o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing

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America in Crisis:

The Triumph of Political CorrectnessRichard Rorty: The Argument for EmpathyPolitical Correctness and UtopianismUtopian Visionaries in History and LiteratureNoble Intentions and Sinister Impulses: The Strange Case of Mistah Kurtz

by Wm. B. FankbonerAn impalpable censorship is eliminating all intellectual and artistic vitality in

Western society with a vengeance; persistent recourse to euphemism andcircumlocution is corrupting and debasing language; and the coerciveatmosphere of guilt, fear and intimidation surrounding this censorship isinhibiting the easy give-and-take of human discourse, the life-blood ofdemocratic institutions, and ultimately of man's own social and spiritual life.Thoreau warned us to 'beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.' Whatwould he have said about enterprises that require new vocabulary?

'The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versusindividualism. [but] to write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinksfearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.' George Orwell

'Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is aself-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, butthey don't seem to see this.' Doris Lessing

'Chastity, by nature the gentlest of the affectionsgive it but its head'tis like a roaring lion.' Laurence Sterne

'Art made tongue-tied by authority' W. Shakespeare

Like life, history is shot through with coincidence. Consider the sudden resurgence ofpolitical correctness in the wake of the communist collapse in Europe, seemingly disparateevents with no apparent connection. But coincidence is often only a statistical illusion, a bit of

hocus-pocus which, on closer examination, yields to the laws of cause and effect. Viewed in a

broader context, the air of mystery dissolves and a connection emerges: for the New Left, the

defeat of the Soviet Bloc was a sign that mankind was on the threshold of a Golden Age of

World Peace, that the time had come to conquer the evils of society itself. Verily, the

Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Now that the threat of armed conflict has been eliminated

from the human landscape, man can advance to the next stage of his social evolution and

create an organic social order, a dream that has eluded mankind from time immemorial.
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There is only one problem with this narrative: man himself, a brutish,

savagely territorial creature driven by irrational impulses, superstition and

ignorance, and beguiled by the idols of the cave. Despite spectacular advances

in science and technology, mankind remains stubbornly depraved. In The

Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima and the mysterious visitor, Mihail, find

that they share the same epiphany: that if men were to take upon themselvesthe crimes of all other men, the Kingdom of Heaven would be a living reality.

(Antoine De Saint Exupery, explaining his hopeless stand against the German

Luftwaffe, said: 'I understand now for the first time the mystery of the religion whence was

born the civilization I claim as my own: "To bear the sins of man." Each man bears the sins of

all men.') But, asks the young Zosima, when will this come about? Not for some time, replies

Mihail soberly. Man must pass through the crucible of individualism and existential isolation

before he will be ready for universal love. This will take some time, he councels. The

Christian exhortation that we should take upon ourselves the crimes of all other men, a

sharing of guilt and sin not to be confused with the Marxist sharing of surplus value and the

means of production, has an intoxicating allure, but it is not at all clear Dostoevsky believed it

possible in this life.

Nonsense, say the social revolutionaries. Human nature is not immutable. Just as the human

race evolved biologically, it is capable of evolving socially, of making 'moral progress.'

Mankind is still young and the universe unfinished. All that is necessary to ascend to the next

level of his spiritual evolution is verbal discipline, for man to cleanse his mind of 'incorrect'

thoughts and attitudes. Language rules thought and thought is destiny. By establishing a

program of linguistic hygiene and purging speech of all the verbal correlates that predispose

man to iniquity, we can remove the precursors of immoral conduct and man's unconscious

biases, and contain his capacity for evil.

But this program has an ominous ring to it: substitute the word 'subversive' for 'incorrect,' and

you have the old Communist Party line for thought control and the suspension of free speech

for the greater good of the state. In Arthur Koestler's novel, The Darkness At Noon,

Rubashov, an old guard Bolshevik imprisoned for treason by the Soviet government he helped

create, is asked by the man in the next cell why he was arrested. Using the prisoners' quadratic

alphabet Rubashov taps out an enigmatic two-word answer on the wall of his cell: "Political

divergencies." As far as the Marxist-Leninist schedule was concerned, the time for political

discussion was over. Political purity was the only way to achieve the single-minded

dedication required for victory. A new form of autocracy had come into being far more

despotic and lawless than the one it had replaced. 'The dictatorship of the proletariat,' said

Lenin, was a power limited by nothing. (Ironically it was this elevation of Marxist dogma toinfallible gospel that hastened rather than forestalled the collapse of Soviet Communism.)

