Roger
Scruton
The
root of totalitarianism
So many attempts have been made to
understand the nature and causes of totalitarianism that it
is very unlikely that I shall have anything original to say
on the topic. However, it is a striking fact to anyone who has
lived through the experience of communism that the 'totalitarian
temptation', as Jean François Revel has called it, should still
exert so powerful an attraction, and that the peculiar mind-set
of the revolutionary should still be observable everywhere among
the intellectual class. Although the totalitarianisms that are
commonly discussed are marked by modernity, therefore, I suspect
that they correspond to something in the human temperament that
is permanent and incorrigible, like sex, sin and sorrow.
First,
what do we mean by totalitarianism? I think we should distinguish
two applications of the term: to a system of government, and
to the ideology that serves it. Totalitarian government is government
by a centralised power structure, which is neither limited by
law nor self-limited by a constitution, and which extends into
every aspect of social life. Totalitarian ideology is the system of ideas
and doctrines that justify and normalize the totalitarian form
of government, usually by representing it as the reign of justice,
maybe even as the 'final solution' to a social problem that
can be solved in no other way.
Clearly,
on that definition, totalitarian government is a matter of degree.
A government may be to some extent constrained by law, even
if able to overrule the law in special cases; it may present
itself behind the mask of a constitution, even if the constitution
is of only limited effectiveness in reducing its power. The
important point is not the extent of the totalitarian lawlessness,
but the absence of any fundamental constraint on the central
authority, and the assumption that every aspect of society,
however remote from the normal concerns of government, is one
over which the central government can, should it choose, exert
control.
Those
influenced by Hegel might express the point in another way,
by saying that a totalitarian government is one that does not
respect or acknowledge the distinction between civil society
and state. The state is the final authority in all matters of
social choice, and nothing limits the power of the state in
the way that it might be limited by a representative legislature
or a system of judge-made law. Under totalitarian rule society
is itself a creation of the state, rather than the other way
round, and those who can claim the protection of the state have
an insuperable advantage over their neighbours in the competition
for scarce resources.
In
East Central Europe totalitarian goverment was imposed by political parties, following the principle of
'democratic centralism' invented by Lenin and later copied by
Hitler. The party was a quasi-military organisation, quite unlike
anything that would be called a political party in the Western
world today. It did not try to extend its membership but, on
the contrary, tried to restrict its membership to those who
could be relied upon to carry out the centrally issued commands.
Joining the communist party was a privilege, not a right. Members
were rewarded for their obedience with social benefits that
could not conceivably be enjoyed by ordinary citizens. In this
way the communist party generated, as Djilas expressed it, a
'new class', known in Russian as the nomenklatura, whose privileges
were far more secure than those enjoyed by previous aristocracies,
since they did not arise 9vy an invisible hand' from social
interaction but were imposed from above by the state.
Society was controlled by the state, the state was controlled
by the party, and the party was controlled from the top by the
leadership. Because it was conceived in military terms, the
party could not depend upon the existing civil law to exert
its discipline, but had to bend the law to its purposes. Henceforth
the law ceased to be a means of settling social disputes and
establishing justice and became a device for punishing those
who deviated from the party line.
All
that is familiar from the Polish experience. But we should not
deceive ourselves into thinking that totalitarianism is simply
a twentieth-century phenomenon, or one invented by Lenin. The
desire to organize society on military principles, and to exert
a top-down control over every social initiative, the economy
included, has antecedents in the slave societies of the ancient
Middle East. It has been widely
observed in the Far East and Africa,
and has erupted into European politics many times prior to the
twentieth century. The recent experience of totalitarianism
in Europe was foreshadowed at the French Revolution, when the
Committee of Public Safety acted in the same way as the Nazi
and Communist parties, setting up 'parallel structures' through
which to control the state and to exert a micromanagerial tyranny
over every aspect of civil society. Recent scholarship, which
has tended to look on the French Revolution without the rosy
spectacles worn by the nineteenth-century advocates of liberty
and the rights of man, has also tended to the conclusion that
its significance is to be found more in the Terror than in the
liberal slogans that disguised it.
