nineteenth century
If
we take the main personalities in socialist history as reflected by the table
of contents of Fried and Sanders' Socialist Thought, and if we then look
up these men in Collier's Encyclopaedia, here is what we find about
their origins:
Jean
Jacques Rousseau.
"The Rousseaus were watchmakers and substantial
citizens." "Gracchus" Babeuf. A land surveyor.
Claude
Henri Saint-Simon. “At the height of Jacobin power, he formally
abdicated his noble name and titles.”
Charles
Fourier. “The son of a prosperous
cloth merchant.”
Robert
Owen. Although he started at a relatively low level
as an apprentice draper, he became a wealthy businessman.
Pierre
Joseph Proudhon. He
was one of the few whose origins coincided with the popular image of
socialists. He was born “of a poor
labouring family.”
Karl
Marx. “His father was a Jewish lawyer.” When he was seventeen he “entered the
Friedrich
Engels. “The
son of a prosperous and conservative textile manufacturer.”
Michael
Bakunin. “Born in 1814 into a
family of the Russian minor landed nobility….”
Peter
Kropotkin.
“He was born in
Georges
Sorel. “
Ferdinand
Lassalle. “The son of a Jewish
merchant.”4
Leon
Trotsky. In his autobiography, My Life, Trotsky
downplays his early years as “the grayish childhood of a lower-middle-class
family,” but this impression is contradicted by what he tells us about
specifics. He refers, for example, to
his family’s having had a cook and a maid. His father cultivated 650 acres, had herds of
cattle and of horses, and had buildings that featured a machine-shop, servants’
quarters, a stable, a chicken house, and the like. The children took music lessons. Later, “the October Revolution found my
father a very prosperous man.”5
2. Most people probably don’t associate National
Socialism in
In The Socialist Revolution,
Richard Vetterli and William E. Fort, Jr., say about
Nazism that
Vetterli and Fort include a significant passage
that they say was written by Peter Viereck "at
the height of Hitler's power" and that observes that "most of these
leading Nazi ideologists (except for the brilliant George circle) may justly be
denied the status of first-class thinkers. But neither do they deserve to be
dismissed with the haughty contempt usually accorded them in America. Rather,
these German word-warriors (like Langbehn, Lagarde, Eckart, Gottfried, Feder, Darre, Ernest Krieck, Count Reventlow, Funk, Goebbels, Rosenberg) generally have a status midway
in-between the first and the third rate…After 1933 many of them repented. Many
courageously strode to torture and prison... But too late!!! Many of the most
talented German intellectuals (including Blunek,
Grimm, Ludwig Klages, Krieck,
Reventlow and the rest) still support Hitler through
the worst."
Some
of these intellectual influences pertained to the Nazi's organization of the
economy. Vetterli and Fort say that Walter Rathenau profoundly influenced German economic thinking,
and that he, "perhaps more than any other socialist intellectual,
determined the views of the generation which grew up in Germany during and
immediately after World War I.” They say
that some of the men most closely associated with Rathenau
"later became the backbone staff of Goering’s
Five Year Plan Administration.”6
In
Italy, the fascists were, according to Lichtheim in
his A Short History of Socialism, “a radical nationalist movement of the
intelligentsia." Benedetto Croce was one of the leading thinkers in Italy,
and Vetterli and Fort tell us "believed that
Fascism had justified itself by overcoming Italian indifferences to politics
and by reviving national morale." They say that "the philosopher
Pareto also praised the new dictatorship" and that "other top
Fascists, such as well-known intellectuals Paolo Boldrin,
Rodolfo Vagliasindi,
and Count Pier-Ludovico Occhini, were holders of
the PhD, and had published extensively. Another, Guglielmo
Marconi, was a recipient of numerous honorary degrees and had been awarded the
Nobel Prize." They quote Professor Alfred Rocco as having written that
"for Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its life
consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends." They speak of Giovanni Gentile as a
"neo-Hegelian phi1osopher and one of the Fascist movement’s top
intellectuals." Later they mention Mario Palmieri
as also having been a Fascist intellectual.
3. Marxist ideology has acknowledged the
phenomenon of the alienation of the intellectual, though that ideology
necessarily gives it a different interpretation than I do. John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset
write that "the basic contradiction of post-industrial society -- the
Marxist-Hegelian sense of contradiction -- may well turn out to be, not the
growth of a manual working class that is potentially alienated, which Marx saw
as the central contradiction of the nineteenth century capitalist system, but
the increase of an inherently alienated new leading stratum, namely the
intellectuals."8 This recognizes the existence of the
alienation, its magnitude and duration, and the challenge it has posed to the
predominant society.
