One

The Radical Madness

For Eliseo Vivas

TODAY, HAPPILY, we have much less confidence than a Montesquieu or a Hegel in depicting the “spirits” of nations, times, and generations. The more intelligible such depictions are and the more suitable for their role in world-historical drama, the less plausible they seem to those whose spirits they are supposed to be. For no matter how subtly drawn and with no matter how many reservations, they remain in the end categories. The application of categories to anything living itself generates a categorial malaise: the category is clear, but life, while it illustrates that category, also illustrates its opposite as well as an indefinite number of other categories not encompassed in either the one or the other.

If this error seems too obvious to mention, it is, I am convinced, the abstract statement of something whose resolute and systematic commission constitutes the spirit of the radical. In characterizing and criticizing such a spirit, this chapter might then seem to fall under its own condemnations; but it should be understood at the start that we shall be considering not persons, which would be indecent and personal, but persons insofar as they have chosen to radicalize themselves—or, put otherwise, only persons in their chosen roles, in the categories or personae they wish to illustrate. It will be therefore a categorial critique of categories, and not a categorial critique of persons. That ontological distinction preserves the dignity of the person while permitting a critique of his actions and aims. It is precisely the refusal to sustain such a distinction that constitutes the inherent confusion, distress, and ultimate futility of the radical position. This is said by way of preface and postface; in between I shall take a look at various facets of a contemporary moral distress called the “Movement” or the “Revolution,” by analysis show it up as an absolute philosophical nullity and, when put into action, the father of atrocities.

To claim this distress as “contemporary” means here that it is remarkable in only a small section of our contemporaries, those who are either on campuses or who otherwise would be on them if they had not alienated themselves, a group so small they would properly go unnoticed if the newspapers did not from time to time announce yet another bombing by the Weathermen, or yet another atrocity committed under drugs, of which Manson and his “family” may stand for the ne plus ultra. The shocked public learns that what would otherwise be ascribed to madness instead offers an ideological explication and justification of itself: we are asked to look at a new “religion” or a new “politics,” and even give Constitutional comfort to them. Are they not radical forms of Freedom? And who is there to speak a word against Freedom, unto the final freeing of oneself from the human condition altogether? In any event, we shall be looking at its “theory” or rather ideology if that term is taken as expressing a welter of slogans, sensibili־ ties, associations, loves, and hatreds all rendered in a jargon that changes week by week. In passing, it might be noted that the ephemeral jargonization of speech follows a certain internal necessity of the Movement; no one can follow it without being in it, and to follow it is to follow nothing but the turbid movement itself; its jargon says nothing but does serve to distinguish the current members from the interested outsiders. And, of course, nothing is better designed to frustrate the “fascism of thought” than a radical confusion of language. The contemporary moral scene was not created by the youths who follow it but rather by their slightly senior intellectuals who hoped to find their audience in youth, and in that were not disappointed. In this respect college students have willingly played the role of Ion the Rhapsode to some mad Homers. But let us begin our diagnosis.

Some Phenomena

The radical, of course, is one who goes straight to the heart or roots of everything and envisions some form of total revolution. Now the revolution cannot be total unless what is revolved turns upon one center; if the Establishment is to be dismantled, it must be seen as a vast noxious outgrowth of a single cause or, at least, a small number of manageable causes. For if the whole of social life and its arrangements had no single root, how could it be uprooted? If, in short, human life were something which had an infinite number of roots in the past, present, and presumptive future, if it were unsurveyable in its sources and consequences, if men were not the puppets of single passions, in a word, if concrete life were concrete life, on what could the radical aim his guns? The reformer contents himself with this or that change; the radical scorns the reformer for trying to fight the hated Gorgon by cutting off only a few heads; the radical goes straight to the heart of the monster to kill it, which presupposes what is patently false, that the historical social life of men is like Gorgon. The fantastic notion that any existing society or even a single person can be grasped altogether, in its “root,” which can then be extirpated or changed in essence, is the presupposition of the radical’s thought, his proton pseudos. And it is one form of that logical error noted earlier, a form of the hubris of reason, overconfident in its power of apprehension. It has some particular forms I will now examine.

THE MORALIZATION OF LIFE

Perhaps the initial and determining experience of the radical is that society as a whole is immoral, immoral in its root. Or if “immoral” is too redolent of a past age, “unjust,” “intolerable,” “repressive,” or whatever term seems appropriate, but I shall use “immoral.” It is absolutely wrong and wrong in its very roots; if the radical did not have some such consciousness of himself, the one who had unmasked a radical evil, how could he justify himself? Without his conviction, he would sink in his own eyes to what he is in the eyes of others, a common criminal. In a word, the radical is an implacable moralist, and his speech is that of denunciation. All of which is particularly astonishing considering the efforts of previous social science to de-moralize everything. The “historical sense,” “cultural relativism,” “ethnology,” had all worked out, it thought, a benign pluralism which sympathetically entertained a variety of cultures, styles of life, values, and human destinies, which abstained from moral denunciations of human life, held the old missionaries in contempt, and hoped to promulgate a smiling and civilized interest in everything. Nothing could be more abhorrent to its heart than Jeremiah denouncing the people for wickedness and calling for a radical change of heart. No sooner said and done, than all undone in the moralism of the fifties and sixties, when Jeremiah shouts again. Savanarola burnt wicked books and the frivolities of personal adornment; following the same necessities, the radicals too shun personal adornment and, as for books, when they are not burned they are simply not read. If before, the deluded prophets spoke in the name of God, their successors, equally confident of their insight, speak from the chair of social justice and freedom.

