[This
is Chapter Thirteen of Murphey’s book Understanding
the Modern Predicament.]
In
the preceding chapter, I discussed several of the consequences that have
emerged from the alienation. Both the alienation and its consequences are of
major importance if we are to understand the "modern predicament." I
wouldn't have us lose sight, though, of the other interrelated aspects of the
picture I have painted: the half-maturity of mankind at its present state of
development, the lack of paradigms from the past, the rise of the average
person to predominance in society and the spiritual vacuity that trivializes
our way of life. These have all played a part in creating our unique situation.
The
essential point is that the ground under our feet is not entirely solid, and
that much of what we do can best be understood as an adjustment to that fact.
One
of the most pervasive results of this continuing adjustment has been the rise
of the major ideologies. They have provided us "systems
of interpretation." We see ourselves and others through -- and
consequently base our actions on -- these organized systems of perception. They
are fundamental to our ontology, defining the reality in which we live. These
social philosophies are so influential and are so affected by the factors we
are discussing in this book, that I will devote additional books to discussing
them.
The
remainder of the present book will have a more limited purpose. It will be to
show the problematical nature of our civilization by reference to some of the
main historical events of the past two hundred years. The present chapter will
discuss the first of those -- the French Revolution.
My
discussion of the French Revolution will be limited to showing how it illustrates
the continuity of three features of immaturity: the abuse of power, the
questionable capacity for self-government, and the lack of a sufficient
spiritual basis.
The
first of these – statism -- was present under the
autocracy of the Old Regime. It wasn't abolished, though, by the Revolution,
which continued the abuse of power through its many Fears and Terrors and
through the way many of its leaders viewed the role of the state. Later, it
reached a
The
second feature -- the problematical capacity of the average person to maintain
a high civilization and a free society -- was also present before, during and
after the Revolution. One way of understanding the social structurings
of the medieval system as they existed under the Old Regime in
The
third aspect is one that I won't do much more with than just mention. It has to
do with the lack of a proper religious foundation for human life. Robespierre
attempted a short-lived Cult of the Supreme Being, which symbolizes the
yearning men still feel even after we have left the Age of Religion and have
become increasingly secular.
Statism. The
famine during the winter of 1788-89 was one of the factors that led to the
Revolution. It is significant that Leo Gershoy tied
the famine to the statism of the Old Regime.
"Lack of resources and primitive methods of agriculture alone do not
explain the recurrent food shortages and famines that
A long history of abuses under the Old Regime preceded the violence that was so spectacular a part of the Revolution. Alexis de Tocqueville said that "I have no hesitation in affirming, after a careful study of the facts on the record, that a great many of the practices we associate with the Revolution had had precedents in the treatment of the people by the government during the last two centuries of the monarchy. The old regime provided the Revolution with many of its methods: all the Revolution added to these was a savagery peculiar to itself.”2
As
we assess the horrors of the Revolution, we need to appreciate that French
society was in extremis.
Just
the same, the enormities make the Revolution, with its guillotine, the appropriate
symbol for the statism that has plagued all ages.
This is especially so since they are personified so well by a number of
peculiarly bloody individuals who stand out with romantic ghastliness from the
history of those years. Marat was such a figure. His
vague and contradictory theories justified an "eternal call to
massacre." "On the day of the fall of the Bastille," Beraud says, "he asked for five hundred heads. A year
later, he demanded five or six hundred more, not for vengeance, but for national
security. As time went on, he showed more avidity. In August, 1791, he wanted
eight hundred gibbits; towards the end of 1791, he
insisted upon five thousand, six thousand, twenty
thousand. 'And,' I he said, 'let us not hesitate for an instant. With the new year, his demands grew; he asked
for seventy thousand!"3 It isn't surprising that in the
dialectic of violence Marat would himself be
assassinated -- as he was in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday.
The
Revolution was bourgeois and moderate in its early stages. The Declaration of
Rights was founded on classical liberal ideals of personal liberty. If the
Revolution could have been stabilized at that point, the later horrors would
have been avoided. But, of course, it wasn't. Things went from bad to worse: The
King escaped, was recaptured and eventually executed; the Terror began in
September 1793; in October, the revolutionary tribunal guillotined Marie
Antoinette and then the Girondins, so that in all
twenty thousand people were killed at that time; the Hebertists
were executed in March 1794, and Danton and his
supporters in April. The "Great Terror" guillotined thirteen hundred
during June and July. At that point, Robespierre himself was overthrown and
guillotined. The next year, when the Jacobins tried a coup that failed, the
"White Terror" retaliated against them. The time was ripe for
Napoleon to seize power. At first there was a glow of hope that he would
reaffirm the aspirations of the Revolution; but this faded as he made himself
more and more kingly and as his militarism bathed
A
few years later, the French economist Frederic Bastiat
blamed statist philosophies for much of the
revolutionary abuse. In The Law, he wrote that "like
Rousseau," the radical Jacobin leaders "desire to force mankind
docilely to bear this yoke of the public welfare that they have dreamed up in
their own imaginations."4 He quoted Saint-Just: "The
legislator commands the future. It is for him to will the good of
mankind. It is for him to make men what he wills them to be."
