Читать книгу Incompatibility and other essays - Peter Lustig - Страница 13

That socialism should have come forward in two versions was not altogether surprising. Jacobinism had originally raised its protest against the gentry. Its offspring, social reform, raged against the bourgeoisie, which had concentrated, from the start, on reinforcing the principle of nationhood, as opposed to the narrow, class-centred alternative brought on by the Left. Consolidation of the nation state took place, in Italy, at the same time as the Vatican was deprived of its territories. The Church, as an ecumenical institution, was supra-national. The nation state became its ostensible rival and/or enemy; because it stood for the exact opposite: viz. the interests and the peculiarities of ethnic identities pitted against each other.

One immediate consequence of the insufficient power of such a nation state was the idea of Realpolitik (Bismarck’s name for pragmatism). That the mightiest military organizations should have felt obliged to make defensive alliances only proves that none was strong enough to hold its own against the others. Sooner or later the time would come when they would have to pit their strengths against each other. Does it make sense to claim that this could not have been anticipated, only because the exact date when it might happen was uncertain?

The Great War marked the end of an era. An era much lamented by the bourgeoisie. Why? Because politics were hereafter taken over by the masses. Those on the Left claimed to be peace-loving; those on the Right ranted war-like. Why was that unforeseeable, if Marxism was preaching the brotherhood of the workers, as a matter pertaining to class, independent of nationality, and their rivals were waving the banners of military acumen and cultural supremacy unflaggingly? As indicated above, while the Church was being sidelined, its place was taken, throughout the twenties and the thirties, by those two relentlessly hostile factions, despite a belated effort to introduce a “mixed” system, part state controlled and part “liberal”.

It should be understood that the position of the Church, with regard to Socialism and Fascism, is being considered exclusively in the light of politics. The trouble lies in that, once the political positions have been spelled out, there is no room left for anything else and it is too late for recanting, if only partly, on the ideological front (as could be seen all the way through the XX century); although this does not rule out a religious revival, such as was witnessed in places where religion had been outlawed for seventy years, under Soviet domination. That religion may be revived as a token to nostalgia is much like attributing sentimental value to reminiscing what the world used to be like before 1914, as the generation old enough to have cherished such memories as secure members of the bourgeois middle class used to do, in the course of reviewing their distress, because nothing would ever be the same again. The feeling of total loss, in addition to despair over starvation and hopelessness, in the aftermath of defeat, drove some to delude themselves into seeking shelter in the past; but if this past should have meant nothing to a majority of people, compelled to stake their lives to uphold a political order in which most of their kind were treated like outcasts, as a class, small wonder that loyalties should have been transferred away from Kaiser and Church, in order to bring about social reform along the lines of the complaisant “new man”, proclaimed by the Left, or the militant bully of the Right.

The one thing that these otherwise irreconcilable positions had in common was the need to dispose of entire sectors of society to make room for their own. It hardly mattered that, upon further analysis, it had been shown that the Right and the Left could be fitted into a single category: totalitarianism. Or that the bourgeoisie could be equated with the aspiring middle class that had many traits -such as a purposeful self-perception and a far-reaching overview- in common with the Jews. In some ways it was inevitable that what was left of both these cultural identities, after World War II, should have felt at loose ends about whatever they might have been able to contribute to post-war society; because the priority was to ensure survival and that could best be achieved through political empowerment, by granting statehood to the Jews and implementing the welfare state for all the others, including the freshly enfranchised masses (even where the single party vote prevailed pro forma).

It has been statistically proven that the cost in human lives, by the end of World War II, was almost ten times greater than that of the extermination of European Jewry. This cost was due to social engineering having taken a far greater toll than the actual fighting. Can there be any doubt that the issue of survival ought to focus on the individual, if so many human beings were summarily disposed of as ballast or surplus labour? During the XIX century, the industrial revolution had abused the urban poor with similar unconcern. In consequence, the conscience of the working class was aroused. Has anything of the sort been devised to vindicate the victims of the contemporary ideological hubris? Why should a return to the past, for sentimental reasons, provide less disastrous results today, if they are based on the same notions that produced those dreadful outcomes? What is the point of rationalizing about the inevitability of war, when civilization was meant to be the most effective construct to make recourse to force redundant?

Some standard opinions on certain rights that all men are entitled to enjoy refer to conventional appraisal of a political identity and the principle of equality applying across the board, as a tribute to fairness or “social justice”. In this way, it is assumed that no entity is likely to be overwhelmed, at least not without having the opportunity to stand up and fight to the bitter end. But this is precisely what should be avoided, given the prospects for war in the atomic age. To assume that an evolutionary stage may have been reached where a realization of the futility of war had sunk in, for anything other than its dismal prospects, sounds unconvincing. It would be closer to the truth to admit that learning takes place in response to necessity and not that any miraculous change should have taken place in human nature. The fewer the illusions that may lead to disappointments, the more sensible and realistic the diagnosis and, obviously, the greater the likelihood of finding an appropriate solution.

Can it be said that democracy, in its current form, addresses the needs of modern society? Even though there exists a general consensus about it being the least ominous system of government, opinions are divided as to its suitability in all circumstances. The notion that things will work themselves out in due time, provided they are dealt with rationally, is under heavy pressure from conflicting evidence. A majority might easily be swayed to regard the multicultural vanguard as a sort of demographic advance upon the West (although it should be happening anywhere in the world, thus offering proof that globalization has been around for a long time), as an outcrop of post-colonialism and, more closely, of post-imperialism and the ensuing displacement of populations through persecution.

As soon as the moderately liberal Western middle sectors became convinced that they were under a concerted attack by Muslims, uncannily indifferent to extremism in their midst, a preventive religious war might be launched, to put these people out of business, before they can get their demographic onslaught under way. Already the version is doing the rounds that, by such and such a date, Muslims will have displaced Westerners on their home ground, thanks to higher birthrate figures that will determine the shape of the population. With universal suffrage in force, a 51% majority should suffice to throw the whole system off balance. The argument is simple enough for any unsophisticated layman to foresee what he will be up against. Who is going to tell a population that feels threatened and thinks there may still be time to take action before it is too late, to lie low while education makes headway trying to induce culturally estranged and maybe hostile outsiders to integrate?