The politics of disintegration
Christopher Booker
The current, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Encounter contains an article by Leszek Kolakowski, who was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw until he was dismissed in the repression of 1968, entitled 'How to be a ConservativeLiberal-Socialist'. Professor Kolakowski's purpose is not to reflect the mere parochial confusion which might at present be afflicting any of us in this country, as we face the near-impossibility of casting a vote with conviction for any of the three major parties at the next election. His concern is somewhat wider. He has correctly singled out the three great political ideologies which, broadly speaking, have dominated the Western world in the past two hundred years. He has perceived that, in terms of their general critique and highest aspriations, they each put forward a plausible and attractive view of society, to which any rational, ,humane and realistic man might give assent, without abandoning reason, humanity or realism. He argues that at the highest level there is thus no insurmountable contradiction between the three ideologies; in other words that it is quite possible to be a 'conservativeliberal-socialist'. We can all therefore envisage a point of universal agreement, and those political divisions which have our world so desperately on the rack no longer need arise.
Now why is it that, even if Professor Kolakowski's jeu d'esprit is not meant entirely seriously, such wishful thinking seems so infinitely melancholy? It is no good simply saying that, by choosing to display the best of the conservative, liberal and socialist viewpoints to make them seem compatible, when we know that they are not, the Professor is being unrealistic. After all, there are few societies or polities in the world which do not already display a combination of at least two of his ideologies. Russia, for instance, is socialist and conservative, if not liberal. America is liberal and conservative, if not socialist. Mrs Thatcher's brand of conservatism is cer tainly as much liberal as it is conservative. And one might even argue that the reason why Britain is still in many ways probably a pleasanter country to live in than almost any other is precisely because our way of life still does manage to preserve a fragile balance between all three.
The real reason why I believe Professor Kolakowski's vision of a Conservative Liberal-Socialist Millenium is so sad is twofold. The first is that he has fallen into one of the greatest traps which any political philosopher can ever fall into, which is to attempt to discuss ideologies in the abstract, without taking account either of the his torical context in which they arise, or of the fact that they are always consequently in the process of evolution. The second is that he has fallen into that even greater trap which is to judge ideologies by their conscious aspirations — thus failing to take account of by far the most important aspect of the way they actually work in practice, i.e., the degree to which their adherents automatically become subject to unconscious factors.
Let me elaborate. For the past two hundred years, Western society has been dominated in countless ways by one great ideological conflict, subsuming all the others — the conflict between 'Left' and 'Right'. From the time of the French Revolution and the rise of Romanticism onwards, we can see this opposition at work all through European Society — in politics, in the evolution of art, in social mores: the 'Right', broadly speaking, standing for the past, for established values, for tradition, for hierarchies of age and class; the 'Left' standing for the future, for the overturning of tradition and established values, for the dismantling of all forms of hierarchy in the name of all those groups, workers, the young, women, colonialised peoples and anyone who could be seen under the old system' as an underdog.
The supreme value of the 'Right', in all its different manifestations, is 'order'. In politics this gives rise to the ideology of conservatism, based on the importance of stability, the family, traditional morality, discipline, the rule of law and so forth — all of which things, as no one can deny, have been supremely important to the human race since the beginning of civilisation. But the whole point about the conservative view of the world is that, while it may seen all very well on the level of conscious aspiration, it has another side to it which is by no means so attractive. The trouble with a belief in stability, tradition, law and order is that it may only too easily carry with it a tendency to stagnation, repression, hypocrisy and complacent egotism — in short, lifelessness of a peculiarly oppressive kind. Of course the conservative, in his cosy state of psychological one-sidedness, may well not be aware of these things: precisely because they are the inevitable unconscious underside of the right-wing view of the world.
But the progressive, or `left-winger' is aware of them all right. Indeed he sees almost nothing else about the `right-winger' except the dark, oppressive, dead underside — and in opposition he proclaims the values Qf 'life' and liberty: freedom from oppressive hierarchies, freedom from traditions and conventions, freedom for the underdog, freedom for the individual human spirit to explore, in the arts, in morals, in the realm of the intellect, without being cribbed, cabined and confined in any way by the dead old 'order'. Thus, in short, arise all the life-enhancing glories of the ideology known as liberalism.
Again, on the level of conscious aspiration, it all may seem attractive enough. But liberalism too has its unconscious underside. Without being aware of what is happening to him, the liberal (as we have seen in the evolution of politics, morals and the arts over the past century) is carried forward willy-nilly to an ever greater and deeper sense of rebellion against everything to do with order, framework and hierarchy. What still seems entirely acceptable to one generation (such as, say, the public inadmissibility of four-letter words) becomes to the next an intolerable restraint. Decade by decade, successive waves of liberals see themselves as battling heroically against the dead structures of the Establishment for new rights, new freedoms (whether they take the form of votes for women or atonality), only to find that there is always still one last great barrier to cross, one last oppressive obstacle to be dismantled, before the promised land is reached — until eventually the liberal is driven by the unconscious logic of his belief in freedom to the view that there should be no restraint on the individual at all: that all divisiveness, all 'elitism', all exploitation must be abolished, because every human being must be considered, in external and material terms, equal. But the nearer he reaches this point, the more does the liberal find himself caught up in a rapidly closing vice of selfcontradiction. Because in order to achieve all these admirable humanitarian ends, he has increasingly had to summon up a mighty engine to ensure that they are pursued, the only instrument known to man which can enforce by law the protection of the underdog, the abolition of exploitation, and the supervision of every detail of social life to ensure that equality and fairness prevail. That machine of ultimate compulsion is of course the bureaucratic State — and the closer it comes into view as the only means whereby the liberal can achieve his purPoses, the more does the see-saw begin to tip from liberalism towards socialism.