One mark of the most primitive thought is its penchant for tracing the most diverse phenomena back to a single cause or spirit; but there is no need of anthropology for our best examples. The contemporary radicals serve far better: from the most trivial to the most terrifying “evils,” they are one and all traced back to that root which they wish to extirpate. What is its name? No one knows, or rather its names are legion: imperialism, racism, private property, exploitation, repression, technology, a bad relation to “Nature,” and so on, ending finally with “it all. . . .” And the phenomena of immorality or injustice? From smoking cigarettes, driving an automobile, eating fruit sprayed with detergent or grapes gathered by nonunion workers, through either traveling or not traveling to North Vietnam, China, or the Soviet Union, paying the income tax, failing to stir up students on these questions or teaching at all at a university, to the horrors of patriotism, respect for policemen, the flag, until we reach the ultimate symptom of all moral rot, our efforts in Indochina.

Now my present point is not to discuss any of these particular issues, but to note the aegis under which the new radical discusses them: they are all moral symptoms of a deeper moral flaw, which itself must be rooted out lock, stock, and barrel. It is not enough to address oneself to anything specific; that would be superficial. It is that potent but unnameable spirit behind all of this which is the Enemy. The Enemy, as in the most primitive thought, lives in some vague exteriority; it is rarely in oneself, although outsiders hear reports of sessions where radicals rap and examine their own hearts; with the pitiful sincerity of children, they ask themselves how they may have unwittingly sinned that week, maybe even shaken hands with the Enemy!

The immediate consequence of the moralization of every problem, and the accompanying devil theory of human life is the abrupt and irremediable termination of the political process. To make a pact with the devil is itself devilish, and since the political process is essentially devoted to discussion, compromise, and mutual adjustments of claims and convictions, the political process itself must disappear into revolution. Politics is effective only when the parties to the process respect one another, regard the other not as immoral but as differently moral and have sufficient faith in the society as a whole to give up something personal for its success. But if society as a whole is the Enemy, and if opponents are unjust, repressive, fascists, in a word, immoral, what basis is there for discussion or agreement?

It is hardly surprising, then, that even the feeblest of radical devices far short of assassination and bombing are all deteriorations of any genuine political process. Since the radical is not likely to be effective with legitimate representatives of the citizens, he will favor the “people,” which means citizens are unrepresented, that is, the mob. Up goes a new slogan, “power to the people,” a singularly hypocritical one to be immediately withdrawn if the “people” form themselves into a lynching bee or even a crowd of angry hard-hats. And then there is the device of civil disobedience, thought to be ennobled by the examples of Thoreau and Gandhi, in which disobedience is taken to be obedience to a higher moral law, conscience, or conscience speaking the judgments of the radical press; it is not long before some expect to be rewarded for their disobedience to the laws by the laws themselves. That civil disobedience is simply a refusal to comply with those laws and hence must be punished by the laws is forgotten, particularly when society out of weariness or indifference in turn looks upon the disobedient as pranksters or misguided hotheads. And some have carried their ideas to the point where they are willing to dissolve the historical units of society, dreaming of separate political states for themselves, usually California, which would issue visas, admit some and refuse admission to others, maybe a black state or a pot state, and of course, in its new sovereignty, endowed with the power to make war. Or maybe a city community within a city, with its own laws, police force, and mayor. The radical radicals perceive the folly of all this; they have world and even metaphysical ambitions analogous to the god Shiva, who created and destroyed worlds at will: no small communities for them.

With the radical moralization of life comes the concomitant modification of human discourse. We have already noticed the preference for a slang that changes so fast no outsider can keep up; nor any insider either, since it is deliberately designed to say nothing but only to stir sympathies and antipathies, in effect to create a subconscious emotional group. But moralists of whatever stamp rarely have anything to say anyway; their speech is denunciation and persuasion, and all under a rock-solid conviction of being right. Among moralists then there can be no discussion, only rant; neither side has or can have anything to learn from the other, since learning is not exactly the forte of those who have achieved absolute insight. Naturally, nothing could be more common then than the wail that the older generation does not “listen” to them. “Listen,” like so many radical terms, has taken on its opposite sense, namely, “agree with.” But if “agreement” is now the precondition of discussion, it is hard to know what discussion genuinely discusses. Herbert Marcuse won’t even permit much of that in his new state, where what had always been called “intolerance” is now gleefully redubbed “repressive tolerance,” the emphasis as always falling upon “repressive.”

Or, lacking the capacity for discussion, the radicals are willing from time to time to rap or dialogue. This at first sight looks admirable; it even suggests genuine discussion, until disillusion sets in. The moralist and radical really have nothing to discuss, and the dialoguing will show it. First of all, everyone of no matter what age must sit on the floor, so that no one is “higher” than anyone else. Have we not seen pictures of aged college presidents sitting on the floor or wishing to be beneath the rug in order to show to all their common spirit? But not merely must everyone be on the floor, all minds and ideas also must sit there. Again we are the spectators of the Grand Simplification, an equalization in which the experienced and the young, the informed and uninformed, the young and the old, the loud and the quiet, all must be equalized; or not exactly; those tainted with the bad vibes of experience must be equalized out. The genuinely dialoguing group will not dig them; and if they try to reason, to consider alternatives, realities, they are definitely not with it. Gut-feeling is the word, yet who can feel thought, experience, and reason? Do they not even give rise to the suspicion that one is being exploited by the “fascism of the mind”? “Thinking” is indeed suspect in dialoguing; its worst sin perhaps is introducing a pause between certain conviction and action. Even Herbert Marcuse’s books are no longer read; they do not “propel the reader into the streets” but waste his time thinking. None of this would have surprised Hegel, of course, who knew and perfectly analyzed these frenzied phenomena of “conscience” and the “heart” as final arbiters of action.

