Our Century of Gangsters

...Every once in a while you see a man wearing one with proper dignity and not as a spitefully degraded addition to bohemian costume...

...fifty billion is just a sound...

...Johnson's constant awareness of magnitude runs contrary to the current wisdom that modernity has made the world shrink...

...Professional revolutionaries, Lenin averred, know not only how to keep a secret, but also how to punish those who betray one" "In order to rid itself of an unworthy member an organization of genuine revolutionaries recoils from nothing...

...But even the most genuine scientific theories exert an influence that goes far beyond the rigorous context in which they are formulated, tested, or technologically applied...

...Matei Calinescu is Professor of Comparative Literature and West European Studies at Indiana University and author o f Faces of Modernity (Indiana University Press...

...The legend has followed me unforgivingly --though forgiveness for such a departure from the slovenly and the drab is the last thing I would seek...

...Dandyism is the unforgivable offense against democracy's cult of informality...

...Both Mussolini and Hitler, as political gangsters in their own right, looked at the Bolshevik example with a sense of emulation not diminished by ideological hatred...

...The theory was Einstein's General Relativity and it was confirmed empirically by the two British astronomers, Arthur Eddington and Frank Dyson...

...A letter describing this offer was mailed to all subscribers in July...

...Such reasonings play directly into the hands of totalitarianism as described by Johnson, with its contempt for facts, with its (gnostic) adversary attitude toward evidence, with its rejection of experience in the name of theoretical unreality, with its constitutive hostility to freedom...

...Peirce was probably the first thoroughgoing exponent of selfconscious scientific "fallibilism" (a term he himself coined...

...To these should be added: the hierarchical principle, the notion of an overriding "morality of the party," and the (declared or undeclared) legitimacy of violence, indeed its necessity...

...The Soviet Union is no longer regarded as a model because, contrary to its socialist pretensions, it presumably has become a capitalist country--an instance, to be more precise, of state capitalism...

...Still, he does not do so without a good reason...

...such operations, termed "expropriations," were among the fund-raising methods used by the party of professional revolutionaries...

...Paul Johnson speaks repeatedly of what is perhaps the single most consequential moral-political development in the modern world, indeed "the greatest human scourge of the twentieth century," the emergence of the "full-time professional politician," driven by an obsessive "will to power...

...No one is going to forget the kilt of James J. Kilpatrick, and I have heard of Dr...

...With its sad collapse, the role of counterrevolutionary helmet passed on to the humble billycock or bowler...

...Modern Times confronts us with perhaps the main challenge of contemporary life: the sheer magnitude of historical events and their conse'Harper & Row, $27.95...

...Such are the chiefs and the leaders . . . . Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured--that is the definition of revolutionary success...

...Thus, to take an example from the 1930s (if not from today), the mere fact of not being "committed" to the cause of social justice--as Marxism defined it--became an almost intolerable source of guilt for many Western intellectuals...

...Again, in the mid-twenties, Stalin was able to "smash up Zinoviev's party apparatus [in Leningrad] and take it over," by employing "essentially the same methods, but on a larger scale, that Al Capone was employing to extend his territory in Chicago at the very same time...

...On the same occasion, I was wearing black and white Oxfords...

...Where Wolfe fails as one is in his journalistic method...

...Thus, the struggle for power within the Bolshevik party after Lenin's death readily lends itself to comparisons with typical gang-wars...

...so have our means of instant communication...

...In discussing this crisis, Paul Johnson points to one of the most puzzling features of the modern mind: its aversion to facts...

...Baudelaire summarized the creed of the dandy as "always to astonish and never to be astonished...

...But his political formation was fundamentally Marxist...

...One doesn't take off one's hat in a saloon, or, if one is a grandee, in the presence of the King of Spain...

...Thus, by the late 1930s, the stage was set for the extension of gangsterism from domestic to international politics...

...P a u l Johnson's Modern Times' is an extraordinary book: a comprehensive narrative history of the contemporary world, and at the same time a sustained and passionate meditation on the meaning of history in general, and of modernity in particular...

...Paul Johnson discusses this latter need at length and more generally the cardinal role that hatred plays in totalitarian doctrines...

...and, in myriad ways, technology enables us to control space, "save" time, and feel at home in the remotest corners of "spaceship earth...

...From Marxism to neoMarxism, through "psychohistory" and "cliometrics," to structuralism and, now, post-structuralism, the various modern assaults against history have been united by a common enemy: empirical evidence...

...Some British lords are under the impression that they are grandees of some sort too, because they possess very old dispensations allowing their ancestors to remain covered before the sovereign...

