Chapter Eleven
The preceding chapter’s discussion of the alienation of the intellectual was descriptive. It simply told the story of the alienation. We still need to understand its causes, which is the subject of this chapter. And then in the next chapter I will discuss the major consequences that have come from it.
The alienation can't be
explained by a single cause. Any simplistic explanation is inadequate and, as a
consequence, unfair. One such partial analysis comes from the alienates
themselves: anyone who is immersed in the literature and rhetoric of alienation
will naturally be inclined to think of it as the direct result of the defects
in our society about which they feel the alienation is a complaint. If we had
asked Emerson why he was alienated, he would have pointed to the "abuses
in which all connive." From this perspective, the alienation would be
satisfied and disappear if the defects were cured. But I hope to make it clear
that this explanation -- which I call the "substantive" explanation
-- would be seriously deficient if taken just by itself. The substantive
defects do in fact play an important role in creating the alienation; but they
are by no means the only cause. I will even express my own conclusion that they
are secondary.
Among the opponents of
the alienates, on the other hand, there are those who would just as quickly
assign an unflattering cause and let it go at that. In this vein, they may
speak of the intelligentsia's rivalry, as a social class, for power in a
secular, commercial civilization. This makes the alienation an expression of a
desire for power and status. Or on the individual level such critics may speak
of the envy that each individual alienated intellectual may feel toward the
success of the businessman. Here, too, I am struck by how insufficient and
unfair such explanations are. I can't see my way clear to write a book that
will attribute the alienation exclusively to sociological rivalry or to
personal envy. To do so would be to engage in too partisan a failure to see the
part of the truth the alienation puts toward. An important by-product of this
injustice would be that we would thereby limit our own understanding. We would
fail to come to grips with the full attraction the alienation has had for so
many sincere and capable people.
I have appreciated the
open intellectual qualities that John Stuart Mill demonstrated in his essay On
Bentham and Coleridge. His intellectual breadth permitted him to see that
each of these polar opposites of the early nineteenth century -- Bentham and
Coleridge -- had hold of a portion of the truth. Mill emphasized that we gain a
little and lose a lot when we close our minds to the partial truths contained
in opposing points of view. Many views that seem to contradict each other are
really focusing on different things. It would be silly to draw from Mill's
example the conclusion that we should adopt an unthinking eclecticism. Nor should
we ignore real conflicts between points of view. But where a civilization and
its problems are highly complex the "truth" -- viewed as a whole --
will almost certainly consist not of a single perception or value, but of a
balance of values and a large body of complementary insights. Because of this,
I expect that future thinking will look back upon each of our current
ideological systems as in various ways correct and in other ways insufficient
-- at least as they have been stated.
I will discuss several
contributing causes of the alienation. Although each will be separable from the
others, they are mutually consistent. Each mirrors a different part of the
civilizational context within which the alienation occurs. I will point to six
such causes and will evaluate their relative importance when I have finished.
The six, briefly stated, are:
1. A substantive
explanation that will look to the spiritual and cultural defects of the society
at large. This explanation also involves all economic and political issues. It
is from the alleged defects of capitalistic and bourgeois society that the
alienation says it is in rebellion.
2. The sociological
rivalry and the acting man of business.
3. The role of envy.
4. The difference in
personality and temperament between the contemplative and the active man.
5. The fact that many of
the value systems we have received from the past have looked with disfavor upon
the man of commerce and the type of culture he creates.
6. The continuing process
by which the alienation of one generation of intellectuals is reproduced in the
next. This is not an initial cause, but it is an important secondary one.
7. [Note in 2003: When I
wrote Understanding the Modern Predicament, I wasn’t aware that some
groups that became a part of American life through immigration, especially
after the revolutionary year of 1848 in Europe, brought with them ideologies
that were inevitably hostile to the mainstream of American culture. These were socialist and often revolutionary,
feeding into all parts of the American Left over the following century. This is especially true of the great bulk of
Eastern European Jews who immigrated after 1880. Accordingly, my 2003 review of Kevin
MacDonald’s book The Culture of Critique should be
considered a vitally important part of this analysis of the causes of the
alienation. This review can be accessed
by a simple click on the hyperlink here, or under “Book Reviews” in the Table
of Publications on this Web site.]
The Causes
The substantive
explanation. A highly intelligent but at
the same time alienated collection of essays about American society appeared in
the 1920s under the title Civilization in the United States. In his book
about alienation in the Twenties, Henry May summarized the charges the essays
leveled against our culture: "(1) emotional barrenness. (2) enforced
conformity. (3) excessive moralism. (4) commercialism, and (5) hypocrisy."l
I am not sure such a list gives a sufficiently fair picture of the subtlety of
the essays, but it does at least present a summary. If we look at the items on
the list, we see that its content is similar to the spiritual problems I
discussed in Chapter 9 in the context of the split between the radical solitude
of each individual and the trivialized outer reality of social contacts. I
won't repeat that discussion at this time, but we should note that everything
that I discussed there has to be taken into account now in terms of its bearing
on the alienation of the intellectual.
The contemplative man is
the one who most cultivates his inner solitude. It is this man, then, who will
feel most acutely the impact of a culture that trivializes and blanks out the
things he considers most meaningful. There are many passages in which men of
learning and sensibility have spoken with great relish about good conversation,
and there are just as many in which they have abhorred a lack of conversation
where that has existed. But the matter goes much deeper than simply into
whether or not there is good conversation. These men will be offended by the
entire style of life in a situation in which their companions are by their
existential make-up steeped in meaninglessness. Where trivia prevail, sensitive
men will form the most far-reaching dissatisfaction with the culture and its
works. Its tastes, fashions, economics and politics -- all of these and more
will seem to him to be built out of nothing. He will see them as reflections of
the false values which he understands to lie at the heart of the culture.
Lostness is one of the
consequences of the split between the inner and outer realities. It has been
brought up again and again in modern literature. Lostness was the main
characteristic of Benjamin in The Graduate. It is basic to much
existentialist thought and to the "loss of meaning" that Viktor
Frankl has described as the most prevalent spiritual problem in the twentieth
century.2 The associated tendency toward withdrawal has also been
apparent. In the counter-culture of the New Left we saw the classic symptoms of
extreme withdrawal.