And so: all of life falls under an abstract moral judgment, and the moral glow that judges is that which finds all of it, subsumed under the idea of the Establishment, wicked. The organ that accomplishes this monstrous judgment is called the “heart” or “conscience.” Political process and discussion are replaced by no process at all but the immediacy of bombings, civil disobedience, assassinations, shoutings at street rallies; discussion, with its own sense of both relevance and irrelevance, is replaced by dialoguing, where digging, feelings, vibes among the sympathetic hold sway. After all, the moral is always the conclusive if not convulsive; he who loves conclu־ sions would only waste his time with considerations, whose only effect, as he experiences them, is to cool moral passion. But a cool moral passion is none at all; it even begins to look like the proper basis of intelligence, civilization and accommodation.

THE CATEGORICAL ELIMINATION OF EXPERIENCE:
THE METHOD OF YOUTH

The radical moralist necessarily judges; he is the judge par excellence. What indeed would be the point of moralizing if one could not judge with a resounding “guilty!”? Judgment is an essential function of the human spirit, of course; but for our present purpose we can note two very different forms: the unconditional and the conditional. The unconditional judgment immediately subsumes the act or institution under an ideal abstraction of justice, equality, or whatever; no wonder that this form of judgment is usually condemnatory, uncompromising, and pitiless. It is the form of judgment beloved of the radical spirit to which anything else looks wishy-washy and sold-out. It obviously requires nothing by way of experience; the abstract ideal is lodged a priori within the abstract conscience and is unquestionable; the act or institution judged demands only a minimum of acquaintance to exhibit its distance from the ideal; nothing is simpler than unconditional condemnation. And it is obvious at a glance why such judgments can easily proliferate throughout the world; the Establishment, the Power Structures all fall instantly under its condemnation with a persuasiveness that captivates all who have little experience of life.

The conditional judgment also decides, but it has another domain within which it is deciding, namely, an ambiguous world. Now, to know that the world is ambiguous requires experience, and not the experience of the cynics but that of responsible men, with memory to recall how often they have been wrong themselves before their own judgment, and how often things and persons have turned different faces to them in time. Nothing could be more repulsive to such a spirit than the unconditional judgment, the immediacy with which a simple radical spirit holds each thing in isolation, or all of them together, up to an abstract ideal. Experience is the very medium of the conditional judgment, and since it is what youth does not have, youth is given to the radical and unconditional. And so with the “intellectuals,” who are not intellectual by virtue of their experience in life but by virtue of intellectual powers independent of it, powers of abstraction, analysis, dialectic, argumentation. Now these virtues are indeed virtues, but not exactly those required for conditional, practical moral judgment.

The unconditional judgment with its categorical elimination of experience dictates a certain way of pronouncing judgment. Classical literature abounds in examples of judges, even God Himself, who, while they must pronounce judgment, do so with a tear in their eye. The ultimate origin of that tear would carry us far beyond the scope of these remarks, and yet it could hardly be in that radical and unconditional spirit which, confident in its apprehension of absolute good and evil, is pitiless in its condemnation of the world. And if some freshly experienced pitilessness appears to radicals as a new and rigorous hardness, to others it looks like hatred masking as moralism, and I shall have to be forgiven if I no longer know which is the origin of which. But all of this, deeply explored in the Bhagavad Gita, the Old and New testaments, and virtually every place where men who knew something of life reflected upon themselves, no doubt equally appears as a digression into conventional sentimentalism to the radical spirit. Precisely why, that spirit asks, should one shed a tear for “those who cause” war, inequality, slavery, exploitation, oppression, and the rest? Is that tear not a sign of personal weakness, perhaps a first trace of the softening of the radical will? In any case, it is usually called “humanity,” and most assuredly it is that humanity which is the final enemy of the new radical tyrants, moralists devoid of experience. The unconditional judgment abstracts a man, his acts, or a society and its institutions from concrete conditions, and holds it up before the abstract moral category; the “conditions,” however, happen to be essential to the truth of any judgment about existence, existence itself being the domain of conditions which are unsurveyable. No wonder the essential error built into the radical spirit. Its essential mercilessness follows necessarily.

The radical, youthful moralist following his own lights proceeds to make himself a tyrant. Tyrants notoriously have always had to “make themselves hard,” that is, by a secret inner act turn themselves into unpersons. The shedding of humanity, first inwardly and then shamelessly before the world, is the very essence of the despot. Popular history records mostly the shocking and the unprecedented; but who enacts such unheard-of deeds but unprecedented men? And who are they but those who are the most radical, that is, those who have freed themselves of what had been regarded as the “human” until themselves? It is certainly not an accident that those who choose to turn themselves into something unprecedented exercise their first radical critique upon precedents, either with only an inkling of what tradition is or in an abysmal ignorance of it, or through a pathological withdrawal of respect for what had until themselves passed as the human. A new age will begin with themselves, and with that their historical place is guaranteed, at least in the popular histories of monsters.

The new age indeed looks new for a moment, the moment it originates. There must at the beginning be a new simplification. Human beings are now radically reclassified: people are divided with ease into sheep and goats; they are either with us or else they are “hyenas,” “pigs,” or excrement. It is now for the first time relatively easy to decide who are worthy of life. For those who survive the first test, actions are easy to command or proscribe categorically, always on the most formal grounds. Their arts, religions, and philosophies are quickly subsumed under immediate judgments. They are “degenerate,” “socially dangerous,” or “useless,” “bourgeois,” “parasitic,” and so on, all seen through those steely eyes that never betrayed the least glint of recognition of what humans, their acts, and their final ambiguous tragedies and loves ever were. Nor was any such thing ever necessary; after all, was this not to be a new age, a wiping of the slate clean, something unprecedented? The “slate” that is being wiped clean, •the human spirit and its historical social life, is being wiped clean of precisely that traditional singular experience that is not the possession of “anyone,” but that into which we slowly find our places, which is what we are and have lived, and is the very medium of any significantly human life, as well as any significant judgment of it; it is precisely that which the radical spirit has chosen to detest. The resulting tabula rasa, for whatever philosophical curiosity it has elicited in epistemological questions as a spiritual prime matter, is certainly denuded of every capacity for either understanding or recreating anything recognizably human. It would, if possible, be indeed unprecedented.