Let
us at least be realistic, and recognize that, if totalitarian
governments have arisen and spread with such rapidity in modern
times, this is because there is something in human nature to
which they correspond and on which they draw for their moral
energy. It is characteristic of intellectuals to believe that
the totalitarian temptation is a temptation in the realm of
ideas: a temptation to error, of a kind that can be witnessed
in the false theories of the early socialists. The intellectual
critics of communism trace the tyranny of the system to the
refuted labour theory of value, to the inversion of cause and
effect in the theory of base and superstructure, to the simplistic
idea of class struggle, and to the potential contradiction in
the idea that classes are both the by-products and the agents
of social change. On this view Terror is just error with a capital
T.
Now
there is no doubt that totalitarian ideology is replete with
intellectual confusions, and that Marxism is responsible for
many of them. But not everything in Marx is false, and one of
his theories is particularly relevant to the understanding of
totalitarianism, which is the theory of ideology itself. Marx
understands 'ideology' as a set of ideas, doctrines and myths
that exist because of the interests that they advance rather
than the truths that they embody.
Underlying
the theory is the contrast drawn by Marx (somewhat obscurely)
between ideology and science. For Marx science is the opposite
of ideology and also the cure for it. As we might put it now,
scientific beliefs arise from, and are explained by, the search
for truth, and scientific method is the method by which we advance
from truth to truth. Ideological beliefs arise from, and are
explained by, the search for social and economic power. Hence
we can criticize ideology from a scientific perspective, by
showing that it is not a truth-seeking but a power-seeking device.
But criticism of science from an ideological perspective is
mere ideology, which explains and undermines nothing.
For
Marx, the interests that are advanced by an ideology are those
of a ruling class. We might similarly suggest that the interests
advanced by totalitarian ideology are those of an aspiring elite.
And we might confront totalitarian ideology in Marxian spirit,
by explaining it in terms of its social function, and thereby
exploding its epistemological claims. It is not the truth of
Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe
it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their
attempts to control the world. And since, as Swift says, it
is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned
into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power
to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed
but a power-directed system of thought.
That
is all very well, so far as it goes. But it raises another question,
which is why Marxism has this power - the power
to confer power, to put it bluntly. Marxism conferred power
on the intellectual elite because it placed something in their
hands over and above a set of ideas and theories. What was that
thing? And how could it be used to gain the rewards of government?
In
answering that question we should also recall that Marxism was
not the only totalitarian ideology of modern times. The ideology
of the French revolutionaries was one of enlightened optimism,
popular sovereignty and human rights; the ideology of the Nazis,
although based on socialist theories, had an important racial
and nationalist component that is alien to the central tenets
of Marxism. All three ideologies, however, were adopted in the
pursuit of power, and are to be explained in Marx's way, as
power-seeking rather than truth-seeking devices. What is it,
to repeat, that they placed in the hands of those who adopted
them?
The
answer to this question was suggested by Nietzsche. Totalitarian
ideologies are ways to recruit resentment. Nietzsche used the
French word ressentiment, in order to suggest
a virulent and implacable state of mind, that precedes the injury
complained of. Scheler, in his book on the subject, followed
Nietzsche's usage. Neither was discussing totalitarianism. Nietzsche
was concerned to diagnose the evils, as he saw them, of Christianity;
Scheler, who in my view entirely refutes Nietzsche's charge
against the Christian faith, levels it, nevertheless, against
the socialist doctrines of his time. In using the term 'resentment'
I want to set myself at a distance from those controversies,
and to use Nietzsche's suggestion for a purpose that he would
perhaps not have recognized.
The
picture I should like to urge on you is this. Totalitarian systems
of government, and totalitarian ideologies, have a single source,
which is resentment. I don't see resentment as Nietzsche saw
it, as peculiar to the 'slave morality' of a Christian or post-Christian
culture. I see it as an emotion that arises in all societies,
being a natural offshoot of the competition for advantage. Totalitarian
ideologies are adopted because they rationalize resentment,
and also unite the resentful around a common cause. Totalitarian
systems arise when the resentful, having seized power, proceed
to abolish the institutions that have conferred power on others:
institutions like law, property and religion which create hierarchies,
authorities and privileges, and which enable individuals to
assert sovereignty over their own lives. To the resentful these
institutions are the cause of inequality and therefore of their
own humiliations and failures. In fact they are the channels
through which resentment is drained away. Once institutions
of law, property and religion are destroyed - and their destruction
is the normal result of totalitarian government - resentment
takes up its place immovably, as the ruling principle of the
state.