The "mask of
hypocrisy" is another of the problems I mentioned in Chapter 9. It, too,
has been commented upon many times in modern literature. In fact, the charge of
hypocrisy is one of the most frequent complaints the alienation makes against
bourgeois culture.
The alienated
intellectual has stressed the emptiness of contemporary life in all of its
aspects. This is not to say that the explanations that are given in the
literature to explain this emptiness are always the same as I have given. There
are many different explanations. There is often a desire to explain the
emptiness in economic rather than existential terms, such as in Veblen's The
Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen attributed the false values to the
adoption a long time ago of private property and of a "predatory"
competitive economic nexus.3 In so saying, he followed Rousseau.
This analysis is different from my own, although in some ways it overlaps with
my existential view.
There is another aspect
of the substantive cause of the alienation that we still need to consider. The
substantive causes are not all matters of culture and lifestyle. We would miss
a major aspect if we overlooked the role played by the many difficult social
questions that people have had to face during, say, the past three centuries.
It could hardly be expected that all reasonable men would share a consensus on
these issues. Socialist thought has not consisted exclusively of alienation. It
has also been a response to some pressing questions about the role of the
industrial "masses" and the means to their well-being in a society
that has witnessed the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying
"explosion of the multitudes." Since there are several options, it
isn't likely that all sensitive men would agree with classical liberals that
what has been needed has been more and not less capitalism. There are bound to
have been some whose judgment would opt for a socialist solution.
It is diversity rather
than consensus that we have inherited from the past. The shattering of the
medieval worldview left men unprepared to share a common interpretation.
The capitalism we have
known is historically quite new. It has necessarily been less than fully
mature. It has not had all of the answers. This would have been true even if
the theory of capitalism had been carried out to the letter -- which, of
course, it has not. It isn't hard to find much to be alienated against in an
immature, imperfect society. Even if classical liberalism had been fully
implemented, the cultural existential problems still would have been there to
contend with. And classical liberalism would have needed to have gone much
further into developing voluntary solutions to such "social welfare"
needs as job security, disability income and old age protection. The difficult
issues of the business cycle, of monopoly and of urban development would still
cry out for solution. There have been many real, substantive issues. The
branches of the Left have proposed a variety of solutions for them. Although I
don't think they have offered ultimately constructive solutions, it is obvious
that many people will have approached these issues from a socialist
perspective.
Herbert Spencer was a
thorough-going defender of capitalism, but he was well aware of the
imperfections of his age. He readily acknowledged that "it is not to be
denied that the evils are great and form a large set-off from the benefits. The
system under which we at present live fosters dishonesty and lying. It prompts
adulterations of countless kinds; it is answerable for the cheap imitations
which eventually in many cases thrust the genuine articles out of the market;
it leads to the use of short weights and false measures; it introduces bribery,
which vitiates most trading relations, from those of the manufacturer and buyer
down to those of the shopkeeper and servant." Spencer joined with the
alienate in speaking of the "depravity of the age." He saw that there
were problems that could elicit the concern of sensitive men. The reason he was
able to retain his philosophical identification with the culture was that he
realized that "it is not a question of absolute evils; it is a question of
relative evils." He knew that a depraved humanity had better not look to
socialism for its answers. The same human qualities that vitiated capitalism
would vitiate socialism, too -- and with much more dangerous results.4
But this is the sort of conclusion Spencer and I might reach. Other men who see
the same evils may analyze their causes differently or be more impatient for a
remedy.
Emerson wrote along lines
that were very similar to what I have just quoted from Spencer. We could hardly
attempt to explain Emerson's alienation without addressing ourselves to the
abuses that he himself thought were the source of it.
The world we live in is
exceedingly imperfect. The imperfection is partly concealed by our affluence,
but in many ways it is laid bare. The speed of change is so great that hardly
anything has had a chance to become settled upon solid foundations. We haven't
had time to develop subtle ways of dealing with many problems. There are
countless rough edges and there is even a basic inanity. Needless to say, there
are many legitimate substantive issues.
The displacement theory. One of the main explanations of the alienation of the
intellectual is that the intellectual in modern society has been displaced from
a top-most position in society and has, as a result, been engaged in an
extended rivalry for prestige and power with the acting man. This
"displacement theory" was expressed by Eric Hoffer in The Ordeal
of Change in his chapter on "The Intellectual and the Masses." He
said that "the rise of the militant intellectual in the Occident was
brought about ... by the introduction of paper and printing ... The new men of
words, like those of the eighth century B. C., were on the whole unattached --
allied with neither Church nor government."5 The key element is
that "they had no clear status, and no self-evident role of social
usefulness. In the social orders evolved by the modern Occident, power and
influence were, and to a large extent still are, in the hands of
industrialists, businessmen, bankers, landowners, and soldiers. The
intellectual feels himself on the outside. Even when he is widely acclaimed and
highly rewarded he does not feel himself part of the ruling elite ... Small
wonder that he tends to resent those in power as intruders and usurpers."
Hoffer went on to say
that "the antagonism between men of words and men of action ... reappeared
in the sixteenth century in the life of the modern Occident and set it apart
from all other civilizations." He talked at length about the alliance that
the alienated intellectual has so consistently sought with the "masses” --
an alliance that has been essential if the intellectual were to have enough
political weight to win in his rivalry with the man of commerce. This alliance
is one of the consequences of the alienation that I will discuss in the next
chapter. It arises out of the rivalry of the intellectual subculture with the
acting man.
