Ominous Parallels (18 page)

The men who still rule our era and our country are the men who did originate fundamental ideas, the men who created the current trends: the philosophers of the past centuries—particularly, Kant and Hegel. The evidence of their continuing power is the dead ideas alive in America today, the ideas alive and dominant by default, not because there are crusading philosophers any longer, but because there
aren’t.

In the battle between the
Critique
and the Declaration, the Critique, so far, is winning hands down.

PART TWO

PRACTICE

7

United They Fell

Because philosophy deals with broad abstractions, most people regard the subject as detached from life. They regard philosophy as they would a political-party platform—as a set of floating generalities unrelated to action, generalities which are part ritualistic piety, part rationalization or cover-up, and part rhetorical hot air.

What, people ask, do these generalities have to do with the real issues of life, the issues which are immediate, topical, practical: the fierce debate in the Senate between the liberals and the conservatives, or the crisis of the economy, or the failure of the schools, or the mood of the new generation on the campuses, or the bitter controversy over the latest, shocking movie, play, painting, novel, or psychotherapeutic method.

People cannot explain the developments in the fields that do interest them because they do not know the source of those developments. In every field, the source is the choices men make, which rest ultimately on their basic choices. Knowingly or not, those choices flow from men’s basic ideas and values. The science of basic ideas is philosophy.

If a man is skeptical about the role of philosophy in life, let him put aside philosophy books. Let him leave the cloistered ivory tower of theory and plunge into the sprawling realms of practice. Let him observe the concretes of his society’s
cultural life—
its politics, its economics, its education, its youth movements, its art and religion and science. In every area, let him discover the main developments and then ask: why?

In every area, the actors themselves will provide the answer. They seldom provide it in the form of philosophical speeches. Frequently they offer moral declarations. Predominantly, however, they offer passing references, vague implica. tions, and casual asides—which seem casual, except that the actors cannot avoid making them and counting on them. The references are the tip of the iceberg: they reveal the basic premises motivating a given development.

When a man discovers that those references, in every area, reveal the same fundamentals at work, when he sees the same broad abstractions setting the terms for every action, issue, alternative, and turning point, then he will know the power that integrates the concretes of human life and moves human history.

To understand the state of a society, one must discover the extent to which a given philosophy penetrates its spirit and institutions. On this basis, one can then explain a society’s collapse—or, if it still has a chance, forecast its future.

This is what can make intelligible the fact of Hitler’s rise, and the possibility of America’s fall.

At 3:15 P.M. on February 6, 1919, an historic National Assembly, comprised of 423 freely elected delegates, was formally convoked in the city of Weimar, Germany. Its purpose was to replace the imperial regime of the Hohenzollerns, which had collapsed after the country’s defeat in the war, with a new German government, operating in accordance with a new, republican constitution to be written by the delegates.

The delegates appreciated the significance of their meetings. The product of their debates, they knew, was to be not a paper formality, but the document that would determine the political system and thus the future of the country.

The leaders of the interim government (who were Social Democrats) had decided not to hold the assembly in Berlin, because the risk of violence was too great: Germany’s Communists, refusing to participate in any parliamentary process, had taken to the streets, crying “All power to the Soviets.” Besides, the leaders wished to emphasize the postwar desire to be “free from Berlin,” i.e., from rule by Prussia.

Prussia, the largest and most powerful German state—a semifeudal, militarist verboten-ridden tyranny—had dominated the nation’s affairs since the first united Germany was formed in 1871. The new Germany, its leaders vowed, would be made in the image not of Potsdam but of Weimar. Weimar was the longtime home and symbol of Germany’s non-Prussian tradition: the tradition of Goethe and Schiller, of classical humanism, of political liberalism. It was, in effect, the symbol of the German Enlightenment.

The German Enlightenment was essentially different from its counterparts in England, France, or America. The difference may be condensed into a single fact: whatever the greatness of its artistic representatives or (as in the case of Schiller) their love of liberty, the top
philosopher
of the German Enlightenment, the figure universally taken as the country’s leading champion of man, reason, and freedom, the most Influential thinker of “the Weimar tradition,” is Immanuel Kant.

In the meetings of the Weimar Assembly, however, during the fateful spring of 1919, the contending parties had little time to be concerned with philosophy or with Kant. They were concerned with politics and with Marx. The major contenders were the Social Democrats—an officially Marxist group carried over from the imperial period, who had emerged from the postwar elections as the nation’s largest party—and various groups of conservative nationalists, who opposed the creation of a republic.

The Social Democrats continued all the longtime traditions of their party and sought support in essence from only one segment of the electorate: the “proletariat,” i.e., the urban workers. The party’s goal, in the words of one resolution, was “to unite the entire strength of the proletariat in the struggle against the common enemy, capitalism and reaction.”
¹

The purpose of the struggle, Social Democratic leaders told the workers, is to achieve a single ideal: socialism. Socialism, they said, means public ownership of property; it means an end to rule by bourgeois greed; it means a selfless, egalitarian, classless society, in which all men live to serve the common good. Until the withering away of the state, the leaders added, socialism also means a powerful government. We must fight against the “night watchman” view of government, in order “to protect the age-old vestal fires of all civilization, the state, against the [liberal] barbarians,” said Ferdinand Lassalle, the most influential source of German Social Democracy in the nineteenth century and “the greatest single figure in the [party’s] history.” “The state is this unity of individuals in one moral whole...,” said Lassalle. “The purpose of the state is, therefore, not that of protecting the personal freedom and property of the individual which, according to the bourgeoisie, the individual brings with him into the state.”
²

