10

Against the Cynical Interpretation of History^*

In my long life I have never been bored – except at lectures, and especially those school lessons that produced a very painful numbing of the brain. I remember that the effect was particularly deadly in history and geography.

Perhaps it is forgivable, then, if many history teachers try to spice up their classes with a touch of cynicism. And it is understandable, though certainly not forgivable, if they go too far and make a cynical view of history the height of fashion.

The cynical interpretation states that, in history as well as more generally, greed is always in command – avarice, money-grubbing, gold, oil, and power. That, they say, is how it always has been and always will be, in despotic forms of rule but also in democracies, the only difference being that in the latter the hypocrisy is, if possible, even worse. I regard this theory as not only wrong but irresponsible, precisely because it has a ring of plausibility. I think there is an urgent need to combat it. For what we think about ourselves and our history is of some importance to us, important for our decisions and our actions. It is why I have chosen this topic today.

The cynical interpretation of history is the most recent of the three major fashions I should like to mention here. Nowadays it appears as a direct successor to the Marxist interpretation, which in turn became all the rage after the collapse of the nationalist or racist account of history.

In Germany, the nationalist or racist interpretation of history flourished between the Napoleonic Wars and the collapse of Hitler’s Reich. Being fashionable even before Hitler, it created an intellectual atmosphere, a view of the world, without which Hitler would not have been possible. It is partly Napoleon, partly Hegel whom we have to thank for this view of the world. History is seen as a struggle for dominance between nations and races in which the issue at stake is total extermination. According to this theory of history, the defeat of Hitler’s Reich, for example, should have meant the total annihilation of the German people. It is well known that Hitler took every practical step at the end to bring about this theoretically predicted total annihilation of the German people. But despite his efforts, the prophecy happily proved to be false.

A theory worth taking seriously is discredited when a prediction does not come true, and something of the kind occurred with the highly fashionable nationalist interpretation of history. This certainly contributed to the fact that the Marxist interpretation of history became all the rage after the Hegelian and nationalist interpretations – by no means only in what was then Eastern Germany. As it is the intellectual collapse of the Marxist view of history that has recently led to the victory of the third, cynical fashion, I must start by examining that view a little more closely. Above all, I want to do this because the struggle against the Marxist interpretation of history has played an important role in my life.

The Marxist interpretation is known by the names ‘materialist conception of history’ and ‘historical materialism’, both of which go back to Marx and Engels. It is a reinterpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of history, seeing history as consisting not of racial struggles but of class struggles. It has one aim: to furnish proof (scientific proof) that socialism (or communism – the words do not matter) must triumph as a historical inevitability.

This supposed proof can be found for the first time in the last three pages of Marx’s book The Poverty of Philosophy, which originally appeared in French in 1847 as Misère de la philosophie. Here is the proof.

History is the history of class struggles. In our times (Marx was writing in 1847) this means struggles between the bourgeoisie, the exploiters, and the proletariat, the class of exploited producers. This struggle can end only with the victory of the producers, for if they become class-conscious and organized, they can bring production to a halt. ‘All wheels stop when your strong arm wills it.’ In other words, the producers hold the material power in their hands, even if they are not yet conscious of it. Besides, they make up the overwhelming majority. Their emancipation, their victory in the so-called ‘social revolution’, must therefore come to pass. This must end in the liquidation of the bourgeoisie, a process that takes place through a dictatorship of the victorious proletariat.

This ushers in a society made up of one single class, which is therefore a classless society of the producers. There is no longer a ruling class, and therefore – as soon as the bourgeoisie is liquidated – there are no rulers and no ruled. And the classless society brings with it the longed-for peace on earth, since all wars can only be class wars.

This, in a nutshell, is the ostensibly scientific proof of the ‘historical necessity’ with which socialism must arrive.

Already in 1847, on the penultimate page of The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx considered an objection to his account. Could it not be that after the fall of the old society there will be a new class domination culminating in a new political power? To this question of such evident importance, he answers with a single word: ‘No.’ He seems to assume that the class of producers will not itself divide; that there will not, as in the French Revolution, be a split between a new ruling class of Napoleonic dictators supported by their bureaucracy, police, and henchmen, on the one side, and everyone else on the other side. Marx did not envisage that.

