The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (8 page)

In very short order Napoleon realized that people of principle—any principle other than loyalty to him—were a threat to his plans. He considered the Royalists his greatest threat, but for political reasons it was easier for him to concentrate his ire on the
idéologistes
(the terror, after all, was still fresh in the popular mind). Napoleon’s men started fueling rumors and planting accusations in the press that the
idéologistes
were really unrepentant Jacobins nostalgic for Robespierre, a cutting lie given how much the
idéologistes
despised Robespierre and his Terror. In January 1800, an article, in all likelihood planted by the government, coined the word ideologue:

The civilian faction is also called by the name metaphysical faction or “ideologues.” Flatterers of Robespierre, they drove him to death, by the very excess of power they allowed him. They used the Directory to proscribe talents which overshadowed theirs. They looked for heroes to bring down the Directory. Today they have hatched new plans.
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In December of the same year Royalists attempted to assassinate Napoleon with a bomb planted on the side of the road in Paris, in the famous
Machine infernale plot
(also known as plot of the Rue Saint-Nicaise). Napoleon escaped death by pure, dumb luck—though many others didn’t. He parlayed the incident into even more popularity. He even went straight on to the opera after the explosion and received a standing ovation. At first Napoleon honestly believed the attack came from the “Jacobin” leftists, but he soon discovered that it was in fact a Royalist plot. Nonetheless, he used the bombing as an excuse to order the public executions of numerous Jacobins. Later, and more quietly, he had the Royalist plotters killed, too.

A little over a month after the bombing, Napoleon was claiming credit for coining the word “ideologue” and using it freely as an insult aimed at eggheads allegedly ensorcelled by abstractions and metaphysics, who were getting in the way of the practical administration of the state. He railed against the “Windbags and ideologues who have always fought the existing authority.” Napoleon saw ideology as a threat to his power and used ideologue as an epithet, as a way to claim that those who held principles independent from the demands of power were in fact independent from reality. And, when convenient, Napoleon’s indictment described most religious and philosophical thought as ideology.
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Ideologues—real and imagined—over the course of the decade became the scapegoat for the failures of his regime.
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In today’s terms he blamed them for “gridlock.” The word ideology ceased to refer to anything other than theorists idealists, and intellectuals divorced from reality. “As Napoleon’s position weakened both at home and abroad, his attacks on ideology became more sweeping and vehement,” writes historian John B. Thompson. “Nearly all kinds of religious and philosophical thought were condemned as ideology. The term itself had become a weapon in the hands of an emperor struggling desperately to silence his opponents and to sustain a crumbling regime.”
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In 1808, in Erfut, Prussia, Napoleon warned the Prussians of the danger posed by the ideologues:

Several things are interesting about all this. First, the ideologues themselves were in many respects the forerunners of the American Pragmatists. American Pragmatism was launched as essentially the science of ideas. William James, the founder of the movement (though Charles S. Peirce coined the term), wanted to move away from what he believed to be the mysticism and cant in philosophy and get right down to the questions of why we believe certain things and how we act on them. More on that in a bit, but it’s a nice irony that arguably the very first Pragmatists were the first to get beaten over the head with the scare word ideologue.

Second, Napoleon himself was a consummate Pragmatist (indeed, if you search through biographies of him the word pragmatic is a near constant refrain). He didn’t believe in labels. He only cared about what works.

Third, he despised the ideologues because they were divisive. Napoleon was no great fan of Christianity or the Church. What he liked was the social cohesion that came with them, the compulsion to conform to the Rousseauian general will that found sole expression in Napoleon himself. “In religion,” Napoleon famously said, “I do not see the mystery of the Incarnation, so much as the mystery of the social order.”
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Even Napoleon’s brother, Lucien, saw in Napoleon a dismaying rejection of principle. Years before his brother’s rise to power, Lucien wrote, “I’ve long discerned in him a completely self-centered ambition that outstrips his love of the common good. I really believe in a free state, [hence] he is a dangerous man.”
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Lucien would later support Napoleon in his bid for power, but at one moment he allegedly pointed his sword at his brother and vowed to run him through if he ever violated the principles of
Liberté
,
Fraternité
, and
Egalité.
Alas, he never got the chance.

We need to leave Napoleon here, but one last point is worth making. Napoleon, as Ralph Waldo Emerson eloquently wrote, was a truly modern man. He represented the ascent of a host of new ideas, forces, and trends: the self-made man; the movement of history; the ability of great
men to create their own values while destroying the values of others. For Hegel, Napoleon was the “world-soul.” After laying eyes upon Napoleon, Hegel said, “It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”
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Nietzsche, another pragmatist of a kind—the kind who, in his words, “philosophizes with a hammer”—saw in Napoleon “the embodiment of the noble ideal.”
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Otto Von Bismarck, the inspiration to a generation of progressive and pragmatic ideologues, was an “adorer” of Napoleon’s rule. The Iron Chancellor and the Little Corporal shared countless attributes and personality traits, chiefly their hatred for binding rules or principles.

