Utopia and Revolution
Lasky, Melvin
in part is deeply religious. We cannot escape from that. Traditional religious forms and symbols no longer seem adequate for contemporary man (outside of Plains, Georgia, and the Bible...
...Perhaps men need gospels of Divinity or Utopia, and anything less is uninspiring...
...Manor Every decade or so a book appears to rouse the sluggish world of intellect...
...Guiltless and without conscience, they embrace an anonymous future in the name of invented but undisclosed values...
...This was the first major essay to place F.S...
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...Lasky finds that "revolution belongs in its way to the paradigmatic gestures of archaic humanity, to the archetypes of the primordial world...
...Not so to the revolutionaries...
...What chance had Comenius, I thought, to sway these tired summiteers--who had little inclination to worry about a far-away country and its people of whom they knew nothing...
...Now Melvin Lasky, editor of the Encounter magazine of London, in his equally monumental survey asks us to rethink the relationship between ideas, ideals, and ideologies...
...It is a rare intellectual pleasure to accompany this erudite cicerone as he shows us the influence of words upon ideas and ideas upon mankind which, despite all historical precedents, appears unable to free itself from the magic chain of metaphors, forever returning to the ancient dreams which can be implemented solely by violence--and the violence destroying not only the existing social system but freedom itself...
...How easy it is to succumb to the apocalyptic vision that has played havoc with human minds, and destinies, throughout centuries and still bears sway over our unteachable world...
...Prisons were crowded and the executioner was busy...
...No wonder that the Prague Marxist regime, as Mr...
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...Where the former borrowed the language of Judeo-Christian prophecy, the latter have drawn upon nineteenth-century speculations in the fields of history, biology and sociology...In reality, however, the racial theory adopted by National Socialism was wholly unscientific and the simplified version of Marx's teaching known as Marxism-Leninism (formerly Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism) is hardly less so...
...It is fascinating to watch Mr...
...Lasky ends his thoughtful book...
...Viewed at a distance of two generations, over a period in which more people have been murdered in the name of this false tomorrow than had once inhabited the known world, the verse sounds trite and the thought puerile...
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...The limited number of familiar images take their turn again and again: fire, fever, earthquake, storm...How perverse it must have seemed to some that men's hearts could leap with joy at the prospect of natural catastrophes which in normal responses on land and sea caused men to shudder in mortal fear...
...but, in the last analysis, it offers unpalatable soup, too thin for the creative human imagination...
...Dwelling at some length on events in Miinster under the Anabaptist leader John of Leyden---a prime example this of a utopia that quickly degenerated into vulgar tyranny--Prof...
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...If they alone can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of sceptics...
...One merely has to remember the students of Paris and of Rome, smashing cars and burning shops as hated symbols of "consumerism," or the cries of "Burn, baby, burn...
...and with flight from felicity and freedom as a prime mover of turbulent men...
...Lasky as he confronts the struggle that every intellectual historian, from Bayle to Mme...
...It lies, I am sure, in the quotation from Raymond Aron: "If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe...
...Thus words tend to draw the mind into excessive rigor and destructive roles...
...In his despair Comenius sought consolation in chiliastic extremism...
...There were as yet no barbed-wire fences nor mine-fields and scatter-guns, but the muskets and sabres of the soldiers guarding the border and hunting down refugees were as deadly as any automatic weapon of today...
...Lasky's book contemporary examples--from Malcolm X to Sukarno and Qaddafi--to illustrate the permanence of primitive word-magic in the world of politics and apocalyptic hope, his work is firmly anchored in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries...
...Things in their Babylonian corruption, Comenius wrote, needed "to be reformed from the very foundation, or to be rooted up from the very foundation...
...The true message is elsewhere...
...To Goethe and H~]derlin they were a symbol of repose...
...Post-modern technological society needs a set of viable moral ideals to sustain men, to give their lives direction and meaning...
...And Mr...
