THE FOCUS ON ATTACK

We have discussed two of the more important facts about modern society: the alienation of the intellectual, and the consistent effort by the intelligentsia to seek an alliance with any unassimilated or disaffected group in opposition to the predominant culture.

Now we need to become aware of how much these things have given rise to an active impulse, a desire to attack, to be on the offensive in conducting the on-going rivalry with the main culture. The reverberations are extensive and, sometimes, surprisingly subtle. All Leftist ideology and many of the well-known movements within modern thought have been molded profoundly by the dictates of this offensive posture.

I do not mean to say, of course, that this is the only explanation for the many tendencies and schools within modern thought. There are other important factors, but the fact that a concept is useful as a means of attack is one of the things that determine the form it assumes.

Chapters 8 through 13 will illustrate several aspects of this attack posture.

Chapter 9 will deal with the extent of the rejection of liberal values and institutions. This rejection has been prominent in my discussion of alienation; but we need to notice, too, that hatred for bourgeois life has been the common thread that has tied together many otherwise dissimilar movements. What accounts for Werner Sombart's migration intellectually from the German Historical School to Marxism and then to National Socialism? The answer lies in the viewpoints’ common animus against the bourgeoisie and the classical liberal worldview. Standing on different peaks, Sombart excoriated all the same things in the bourgeois valley below. The particular form of what he affirmed was not as important to him as what he negated.

The ubiquitous presence of this anti-bourgeois sentiment shows how little validity there is to the notion that the Left is an extension of the historically earlier classical liberalism. Rather than medievalism giving way to classical liberalism and this in turn giving way to the Left as a modified version of itself, medievalism was opposed by classical liberalism and there almost immediately arose an antagonistic movement that has deeply resented almost everything that classical liberalism has stood for, even while sharing with it such features of modernity as secularism and empiricism

Chapter 10 is important in examining the extent to which relativism has been a mechanism of attack. This is vitally significant when we think about how many forms relativism has taken during the modern age, and how influential they have been. Relativism in itself is valid and is inherent in the reality-oriented method of empirical science, but it has a second face: it can be used ideologically to undermine existing values and institutions. The Left has no reluctance to so use it.

Chapters 11 through 13 then note that a world-view -- the elaborate mindscape of the Left (not to mention that of the far Right, which despite our confused semantic is closely related to the Left) -- has long-since emerged from these factors. An elaborate conceptual superstructure, mediating social reality according to closely intermeshed perceptions and values, has come into existence. The central tenets of this worldview will be discussed in these chapters, which deal in turn with the concept of "entrapment," the theories of exploitation," and the Left's attitudes toward the relation of people to their environment .

Before we conclude this brief reference to the role that has been played by an active, aggressive mentality, we should recall what Kenneth Coutts-Smith said in his book about the Dadaist movement in art earlier in the twentieth century:

"The beginnings of Dada, Tzara has stated, ' were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust.' As Tara suggested, the aim was to 'humiliate' art. The most obvious aspect of Dada... was a deliberate programme to undermine the moral and social assumptions of existing middleclass society. Disillusionment was the ultimate in nearly everything that Dada represented. Richter pointed out that art must be 'set on its way towards new functions which would only be known after the total negation of everything that had existed before.' Art was the symbol of bourgeois culture that was to be unrelentingly attacked...."¹

Coutts-Smith tells of the 1920 exhibition by three Dadaist artists: "A great deal of planning went into the arrangement of the exhibition in order to produce the maximum amount of shock, scandal and social consternation... The exhibition was opened by a young girl dressed as for her first communion who suddenly began to recite obscene verses."

Nihilism isn't always the same. Sometimes it is deadpan serious, as with certain of the nineteenth century Russian nihilists; sometimes it is rollicking in its sense of belittling fun. In this form, it was much used, for example, by the New Left in the United States in the 1960s, where it was the inspiration for such a mock-comic figure as Jerry Rubin. It is worth noting that the style of exaggerated ridiculousness has not been well received by all factions within alienated ideology: Hitler had artistic tastes that detested it; and "socialist realism" within the Soviet Union had nothing to do with it. In fact, it is sometimes referred to as "decadent bourgeois art," even though such a perception totally misunderstands its origins.

Within the ideologies of alienation, there is both continuity and variety. Some styles of attack are repeated many times over, but not all members of the vast alienated subculture choose the same instruments.

NOTES

Kenneth Coutts-Smith, Dada (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1970), pp. 21-23, 16-117.