For
the resentful there is no such thing as authority or legitimate
power. There is only pure power, exercised by one person over
another, and diagnosed through Lenin's famous questions: 'Who?
Whom?'. Once in power, therefore, the resentful are inclined
to dispense with mediating institutions, and erect a system
of pure power relations, in which individual sovereignty is
extinguished by central control. They may do this in the name
of equality, meaning thereby to dispossess the rich and the
privileged. Or they may do it in the name of racial purity,
meaning thereby to dispossess the aliens who have stolen their
birthright. One thing is certain, however, which is that there
will be target groups. Resentment, in the form of it that I
am considering, is not directed against specific individuals,
in response to specific injuries. It is directed against groups,
conceived as collectively offensive, bearing a collective guilt,
and being collectively in need of punishment.
In
every totalitarian experiment, therefore, you will find that
the first act of the centralised power is to single out certain
groups for punishment. The Jacobins targeted the aristocracy,
later expanded to the ubiquitous 'emigrés', whose invisible
presence licensed the most arbitrary murders and exterminations.
The Nazis singled out the Jews, on account of their material
success and because their apartness was both real and hidden.
The Russian communists began with the bourgeoisie, but were
fortunate in having to hand another and more artificial class
of victim: the kulaks, a class created by the state, which could
therefore easily be destroyed by the state. One function of
the ideology is to tell an elaborate story about the target
group, showing it to be less than human, unjustly successful,
and intrinsically worthy of punishment. Nothing is more comforting
to the resentful than the thought that those who possess what
they envy possess it unjustly. In the worldview of the resentful
success is not a proof of virtue but, on the contrary, a call
to retribution
That
explains why totalitarian ideologies invariably divide human
beings into innocent and guilty groups. Behind the impassioned
rhetoric of the Communist Manifesto, behind the pseudo-science
of the labour theory of the value, and behind the class analysis
of human history, lies a single emotional source - resentment
of those who control things. This resentment is both rationalised
and amplified by the proof that property owners form a 'class'.
According to the theory the 'bourgeois' class has a shared moral
identity, a shared and systematic access to the levers of power,
and a shared body of privileges. Moreover all those good things
are acquired and retained 'at the expense of', or through the
'exploitation' of, the proletariat, which has nothing to part
with except its labour, and which will therefore always be cheated
of what it deserves.
That
theory has been effective not merely because it serves the function
of amplifying and legitimizing resentment, but also because
it is able to expose its rivals as 'mere ideology'. Here, I
believe, is the most cunning feature of Marxist ideology: that
it is able to pass itself off as science. Nazi genetics made
a bid for the same high ground, but anti-semitism was a social
rather than a scientific outlook. The science supposedly gave
support to the ideology; but it was not identical with it. The
Jacobins also had scientific pretensions, but nothing, besides
Enlightenment scepticism, with which to confront opposing views.
In this respect Marx had the edge on his predecessors and his
successors. Having hit on the distinction between ideology and
science, he set out to prove that his own ideology was in
itself a science. Moreover, Marx's alleged science undermined
the beliefs of his opponents. The theories of the rule of law,
the separation of powers, the right of property, and so on,
as these had been expounded by 'bourgeois' thinkers like Montesquieu
and Hegel, were shown, by the Marxian class analysis, to be
not truth-seeking but power-seeking devices: ways of hanging
on to the privileges conferred by the bourgeois order. By exposing
this ideology as a self-serving pretence the class theory vindicated
its own scientific claims.
There
is a kind of theological cunning in this aspect of Marx's thought.
Since the class-theory is a genuine science, bourgeois political
thought is ideology. And since the class-theory exposes bourgeois
thought as ideology, it must be science. We have entered the
magic circle of a creation myth. Moreover, by dressing up the
theory in scientific language Marx has endowed it with the character
of a badge of initiation. Not everybody can speak this language.
A scientific theory defines the elite that can understand and
apply it. It can offer proof of the elite's enlightened knowledge
and therefore of its title to govern. It is this feature that
justifies the charge made by Eric Voegelin, Alain Besançon and
others, that Marxism is a kind of gnosticism, a title to 'government
through knowledge'.