Robespierre, Le Pelletier and Billaud-Varennes
expressed similar views. Bastiat ascribed this in
part to classical studies. "These centuries were nourished on the study of
antiguity. And antiguity
presents everywhere... the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to
their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and fraud." This points to the
continuity I have been stressing, since statist
influences from the past, even from the ancient Greeks and Romans, have served
as the backdrop for modern society.
Human weakness. A
system of "estates" within the Old Regime separated the common people
into a class of their own. It is entirely possible that under the circumstances
of earlier centuries this subordination served a needed purpose; it may have
been an essential expedient to fill the void left by humanity's weakness. It
may have been needed, as Edmund Burke said of Christianity, to "cover our
nakedness."
If
we reverse the assumption, it becomes clear that the hierarchical social system
was a void-filling makeshift: Would truly competent people have allowed
themselves to be held in subordination? A system like that is per se a
symptom of an underlying deficiency.
One
aspect of the social hierarchy was that the average person was "below the
threshold" of the empathy of those on top. Tocqueville spoke of this
psychological division when he said that "we are reminded of the conduct
of Mme. Duchatelet, as reported by Voltaire's
secretary; this good lady, it seems, had no scruples about undressing in the
presence of her manservants, being unable to convince
herself that these lackeys were real flesh-and-blood men!”
But
even the makeshift had eventually weakened. Commentators disagree about the
viability of the aristocracy before the Revolution. Burke thought the
aristocracy in France was sound, but Tocqueville wrote that "while ceasing
to be a ruling class, they had remained a privileged, closed group, less and
less an aristocracy and more and more a caste."
Needless
to say, the Revolution radically changed the outer structures of society. But
it could not remove the problem of human weakness. The will of the multitudes
to stand as free individuals has been an open question ever since. John Bright's democratic optimism has been severely tested. You
will recall my earlier observation that modern society has not been in a
position where it could receive a clear reading of this propensity. The
alienation of the intellectual will have to be overcome before we can judge the
tendencies of the so-called "masses" themselves. Up to this point,
the move toward socialism and totalitarianism has not come even primarily from
the average person; the influence of the intellectual, especially through
Leftist ideology which panders so much to the worse instincts of the have-nots,
has been enormous.
The
picture the Revolution gives us of the multitudes isn't a favorable one. It is
a picture of savage fury reduced to pitiful dimensions by fickleness and
vacuity. The "masses" were inconstant and intemperate, literally
cheering every excess. It is surprising and saddening that on his way to the
guillotine Camille Desmoulins received no support
from the mob when he called out: "People! Your friends are being killed!
Who called you to the Bastille? Who gave you your cockades? I am Camille Desmoulins." It is not surprising, in light of this,
that the same people were able to become the cannon fodder for Napoleon.
The
population grew rapidly during the final years of the Old Regime, especially in
the cities. Crane Brinton says that "literacy
now began to extend to a considerable part of the population in the West. The
masses did not yet read, though by the end of the century the skilled workers
in the more advanced countries could and did read."6 But, of
course, this advancement was hardly enough to prevent superstition. Gershoy points out that "the Age of Enlightenment was
also an age of superstition, particularly in Paris, where spiritualists and
charlatans like Mesmer and Cagliostro
had a tremendous following. Along with the works of the philosophes
there was a tremendous vogue for books on magic, sorcery and alchemy." It
is true that the Revolution was sponsored by the rising commercial class; but
it was "carried out by (the nation's) least educated and most unruly
elements."
At
the same time, the French were passing through a “revolution of rising
expectations." Stanton Coblentz observed that
the French Revolution occurred despite the fact that "the French masses,
even if one takes the darkest possible view of their situation, were less
oppressed than other Europeans who did not rise in revolt."7
Demagogic manipulation of the "masses" wasn't absent. It is noteworthy that even the nobility had pandered to their inertia and discontent. Tocqueville said that "the very men who had most to fear from the anger of the masses had no qualms about publicly condemning the gross injustice with which they had always been treated. They drew attention to the monstrous vices of the institutions which pressed most heavily on the common people and indulged in highly colored descriptions of the living conditions of the working class and the starvation wages it received." A continuous thread runs from this to Emile Zola's novel Germinal and to President John F. Kennedy's well-known appeal on behalf of "seventeen million Americans who go to bed hungry every night."
