The Politics of Authenticity
Wesley, W.
The Politics of Authenticity" The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society by Marshall Berman Atheneum, $8.95 T HIS IS yet...
...W. Wesley McDonald Comrade Mountebank The Rise and Fall of T.D...
...It should be clear by now," he writes, that the approach to modern society I have found in Montesquieu and Rousseau prefigures Marxism in many deep ways...
...The A l t e r n a t i v e F e b r u a r y , 1972 13 The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society by Marshall Berman Atheneum, $8.95 T HIS IS yet another book intended to seduce the modern intellectual into believing that there must be something radically wrong with modern society...
...It is an engaging study of the psychological relationship that exists between master and slave...
...He was consigned by nature to perform the functions of a hunter or farmer...
...At this point, we hit one of the essential dividing points between the traditional conservative and radical libertarian points of view...
...True love is only felt and expressed when the partners respect each other's authenticity - - the right to be oneself...
...Woman's liberation would have been incomprehensible in a society so restricted by nature to ageless patterns of life...
...Shortly thereafter, the great Russian biologist Rapoport was summoned by a party bureau and told to denounce the genetic theory of inheritance...
...The suppression and isolation implicit in such an arrangement forces the women to be something other than what they naturally would be...
...Two authentic people fall in love, but are prevented by the inauthentic society from establishing an eduring relationship...
...Certainly, modern civilization offers more than this...
...Medvedev's book opens with the words of N.I...
...Man is presently miserable, because he is born in chains, Rousseau argues, hampered and restrained by the traditional inauthentic society...
...Part of this'book was distributed hand-to-hand during the postwar attempts to discredit Lysenkoism...
...This projected society he candidly admits is a 'dream...
...The multiplicity of things to do, or not to do permits us all to express ourselves in more ways than ever imaginable to the simple savage...
...The Navy's almost an antique...
...Without a sense of morality, of stable social relationships, and of the customs and habits which define our human interactions, man would be thrown on the meager resources of private judgment,having run recklessly through the bank and capital that is the wisdom of our ancestors...
...Berman argues persuasively for the right of a man to be himself, or a s G.K...
...Lysenko by Zhores A. Medvedev (I.M...
...Medvedev is the former head of the Department of Molecular Biology at the Institute of Medical Radiology at Obninsk...
...The sultan himself in this arrangement is also inauthentic and miserable because he is unable to express true love...
...But now with Willimn Rehnquist i n , / 1 f o r o free copy I'm managin_l~ am NATIONAL RE. . VIEW, write: Dept...
...He calls for a revolution of some sort that would wipe away all existing social structures...
...Np, this isn't a quotation from Hitler or Lenin but from the pages of this book...
...The individual is felt to be more constricted in his freedom than ever before...
...Now, to clap Montesquieu into a radical libertarian tradition will not settle well with many readers...
...Through this book, Berman strives to heal what he considers to be the major illness of modern society...
...Berman argues that Burke's decent drapery" only perverts and suppresses the individual, preventing him from enjoying the total freedom to which he is entitled...
...The love, and even the very idea, of genuine liberty," writes Burke, "'is extremely rare...
...He offers as a panacea the politics of authenticity...
...The sultan Uskek keeps a seraglio about to revolt against his autocratic rule...
...Rousseau worries not about the control of will, but assumes that an expansive will to brotherhood will form as the traditional controls disappear...
...In the new society which would exist after, Berman is ambiguous as to what would constitute the new man...
...It is the traditional conservatism of thinkers like Edmund Burke which Berman finds most abhorrent...
...Nothing would remain to restrain a man from expressing himself to the point of annihilating his fellow man...
...In this book, therefore, we have all the ingredients of true radmalism: a call for revolution, an atomistic individualist doctrine, a hankering for the destruction of all presently existing social structures..'All these seekers after authenticity are just beginning to learn a fact of life which our first seekers always knew...
...For a man anxious for the promised utopia of tomorrow, Berman paradoxically is concerned aboul extracting from the history of political thought a tradition which will serve as a foundation for his present political assertions...
...The Persian Letters, Montesquieu's first book, was as Berman notes the first political novel written in the West...
...What must interest us here is in .what kind of order will Berman's freedom exist...
...In the 1930s, Lysekno and others of his clique used pseudoscientific "experiments," coupled with political invectives against those who disagreed, t o consolidate their hold on Russian agribioiogy...
...14 The Alternative February, 1972 society by pitting man against man in the Hobbesian sense of "war of all against all...
...the writing is a bit choppy, but compensated for by the wealth of details given by the author...