...Lasky's skillful guidance to follow words as they developed into ideas, and ideas into violent acts...
...Manor is the senior editorial writer of the Winnipeg Free Press...
...20th-century totalitarianism within the historical-sociological framework of mankind's millennial aspirations...
...One word too many may be followed by a landslide...
...Lasky remarks in his notes (there are a hundred pages of closely printed notes in this book, in themselves an intellectual feast), established the "progressiveness" of Comenius' defense of apocalyptic prophets and his mystical belief in the millennium...
...From this hell Comenius had escaped...
...Today, the rush of the Italians, and above all of the well-fed spriteful French, into the embrace of Communism, as well as the slide of Britain into what has been described as "Anglo-Communism," serves to demonstrate the remarkable accuracy of Howell's 300-year-old sociological analysis...
...Two years ago I stood in Miinster's Peace Hall, miraculously preserved when most of the city was destroyed in wartime bombing...
...When the Peace of Westphalia was signed his dream to return to his homeland that would again be free was shattered...
...Secular humanism thus far may have failed many people in providing that: It has not offered alternative religious symbols of sufficient power and intensity...
...How startlingly familiar was the Miinster of 1648, and how familiar, almost contemporary, was the scene that year in Prague...
...In the 17th century, James Howell linked Revolution both with misery, an explosive relationship between affluence and poverty...
...Lasky wears his learning lightly...
...For all his erudition, Mr...
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...So deep is the hunger after immortality that many will grasp at the mere promise, hoping thereby to give their frail human existence a deeper cosmic purpose...
...Whether reason, without illusion, is ever enough is a troublesome question...
...Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium analyzed the apocalyptic movements that convulsed Europe from the 11th to the 16th century...
...Although we find in Mr...
...The sweet dream has become inviolate dogma...
...Yet intellect provides no immunity against this infection, as Lasky shows by the case of Comenius...
...All present things will be destroyed at once...
...I looked at the fine portrait of that supercilious rake, young Oxenstierna, whom in 1648--the year in which the Peace of Westphalia was finally signed--his wise father admonished: "Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed...
...And now" the intellectuals of utopia and revolution--clever, versatile, excitable, volatile, never reforming, always transforming-have come full turn...
...Is the dichotomy of Comenius the scientist and Comenius the chiliast any different from that exhibited by Prof...
...Ten years ago Raymond Aron published his survey of relations between states, his monumental Peace and War...
...When I was a schoolboy, in my 300-yearold grammar school of Prague the only picture that adorned the three-foot-thick whitewashed walls was a lithograph of Comenius kneeling at Miinster before the delegates to the peace congress, vainly imploring them to grant justice to Bohemia where the Thirty Years' War began...
...It lies in the quotation from Kant: "The sweet feeling of benevolence must be sought for and realized by gradual reform in the light of firm principles...
...Howell believed that the turmoil of his own times stemmed from a surfeit of prosperity, peace, and happiness: "...the Inhabitants of this Ile more than others, being a well-fed spriteful people...
...The revolution remains their utopia...
...Twenty years ago, Prof...
...Cuius regio, eius re/igio was the legal compromise adopted by the congress, the spiritual ancestor of Helsinki's "Final Act": The religion (or ideology, if you will) of the ruler will be the religion of the ruled...
...In so much, that it is grown a Proverb abroad, The Englishman doth not know when he is w e l l . ' ' Harold Macmillan's 1957 reminder to the British, "You've never had it so good," has respectable antecedents...
...To this Mr...
...Cohn sought to find in the chiliastic movements of medieval Europe antecedents to the twin phenomena of Hitler and Stalin: Between the revolutionary eschatology of the later Middle Ages and modern totalitarian "ideologies" there is of course one obvious difference...
...In their end is their beginning...
...Marxism as an ideological religion has moved into the vacuum seeking to provide symbols of salvation and hope...
...Its splendors and miseries," Mr...
...The borders were sealed and all emigration forbidden...