There are convincing arguments that this semi-religious fervor for ideological purity, which

gave the world the concept of 'thought-crime,' is, among the industrialized nations, unique to

Russia, which remains in many respects a tribal society. Wrote Marshall McLuhan (p.30, The

Gutenberg Galaxy):

[In] a society still so profoundly oral as Russia, where spying is done by ear and not by eye, at

the memorable "purge" trials of the 1930's Westerners expressed bafflement that many

confessed total guilt not because of what they had done but what they had thought. In a highly

literate society, then, visual and behavioural conformity frees the individual for innerdeviation. Not so in an oral society where inner verbalization is effective social action.

Doris Lessing


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Unlike 'profoundly oral' societies like Russia, Western literate communities, with their long

tradition of print technology, humanism, applied science, egalitarianism, and universal

education, do not feel compelled by tribal ritual or social law to restrict thought in any way,

since verbalizations generated by book culture are educational or informational in nature, i.e.

our private ruminations do not directly result in 'effective social action.' As Spinosa says,

'Every man is by indefeasible natural right the master of his own thoughts.' And the so-called'life of the mind,' a thing unknown to oral cultures which depend exclusively on 'operational

wisdom,' is a product of the Gutenberg invention of moveable types and Western literacy.

McLuhan credits J. C. Carothers with this valuable insight. Says Carothers in his study

contrasting literate and non-literate natives

In these circumstances it is implicit that behavioural constraints must include constraint of

thought. Since all behaviour in such societies is governed and conceived on highly social

lines, and since directed thinking can hardly be other than personal and unique for each

individual, it is furthermore implicit in the attitude of these societies that the very possibility

of such thinking is hardly to be recognized. Therefore, if and when such thinking does occur,at other than strictly practical and utilitarian levels, it is apt to be seen as deriving from the

devil or from other external evil influences, and as something to be feared and shunned as

much in oneself as in others. (p. 312, J. C. Carothers, writing in Psychiatry, November,

1959, on "Culture, Psychiatry and the Written Word")

A haunting and poetic dramatization of this brutal, nightmarish aspect of tribal life can be

found in Joseph Conrad's short story, "The Lagoon," in which two Malaysian lovers, Arsat

and Diamelen (a servant of the Rajah's wife), attempt to flee the repressive atmosphere of

strict religious law and coercion by eloping. Pursued by the Rajah's men, they die in their

attempt to find freedom in the white man's world of justice and law.

Cultural Marxism Finds a Home

Ideology does not like a vacuum. Is Doris Lessing correct in her belief that political

correctness is 'the heritage of communism'? Have the dispossessed ghosts of the Marxist-

Leninist Revolutionary Club found a new home in the Victims' Revolution? While such a

strategic transformation might not have been what Marx had in mind when he called for the

'forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions,' it could achieve a similar result; and

comes not a moment too soon for the moribund Communist movement. According to

orthodox Marxist theory, the Communist revolution was supposed to take place in a decadent

capitalist society, not in a Slav agrarian economy like Russia's, leaving many to wonder ifRussian communism was anything more than Czarist thuggery masquerading as ideology. But

if, as diehards of the Marxist rearguard maintain, Communism has never failed because it has

never been faithfully implemented in any society, what is this but to say that Marxist doctrine

in its 'pure' form is so perversely utopian and politically regressive it has never captured the

imaginations of able men?

Commenting on the doctrinaire incompetence of the Soviet apparat and Party nomenklatura in

Putting Up With the Russians, British journalist Edward Crankshaw, wrote: "this is a milieu

almost impossible for the foreigner to present to his own countrymen. I have had to work with

such officials in war and peace. Their sycophancy, their barefaced lying, their treachery, their

cowardice, are so blatant, their ignorance so stultifying, their stupidity so absolute, that I have


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found it impossible to convey it with any creditability to those fortunate enough never to have

encountered it."

Crankshaw would have little trouble conveying this sensibility today, for, paradoxically, it is

just this milieu that we are encountering with increasing frequency in Western society. In fact,

it bears a remarkable resemblance to a fringe movement of political activists who identifythemselves as the New Left.