...Society," states Burke, "cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without...
...Thus, compelled by duties, obligations and responsibilities, they must sacrifice their true impulses...
...Genetics teaches that environment influences heredity only through occasional mutations (most of them useless) and through natural selection, the statistically greater success and reproduction of the more fit...
...Life was short and brutish, there was no time to think of liberation...
...Medvedev's point of view seems odd...
...Thus, Berman offers us the new man as the model of authenticity, 1" homme revolte, "the man who gains his freedom and becomes himself by striving to both liberate himself and his fellowmen from a social system that alienates them all...
...No matter how great his talent might be, he did not have the opportunity to become an executive, a jet pilot, a teacher or a poet...
...The System has suppressed self and now action is demanded...
...Lacking the very rudiments of personal freedom, they are miserable...
...It was poetic justice that Rapoport was the scientist commissioned by party leaders, right after Khruschev was ousted, to write a detailed denunciation of Lysenkoism which was widely published in the USSR...
...Liberty consists in doing what the laws permit...
...The Army has begun to creak...
...Unable to be themselves, they become miserable shells of human beings...
...There was no possibility of her exchanging roles with the man...
...Certainly one of the arguments of this book is that the social and political trend of history has been a movement away from a primitive freedom toward a more restrictive, oppressive, subsequently inauthentic society...
...I n a State, that is to say, in a Society where there are laws," he writes in The Spirit of Laws, _9 "liberty can consist only in being able to do what one ought to wish, and in not being constrained in any way to do what one ought not to wish...
...X, 150 E. 35 Street, N. Y. 10016...
...The New Left, he fondly hopes, will 'bring radicalism back to its romantic roots"-to the ideal of authenticity...
...His art life was extremely limited and usually designed for the creation of things of an essentailly practical nature, ~uch as weapons or eating utensils...
...Only drastic social reform can save us...
...One must have the fertile imagination of Rousseau to believe that the primitive savage in his forest was more free than the modern man...
...In 1969 he was incarcerated briefly in a mental institution, a typical cure for Russian dissenters, until the protests of his colleagues led to his release...
...Chesterton wrote, the right of everyone "to be his potty little self...
...To accomplish this, what is necessary, although Berman does not detail exactly what he means by a revolution (does he merely mean a revolution in man's self-concept of what he is or does h~ want an actual political overthrow of the state...
...they have rendered us inauthentic...
...Although much space is spent in a discussion of Montesquieu' Persial~ Letters and Rousseau's Emile...
...There is much, he argues, in the Letters and Emile which will bear fruitfully on an understanding of our current maladies...
...The overthrow of habits and moral authority would not bring about a new man of higher moral impulses, but a new kind of barbarian...
...His number one wife, Zachi, writes him a series of letters explaining with profound insight why the traditional relationship between the wives and the master is a perverted one...
...Liberty has meant for the French equality - - that is, everyone would have the same social station, the same advantages and the same privileges...
...This is blatant mis-reading of history...
...The women were even more oppressed, consigned to the duties ot mating, bearing children and cleaning and cooking...
...The roots of self are dying, cries Berman still...
...Berman's book is not intended as a literary critique...
...as Rapoport tried to defend genetics, he was countered with a quotation from comrade Molotov's recent speech...
...it is a political polemic...
...The search for authenticity, he further maintains, is "bound up with a radical rejection of things as they are...
...Scientists who wished to study genetics were harrassed and forced to do their work on the sly...
...Rousseauin his other work carries this argument to become an all-embracing critique of traditional society...
...Real reform is possible only if an intellectual and spiritual vanguard, who possess a higher form of consciousness,' can manipulate the oppressed but confused masses into action...
...We would destroy "THE LORD KNOWS [ have been among / Conservatives who feel plain stung...
...Liberty, in Burke's political thought, is an act of subordination to that which he venerates, e.g., the law, one's country, his God...
...Lysenko's theories were easily debunked in the West, but since all the Russian universities, research centers, newspapers, scientific journals and funds for research and teaching were under the control of the state, and since Lysenko had the backing of Stalin and later, Khrushchev, the Lysenkoists were able to hide their experimental failures and silence their opposition...
...Why do you think that Molotov knows genetics better than I?" he replied...
...With this statement, Berman concludes with the most radical of all doctrines, that politics encompasses the totality of our lives, that nothing private remains...
...Political liberty does not consist, he tells us, in doing what we wish...
...What controls, we must ask however, would be placed on this new man to prevent him from irrational or socially harmful behavior...