4. Chapter 11 in Understanding the Modern
Predicament analyzed the causes of the alienation. Chapter 9, which dealt
with existential problems within a commercial culture, should also be
understood as relating to the causes. One
of the causes is what I have called "displacement." This
refers to the fact that the modern intellectual has been displaced by the
acting man of commerce and industry. The intellectual has had no settled,
satisfactory place; he has struggled in an on-going rivalry for the power and
status that he feels he deserves.
Many
passages in socialist writing relate to the displacement. David Caute, for example, says in The Left in Europe Since
1789 that the various movements of the Left have often received their
theory and leadership from intellectuals.
He refers to the intelligentsia as "a group which combines a high
educational level with a relative lack of social integration."9
(Emphasis added.)
In
part, the displacement shows a lack of economic integration. The demand for the
product produced by "men of words" is often not high enough to reward those products well, in part
because of the large numbers of such people. An interesting illustration is given by Lewis S. Feuer, who
points out that "England in the 1880s was already producing a surplus of
intellectuals that the economy could not absorb." He refers to a passage
by William Clarke in the first Fabian Essays in which Clark spoke of an
"intellectual proletariat." Clarke said that "fifty years ago
you could have gathered all the press writers of London into a single moderate
sized room. Today all told they number ten thousand...You see at once that it
is impossible for all these men to earn a living... The
result is that the keenest and most dangerous discontent comes from the
educated classes, who are leading the Socialist masses all over Europe."
I do not, however believe that the
struggle for a good living should be thought of as standing alone. In addition, the intellectuals are morally
offended, and they feel that they are being denied the power, prestige and
influence that is their due. These dimensions are apparent in Feuer's later observation about "a vast corps of
literary and aesthetic intellectuals without high competence or talents, often
semi-educated, but who nonetheless feel themselves as most properly qualified
(in Shelley's phrase) to be the legislators or mankind. Society, they feel, is
not proffering the places they merit."10
The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was stalwartly pro-capitalist. He praised the market
economy for the "consumer sovereignty" that is inherent in it. Those
who advocate a "free society" in the classical liberal sense will
applaud the market system in part because of the consumer choice it allows. It
is worth noticing that this involves a democracy of choice, which is very much
at odds with the system of rewards an intellectual almost necessarily prefers.
The intellectual is convinced that he himself -- as a person who is sensitive,
discerning, conscientious and capable -- has intrinsic merit. Beyond that, he
feels that his vital concerns and work products are also of imperative value,
whether many other people think so or not. If we appreciate the enormous value
of spiritual and intellectual life, we will realize that he is often correct in
this feeling. But this does not suggest that people in general, as they decide
what to buy and not to buy, will reward any given intellectual, or even
intellectuals as a group. In my own case, I write classical liberal philosophy
for which there has been virtually no market. To the extent there are classical
liberals in our society, and in a broad sense there are many, they devote
themselves to other things and not to the serious reading of abstract ideas.
This does not mean that there is no value in what I write, but it does mean
that years of thought and effort bear no inevitable relationship to recognition
and reward. It would be foolish to think that this not a potent source of
grievance on the part of intellectuals. In a market system, anything that does
not appeal to someone else's economic demand becomes a private indulgence, a
form of personal consumption that has costs but that produces no income. The
result is that many valuable, even essential, people and things are minimized.
At least this is true about the direct operation of the market, although in a
broader context the enormous productivity and affluence a market system brings
about creates a setting in which there is more support for intellectual and
aesthetic pursuits than has existed before. The modern intellectual, however,
takes this broader support for granted as an entitlement (just as he takes our
giant universities for granted) and continues to be sensitive to what he sees
as a general lack of appreciation and reward.
This is why classical liberalism, as
the philosophy of an individualistic, market-centered society, needs to be
deeply concerned about the spiritual and intellectual elevation of bourgeois
life. A bourgeois society cannot be complete without an elevating leadership by
an appropriate intellectual "clerisy," to
use the word preferred by Coleridge and John Stuart Mill. The greatest tragedy
produced by the fact of intellectual alienation is that the flight of the
intellectual has deprived modern civilization of an essential element. There
are dimensions of aesthetics, of poetry, of
broad vision and sensibility, that must be part of a bourgeois society
if it is to fulfill the best that is in people and is
to avoid incurring perpetual loathing. The blame for the failure in this area
in the modern age lies about equally with the average person, in his lack of
interest and awareness, and with the intellectual, in the inappropriateness of
his alienated response.