Here
then is the perfect totalitarian ideology: a pseudo-science
that justifies and recruits resentment, that undermines and
dismisses all rival claims to legitimacy, and which endows the
not quite successful with the proof of their superior intellectual
power and of their right to govern. The Marxian ideology provides
the frustrated intellectual with the power that he needs: the
power of his own resentment, which echoes and amplifies the
resentment of a victim class.
It
is a well known fact that revolutions are not conducted from below
by the people, but from above, in the name of the people, by
an aspiring elite. The French Revolution, for example, was the
work of lawyers, professionals and minor nobility, impatient
to enjoy political power in a society whose upper reaches were
clogged up with functionless fat cats. The revolutionaries acted
in the name of the people, announcing liberty, equality and
fraternity. And they consciously identified themselves as an
enlightened class, who had earned through their superior understanding
the right to summon the people to their aid. Their slogans and
doctrines did not merely legitimize their own resentment. They
were calculated to conscript the resentment of others.
Now
it is my contention that totalitarian ideologies always have
that character. They legitimize the resentments of an elite,
while recruiting the resentments of those needed to support
the elite in its pursuit of hitherto inaccessible advantages.
The elite derives its identity from repudiating the old order.
And it casts itself in a pastoral role, as leader and teacher
of the people. Its theories and visions have the status of revelations,
conferring authority on the priestly caste. But they also identify
a collective enemy, and in the destruction of this enemy the
people can cheerfully join. The elite justifies its seizure
of power by referring to its solidarity with those who have
been unjustly excluded. Henceforth they will still be excluded,
but justly - since they will be excluded in
the name of the people, and therefore in the name of themselves.
It
is my contention, also, that the totalitarian system of government
is an inevitable result of the resentment that underlies this
ideology. Indeed, I think we should see totalitarianism as institutionalised
resentment - resentment ossified in institutions that survive
the emotions that first demanded them, and which go on generating
a kind of impersonal resentment of their own. I say this because
I believe resentment to be a quite peculiar social emotion,
which is functional only so long as it is allowed avenues of
escape at the local level, and which becomes radically dysfunctional
when suddenly projected into a position of power.
We
all feel resentment towards those whose success is either undeserved,
or purchased at a cost to ourselves. There is nothing intrinsically
evil in this, even if Christian morality urges us to forgive
our enemies and to accept our humiliations in the sacrificial
spirit of Christ. Indeed, some measure of resentment is necessary,
if people are to keep a proper distance from each other and
to treat strangers with respect. I am aware of the dangers of
resentment, and therefore try to avoid provoking it. I give
people their due, treat failure with sympathy, try to help those
in need and do not make blatant display of my triumphs. In the
words of Schoeck, I cultivate 'envy-avoiding' stratagems, knowing
that I need strangers to accept my presence among them, and
that I am as dependent upon their good will as they are on mine. Resentment is the equilibrating device that
keeps the society of strangers in balance, by punishing those
who offend the laws of solidarity and rewarding, through its
absence, those who contribute to the common good. Looked at
with the superman superciliousness of Nietzsche resentment may
seem like the bitter dregs of the 'slave morality', the impoverished
loss of spirit that comes about when people take more pleasure
in bringing others down than in raising up themselves. But that
is the wrong way to look at it. Resentment is not a good thing
to feel, either for its subject or its object. But the business
of society is to conduct our social life so that resentment
does not occur: to live by mutual aid and shared rejoicing,
not so as to be all alike and inoffensively mediocre, but so
as to gain others' cooperation in our small successes. Living
in this way we create the channels through which resentment
drains away of its own accord: channels like custom, gift, hospitality
and the common law, all of which are instantly stopped up when
the totalitarians come to power. Resentment is to the body politic
what pain is to the body: it is bad to feel it, but good to
be capable of feeling it, since without the ability to feel
it you will not survive.
Hence
we should not resent the fact that we resent, but accept it,
as a part of the human condition, something to be managed along
with all our other joys and afflictions. However, resentment
can be transformed into a governing emotion and a social cause,
and thereby gain release from the constraints which normally
contain it. This happens when resentment loses the specificity
of its target, and becomes directed to society as a whole. In
such cases it ceases to be a response to another's unmerited
success and becomes instead an existential posture: the posture
of the one whom the world has betrayed, by first exciting and
then denying his ambitions. This happens in many ways. For example,
a person may be embittered by his small size, sexual failure,
and poor economic prospects, while at the same time nurturing
energies and ambitions that promise the whole world as his rightful
reward. And his bitterness may cause him to turn away from friends
and to live in isolation. The result is a dangerous character,
an unwanted by-product of the normal functioning of human society,
and one who may seek some opportunity to take revenge on the
world that has denied him his due. Such were St Just, Lenin
and Hitler, and we know what they sought by way of compensation
for their early failures. Such characters do not regard this
person or that as the authors of their suffering. Their target
is the human world as such. They are fired by a negative energy,
and are never at ease unless bent on the task of revenge.