...During the period 1950-1970," Johnson writes in the coneluding chapter, "as the golden age of theoretical physics ended, a new era of biology began...

...I ' m the only person who would confess all this to somebody," says Wolfe...

...To write a history of the modern world--a history in which statistics do bleed--is an enterprise that defiantly goes against the grain of major trends in modern thought...

...Johnson comments: "Modern secular faiths needed human devils, and whole categories of them...

...The book lends itself to philosophical discussion for a simple reason: In our century, the very choice of writing narrative history has become inherently philosophical...

...when I met him, he was wearing suede wingtip shoes...

...Franz Pick, who pays his tailor in Krugerrands...

...Such fallibilism, Peirce thought, far from being an impediment, is in fact one of the very conditions for the growth of scientific knowledge...

...intolerance--than any of the older mainstream religions...

...An immediate obstacle is the crisis in the concept of history itself (i.e., of narrative history...

...Matei Calinescu OUR CENTURY OF GANGSTERS As Paul Johnson reminds us, the worst of them pillaged in the name of ideology...

...Trotsky wanted the palm without the dust, a fatal mistake for a gangster who could not appeal from the mafia to the public...

...The days of the individualists who felt a compelling psychological urge to scandalize the indifferent liberal culture with sartorial sarcasm are probably over...

...To obtain a copy, send a check for $36.95 ($21 for the subscription, $13.95 for the book, and $2 for postage and handling) to The American Spectator.--Ed...

...The ideas of Darwin, Johnson shows, have started working out their real scientific implications only when such new disciplines as molecular biology, neurphysiology, endocrinology, and others succeeded in explaining, at the micro-level, the mechanisms of genetic programming and inheritance...

...They change our ideas...

...It is invariably "worth it" to the true dandy...

...Given the nearly universally acknowledged correlation between the development of science and the very idea of modernity, it is perfectly legitimate to begin a general history of modern times with considerations of the history and philosophy of science...

...Of the modern totalitarian theories, Marxism has obviously been the most successful, in part because of its ability to accommodate in its own terms the basic ingredients of fascism (including nationalism, anti-Semitism, and more generally racism...

...Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy," said Wilde...

...It seems that today's pipe-smoking pretend preppy puppies will only grow up into tomorrow's respectably businesssuited policy analysts, without even the wit of a Dr...

...What impressed me most," Popper noted, "was Einstein's own clear statement that he would regard his theory as untenable if it should fail in certain t e s t s . . . Here was an attitude utterly different from the dogmatism of Marx, Freud, Adler and even more so of their followers...

...I t ' s really odd, but you can have fun if you're willing to be a bit pretentious...

...quences, intended or not...

...A monarchist friend of mine had to stop wearing his Carlista red beret out of fear he would be mistaken for one of those vigilantes known as Guardian Angels...

...Modern Times is informed by a highly articulate moral vision, at whose center lies the old recognition of the necessary correlation between ends and means...

...In total contrast with this approach axe the all-purpose general theories that modernity has brought about...

...His appearance is timeless...

...Eliot...

...the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August 1939...

...Statistics don't b l e e d . . . We are unable to embrace the total process with our awareness...

...Thus the modern practice of genocide was born...

...If there is any religious precedent to the modern drive toward despotic utopias, ruthless experiments in largescale social engineering, and other forms of the violence of theory, it should be looked for in the history of heresy and fanatic sectarianism...

...In the newspapers, his pretentious pr#ciositt was sufficient to get a hardened journalist to call out, whenever he saw Wolfe, "Here comes the man with the double-breasted underwear...

...We also recall that before the revolution Stalin/Koba had impressive credentials as an organizer of bank robberies...

...This is in sharp contrast to the messianic and millenialist claims of modern totalitarian ideologies, whose immediate consequence is that violence ceases to be a matter of unreflective practice or a sort of rule of thumb and becomes the foundation of revolutionary legitimacy...

...So does magnitude...

...As Johnson notes: "There is no essential difference between destroying a class and destroying a race...

...Sir Frederick Wilhelmsen lecturing at Hillsdale in the cape of the Order of the Proscribed Legitimacy--with a "leisure suit" underneath...

...It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help ctlt society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of JudeoChristian culture...

...At the time, Hitler (according to Ribbentrop) held Stalin in great admiration and thought he "had produced 'a sort of SlavonicMuscovite nationalism' ridding Bolshevism of its Jewish internationalism...