The intellectual's grievance with
the market is really a grievance with other people. It would be a grievance
even if they were all to become intellectuals. They are preoccupied with their
own lives and do not have the time or sensibility to "value him for his
own sake." If his own internal
consciousness, his radical solitude, is a shrine, it is he himself, and not
others, who must be the worshiper. Even if the others were all fellow
intellectuals (which is something that will never happen, as I see human
nature), he could not anticipate that they would worship at his shrine, since each of those others would have his own. An
exception occurs when a thinker is able to develop a strong group of disciples.
But all thinkers ought not to expect
this as their due, and there is room for doubt about whether discipleship has
much real value anyway.
Not only will most people not value
the intellectual for his own sake; often they won't even buy what he produces.
This isn't the market's doing; the reason for it lies in their having their own
tastes and interests. This can't be remedied by getting away from a market
economy unless doing so provides the means either to remake peoples' tastes or
to force their attention. This is something we will need to keep in mind later
when we discuss the desire many intellectuals have to use socialism or
revolution as a way to remold mankind in their own
image.
There is an analogy to the Marxists'
point about "the alienation of people from their work." This use of
the word "alienation" pertains to the separation that exists between
work-for-its-own-sake and work-for-a-saleable product. The point that Marxists
make is that a market system causes substitution, for the enjoyment of work for
its own sake, of a secondary, or "false," set of values. Instead of immersing themselves in work for
the sheer enjoyment of creativity, people look ahead to what they will receive
in payment. The same split is seen in the difference between a college
student's studying a subject for its own sake and his studying for the grade
that he hopes to make. The concern over
the grade involves the substitution of a more secondary, mediocre, but
tangible, set of values.
What the Marxists fail to see, or
disregard because they think they have a better alternative, is that the
problem arises because of the inescapable fact that other people are
involved. Exquisite, hand-carved cabinets of the type that give great job
satisfaction for the carver can be made for the rich, but the average person
must obtain less expensive, more functional cabinets, which can only be made
generally available through mass production. No society can assure everyone
meaningful, satisfying work unless it can force consumers to abandon their
desire for cheap goods. The situation with a student's grades similarly
reflects the realities of a world of people: other people want to have
an easy way to judge the work a student has done; in addition, parents and
educators don't find that pure intellectual satisfaction is enough to motivate
many young people. A more tangible value system is introduced that is
spiritually inferior but more effective.
This universal accommodation of
everyone's genuineness to secondary, indirect values involves considerable loss
on at least one side of the ledger. The alienated intellectual and the
socialist have hit upon legitimate concerns. This is true, even though the
losses are more than made up for on the other side of the ledger. This came to
mind this past summer while I was coaching a ten year old boys' baseball team.
I was very fond of the boys, but there were times when I valued each boy for
what he could produce: a hit, a pitch delivered hard over the plate, or a
straight throw to first base. This, it seemed to me, is as it should be,
despite the socialists' protests to the contrary. It atrophies life to want it
always to be an accepting, caressing, non-judgmental womb. We measure ourselves
by standards that relate to the social context in which we find ourselves (in
this case, the aspirations of everyone connected with the team), when we come
to expect objective performance.
Socialist literature has often
expressed the complaint against this dichotomy in human life. Adam Ulam observes that there may be a sociological explanation
for why intellectuals have not liked capitalism: "the system deprecates
the importance of the intellectual class, and it has the tendency to evaluate
achievement in pragmatic business-like terms."11
Werner Sombart
migrated through several forms of anti-capitalist alienation. He was first a
leading member of the German Historical School, then a Marxist, then a devout
supporter of Hitler. He articulated the socialist concern especially well in
1937 during his Nazi phase when he complained about "the exclusive
acceptance of money value” in a market system and said that "all other
values are, through a refined process of disapproval, divested of their power
to command recognition, or they merely serve as a means of achieving riches. An
intellectual person obtains neither standing nor approval in society until he
has a large income. A poet, a composer, a sculptor, a painter, a physician, a
lawyer are regarded as insignificant until they can prove the contrary through
a large tax bill; in other words, until they can show 'results.' But to achieve
results at present means to be recognized by a large number of persons who are
solvent and can, therefore, pay a high price. In all avenues of life results
are measured by the amount of income received. The declining scale is as
follows: from spiritual value to performance value, from performance value to
result value, from result value to value of visible result, from value of
visible result to value capable of being coined."
