“The real tragedy of existence,” Hegel once wrote, “is not the conflict between right and wrong but between right and right.” The present crisis of freedom and organization in Western society would be easier to resolve if it were plainly the outcome of opposed forces of manifest good and manifest evil. But who can doubt that the mounting anxiety and the widespread sense of moral conflict in contemporary liberal thought are the consequence of a state of mind which sees the things we value opposed by other things we value as well as by what we hate.
On the one hand we prize equalitarian democracy, moral neutrality, intellectual liberation, secular progress, rationalism, and all the liberating impersonalities of modern industrial and political society. On the other we continue to venerate tradition, secure social status, the corporate hierarchies of kinship, religion, and community, and close involvement in clear moral contexts. Conflicts between these sets of values seem to become ever more pressing. We esteem rationalism but we shrink from disenchantment.
The result of intellectual and moral conflict is written large in the thought of the contemporary liberal. The last two decades have undoubtedly produced a greater effusion of disillusionment and doctrinal abdication than any similar period in modern history. Never have past, present, and future seemed more discontinuous in terms of ideals and hopes. Whatever the basic intellectual significance of existentialism, its present popularity, especially in Western Europe, is one more example of the flamelike attraction that moral atomism and solipsism have for the disinherited and the alienated. When even the ideas of humanitarian liberalism are consigned by the intellectual to the same charnel house that holds the bones of capitalism and nationalism, his emancipation is complete. He is now free—in all his solitary misery.
To observe this is not to write in complacent irony. More and more it appears that only the stupid and the blind can hold fast to social and moral creeds with the same degree of assuredness that marked the intellectual's faith of even a decade ago. In few ages have ideals changed so suddenly and drastically from vital symbols of faith and action to mere museum pieces. The convinced socialist, like the convinced atheist, has ceased to be the recognized standard-bearer of radicalism. He has become simply irrelevant. His position, among intellectuals, is no longer given even the dignity of attack.
As one secular hope after another has failed, the liberal finds himself in the position described by Matthew Arnold. The sea of faith is once more
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
But now it is the long, withdrawing roar of liberalism and secularism that is heard, not Christian orthodoxy.
To regard all evil as a persistence or revival of the past has been a favorite conceit of liberals nourished by the idea of Progress. For several centuries Western liberal thought has been buoyed up by the assumption that history is a more or less continuous emancipation of men from despotism and evil. Past, present, and future have been convenient categories into which to fit precisely the moral qualities of bad, good, and best. Present evils could be safely regarded as regrettable evidences of incomplete emancipation from the past—from tribalism, from agrarianism, religion, localism, and the like. In one form or another the theory of cultural lag has been the secular approach to the problem of evil.
This chronological categorization of morality has not, to be sure, disappeared even in the present time of troubles. But more and more people of a reflective disposition, without losing entirely their distrust of the past and their faith in the future, are coming to see a large element of uncertainty, of Devil's brew, in the aspects of society that are most plainly “modern” and that point most directly to the future. To look into the future as far as one can see is now more likely to produce the black pessimism of an Orwell or Koestler than the enthusiasm of a John Reed.
One of the most dismaying features of the present intellectual scene is the reluctant abdication of some of the values and faiths that have been among the highest glories of Western civilization: the dignity of the human being, the faith in the people, and the possibilities of reason based upon human experience. The reasons for this abdication are not far to see. As values these seem to possess less and less relation to the area of actual choices and realities that lies before us. But the consequences of the abdication are nonetheless tragic.
We cannot overlook the crisis of belief regarding the nature of man himself. At the beginning of the present century the great economist, Alfred Marshall, declared that “the average level of human nature has risen fast in the last fifty years.” How many could now be found who, far from agreeing with this judgment, would not instead wonder whether the level of human nature has not sunk abysmally? Two world wars within a quarter of a century together with revelations of the extermination and torture of untold numbers of people in some of the most civilized of modern areas have done much to reawaken in the modern intellectual a respect for the ancient dogma of original sin. More and more of us have come to feel, with Melville, Hawthorne, and Dostoevsky, that in men's souls lie deep and unpredictable potentialities for evil that no human institutions can control.
