Robert Conquest

Reflections on a Ravaged Century

An Excerpt, Part 2 of 2

Again, cultures — an inadequate word — have doubtless produced, or at least selected, personalities with overall results different from those of other cultures. It is not easy to get into another man's skin, let alone that of another culture. In seventeenth-century France the great Condé once remarked to the Cardinal de Retz that the reason why historians got things wrong was that "Ces coquins nous font parler et agir comme ils auroient fait eux-mêmes à notre place." He noted, in fact, that intellectuals of his own culture would not make, or at any rate had not made, the effort adequately.

It is not as if Condé himself was an intellectually muscle-bound thug of a professional soldier. Those who frequented his ch‰teau when he was in disgrace — Molière, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Bossuet — make almost a roll call of the genius of the Grande Epoque. But if academics fail to understand the temperaments of the generals of their own culture, they are all the more unlikely to grasp the temperaments producing and produced by other traditions. When it comes to alien cultures, the immodesty of some anthropologists and social historians, who believe that they have got into the essence of a society, is a constant trap.

Louis MacNeice, the poet, who was also a Professor of Greek and deeply versed in ancient Athens, could nevertheless write:

And how one can imagine oneself among them
I do not know.
It was all so unimaginably different,
And all so long ago.

And this is Athens! Incomparably closer to us, in many ways, than most of the other ancient cultures and many modern ones.

And yet the effort must be made. And when it comes to modern alien cultures, no understanding, and so no policy, is worth anything unless academics, statesmen and all others concerned make that effort, to the degree that unreal assumptions are driven even from their almost unconscious first thoughts on affairs. After that they need, it may be suggested, to master the idea that these deep-set historical forces of motivation are not merely very strange to us but cannot easily be changed by argument or manipulation.

The true criticism of Neville Chamberlain is that he could not really imagine a man like Hitler or a party like the Nazis. "He's a good fellow and 'twill all be well," whatever may be said of it as theology, is a parochial and limited attitude when it comes to foreign politics. It is not only on the left — and, of course, many on the left are exempt — that one finds this inability to grasp the totalist mentality imaginatively. The notion that people who raised the alarm about Hitler in the 1930s were being immoderate and unreasonable was found in the Times and at All Souls, in all the blinkered and complacent crannies of the Establishment. The concept of a quite different set of motivations, based on a different political psychology, was absent.

We are still faced with the absolutely crucial problem of making the intellectual and imaginative effort not to project our ideas of common sense or natural motivation onto the products of totally different cultures. The central point is less that people misunderstand other people, or that cultures misunderstand other cultures, than that they have no notion that this may be the case. They assume that the light of their own parochial common sense is enough. And they frame policies based on illusions. Yet how profound is this difference between political psychologies and between the motivations of different political traditions, and how deep-set and how persistent these attitudes are!

On the confused and complicated mental battlefield where all these issues are being fought out, we must now turn to examine our own record and prospects. What are the resources available to us? What are our strategic and moral advantages? What are our weaknesses and how (and to what extent) have they been overcome?

To repudiate or at least deplore Ideas is not to favor the shortsightedness, the narrow establishmentarian or immobiliste attitudes which are almost as common now as they have been over recent centuries.

The "Western" culture has always implied the absence of absolutes, disbelief in perfect political wisdom, in readily predictable futures. But the avoidance of the extreme, ideologized way of thinking does not in itself save the political entity concerned from a milder, but still potentially dangerous, form of the affliction. And these less malignant varieties have to some extent taken hold — with uncritical devotion to various quick-fix solutions by humans and their states to the problems facing them. As in medical usage we speak of "-itis" in a real ailment and "-osis" in merely a morbid condition, we might speak of "ideitis" in the totalitarian countries and "ideosis" in certain Western cases.

To look at it from a different angle, we may consider if packages of lesser "ideas" are a unity based on reason or a temperamental one. None other than Hobsbawm once penetratingly noted the causes pursued by the typical progressive figure a hundred or more years ago: "natural philosophy, phrenology, free thought, spiritualism, temperance, unorthodox medicine, social reform, and the transformation of the family" (New Statesman, 4 April 1970) — each supported with just as much righteousness and certainty as the partially different batch now so much heard of. The point is once again, clearly, that what comes out of the package is not intellectual coherence, or the pursuit of interests, but a cast of mind. There is no logical connection, no overriding ideological connection, between the views noted, but only the accidental one of novelty and unorthodoxy, and the temperamental one of the odium theologicum. (It is hard to exaggerate the element of sheer lunacy in some of the "progressive" thinkers who are still highly regarded. Fourier sincerely believed that under socialism the sea could be turned into lemonade.)

Now, modern men, though they might not agree on every point, would certainly grant that some of the opinions in that earlier package were totally crackpot and that others were not. The difficulty is that one cannot yet distinguish easily between what may prove to be a possibly useful contribution to social or other progress and what will in a century be regarded with amusement as the strangest of aberrations.