Edmund Burke's
description of the eighteenth century intellectual sheds some light on the
uniqueness of the modern intellectual as a social type. Burke said that
"along with the monied interest, a new description of men had grown up
with whom that interest soon formed a close and marked union -- I mean the
political men of letters. Men of letters, fond of distinguishing themselves,
are rarely averse to innovation. Since the decline of the life and greatness of
Louis the Fourteenth, they were not so much cultivated either by him or by the
regent or the successors to the crown, nor were they engaged to the court by
favors and emoluments so systematically as during the splendid period of that
ostentatious and not impolitic reign. What they lost in the old court
protection, they endeavored to make up by joining in a sort of incorporation of
their own." Burke commented on the negativism that was already apparent:
"To this system of literary monopoly was joined an unremitting industry to
blacken and discredit in every way, and by every means, all those who did not
hold to their faction. To those who have observed the spirit of their conduct
it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of carrying the
intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution which would strike
at property, liberty, and life.”6
Marc Raeff describes the
development of the nineteenth century Russian intelligentsia in a way that
corresponds to Burke’s observations. Raeff says that "frustrated and
exasperated, the generation of the 1820s turned to the organization of secret
societies and staged the abortive revolt of December 14, 1825. Their failure,
as is well known. created an irrevocable gulf between the elite and the state
-- the one institution that through service had been an anchor for the educated
class since Peter the Great. The elite had not yet overcome its isolation from the
people, and now its ties to the state were cut, too”7 This
involved a deep social displacement.
The upshot, according to
Raeff, was a sense of group identity and an emphasis on transforming society.
"Left alone and adrift, its members turned their energies to find new
roots, using the mental and spiritual traits that had been developed during the
eighteenth century. Lacking solid roots in their family, their region, or their
people, the new generation of the elite sought meaning for their life in thought
and action aimed at transforming the men and society surrounding them ... The
intelligentsia was coming into being."
A similar development
took place in the United States. Jurgen Herbst's The German Historical
School in America Scholarship tells about the uncertain status of the
American intellectual during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
and of the intellectual's irritation over his lack of clear leadership.
"In democratic America politics was everybody's business, whereas in Germany
it was the business of experts. When a German-trained professor returned to his
native shores, eager to contribute his knowledge and skill to the shaping and
guidance of American domestic and foreign policy, he met with deaf ears on the
part of the statesmen and politicians. Instead of citizens eager for sage
counsel and specialized information he encountered Americans preoccupied with
their own selfish advancement and cynical toward scholarly
disinterestedness."8
In light of the
commentaries I have just cited about the sense of displacement that was felt by
intellectuals in England, Russia and the United States, Hoffer's explanation
makes a great deal of sense. It seems to me that this is as it should be. There
is no reason to suppose that the intellectual as a human being operates outside
the common tendencies of mankind. A sociological explanation that is based on
the intellectual's self-interest and his sense of collective identity is bound
to be as true of him as it is of others. (It is also important, though, to
realize that "economic" or "self-interest" explanations are
rarely the whole truth about anybody. They are no more likely to be the whole
truth about intellectuals than they are about others.) Modern thought,
especially on the Left, has often viewed the acting man as mainly a creature of
his economic self-interest and his power cravings. A "realistic” portrait
of this type amounts to a Machiavellian perception of human motivation. This
perception has been a product jointly of the empiricism that has been
characteristic in modern thought and of the Left's ideological desire to debunk
the motives of its opponents. Because of the latter, the
"self-interest" explanation has often been used as a cynical acid.
The same acid can just as validly (and invalidly) be used against the
intellectual, who is by no means immune to the appeal of self-interest and of
drives for power and prestige.
The importance of the
displacement theory as an explanation of the alienation is suggested by
precisely those many writings in which modern intellectuals have told us that
economic and class interest is the main mover of men. When Marx tells us of the
all-encompassing importance of class theory, he is by implication telling us
that the same applies to himself. When Charles Beard and Thorstein Veblen and
Marshall McLuhan describe in subtle detail how human actions are formed out of
economic influences, we can hardly think them exempt. Surely such analyses
contain a grain of subconscious autobiography.
The role of the intellectual
as "intelligentsia," as a distinct social class or subculture engaged
in a struggle for power, is evidenced by the frequent elitism of the
intellectual and his desire to occupy the topmost place of status and
leadership. This elitist striving is apparent in many famous books: the
philosopher king was to be on top in Plato's Republic; the intellectual
was to constitute a priesthood that would share the topmost spot in Auguste
Comte's utopia; in late nineteenth century Germany the "socialist of the
professorial chair" valued his role as advisor to the state; in Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward the intellectual was to receive the
highest honors.9 An endless string of authors have wanted to use the
modern state for an essentially theocratic purpose -- with the intellectual in
the position of primary influence. Even the socialist movements that have
involved the alliance between the intellectuals and the so-called
"masses" and that have accordingly been most ostensibly democratic
have had this element at their ultimate center, since it isn't to be supposed
that after the alienated intellectual has succeeded in his long-standing
rivalry with the man of commerce he will be satisfied with the quality of those
masses. He will be eager at that time for their reformation and will dominate
them, if he can, for that purpose. If he can't dominate them, he will probably
become their bitter enemy.
The Envy Theory. The displacement and envy theories are really two sides of
the same coin. The first explains the alienation in terms of class interest,
the other of individual unhappiness. One is "macro," the other
"micro." In the envy theory we see the psychology of personal
resentment. This individual resentment tends to become an ideology among those
who are equipped to rationalize and articulate it.
A century ago, Sir Henry
Maine wrote his famous discussion of the movement of civilization from status
to contract.10 The individual, Maine said, is no longer being
assigned a place in society from which he cannot deviate. He is becoming free
in modern society to arrange his own place through voluntary relationships he
establishes with others. Maine saw this as having been the tendency within
Western society up to the time of his writing Ancient Law. But during
the century that has followed its publication the tendency has been very much
back the other way. We have continuously added to the status aspects of our
society. This shift back was so evident by the late nineteenth century that
Herbert Spencer commented on it in Man Versus the State.
A comparison has often
been made between the position of an individual within a status society and his
position within a competitive culture. It is argued that the individual in a
status society has a basis for being at peace with himself. This was Samuel
Johnson's view in the eighteenth century when he argued that
"subordination tends greatly to human happiness."1l The
idea is that if a man has inherited, for example, the job of chimney sweep from
his father, and his own son will inevitably inherit it from him, he is under no
pressure to rise higher. The “system of society" won't let him rise.
Accordingly, he feels no nagging frustration over his failure to do so. His
status is not a personal reflection on him, since everyone knows it is beyond
his control. He has no tendency, then, to form scapegoats to rationalize his
lack of success.
I don't agree that this
is a totally adequate view of a status society. History shows continuing
frustration and alienation within such cultures. The plebeians in the early
Roman Republic were not content with their status; they devoted three hundred
years to a fight for equal status with the patricians. In the Greek city-states there was a continual
"struggle of the orders" between the aristocracy and the have-nots.