The rise of the multitudes has been full of democratic promise -- but it has left Western civilization with a strangely problematical aspect. Coblentz quoted the concern that was voiced by Albert Guerrard in The Life and Death of an Ideal: "If we compare France in the middle of the nineteenth century with France in the middle of the eighteenth, we cannot suppress a feeling of loss. It ought not to be so: material progress is undeniable; knowledge as well as comfort were more widely diffused; poetic sources long sealed had been opened, science assuming profounder meaning. Yet, with it all, we are conscious of a vulgarization, a rebarbarization." This sensibility has been widely discussed in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is itself part of the alienation many sensitive people, including the alienated intellectual we have examined, have felt toward modern culture.
Intellectual weakness. Edmund Burke and Samuel
Johnson in England articulated superbly the intellectual position that underlay
the Old Regime. I am not one who believes, though, that that worldview was a
satisfactory paradigm for humanity. It rationalized a closed system, accepted
many enormities that people cannot be expected to accept once they can do
otherwise, and idealized certain things that the photographic eye of modern
realism knows to have been less than actual. The medieval worldview has
bequeathed us some partial truths, but it is essentially false. The fact that
it is false means that to that degree men were left mentally and spiritually
"to their own devices" as they entered the modern period. The earlier
age didn't provide a solid set of answers. The modern age, as symbolized for us
in this chapter by the Revolution, has experienced a loss of consensus; but in
my opinion the existential indecision that appears in the modern period is a
significant improvement over the medieval consensus. The Middle Ages seemed to
offer solutions because it possessed an agreement on a makeshift. But agreement
of this sort is itself a type of transciency. The
indecision of our own time may not affirm Truth, but at least it is not a
stasis of error.
However,
although this is true of the Old Regime's mindscape, it is also true that the
foolish and simplistic philosophies of the Revolution pointed ahead to the
severe intellectual weakness of the modern period. A few years ago I heard a
respected scholar praise Rousseau's thought as genius par excellence (even
though he disagreed with Rousseau's position); but his praise of Rousseau ran
counter to my own impressions. We would be hard pressed to name a writer who
has been more influential than Rousseau during the past three centuries.
Sophisticated reiterations of his worldview have been published tens of
thousands of times. They have included the writings of Thorstein
Veblen, for example, and more recently of Charles
Reich, Theodore Roszak and Herbert Marcuse. But notwithstanding Rousseau's continuing influence
as a father of the Left's cultural relativism, his writings should, in all
honesty, be recognized as simplistic makeshifts. When I first read his Discourse
on the Origin of Inequality Among Men, I was amazed that it could be taken
seriously; and I was puzzled about the mentality of Rousseau's contemporaries
who awarded it a prize. It has no substance whatsoever outside of a single
observation about human society that is the theme of the essay and that is
utterly trivial. His point was that so long as men simply existed as animals,
living and dying with neither foresight nor memory and merely responding in a
stimulus-response way to their environment as do other animals, they lived with
the content simplicity that is typical of animals. He said that all of the
other qualities of human life, both good and bad, including political
inequality, have come about because men left that isolation and
short-sightedness and came into society.
When
confronted with this point, we have to ask "So what?" Even Rousseau
didn't want mankind to revert to that animal condition. If not, then why should
that condition be used as the standard by which civilization is judged?
Rousseau fashioned a simplistic and useless tool by which he and his alienated
followers could undercut, by a perpetual cultural relativism, any existing
society. He stood outside the culture and refused to accept any of its values.
The desire by so much modern intellectual culture to undercut the predominant
culture has been complex and has even contained some important truths. But
Rousseau's own formulation was pure artifice.
A
similar criticism applies to his Social Contract. Rousseau argued that
men should follow the General Will. He wasn't able to indicate how this
mystical General Will is to be known, though, since he said that it can't be
ascertained by taking a vote. The result is that there is a fundamental
ambiguity in his central concept. Accordingly, his idea of the General Will has
been used equally well to justify democracy or despotism. Anyone can claim an
insider's intuition about what it is.
Although
Rousseau's thought wasn't the only intellectual precursor of the Revolution,
its influence was immense, especially with Robespierre and the other Jacobins.
This indicates to me that there was intellectual weakness on the part of those
who held him in such esteem. Their mental "void" played a significant
role in the Revolution -- and a similar void has continued throughout the
modern era. It has been apparent in the Jacobins, in the nihilists of
nineteenth century Russia, in the more extreme Abolitionists before the Civil
War in the United States, in the anti-bourgeois fanatics of the German Youth
Movement both before and after World War I, and in the counter-cultural
alienates of the American New Left. Each included a type of intellectual who
mixed idealism with fanaticism, energy with uncivilized impatience, virtue with
cruelty, and high purpose with vulgar demagoguery. Such a mixture carried the
French Revolution to the bloody heights of Robespierre's
"Republic of Virtue."
