Ideology And The Beau Gesten
Bell, Daniel
I agree with much of what Dennis Wrong says in his "Reflections on the End of Ideology," in the Summer 1960 issue of DISSENT. Mr. Wrong writes that the "end of ideology" is a fear of the...
...and one need not recapitulate the grisly events of the last twenty-five years to underline that point...
...If anything, one can begin anew the discussion of utopia only by being always aware of the trap of ideology...
...One passage in Mr...
...Ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues on their individual merits...
...They did not spell out what they wanted...
...In Ghana, Nkrumah has announced, in imitation of the old masters, that persons persisting in political opposition to him may be flogged...
...But what is more concrete than a vision—literally something seen with the eyes rather than conceived by the mind...
...This accounts, I think, for the occasional tone of complacent determinism he adopts and for his readiness to patronize those who continue to be moved to strong protest against much in our lives as nails or romantics committed to dissent for its own sake...
...I agree with much of what Dennis Wrong says in his "Reflections on the End of Ideology," in the Summer 1960 issue of DISSENT...
...The fact that these social movements were justified in their demands for freedom, for the right to control their own political and economic destinies, does not mean they have a right to a blank check for everything they choose to do...
...A beau geste that ended, one might say, in a mirthless jest...
...The end of ideology closes the book, intellectually speaking, on an era, the one of easy formulae for social change...
...against mass culture) or Utopian speculation when these activities lack any immediate political relevance...
...With their myopic rationalism, they assumed that "History" or "the Future" would settle all problems...
...I am as depressed as he is by the quotation from Alasdair Maclntyre—must we go through all that again...
...One can and should imaginatively explore ends in their own terms independently of any consideration of means, degrading or otherwise...
...It was a beau geste...
...Bell is frequently critical and even Utopian himself, but it is what I had in mind in complaining that he and Seymour Lipset remain "political men" to an excessive degree...
...It is in attitudes toward Cuba and the new States in Africa that the meaning of intellectual maturity, and of the end of ideology, will be tested...
...Wrong cites me as saying that Marx, Lenin and their followers "sought to win millions of people for the idea of a new society without the slightest thought about the shape of that future society and its problems," and then goes on to comment, "In other words, there is a sense in which the Marxists were not visionary enough...
...Wrong writes that the "end of ideology" is a fear of the "destructive mass emotions that ideology has proved capable of -unleashing...
...But to close a book is not to turn one's back upon it...
...You are expected to be simply for or against it and judge and be judged accordingly...
...One has only to read Lenin's State and Revolution, or the more revealing essay, Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power...
...they did not think through the consequences of what "the Revolution" would mean...
...Its outriders exult that it is "on the move...
...Wrong's strictures: the problems which confront us, at home and in the world, "are resistant to the old terms of ideological debate between left and right," and, "if 'ideology' is by now, and perhaps with good reason, an irretrievably fallen word," it is not necessary that " 'utopia' suffer the same fate...
...Hatred and intolerance are wiping out whatever middle ground may have existed...
...between them they show the alternative paths for the intellectuals," writes Alasdair Maclntyre, in an essay in Out of Apathy, the recent testament of the "new Left...
...I would say just the opposite: they were not concrete enough...
...When these beliefs are suffused by apocalyptic fervor, ideas become weapons, and with dreadful results...
...The one is of J. M. Keynes, the other of Leon Trotsky...
...For among the "new Left" there is an alarming readiness to create a tabula rasa, to accept the word "Revolution" as an absolution for outrages, to justify the suppression of opposition and civil rights—in short, to erase the lessons of the last forty years with an emotional alacrity that is astounding...
...Referring to my remarks on Utopia, Mr...
...Wrong's concerns— that the end of ideology must not be the end of utopia as well...
...This is, of course, necessary if we intend immediately to create a political movement to "realize" our Utopia, but I specifically denied that a program of political action in the ordinary sense was a prerequisite for creative Utopian thought...
...written on the eve of October, to be astounded by the simplicities of thought and the ingenuousness of the promises...
...Nor do I agree that the idea of Utopia is either valueless or potentially totalitarian if it fails to include specifications about how to get there and what the costs will be...