The radical spirit, denuded of that tradition and experience which could only erode its radicality, can, of course, only exercise the unconditional and abstract judgment: right or wrong, good or bad, yes or no, for us or against us, preserve or eliminate; in a word, like a fish in water, it lives in the medium of the unconditional moral judgment. It breathes only in those judgments which other men who do not wish to make themselves unprecedented in the continuous history of humanity shun at all costs from making, and to whose necessity they succumb only at the extremity, when they must. Hence it is not surprising that for the radical moralist, everything is a crisis, or can gleefully be made into one. Where before, there were requests, now there are nonnegotiable demands. Meetings become confrontations full of sass, impudence, and effrontery. Courtesy vanishes into incivility. Every trace of the ancien regime must be obliterated categorically, and, since the ancien regime was indeed a whole society and form of life, there can never be an occasion when hostility is not appropriate. The ensuing bewilderment and counter-hostility among those still living in the previous age is of course only a new source of glee to the new men. New words must be substituted for old, new values, new behavior, new clothes, and new faces, eyes now inscrutable behind black glasses. The new man wishes to become unrecognizable; his virtues will seem like vices to former men, his language incoherent to them, his behavior mad or childish, in a word, an effort to abruptly create a new world out of nothing. At first, it simply looks like the emergence of the dregs of the former world; but the new man intends to reverse such judgments by dominance; they are not dregs but prophets.

It hardly takes much perspicacity to perceive that no such unconditional counter-world is possible. What is possible is a change of personnel and a temporary confusion, a deterioration of custom, precedent, expectation, a redistribution of wealth, honors, and power all in this world. But the new age when installed proceeds to reinstitute all those a priori structures and hierarchies it thought it was destroying, and who is surprised when those new, unprecedented, and faceless men gradually become old, begin to cherish their personal faces and uniforms, plaster them on billboards everywhere, prefer their old revolutionary friends or execute them, establish new precedents and rules suspiciously like the old? The revolutionary work has produced nothing but a vast and temporary dust-storm of confusion. A small change here or there, most usually one that was already afoot during the previous age.

Survivors into the new age might even welcome the restoration of social order, precedent, and tradition if they could ever quite forget the blood shed to give the wheel another delusive turn. It may be questioned whether it is in the least possible for history to move “forward”; but is there any question at all whether it should move forward at this cost? In any event, if the “progress” of history must be at the expense of “cracked heads,” must we not always ask on what scale the “progress” is being measured? It might be theoretically possible to “progress” clear outside the human precedent itself by relentlessly pursuing something that appears to its devotees as “unconditionally moral.”

The dialectic of the radical spirit I have been trying to trace has its own phenomenological logic. It is by no means a casual, empirical summary of current fads and fantasies, which have been sufficiently documented by others. The radical spirit, even when it thinks itself most free, is in effect, when consistent, the servant of an idea. It is that idea whose puppet he is that directs the radical’s attitudes; his only freedom, as a human being, is whether and how to follow it. If we can grasp, then, the determining idea of the radical spirit, we shall have grasped that essence from which the sequence of the radicals’ passions and actions follow, when their meaning is understood. And the truth of that analysis would, of course, be quite independent of what the radical thinks he is doing, but would enable us to understand even the peculiarities of that thought, though not in its own terms.

The radical spirit has fallen in love with an abstraction, the abstract moral idea; since the moral idea is moral, it of itself commands its immediate realization in history. And so the radical spirit must necessarily attempt to introduce into history and life a perfect abstraction. If it merely contemplated its abstraction, it would be morally remiss in its devotions, and contemptible in its own eyes. Any abstract ideal whatsoever can enter history only by way of a revolution in that history; and, if the abstract ideal preserves its abstract purity, the revolution it generates must be perpetual That pure or abstract ideals must necessarily generate a perpetual revolution within history is a consequence of the ontological difference between existence and ideal abstraction. They are two ontological domains with radically different properties; their immediate fusion is catastrophe or revolution, a writhing of existence when it is touched even for a moment by the abstract or ideal. History, of course, has its own practical ideals, which are never abstract; it moves accordingly in its own concrete way, adjusting itself to its own changes. But such movement is never revolutionary, never directed by abstractions, and it always manages to preserve some continuity of social and personal substance. It would therefore be a monstrous mistake to suppose that individuals and societies not maddened by abstractions must sink into apathy, have no moral life at all, and finally die; that is an illusion cultivated by the radical, and it expresses no reality except the profound blindness of the radical spirit.

