Following his earlier examination of the attitudes of English and European Utopians, Conquest now turns his attention to the aftermath of Utopianism: the “anti-Western, anticapitalist, antipluralist assault took on a new sharpness,” he writes, “recalling the nihilism of the most violent section of the Russian intelligentsia a century and a half ago.” This is the subject of Chapter V – “After Utopia”.
The new Utopianism, if such it can be called, consists mainly of a rejection of reason: while the socialists at least had arguments and a program, the new anticapitalists “seem to have sunk to a lower mental level.” There are roots and precedents and roots for this malaise. Conquest points to the emotionalism of postwar French intellectual life, when “much of the emotional drive had not come so much from a devotion to the proclaimed social transformation as from a hatred for the actual.” It was Camus who pointed out that French intellectuals did not so much adore Stalinism as they “heartily detest part of the French”.
It might be of interest here to look in a little more detail at what Camus said in the interview Conquest refers to – it’s the “Socialism of the Gallows” interview that was published in the French journal Demain in February 1957, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary the previous year. Speaking of the attitude of the French Communist Party, and its newspaper L’Humanité, Camus remarked:
"Expediency for a Communist newspaper perhaps amounts to saying that the whole population of Hungary is fascist except Kadar [the Hungarian Communist leader], his policeman, and his executioners. But the factual truth is that we have seen a revolt of workers, intellectuals, and peasants who wanted national independence and personal freedom. The real fascism, to speak clearly, is the fascism of Kadar and Khrushchev, who methodically crushed a popular revolt, and of the Russian government, which permitted it.
"I confess," Camus went on, "that I don’t understand either the sense of expediency that urged some of our militant progressives, after they had denounced the Soviet intervention in Hungary, to recommend in their congress a unified action with the French Communists, who continually insult the insurgents. Their recommendation came at a time when Hungarians were still being hanged (just yesterday a girl of twenty) and at the very moment when a representative of the French Communist Party declared that, under the same circumstances, he would be willing for the USSR to inflict on France the same treatment it is giving Hungary. Such obsequiousness eventually becomes overwhelming. Can it be that the Communists and progressive militants feel such love for the Russians they have never seen? No, but they feel such a loathing for a part of the French, the part that loathed them enough to be willing to serve the cause of Hitler. If France is to disappear, rest assured that she will die poisoned by these two hatreds."
Conquest develops Camus’s argument in the context of 2004: now, since the fall of Communism, the collapse of alternatives to a pluralist order is generally accepted, but “detestation of it persists – as does (often enough) the lack of, indeed rejection of, any serious attempt to examine the probable defects any feasible alternative might, or would, produce.” Conquest characterizes this new “Western anti-Western mindset” as “negative Utopianism”. Its argument is a primitive one: “’capitalism’, ‘globalism’ – bad.” But, he asks – what is a good nonutopia?
The essay goes on to consider how this destructive mindset, with its concomitant mental distortions and alienation from reality, could have arisen. In essence, Conquest argues, it proceeds from a phenomenon that is not new at all, and has been a characteristic of every literate society from as far back as can be recalled. He invokes the memory of “the scribes who worked on the Book of the Dead (the collection of writings that were placed in tombs as a means of guiding the ancient Egyptian soul on its journey to the afterlife DM), the documentation of the Byzantine synods, the volumes of pretentious drivel that so aroused Erasmus,” and the sub-Marxism of our own time. In his autobiographical memoir Native Realm , the Polish writer who perhaps more than any other resembles Camus, notes how in post-war Warsaw “even more or less disillusioned intellectuals felt at home in the left-wing cafés and never thought to consort with the reactionary peasants and colonels or their representatives.” The same divide, Conquest asserts, can be found elsewhere: less in Britain, but more in America – and most in France.
George Orwell says that the man in the street is at once too sane and too stupid to fall for the fads of the intelligentsia. We might note that the opposite of sane and stupid is insane and intelligent. But insanity itself is a denial of intelligence.
The problem, the essay suggests, is that the educated class which now prevails in Western society has misunderstood and misevaluated history in a way that is in itself historical. Even though, for example, Marxism has been discredited as a method of scientific prediction, in Western intellectual circles there survives a widespread belief that Marxism somehow "for the first time opened up various historical perspectives - or some such rather vaguer pretension." Those who hold such a belief tend to be impervious to both arguments and facts. Conquest likens them to their grandparents, whose beliefs about the USSR led them to accept and support a huge tissue of lies and falsehoods propagated by the Soviet "information agencies". For many of those people the Soviet Union, despite its horrors, remained acceptable or even praiseworthy - at least until 1956, and even beyond. Where more recent developments are concerned, the sub-Marxism now current in academic circles, Conquest argues, has contributed to maintaining this low level of political understanding:
Not only does Marxism, or at any rate a sort of sub-Marxism, still put out shoots in academic spheres that have been inadequately unweeded, but even non-utopian theorizing, attempts to inject rigor into the political systems-analysis, rational choice theory, path dependence - all tend to remove realities from academic work... If a political theory is taken as thoroughly correct, it follows first that your critics are "wrong". (This is a recipe for taking over university departments.)In the end it may be wondered if argument is possible at all in such a climate of unreality, mental blocking, and denial. In addition to the problems of war and terrorism, Conquest warns: "There is a mind-set to unscramble."
See also: Dragons and Democracy
Dragons and Democracy - II
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