...And it is solely on the basis of such denial that the main theories of revolutionary violence have been able to claim a "higher morality," in fact, a reverse morality which, as Johnson stresses, could only lead to "the destruction of conscience and all other elements of idealism...

...Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know," said Wilde again...

...Darwin's notion of the survival of the fittest was a key element both in the Marxist concept of class warfare and of the racial philosophies that shaped Hitlerism...

...With exemplary lucidity he brings out the shared gnostic assumptions of psychoanalysis ("sexual gnosticism"), Marxism ("another form of gnosticism claiming to peer beneath the empiricallyperceived veneer of things to the hidden truth"), or, more recently, structuralism, which like the Marxism from which it sprang, was anti-empirical, denying the real world in favour of the theoretical world, discounthag facts in favour of 'explanations.' Communists have always been identified by the tendency of facts to get in the way of Marxist theses...

...Our awareness, Arthur Koestler once reflected, is incapable of grasping large processes: "Distance in space and time," he wrote in The Yogi and the Commissar (1945), "degrades intensity o f awareness...

...Peirce...

...Always it is accompanied by the tightly furled bumbershoot, which is a cryptowalking stick...

...The development of Darwinian insights at the macro-level, from ethology to sociobiology, has been far more controversial, due in large measure to the power of "Marxist superstition" in intellectual circles...

...Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time...

...Many things have changed in recent decades, but the propensity of the intellectuals to feelings of irrational guilt has remained...

...I fear, however, that propinquity to the corridors of power is already exercising a chastening influence upon conservative individualism, and this is tragic...

...three milllion Jews killed in Poland causes but moderate uneasiness...

...A new kind of heresy-22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 once fascism had replaced the Marxist notion of "exploited classes" with that of "exploited nations"--was responsible for the birth of Hitlerism, in which the Marxian doctrine of classwarfare was changed into that of racewarfare...

...This dogmatism can be sustained only by a flexibility of argument verging on sheer incoherence-it is only thus that Marxism, to give an example, manages to render itself irrefutable...

...The mafia's ideological claims are--to the degree that such claims are articulated-modestly conformist...

...His career ends only with bankruptcy, madness, exile, or mysterious disappearance, but never with old age...

...They are recognizable by their built-in sense of infallibility, translated into a bizarre kind of dogmatism...

...As Karl Popper, whom Johnson cites and endorses, insisted, Einstein had "the true scientific attitude" toward his momentous discovery...

...No less banal are the grim views of modernity as an age of alienation, anomie, and decay, in which technological advances do nothing more than speed up the moment of global perdition, the final shrinking o f our world into nothingness...

...The stick implies the threat of possible use, as when the Baron de Christiani brained the President of France at the Auteuil races for re-opening the Dreyfus case...

...And this may be one of the most subtle and important lessons of Modern T i m e s . , THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 23...

...The world, we are told ad nauseam, is a smaller place: Fast travel has made great distances evaporate...

...This surprise is also an opportunity to reflect on the nature of hope...

...We also note that while irrefutability may be a bad thing for science, it certainly is not for the ideological manipulator...

...Consider the elitist organizing principle that lies at the core of the Leninist theory of the "vanguard" party...

...So much so, that the encouraging signs he discerns at the end of the book--a possible rediscovery of freedom, a shift in the world of science, a suggestion that a better understanding of the ethic of scientific research might bring about some broader respect for facts and thus inhibit violent theorizing--take the reader by surprise...

...Each one of these schools has attempted to theorize facts--the building blocks of the true historian--out of existence, or at least to suppress those facts that do not support its favorite theory...

...It is precisely this correlation that has been denied, overtly or covertly, by the various relativistic/ dogmatistic doctrines of modernity...

...As Johnson emphasizes, they do more than "change our perception of the w o r l d . . , and increase our mastery over it...

...In any event, if a man has "vanity, and fails to divert it into his wardrobe or his prose style, it may corrupt his moral sense, or prevent him from ever forming one...

...The walking stick is the reactionary's sceptre of office, a mace with which to call democracy back to order: from the Herculean ivory club of Honor~ de Balzac (sole support of his dubious particle), to the swordstick of Chesterton and the malacca of the monocle'd T.S...

...Political professionals are all, to a greater or lesser degree, "power addicts" (I borrow the phrase from Malcolm Muggeridge...

...Modern Times is now available to American Spectator readers for half price with a new one-year subscription or renewal...

...Even while recounting in rich detail the events that have directly shaped our world, Johnson is engaged in a larger struggle of ideas...