And in the Middle Ages, the aristocratic hegemony eventually felt the pressure
of the tradesman to rise. Contentment is not an accurate portrayal of a status
society. Herbert Spencer told how the removal of the restraints of a status
society by the old Whigs had been felt as a great positive benefit.
Although this
qualification is necessary, a comparison with a status society is still helpful
to highlight an aspect of competitive society. In a competitive culture, a
person can attend his twentieth year high school reunion and see many who
succeeded better than he has. The individual is peculiarly sensitive to his
failures. Emulation and "invidious comparison," to use Veblen's
phrase, are important to him. But he won't usually accept his inferiority (as
he sees himself or as he imagines his friends and especially his wife see him)
graciously as the result of a system of natural justice. He will very likely
develop defense mechanisms by blaming those who have done better than he has --
or by blaming "the system."
This rationalization of
failure is bound to be an important psychological mechanism within a
competitive nexus. Richard Weaver said of modern man that "because he has
been assured that he is 'just as good as anybody else,' he is likely to suspect
that he is getting less than his deserts.”12 Weaver added ominously
that "resentment, as Richard Hertz has made plain, may well prove the
dynamite which will finally wreck Western society."
It is noteworthy that the
analyses of Thorstein Veblen, who was anti-capitalist, and Ludwig von Mises,
who was pro-capitalist, correspond closely on this point. Veblen observed that
''as fast as a person makes new acquisitions, and becomes accustomed to the
resulting new standard of wealth, the new standard forthwith ceases to afford
appreciably greater satisfaction than the earlier standard did... and this in
turn gives rise to a new standard of sufficiency and a new pecuniary
classification of ones self as compared with ones neighbors." The result
bears heavily on the frustration we are discussing: "So long as the
comparison is distinctly unfavorable to himself, the normal, average individual
will live in chronic dissatisfaction with his present lot."
Veblen, of course,
arrived at negative value judgments about the culture he was describing in
these terms. But I commented earlier that John Bright drew just the opposite
conclusion. Bright thought a "spirit of emulation" was necessary for
human well-being. He took its absence to be an important cause of the degraded
condition of the average Turk in the nineteenth century.13 Ludwig
von Mises agreed with Bright when he saw competitiveness and social striving as
parts of progressive society and of the freedom of the individual. This did not
blind Mises, though, to the realization that envy is one of the main sources of
anti-capitalist feeling.
Mises said something very
close to the passage I have just quoted from Veblen when he commented in The
Anti-Capitalist Mentality that "television sets and refrigerators do
not make a man happy. In the instant in which he acquires them, he may feel
happier than he did before. But as soon as some of his wishes are satisfied,
new wishes spring up." He differed from Veblen, though, when he added a
favorable value judgment: "This lust (for goods) is precisely the impulse
which leads man on the way toward economic
betterment."14
He
distinguished between the situations under status and contract. "In a
society based on caste and status, the individual can ascribe adverse fate to
conditions beyond his own control." But "it is quite another thing
under capitalism... Everybody whose ambitions have not been fully gratified
knows very well that he has missed chances." He agreed with Veblen when he
said that "whatever a man may have gained for himself, it is mostly a mere
fraction of what his ambition has impelled him to win... Everybody is aware of
his own defeat and insufficiency."
The result is an
anti-capitalistic philosophy -- a philosophy of alienation. "In order to
console himself and to restore his self-assertion, such a man is in search of a
scapegoat... (He will say that) he was too decent to resort to the base tricks
to which his successful rivals owe their ascendancy... The more sophisticated
do not indulge in personal calumny. They sublimate their hatred into a
philosophy, the philosophy of anti-capitalism." Mises said the
intellectuals "loathe capitalism because it has assigned to this other man
the position they themselves would like to have." He also pointed out how
wealthy Americans have made this reaction worse by not including intellectuals
in "society, " as is done in Europe.
This resentment --
commented upon by both a friend and an enemy of an individualistic society --
is an important cause of the alienation. And yet, I have already expressed my
opinion that it would be unfair to make it the only explanation.
There are, in fact, good
reasons for resentment in human life. This is as true within individualistic
society as it is elsewhere. Emerson said that a young man, on entering commerce,
must forget the prayers of his childhood and take on the yoke of routine and
obsequiousness. Is the resentment felt by such a man as Emerson something that
we can understand as pure envy? Is there nothing more to it than a petty man's
response to the achievements of those who work harder and think better than he
does? To think so would be to entertain too narrow a perspective. Mises had one
of the finest minds and some of the most decent instincts in modern thought,
but he missed the complexity of the matter when he wrote that under capitalism
there is "the sway of the principle, to each according to his
accomplishments," and concluded that the resentment is almost totally a
rationalization for inadequacy. No doubt such rationalizations occur. But so
will the quite distinguishable anger of the sensitive, decent man against those
features of human relationships that Herbert Spencer referred to as "the
depravity of the age." The resentment can be toward the actual defects in
human relations and not just toward personal failure.
At the same time, it is
important that the alienated intellectual come to see that his alienation has
some roots that are not as noble as he has thought them to be. What is needed
is that all parties to the modern controversy take a broader and fairer look at
the polarization.
Before I conclude my
discussion of the envy theory, I should mention that a related part of its
dynamic lies in the psychology of spoiledness, which I discussed in detail in
Chapter 8. Anyone who takes gratifications for granted as a matter of
entitlement is predisposed to feel resentment. Since such a person will resent
any obstacle or frustration, resentment is a normal part of his frame of mind.
This is itself a source of alienation. It can also be played upon by
opportunists and demagogues, both literary and political. Such demagoguery,
unfortunately, is a significant part of the Left's program and rhetoric. A
number of years ago, Herbert Spencer remarked sagely that "the more things
improve the louder become the exclamations about their badness." He
observed that "there has been... a conspicuous progress in the condition
of the people. And this progress has been still more marked within our own
time." But nevertheless there has been perpetual discontent. This is
sometimes spoken of as "the revolution of rising expectations." If we
analyze it, we see that it is a complicated matter: In part the unhappiness
reflects a legitimate sensibility on the part of those who have known that the
average man has been held in bondage in the past and have tried to eradicate
any vestige of that bondage; in part, though, it reflects the spoiled child
mentality; and in part it reflects the manipulation of the "masses"
(in a new form of bondage?) by politicians and intellectuals who have used the
"masses” as pawns in the strategic game of politics and ideology.