At
the same time they seek a following, who will applaud them and
reward them with gratitude, so compensating for their deep isolation.
By gaining power they will also liberate their followers. Hence
they must divide the world into the damned and the saved, the
ones collectively responsible for the prevailing injustice,
and the ones who will be freed from their chains.
Imagine
then what happens, when such a person decides to seek power.
He will compensate for his isolation by establishing, in the
place of friendship, a military command, with himself at the
head of it. He will demand absolute loyalty and obedience, in
return for a share in the reward. And he will admit no-one into
his circle who is not animated by resentment, which is the only
emotion that he has learned to trust. His political project
will not be to gain a share of power within existing structures,
but to gain total power, so as to abolish the structures themselves.
He will set himself against all forms of mediation, compromise
and debate, and against the legal and moral norms which give
a voice to the dissenter and sovereignty to the ordinary unresentful
person. He will set about destroying the enemy, whom he will
conceive in collective terms, as the class, group or race that
hitherto controlled the world and which must now be controlled.
And all institutions that grant protection to that class or
a voice in the political process will be targets for his destructive
rage.
The
inevitable result of his seizure of power will be the establishment
of a militarised core to the state - whether in the form of
a party, or a committee, or simply an army which does not bother
to disguise its military purpose. This core will have absolute
power and will operate outside the law. The law itself will
be replaced by a Potemkin
version, that can be invoked whenever it is necessary to remind
the people of their subordinate position. This Potemkin law
will not be a shy retreating thing, like law in civilized societies,
which exists precisely in order to minimize its own invocation.
It will be a prominent and omnipresent feature of society, constantly
invoked and paraded, in order to imbue all acts of the ruling
party with an unassailable air of legitimacy. The 'revolutionary
vanguard' will be more prodigal of legal forms and official
stamps than any of the regimes that it displaces, and the millions
sent to their deaths will be granted an impeccable document
to indicate that their end was rightfully decided and officially
decreed. In this way the new order will be both utterly lawless
and entirely concealed by law.
The
vanguard begins by targeting the culpable group, class or race.
This will be a group marked by its previous success, the fruits
of which will be taken from it and either destroyed or distributed
among the victors. The members of the group will be humiliated
and even reduced to some kind of animal condition, in order
to display the extent of their former presumption. Hence the
Gulag and the death-camp arise naturally from the seizure of
power, since they show the depth of the deceit that the world
has hitherto practised against those who now control it. Resentment
does not rest when its victim has been deprived of his worldly
goods. It seeks to deprive him of his humanity, to show that
he was never entitled to possess the slightest share in the
earth's resources, and that his death is no more to be regretted
than the death of any other kind of vermin. Exemplary in this
respect was the humiliation of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France,
who was accused of every crime, including incest, in order to
represent her as excluded from the normal fold of humanity.
It
is one mark of resentment in its pathological version that it
will not allow a right of reply. The gap between accusation
and guilt is closed. Hence the importance of the new and often
invented crimes, which signify an existential condition rather
than a specific act of wrongdoing. 'You are a Jew/bourgeois/kulak'.
'Well yes, I admit as much.' 'So what is your defence?'
However,
the party that founds its rule on resentment will never feel
at ease in the world that it creates. It will be like the puritan,
as defined by H.L. Mencken, subject to 'the haunting fear that
someone, somewhere, might be happy'. It will suspect that people
are proceeding with the old way of life, expressing their energies,
enjoying their successes, achieving the peace and happiness
which the resentful are forever denied. The ruling party will
tirelessly search for the weeds of human industry, the first
frail tendrils of ownership, the timid attempts of people to
grow together in their 'little platoons'. It will never be certain
that the emigrés, Jews, bourgeoisie, kulaks or whoever have
been finally destroyed, and will be haunted by the sense that
for every one killed another comes to replace him. The order
of resentment will be forced to confiscate not only the free
economy but also the clubs, societies, schools and churches
which have hitherto been the natural instruments of social reproduction.
