What Shall We Do?

...I know, I know things are different in Britain and in India, but I write about America...

...they are radicals, among other things, because they believe in the "perfectability of man," that is, the possibility of major change in the quality of human life as it unfolds in history...

...Here, it would seem, a most radical reversal of time perspective is in order...

...We have used the term radical somewhat interchangeably with the word socialist, and this was no oversight...

...They too easily become stunted, deformed, cranky and dyspeptic, and when they are kept isolated for too long they become oddities and freaks—and the "healthy" and "adjusted" members of the crowd can point gleefully to their obvious sickness, and thus find added justification for heading for the suburbs...

...rostrum that things are fundamentally sound, one must be constructive and moderate, and in any case some minor reforms wiII set things right...

...their organizations and groupings were to be like water turbines that would channel the muddy and unruly stream of popular energy, and transform it into an irresistible organized force which would help usher in the reign of freedom...

...But it is a fallacious argument...

...He feels that the dangers of progressive cretinization via the mass media are as serious a problem as economic deprivation...

...To stay sane in an insane society may indeed require the most sustained emotional and intellectual efforts that a man is capable of...

...To safeguard one's self, one needs to become impervious to the barrage of directions and signals that the social environment continuously beams at one...

...But at present radicals are not involved in struggles for power, and on an ethical plane it is preposterous to discriminate between an injustice in a crucial and a less central area of public life...

...This is especially true because our age has been so deeply marked by instrumental and pragmatic standards of appraisal that a theory, an attitude, an idea will be judged primarily by the control it permits of the immediate realities at hand, or more vulgarly put, by whether it 'works.' Since radical and socialist ideas manifestly have gained few new adherents, since they seem not to deal with immediate and concrete issues, they are judged tp be of no importance...

...Hampshire's article first appeared in the English magazine Encounter, with whose permission it is here printed, and was also given as a paper at the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" in Milan last fall.—The Editors...

...Quantum referet, in quae tempera vel optimi cuisque virtus indicat...

...Very few have as yet understood that an argument couched in the terminology, say, of psychoanalysis may be as significantly radical an argument as one couched in the language of economics or "historical materialism...

...Neither, I believe, is present radical action necessarily predicated upon the view of future possibilities that one may hold...

...At this point we need return to what was said earlier about the tendency of the old radical movement to discount the present in the name of the future...

...Certainly not the hope in a proximate resurgence of mass movements...

...When the Abbe Sieyes was asked after the French Revolution what he had done during the terror, he is said to have answered "I stayed alive, Sir...

...But what are the organizational correlates of all such concerns...

...If the radical is concerned with the quality of our lives, if he criticizes the spuriousness and hollowness of our culture, it is out of a sense of in timate involvement, not of aloofness...

...Similarly it might well be that the political and social struggles of the future may revolve not so much upon the quest for adequate "stand...

...I will readily grant this...

...And to struggle for the civil and human rights of an obscure Negro in Mississippi may be as meaningful a social act as the more spectacular involvements that marked an earlier period...

...In the talks some of us have had with such younger people one theme has been recurrent...

...Have we not seen in our time so many catastrophes provoked by men who acted from pure motives...

...Hence, it should be added at this point, that, as E. V. Walter has argued in these pages, "he who denies human 'perfectability' is an immoral moralist because he prevents it from becoming real...

...Yet one may ask whether in a sense much less obvious than is apparent to these obvious thinkers, "negativistic" radicals are not in real...

...I am not aware that anybody has yet found answers to such questions...

...hence to be not only false but, more importantly, perhaps, irrele vant to radical activities...

...Within the general Marxist framework there existed wide varieties of thought, but since this is not an essay in historical explanation I will forego the temptation of analyzing them in detail...

...If we do indeed live in a time of trouble, must not one direct all his energy to combat the barbarians from without, close ranks, and see to it that whatever remains of human culture is preserved against the totalitarian onslaught...

...Perhaps, as David Riesman pointed out in his early writings, we do indeed need the "nerve of failure...

...Humanity marched forward and we knew its destination...

...The following pages are to be understood as an effort to reestablish a dialogue between two generations of radicals, one that has tasted political defeat and another that is uneasy before worldly success...