I am especially struck by
the trait of spoiledness that is shown by an intellectual who chooses to devote
his life to books and self-cultivating things, and then envies the attainments
of the man who has been out sweating and grunting. It is an example of “wanting
to have your cake and eat it, too.” The
facticity of life means that years of preoccupation in one direction necessarily
carry with them the cost of not having been able to spend years becoming
successful in another. To resent that something has not come to him when he has
not worked for it is simply to reveal a spoiled state of mind.
Temperament. Despite all of
these considerations, I can't be altogether sure just what it is that makes one
man live life as it has been presented to him and another stand back and pick
it to pieces through an extraneous sensibility. I am not sure I understand the
root difference, for example, between Benjamin Franklin and Henry David
Thoreau. Part of the difference was existential: Franklin enjoyed intellectual
communion with others in the library society that he formed with some friends,
while Thoreau felt deeply isolated by the poverty of soul he sensed around him.
It may be that there was an increase of an academic type of intellectuality
between their respective periods, so that the displacement theory plays a part;
but there was an apparent difference in temperament. These causes were
undoubtedly played upon by the rising Romantic movement in Europe, which
repudiated the Enlightenment and voiced an intense alienation against bourgeois
values.
I have felt the
difference in temperament within myself. It comes up readily even in so simple
a thing as a game of volleyball. A few years ago, the law firm I was in put on
an annual summer picnic, and part of the afternoon was spent playing
volleyball. I noticed that my own attitude as I played the game differed
substantially from that of most of the other players (who as lawyers epitomized
the aggressiveness of the acting man). My expectation was that I had a certain
zone and that if the ball came to me there I would be entitled to hit it back,
but that if it seemed clearly to be going into someone else's zone I had a
reciprocal obligation to let him get it. But the result was that I rarely got
to hit the ball at all, even when it came straight toward me. There were
invariably one or two players muscling in to get in over me, rudely but
obliviously making a spectacular play.
These other players
didn't preoccupy themselves with punctilio about how the game was to be played.
They just played it, and they did so with all the gusto they could muster. They
were, as a result, better players, at least in this informal game where
discipline was not a major factor. The main thing was to see that the ball was
returned. These other players were very much in the game, absorbed in its
give-and-take. My own sensitivity and sense of the decencies withdrew me into a
spectator role, even while the game raged around me.
This was a difference of
personality. It was too small a matter to reflect a "sociological
rivalry.” It was a contrast between contemplation, introspection and
sensitivity, on the one hand, and a thorough-going absorption in the active processes
of energetic life on the other.
Once this difference is
apparent, we can easily see its ramifications. The intellectual playing
volleyball will resent the other players' lack of consideration. He will feel
himself absolutely right in saying that "that player does so well only
because he doesn't care anything about the decencies of the game.” And he will
be right. But at the same time, the volleyball situation is good to show that
there is another side to the story. There is something to be said for the
active man who is able to go ahead effectively without a Hamlet-like
introspection. The case isn't clearly for either type of man.
This difference in
temperament deeply separates the two types. They are bound to see most of life
differently. They will espouse contrasting values, live different lifestyles --
and be antagonistic in many ways. The divisions between them that relate to the
other causes of the alienation will probably relate in some way to this
difference even though this difference in personality isn't the sum total of
the split between them. The other causes continue to play their separable but
complementary roles.
In a newspaper column,
Jeffrey Hart commented on this aspect of temperament as it relates to those who
select an academic career. "I think that one main factor can be singled
out," he wrote. "It has to do with the nature of the decision to
enter upon an academic career. I have worked closely with undergraduates who
were considering a teaching career and with graduate students who were
preparing themselves for such an occupation... Quite characteristically, the
decision (to enter academic life) is... powerfully negative -- not, very
definitely not, to become a doctor or an engineer or an admiral or an
executive, not to participate in quite that direct a way in the ordinary
life of the society” (Emphasis added). He went on to say that "this
negative decision, the decision against the ordinary life of society, may flow
from any number of sources -- temperamental, ideological, neurotic, and so on.
It may even be only half-conscious and unavowed. But it is a reality in a great
many instances." He said that "the intensity of the No said to
society varies in a fairly predictable way from department to department. Those
that tend to be involved with the life of the outer society… attract a
personality type likely to be on much more genial terms with society than do,
say, religion, philosophy, and higher mathematics." He concluded that
"in my opinion this is the main factor in faculty leftwardness."15
Anti-bourgeois
intellectual traditions. The problem of
understanding the alienation isn't entirely one of explaining its immediate
causes. In part, at least, it is a matter of seeing that the alienation against
commercial culture has always been a strong factor in European thought and that
the modern alienation is a continuation of it. The alienation wasn't made up
out of wholecloth at some point in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. The
more I have studied the history of ideas in Europe, the more weight I have been
convinced to give to the aspect of continuity. The alienation was fed by powerful streams that flowed into the modern era.
There was, of course, a
torrent of aristocratic thought that never admitted the case for modernity.
Among other things, it looked on the tradesman and the average man as
vulgarians. If we consider even the milder expressions of such views as they
were voiced in England, major literary names stand out: Samuel Johnson, Edmund
Burke, Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Coleridge, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Robert
Southey. By the time socialism began to rise in England in the middle of the
nineteenth century, the alienation was already at a high pitch. And the
situation in England paled by comparison to the continent, where the
anti-rationalist, anti-bourgeois backlash following the French Revolution
carried a great many intellectuals to mystical and totalitarian extremes.
Another stream was the
socialist theory that had been extant throughout history. It can be seen in the
writings of Campanella and Sir Thomas More. It offered the foundation for a
collectivist critique of society.