The claim of Marxism to provide a scientific prediction of social revolution and the inevitable coming of socialism – just as a solar eclipse is predictable with the help of Newton’s celestial mechanics – contains a terrible moral danger. I experienced this in my own life in the winter of 1918–1919, at the end of the First World War when I was sixteen and a half years old. When a youngster is taken in by the proof of the historical necessity of socialism, he feels a deep moral obligation to offer his help – even if he sees, as I did, that the communists often lie and employ morally reprehensible means. For if socialism must come about, it is obviously criminal to fight its coming. Indeed it is everyone’s duty to further the coming of socialism, so that what must come will encounter as little resistance as possible. Since you are not strong enough as an individual, you have to go with the movement, with the Party, and give it your loyal support, even if this means you support or at least swallow things you find morally repulsive. This is a mechanism that must lead to personal depravity. You swallow more and more intellectual trickery, excuses and lies. And once you go beyond a certain threshold, you are presumably prepared to accept anything. That is the road to political terrorism, to crime.

I myself escaped this mechanism after eight weeks or so, when I rejected Marxism once and for all shortly before my seventeenth birthday. Feeling affected by the death of some young comrades who had been shot by the police at a demonstration, I asked myself: ‘Do you really know that this supposedly scientific proof holds water? Have you critically tested it in any real way? Can you take responsibility for encouraging other young people to put their lives on the line?’

I found that a clear ‘No’ was the only honest answer to these questions. I had not really critically tested the Marxist proof. I had partly let myself become dependent upon the approval of others, who depended upon others (including myself) in their turn – a mutual insurance in which all partners are intellectually bankrupt and (unconsciously) tempt one another into falsehood. It was a state I recognized in myself, and it evidently had the party leaders most emphatically in its grip.

Everything turned upon the Marxist proof of the coming of a classless society, I learnt. But this broke down at the very point where Marx had seen and denied the possibility of a counter-argument. Clearly it is the party leaders who, with the party’s help, form the beginnings of a ‘new class’ and thereby negate Marx’s hopes. This ‘new ruling class’ deceives and mistrusts its future subjects, yet demands their trust. Already before victory and dictatorship, the leaders were rulers who expelled from the party anyone who posed awkward questions. (They could not yet kill such people.) This was their way of dealing with questions. This was the source of party discipline.

I had the great and undeserved good fortune to see all this in time. On my seventeenth birthday I turned my back on Marxism for good. What would have become of me if I had gone along with it any longer? Even a brave and determined dissident like Sakharov was for a long time sufficiently captivated by the Marxist proof to press into the hands first of Stalin (via his henchman Beria), and then of Khrushchev, the most terrible weapons of mass destruction ever invented. Even in its weaker version, Sakharov’s superbomb was designed to be ‘several thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima’.¹

I myself later met important scientists who believed in Marx’s proof and were members of the Communist Party. I am proud that I was able to persuade one of the greatest to leave. He was the great biologist J.B.S. Haldane.

On the occasion of Stalin’s death, Sakharov excused Stalin’s crimes as humanistic deeds, on the grounds that such things were unavoidable in (what he saw as) the social revolution of decisive importance for humanity. But fortunately it became clear to me very early on that one should sacrifice only oneself, and not anyone else, for one’s ideals.

Although Marx’s proof was intended to show the inevitability of the coming of socialism and peace on earth, there are other features in the Marxist view of history that may well be described as vulgar-Marxist. Let us briefly summarize them. Everyone who does not struggle for socialism is motivated by self-interest and nothing else. If people do not admit this, they are just swindlers and hypocrites – indeed, criminals in a big way. For if they try to delay the coming of socialism, they bear the guilt for all the human sacrifices that will have to be made for the revolution. It is resistance to the unstoppable revolution that forces it to act violently. It is the greed of such criminals that forces revolutionaries to shed blood.

Now I come to the third great fashion in the interpretation of history.