A glance at the fundamental ontological difference between abstract ideal and historical existence is sufficient to see the essence of what is characteristic of the radical spirit and its favorite activities. Abstract ideals, liberty, equality, fraternity, rights, happiness, justice—the list is endless—all have the common property of being ideas. They are ideas of the Good, what reason itself can perceive of the Good. As the abstractive work of reason, they must bear all the signs of that work; after all, not everything that passes through the mind is an idea. Experiences, passions, memories, none of these can be called “ideas” in our present sense. The marks of an idea are simplicity, clarity, distinctness. “Equality” possesses an almost mathematical clarity; “Freedom” is particularly clear since it is nothing but the negative idea of being independent of everything else. “Justice” at first glance seems equally simple and clear, perceptible to the untutored reason in every man. And “Happiness” looks like the very obvious sense of life; is there anyone who would defend “unhappiness”? Each, inspected by reason or “conscience,” is in itself clear, and distinct from its opposites, which are all various forms of Evil. The satisfactions possible to an idealism of this stamp are endless and quite understandable. In the first place, ideas do not demand experience for their comprehension since they have been abstracted from that problematic and questionable domain. They are in their rational simplicity equally available to all. The simplest and most naive heart can pretend to love them. They are democratic par excellence. From which we deduce their popularity with the young. All of them, in their capacity of being “moral,” command at first glance immediate realization; they are so many trumpet calls for action. Again, their appeal to the active young is obvious. An idea, as such, stands alone; it is distinct from its opposite; it has no history, no precedents, no context except logical or dialectical; it neither knows nor can know anything of precisely that domain of historical existence where it wishes to intrude. When it does so intrude, it is hardly surprising that it can do so only by perpetually turning that existence upside down, by the perpetual revolution. For no sooner is a new historical formation created, than it too falls under radical criticism. It too is but another historical, existential formation, necessarily sharing all the faults of existence as such when held up against the purely abstract. Hence the true radical revolutionary is, unknown to himself, fighting against ontological necessities and must necessarily fail.

It is hardly a controversial philosophical thesis that the very essence of what we call existence is to be infinitely various, infinitely ambiguous, and infinitely incapable of being thoroughly grasped. It is apprehended through finite points of view, perspectives, glimpses, opinions, all of which declare their incompleteness of themselves. Now, how indeed can any such thing as existence, whether it is that of one man or of a society, let alone the history of men, offer itself up to any such thing as the abstract ideal, instantly graspable by anyone in its own unique clarity, simplicity, and distinctness?Of course our lives, their precedents, and their destinies are over our heads; the refusal to live in such a domain by submitting it all to the pseudo-clarity of the idea is precisely the choice of the ideological radical. As G. K. Chesterton remarked, the madman is not he who has lost his reason, but he who has lost everything but his reason.

The Good itself, which secretly animates the whole process giving its own majesty and ultimacy to each of its infinite forms—justice, equality, fraternity, freedom—the Good itself appears somewhat remote, in the same position as God the Father, too awful to approach except in more human forms, which adapt themselves to the circumstances of their devotees. And to any dialectician worth his salt, nothing could be clearer than the proposition that from the Good itself nothing whatsoever in particular can possibly follow. It cannot direct conduct, it is the goal of no action, and it can neither criticize nor justify anything whatsoever. Which is not to deny its meaning, but to locate that meaning elsewhere, out of the field of political or personal decision. It must remain behind and out of sight for the political and moral practices of men. Appeals to it can only wreak havoc with decision and the political process, when men are most clearheaded and responsible about their direct concerns.

The various epiphanies of the Good are not much better. Each specifies the Good: equality is not the same as fraternity, nor either the same as freedom, nor any the same as justice, nor any of these the same as excellence. Even in their relative abstractness they are all specifications of that highest principie, the Good. As specifications, each delimits itself from the others; what one all by itself demands is refused by another. To refer or allude to them for ultimate justification then is not to solve a problem but to create one. Or rather to reflect, now in the ideal domain, precisely that ambiguity and pluralism of meanings and values which essentially define the domain of life. It is apparent, therefore, that there can never be any situation at all in existence that is undiscussable, nonnegotiable, and unable to withstand the political process, instead to be solved by “dismantling the Establishment,” “cracking heads” as though they were eggs for an omelette, closing down the governmental institutions made to assist the political process, exploding bombs, or joyfully committing acts of treason. The ironic horror of these dialectical errors is that the Good itself or any of its abstract specifications can enter history immediately only through conspicuous evil. Nor could there be any justification whatsoever for those forms of negotiation in which the parties to the negotiation are committed to contempt for one another. If the immediate introduction of the abstract ideal into history is a form of contempt for living history itself, its agent, the radical spirit, also imagines a certain ideal aura about his head, the aura of contempt for existing life. He loves the “charismatic,” is prepared for or even desires martyrdom; he has an unprecedented life, something more than human, or, in other eyes, less. Inflamed by the abstract, he pays the price by sacrificing that life to the abstract, accomplishing whatever of value he might accomplish only at random, by accident, and as a by-product of his ultimately metaphysical revolt. It would not be difficult to make comparisons with artistic “geniuses” of the Wagnerian stamp, possessed by their Muse, and therewith authorized to do as they wished; but where this may be “interesting” in the arts, it is little short of a horror in political existence. The confusion of aesthetic with moral categories that Kierkegaard exposed in its absolute depth continues to generate new tragedies, in which the radical spirit lives not so much in the presence of God as in that of news media and dreams of his own role in posthumous histories; what he has forgotten and where he misfires is precisely that domain, human existence, where his true function should have been envisaged in the first place.