...It may he correct to say that in a political sense certain types of activity have more specific weight than others because they take place in areas that are of crucial significance in the struggle for power...

...But it is essential that the trumpet remain...

...ards of living," but rather around the fact that even though immediate material problems may be near solution, many have no control over their social lives...

...One can organize workers against exploitation, but how is one to organize those who are psychically exploited by the engineers of consent...

...But this alone would be hardly sufficient...

...Very often they simply desired to know "How is it possible to disengage oneself...

...But before this can be done it is necessary to sketch, even if only in the broadest outlines, some of the reasons why the radical socialist consciousness, quite apart from the reaction it encounters in society at large, suffers from a profound internal crisis...

...It might be that the most significant answer that radicals could give in the future to a question about their "action" in our period would he "I stayed alive, Sir and I remained sane...

...The rhetoric of the Marxism of the twenties and thirties had some of the same hypnotic appeal as has the monotonous sound of army units on parade...

...men not too dissimilar from the "liberal" acclamation brigade who in our age shout from every A.D.A...

...But the situation in the fifties is profoundly different...

...Maybe next year, or twenty or five hundred years from now...

...by questioning the rationale of the insane acts of men of power, by pointing to the fact that perhaps the emperor really has no clothes on, they may allow men to keep their sanity and hence their autonomy, to control themselves instead of being controlled...

...All the above is, of course, not meant to imply that radicals have no hopes for the future...

...As a matter of fact few have even learned to ask the questions...

...There is no common ground between tutelage and fraternity...

...ity a more "positive" force in present society than the defenders of the status quo...

...One common misconception ought to be cleared up: the "negativistic" critic is far from indifferent to the fate of his culture and society...

...Among the contributors to DISSENT are some who feel—as I do not— that America is still going to face an economic crisis similar in proportion or even larger than the depression of the thirties and that under such conditions the expectations of the earlier radical movement can yet turn out to be realistic, if premature, forecasts...

...I am, of course, aware that there was nevertheless a perennial tension between "trade union consciousness" and radical socialist consciousness...

...But then those who are engaging in radical activities with an ethic of success, even of "historical success," have made a mistaken choice anyway...

...that the increasing rates of men tal disorders are as significant signs of the decay of modern culture as economic injustice...

...They can point out the sham of liberal rhetoric and conformist behavior, of democratic theory and bureaucratic practice—and this not only within the body politic but in all those organizations and groupings of which they are a part...

...Perhaps to a radical movement of the future the fact that, say, one Henry Luce or David Sarnoff possesses the means for directing the minds of millions, that a very few members of the corporate and bureaucratic elites control the bulk of economic life, will be of much more crucial significance than the standard of living...

...We have tried to suggest to them that one of the key virtues in an age like ours may be the virtue of patience, that what may matter most is the capacity to endure...

...I wish here to try to show in what sense these ideas are of relevance to our day...

...It doesn't depend on me, you know...

...We have thereby gained in humility and, perhaps, humanity, but we have lost in persuasiveness...

...Those who were committed to radicalism belonged, they felt, to the vanguard of the knowing servants of history on whom it was incumbent to act as the midwives of the coming revolutions...

...And if we were concerned with them only as private persons we would be inclined to feel sympathy, perhaps...

...and that the general alienation of men in modern society is as pervasive in the sphere of leisure as in the sphere of work...

...In fact, some of the more effective indictments of modern culture have come from conservative critics whose rejection of the present is rooted in a desire to return to a more ordered and structured past...

...The radicals of today need consider it their principal task, it would seem to me, to help ecraser l'infame rather than to prepare forever for tomorrows that may turn out to be replicas or caricatures of yesterday...

...There is at present no significant social force in American society which could provide a "social basis" for a new radicalism in the same manner that the labor movement provided, or was thought to provide, a basis for the radicalism of an earlier movement...

...The temptation is great, there fore, to adopt the stance of those characters in T. S. Eliot's play who "may remember the vision they have had, but...

...To the extent that radicals refuse to join the ranks, are they not thereby helping to facilitate the victory of the totalitarian enemy...

...But in our day such beliefs almost al ways turned out to he subtle rationalizations for an acceptance of the historical given or for sterile disregard of present opportunities and op tions...

...History moved, we felt, in some inevitable way to a final eschaton in a classless society...