It is clear that if the coming of socialism is dropped from Marxist theory, a cynical view of history directly follows. No new ideas are needed – or at most, only the pessimistic idea that things always have been and always will be so, that hunger, forced exile, war, and poverty will play the major role even in a society of real abundance, because the social world is ruled by people greedy for power, gold, and oil, and by the unscrupulous weapons industry.

Marxism, and therefore cynicism as well, teach that everything is of course worst in the wealthiest country of all, the United States of America. This is how anti-Americanism arises in other countries, especially those not quite as rich.

This closes my brief sketch of the ultramodern cynical view of history and its two dangerously influential predecessors. Now I turn abruptly to some of my own views. How abruptly, you will see from my next statement, which I could use as the title for the second half of my remarks. This is: I am an optimist.

I am an optimist who has no knowledge of the future and therefore makes no predictions. We must make a very clear division between the present, which we can and should judge, and the wide-open future, which we are able to influence. We therefore have a moral duty to face the future quite differently from how we would if it were just a continuation of the past and present. The open future contains unforeseeable and morally quite different possibilities. So our basic attitude should not be ‘What will happen?’ but ‘What should we do to make the world a little better – even if we know that once we have done it, future generations might make everything worse again?’

The second half of my talk, then, also deals with two questions: my optimism about the present; and my activism with regard to the future.

Let me say straight away that it was my first trip to the United States in 1950 that made an optimist of me again. Since then I have been to America twenty or maybe twenty-five times, and each time I have been more deeply impressed. That first trip tore me for ever out of a depression caused by the overwhelming influence of Marxism in postwar Europe. My book The Open Society and Its Enemies, which I began in 1938 after Hitler marched into Austria, had finally been published in 1945. But although it sold well and was favourably reviewed, it seemed impossible to do anything about the triumph of Marxism.

Here I should explain the main components of my optimism.

1 I repeat that my optimism refers exclusively to the present, not to the future. I do not think there is such a thing as a law of progress. There is not even one in science or technology. Progress cannot even be described as likely.

2 I claim that we in the West now live in the best social world there has ever been – despite the high treason of most intellectuals, who preach a new pessimistic religion according to which we live in a moral hell and are perishing from physical and moral pollution.

3 I argue that this pessimistic religion is a blatant lie, and – to come straight to one of my main points – that never before has there been a society as enthusiastic for reform as our own.

4 This enthusiasm for reform is the result of a new ethical willingness to make sacrifices, a willingness that was already apparent (on both sides) in the two world wars. In the Seven Years’ War, Friedrich II still had to force his men to look death in the face. His rallying-cry is well known: ‘You curs, do you want to live for ever?’ But then it turned out that an appeal to ethical values is enough: to duty and fatherland in Germany, to fatherland, freedom, and peace in the West; and on both sides to comradeship.

As I have already indicated from my own experience, I think the power of communism lies in its ethical appeal; and the same is true of the peace movement. I think also that many terrorists originally responded to an ethical appeal, which caught them, however, in that inner duplicity I have already mentioned.

Bertrand Russell, to whom I felt very close for many years until, as an old man, he fell under the sway of a communist secretary, wrote that the problem of our time is that our development has been too fast intellectually and too slow morally, so that when we discovered nuclear physics we did not achieve in time the necessary moral principles. In other words, according to Russell we are too clever – but morally, we are too bad. Many people, including many cynics, shared Russell’s view. I believe the exact opposite. I believe that we are too good and too stupid. We are too easily swayed by theories that appeal directly or indirectly to our moral sense, and our attitude to these theories is not sufficiently critical. We are not intellectually mature enough for them, and become their obliging victims, ready to make sacrifices of ourselves.

I would summarize as follows the positive side of my optimism. We live in a simply wonderful world, and here in the West we have created the best social system there has ever been. We are constantly trying to improve it, to reform it – which is far from easy. Many reforms that look promising turn out to be misconceived. For it is very important to realize that the consequences of our social and political actions are often quite different from what we intended and were able to foresee. Nevertheless, we have achieved far more than many of us (myself, for example) ever hoped.