Suppose some unrepentant Marxist wished to reproduce the Russian milieu of personal and

moral degradation described by Crankshaw in American society. Absent the lethal methods of

coercion and intimidation at the disposal of the communist terror state, how would he

proceed? First, he would revive class hatred and cultural warfare by promoting the cult of

victimhood, invoking an inclusive class of perpetual victims, and deputize legions of

carpetbaggers and race hustlers to interpret, codify, and eulogize their every resentment,

manufactured or real. Next, he would create a repressive atmosphere of fear and paranoia by

promulgating exhaustive lists of verbal taboos and forbidden ideas so comprehensive,

arbitrary and capricious that, as in Puritan Salem, no one would be above suspicion. Finally,he would establish cultural relativism as the state religion, and advance the cause of

multiculturalism in order to undermine and trivialize the intellectual and cultural

achievements of Western society. In short, our Marxist would institute Pavlovian conditioning

in the form of political correctness, enabling a reflexive Marxist police state in all but name.

How ironic it would be if the conquest of world Communism were only to result in its revival

in cultural form, as a kind of psychological deprivation that perceived the self as a spiritual

nullity. What a triumph for the forces of totalitarianism if, by a mere verbal substitution of the

word 'incorrect' for 'subversive,' they could retire terrorism and the familiar apparatus social

repression (intimidation, imprisonment, torture, murder, blackmail, exile, etc.) and implement

an invisible censorship to promote the Marxist worldview with Pavlovian conditioning. The

police state would no longer require vast bureaucracies of agents and informants, Gulags and

labor camps, to suppress dissent and achieve its utopian social goals; it need only indoctrinate

men to police their own thoughts.

That militaristic regimes and police states contain the seeds of their own destruction is, of

course, a historical truism. After interrogating senior Nazi officials in the days immediately

following Germany's surrender in World War II, intelligence analysts from the U. S. State

Department expressed surprise at their mediocrity, observing that, with the exception of few

men like Albert Speer, they were 'a bunch of jerks,' an opinion shared by many Germans at

the time. How a gang of inept sociopaths succeeded in taking over the country that producedKant, Goethe and Beethoven is still something of a mystery. When asked, most Germans

simply shrug and say they awoke one morning and found the Nazis in control. Though the

Nazi Party seized power in stages, over a period of about fifteen years, the recollection of

many ordinary citizens is of an event that took place overnight.

Something of the same illusion of suddenness attends the arrival of political correctness. It

seems only yesterday that cases of PC began appearing in the press and the evening news.

There was about these initial incidents a sense of suspended disbelief and complacency, and

its early critics were accused of hysteria. Katharine Whitehorn, a British journalist, wrote:

"The thing has been blown up out of all proportion. PC language is not enjoined on one and allthereare a lot more places where you can say "spic" and "bitch" with impunity than places where you cansmoke a cigarette."


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Few observers understood that by the time a cultural phenomenon has come to the attention of

the media, it is already deeply entrenched. Typical of reported incidents was U. S.

Congresswomen Pat Schroeder's complaint that current specifications for the cockpits of

fighter aircraft conformed to only 85% of the general population. Fighter cockpits should

accommodate 95% of the population, insisted the stalwart egalitarian. Aeronautical engineers

patiently explained that an ejection seat designed to hurl a 250 pound man clear of a mach 2fighter, would toss a 100 pound woman into the stratosphere.

When sensitivity collides with common sense, the result is always absurdity, and incidents of

this kind have provoked hoots of laughter from both the right and the left sides of the aisle,

along with the growing contempt of the public. But while critics may cackle, it looks as

though PC partisans may have the last laugh. Imperceptibly, the victims' revolution has

acquired the ubiquity of smokers' cough and the hysterical frenzy of a Southern Baptist

revival. A sense of inevitability hangs in the air, and there are ominous signs of a fait

accompli. Skeptics who thought political correctness was a camp phenomenon or a passing

fad are invited to read theNew Yorkerreview of the movie What's Eating Gilbert Grape, in

which the mentally retarded brother is described as 'mentally challenged.' Evasive,patronizing and inelegant, tortured circumlocutions like this have crept into the writing of

discriminating journalists and writers who would have considered them ludicrous a few years

ago. Thoreau warned us to 'beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.' What would he

have said about enterprises that require new vocabulary?