...But Berman goes furthcr...
...Perhaps he does not consider it important, or rejects the notion that in a free society man is capable of wrong-doing...
...Stalin and other Russian leaders preferred to believe that the environment ~as much more significant than heredity because they wanted to create the 'New Soviet Man" rapidly by altering the structure of Russian society...
...Vavilov, a distinguished biologist and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, was arrested for his opposition to Lysenko's dogma and sentenced to ten years in prison...
...We are sympathetic with this argument...
...That Berman calls for the maximization of freedom makes him little different from the vast bulk of political thinkers...
...Typical of the period is this vignette: In a speech for the 31st anniversm'y of the Russian revolution (1948), deputy premier Molotov praised, among other things Russian, Lysenko's achievements...
...that whoever you are, or want to be...
...They must be docile, forever passionate in their love-making, and slavishly obedient...
...Either Medvedev is provincially patriotic about Mother Russia or he was careful not to be too...
...Rousseau's Emile contains similar insights...
...During this period, an illeducated charlatan, T.D...
...In the middle of all this prattle about equality, Berman introduces us to the most brazen elitism possible, revealing to us perhaps his secret desire to be part of that vanguard that would assume leadership of society...
...Shortly after World War II, scientists who had the knowledge and courage to oppose Lysenko tried to discredit his doctrines, but they were unsuccessful in the political maneuverings necessary to weaken Lysenko's grip on Soviet biology...
...he died there a year later, in 1943...
...This is exactly what the traditional conservative would deny...
...What Montesquieu and Rousseau lack is proper revolutionary impulses, Berman adds...
...Lysenkoism, or Michurinist biology," was a variant of Lamarck's disproven theory that acquired characteristics can be inherited...
...you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you...
...In fact, one of the reasons for Nikita K.'s dismissal was the state of Russian agriculture (especially the grain shortage of 1963), which in turn was partly caused by the crackpot schemes of Lysenko and his ilk...
...On this point, Berman is silent...
...Others similarly imprisoned were Karpechenko, Levitsky, Govorov and Tulaikov...all of whom died while in prison...
...Rapoport was fired from his position, expelled from the Communist party, and forced to work as a laboratory assistant at a geological institute...
...rise to his romantic ideal...
...With Chiang about to disappear / And welfare marehir~ from the rear, / I hold my thumb beside my nose / When faced with Presidential pro~e...
...Vavilov, "We shall go to the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not renounce our convictions...
...By this, he means a society which will acknowledge the right of every individual to be himself, or do his own thing, or do it like it is...
...Lerner, translater) Anchor Books, Doubleday, $2.50 W OULD YOU believe that for a quarter century, up to Khrushchev's dismissal in October 1964, the teaching of the principles of genetics was banned in Russia...
...is a revolution which will cleanse society of the institutions which have fettered him to inauthentic ways and allowed man to...
...If we take this seriously, we must believe that according to Berman's thinking the present urban guerilla or Weatherman bomber would be the very model of an authentic man...
...He had no choice in his life's occupation but to follow in his ancestors' footsteps...
...Those who disagreed with Lysenko's neo-Lamarckism were labelled 'bourgeois biologists" and enemies of the people...
...What the author seeks in these eighteenth century works is a philosophical foundation for modern radical thought...
...Even totalitarian political thought claims to be enlarging a _9 "peoples' freedom" or ffreedom of the race...
...One does not ask impertinent questions...
...Liberty," writes Mallet du Pan, ' i s one thing forever unintelligible to Frenchmen...
...Authority, custom, established institutions, government, tradition, all of which are essential to maintenance of civilization, must be abolished for they have prevented us from being ourselves...
...For Montesquieu is remembered for his reverence of the law as the basis for civilized society...
...Burke saw that the revolutionary impulse would strip man of the "decent drapery of life," those traditional moral values and habits which restrain his desire...
...Lysenko, controlled the biological sciences to such an extent that some of his critics were jailed, others fired from their jobs and none allowed to publich material criticizing Lysenkoism, a fraudulent theory which did immense harm to Russian agriculture...
...What is needed is for a new kind of society to come about where the authentic man might find true expression...
...Remove the social and moral restraints upon the individual and you will discover not the Rational Man, but more likely those hopelessly morally destitute characters that Charles Dickens describes in the novel Tale o[ Two Cities, Madame Defarge, The Vengeance, and Jacques Three...
...In an egalitarian, unpropertied, communal society, Berman tells us that man would be creative, imaginative and psychologically well-fitted...
Vol. 5 • February 1972 • No. 5
