Understanding Western Thought

Excerpts from:

“Will There Be An “After Socialism”?”
By Alan Charles Kors, distinguished professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania

“……..The pathology of Western intellectuals has commit­ted them to an adversarial relationship with the culture-free markets and individual rights-that has produced the greatest alleviation of suf­fering, the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition, and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all hu­man life. No one has explained the etiology of this pathology adequately, although it constitutes one of the deepest flaws and tragedies of societies based on free markets and individual rights, the most radically progres­sive civilizations that the planet has seen thus far. It is a pathology that with each passing decade becomes coarser and more detached from any principle of reality………

“The cognitive behavior of Western intellectuals faced with the accom­plishments of their own society, on the one hand, and with the socialist ideal and then the socialist reality, on the other, takes one’s breath away. In the midst of unparalleled social mobility in the West, they cry “caste.” In a society of munificent goods and services, they cry either “poverty” or “consumerism.” In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry “alienation.” In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry “oppression.” In a society of bound­less private charity, they cry “avarice.” In a society in which hundreds of millions have been free riders upon the risk, knowledge, and capital of others, they decry the “exploitation” of the free riders. In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth, they cry “injustice.” In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfec­tions, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of in­dividual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like “liberty” in quotation marks when these refer to the West. Note well, of course, that when an enemy arose that truly hated Western intellectuals-fascism and Nazism-and whose de­feat depended upon the West’s self-belief, intellectuals had no difficulty at all in defining and indeed popularizing a contest between good and evil…….

“This intellectual behavior is a pathology that freezes time selectively to suit its purposes. The first economic dislocations of capitalist industrial­ization became the intellectuals’ model for the future that would emerge from such dynamism, as if one should ignore the process that raised previously unimaginable numbers of human beings to a dignified, free life, protected as never before from helplessness before nature and men. Russia from 1914 to 1917 became frozen for all time, with war and Ras­putin being the only alternative to Stalinism, as if the curve of Russian economic and social development by the early twentieth century did not point to energetic and promising change. Once able to mobilize large numbers at any moment, Communists were given a right to permanent and absolute power, as if the Republican Party of 1920, which at least won an honest election, had gained a permanent right to govern America and to choose the party’s own successors.

The intellectual manifestation of this pathology was and is a collective delusion that ignores both history and ethology. It is a belief that good­ness, stable order, justice, peace, freedom, legal equality, mutual forbear­ance, and kindness are the default state of things in human affairs, and that malice, disorder, violence, coercion, legal inequality, intolerance, and cruelty are the aberrations that stand in need of historical explanation. Getting the defaults precisely and systematically wrong, Western intel­lectuals fail to understand and appreciate the form of society that has given us the ability to alter them. The pathology is also the demented belief that evolved successful societies may be redrawn at will by intel­lectuals with political power and that the most productive human cul­tures are almost wholly dysfunctional…….

“Rousseau and all the Marxisizing intellectuals who have cast their dark­ness over the past one hundred years and more have had it all backward in this domain. It is not aversion to difference that requires historical explanation-aversion to difference is the human condition. Rather, it is liberal society’s partial but breathtaking ability to overcome tribalism and exclusion that demands elucidation, above all in the singular American accomplishment. Tyranny and abuse of power have also been the human condition. It is, in contrast, the limitation of power and the recognition of individual rights that demand historical explanation. It is not slavery that startles, because slavery is one of the most universal of all human insti­tutions. Rather, it is the view of self-ownership, liberty, and voluntary labor that requires historical explanation, the values and agencies by which the West identified slavery as an evil, and, to what should be our wonder, abolished it. Western intellectuals write, dramatically, as if it were relative pockets of Western poverty that should occasion our aston­ishment, when in fact the term until recently for almost infinitely worse absolute levels of poverty was simply “life.” What generally remains unaddressed by our secular intellectuals is the question of what values, institutions, knowledge, behaviors, risks, and liberties allowed the West to create such prosperity that we even notice such relative poverty at all, let alone believe that it is eradicable. Tragically, the very effort to overturn the evolved systems and values of the West has produced the most ex­treme examples in history of, precisely, malice, disorder, violence, coer­cion, legal inequality, intolerance, and cruelty………

“Ironically, of course, the main traditions of socialism and Communism both claimed Marxist credentials, and the Marxists surely had one argu­ment right: we should judge human systems, in the final analysis, not as theories and ideal abstractions, but as actual history and practice. In ineffable bad faith, they applied that measure to everything except what allegedly the most to them. From one end of the earth to the other, Marxist intellectuals, propagandists, professors, and apologists never contrasted the existing “socialist world” with the more or less liberal societies of Western Europe and North America . They contrasted, instead, a fictional perfect society that never was to an existing imperfect society that had accomplished actual wonders, Marxists were fond of denounc­ing such antirealism as “philosophical idealism” when they condemned it in others. It was they, however, who feigned an ideal world of their own spinning-it was they, that is, who were always the most antirealist of all. It is fitting, now that historical evidence has taken everything away from Marxism, that its heirs-the anti-Western postmodernists of the cultural Left-should embrace that antirealism explicitly, as a chosen cast of mind…….

“After generations of conflict between two systems, where now is the excitement of comparative scholarship? From the economists to the cul­tural scholars of gender and sexuality to the ecologists, history now has opened a vast terrain in which to study the differences in real terms between private property and commons, markets and planning, and in­dividual rights and collective purpose. Have the Greens, in anguished study of centrally planned pollution of air and water, discovered the tragedy of the commons? Are historians teaching their students any dif­ferently about the human consequences of free markets in a real world of comparative phenomena? Have our Foucauldians and postmodernists reexamined their own premises in the light of intensive study of gender and sexuality behind the Iron Curtain or, indeed, so close by in Cuba ? It is extraordinary that we do not have an intellectual, moral, and, above all, historical accounting of who was right and wrong, and why, in their analyses of socialism and of socialism in power. We live in an era of appalling bad faith……..”