...and one quickly comes to realize that the metaphor, the tyranny of semantics, is riding higher than ever...
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...Thus a voice on the mountainside is enough to set off an avalanche...
...It is to these pristine origins of ideology that we are led under Mr...
...It will be the second volume, now in preparation, that promises to illuminate the world of Marxism and the post-Marxist utopias and revolutions of our own times...
...Lasky adds: "The utopians loved mankind too much, and the revolutionaries loved men too little...
...The blue eyes of the Revolution shine with a necessary cruelty Aragon rejoiced, while Auden promised: We shall build tomorrow A new clean town With no more sorrow Where lovely, people walk up and down We shall all be strong We shall all be young...
...Though this be vain prattle, unconfirmed by the evidences of experience, it may be too hard for many human beings to accept the world for what it really is or is not...
...Traditional religious forms and symbols no longer seem adequate for contemporary man (outside of Plains, Georgia, and the Bible Belt...
...Max Beloff describes as "a voyage of discovery across the three centuries that elapsed between the writing of More's Utopia and the new era that began with the ending of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars...
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...Instead, irrational salvational doctrines contend for men's allegiance...
...Victor Hugo wrote these words shortly after the Paris Commune of 1871...
...The word "Revolution," adapted from the then new science of astronomy, first implied a circular motion, removing the present bad to return to the golden age of yore...
...For if utopia and revolution are too much with us today, it was not always so...
...The King is on his way to the scaffold...
...Mountains, which have always intrigued and inspired men, have been sequestered for revolutionary service...
...To read into reality more than it is, is simply a form of selfdeception...
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...Was it all that different from Andrei Amalrik, who has envisaged Russia's freedom to be born out of the forthcoming Sino-Soviet war...
...but our images of the future, to be effective, should not be out of cognitive touch with the world, nor immune to the scrutiny of critical intelligence...
...Lasky adds, "will be as mixed as these metaphors...
...Chomsky...
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...Quoting from English, German, French, Italian, and Latin sources, he sets out to analyze the ideological extension of human personality over some five centuries of history...
...Soon, however, the term becomes the means of ushering in utopia...
...Thus Mr...
...The cataclysm is upon us, the globe is in upheaval...
...He wanted," says the regime, "to use them as weapons which might change the course of the world for the better...
...This Czech refugee from Counter-Reformation 34 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 was one of the great humanists of the 17th century, father of modern universal education whom Governor Winthrop of New England invited to become principal of the newly founded Harvard College, a man before his time who, three centuries ago, demanded that women should not be excluded from education since they are "human beings with equal intellectual capacities...
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...An ideological terror raged across Bohemia, with house-to-house searches for books and subversive material...
...in America's ghettoes where the mobs were burning down their neighbors' houses to "cleanse by fire" their society...
...Lasky casts his net much wider...
...We embark here on what Prof...
...Yet perhaps men would rather be deceived than accept the finitude of human existence, or the need to develop confidence in their own powers of courage and intelligence...
...Yet it would be false to the book's spirit to leave the reader with this eloquent summing up...
...de Stall to Albert Camus, has to confront: the struggle "to hold out against the boisterous sea, to resist the waves of faction, to escape the howling wolves, to rise above the controlling powers of zeal, resentment, and prejudice ~ droit et a gauche...
...The book is eminently readable, a compelling book, and although I am a busy newspaperman fully occupied with what the Greeks so aptly call ephemeridae, the fleeting record of minute slices of contemporary history, I found it difficult to tear myself from the swiftly flowing, albeit demanding, overview of mankind's progression, the patient but incontrovertible demonstration that history is not fashioned by economic development but by the force of ideas...
...If ideology appears to have become in our time an anthology culled from a vestpocket dictionary of iddes re;ues, and if in every ideological phrase there lies buried the etymological lore of centuries, there was a time when the words were new, the sentiments fresh, the ideas original and unprecedented...
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Vol. 10 • June 1977 • No. 9