The alternative to all this has already been adumbrated. It will look “immoral” to the radical fanatic, but not especially noteworthy to men of some practical experience and responsibility in life, since it is what they do anyway and by sound instinct. The alternative to the theoretical life of the radical is not, needless to say, yet another theory or ideology, which would be no alternative at all. But the alternative begins with the realization that no sensible or wise decisions can proceed out of theory or of reasons that can be adequately stated. Reason, so understood, has always been the hallmark of the “theoretical man,” and at the same time the source of his manic irrelevance to practical decision. Ideology may be appealing to the young and the intelligentsia, who rarely proceed from talk to practical decision, or, if they do, can only act violently. But it looks either foolish or insane to those who must both act and hold themselves responsible for the consequences. The truth is that the man quick with reasons is used only by practical men on public occasions to give easy rhetorical formulations for decisions made strictly on other grounds, grounds always too complex to state. The “intellectual” then “names” a decision already made or “argues” for it by subsuming it under some more or less popular moral category, whether “just” or “unjust.” None of this, of course, has anything whatsoever to do with the pertinent thinking behind the decision. That thinking, if it has any seriousness at all, involves matters far too complex, far too embedded in experience, risk, and hope to ever be formulable. Political thinking when responsible is always within a schema of the whole, not so rigid as to be insensitive to its own limits, yet not so loose as to offer no direction. It must envisage schematically the whole of political life since political society is not an agglomeration of separable persons, classes, acts, or moments, but aims at least at a whole society in movement. Political decision then must not merely look at the simple question of “spending more for health,” but also know that spending more for health is spending less for defense, welfare, education, and the rest. Analogously, a physician would be incompetent if he treated one organ at the expense of the others, eventually the organism. Nor is an organism a summation or agglomeration of organs, but a single living creature with a mind and purposes in life, a past and a presumptive future. The ideological doctor could only be a quack; reducing all illnesses to disorders of the spine, heart, diet, or elimination, he looks simpleminded. Taking over the whole patient and reforming his life radically, he is nothing but a tyrant of another, seeking to unmake the past, reconceive the present, and compose for his patient a life according to a scenario envisaged by himself. But physicians since Aesclepius have known perfectly well that their arts only assist the natural life of the body to maintain itself; it is not to generate monstrosities by favoring one organ, nor is it to produce a wholly new life by a magical art. If true physicians then humbly cooperate with a natural life already afoot, how could true political thinkers do otherwise in a domain even more complex and even less amenable to theory?

And so true political decision is circumspect; it involves that knowledge of the feasible which only experience can suggest, a sense of the time required, of what good may be lost with every new one chosen, a sense of alternatives, limitations, possibilities, a sense of continuity since it is only within continuous experience that experience itself can count for anything. All of this amounts to a patience which knows that not every evil in life is remediable by political action, and yet some are. Good political sense, the only one that can be effective, could be given an indefinite number of formulations; what those formulations aim at is indeed a sense and not an idea, and a sense is embodied only in a man of a given stamp. His “sense” is not in the least a dialectical expertise but something born of both experience and its experiential critique, involving abilities and experiences neither transferable nor teachable nor even comprehensible by that abstract reason which all possess as their birthright. To the radical spirit, obviously, these are the most questionable abilities of all; born out of historical life and pertinent only to it, they must be vulnerable to any abstract critique descending from the a priori; political wisdom as such seems forever compromised to that radical and abstract revolution against historical political life itself. Little wonder that political ability has little charm for the young and for those maddened by abstractions; it is beyond their reach, whereas abstract justice, equality, fraternity can be grasped in a flash by anyone, experienced or not, and with that flash the radical achieves the conclusion to all possible discussions.

In effect, then, the second phenomenon in the present moral distress is the frighteningly abstract character of the gods who have maddened the radical. Being abstract, they have no history, and they can enter history only through violence, and, being abstractly rational, they can have no truck with that slow, ambiguous, tentative yet stubborn sense of human affairs that defines political wisdom.

HOW TO BECOME ALIENATED

There are friends, enemies, acquaintances, the indifferent, and then something else: the “alien.” Has one ever heard so much talk before about “alienation”? With Hegel, as everyone who has read him knows, alienation as well as reconciliation take on their full metaphysical depth; but then the contemporary “alienated” cannot read Hegel. Their alienation would then appear as nothing more than a deplorable prolongation of an adolescent disease, except now it wishes to justify itself. Not merely are they alienated in some sense in which they ought to get over it, but they ought to be alienated, everyone ought to be alienated, and those who are not absolutely alienated are hypocrites. Society and everyone in it ought to be “restructured” so that the presently alienated would find themselves home at last.

The immodesty of the attitude needs no comment, but then modesty is only appropriate within a society recognized as a source of values within which one takes one’s place and from which one draws a significant portion of the values of one’s life and to which therefore loyalty and piety are appropriate. But no, all that belongs to the unreconstructed consciousness. Today is the day for a “rational critique of society.” From what standpoint such a critique is to be operated is most obscure indeed, although for any ordinary mind it should be the first order of the day. What could be more obvious than that there cannot be any “rational critique” of society? Which is not to say that there can be no critique at all of it, but that that critique cannot proceed out of reason or anything remotely like it. Reason could conceivably only operate within society, clearing up this or that, finding more appropriate ways of doing things, extending the coherence of laws, eliminating patent injustices, and so forth; but for reason to wish to dismantle this society or create a new one is for it seriously to mistake its rightful powers, blinding itself in hubris to both its origins and its proper scope. What reason can do, clearly, is to see, to infer, to examine and illuminate. What it cannot do is to create anything, decide or choose anything. Even the choice to reason at all is itself not a choice by reason. And it follows that while reason certainly can find this incoherent with that, it cannot itself choose either coherence or incoherence. It is therefore in no authentic position to reconstruct anything whatsoever. It can do its best to light up choices but that is all; and there is a further serious question whether even this is not in principle too much for anything called reason. The previous section developed this theme. In any event, and for whatever it is worth, men have only very rarely chosen to live solely by the light of reason, have only very rarely chosen to rationalize their society, preferring always a more incoherent, flexible confusion of things to that tidy coherence which is all that is available to even the most subtle and comprehensive reason. Has not every rationalized society appeared before and afterward as nothing but a concealed tyranny? During its rise it lives on hope; when that hope begins to be fulfilled, the first cracks in the rational world appear.