The prevailing ideology, which sees us living in a morally evil world, is a blatant lie. As it spreads, it discourages many young people and makes them despondent – at an age when they may not be able to live at all without some hope to support them. To repeat: I am not an optimist regarding the future. For the future is open. There is no historical law of progress. We do not know what tomorrow will be like. There are billions of possibilities, good and bad, that no one can foresee. I reject the prophetic goal-setting of the three interpretations of history, and I maintain that on moral grounds we should not put anything in their place. It is wrong even to try to extrapolate from history – for example, by inferring from present trends what will happen tomorrow. To see history as an at least partly predictable current is to build a theory out of an image or metaphor.

The only right way to proceed is to consider the past as completely different from the future. We should judge past facts historically and morally, in order to learn what is possible and what is morally right. We should not try at all to derive trends and directions from the past in order to make predictions about the future. For the future is open. Anything can happen. At this moment, there are thousands of Sakharov’s superbombs in the Soviet Union, and there are certainly plenty of megalomaniacs who would be happy to use them. Mankind may be wiped out tomorrow. But there are also great hopes; there are countless possibilities for a future that will be far better than the present.

Unfortunately, this way of looking at the future does not seem easy to grasp. Some intellectuals are simply incapable of making this distinction between the future and the past and present – intellectuals who have learnt from Marxism to require some wise man to point the way into the future. More than once I have been told that my optimism must be at least a disguised pointer, because there are no optimists about the present who are not also optimists about the future.

But all that my optimism about the present can offer for the future is hope. It can give us hope and incentive; for we have succeeded in making a lot of things better, and similar success is not impossible in the future. Since maids were released from thraldom in the 1920s, for example, there has been virtually no servitude in the West. We can be proud of the fact that, in this sense at least, the West is free.

As far as the future is concerned, we should not seek to prophesy but simply try to act in a way that is morally right and responsible. This means we have a duty to learn to see the present correctly, not through the tinted spectacles of an ideology. We can learn from reality what it is possible to achieve. But if we see reality through the lens of one of those three ideological conceptions of history, we violate our duty to learn.

The future is open, and we have a responsibility to do our best to make the future still better than the present. But this responsibility presupposes freedom. In a despotic system we are slaves, and slaves are not fully responsible for what they do. This brings me to my final main thesis.

Political freedom – freedom from despotism – is the most important of all political values. And we must always be prepared to struggle for political freedom. It can always be lost. We should never sit back and assume that our freedom is secure.

Under despotic rule, all are in danger of betraying mankind and thus of losing their humanity, of becoming dehumanized. Even someone like Andrei Sakharov (whose later admirable behaviour showed he had the courage to resist despotism), even he, as a young man, could behave like a sadistic criminal. Not only did he, as I showed, press the most terrible weapons of mass destruction into the blood-stained hands of Stalin’s henchman, the sadist Beria; he developed a still more terrible plan for their use by the Russian Navy. A high-ranking officer rejected this plan, because it conflicted with his combat morality, and Sakharov writes that he felt ashamed of himself. All this happened because he was blinded by that crazy and depraved Marxist ideology and therefore believed in the mission of Stalin the great humanist – which is how he saw him at the time. In this climate of despotism, Sakharov temporarily became a really mad beast – temporarily, but for long enough to prepare the greatest conceivable disaster, to hang a sword of Damocles over every living creature.

Despotism robs us of our humanity, for it robs us of our responsibility as human beings. Someone who seeks to follow his conscience then finds himself faced with impossibilities: insoluble conflicts, such as that between his duties to his family and his duty to stand by the persecuted, or at least his duty not to collaborate in their persecution. He must have great courage not to confuse his true duties to himself with a false so-called duty to the despots standing over him, a duty that Sakharov had promised Khrushchev he would fulfil and that he later used in his defence – just as the German war criminals did.

How despotism destroys the human sense of duty and responsibility, together with the people who try to fulfil them, may be seen from the unforgettable example of the White Rose in Munich, that close circle of students and one teacher who in the winter of 1942–43 put up posters calling for resistance to Hitler’s war. Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie were executed along with Christoph Probst on 22 February 1943; Alexander Schmorell and Professor Kurt Huber on 13 July 1943; Willi Graf on 12 October 1943. Hans Scholl was 24 years old and Sophie 21; the other students were the same age. Some of their comrades are still alive today.