There were also some
important strands of Christian thought that lent themselves to an opposition to
a compet1tive, secular, individualistic social order. Christian thought has had
so many different sides to it that it is misleading to generalize about it as a
whole. There is much in it that would support capitalism and the middle class,
and there is at the same time much that would provide a strong basis for
opposition. We should recall that when Bernard Mandeville wrote The Fable of
the Bees he had to speak of individual self-interest as though it were a
vice -- and then to argue a paradox,
that it is precisely men's "vices" that are a source of human
betterment. The British Fabian socialist R. H. Tawney was able to relish a good
many medieval values that contrasted with later capitalist values.
Reproduction of the
alienation. Once the alienation existed,
it reproduced itself from generation to generation, passing from aristocrat to
socialist. The ideas have been passed on by an immense and continuing
literature. If a present-day college student, for example, has the slightest
tendency to feel hostility toward the society in which he lives, he will find
instant reinforcement in countless books and movies. These will provide him
with an extensive and sophisticated rationale for his alienation.
Chapter will tell of the
youth movement in Germany both before and after World War I. The movement involved
a passionate dislike for bourgeois society. This movement led directly to the
totalitarian ideologies and reflected them as they existed at that time. Both
Marxism and National Socialism were nourished by the youth movement's
alienation. But it is worth noticing that the movement was just picking up the
alienation that already existed in the preceding generation of intellectuals.
Despite the movement's emphasis on youth and novelty, its members embraced the
many forms of alienation that came down to them through the Romantics and Hegel
and the Volkish thinkers and the Historical School and the Marxists, to mention
just a few of the many sources. It was a movement that in many ways is
analogous to the New Left of the 1960s. In neither movement did the young
originate their own ideas, despite a lot of talk about a "generation
gap"; they wrapped themselves, instead, in the ideas of the rebels of the
preceding generation. They were in rebellion against
their middle class parents, but this was not the same thing as a repudiation of
the already-existing intellectual subculture. Such New Left authors as Marcuse,
Brown and Alinsky, who were themselves not young, embodied the earlier
influence of Fourier, Marx and Rousseau. The slogans of the Russian Revolution
were popular, although they weren't recognized as being such by an historically
illiterate American public.
The alienation has not
existed only in such visible outpourings, however, as the German youth movement
or the later New Left. The alienation has colored the Left in general and was
profoundly important in National Socialism in Germany. It has also been one of
the main roots of modern liberalism in America.
Alternative explanations.
The six explanations I have given [Note
in 2003: and the seventh that I mentioned earlier] are the ones that seem
to me to be the strongest, but our society is sufficiently complicated that a
good many other factors can be pointed to in an even more extensive list.
Jeffrey Hart surmised that still another cause may exist in the rationalism of the modern intellectual, since this questioning frame of mind may lead to dissatisfaction with an unplanned society. It is satisfying, for example, to be able to spell out the optimum operation of the Mexican economy in a set of equations on a blackboard. The intellectual as a model-builder and specialist may prefer a nice predictability that isn't to be found in a voluntaristic society.
Hart also suggested that
the alienation may stem in part from personal problems in people's lives. Some
problem may cause a verbalized response if the person doesn't feel he can come
to grips with it.
At the end of his
anthology on alienation in the 1920s, Henry May included a brief chapter on the
causes. Although he didn't personally endorse reach of the explanations he
listed, they included:
. The view that the
intellectuals of the period were "deluded … immature and ignorant"
and took a superficial view of the society they criticized. According to May,
this was the opinion expressed by V. L. Parrington in 1929 and Bernard DeVoto
in 1942. May acknowledged that some of the alienates of the 1920s may have been
superficial, but he didn't think that this was sufficient to explain the
alienation as a whole. For my part, I agree with May. The alienation often
involves, either as cause or effect, a loss of balance in values; but it just
isn't sensible to try to dispose of the serious issues that are raised by the
alienation by attacking the thinkers themselves as ignorant. The alienation is
too deeply rooted in a number of significant aspects of modern life.
. The possibility that
they were correct in their criticisms. This is the same thing as the
"substantive explanation" that I have talked about already.
. The idea that World
War I brought on the alienation. May says that the alienation preceded the war,
so that the war can't be the main explanation. This becomes especially apparent
when we consider that the alienation existed for a century before World War I.
But this doesn’t mean that a war (especially one with such horrors as World War
I) is totally irrelevant. As with the Vietnam War, a conflict can serve as a
catalyst to bring the alienation into the open and to attract additional
people. In some cases, as with Tsarist Russia, war can play a major role in
weakening the existing regime and can set the stage for effective political
action by those who are alienated.
. The
Marxist interpretation that capitalism was in decline and that it was
predictable that the intellectual would become alienated at some point in the
dialectical movement toward revolution. May correctly says that this point
depends upon the validity of the Marxist interpretation of history. Since I
consider "dialectical materialism" an unscientific pretension, I
don't give this explanation any weight.
. The possibility that
the middle class was in decline. I agree that a growing void or insufficiency
in classical liberal thought was both a cause and a consequence of the
alienation. I have chosen to discuss it among the consequences of the
alienation when we review them in the next chapter.
. The view that a
"machine civilization" and the speed of change gave rise to
dissatisfaction. A Burkean conservative would certainly tend to agree with
this, since the rapid cultural changes have removed many of the cements of
tradition and continuity.
. The related view
that there has been a "loss of faith.” This attributes the alienation to
the loss of consensus that occurred as Europe emerged from the age of faith.
This point is similar to what I said in my chapters on Greece, Rome and the
Middle Ages when I argued that modern society has received a rich variety of
suggestions from the past, but no paradigms. Rationalism and secularism have
left the world open for debate, just as the Romans were left without a
consensus by the disintegration of the mos maiorum. No thorough-going
consensus has come in to take the place of the shattered hegemony of
traditionalism and faith. I might add that a Burkean conservative would argue
that modern man has lost sight of the reality of God, and that this would
inevitably lead to quarrels among the many competing gnostic creeds.
. A suggestion that
the Puritan heritage left an intensity of emotion and even fanaticism that
carried over to the modern intellectual. In both the United States and Russia
the clergy was an important source for the alienated intelligentsia, and in
each case the clergy had a tradition of intense emotion and
“righteousness." The history of nineteenth century American radicalism shows
clearly that the New England clergy was an important factor.
