Leftism

Viewed from a biological angle, the New Left movement is carried largely by the young, but its original minds belong to men of an advanced age, to a European generation which has become successively disillusioned by Wilhelminian grand-bourgeois Germany, the Weimar Republic, Nazi totalitarianism, Stalinist communism, and the materialistic society of consumers. Having been formally on the left (and often still publicly professing to be so), they have seen all their gods fail, all their illusions destroyed.

The present order, no doubt, is iniquitous in many ways. However, life according to Christian precepts, is a vale of tears and the “pursuit of happiness” on this earth is more or less bound to fail. Christianity does not eliminate suffering, but gives sense to it. It does not make people “happy”; it offers joy and by giving a sense to suffering, prevents despair. We have to admit that the present state of our Western civilization (and of the rest of the world as well) is worse than has been in almost any period of history. In spite of good dentists, anesthetics, better health conditions, moon flights, television, birth control, and a greatly decreased mortality, it would be easy to prove that human unhappiness has reached a very high level. Fear, loneliness, alienation, aimlessness, anguish, and melancholia are more prevalent than ever. There is not the slightest reason to believe that “progress” has made people happier. It has (above all in its technological form) an inflationary character. Technology moreover means more regulation, the need for more controls; it increases responsibilities, makes us more dependent, more vulnerable.

All this is evident to the New Left which therefore assumes the antitechnological stand of young Marx. Not only in this respect, but in many other ways, the New Left repeats knowingly-unknowingly the nineteenth-century conservatives’ critique of modern society. When the latter felt that they were defeated, that the immediate future belonged to “progressive” industrial society, their prophecy as to the shape of things to come was roughly this: “You think that you can establish a social, political, economic order based merely on the profit motive, that you can achieve happiness for yourselves or for the masses with the aid of technology, medicine and the provider state. You think that your ‘system,’ your establishment, will guarantee liberty for everybody, that you will be able to eliminate a feeling of inner independence by destroying the old historic estates. You are wrong! You will actually lay the foundations of a society in which servitude will assume a more subtle, more ubiquitous, a more oppressive character than ever before. Life will cease to have color, to be spiced with adventure, and people will revolt against the inhuman boredom and the drabness you offer them. In the long run man will not be satisfied with a social system giving him nothing but security and a near anonymous government of laws and regulations—rotating, impersonal, lacking all glamor. Emperors, kings, princes, cardinals, bishops, and noblemen will be replaced by general directors, bureaucrats, manufacturers, bankers, trade union leaders, party bosses, and dictators: This will make rule not less burdensome, only duller and, in many ways, more oppressive. Young people especially will rebel against an order based on the counting of noses, an order giving them nothing to live or to die for. Once all great dreams are gone, this society of identical and equal people in their purposeless solitude will start to scream!”

Yet, as was to be expected, the masses, especially the working class, could not be won over to the New Left because—as its ideologues fully realize—the wage earners have at long last achieved middle-class living standards, and are not (and never will be) prepared to sacrifice them to some rather sophisticated doctrine without “practical” aims and material rewards. Marxism could be popularized, the New Left with its sophisticated intellectual somersaults cannot. The worker, as we said, has been totally assimilated by the industrial machine which might offer him extremely monotonous work but at least feeds him well. The financial interests of workers, management, and investors are, in fact, identical—a maximum of production, an optimum of sales.

If we now ask why the New Left has not developed a constructive program, a blueprint, a utopia all its own, we find several reasons. We already alluded to the fact that mankind today is not “futuristic” and that the typical New Lefter lacks all family sense, all generational vistas. Also, curiously enough, a certain rather anti-ideological substratum can be observed in the New Left and, consequently, a real aversion to produce a precise program. Any program already smacks of “prescription” in the Kirkian sense. Whenever I asked young New Lefters about their New Order the answer was that this problem is to be settled by discussion after “victory.” Debate and discussion—they are the delight of the ill-prepared, inexperienced, unread theoretician. Talking to a group of Catholic Bolivian students of the New Left persuasion about their vision of a “New Bolivia,” I found that their only immediate aim was the destruction of the entire old order. Unpleasantly winking, they told me that it would not be difficult to occupy the waterworks of the city of La Paz, as well as the electric plants, and thus force the surrender of the capital. And what if the government was not going to yield? What about the 400,000 inhabitants? Would they not have to leave the city? What would happen to the hospitals? The insane asylums? The homes for the aged? They could not have cared less. Liberation always has a high price. And the new order? That would be debated, discussed.