In short, resentment, once in power, will move of its own accord
toward the totalitarian state.
Of
course, the original resenters will die, most of them caught
up in the machine that they made for others' destruction. One
or two may even die from natural causes, though it is one of
the pleasing lessons of recent history to discover how few they
are. Eventually the machine will be functioning on automatic
pilot, its software ossified into hardware. This is the final
stage of totalitarianism - a stage not reached by the Jacobins
or the Nazis, but reached in our day by the communists. In this
condition, which Havel ventured
to call 'post-totalitarian', the machine runs itself, fuelled
by its own impersonal distillation of the original resentment.
People learn to 'live within the lie' as Havel put it, and go
about their daily betrayals with routine acquiescence, paying
their debt to the machine and hoping that someone, somewhere,
might know how to switch it off. This is the stage that produced the most
interesting experiments in totalitarian literature, including
the novels of Solzhenitsyn, Zinoviev and Kundera, describing
the various forms of schizophrenia that flourish as people paddle
in the receding wave of that vast catastrophe, but don't dare
to run past the shallows where the wrecks still lie, to the
dry land beyond.
As
Poles have discovered, when at last they reach the sands, a
new society of intellectuals is basking there, each with some
carefully nurtured resentment, and each with a book of ideology
open on his knee. The books convey a familiar message: the world
is in the wrong hands, the oppressors are united, a new order
is needed, the established institutions must be pulled down
and the old privileges destroyed. This is the message that you
will find in Foucault, who still uses that old label 'bourgeois'
to denounce his chosen enemy, seemingly without a hint of irony;
you will find it too in the American feminists, who are at war
with a 'patriarchy' which controls the social world; you will
find it in the new historicists, the deconstructionists and
the postmodernists, for whom the old tradition of scholarship
and learning has shown itself to be an ideological mask. The
new ideologies define themselves negatively, not for some ideal of human nature and society, but against the present actuality, and against
the groups that exploit it. Read almost any essay in the Modern Language Review, for example, and
you will find the same background assumption, so evident that
it does not need to be stated, which is that Western society
in general, and American society in particular, is in the wrong
hands, that the official institutions are dedicated to reproducing
a culture of domination, and that only radical dissent can be
either rightly expressed in scholarship or honestly taught to
the young.
The
new ideologies are isomorphs of the old: ideologies of division
and victimhood, which do not confess to their own ideological
nature but on the contrary deny it, just as Marx did. Marx's
honest attempt at a theory of history included various stabs
at science, open to refutation and duly refuted. The new ideologists
have therefore recognised the great price of honesty, which
is the possibility of refutation. Hence they prefer 'science'
to science; their expertise is gobbledegook, though gobbledegook
so fortified by technicalities that it can survive the most
penetrating satire. Read Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard,
and you will find a proliferation of theories and metatheories,
piled like Pelion on Ossa, avoiding anything that resembles
an encounter with an observable fact, but issuing in subversive
pronouncements against the hierarchies sustained by Western
culture.
When
you read this stuff, written by sophisticated people who will
deny any sympathy for those old totalitarianisms, or for the
communists and their fellow travellers, dissociating themselves
even from Sartre, even from Foucault, even from Chomsky, by
way of affirming their abhorrence towards the totalitarian crimes,
you will be struck by the extent of their negative energy. You
may not know what they are for, but you will know what they
are against. The target is not an individual or a football team
or anything identifiable among the ordinary objects of day-to-day
resentment. It is not even a class in Marx's sense and certainly
not a race - though the feminists' more vehement pronouncements
often seem to take a sex as their target. Yet the target has
something in common with previous enemies. It is a source of
collective evil, which invites a collective retribution. It
goes by many names: the West, Western culture, the canon, the
classical curriculum, objectivity, truth - anything, in short,
that identifies the old assumptions of the academic life. The
dominant culture has victims, epitomized by marginal groups,
transgressors, people who occupy some other place than our academic
establishment on the multicultural spectrum. And the author
is putting himself forward as a champion of these marginal groups,
sharing their grievances and promising a new approach to whatever
the subject might be, one that will liberate the victims from
the dominant culture. Meanwhile he works to expose the ideological
assumptions of that dominant culture, and to expose them as
ideological. By virtue of his superior science (deconstruction,
postmodernism and so on) he is able to see through the ideological
mask of the academy and to show it for what it is: the legitimization
of arbitrary power.