. The thought that
democracy lends itself to conflict of opinion, even though it also involves
aspects of conformity. This point undoubtedly has some profound implications,
but even superficially we can see that a free society permits the expression of
alienation. This contrasts sharply with a totalitarian state such as the Soviet
Union, where a great deal of alienation is simply not allowed to become an
overt movement.
These many suggested causes
show that the subject is by no means closed. There are as many assignable
causes as there are facets of the civilization.
So far, I have discussed
a number of contributing causes, but without trying to weigh their relative importance.
It seems to me, though, that some are clearly more important than others.
At first, I was inclined
to give the substantive explanation the highest priority. I was sensitive
myself to the cultural and intellectual deficiencies to which the alienated
intellectual pointed. And it is far more charitable to give the intellectuals
credit for responding mainly to defects than it is to emphasize other causes of
their dissatisfaction.
I have reluctantly
changed my mind from this more charitable view to conclude that the
envy-displacement-temperament causes have been the most important. The reason
for my change of mind is that the response that the alienated intellectual has
made to his alienation has been inconsistent with the type of response that could
be expected if the substantive problems were his main grievance. It is a
response that only makes sense in the context of the intellectuals' tactical
position in modern society and their alliance with the have-nots.
One part of the
substantive causes had to do with the existential problems of the middle class:
the trivialization, the suffocation of higher values, the isolation of the
radical solitude, the heightening of hypocrisy, the "political"
nature of human relationships, and the loss of connection with other human
beings. If these defects had been the main cause of the alienation from
bourgeois culture, what would have been the intellectuals' most effective and
natural reaction? In answering, we must keep in mind that the bourgeois society
has been a free society and that, in addition, it has made abundant means
available to its intellectuals as apart of its general affluence. In such a
setting, the intellectuals could have immersed themselves in their own serious
work, flooding their own academic communities and a good deal of the remainder
of the society with excellent art, music, literature, research and thought.
They could have affirmed in countless ways a creed that would not be
trivial and would not involve hypocrisy or a suffocation of higher meaning.
They could have announced a creed of elevation and ennoblement.
Tens of thousands of intellectuals creating an ennobled, elevated, humanistic literature, art and music could do everything that would be necessary to give the culture in which they live the elements they have felt it to lack. Even our tenth-rate universities bring together more people with doctorates than Athens was ever able to aggregate in credentialed intellectuality in any one generation. Just from the universities themselves the culture could be flooded with great art and sculpture. The intellectuals themselves and those they could inspire among their millions of students could constitute a readership for a literature that could be the finest the world has ever seen. There would be enough such people to create a market for worthwhile things. When we would turn on our car radios we would be able to find perhaps one or two or even three stations playing beautiful music. A profound cultural renaissance would emanate from the university campuses. If there were people in the broader community who were somehow able to go untouched by its influence, their presence would be of little matter to the intellectuals themselves. The creative man would have his own rewarding life within a milieu that in countless ways would offer him a sense of community with others.
But it is necessary
instead to compare this natural response with the actual response most modern
intellectuals have made. Instead of throwing themselves into creative effort
for an easy transcending of the mediocrity they have seen around them, they
have been willing -- even anxious -- to become chronic complainers. They have
been pleased to create a literature, art and music of complaint and dissonance.
They have elevated the anti-hero and, consistently with the alliance with the
have-nots and their rivalry with the acting man, they have launched a
relativistic attack on standards and values.
The dissonance does
nothing to ennoble or to give meaning. It doesn't make sense if we think that
the intellectuals' main concern has been to overcome triviality and lack of
meaning. But it becomes quite understandable when we think of attack and complaint as weapons. They have been
weapons against the acting man of bourgeois culture.
Likewise, the anti-hero is hard to fathom if we think the intellectual
has mainly resented the emptiness of bourgeois life. But the anti-hero is an
appropriate vehicle in the context of the alliance with the have-nots and of
the opposition to so-called "middle class values.” The have-not has had
real needs during the past two centuries, but one thing is, in general, clear
about him: he is not a hero himself. Those who pander to him can't do so by
elevating the hero. They have to put themselves on the level of the have-not
and speak to him on his own terms. He will often be receptive to an attack on
the "middle class virtues" of hard work, prudence, thrift,
responsibility and self-reliance. By opposing such bourgeois aspirations, the
alienated intellectual can attack the society he dislikes and at the same time
cultivate his political, ideological alliance with the have-nots.
Much of the specific
ideology of the Left follows from this: the relativism that denies the
possibility of values, the "environmentalist assumption" that takes
all responsibility off the individual and places it onto "society,"
the view of the state as the protector of enfeebled men, the theory that
capitalistic society is overwhelmingly exploitive.
William Barrett praised
"modern art" in Irrational Man because of its "confession
of spiritual poverty. " He said this has been its “greatness and its
triumph."16 Such praise, for such a reason, will seem
incredible to anyone who is not deeply affected by the spiritual neuroses of
the Left. "Realism" has appeal as an expression of truth, but this is
a far cry from dwelling for decade after decade on the depravity of man.
Such a dwelling is by no means a realistic view of man. Our age has mastered
technique, but I have no doubt that the future will look back on much of our
art as an aberration. It will probably see the finest work of our time in the
paintings, instead, of such men as Andrew Wyeth and Norman Rockwell.
Tennessee Williams
contributed an introduction to Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye.
The back cover describes the book as "an artistic vision of a human
hell." The cover goes on to say that "this particular hell is an army
post in the South. Its inhabitants: a sexually disturbed officer; his sensual
animal of a wife; his fellow-officer and wife's lover; a delicate, sensitive
woman who must live with her husband's infidelity; and the driven young Private
who brings the searing drama to a head. From these elements, one of America's
superlative writers has produced a vision of existence as terrible as it is
real." In his introduction, Tennessee Williams wrote that "Reflections
in a Golden Eye is one of the purest and most powerful of those works which
are conceived in that Sense of the Awful which is the desperate black root
of nearly all significant modern art, from the Guernica of Picasso to the
cartoons of Charles Addams."17 (Emphasis added)
The
relationship of this literature and art to the Left was apparent in the
"revolutionary theater" of the late 1960s. Screams and writhing bodies
and dissonant rhetoric constituted the dramatic medium. The Sense of the Awful
was a direct anti-bourgeois tool.
