Hard shell and soft head
Kenneth Minogue
Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery Barrington Moore, Jr (Allen Lane £3.50) A few years ago, during the student troubles at LSE, I had an American student who unwittingly taught me what radicalism was all about. "I used to be naive," she said, looking up at me with soft brown eyes, " I used to think there was no connection between racial prejudice, Vietnam, poverty . . ." It was clear she had suffered an exhilarating conversion from liberal benevolence to militancy: she had at last identified the Devil. He had many faces but one essence which must be smashed by a revolution before men could become truly human. Professor Moore's essay brought back vividly that now rather outmoded world of ' naives' and ' militants.'
It is clear that the militants have the stronger moral position: the world continues to be full of suffering, the revolution never really takes place, and there stands the militant, granite-like in his righteousness and contemptuous of the tinkering of 'naives.' On the other hand, even righteousness can pall, and when reaction eventually sets in (as it always does) the ' naives ' can come forward again and advocate reform from within. They need, of course, to guard their realism by emphasising their pessimism, but if they are cautious enough, they need not fear the contempt of the militant.
This is Professor Moore's situation. A distinguished scholar, sound on Soviet politics and suggestive in earlier work about the processes of social change, he has now fallen prey to an urge as profound among social scientists as that to play Hamlet among actors: punditry. He has produced an essay on the biggest of all questions: why are human beings such a miserable lot, and above all, why do they do so many nasty things to each other? He claims a certain originality for his theme in concentrating on misery rather than happiness, for it is well known that one man's meat is another man's poison and therefore men will never agree on what makes them happy. On the other hand, few humans enjoy being burned over a slow flame, being starved to death or living lives of quiet desperation. Professor Moore advances the negative focus of his subject like a man who has found a rock-solid value on which we can all agree.
The trouble with rock-solid values in social theory, however, is that they always turn out to be promoted truisms. This defect in the very nature of the exercise is here intensified by the fact that Professor Moore, the friend of and collaborator with Herbert Marcuse, has an imagination stuffed with radical imagery. When he wishes to call up a picture of barbarous suffering, what pops into his head, is the phrase "napalmed children." Why does napalm always seem to fall on children? Clearly, because children constitute a more effective sentimental image. But such lapses into cliche hardly bode well in an essay which offers to conduct us on a tour d'horizon of the human predicament. Similarly, the reader may legitimately expect an avoidance of muddled pseudoprofundity, but we soon stumble across the radical dogma that: "The refusal to be concerned, with political issues is in itself a political stance . . ." And in canvassing alternative possibilities, Professor Moore settles for the empty abstraction of ' reactionary ' or ' revolutionary ' or 'reformist.' Any boat would sink that laboured along with such a dreary conceptual cargo.
Professor Moore is, then, the soft head of ' naïveté ' trying to poke its vulnerable head out of the hard tortoise shell of militancy. He confesses to being pessimistic about the future because the world is in a terrible mess, but all the obvious ways out seem to lead on to disaster. Like my American student, he takes monolithic fancies like 'imperialism ' and 'the system' perfectly seriously, but he does realise that they conceal a few difficulties. He can remark, apparently with a straight face, that: "In the advanced countries the automobile, the household washing machine, even the television set, do not owe their ubiquity, I have come to believe, to the formation of taste by a corporate elite that needs to jam goods down the consumers' throats in order to maintain its profits and hegemony. Rather they owe their popularity to the fact that they free people, at least in the short run, from dependence on others." He has even come to think that much of the poverty of the third world cannot be directly attributed to American imperialism. These and other statements of opinion, which have about them the air of recantation, open up for him the possibility that significant changes might be brought about by peaceful political means. Thi; leads him directly to the statement of what might be counted as the credo of the ' naives ': "I believe very firmly that unless future radical movements can somehow synthesise the achievements of liberalism with those of revolutionary radicalism, the results for humanity will be tragic." But he is not profoundly hopeful, for he is torn between unhappiness at what he calls 'the crimes of law and order" (an expression used without any sense of paradox) and the blood and boredom of actual revolutionary regimes. This is a bad time for men of goodwill.
The alert reader will already have recognised what lies behind this kind of argument. It is American navel-gazing in the idiom of social science, sparked off by the Vietnam war and the social disorders of the 'sixties. The early chapters of Professor Moore's book are tentative; they jump superficially from theme to theme because he is waiting to arrive at his discussion of America. Is human aggres sion innate? He does not really think so.
Would the technological conquest of scarcity lead to the end of human misery?
He has read enough Hobbes to doubt it. What should intellectuals do about it? On this, we are back with the radical litany that "the pursuit of knowledge unavoidably has political consequences." Professor Moore admits that they often cannot be foreseen, but nonetheless "professional thinkers should see to it that these consequences are as far as possible humane and constructive ones, that they reduce rather than increase the amount of misery and cruelty at large in this world." This is sound enough as utilitarian moralism, but with curious Marxist overtones.
And when we do arrive at the discussion of America (which takes up nearly half the essay) the conclusion hardly cuts deeper. Professor Moore's starting point is the radical image of America as a country using enormous power for destructive purposes, and scattering but a few sops to its own poor and suffering. He invents the term "predatory democracy" to describe this situation, and goes on to argue that the radical picture is an exaggeration: there are possibilities of peaceful change in America, and most people do in fact continue to believe in such possibilities.
It is always the destiny of the moderate to displease most people: and this is especially true where moderation is still imprisoned in the terminology of extremism. Professor Moore's book will be deplored by militants, and it is not likely to be much liked by American patriots and conservatives. To be a ' naive ' is to have achieved at least a certain openmindedness, but there is a lot more thinking to be done before it looks like a real understanding of current realities.
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