As the vice closes upon him, the liberal to a greater or lesser extent becomes aware of his predicament, and he can then do one of two things. He can either attempt to run backwards, to some kind of fragile compromise with conservatism (a very popular refuge in our own time, although one usually demanding a fair degree of wishful thinking and self-deception). Or he moves forward, more or less consciously, to that fascinating point of political evolution Which we have seen so often in our century Where the extreme libertarian be ig.ns to dissolve, gradually or quite suddenly, into the totalitarian socialist. Consciously, of course, he is still likely to be proclaiming the Slogans of his liberal past. He is still against exploitation, oppression, imperalism, bourgeois morality, hierarchy and all the trappings of the old order. In fact he never becomes fully totalitarian until he reaches some position of power (even if that is only as Chairman of a local authority housing t committee). But when he does so, w happens? As we have seen so clearly from the experience of Soviet Russia, he sets up a society more obviously based on exploitation, oppression, imperialism, bourgeois morality, hierarchy and the trappings of the Past than any in history. Now why does this happen? It is not enough just to say that the totalitarian Socialist has become prey to unconscious factors — although clearly anyone who, in the name of liberation, humanity and brotherhood, proceeds to set up a brutal imperialist dictatorship must be suffering from some fairly severe form of psychic split. But the question is —what has become unconscious? Let us recall where the whole process started: with the conservative becoming one-sided, through his elevation Of the socially essential principle of 'order' into his supreme value — thus losing touch with 'life'. In psychic terms, order, like power, is a 'male' concept (which is why extreme right-wing societies, like South Africa, are dominated by the male values of 'Father). What is lacking from such a one-sided state are the feminine qualities of feeling and sympathy, the very qualities which began to well up in Europe at the time of the French Revolution and the rise of Romanticism as the driving force of liberal protest against the harsh, orderand-power dominated values of reactionary establishments and the new materialistic industrialistn. Indeed the whole 'Left-Right' Split in society over the past two hundred years can be analysed precisely in these psychic terms, as a split between 'male' and 'female' functions. But the point is that the human psyche is so constituted that, as someone becomes 'one-sided' (in either direction), the functions of the 'other side' do not just vanish altogether. They become repressed into the unconscious, where they take on a dark or, in technical language, 'inferior' form. As the 'feminine', feelinginspired liberal-romantic revolt against the harsh impositions of a one-sided, dead order gathers way, the 'male' elements of the psyche do not disappear. They slip down into the liberal's unconscious. His conscious mind is increasingly taken up with visions of a free, anarchic world, in which everyone has been 'liberated' from the restrictions of order, to enjoy the maximum degree of self-realisation. But below the threshold of consciousness, in the dark underside of his psyche, the 'male' principles of power and order survive, in a new completely repressed form — until ultimately, as with anyone who is in the grip of a psychological one-sidedness, the unconscious factors emerge to dominate his behaviour and attitudes almost totally, without his being aware of it.
The result, at the end of the road, is a state like Soviet Russia. On the conscious level, Russia sees itself as supremely dedicated to the 'female' values of 'Mother' — speaking in the language of compassion, caring for the welfare of her children (who are all, of course, in her eyes equal), and utterly opposed to all the horrid 'male' qualities represented by the power, money and imperialism of the United States, South Africa, Chile etc. But by the time you have travelled that far into psychic onesidedness, the most obvious thing to anyone else (unless they are similarly afflicted) is invariably the way that the repressed functions have emerged to become psychically dominant, in an unconcious and inferior form. Thus instead of being truly cherished the 'children' of Mother Russia are ruthlessly suppressed by the repressed power principle, stifled by inferior forms of 'order', and generally treated like the offspring of any 'Terrible Mother' who is so one-sidedly conscious of her wonderful maternal qualities that she cannot allow her children to grow up. And as for the way the same process works at the other end of the spectrum, when the values of 'Father' are consciously dominant (i.e. it is the 'feminine' which is repressed), one has only to look at South Africa, where feminine protective feeling emerges in that contemptuous attitude towards the blacks — 'they are just children' — which by a misnomer we call 'paternalism' ( in fact 'paternalism' is only the expression of a repressed maternalism).
So where does this leave Professor Kolakowski's vision of a ConservativeLiberal-Socialism? As he recognises himself, there is no hope that this dream will ever become a reality, because 'it cannot Promise people that they will be happy'. Of course it cannot, because at the present curious stage of civilisation in which we live, there is no hope of re-integrating these masculine and feminine elements except in our own individual lives. It was indeed the dream that they could somehow be reintegrated collectively that caused all the trouble in the first place. As was so wisely observed just before the French and Industrial Revolutions, the rise of Romanticism, and all that splitting apart of the collective European psyche which these things represented: 'How small of all the ills that human hearts endure That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!'.
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