Joseph Schumpeter reached
the same conclusion I am expressing that the social rivalry of the intellectual
has been a more important determinant of the intellectual's ideology and
behavior than has his concern over defects in bourgeois lifestyle. In Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter spoke of "a group interest shaping a group
attitude that will much more realistically account for the hostility to the
capitalist order than could the theory
-- itself a rationalization in the psychological sense -- according to
which the intellectual's righteous indignation about the wrongs of capitalism
simply represents the logical inference from outrageous facts."18
He also spoke of the effect on the intellectual of the political necessity of
appealing to the have-not: "Having no genuine authority and feeling always
in danger of being unceremoniously told to mind his own business, he must
flatter, promise and incite, nurse left wings and scowling minorities, sponsor
doubtful or submarginal cases, appeal to fringe ends, profess himself ready to
obey -- in short, behave toward the masses as his predecessors behaved first
toward their ecclesiastical superiors, later toward princes and other
individual patrons, still later toward the collective master of bourgeois
complexion.”
Nietzsche made a similar
point when he said that "decadence is only a means for the type of
man who demands power in Judaism and Christianity, the priestly type."19
We can see this in practice when the modern intellectual dwells on "the
poverty of the soul." He has a definite interest in making mankind sick.
I have commented at
length on the existential emptiness within our society, but one thing must be
said: that our society has nevertheless made vast resources available to its
intellectuals. They enjoy magnificent university facilities, great libraries,
excellent concert halls and galleries, and a leisured campus life. This suggests
that it is most appropriate to blame the emptiness, when it continues, not so
much on the acting man as on the intellectual. It has been by becoming a
chronic complainer and a spokes- man for the anti-hero that the intellectual
has made George Babbitt a continuing reality.
There is still another
aspect of the substantive cause for the alienation to consider, though. Matters
of aesthetics and lifestyle have not been the only basis for the intellectual's
complaints. As I commented earlier, the substantive issues also include all of
the economic and political arguments against capitalism.
But even here, there are
good reasons to assign the substantive cause a secondary place. One is that, on
balance, the economic and political criticisms of capitalism do not have nearly
enough merit to account for their influence. Since this a major subject in
itself, I will have to leave the various economic and political issues for
discussion in my books that survey the competing ideological systems. All I can
do at this point is to express my conclusion.
But there is a more
definitive point, too. It is that the chronology of the nineteenth century
shows that the alienation preceded, did not follow, the period of
classical liberal ascendancy. Capitalism wasn't tried and seen to fail before
the intelligentsia developed its hatred for it. The hatred came first. In the
United States, the alienation began in the generation of Emerson and Thoreau.
This was still during the pre-Civil War age of local, small-shop capitalism, well
before the smoky industrialism and tendency toward concentration that are
usually pointed to when we receive our impression of why intellectuals abhorred
capitalism. In England, the landed aristocracy -- not the middle class --
controlled both the politics and the economy until after the passage of the
Reform Act of 1832. Even then it took Richard Cobden years of struggle to gain
even a partial adoption of the Free Trade position. When Chartism showed its
hostility, the bourgeoisie and capitalism had
hardly been given a chance. In Germany, there was little capitalism until late
in the century. But this didn't deter Karl Marx from devoting his life (mostly
in England) to excoriating it. His theories, and those of Lassalle and others,
were not precipitated by terrible experience. They were a priori,
the product of agitated minds, not of history itself. In Russia, socialist
radicalism began before mid-century. There was almost no capitalism at that
time.
It is noteworthy that socialist thinkers have often assigned the vices of
landed aristocracy to the incipient capitalism, as though classical liberalism
and the landed aristocracy were a single continuous phenomenon and had not been
bitter enemies. In England, the achievements of the factory system in raising the
length of life and the standard of living were ignored. The overcrowding and
misery captured all the attention -- and it made no difference that these were
in large measure caused by the landowners' tariff on grain, the Enclosure Acts
by which aristocrats had long forced people off the land and into the towns,
and the immigration from poverty-stricken Ireland. There is an obvious
overeagerness to dress capitalism with a crown of thorns when socialists blame
it for these things.
The answer can be, of course,
that thinkers don't have to wait to see how something will turn out before they
can conscientiously oppose it. And that will be true. But it is an argument by
way of "confession and avoidance." It confesses or bypasses the
aspect of whether or not the socialist authors were justified in their
condemnation of capitalism by the facts as they then existed. It then leaves
the question of whether an a priori condemnation was called for. In
order to answer this, we need to think back to what the situation was. Europe
was just emerging from the age of kings and aristocracy. Omnipresent feudal
remnants were just being brushed away. The liberty of the individual was being
championed. Was it a time for optimism, for hope, for an enthusiastic
exploration of what a society of free men could do? Classical liberalism
certainly thought so. But not the socialist critics. To them, it was already
self-evident that a market economy would breed entrapment and exploitation
rather than meaningful freedom. And why did they opt for that conclusion? I
believe it was not because the conclusion was irresistible, but because they
already felt a profound alienation from other causes. If I am correct, the
other causes of the alienation have to be given greater weight than the substantive
complaints.
7. Marc Raeff, Origins
of the Russian Intelligentsia (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.,
1966), p. 170.
8. Jurgen Herbst, The
German Historical School in American Scholarship (Cornell University
Press, 1965), p. 173.
9. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (New
York: Modern Library, 1942), p. 132.
10. Sir Henry Sumner
Maine, Ancient Law (New York: Charles Scribner, 1964), p. 163.
11. James Boswell, The
Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Modern Library, 1952), p. 121.
12. Richard M. Weaver, Ideas
have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 43.
13. R. A. J. Walling
(ed.), The Diaries of John Bright (New York: William Morrow and Company,
1931), p. 41.
14. Ludwig von Mises,
The Anti-Capitalist Mentality (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1956), pp. 4,
11-13, 14, 16, 19, 12.
15. Jeffrey Hart,
newspaper column entitled "What Makes a Ph.D. Run?"
16. William Barrett, Irrational
Man (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1958), p. 40.
17. Carson McCullers, Reflections
in a Golden Eye (New York: Bantam Books, 1941), p. xiv.
18. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), pp. 153,
154.
19. Friedrich Nietzsche, The
Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968),
pp.
593-594.