Obsessions can cover the whole of society, or can be concentrated on minor points — such as the theory that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, or even such lesser matters as the pseudo-Anastasia's claim to be the Tsar's daughter. Concerning the point on which their obsessions concentrate, believers are often very well informed, with a mass of detail not readily available to their critics, though in fact either distorted or meaningless.

It would seem to follow (since political decisions are of more immediate consequence than literary ones) that certain temperaments are unfitted for action or advice in a pluralist order. But in most cases, no doubt, minds are not so rigidly set in their ways as to make them immune to experience and argument. The problem is in their breathing an atmosphere of thought containing at least a trace of noxious fumes. Indeed, in controversies of this sort, and more generally, one seems to see a certain degeneration. Except in admittedly extreme cases, it was usual even among those "committed" to certain opinions to preserve at least the appearance of rationality, balance, objectivity. Even this is often now abandoned.

Even when full-scale ideologies have not possessed human minds, less complete but still dangerously obsessive ideas have thus distorted our societies. Certainty on matters in which our knowledge is inevitably imperfect is the enemy of good understanding and good policy.

We must indeed distinguish between the aim or actuality of the total state, on the one hand, and what are no more than partial, and often hardly intentional, tendencies distorting normal states or systems of states. But even when totalist programs are not in question, the principle of state control and the actuality of bureaucratic power have become excessive even in the West — including excessive legislation, excessive regulation, and excessive litigation, often for aims based more on conviction than on knowledge. Misleading general views that perfuse the political class at any given time, whether in the West or elsewhere, are not for that reason sound, or durable. They gain momentum by involvement in state, or international, negotiations and administrations, until they appear unstoppable. But eventually, as often as not, they burn out.

What has suffered in all these cases is a sense of balance, between the proper rights of the individual and the necessary rights of the state, between personal aims and mutual obligations, between the often conflicting claims of liberty and of equity.

General ideas, general concepts, general principles, interpreted as absolutes rather than approximations, are mere kindling wood for a new conflagration. But of course we must use general ideas and general concepts. General words are necessary and natural — as long as those who use them understand that their generality is a convenience, bringing together certain phenomena for certain purposes, but not a monolith. We must keep a balance, and not allow these to get out of hand and take over. They must be our servants, and not our masters. In fact, as in all our arrangements, we must once again seek a balance. We must learn from experience, yet not believe we can see far into the future. We must take short views, but not too short. We must allow the state a role in social affairs, but not a dominance. We must grant the legitimate claims of nationality, but reject its extreme manifestations. This undogmatic type of approach has been among the essentials of the civic and pluralist culture.

There is no formula that can give us infallible answers to political, social, economic, ecological and other human problems. There is no simple concept which will answer such questions as how much the state can do (though we have learned that to give it too much power is disastrous), or how far market forces can give positive results (though we have learned that their abolition is disastrous). Nor is there a simple guide to the conduct of foreign policy.

What does not need to be done needs not to be done — though, of course, there are things that need to be done, and situations so dangerous that quick and major action is required. But it is not enough to show that a situation is bad; it is also necessary to be reasonably certain that the problem has been properly described, fairly certain that the proposed remedy will improve it, and virtually certain that it will not make it worse. This requires thought, common sense, careful judgment, and above all no untested, or ill-tested, all-purpose solutions. All that sounds obvious and indisputable. It has not been the usual practice in the twentieth century.

In part this is because, as we have suggested, many cannot admit that the condition of humankind in all its vast complexity is not to be understood by formula, and that in any but the short run its developments cannot be predicted by theory, or otherwise. The future appears to us neither as impenetrable darkness nor as broad daylight, but rather in a half-light, in which we can descry the rough form of the nearest objects, and vague outlines farther off. We cannot do without ideas: but we should not make ideas into Ideas. We should note the catastrophes due to fascination with fantasy, addiction to absolutes.

Generally speaking, the political virtues of free discussion, political compromise, plural societies, piecemeal practicality, change without chaos, and market economics have triumphed. But it was a near thing, and we are still beset by a whole array of great dangers.

What we call "democracy" is far less a matter of institutions than of habits of mind. It is vulnerable to various weaknesses and always needs adjustments and improvements — but if these are to be helpful, they need to go with the grain of, and be within, the established order. The stresses and strains that affect the democracies and the minds of their citizens today need not be overestimated, but they must be taken into account in any survey of the world as it is, and as it may be.

It is in this context that we must emphasize the measure of success totalitarian ideas had in the minds of citizens of the pluralist countries. Many in the West gave their full allegiance to these alien beliefs. Many others were at any rate not ill disposed towards them. And beyond that there was, as we have said, a sort of secondary infection of the mental atmosphere of the West which still to some degree persists, distorting thought in countries that escaped the more wholesale disasters of our time.