Sombart
showed the importance he attached to this when he said that "the most
singular mark of the economic age is that wealth which has its origin in
the counting-house carries no stain, and that the representatives of economics,
the businessman, as such, enjoy the respect of the people and wield the power
in the state."12 (Emphasis added) This is reminiscent of Thomas Carlyle's
vigorous complaints about everything's being reduced to a "cash
nexus."
Joseph Goebbels
thought the ideal solution to the intellectual's paradox was provided by
national socialism: "How could the German artist not feel sheltered in
this state! Socially secure, economically improved, esteemed by society, he can
now serve his great plans in peace and without the bitterest cares for his
livelihood. He again has a people that awaits his call."13
5. Another of the causes of the
alienation I discussed in Understanding the ModernPredicament
was the role of envy, with the associated desire to possess power. This is a
cause that is closely related to the displacement.
Joseph Schumpeter spoke of Marxism
as having stated "with unsurpassed force that feeling of being thwarted
and ill treated which is the auto-therapeutic attitude of the unsuccessful
many."14 He felt that capitalism is unable to create an
emotional attachment in its people, and that in the absence of such an
attachment the frustrations of everyday life build up to a "hostile
impulse" that becomes a "permanent constituent of our psychic
setup."
Feuer says
that to rule has been “the frustration of their will to rule has been the
deepest unconscious source of intellectuals' alienation." He says that
they felt themselves an elite that has been "entitled to rule" in
place of business, legal, military or even popularly elected elites. The
subject isn’t a simple one with Feuer, however, since he sees a variety of
motives at work within the intellectual. The intellectual is altruistic and
self-sacrificing while at the same time yearning to merge "in an
alternating dominance and submission, with the physical power of the
people." Depending upon circumstances, this merger can be with the
peasants, the proletariat, minority races, backward countries, or any other
have-not group.
Feuer's
writing shows the relationship among several factors: displacement, personal
envy, the quest for power, the alliance with unassimilated elements, and
elitism. These are all parts of the same phenomenon even though we can separate
them for discussion.
Temperament is another aspect
closely tied to displacement and envy. The intellectual tends to be the sort of
personality who, instead throwing himself unreservedly into any activity,
stands aside as an observer even while he appears to be actively involved. It
would be an interesting empirical study to compare groups of
"intellectuals" and "acting men" on how successfully they
participated in childhood team sports. There seems be a pattern that forces
those who are less capable at sports, whether because of temperament or sheer
lack of physical ability, to drop out and shift their efforts to other things.
Feuer comments how remarkable it is that such intellectuals as Shaw and
Einstein "had similar traits of personal incapacity to cope with a
competitive world." This has led, he says, to their estrangement from
other people. It is an easy jump from this to alienated political ideology, as we
see from Kingsley Amis' comments in one of the Fabian
tracts when he refers to
political writing and activism as "a kind of self-administered therapy for
personal difficulties rather than as a contribution towards the reform of
society -- this I think is an important key to the whole intellectual approach
to politics." He say that those who love what is "established and
customary" move toward the right; those who hate it move toward the left.15
It would be a mistake to think that
the rejection of everyday life with its gregarious activity, and the
intellectuals' withdrawal into self, are just a matter of personality
preference. The intellectual sincerely rejects the vacuity of what in Understanding
the Modern Predicament I referred it as “the extroverted outer flow."