...As if to underscore this relationship, Johnson begins and ends his book with a discussion of shifts in scientific thought, and of what distinguishes legitimate scientific theories from their widespread misinterpretations, abuses, and perversions...

...What might be termed the cultural violence implicit in such attacks on history is merely one expression of a broader and much more troubling cult of violence, in which naked power becomes an end in itself, power for power's sake, a ferocious new divinity...

...It is still a great paradox of our relativistic world that it has presided over the appearance of new ideologies more intolerant--and incalculably more efficient in the exercise of even the reconstruction of the past...

...A brummagem pretender to the Polish Throne, Count Potocki de Montalk, publisher of the Right Review, wore a miniature crown under his beret, and would snatch the hat o f f at dramatic moments to establish his true identity, doubtless creating the same sensational effect that Clark Kent did whenever he opened his shirt...

...These were long ago unpopularized by the Prince o f Wales (Edward VIII), on whom they were taken as evidence of an unstable temperament...

...Although Johnson takes Popper as a guide to what constitutes the true scientific attitude, for reasons both THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 21 historical and terminological I would also mention one of Popper's great nineteenth-century precursors, the American philosopher C.S...

...Paul Johnson's powerful and grim history, up to the very last pages, seems to leave little if any room for hope...

...Marxism not only was the most convincing type of modern accusatory thought, it also offeted a sure way to salvation for all those who were ready to join the forces of revolution...

...It was no accident that one of Lenin's favorite words was the verb "to exterminate" and that he consistently described the enemies of revolution in entomological terms (as when, in 1918, he called on the state agencies "to purge the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects...

...As the tipsy killers lurched about the room, fumblingly hugging each other, they resembled nothing so much as a congregation of rival gangsters, who had fought each other before, and might do so again, but were essentially in the same racket...

...It derives from a radical conceptual separation between the (proletarian) mass, whose "class consciousness" always lags behind, and its natural leaders, whose consciousness is far in advance, simply because their sole "occupation is revolutionary activity...

...With structuralism on the wane in the late seventies, the main gnostic strains of modernity appear to have all but exhausted themselves...

...If it's worth it to you...

...As such, the USSR is not essentially different from its main Western rival, the United States: According to this bizarre and irresponsible logic, both countries are totalitarian, indeed OrweUian societies, and the first duty of American progressive opinion is to expose the evils at home--hate begins at home...

...It is safe to assume that our age's socialist ideologues masterminded the death of the hat because, sitting atop the head, it obviously represented hierarchy or subordination--a word so dear to Dr...

...The three major forms of totalitarianism in our century (Communism, Fascism, and Nazism), as well as their numerous imitations, combinations, and ramifications, have their origin, then, in the professionalization of (revolutionary) politics...

...The method of Wolfe is to communicate his astonishment to us...

...That we know, but toward the end of the book Johnson adds: "The experience of the twentieth century shows emphatically that Utopianism is never far from gangsterism...

...There also are more positive indications that a new, more hopeful era of history may have begun...

...Wear some trick outfits...

...Along similar lines, Mussolini believed that Stalin had replaced Bolshevism by "a kind of Slavonic fascism...

...The metaphor of addiction brings immediately to mind the world of organized crime, a world that is as rigorously brutal and corrupt as the world of "organized revolution...

...we can only focus on little lumps of reality...

...Indeed the political and social consequences of Darwinian ideas have yet to work themselves out . . . . So, too, the public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history...

...Now that it is easy to be a conservative, it will become boring...

...But it was probably because they had ring-worm...

...The enemy, to be plausible, had to be an entire class or race...

...Obviously this was a heresy even from an orthodox Marxist point of view--but a heresy with a future...

...Summarizing one of Johnson's great insights, we can speak, in our century, of an equation between theory and violence...

...At the end of a century of "grotesquely betrayed hopes," and of his own history of such betrayals, Johnson puts one in a position to discover that hope's awareness of fragility may be its great secret strength...

...Paul Johnson writes: Newtonian physics formed the framework of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and so helped to bring modern nationalism and revolutionary politics to birth...

...Seventeen is a figure I know intimately as a friend...

...John Lukacs confessed to me that in youth he aspired to le dandysme...

...Some parallels have already suggested themselves: the rule of secrecy, the getting rid of "unworthy members...

...A dog run over by a car upsets my emotional balance 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 and digestion...

...In our time, the unprecedented growth of science and spectacular technological breakthroughs have generated a whole new mythology of science: a striking example of what Karl Popper calls "the law of unintended consequence," another notion of strategic importance to Paul Johnson's understanding of modern history...

