The Politics of the Death Wish
FEUER, LEWIS S.
Nearly a decade has passed since the USSR ended the U.S. monopoly of atomic weapons, and more than five years since it exploded its first hydrogen bomb. To the Western fear of Communist political...
...So in the 18th century, under skeptical influences, it came to be regarded as poor taste to argue religious differences, and the lure to martyrdom became suspect...
...It is when these identifications are destroyed that man becomes solely a creature of the present...
...There is at least a strong historical possibility that they will make themselves heard...
...The growth of indifference to theology was much more behind the rise of liberalism than the readiness of men to die for their theological beliefs...
...The free society from Pericles on, it is said, has survived only because it valued some things more than survival itself...
...The Spanish Inquisition would have made the Soviet secret police look like amateurs...
...It takes delight in the traditions which link it to its ancestors as well as in the thought of the heritage which its descendants will enjoy...
...Then we are reminded of the countless generations through which the human species has evolved...
...The English scientists of the Royal Society in 1662 were in many ways skeptics who had had their fill of ideas which were weapons...
...What we assert is that the Soviet appeal to the welfare of future generations has been largely a rationalization which conceals their basic motives...
...The Community philosophy, he says, "cruelly sacrifices existing generations for a glorious future to be enjoyed by the still unborn...
...Nor will it do to say, as Professor Hook does, that all preferences on these questions of human choice "may be irrational...
...The apocalyptic mode of thought, moreover, is entering politics, and we are getting arguments for "end of the world" political decisions...
...I do not share this theology...
...Actually, however, the will to martyrdom was a minor factor in the rise of liberal societies...
...There is a pragmatic argument for the "end of the world" standpoint which we have, however, neglected...
...And the recent debate between Bertrand Russell and Sidney Hook has posed a question of ethics which borders on metaphysics: What do we owe to the unborn...
...At any rate, it betokens a dis-proportionality in judgment when one is prepared to write off the possible vistas of the human race because of the presumably intense suffering of present humanity under a world Sovietism...
...Conditions in the Soviet Union are bad...
...Must we blind ourselves with dogma against the fact that human vitality and the urge to freedom can survive the long winter's repression...
...To the present-bound man, all concern with the future is meaningless...
...We can admire the person whose self-sacrifice is born of his affection for others...
...Pragmatically, both these attitudes have something to contribute to the liberal philosophy...
...dictatorships have come and gone...
...And have we forgotten so soon Dachau and Auschwitz, the Nazi centers for mass extermination...
...Actually, without making any theological assumption, we do consider in our present decisions the welfare of our posterity...
...What are the grounds upon which Professor Hook is prepared to accept universal extinction...
...The widespread readiness of the human race to destroy itself if its liberties were abrogated, would, from this viewpoint, be a condition for the very survival of those liberties...
...Death can be an easy substitute for a demonstration which one is unable to provide...
...Now Professor Hook answers that it is characteristic of Communists that they always claim to be mindful of the unborn generations...
...it is more than doubtful that it would be extinguished even by a Soviet world dictatorship...
...Today, we have a huge "end of the world" literature in millions of pocket books...
...I myself have seen Asian coolies in the South Pacific treated by their French masters in ways as frightful as in the Soviet labor camps that I've read about...
...Moreover, Professor Hook doubts that the Soviet society will improve: "the probability is just as great that greater infamies will also develop...
...Professor Hook adds, however: "Morally, those who are unborn cannot reproach us for denying them the bliss of birth in a Communist society...
...Otherwise the principle may become a servant of the death wish...
...Perhaps we should therefore return to the concrete problem, and avoid apocalyptic politics...
...We reach, he says, ultimate situations "in which to prefer the non-existence of mankind to its continued torture would be to choose a lesser evil...
...When the death wish grows strong in our "end of the world" philosophizing, we tend to forget that the present crisis may be a transient episode in a long evolutionary progress...
...We are mindful of unborn generations...
...And the irrational is involved in this "end of the world" political philosophy in which the death wish weights the scales against the evidence...
...We are as a nation committed to policies of the conservation of our natural resources...
...Here we present two other views, by Lewis S. Feuer, professor of philosophy at the University of California, and (page 19) Salvador de Madariaga, the Spanish liberal historian and pre-Franco diplomat...
...The life-time of modes of government seems to be in the neighborhood of a hundred years...
...but, where self-sacrifice is the instrument of self-hatred or where there is a tendency to turn such sacrifice into a value in itself, unreason has taken control...
...But freedom has found its expression in devious ways under past systems of persecution, and there is reason to hope that Soviet intellectuals will not be too different, in this respect, from the French intellectuals of the Ancien Regime...
...We replant our forests, we keep an anxious eye for the maintenance of oil and mineral reserves...
...It is the mark of a healthy people, as of a healthy man, that it doesn't feel the need to repress either its future or its past...