Back to the alienated ones, for a moment conspicuous in urban centers throughout the world, wearing their new uniform of artificial rags, hair tangled in Gordian knots, faces sullen and morose, social gestures full of the uncertainty whether even to shake hands with the Enemy or not, perceiving hypocrisy everywhere, and confirming their alienation by stealing rather than working, lying in order to play the Establishment’s game, and living for as long as possible off the effluvia of affluence. Their favorite music is too loud to be listened to, a form of aural assault whose purpose is the obliteration of anything but the consciousness of itself. It is of course a sublime protest, but against what? And for what? But the latter question hardly bothers the alienated ones: “first the revolution, then we shall decide what we shall do. . . Against what? A certain embarrassment flushes the face when one hears the list of horrors against which the revolution revolts: a consumer society, television, Madison Avenue, alcohol, regular hours, marriage, wearing clothing at all, a conventional smile, private property, differentiations between male and female, teacher and student, young and old, rich and poor, white and black, or, in fact, the category of differentiation in any manifestation. Here the flower children of a few years back enacted in advance what the activists only vaguely dream about. All is One, the flower children saw, garlanding the police with wild posies. At least the flower children were not alienated, so long as they could float away into Lotus Land; it was waking up that did it. But the activists manage to maintain their alienation by a certain mental process I shall examine below. Not that there have not always been and always will be more than enough objects from which they may feel alienated. Still, perhaps all those objects have a single meaning: authority! It can be perceived everywhere: the obstinate authority of the past, and particularly the present, where authority can actually be seen and felt in the form of the police, professors, males, whites, the civilized, the President, parents, and so on virtually ad infinitum. Higher and Lower can be seen everywhere; is it not detestable, particularly to the Lower, and must therefore the revolution not be total and permanent? So it seems to the Lumpenintelligenzen who, although they call upon Nietzsche in their ignorance, fail to perceive that it was the failure of the Will to Power, the failure of discrimination, by which Nietzsche characterized the modern age of nihilism and vacuity. But such matters can hardly touch those who do not dig either reading or thought. But the paradise dreamed of by the alienated can hardly even be called “childish”; the blessed happiness of children, as we recollect it, was possible only under the protective wings of the parents, and known to be so by every child worthy of the name. No matter: the hubris of egalitarian Reason knows no bounds, and who is to say whether even the most fundamental conditions of humane existence could not be swept away, leaving its scourges with what would be an unprecedented desert. But of course even a minimal sense of existence is not the strong point of the revolutionary moralists. The millennia of human existence have exhibited in an infinite variety of forms always the old basic conditions of hierarchy, authority, and differentiations of role, taste, and style. Yet who is to say that we cannot abolish authority forever? And lurking around among the many hidden premises of that view is the most dangerous one of all: if it can be done, it should be done, or at least tried. The total lack of any existential anchoring in this mad dream or rational critique need hardly be emphasized; but perhaps what does deserve attention is the inevitable paradox, known well to Hegel, that unanchored reason is in fact not unanchored at all: it is simply blind to its own anchor, which now in unexamined shape proceeds to exert its own particular will. In the present case, alienated from society and refusing to be the illuminating organ for society, the active force of reason well hidden from reason itself turns out to be nothing but a rather miserable form of egotism. It will speak the language of reason, justice, democracy, and the Future; but the organ speaking is the individual ego, which would never have surprised Nietzsche. Where indeed is the hypocrisy?

Why then the alienation from society? Simply because society is there, already alive and going; but where do I fit in? It has to be sure, a place for me but the I may have a higher one in the new society of which I can envisage nothing except that in it I will be more loved, respected, and honored than now. And, raving on, should there not be a special punishment devised for the present happy few, some special humiliations devised for the exploiters, expropriators, imperialists, racists, those hated Authorities, who are the “cancer of history”?

The rage against Authority can like all spiritual phenomena be understood in a multiplicity of ways both accidental and essential. Here we shall content ourselves with a phenomenological understanding, that is, with an effort to articulate what that rage rages against as seen in reflection and not by itself, since rage never reflects and therefore has only a naive understanding of itself. In a word, we shall try to understand it better than it does itself, and not through any help from psychoanalysis or any genetic interpretation, which could never get at the essence of the lived phenomenon. How can the very sense of spiritual phenomena be disclosed by tracing any phenomena back to infantile manifestations, manifestations of what but the very phenomenon that seeks clarification? And so, for whatever value it might have, I do not perceive any great clarification of the rage against Authority to be found in prior rages against Father; if it is the same, where is the clarification; and if it is different, how does it help to clarify anything? Why indeed should anyone rage against Papa? And if one does, then what does that mean? We must return to the essence of the act itself.

To rage against Authority, first of all, is not a fatality but rather a choice. No one is obliged to do so either by way of early experience, genes, sex, minority in age, citizenship, or any situation whatsoever; nor is there any a priori obligation to do so that derives from the Good or any defensible moral principle whatsoever. The principle it most usually invokes is Freedom; but if the freedom in question is a freedom from authority, it is synonymous with anarchy, and anarchy as a guiding principle is on any level of being—from the atom on up through a thing, plant, animal, human being to a society—synonymous with the death of that unit. Since any entity is obviously a unity of parts, for each part to dissociate itself from the unity is for the unity to dissolve; but the dissolution can never stop if it proceeds ahead on principle: the so-called “part” is itself a unity of its own parts, each of which, claiming independence and freedom, now runs free, and itself becomes subject to the same ontological decomposition. If the process is arrested at any particular stage, the ordering and dominating principle that stops the disintegrating process is vulnerable to the charge from its parts that it is “authoritarian”; by what “right” indeed does it arrogate to itself the power to arrest universal disintegration?