...These can hardly be well defended at home once one begins to justify their suppression abroad—whether it be in Cuba, Ghana, Indonesia, or any other rising star of Revolution and "direct democracy...
...Bell's outlook is the indication that he has learned his lessons from Marx and Dewey so well that he refuses to see any value in sheer protest (e.g...
...One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out come the prepared formulae...
...Wrong's essay provides, I think, the necessary confrontation...
...But the ladder to the City of Heaven can no longer be a "faith ladder," but an empirical one: a utopia has to specify where one wants to go, how to get there, the costs of the enterprise, and some realization of, and justification for, who is to pay...
...To return to Mr...
...Bell gets around a good deal more than I do and his examples suggest that he has the English "New Left" in mind when he insists on the importance of not forgetting the lessons of the recent past and the "old verities" they confirm...
...Eighty years ago, when a French radical threw a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, killing some people, his act was defended by some Symbolist poets on the ground that, "So what if a few persons were killed...
...But where it is going, what it means by Socialism, how to guard against bureaucratization, what one means by democratic planning or workers' control—any of the questions that require hard thought are answered by bravura phrases...
...The young British leftists too often give me an uncomfortable sense of deja vu, but perhaps they reflect a continuing British insularity about politics that is not found on this side of the Atlantic or on the European continent...
...The cruelty and fanaticism of organized masses is seen as a possibility inherent in modern industrial society and all social movements are anxiously scrutinized for their vulnerability to the totalitarian spirit...
...Two images...
...There is now, more than ever, some need for utopia, in the sense that men need—as they have always needed—some vision of their potential, some way of fusing passion and intelligence...
...This is all the more important now, for a "new Left," with few memories of the past, is emerging...
...Certainly, neither the young leaders and supporters of the Southern sit-down movement nor the apolitical Beats appear to be attracted by the kind of revolutionary romanticism that predictably finds its hero and martyr in Trotsky...
...To avoid misunderstanding, let me add that if a defense of Utopia is not a proposal for revolution, or even for milder political action, neither should it be understood as a counsel of complete withdrawal from politics...
...I agree too—and this I take to be the burden of Mr...
...This, I think, fairly summarizes the concerns of my book...
...Nor does the fact that such movements take power in the name of freedom guarantee that they will not turn out to be as imperialist, in demanding their turn on the stage of History, as the states they have displaced...
...Bell is saying something that vitally needs to be said to Americans, and more specifically to American intellectuals, at the present time...
...My arti cle also criticized the effects on practical politics of the "end of ideology" when it is invoked to justify a "moderation" that exalts the legal forms and technical skills of political bargaining over the content of political issues...
...I hasten to add that this tone is by no means always manifest—Mr...
...IF THE END OF IDEOLOGY has any meaning, it is to ask for the end of rhetoric, and of rhetoricians, of "revolution," of the day when the word "Revolution" excused all...
...Bell wants a "concrete" view which, he claims, is "just the opposite" of a "visionary" one...
...I agree with most of what he says in his letter, and his assertion that "the end of ideology is not a fashion but an experience" admirably sums up what I wished to convey in the opening paragraphs of my article...
...But I am not persuaded that Mr...
...THE POINT IS THAT IDEOLOGISTS are "terrible simplifiers...
...What troubles me about Mr...
...And in Cuba, as George Sherman, the correspondent for the London Observer reports: "The Revolution is law today although nobody has said clearly what that law is...
...It has passion and energy, but little definition of the future...
...The end of ideology is not a fashion, but an experience...
...I think of them at the end, Keynes with his peerage, Trotsky with an icepick in his skull...
...Dennis Wrong replies: Daniel Bell and I differ largely in what we choose to emphasize...
...But it may, if those who now call loudest for utopia begin to justify degrading means, in the name of some Utopian or revolutionary end, and forget the simple lesson that if the old debates are meaningless, some old verities are not—the verities of free speech, free press, the right of opposition and of free inquiry...
...They are the twin lives between which intellectual choice in our society lies...
Vol. 8 • January 1961 • No. 1
