BOOKS The Progressive Syndrome

By CONSTANTINE FITZGIBBON

ACLIClig of contemporary political writing is that ideologies are the modern equivalents of religions. Like all clichés, this one contains its glimmer of truth. An ideology can be a substitute in Christ's sense when he spoke of offering a child a stone in place of a loaf. But, of course, the stone and the loaf have no properties in common, any more than Nazi anti-Semitism or Marxist class-hatred have with the Christian re- ligion.

A religion is concerned with faith and usually With values. An ideology is a closed system of intellectual thought within which certain intellec- tual assumptions are beyond dispute: these assumptions provide the premises from which all further argument proceeds. Once the basic assumption or assumptions of an ideology are removed, the whole edifice collapses. It was thus not possible to be partly a Nazi. And when Nazism collapsed, its collapse, like everything else about it, was total. It will be the same with Communism as an ideology, though perhaps not as an economic system. We know that ex- Communists are usually anti-Communists: when their pseudo-faith goes, it goes totally. One can detect symptoms of a similar reversal on a national scale in the satellite states and even in Russia. This is, of course, because the basic assumptions of Nazism and Communism were false.

Mr. James Burnham, in his Suicide of the West,* makes a very strong case for his thesis that contemporary liberalism (which is Ameri- can usage: we would say progressivism) is an ideology comparable in respect of its illogicality and the closed nature of its mental processes to those others. He lists thirty-nine articles of belief to all of which a simon-pure progressive Must subscribe. And he claims that the reactions of such a person (nor does he hesitate to name some of them) to any event are predictable, as are those of the newspapers and periodicals they control. It is, indeed, extremely easy to foresee What the line will be in, say, Tribune or the New Statesman, easier even than to forecast what the Communist line will be, for this must be Periodically modified to suit the needs of Russian or Chinese policy, while no harsh breath from the real World need blow through the cloistered chambers of the pure progressive mind.

It is not surprising that progressivism makes a great appeal to a certain type of academic. They discuss the real world with all the arro- gance, of a self-satisfied don putting Shelley or Shakespeare in his place. And they regard their manner of thought as being so self-evidently true that there is a fortieth, a key article of the Progressive creed: it is that all men of good will must think as they do. The fact that they believe this is the strongest evidence that they are the Prisoners of an ideology, of a closed system of thought.

They also assume that all coherent thought is itself ideological, and they therefore, like the Communists: tend to lump all those they dis- *Cape, 30s.

agree with into counter-ideological groups. Although they really know better, they do not hesitate to call men of the right, such as Barry Goldwater, fascists. They have even invented a milder conservative ideology called 'the Estab- lishment.' This lumping together into camps of those with whom they disagree can, among pro- gressives inclined to paranoia, produce the belief that they are confronted and threatened by a right-wing conspiracy controlled perhaps by the 'Pentagon generals' or 'the gnomes of Zurich.' And from this in turn derives the fact that there is so much hatred in their writing. Bertrand Russell's regular contributions to The Times are only a very spectacular example of this.

We have seen how Soviet Communism, while pretending still to draw its entire sustenance from the holy well of Marxism-Leninism, is, in fact, being modified beyond recognition. We saw how Hitler's racism did not prevent him from plan- ning the extermination of the Dutch. But the pure progressive, as opposed to the practical politician of the left, has little need of change. Thus for him colonialism is not only evil, but is defined as the domination of men with dark skins by men with fair ones. The colonialisms of a Sukarno or a Nasser do not fit his ideological assumptions and are dismissed as irrelevancies.

But the basic premise of all, and perhaps the most erroneous and dangerous, is that all men are improvable and that human error and crime are due solely to external causes. This is taken a stage further in the thirtieth of Burnham's articles: 'There are no Significant differences in intellectual, moral or civilising capacity among human races and ethnic types.' They do not go quite so far as the Communists and maintain that all men are perfectible, and they arc not so crude as to ascribe all human failings to economic oppression, but they do dismiss the concept of Original -Sin totally. Scientism plus egalitarian- ism have led them to the assumption that all men are 'curable' and all problems soluble, every- where. As somebody once remarked, that eminent progressive, the late Eleanor Roosevelt, regarded the whole globe as one vast slum-clearance pro- ject. Some of her heirs would even dynamite the slums, would invade South Africa in the name of brotherly love.

That the term 'liberal' should be applied to such people, that they should apply it to them- selves, is indeed paradoxical. Mr. Gladstone's comments would be illuminating. The Liberals believed and believe in certain specific freedoms, above all in economic freedom as exemplified by free trade and a free market. The progressives believe in restraint, both of personal freedom in what they decide are the interests of the com- munity and of its individual members, and of economic freedom both national and inter- national.

The progressives are, in fact, the party of regimentation. Since they know best, it follows as A follows B, that if they order you, say, to stop smoking cigarettes they are depriving you of your smoking for your own good, and you should be grateful to them for doing so. A true

Liberal, such as Don Salvator de Madariaga, is a really international figure: a true progressive regards all foreigners of European blood with the deepest distrust. In fact the progressives are not the heirs of the Liberals but, remotely, of Oliver Cromwell's people. They, too, would if they could appoint sergeant-major generals to make us all good and healthy, though they would not bother to make us God-fearing any more. And if there is any link with the old, real Liberals' it lies in the anomalous figure of David Lloyd George.

Of him it has been said that he passed straight from socialism to the leadership of a Conservative government without ever being a Liberal at all. His meteoric political career went on. By the end he and Adolf Hitler were mutual admirers. Thus, today, do the more extreme progressives express a certain admiration for Mao Tse-tung (he has brought what they regard as 'order' to China, just as Hitler did to Germany) and an almost pathological hatred of Chiang Kai-shek, who is the West's ally.

For behind all their talk of improving our society there lies a profound dislike of what that society really is. Hence their desire to alter it by any means, not excluding, in some cases, force. The gulf between a true progressive and a true Liberal is much greater than that be- tween a progressive and Mr. Colin Jordan. But because of his blinkers, no progressive could ever see this.

In the past, when the west ran the world, the emotions of the progressives were not only harmless but at times positively beneficent. They served occasionally to. restrain the more aggres- sive individuals and nations from using their powers in ways and for purposes that accord- ing to western values were immoral. While imperialism lasted, the best of the liberal pro- gressives fulfilled a function not dissimilar to that of the priests, particularly of the Jesuits, during the heyday of the Spanish-American em- pire. And in foreign affairs many, though by no means all, of them were swift to condemn Hitler's methods, even if they were slow to draw the necessary conclusion from such condemna- tion owing to their pacifist tendencies, and even slower to condemn Stalin's. They were never, as they vociferously claim, the 'conscience' of the west, but they did act as a restraining force, and at times an explosively expansive west has profited from such restraint.

But now? Their function now seems to be no longer to restrain an expansive, aggressive western society, but to weaken and even paralyse a defensive west which has withdrawn within its own ethnic limits almost everywhere and which is itself threatened, not only by two brands of Communism, but also by African and Asian nationalisms that aim at 'imperialism.' They carry out this deplorable function in numerous ways, well resumed in James Burnham's book. One is direct restraint on their own governments, either from within or without. Another is direct or indirect restraint on allied western governments.

But a third, and perhaps the most sinister, takes place in our schools, institutes of higher edu- cation and the mass media, and is the deliberate undermining of that morality, based on Chris- tian teaching, which provides the values that the west has relied on for more than a millennium. If these are finally abandoned in favour of the sterile and usually untrue clichés of the pro- gressives' creed, then the west will truly be ripe for suicide. In such circumstances, however, murder would seem to be the more likely cause of its demise. ,