If the rights of anarchy are preposterous, metaphysically understood, they are terrifying socially enacted. To refuse accreditation to social authority by the cultivation of alienation, under the madcap of freedom and equality, is of course to remove oneself either legally or inwardly from the fundamental basis of citizenship. I, as an individual, obviously am not free from the legal authority of those above me; nor am I “equal” to them in their office. To become alienated from Authority and from its consequent principle of hierarchy may sound exhilarating to the alienated ones, each of whom now feels himself superior to what is rejected; but the superiority is the superiority of the empty over the full, the indeterminate over the determinate, the possible over the actual. And now if the profoundly alienated, having experienced their elation, would begin to fill their void: create, for example, out of their own private and untutored imaginations something called a society, moreover a society with its own traditions, rules, and expectations, and then a new language, new and unheard-of thoughts, or a vast and unsurveyable past of the arts, sciences, and social custom, in short, if they would complete their work, they might have the chilling experience of the vapidity of their project as well as the insufficiency of their means. To command others to divest themselves of authority, hierarchy, direction, control, as well as the civilization possible only under such circumstances, ranges from the criminal to the childishly foolish. Acceptance of authority and hierarchy, both political and cultural, is of course the beginning both of wisdom and of any informed freedom that could be useful to either the individual or his society.

ON MAKING ONESELF MISERABLE

We now have before our eyes three phenomena, or rather three faces of a single phenomenon: a group of intellectual contemporaries who have chosen to turn themselves into moralists of society; who have chosen to think with the least appropriate tools for even such unsmiling tasks as moral judgment, abstractions of conscience rather than concrete sense, experience, and piety; and who finally, or perhaps at the very start, have adopted the attitude of alienation as the only one morally justified. A mad circle indeed and open to anyone who wishes to adopt it. Happily there are other honorable ways to live.

But to return to our theme, if the present radical generation finds itself morally distressed, it has made itself so, and this observer would like to add “too bad.” There are and always will be concrete effective things to do either to maintain or to improve society, but the hysterically alienated moralist is not exactly in a position to do them. What is more pitiful than the tear-stained faces of young demonstrators when, a week or so after the demonstration, everything has remained the same? And what more depressing than the opposite reaction to these exercises in futility, the radical become cynical? If you can’t beat them, join them; and the “them” he joins not by accident turn out to be the least responsible members of society, those “self-seekers” the radical used to see everywhere, where they were and where they were not.

There remains the question of phenomenological motive: why does consciousness choose something like the attitude sketched? To ask it is useless: it will only repeat the selected list of real or imagined ills, whose evil “justifies” moral condemnation, or worse, evils which of themselves demand the moralistic attitude. But is it so? Psychologically, moralism is “catching,” at least in our society; to resist looks like a confession of indifference or complicity. How many can resist the sermons continually preached by Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Dr. Spock, Mary McCarthy, and other well-known political sages in the New York Review of Books ? Or, if that seems too easy, the earnest undergraduates, who two years ago weren’t even reading the newspapers? And then there is always one’s professional association, where year after year, one finds revolutionary advice offered to all, but chiefly to the President on such matters as war and peace, strategy, and various suggestions to who knows whom, deploring a variety of deplorable things, always of course in the name of morality and professional competence. Well, this too can be resisted.

But the question remains why a whole generation has chosen to sicken itself, to alienate itself from the one life granted it to live, and to render itself inefficacious for any genuine solution to genuine problems. Since that from which it has chosen to alienate itself is society as a whole, the Establishment, and even History, its alienation is in effect metaphysical, and not to disappear with the disappearance of any specific problem, such as the Vietnam war, the poverty pocket of Appalachia, or pollution from automobile exhaust. These then are not causes but occasions for the ignition of the passions in question, and when they fade away, there would be no reason in the world why others could not be found. The objects toward which passions direct themselves are not the causes of those passions; passions are responses of persons to objects, and the source of the passion is only to be found in the free choice of the man choosing to respond in that particular way. The present generation and its friends have chosen to adopt the attitude of moral distress; their only solace in their continual frustration seems to be a final extinction of personal responsibility, sinking into the Movement, where all swing and sway together, and no one is personally responsible since a Movement is nobody and turns all its members into nobodies. After the Movement, the communes; and, hopefully, after the communes a return to the family and society that once seemed so wicked and hateful, and then the bitter or amused memories of what it all was: an empty possibility, chosen perhaps simply because it was possible, new, groovy, and exciting, masking itself as moral and leaving behind not a trace of permanent value. It is already beginning to pall; and it was good that so much was written about it; posterity otherwise would not have been able to believe that so many otherwise intelligent people of good will could have said so many foolish or wicked things, actually believed them for a time, or that its more pathological devotees could have actually so ruined their own and others’ lives by living these nightmares. Intellectually speaking, it is nothing but a repetition of some chapters of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind, sometimes carried to paroxysm; existentially speaking, it left its tragedies and ruins, which are not repetitions of anything, but final.

It is hard indeed to find anything whatsoever endearing in these contemporary radical escapades, particularly when played by those old enough to know better. So long as it remains talk, more good-humored talk is all that is called for; when it passes into bombings, treason, and personal violence, good humor would be silly, and those innocent of the knowledge of the power and majesty of their society must, willy-nilly, be made to feel it. If imagination can be gloriously frivolous, existence is not.

For one who is not in the least a friend of the Movement or of radical ideals, there remains the somewhat sour pleasure of a minor alienation itself, that is, an alienation from those who have alienated themselves. And as a compensation, a responsibility possible only to those who join no movements, and find their own friends and kindred spirits here and there, individually, and also in other seemingly happier times. The radical movement and the radical spirit are the maddenings produced in susceptible minds by the abstract idea; against them stands the spirit that remains loyal to its society, not as it forever might be, but as it is, with its own internal motives for stability, change, and improvement. In the long run the dispute is over the precious: the abstract that never has or never will be, against what is, existing men and their existing society, which did not come into being in an instant, which is fragile, which is not to be dismantled by the unexperienced and fanatical, and which is the sole context for values of this life.