...It seems to imply that critical thinking is somehow not an important activity, that "mere thinking" is somehow to be given a low status...

...The act of criticism implies a positive recognition of its object at least in the sense that it is thereby recognized as worthy of criticism...

...But it also seems to lose sight of the fact that sometimes and in some places it is a tremendously significant act to stay sane and to stay alive...

...In other words, a critic of modern society who attacks its disorders from a desire to reestablish a firmer tutelage over man, has nothing in common with a radical critic who sees such tutelage as an insult to human dignity...

...Not content with maintaining themselves by the common routine, they now call upon us—I use a phrase of Trevor-Roper—to line up as a group of army chaplains to encourage the troops, and to consider radical thought as a kind of subtle conspiracy likely to disturb the ranks...

...Above all, it would seem to me, he must be concerned with maintaining, encouraging, fostering, the growth of the species "radical...

...It could well be that one of the most significant contributions of a radical movement of the future will be to allow at least some men to fight their way to personal autonomy, and to provide the means by which such autonomy can be achieved...

...And in this enterprise they have felt the need to attack and to vilify radicalism, to undermine its justifications and moral relevance, to deny its validity as an attitude or political theory...

...Oh what pain...

...But even more significantly, it is difficult as yet to imagine what could be the organizational correlate of such new radical thought...

...The present activities and options of radicals are crucial, regardless of whether they will be "vindicated" by the future...

...But even though it may be granted that the radical critic acts from motives which are not entirely despicable, it may still be felt that the results of his thinking and activity are disastrous...

...This would seem to indicate that variant expectations as to the main drift of the future among at least one group of radicals are of but small weight in determining their conception of their present role and task...

...Just because the radical holds an exalted vision of what man I58 could be, just because he believes in the creative possibilities of man, he attacks a society which alienates and distorts the human personality...

...Despite the growing trend toward tightening, firming up, and coordinating the social structure, there are still enough fissures, gaps and contradictions in American society to allow radical public voices to make themselves heard...

...The inscription on the tombstone of Pope Hadrian VI at Santa Maria Dell' Anima in Rome reads: "Proh dolor...

...They have asked us: "What should we do...

...His very criticism of contemporary culture reveals indeed his intimate relatedness to the human beings that live within it...

...On the individual level it has become more and more difficult to control one's own life, one's own thought, one's own feelings...

...But to insist merely on sheer survival would seem an adequate response only in those societies in which totalitarian tendencies are so far advanced that effective public action is no longer possible at all —and American society is by no means a totalitarian society...

...But all these are admittedly vague indications only...

...It may be as significant to fight for autonomy in a bureaucraticaIlyrun labor union as it is to fight for civil liberties against the McCarthys and the Brownells...

...When will the trumpet blow again...

...What then can serve to sustain radical thought if previous schemes are discarded and the immediate present seems singularly unpropitious...

...But it isn't the trumpet that really matters, it is what its possession symbolized to the peasants...

...Stalinism, Nazism, the decay of the labor movement in the West, have shattered the certainties of most of those who still claim allegiance to radical values...

...To contribute even in some small measure to the struggle against the infamy of the present may seem a sisyphean task—especially if it be undertaken with no illusion of certain success in the future...

...The Communist Party tries to appropriate the trumpet but the resourceful peasants keep it from the Stalinists through many a ruse...

...answers a peasant...

...The fact is, however, that many of them have not stopped at this gesture of withdrawal from radical involvement, which might imply simply a feeling of defeat and inadequacy...

...But most of us today have lost this faith in the possibility of knowing the inner logic of history...

...Not content to justify withdrawal as a personal attitude they have elevated it to a principle and glorified it...

...Does possession of a rusty old trumpet, which moreover may never be blown, seem meager consolation...

...Socialists may be able to rebuild in the years to come the image of socialism as a fraternal utopia that the experiences of the last few decades have so cruelly shattered...

...In the last issue of DISSENT Irving Howe quotes a moving fable from Ignazio Silone's most recent novel, which bears repeating here: the peasants in the community Silone describes had been in the habit of blowing an old trumpet to call one another together when their misery became intolerable...

...Hence the need, wherever possible, to build little oases of radical thought, small enclaves in a conformist world where critical values are honored and where radical individuals can find intellectual as well as emotional support...