Of
course, these new intellectuals are not like Lenin and Hitler,
hoping to assume power over entire societies and to begin the
work of retribution. Their ambitions are revealed in their ideologies.
Their resentments are directed towards the old academic disciplines
from which they were excluded, and which they are determined
to take by storm. Their field of action is limited, but their
goals are the same: to sweep away the institutional constraints,
to seize power for themselves, and to punish the class that
had previously enjoyed it. They posture like Foucault as the
liberators of a victim class - the class of students, of aspirants
to learning, of those without knowledge. But, like other totalitarians,
they do not wish to liberate their favourite victims so much
as to enlist their support. After all, there is only one thing
that liberates you from ignorance and that is knowledge. And
you will search the postmodern authorities in vain for anything
that looks like knowledge - indeed 'knowledge', like 'truth',
is a dirty word, occurring only in inverted commas, as a sign
that it belongs to the speech of the others, the ones who unjustly
dominate the world.
Of
course, not all antagonists in our 'culture wars' (as they have
been called) are like that. But if you doubt that the phenomenon
exists, then you should read Roger Kimball's book Tenured
Radicals, which describes some of the extraordinary courses
and authorities that have invaded the curriculum in many humanities
departments in America. You should
apply to these authorities the method recommended by Marx: look
for the ideology, and diagnose the power. And then you will
see what is going on: namely an attempt by people excluded by
the traditional culture to gain the rewards that it promises,
and to give vent to their feelings against the culture that
excluded them.
I
mention this new phenomenon, because I believe it to illustrate
the principal lesson that we should draw from the totalitarian
movements of the twentieth century, which is that totalitarianism
is not the natural form of a pathological outlook, but on the
contrary the pathological
form of a natural one: the outlook of resentment. In normal
people, who cultivate the virtues of humility and live with
their neighbours on terms, resentment is a rare occurrence and
one from which they can learn. It is stilled by compromise,
and by the steady accumulation of social trust and collective
knowledge that ensues when people live together by free association.
But people who have an exaggerated sense of their own entitlements,
and a diminutive capacity to deserve them, are apt to define
themselves in opposition to that ordinary and neighbourly way
of living with their fellow men. Their resentments are not concrete
responses to momentary rebuffs but accumulating rejections of
the system in which they have failed to advance. Intellectuals,
it seems, are particularly prone to this generalised resentment,
even when they claim, like Nietzsche, to be free of it. Hence
we should not be surprised to find intellectuals in the forefront
of radical movements, or to discover that they are more disposed
than ordinary mortals to adopt theories and ideologies that
have nothing to recommend them apart from the power that they
promise. Any Pole who looks back over the history of communism
in his country, and who takes due note of what was written about
it by Milosz in The Captive
Mind, will recognize that there is at least a grain of truth
in what I am trying to say. But he will be shocked, I think,
to discover the extent to which the ideological journey of the
Central European communists is repeated by each generation of
thinking people, even by those - especially by those - who enjoy
the protection of wealthy universities and the privileges of
a capitalist economy.
The
culture of resentment is not confined to the intellectual life
and the academic rat-race: would that it were. The process whereby
resentment becomes detached from the institutions that normally
defuse it, to become a generalised enmity, is familiar from
another sphere: that of terrorism. The Russian revolution was
an outgrowth of the terrorist culture that had preceded it,
and which had brought Russia
to its knees. Observant writers at the time - Turgenev, Conrad,
Dostoevsky - recognized the transformation of human character
that ensues, when resentment gains the upper hand. Their portraits
of the nihilists, terrorists and revolutionaries who destroyed
the old world of Europe are of lasting significance, not least
because they show the intricate psychological connection between
the ideology of Marxism and the terrorism of the Marxist state.
But the disappearance of totalitarian government does not mean
the disappearance of resentment, nor the disappearance of the
terrorist mentality. On the contrary, a new kind of stateless
terror emerges, directed as before against the carefree and
the successful and with only one goal, which is mass destruction.
That is how we should understand al-Qa'eda: not as religious
movement but as a new kind of stateless terrorism, which has
only the vaguest idea of what it wants to create, and a clear
conception of what it wants to destroy.