The single most eloquent presentation of the Social Democrats’ view of life is
The Weavers,
a play by the famous late-nineteenth-century dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann.
The Weavers,
which helped to make Hauptmann “the idol of the Socialist masses,” deals with the German weaving industry in the 1840’s. The play depicts a mass of oppressed toilers, “flat-chested, coughing creatures with ashen gray faces ... broken, harried, worn out,” creatures bowed by servility and tortured by constant hunger (one old man must eat his pet dog in order to stay alive). The cause of all the misery, says the play, is the forces of the establishment—above all, the fat, rapacious “devils of manufacturers,” who live in palaces, gorge on pastries, and bathe their babies in wine and milk. Such men, the weavers cry, are “hangmen all ... demons from the pit of hell.... Your goal is known to everyone, To bleed us poor men dry.” In the end the weavers, pushed too far, rise up in the name of social justice, sack the homes of the capitalists, wreck all their possessions, and then march off to smash once and for all the workers’ chief enemy: “From here we’ll go over to ... the steam power looms.... All the trouble comes from those factories.”
³

The Weavers
conveys perfectly the basic emotion, and emotionalism, which animated Germany’s Marxists of both kinds, Social Democrat and Communist. In their bitter, sweeping denunciations of the “class enemy” and in their fiery predictions of its “revolutionary” overthrow, the two groups, whatever their differences in regard to tactics, were at one.

In practice, however, the Social Democrats did not approve of sacking homes or smashing up power-looms—and their struggle was not so much against class enemies as against Communist guns. The Social Democrats opposed violence, a proletarian putsch, and Bolshevist Russia—not its ends, which they regarded as noble, but its methods, which they regarded as uncivilized and brutal. Socialism, they said, must come to Germany lawfully, by parliamentary decision; which, they said, meant a slow, evolutionary process, inasmuch as a majority of the German people was anti-Marxist and would have to be reeducated.

In the interim, party leaders decided, they would continue to preach Marxist ideas with all the party’s traditional zeal, but would confine themselves in practice to pursuing a limited, “Reformist” program in the Reichstag. “Reformism” in this context means a form of welfare statism. It means the policy of working within the framework of a semisocialist, semicapitalist “mixed” system, in order to secure the passage or strengthening of piecemeal pro-labor programs, including such items as the extension of union power, the eight-hour day, minimum wages, unemployment insurance, government housing, socialized medicine, government controls over industry, and higher, graduated taxes on upper-income individuals and on business profits.

The party, said its Marxist oratory, rejects the kind of temporizing, social-welfare measures introduced in the imperial era by Bismarck—measures which merely delay and subvert the coming revolution. Such measures, said the party’s Reformist practice, are precisely what the party is fighting for.

We stand solidly, said the Democratic face of Social Democracy, with the moderate bourgeois parties in defense of the republican system, which protects the civil rights and liberties of all men. This “capitalistic” republic, said the Social face of Social Democracy, is merely a transitional stage, a necessary evil, on the road to a truly moral society, in which men will enjoy something greater than liberty: economic equality. “The worker,” said August Bebel (a revered prewar party leader), “has little interest in a state in which political liberty is merely the goal.... What good is mere political liberty to him if he is hungry?”
⁴

Down with the sham liberty of capitalism, shouted impassioned speakers at party rallies. Not now, pleaded the same men the next morning; first we must give the capitalists a chance to rebuild the country after the war: “[I]t seems impossible for us to transfer industry into the possession of the community at a time when the productive forces of the country are almost exhausted. It is impossible to socialize when there is hardly anything to socialize.”
⁵

“Give me chastity and continence, but not yet,” said Augustine in a famous prayer, expressing the torture of a profound inner conflict. Transposed to the political arena, this in essence was the conflict and the torture of postwar Germany’s leading party.

The Social Democrats have been condemned as ineffectual by virtually all commentators on the Weimar Republic. The standard explanation is that the party leaders’ moral character or experience or strategy was inadequate. In fact, the root of the party’s deficiency was not personal or tactical; it was ideological. In their Marxist ideals, the Social Democrats were heirs to Germany’s central, collectivist tradition. In their republican methods, they were clinging to remnants of an opposite (and in Germany weak and peripheral) tradition: the Enlightenment world view. The result was a party incapable by its nature of providing a nation with decisive leadership, a party impaled from the outset on a fundamental contradiction.

It did not take long for the political jokes to begin. Their butt was revolutionists who wanted peace and quiet; proletarian militants who made collaboration with the bourgeoisie an essential policy; socialists who refused to socialize.

Such were the men whom the German conservatives at the time took to be the champions of a scientific approach to life.

The conservatives, whose main political outlet was the Nationalist party, were the groups that sought a restoration of the monarchy (or, failing this, rule by a military junta). These groups included most of the leaders of the imperial establishment, such as the wealthy Junker landlords, the powerful Officer Corps, and many prominent German judges, bureaucrats, industrialists. Two groups in particular were the most influential in proselytizing for the conservative viewpoint. One was the country’s largest religious denomination, the Lutheran Church, which, faithful to the ideas of its founder, had long been a bulwark of Prussianism. The other was the profession trained to teach young minds, the educational-professorial establishment, which, transferred intact from the empire to the Republic, remained to the end a loyal product of the Kaisers.

What socialism was to the leftists, nationalism was to the conservatives: it was their ideology, their political ideal, their common bond. “Nationalism” in this context means the belief in the superiority of the “German soul” over “Western decadence,” and, as corollary, the belief in the historic mission of the Fatherland, its mission to guide (or rule) the world’s lesser peoples.