Napoleon represents power as its own justification, because power works. It works in ways that are obvious and recognizable. And it demands respect from those who want it. Bertrand Russell summarized this inherent flaw in pragmatism when he noted that if taken to its logical conclusions, “ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.”
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Karl Marx comes up more than once in other chapters to follow, so I don’t want to dwell on him too much here. But he is important to this story in this regard: Marx adopts Napoleon’s definition of ideology and adds his own twist by universalizing the idea of an ideologue. At least when Napoleon accused the ideologues of being unrealistically beholden to “shadowy metaphysics,” he conceded that they embraced their views by choice. For Marx that choice is an illusion. An ideology isn’t something you develop or embrace as an ongoing intellectual enterprise. It is something you are born into, that is imprinted on you by external forces. It is entirely a function of your class. He explains it here, but reading the passage will only give you a headache:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling
material
force of society, is at the same time its ruling
intellectual
force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing
more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.
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The only way to break the spell of ideology is to… agree with Marx. If you are working class and don’t understand that you should be a Communist, then you suffer from “false consciousness.” But fear not, you can be cured of this through diligent reeducation by Marxists.

This formulation opened up a lot of options for the left. It created a rationale for dismissing contrary evidence without having to contend with it. Because Marxism was “scientific,” it allowed its proponents to claim there was only one side to the argument—theirs (see
Chapter 18
, Science). “Oh, that’s just your class interests talking” is an abracadabra phrase that makes all substantive disagreements and inconvenient facts vanish—without even the mess of a puff of smoke.

This, as Hannah Arendt once observed, was one of the great innovations of Communists: the ability to dispute any fact by questioning the motives of the presenter. In the 1950s this argument was given even more scientific luster, as Marxist social scientists claimed that the conservative (i.e., fascist) mind wasn’t merely a product of class consciousness but was in fact a diagnosable psychological disorder.

Anyway, enough with Marx for now. Suffice it to say that Marxism was a main, but hardly solitary ingredient in the intellectual stew that started to cook in the second half of the nineteenth century. Darwinism saturated everything. Nietzschean pragmatism—even though the word pragmatism didn’t come until later—suffused intellectual discourse. For Nietzsche the man who threw off the accumulated dogmas of the past to move beyond Christianity, beyond tradition, beyond, even, good and evil, was the superman. And why not? Was God not dead?

In America, William James—decent, sober-minded, kindly William James—was working on his own American recipe of the same stew. It wasn’t as exotically flavored nor as forebodingly thick. But it was a similar dish nonetheless. James and Nietzsche had similar ideas but very different styles. As a brooding Romantic German, Nietzsche felt the crushing weight of history all around him. All those cathedrals and candles! A
beneficent American, James felt liberated from history without having to lift a finger. As Richard Rorty, one of the left’s star philosophers, put it, “As a good American, and as someone who thinks of himself as a pragmatist, I am of course inclined to see pragmatism as having duplicated all the best of Nietzsche while avoiding all the bad.”
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The Nietzscheans, Marxists, and Hegelians had to wrestle History to the ground like she was a wild animal. They came up with theories that tamed History and made it their pet or beast of burden, pulling humanity in a predictable direction. The beast was hitched to the new great causes: nationalism, socialism, the rule of experts and technocrats who understood with “scientific” certainty what history is and where it must go. The fight with capital-H history was an epochal struggle, requiring all able-minded men to muster for battle.

Meanwhile, in America, a country founded on the idea of putting the past behind it and starting over, where reinvention was both a birthright and part of the national character, History was at its back. Whereas in Europe History was a dragon to be slain, in America History could be ridden bareback through the sunny uplands of the New World. The Europeans were weighted down with pessimism, fatalism, and the sense of the tragic. In America anything was possible if you tried really hard. Nietzsche had his gloomy, blood-soaked, “will to power.” James had his happy and upbeat “will to believe.” It’s all oddly reminiscent of George Carlin’s riff on the differences between baseball and football: “Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything’s dying.” Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game played in a park. Football is a military-technological struggle for territory played on a gridiron in a stadium. In baseball you make “errors.” In football you get “penalties.”

Anyway, you get it. The point is not that America’s progressive intellectuals were in sharp disagreement with the Europeans on most of the big questions; it’s just that they were cheerier about it, and William James, America’s premier philosopher at the time, reflected this optimism more than anyone else. When Charles Peirce came up with his very complicated theory of pragmatism, James immediately latched onto it, popularized it, and made it his own. (Poor Peirce simply wasn’t up to the task of safeguarding the term and eventually changed the name of
his own philosophy to “pragmaticism.”) James saw himself—again, like Nietzsche—as sorting out what to do in the aftermath of “God’s Funeral”
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but rather than a somber wake complete with dirges, James preferred something a bit more like the moving party of a New Orleans jazz funeral.

Indeed, there was something admirably jazzlike to pragmatism in its early days. The whole idea was to lighten up, to not take philosophy too seriously. Instead of looking for eternal truths we should concentrate on what works. Ideas were true if they were successful, or in his famous phrase, if they had “cash value.” Instead of an “iron block universe” we should think of a universe with the “lid off.”
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He spoke of “possibilities” and the ability to make the world what you want. He took the hammer and tongs of European philosophical combat and made them into constructive tools for building a better society. “[D]emocracy,” wrote James, “is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker’s picture.”
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What Americans needed to do was find a healthy expression for the “sick shudder of frustrated religious demand.”
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