There is a perceptible weakening of faith in the power of man to set the conditions of the good life. “We are faced,” a recent Gifford lecturer has declared, “with a spiritual conflict of the most acute kind, a sort of social schizophrenia which divides the soul of society between a non-moral will to power served by inhuman techniques and a religious and moral idealism which have no power to influence human life.”1 If there is any inference to be drawn from the recent secular literature of disillusion it is the inference that supports and reinforces this judgment. In many minds there is a growing conviction that between our moral ideals and our available techniques for achieving them there is a constantly widening gulf.
It is hard to overlook, too, the mounting distrust of organized action in behalf of even our most cherished ideals. For, in the twentieth century, there have arisen, under the guise of humanitarian purposes, intensities of tyranny and stultifications of human personality that are unprecedented in Western history. Even if we do not agree wholly with Acton's celebrated maxim that all power corrupts, we have been made unavoidably aware of the fact that the striving for power, however benign in intent, often creates corruptions of the ideals behind the striving.2 The growing distrust of the authority that must lie within any organized action produces a state of mind which affirms with Shelley that
The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys;
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men and of the human frame,
A mechanized automaton.
In many minds lies the paralyzing belief that we have reached a point in the struggle for human justice where some kind of demonic compulsion leads to the supremacy of techniques and instruments of power over even the most exalted of ideals.
So too has the age-old problem of evil reappeared and become once more disturbing to rationalist complacency. The events and transformations of the present century, especially in Communist dominated Europe, have given rise to the suspicion that some of the worst evils of the age arise out of ideas and elements we have long hailed as good. And no odor, Thoreau once wrote, is so bad as that arising from goodness tainted.
What is so disturbing is the suspicion that the abhorrent nature of certain forces in our society arises from the very tradition of secular humanitarianism itself. It was this suspicion that gave George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four its peculiar flavor of horror. For, as amorphous suspicion in a group can lead to distrust of even the most trusted of men, so can suspicion of certain values lead to a wholesale dissolution of moral trust.
Two
More than anything else it is the massive spectacle of totalitarianism, especially in its Communist form, that has brought dismay to the minds of those men who were prepared to find in the mid-twentieth century a realization of earlier visions of emancipation and freedom. Few Western liberals now doubt the evil in Soviet Russia and the world Communist movement. Both represent the most efficiently ruthless concentration of power and subversion of human personality that the Western world has yet seen. Yet, who can doubt that Communism has its appeal, everywhere, to men of the utmost good will? Who can doubt that its success depends in large degree upon its capacity for offering refuge to the hungry sheep, hope to the hopeless, and faith to the disillusioned? And who can doubt, finally, that, making all allowance for the awful gulf between practice and preachment, twentieth-century Communism does have a demonstrable historical connection with social movements and ideals which we in the West continue to prize?
If Communist despotism were unadorned, if it did not have, in the memory of living man, roots in the humanitarian tradition, if it did not depend on the historic slogans of secular humanitarianism for so much of its appeal, the present sense of crisis would be, perhaps, less acute.
Is it democracy that we would point to as the crucial difference between the cultures of the West and the Communist tyranny of the East? Totalitarian Russia stridently reiterates its popular foundations, and appeals, not without success, to the political tradition of Rousseau and Robespierre. Is it freedom? There is, we are told by Communist apologists, almost in the words of Rousseau and of the Jacobins, a “higher freedom” than that of the bourgeois West, a freedom of the people as a whole from the tyrannies of minority elements within it. Is it liberation? What is Communism—in Czechoslovakia, Eastern Germany, and China—but a process of forcible liberation of human beings from the shackles set upon them by landlords, trade union leaders, capitalists, and educational systems? Is it not, again to use the words of Rousseau, a process of “forcing men to be free”?
Is it the common man? There is scarcely any tyranny in the contemporary world, Fascist or Communist, that does not defend its most wanton invasions of personal or associative liberty by an appeal to the common man. Is it equality? The leveling of populations, the radical atomization of every kind of religious, economic, academic, and cultural association within the State, is justified in the name of equality; and if new forms of political hierarchy arise, these, it is said, in the word if not the spirit of Bentham, are but temporary artificial barriers to the redevelopment of exploitation and superstition.