Heroes who can be examples to us have become a rarity in our generation. Those people were heroes: they initiated a struggle that was almost hopeless for them, in the hope that others would take it over. And they are examples: they fought for freedom and responsibility and for their and our humanity. The monstrous inhuman force of despotism reduced them to silence. We should not forget them. And we must speak and act for them.

Political freedom is a prerequisite of our personal responsibility, our humanity. Any attempt to take a step towards a better world, a better future, must be guided by the bask value of freedom.

I find it tragic that Europe has nearly always concentrated only on the failed example of the French Revolution (failed until de Gaulle set up the Fifth Republic, at least), whereas little attention is paid (at least at school) to the great and nearly always misunderstood example of the American Revolution. For America furnished proof that the idea of personal freedom, which Solon of Athens first tried to implement and Kant extensively analysed, is not a Utopian dream. The American example has shown that a form of government dedicated to freedom is not only possible but capable of overcoming the greatest difficulties. Above all, it is a form of government based upon the avoidance of despotism – not least the despotism of a majority of the people – through the division and distribution of power and through reciprocal checks and balances among the powers so divided. This idea has inspired all other democracies, including the basic law of Germany’s democracy.

But America had to go through difficult times. It has been going through them ever since the Revolution and War of Independence, and despite its great successes it has not yet seen the end of them. The struggle for freedom goes on.

The great idea of the freedom of every individual, which inspired the American Revolution, stood in the sharpest contrast to the institution of slavery inherited from pre-revolutionary times, especially from the Spanish, which had been deeply rooted in the Southern States for more than a hundred years. The United States split in two over the issue, when the South launched a preventive war against the North. It was certainly the most terrible war there had yet been, a civil war in which friends and members of the same family confronted each other. It seemed to many that America’s road to freedom would prove as unsuccessful as France’s. But despite the heaviest sacrifices on both sides (600,000 dead, one of them President Abraham Lincoln), the South’s initially successful attack was repulsed and eventually overwhelmed. The slaves were freed, but a huge problem remained of how to integrate the descendants of the former negro slaves; how to overcome a cruel, centuries-old institution which, because of differences in skin colour, was not so easily forgotten.

I have yet to see a German historical work in which this situation has been even moderately accurately described and evaluated.

One of the strongest impressions in my life comes from my witnessing, between 1950 and 1989, the various attempts made by U.S. governments to help the former slaves to become citizens with equal rights. I shall just mention one episode. In 1956 I was a guest at the University of Atlanta, in the heart of the former Southern States. The University then had only black students, and white professors were in a minority. Once I asked the president, a distinguished black scholar, how and when this great and wonderful institution had come to be founded. To my astonishment, I learnt that this black university in the Deep South originated six years after the Civil War, through the amalgamation of a number of Negro Colleges – I think it was eight – that had been founded by all the Christian Churches as places where white and black clergy and teachers worked alongside one another.

I leave it up to you to ponder this story, and to compare it with an entry in Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexicon which says about the end of the Civil War: ‘Slavery, on the other hand, which had been the cause of the war, underwent only the appearance of a solution.’ This seems to me quite wrong, as does much else in the article in question, and I wonder what genuine solution the author would have proposed. Anyway, the history of the University of Atlanta made a strong impression on me, as did many other endeavours that I have seen with my own eyes.

I have been in many countries, but nowhere have I breathed as freely as in the United States of America. Nowhere have I found so much idealism coupled with tolerance and a desire to help and learn – such an active, practical idealism, such a great willingness to help. Later I was also in American universities where the integration of blacks had been a complete success, so that skin colour no longer seemed to play any role at all.

I say all this in perfect awareness that it may not receive an enthusiastic reception. Three years ago at a congress in Hanover, I gave a lecture in defence of America because it had been attacked in a number of other lectures. There was a veritable hue and cry, and my words were accompanied by a chorus of whistles. I welcomed this as a sign that my audience was not bored. And I was happy because I could imagine – or could talk myself into believing – that I was taking up the cudgels for freedom and toleration.

Note

1  I am quoting from Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, Hutchinson, London, 1990, p. 218.

* Lecture given at the University of Eichstätt in May 1991.