I
have already mentioned Marat's call for ever more
heads. Saint-Just dreamed of utopian socialism and spoke to his troops in a
style that foreshadowed Napoleon. He personified sincerity and virtue; and yet
in the name of virtue and for supposed reasons of state he was able to call
first for the head of Louis XVI and then to agitate to bring about the
execution of the Girondins. He later arranged the
execution of the Hebertists and the Dantonists.
The
Revolution does more than illustrate this type of immature intelligentsia. In a
broader sense, it shows the "loss of consensus" that has existed in
modern society. Innumerable factions followed each other in power in rapid
succession. The struggle against monarchy and feudalism pitted the emerging
democratic forces against the nobility and king; but even on the democratic
side we see the beginning of the crisis over what direction the new society
should take. Instead of representing a newly-found consensus, Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being and Republic or
Virtue were ludicrously short-lived. Eventually, as a result of the excesses of
the Revolution and of Napoleon, there was an intense reaction against
rationalism itself. The anti-rationalistic Romantic movement of the early
nineteenth century was part of this overall failure of consensus.
Jose
Ortega y Gasset's theory of history emphasizes the
alternation of consensus with "crisis. " In the eighteenth century,
he said, Europe had been held together by the belief that "kings rule 'by
the grace of God."' This was the unifying conception even though it was
false. When such a unifying conception is lost, as it was during the
Revolution, "the social domain falls prey to passions. The ensuing vacuum
is filled by the gas of emotion. Everyone proclaims what best suits his
interest, his whims, his intellectual manias."8
While all of this was happening, the still inchoate alienation of the intellectual was beginning to take form. Certainly the devotees of the Old Regime have never stopped despising modern culture. And among the revolutionaries such men as Rousseau, Babeuf, Robespierre, Saint-Just and others began the cultural critique that eventually led to the alliance of the intellectuals with the have-nots and to the rise of socialism. Burke had some pertinent observations about the intellectuals of his own day: “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. " He continued: "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." This description seems contemporary today; it is very descriptive of the process that has occurred during the two centuries since Burke wrote.
Unresolved spiritual questions. There
are those, such as Eric Voegelin and Richard Weaver,
who consider Christian theology to encapsulate the true reality of man's
existence. For my part, though, I consider that theology to have been
non-reality bound; by this I mean that the questions it asked were unanswerable
by normal human means. In the secular age that has characterized the modern
period, we have tended (however imperfectly) to move away from questions that
can never lead beyond unresolved speculation.
This
does not mean, however, that we do not face profound spiritual questions with
regard to the meaning and nature of our lives. Many people assume that
spiritual issues disappear in the absence of a theistic faith; Mario Pei recently wrote, for example, that without God man would
find it all right “to behave like an animal.”9 But this is far too
doctrinaire and simplistic. A serious secularist would hardly join him in
asserting it. There are a great many indications that in our secular age many
people still feel deeply that they need answers to the ultimate questions.
Robespierre
sought a solution in his rationalistic state religion. Its failure left an open
question that we still face. The psychotherapist Viktor Frankl
has written that a "loss of meaning" is the central neurosis people
experience in the twentieth century. The point I would make, which relates to
the theme of the early chapters of this book, is that modern man is
existentially still wandering: that he has received no final paradigms,
religiously or otherwise, from the past.
We
feel a morbid fascination toward the French Revolution. It is much the same as
the feeling we have toward the Nazi period. Each, in its own way, was a brutal
caricature of humanity. Each makes essential the theory of man's continuing
immaturity. And each was a modern event.
1. Leo Gershoy, The French Revolution and Napoleon (New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1953), pp. 47, 77.
2.
Alexis de Tocquevil1e, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Garden
City: Anchor Books, 1955), pp. 192, 183, 204, 207, 180.
3.
Henri Beraud, Twelve Portraits of the French
Revolution (London: Cayme Press Ltd., 1929),
pp. l22, 154.
4.
Frederic Bastiat, The Law
(Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1964), pp.
52, 50.
5.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Liberal
Arts Press, 1955), pp. 103-4, 126-7.
6.
Crane Brinton, The Shaping of the Modern
Mind (New York: Mentor Books , 1957), p. 117.
7.
Stanton A. Coblentz, Ten Crises in Civilization
(London: Frederick Muller, 1967), pp. 111, 133.
8. Jose
Ortega y Gasset, Concord and Liberty (New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.), p. 20.
9.
Mario Pei, The America We Lost (New York:
Signet Books, 1968), p. 87.