Modern intellectuals have complained constantly about this emptiness. John
Stuart Mill was extremely unhappy with the intellectual mediocrity of the
rising middle class in nineteenth century England. Ralph Waldo Emerson
explained that men of sensibility "fly for refuge to the world of
ideas" when they find the world too meaningless and false. Since this is a
potent substantive cause of the alienation, we should expect to find the
complaint voiced in socialist literature. It appears in Rosa Luxemberg's comment in 1917 that "this losing oneself
complete in the banalities of daily life is something that I generally cannot
understand or endure."16
Harold Laski complained to Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., about the United States that "it would be a real help to me
if I could discover in this country some widespread and continuous passion for
intellectual effort. I suppose you don't have the opportunity to encounter the
lighthearted ignorance which appalls me."17
A fair assessment of the problem of
emptiness calls for some additional observations, though, that are not
flattering to the alienated intellectual. The affluence of the modern age has
made vast resources available to the intellectual. At the same time, the number
of intellectuals has increased. If instead of preoccupying themselves with
alienation these intellectuals had gone ahead to produce, by their own efforts
and among themselves, the magnificent renaissance that was possible, most of
the pain that has come to them from vacuity would have evaporated, even if
great masses of people remained indifferent. An emptiness certainly existed. It
has been created by the rise of average humanity, the materialistic
preoccupations of the so-called "bourgeoisie," and the trivialities
of the "extroverted outer flow." But intellectuals have been
significantly at fault themselves. They have perpetuated the emptiness by their
own failure to transcend it; and they have contributed their own ingredient to
the emptiness by setting its tone through injecting a non-humanistic neurotic
quality into it. We see this neurosis in a large part of modern art, music and
literature. It appears not just in alienated expressions, but also in many
forms of popular culture, which are strongly influenced by the intellectuals' orientation.
6.
Intellectuals often think of socialism as a way to open the door for
intellectuality. Edward Bellamy envisioned a society in which the highest
recognition would go to intellectuals. Salvador Allende
talked about Communism in Chile as "ensuring for its intellectuals and
artists conditions in which their works will express a true cultural
renaissance."18 By this time in the twentieth century, however,
there is a healthy scepticism on this score because of the disillusioning
experience that intellectuals have had with socialism as it has actually been
practiced. This disillusionment is apparent in Tamara Deutscher's
article in The Socialist Register 1978 when she writes of "the
deeply felt isolation of the intellectual in a society of the Soviet
type." She tells specifically that
"the highly sophisticated dissident philosophers of the so-called Budapest
School... have left Hungary," and that other dissident intellectuals have
a choice either of staying "on the margin of society" or of joining a
mass of sychophants. She speaks of an "inertia of fear" among
dissident intellectuals in the
Soviet Union because of the "relentless persecution by the state."19
Socialists have been predisposed to
ignore such lessons and even now have only partly learned them. One of the
enormities of the twentieth century has been the extent to which the world's
intellectuals have been oblivious to the abuses within the Soviet Union and
Communist China. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is correct in
pointing out that the "Western socialists who waited until 1961 to feel
'ashamed of being socialists side by side with the Soviet Union' could very
well have come to that conclusion some forty or forty-five years earlier. At
that time, Russian Communists were already destroying Russian socialists. But
nobody groans when another man's tooth aches."20
The problem of the role of intellect
in a collectivist society should be considered a perpetual one by those who
think about socialism. The intellectual will at all times and places be in the minority. His role is accordingly
contingent upon factors that are often out of his control. We recall Eric Hoffer's observations in The True Believer about how the idealist is shunted
aside as a revolution matures. Robespierre and Trotsky learned this lesson
through bitter experience.
Chapter 24 will discuss an underlying premise of socialist thought I
have variously called "the assumption of continuity" or "of
regularity." An idealist's call for a collectivist society almost
necessarily involves a supposition that the resulting society will continue his
own values and purposes. He counts on its giving a significant role, often the
places of top leadership, to men like himself; and he assumes that it will
carry out the social values he
finds desirable. This is, of course, quite a naive supposition. It is an act of
faith.
We can imagine what a shock it is to
a good many alienated Western artists to find, as Rudi Supek
tells us, that "an extremely ferocious campaign is being waged in some
socialist countries today against abstract art as the last, 'most radical,' and
most distorted, expression of bourgeois decadency in art."2l
Supek is not talking about Hitler's artistic tastes, but about avowedly leftist
societies to which the alienated artists of the twentieth century have looked
with great anticipation.
[Note in 2003: In the above
passages I have summarized the causes of the alienation as I analyzed them in Understanding
the Modern Predicament. As I have
prepared that book for inclusion on my Web site, however, I have felt it
necessary to add mention of the alienation that various ethnic groups felt that
migrated to the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Most especially, a great many
Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe have taken part in the Left, including in
the alienation that has been so much a part of leftist thinking. It is likely that their alienation stems in
major part from the same causes I have analyzed in my earlier book and in this
chapter; but there may be features in the history of those individuals and the
culture from which they came that need to be understood specifically. I am not sufficiently versed in that history
or culture to comment on the origins of their ideology and sentiment.]