Is it reason? Only the naive persist in treating the Communist and Fascist States, with their technically advanced schemes of scientific management and bureaucratic custodianship of cultural life, as irruptions of the irrational. Immoral and degenerative, we may say, but not irrational! Nor would we dare claim, with painful memory of the assurance and tenacity with which the Russians and the Germans fought in the recent war, that intensity of faith alone is the clue to the kind of cultural salvation which most of us continue to believe in.
It is no wonder that the spectacle of totalitarianism, especially in its Communist form, has done so much to create doubt in many minds of the value of the symbols on which Western liberal humanitarianism has so long depended. For we cannot overlook the triumph of a despotism behind the iron curtain that is carried to ever greater successes by the very slogans we have cherished in the West for generations. Despite the manifest corruptness of the process, despite the blatant hypocrisy of the New Barbarism, there is nevertheless forced upon us at times the nerveless disillusionment that can come only from the experience of seeming to be betrayed by all we have trusted most.
But despite the traumatic effect of contemporary Communism upon the liberal mind, I do not think the spectacle of Communist corruption of liberal values is primary in the process of creeping disillusionment which now seems to threaten paralysis of liberal will and action. The major elements of this disillusionment, unhappily, come from within and are merely quickened in their action by the external shocks that Communism has provided. In large part, the present crisis of liberal thought in the West comes, I believe, from the increasing loss of correspondence between the basic liberal values and the prejudgments and social contexts upon which the historic success of liberalism has been predicated.
It is a commonplace in the study of language that the meanings of words and sentences depend on understandings which exist prior to the utterance of the words themselves. It is equally true that all explicit, formal judgments of value contain, and indeed depend on, certain prejudgments which give the formal judgments their roots of meaning and their possibility of communication. Without some kind of agreement upon the unspoken but efficacious prejudgments, all efforts to derive meaning from and to reach agreement about the explicit, exposed judgments are fruitless. Most of the world's conflicts of faith and action take their departure from lack of agreement about prejudgments rather than from dissension about formal judgments; and these are never within reach of the semanticist.
Finally, it is but an extension of the foregoing to suggest that the communities of assent on which the spoken word depends, and the silent prejudgments which give meaning and efficacy to formal judgments of value, are themselves reinforced and contained by the more tangible communities of interest and behavior that compose a social organization. No one of these three sets of elements is causative or even crucial. They exist as inseparable aspects of the one unified phenomenon. What the philosopher Whitehead has written on the problem of symbolism is pertinent here.
“There is an intricate expressed symbolism of language and act which is spread throughout the community, and which evokes fluctuating apprehension of the basis of common purpose. The particular direction of individual action is directly correlated to the particular sharply defined symbols presented to him at the moment. The response of action to the symbol may be so direct as to cut out any effective reference to the ultimate thing symbolized. In fact, the symbol evokes loyalties to vaguely conceived notions, fundamental for our spiritual natures. The result is that our natures are stirred to suspend all antagonistic impulses, so that the symbol procures its required response in action. Thus the social symbolism has a double meaning. It means pragmatically the direction of individuals to specific actions; and it also means theoretically the vague ultimate reasons with their emotional accompaniments, whereby the symbols acquire their power to organize the miscellaneous crowd into a smoothly running community.”3
But do not some of the profoundest problems of liberal democracy arise at the present time from the weakening of both of these aspects of the symbolism that has been embodied in the Western liberal tradition? On all sides it is apparent that the direction of individuals’ “specific actions” has become confused and chartless. Increasingly, the way is left open for cynical manipulation of the words and phrases that have been, historically, inseparable from the liberal heritage. For fewer and fewer people is it possible to “suspend all antagonistic impulses, so that the symbol procures its required response in action.” And it is the very decline of “vague ultimate reasons with their emotional attachments” that has become the major difficulty in our perspectives of freedom.
“A mind that is oriented,” writes Susanne Langer, “no matter by what conscious or unconscious symbols, in material and social realities, can function freely and confidently even under great pressure of circumstance and in the face of hard problems. Its life is a smooth and skillful shuttling to and fro between sign-functions and symbolic functions, a steady interweaving of sensory interpretations, linguistic responses, inferences, memories, imaginative prevision, factual knowledge and tacit appreciations…. In such a mind, doubts of the ‘meaning of life’ are not apt to arise, for reality itself is intrinsically ‘meaningful’: it incorporates the symbols of Life and Death, Sin and Salvation. For a balanced active intelligence, reality is historical fact and significant form, the all-inclusive realm of science, myth, art, and comfortable common sense….
