Dragons and Democracy

Now that I've finished reading Robert Conquest’s The Dragons of Expectation - Reality and Delusion in the Course of History , I find that it’s hard to characterize the book in a single sentence or paragraph: it’s a miscellany, an anthology of essays which approach the subject of the modern world from many different angles, some of which emerge from the contemplation of the twentieth century, and others which reach forward into the shadows of an unknown, but dimly surmised future. The book’s epigraph, from which its title is drawn, is a quotation from a translation by the 19th century poet Thomas Wright of a verse of the Old Icelandic poem known as the Sólarljóð (Song of the Sun):

Vestan sá ek fljuga
Vánar dreka,
ok féll á glævalds götu;
vængi þeir skóku,
svá víða þótti mér
springa hauðr ok himinn.

(From the west I saw fly
the dragons of expectation,
and open the way of the fire-powerful;
they beat their wings,
so that everywhere it appeared to me
that earth and heaven burst.)

Expectation of disaster, Conquest suggests in a note at the beginning, is something that has characterized Western thinking in the past century, and continues to do so: “For quite apart from the worst perspective, it seems clear that something in the nature of otherworldly “expectations” has seized the minds of many in the West and elsewhere – with misleading thought about what faces us, much of it bred and projected from unreal obsessions about the still-living past.”

Conquest sets himself the task of exploring and examining some of the “myths and manias” of that past, and of the present that follows it. His inquiring gaze is sharpened by an awareness of perspectives other than those of the Western world: in an early chapter discussing Western acceptance of social and political categories, he quotes Vaclav Havel, speaking some years before the collapse of Communism, on the subject of the perennial Western conflict between “socialism” and “capitalism”. “I admit,” Havel said, “that it gives me a sense of emerging from the depths of the last century. It seems to me that these thoroughly ideological and many times mystified categories have long since been beside the point.”

Quoting the Polish dissident Adam Michnik, Conquest also shows how the concepts of “Left” and “Right” really belong to the late eighteenth century, when they first emerged, and when they had social and moral relevance – by the second half of the twentieth century these concepts no longer had much meaning for the majority of people in Poland and other countries ruled by Communism: they were “abstract divisions from another epoch”. He points to the book by the Bulgarian dissident, Zhelyu Zhelev, who later became president of Bulgaria, and whose book Fascism, which was published and then suppressed in the early 1980s, illustrated the similarities between the totalitarian ideologies of “Left” and “Right”. Those similarities have been illustrated in our own time by an observer such s Walter Laqueur, who in a Partisan Review article of 2002 presented quotations from representatives of some of the most extreme American right groups -- the American Nazi Party, the White Aryan Resistance, the Missouri Militia and the National Alliance, in which they expressed their clear support for "the brave Arab bombers of September 11." Another example is the former Baader-Meinhof member Horst Mahler, once on the extreme left but now on the extreme right, who congratulated the bombers, as also did the Italian Red Brigades.

The discussion moves on to consider the history of socialism in Europe. Conquest focuses particular attention on figures such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, whose unthinking acceptance of Soviet dogma and statistics in the 1920s and 30s also eventually led them to an acceptance of class war, of which they had never approved, and thus to a virtual collaboration with totalitarian repression. He contrasts the Webbs with the figure of George Orwell, who was unyielding in his opposition to what he called the “renegade Liberals” -- those who held that “defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought”, as he put it in the preface to Animal Farm.

Looking forward fifty years or so from the time of the Webbs and Orwell, to 1984, Conquest concludes that by then “the Webbite side had won. But this was only part of the old left-wing appeal. The ‘cranks’ had at least not been, or not yet been, dictatorship material. But the utopian or sub-utopian mindset pervaded or indoctrinated part of the intellectual semi-educated class. Over the past half century, Western minds that were diverted by the socialist idea largely abandoned it as a serious program. However, the minds of a generation of the educated are not restructured as easily and completely as that. The thought patterns are, often enough, still set in the direction of state control, thought to represent this with anything like the old sublimity is a hard challenge.”

The problem of our time, Conquest suggests, is not so much “the abuse of general ideas” as “an at first barely formulated inhaling of an atmosphere of hostility to envisaged unrighteousness and to those seen as its perpetrators.” This vague and abstract, or semi-abstract, sense of righteousness has its own language and vocabulary, and leads to a state of mental unreality.

In future posts, I’ll look at some more of the essays from this varied collection. In particular, I’d like to consider Conquest’s always illuminating insights into Soviet history, and the history of the Western intelligentsia’s involvement with “left-wing” ideas.


See also here.