...freedom's estate there is low, but let us not exaggerate matters by calling it "the cruelest tyranny in history...
...But it is well to tincture the readiness to die for principles with some awareness of the latter's margin of error...
...What stands out is the tenacity of the human spirit...
...Indeed, the Soviet future would be far more glorious if there had been less sacrifices in the past and present—for cruelty, when embedded in social organization, tends to perpetuate itself...
...That is the question Bertrand Russell and Sidney Hook have twice debated in these pages recently...
...Neanderthal man, with his horror-ridden universe, is only yesterday...
...Earl Russell would choose surrender to Communism rather than an alternative which might end the existence of human life on this planet...
...The irrational man is the one who deludes himself, who is unaware of the forces which are influencing him, and whose own desires are repressed by such forces into his unconscious...
...To the Western fear of Communist political penetration, the Kremlin's fear of democratic revolution, and the neutrals' fear of great-power exploitation has been added a general fear of the awesome weapons now held by both blocs...
...To be mindful of the welfare of our potential descendants is, according to Professor Hook, to have yielded to theology or Platonic ontology...
...It comes as something of a shock to read that, when we consider the welfare of grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, we have become Platonic theologians...
...Are the weapons or the fear of them the greater threat to democracy...
...We can endow the Soviet rulers with the awesome capacities of a juggernaut...
...Somehow, whether through written agreement or through tacit understandings among the nations, thermonuclear weapons will be abandoned...
...They were frankly cynical toward men with "enthusiasms," who were so filled with the death wish that they were ready to die for their uncertain theologies...
...The early Christians had an "end of the world" theology...
...And to this task, Professor Hook's "A Foreign Policy for Survival" made a notable contribution far more significant than his apocalyptic digression into the end of the human race...
...For according to Professor Hook, they don't exist, and therefore they don't matter: "I have some difficulty," he writes, "with this notion of obligation, as if it implied there were millions of souls extending into eternity waiting to be born...
...The Soviet rulers have demanded sacrifices because these were necessary to keep themselves in power...
...Before we dwell on universal extinction, we might widen our time-span...
...By Lewis S. Feuer THE POLITICS OF THE DEATH WISH RARELY do political arguments reach down to ultimate philosophical differences...
...The task of wisdom is to work for the third alternative: neither surrender to Soviet Communism nor universal extinction but the gradual development of free societies which can disarm because they are free...
...During the past two years, Western scientists and scholars, with a knowledge of Russian, have been bringing back reports of these new currents...
...On paper at least, the Soviets still profess a commitment to universal human values...
...Professor Hook would be prepared to resist the Soviets rather than surrender, even if this meant the extinction of the human race in a thermonuclear war...
...No mode of government in recorded human history has ever lasted more than two thousand years, and the oldest of them, the Chinese Empire, was most exceptional in its duration...
...He prefers to rest on solid ground, and affirms that "there are no future generations whose desires need be considered...
...it is the present generations which must make the choice—"only their desires, wishes, fears and hopes count...
...There is no reason for expecting that the Soviet regime is exempt from the laws of social change...
...But more important, a younger generation is arising which is concerned with these values, which is eager for contact with the West...
...And if rulers arise who worship death, the thing to do is to outlast them, not to provide them with sacrificial objects...
...The irrational man is the one who doesn't understand himself...
...The liberal society came into existence when men got tired of religious wars, of ideologies, of martyrs...
...Actually, if we can judge from the findings of the Harvard Russian Research Center, the average man and average technician in the Soviet Union is coming to lead a life not strikingly different from his American counterpart...
...In the first place, he argues that we need not consider in our choice the experiences of future generations...
...To be sure, the freedom-seeking intellectual is constricted in his thought and speech...
...Now it is characteristic of the "end of the world" mentality that it tends to lose its sense of historical perspective...
...But surely Professor Hook has misstated the nature of our objection to the Soviet standpoint...
...Of what import were family and civic responsibilities if the whole terrestrial order was soon to terminate...
...And such an attitude is precisely characteristic of those theologies which are convinced that the end of the world is at hand...
...Only the "experiences of the existing generations" are relevant, he says, to our political decision...
...Not so long ago, Mark Twain was exposing the physical mutilations which were practiced on the African natives by their white overseers in the Belgian Congo...
...The details of their methods of torture, their punishments, the drawings and quar-terings, and the delight which the populace itself took in watching the autos-da-fe exceed anything in the Soviet chronicle...
...The Soviets, he writes, are "the crudest tyranny in human history," and when he weighs the "tortures and cruelties" imposed on the living generations as against the possible improvements in the future, he finds the cost too high...
...For the first to begin a thermonuclear war will presumably not be among the survivors, and if we can keep in power statesmen with at least a moderate desire to live, the chances of all of us and our posterity surviving are good...
...at least it conquers doubt...
Vol. 41 • September 1958 • No. 31