“The mind, like all other organs, can draw its sustenance only from the surrounding world; our metaphysical symbols must spring from reality. Such adaptation always requires time, habit, tradition, and intimate knowledge of a way of life. If, now, the field of our unconscious symbolic orientation is suddenly plowed up by tremendous changes in the external world and in the social order, we lose our hold, our convictions, and therewith our effectual purposes…. All old symbols are gone, and thousands of average lives offer no new materials to a creative imagination. This, rather than physical want, is the starvation that threatens the modern worker, the tyranny of the machine. The withdrawal of all natural means for expressing the unity of personal life is a major cause of the distraction, irreligion, and unrest that mark the proletariat of all countries.”4
Now, I cannot help thinking that the symbolic nightmare into which contemporary liberalism has been plunged, a nightmare that the brilliant writings of such men as de Jouvenel, Orwell, Koestler, and Mumford have made so vivid, is not the result, as Miss Langer suggests, of the nature of technological development or of alienation from old nature-symbols, though these may well be deeply involved; rather, it is the consequence of that centralization of social function and authority with which we have been concerned throughout this book. I do not deny that symbolic disruptions and dislocations of prejudgments may and do come from many types of intrusion into personal value systems. But the disruptions and dislocations we are most closely concerned with here, those which have made the quest for community and certainty so ominous an aspect of our age, come from the kinds of social disruption that have been the consequence of a system of power which has converted the historic plurality of allegiances and meaningful memberships into, increasingly, a kind of social monolith. In the process of conversion, old values and old symbols have had their social roots made desiccate.
The basic values of modern liberalism have been two—the individual and the moral sovereignty of the people. As values they are as noble today as they were when they were first brought into existence as the elements of modern liberal democracy. But they have become, manifestly, loose and wavering in their appeal. Worse, as we have seen, they have become the potent elements of modern Communist and Nazi despotism. We find ourselves baffled by the problem of not merely making them remain vivid values in our own society but of combating the uses which Communists today make of them throughout the world.
In the remaining two chapters of this book I shall consider in more detail the contexts of historic individualism and democracy and some of the problems created by disruptions in these contexts. Here, however, it is important to stress the close dependence of the whole conscious liberal heritage, with all its basic propositions, upon the subtle, infinitely complex lines of habit, tradition, and social relationship that have made this conscious heritage more than a mere set of formal propositions, that have made it instead a potent body of evocative symbols, striking deep chords in human appreciation and remembrance. The formal, overt judgments of liberalism have rested, historically, not merely upon processes of conscious reason and verification, but upon certain prejudgments that have seldom been drawn up for critical analysis until the most recent times. And these prejudgments have, in turn, been closely linked with a set of social relationships within which their symbolic fires have been constantly kept lighted through all the normal processes of work, function, and belief. It is the disruption of the relationship among judgment, prejudgment, and social context that confronts us at the present time—a disruption caused in very large part, as I believe, by the cultural mechanization and sterilization that have accompanied modern centralization of power.
When we consider either the “individual” or the “people,” we are dealing, plainly, with ideal types. They are moral abstractions. This in no way lessens their potential efficacy, but it does call attention to the fact that their actual efficacy as symbols depends on the means by which they are translated concretely into the goals and actions of day to day living. Today, the formal values of individual and people remain as clamant as they ever were in the days of Montesquieu or Jefferson. But what have drastically changed are the contexts both of the assimilation of these values into everyday life and of their realization in any effective way in the nation at large.
Whereas modern liberalism began in the eighteenth century with an image of man as inherently self-sufficing and secure beyond the effects of all social change, the contemporary image of man is, as we have seen, almost the very opposite of this. And whereas in the eighteenth century the image of the people that glowed in the minds of such men as Jefferson was composed of elements supplied, actually, by a surrounding society strong in its social institutions and memberships, the image of society that now haunts man is one composed of the disunited, despairing masses.
We continue to ring changes on themes handed down from the eighteenth century without realizing that the power of the bells to stir consciousness is always limited by what already lies within consciousness. When this has become altered, no amount of frenzied change-ringing will suffice. For the symbols of liberalism, like the bells of the church, depend on prejudgments and social tradition.