A Battlefield
THE modern world was changed by three men. Marx re-interpreted its sociology and economics ; Freud invented the science of man's unconscious ; Einstein rephrased the physical universe. The fourth man, the philosopher who can create a system of morality within which these immense discoveries can be harmonised, is missing. In his absence the world today js a moral problem.
The Soviet empire has the edge on the rest of the world in one important respect: it has grafted a kind of moral dialectic upon its political system. In the West the individual conscience opposes or accommodates itself to the realities of society with the aid of con- flicting, often irreconcilable, philosophies. The Soviet Man is pro- vided with a persuasive logic which can be brought to bear upon an uprising in Mexico, under-production in a Caucasian stocking factory, a theory of physics, a poem or a piece of sculpture. It will winnow out what nourishes the collective and demolish the rest as a kitchen
disposal unit pulverises refuse and flushes it down the sink. What happens to people caught up in such a system is analysed with remarkable precision by Czeslaw Milosz in The Captive Mind.
Milosz, a forty-two-year-old Polish poet, was in his youth a Catholic with left-wing tendencies. As a result of his experiences in the war, in which he witnessed the Warsaw rising and the mass- extermination of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, he became con- vinced that only a socialist programme could abolish the injustices of the past and rebuild the economies of Central and Eastern Europe. The war over, he agreed to serve the Warsaw Communist Govern- ment and was sent abroad—to Washington and Paris—as a cultural attaché of the Polish Embassies. He was not a Marxist, but he served his new masters through conviction. He thought that he could remain within the Eastern bloc yet keep clear of total ortho- doxy. ' He was wrong. In February, 1951, he broke with Warsaw and remained in Paris as an exile.
Now Milosz believes "there are only two sides ... the choice lies between absolute conformity to the one system, or absolute con- formity'to the other." His book, he says, is " a battlefield."
I believe Milosz is wrong. I believe that many of the evils he found in the Soviet " mperium " exist in embryo in our own sphere. He writes about events that took place in a society in a greater state of disintegration than ours. The character of evil was more naked ; the instruments of compulsion more efficient ; there was more conscious direction for more deliberate ends.
Spared the extremes of Milosz's nightmare, the contemporary Western Man watches helplessly while the area in which individual choice and individual conscience can operate shrinks. There are writers and intellectuals in the West, too, who have not been able to resist the pressure to conform even at the expense of conscientious scruples. Many are employed by mass-opinion organisations ; many lend their names, reputations and talents to causes which they cannot wholeheartedly endorse. Many take refuge in an aestheticism that is an avoidance of responsibility.
Milosz diagnoses a psychological manceuvre that he calls " Ket- manism," after a medivmal Muslim heresy. " Ketmanism " enables a Communist intellectual to assume the appearance of ortho- doxy behind a subtle attitude of nonconformity. Therefore, "what we find in the people's democracies is a conscious mass play rather than automatic imitation." Eventually people are unable to distinguish what they really think, feel and believe.
He gives us four case-histories : Alpha, whose main concern as a young avant-garde writer under the spell of Joseph Conrad was the tragic moral conflict, whg moved by imperceptible stages to a posi- tion where he elevated History to the dimensions of a God and the Communist Man to the stature of a moral hero ; Beta, who trans- lated a nihilist philosophy born of the concentration camps and gas chambers into the convenient ethics of a highly-paid hack journalist writing poison against America, and who committed suicide ; Gamma the anti-semitic Catholic writer, who became a Red Ambassador speaking the clever platitudes of dialectical materialism in an eighteenth-century palace furnished with rich Gobelins tapestries ; Delta, the gay troubado. r, a butterfly broken by the wheels of an express train, the alcoholic and satirist who could not restrain his irony. Delta was forg yen, but for how long ?
"These men are, more or less consciously, victims of a historic situation," comments Milosz. Here, in the West; where history
presses not so ruthlessly, men are less bound. But the threat is there. Victims of our particular history are not hard to find. Not all will agree with Milosz that conformity with one side or another is inevitable ; man still has the duty to follow his own conscience, however unpopular, however difficult and lonely.
EMANUEL LITVINOFF
Previous page