...Beyond that their task will, for the time being, remain essentially a critical one...

...There are indeed pages of Karl Marx that read like something out of de Ronald, as there are pages of Orwell that read like something out of Ortega y Gasset—yet their common horror about the trends and potentialities of the present stems from diametrically opposed views of man and his social world...

...Under the bombardment of the mass media, and the coercive pull of those who control the instruments of power, the individual leads an ever more difficult struggle to be himself...

...it is a total crisis...

...Their human dignity and their endurance was sustained, their inner strength multiplied not by possession of the trumpet but by a communality of belief in man's capacity to come into his own, which was made possible for them by their common feeling about the trumpet and which therefore reflected itself in their daily lives...

...If it becomes extinct, our culture will inevitably ossify from want of challenge...

...What is one to say to people who, when told that the foundations of modern culture are shaking, answer in terms of 90 per cent parity, welfare payments and bipartisan foreign policy...

...This argument cannot be denied a certain persuasiveness, especially in days when the Russian Empire seems continually to be making further inroads upon a West that is immobilized, petrified and incapable of constructive action on a world scale...

...The crisis of culture in our times is no longer an economic, a social or a cultural crisis...

...III What then is a radical to do...

...Not to mention the bread and circuses provided to keep the poor in a state of pleasant euphoria .. . It is indeed exceedingly difficult even to engage in a dialogue with men who have not been able to understand the urgency of the crisis of our age...

...The following articles are devoted to the same problem: the meaning of political radicalism in our time...

...cease to regret it, maintain themselves by the common routine, learn to avoid expecta tions...

...Still, one may conceivably be critical of present society and yet not be a radical...

...It would seem to me that among the central questions—and the central tasks—of the coming period will be an attempt to increase the area of personal and social control...

...Suffice it for our purposes to $ay that in the tradition in which men of my generation grew up, that is men who came to political maturity in the early thirties, radical thought was anchored in a view of history derived from, though not identical with, Marxist thought...

...It would then be possible to link concern with personal and with social control, to affirm that autonomous men can grow only in a social climate in which social control is institutionalized through appropriate organizations...

...One cannot combat the barbarians from without by making a pact with the barbarians from within (which does not imply, by the way, that they are necessarily to be equated or that they cannot be distinguished) . And the tycoons of the amusement industry, the military and corporate elites with their millions of hangers-on in the suburbs and their sycophantic engineers of consent, corporate lawyers and Washington bureaucrats do not defend, they undermine the basis of a culture of autonomous men...

...wherever the weaker attempt to stand up against the stronger, in the plant, the union, the university, the bureau or the laboratory—there is a field for radical action...

...11 We seem to have arrived at an impasse: maintaining the in tellectual models of the past bars radicalism from making any impact on the realities of the present, while discarding these models seems to leave one without any hold in the flux of time, hence condemned to drift with it—even though reluctantly...

...But again, to avoid being dupes, to refuse consent, are eminently positive acts, necessary prerequisites for any wider activity...

...In fact, questions that have recently come to the fore in the labor movement concern the control of decision-making: production schedules, firing, hiring, layoffs, rather than simply wage rates...

...But even the adversaries of the status quo are only dimly aware as yet of this crucial fact...

...The species ought to be preserved, I say, and it can be preserved only through mutual contact, interchange, discussion, human communication and the warmth of fellowship...

...certainly not anger...

...and they did not always mean "How should we engage ourselves...

...To the extent that the old radical movement centered its hopes in the working class and found in that class and its organizations natural allies and supporters, there existed, so to speak, an organic alliance between the striving for justice, for fraternity, and for the good society of the socialist radicals and the more limited demands of the labor movement...

...But the new radical in his fight against the new barbarians must be concerned with issues wider and deeper than those of the old movement...

...Hence, in all those areas of public life in which autonomous men can still make an impact, radicals should act...

...As usual in our pages, each writer speaks for himself...

...It is only when, as in much of the old movement, the present is systematically denigrated that future orientations assume a crucial role(as when present murders and cruelties are "justified" by reference to their "necessity" in the preparation of "tomorrows that sing") . If one assumes, on the other hand, that one is to judge oneself and is to be judged by others on what one does right now, quite apart from any "historical justification," then agreement on the present overshadows by far the variations in future expectations that may exist...