...On this point, Johnson quotes the "wise and sad old Pole," Joseph Conrad, who wrote in his 1911 novel about revolution in Russia, Under Western Eyes: "A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first...

...That is why "he gave no license to the theories of the 'Social Darwinists' which terminated in Hitler's holocaust, and why he brushed off Marx's attempts to appropriate Darwinism for his own theories of social determinism, which eventually produced the massFrom Marxism to neo-Marxism, through "psychohistory" and "cliometrics," to structuralism and, now, post-structuralism, the various modern assaults against history have been united by a common enemy: empirical evidence...

...Nor has the disenchantment of Western progressive opinion with what it labels "really-existing socialism" diminished its deep-seated hatred of capitalism...

...Darwin himself knew that his theory was not " a deductive system, permitting prediction of future developments or murders of Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot...

...One might say that the whole of Stalin's dictatorship had been a campaign against facts . . . . Structuralism, like Marxism, was a form of gnosticism, that is, an arcane system of knowledge, revealed to the elite...

...Its success also stems from its emphasis on secularizing and collectivizing guilt, combined with an extraordinary expertise in manipulating and inflicting a sense of social culpability on segments of the middle classes and particularly the intelligentsia...

...Johnson is right to speak of gnosticism as a distant anticipation of the cast of mind of the most influential "masterthinkers" of our time...

...A mythological misunderstanding of Einsteinian relativity is only one in a series of similar distortions of legitimate scientific theories...

...Its adherents obviously ignore or are unable to acknowledge the fundamental differences between Russia and America...

...For Johnson, the tragic convulsions of our time stem from the erosion and decay of the idea of freedom...

...Hence the theoretical need for an Enemy or an ideological version of Satan...

...Gangsterism" is the common element of twentieth-century totalitarian politics, whatever their seeming diversity...

...Wolfe is already over fifty, and shows no signs of giving uPFhis trade as a clothes-wearing man...

...The first chapter, "A Relativistic World," begins abruptly with this memorable sentence: "The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sobral in Brazil, confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe...

...And, even when they are decidedly not meant to do so, they pose a challenge to our inherited values...

...Along with ghetto swells and urban cowboys, the conservative is among the last persistent wearers of the hat, though he is much more courteous than the others about removing it...

...In fact, as Johnson stresses again and again, the world has expanded in all dimensions, and so have its problems and tragedies...

...Johnson and so demonic to sociologists...

...Anybody can be a fop when he is young, but the true dandy persists to the end...

...Modern utopian attempts to manipulate this idea--another striking illustration of the "law of unintended consequence"--have resulted in widespread political terrorism...

...F o r all its usefulness, the gangster model should not obscure the great and obvious difference between totalitarian and mafia-type organizations: ideology...

...As Johnson points out, Trotsky, when he first attacked Stalin in 1923, could only have been dismayed when he "discovered how well-entrenched [Stalin] was...

...The renewed scientific interest in life as opposed to matter has led to a rediscovery of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, closer to its author's own understanding of what it could and what it could not do...

...Faced with awesome magnitude, the mind takes refuge in comfortable abstractions...

...Clearly, when you deal with "insects," any considerations of "personal guilt" are out of place: "We are not carrying out a war against individuals," a Soviet official declared after the October 1917 seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, "we are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class...

...Above all, the top hat had to go...

...Yet the genius of the cheval-glass is still the essence of Wolfe...

...and they stubbornly refuse to see the confrontation between the two for what it is: a confrontation between perfect tyranny and imperfect democracy, between the absolute predominance of an abstract notion-the party or the state--and the rights of the individual...

...The first German-Soviet deal, Johnson comments, brought "the sudden discovery of a community of aims, methods, manners and, above all, of morals...

...The unsophisticated thought I was wearing spats, since they had never seen either Oxfords or spats...

...Hence, alongside the language of utopia, the extensive use of the language of terror...

...and the SovietGerman Frontier and Friendship Treaty of September 28, 1939...

...Remarkably, Johnson uses this term not polemically but, I would say, as a category of discovery and definition--in other words, as a heuristic device...

...Immediately preceding the outbreak of World War lI, a series of what Johnson calls "gangster pacts" was concluded: the "Pact of Steel" between Hitler and Mussolini...

...As J'ohnson writes: "It was exactly the same heresy which created f a s c i s m . . . Benito Mussolini . . . [had] a wide range of political philosophy, which included Nietzsche --he knew all about 'the will to power'--and he was much more broadly read than Lenin...

...Ideals caricatured, and ferociously so--the history of the twentieth century is rich in such examples...