For example, we still find, even in the West, especially in parts of academe, the idea that everything is a struggle for power, or hegemony, or oppression; and that all competition is a zero-sum game. This is no more than repetition of Lenin's destructive doctrine — Who-Whom? Intellectually, it is reductionism; politically, it is fanaticism.

Then again, much policy-determining "research" is based on supposedly indisputable statistical data, which economists at least are now beginning to abandon but which are widely used in other contexts — the nombre fixe being almost as hard to uproot as the idée fixe.

It was basically common sense that kept the mass of the people in Britain and America less liable than the intelligentsia to delusion about the Stalinists. As Orwell said, they were at once too sane and too stupid to accept the sophistical in place of the obvious. But common sense by itself has its vices, or inadequacies. First, it can go with parochialism. Chamberlain was not alone in failing to understand that Hitler was capable of acts incredible to his Birmingham City Council or other "plain, shrewd Britons." Similarly, this philistine "shrewdness" inclines to the view that there is "something to be said on both sides" in international disputes. (In the Nazi case, the Germans of the Sudetenland had a legitimate wish to join Germany; but to put this in the scale was to unjustifiably counterbalance the essentials of National Socialism.) And then, common sense can decline into muddleheadedness if it is not well integrated with the critical faculty, with an open-ended fund of knowledge and with a breadth of imagination adequate to unfamiliar phenomena.

It was, in fact, what might be called imaginative realism.

On these matters, as we have said, the inexplicit habits of mind of the public are often more sensible than the prescriptions elaborated in the minds of the intelligentsia. Understanding of the complications and contradictions in life implies that all ideas, but particularly those carrying a high emotional charge, should be critically examined in the main areas where they are generated and transmitted — that is, at a superficial level in the media, and at a more responsible level in education.

We may here take note of what we may call Ismology. It has long, though not all that long, been a custom to use the termination "-ism" to validate one's own opinion or to demonize another's.

In the latter case, a crude effect is obtained by the use of the grab-bag term "fascism" not to specify a form of state or of state theory, but, often enough, to object to the use of any form of authority or discipline. Indeed George Orwell noted (as early as 1944) that he had heard the word "Fascist" applied to a list of targets including farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox hunting, bullfighting, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-shek, homosexuality, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs. .Ê.Ê. He also pointed out that at a more serious level, "conscription and a professional army are both denounced as Fascist phenomena." But more usually (and less absurdly) ism-ing brings together under one term a complexity of examples, or a variety of phenomena, phraseologically obliterating the often crucial contexts or differences, as with "capitalism" or "imperialism" (see Chapter XIII).

Using the termination positively, though equally concretizing a fluidity, we find such concepts, or banners, as "feminism" and "environmentalism" where long-standing and broadly accepted attitudes take on — or often take on — a good deal of the intensity and lack of proportion of ideologies proper, and some of the viral qualities of an Idea. Nor should we perhaps forget the strange usage "activism," almost always a favorable word, though the Nazis (for example) were at least as "active" as their betters — indeed deserving of the label "hyperactivist."

Though only peripherally within the scope of this book, we must also note that acceptance of Freudian and other more or less deterministic psychological theories was also an example of the attractions of a pseudoscience, with enough intellectual complexity and a mission in human life. The result was a culture of, or tendency toward, tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner — and, in conjunction with social determinism, of distorting the legitimate claims of social order.

Nevertheless, as J. A. C. Brown remarks at the end of his book Freud and the Post-Freudians, "The explanation of the irrational is a special task of the twentieth century." We shall not attempt an explanation properly speaking, but a mere examination of the phenomenon may be helpful in understanding and avoiding it.

As we have said, intellectual errors in general are often due to ignoring the fact that the human being is both social and individual. To conceive him as solely, or preponderantly, one or the other leads to distortions of policy. The normal human being is motivated both by a desire to improve his own lot and a desire to conform to certain social or moral principles; and in normal life there is mutual adjustment of these urges, sometimes in makeshift fashion. Hypostatized ideas lead to a lack of balance in this and other respects. In fact, we may see the essential of the civic society in its preservation of balance — between the individual and the community, between the desirable and the possible, between our knowledge and our imagination.

The balance implies that we should neither accept solutions, however fashionable, however much supported by narrow-gauge experts, nor deny or minimize the problems. What one might call the nonideology of moderation.

Our purpose is not so much to condemn as to understand the negative phenomena, and especially in the context of helping to prevent such misconceptions in future — not as matters of mere mental improvement in the abstract, but more importantly in warning against the huge disasters lying in wait for the unaware.

We have developed what is often left implicit, the positive characteristics, though also the weaknesses, that have arisen in our own social and political order. We should now consider how such orders have emerged.