...Wherever the infamy, the coercions and the horrors of modern society manifest themselves, there may be a field of radical activity...

...The explanatory schemes upon which most radical thought has relied in the last century were, explicitly or implicitly, Marxist...

...Others may feel that the far more probable outcome of the trends of the present is some kind of atomic garrison state, presided over by the combination of staff sergeant and clerk of whom de Tocqueville wrote a century ago...

...The "locomotive of history" has passed us by, and as we see it disappear over the horizon in a most unexpected direction, some of us have learned to discard the Hegelian hubris of "knowing" which sustained us for so long...

...Furthermore, to the degree that the West, like the late Roman Empire, becomes (as Huizinga once wrote) "a facade, eaten from within," it is impossible to make an alliance with those who, whether from ignorance or malice, encourage us to believe that it is in fact a healthy organism...

...IV One pointer, admittedly still most tentative, as to the possible direction of thought on this question, should be drawn here...

...There must have existed in the Second Century A.D...

...And if not now, when...

...How can I know...

...In that movement the here-and-now was almost always given low status: it was valued only to the extent that it could be said to contribute to the unfolding of the revolutionary potentialities of the future...

...Whether we admitted this openly or not, the here-and-now of our age mattered to us only insofar as it could be perceived as a necessary preparation for the revolutionary days to come...

...Though written independently, and containing quite different emphases, they raise questions that are likely to be of particular interest to readers of DISSENT...

...It would seem that, besides the need to develop and rethink the theory of socialism, no mean task in itself, the proximate goals and the means of the socialists in America largely coincide with those of radicals who do not consider themselves socialist...

...In other words, responsible determination of one's personal life may perhaps be linked with responsible co-determination in public life...

...What is utterly alien will not become an object of criticism, it will simply be regarded with indifference...

...Perhaps a new kind of labor movement with which a new radicalism could make an alliance resembling their alliance of old, would be one that would put control over industrial and governmental decision-making in the forefront...

...After aII, there was more general prosperity in the Empire during the Second Century than the world had seen up to that time...

...In this sense, then, passionate criticism of a culture may be said to be an index of passionate involvement with its fate...

...We are still faced with the insistent question: What should we do now...

...My intention is simply to warn against a particular type of orientation which denigrates the here-and-now in the name of future history...

...I must admit that this question sometimes annoys me more than a little...

...That many, perhaps most, former radicals have made this choice is obvious...

...But such eschatological views once discarded, what remains to sustain our action in the immediate future...

...They may be able to develop a more coherent theory of social control, popular participation, direct involvement in decision-making in a planned society than is presently available...

...Among the few successes of DISSENT we count the fact that we have been able in some minor way to establish a link between radicals of an older generation and younger men and women who are untouched and even bored by the rhetoric of the thirties, yet repelled and frightened by the realities of the fifties...

...But many have replied that our patience is founded on our political defeats of the past few decades and that it is difficult to imitate attitudes which are the fruits of defeat—especially when it is so easy, and so tempting, to bq successful in the world of the fifties...

...As long as the myth of the inevitable and iron logic of history served to inspire men to become "midwives of revolution," it may have had a pragmatic validity...

...But members of the species find it hard to grow in a cold climate...

...that the struggle for civil and intellectual liberties is as important as the struggle for industrial democracy...

...Perhaps if we can answer this question in the affirmative we will have at the same time provided some clues toward answering our earlier question as to the role of the radical in the world today...

...Radicalism cannot simply become a mutual protection society against the world...

...How can one counter the pressures toward conformity and assent which are so hard to resist partly beqause they are so very insidious...

...We who prided ourselves on our secret knowledge of the workings of history, suddenly became aware of our ignorance...

...The moral status of an action in the present is not impaired or enhanced by future history...

...The radical in such a view may be said to assume the role that 18th-century thinkers liked to attribute to visitors from far off civilizations...

...How much depends, even for the most capable man, on the time in which he lives.] Much the same may be said about the relation—and the tension— between American socialist radicalism and a time in which the most profound impulse is conformist and conservative...

...But such disagreements on future trends have made very little difference in our general assessment of the current scene and the options it offers...