Even the augustL. A. Times, flagship of the Times-Mirror colossus bestriding downtown Los

Angeles, has succumbed to the victims' rights agenda, and its stylebook committee codified a

new set of amendments proscribing such phrases as Dutch treat. This, of course, is absurd,

but typical of the comic contradictions that arise when the totalitarian mind attempts to

interpret culture. The charm of slang is its inherent bias, and even members of the Times

stylebook committee must know that you cannot eliminate evil from the world by expurgating

language. Nor is that their purpose. During the debriefing of a KGB agent who had defected

to the West during the Stalinist era, a CIA official asked him why the Communist Party line

was so patently stupid. Didn't this actually work against loyalty to the state? The KGB agent

laughed and replied that you cannot create an atmosphere of terror by requiring people to

believe in reasonable things. In order to instill the maximum fear, guilt and self-loathing

necessary to cow people into abject submission to the state, you must demand that they

believe, or at least act as though they believe, in something that is manifestly absurd. The list

of forbidden words and phrases enforced by the thought police at theL.A. Times certainty

satisfies this condition, and is a useful reminder that the armory of social repression is not

only rather lethal, it is utterly impersonal. Those who resort to coercive censorship, whetherthey are the egalitarian thistlebottoms at theL.A. Times or doctrinaire thugs of the KGB, wield

the same bloody axe. The results are uniformly destructive to the human spirit.

It is axiomatic that those least alarmed

by the erosion of society's moral and

intellectual life have none themselves. It

is easy to understand the crude appeal of

political correctness to liberal yahoos of

the New Left (closet fascists posing as

60's liberals): it provides them with a

ready store of social causes that requireno thought and confers instant moral authority on all those who profess to champion them;

An invention of the educated elite, politicalcorrectness is essentially a class phenomenon, i.e.designer morals for yuppies of uneasy conscience. Socioeconomic groups informed by the starkexigencies of survival have shown little interest in thehair-splitting subtleties and scholastic quibbling ofvictim taxonomy.


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less obvious is its attraction to the intelligentsia. The cynical tactics of manipulation and

intimidation are a throwback to the police state; the childlike faith in the efficacy of social

engineering hopelessly nave; the unctuous solicitude for downtrodden minorities andclammy compassion for the wretched of the earth are an affront to human dignity. What self-

respecting liberal could be taken in by such fatuous posturing and moral exhibitionism? What

is Pat Schroeder doing telling Lockheed how to build jet fighters? Why have hard-nosedjournalists developed a sudden Pollyanna fixation? And why are distinguished publications,

famed for their aggressive editorial independence, appeasing self-anointed victims' groups

and groveling before sanctimonious minorities?

More to the point, why would any society beset with realsocial problems (pandemic crime,

the worst educational system in the industrialized world, an imploding socioeconomic

infrastructure, in a world where terrorist states have access to nuclear weapons, etc.) squander

its limited moral resources on the frivolous, manufactured distinctions posed by the PC

partisans? The question answers itself. The PC movement is both a potent distraction from

more intransigent social problems and an ersatz substitute for the patience, wisdom and

expertise needed to solve them; while the emergence of a class of PC carpetbaggersguarantees that, as the lurid melodrama of the victims' revolution unfolds in the full glory of

its irrelevance upon the stage of jaded public consciousness, grave issues of national survival

will continue to be pushed further into the background.

An invention of the educated elite, political correctness is essentially a class phenomenon, i.e.

designer morals for yuppies of uneasy conscience. While advocates of victims' rights agonize

over whether to call persons of African descent 'blacks' or 'Negroes,' tens of thousands of

Africans are dying of starvation, AIDS, and in tribal warfare. Socioeconomic groups informed

by the stark exigencies of survival have shown little interest in the hairsplitting subtleties and

scholastic quibbling of victim taxonomy. Coincidentally, these are the very social groups PC

purports to champion; but this would not be the first time a subversive agenda and

questionable motives had been concealed by a smokescreen of concern for the common man.

It is a commonplace that elaborate stratagems to compensate penalized minorities and avoid

giving pain to others, such as quotas, affirmative action, preferential treatment, euphemistic

speech, and other palliates, often achieve the opposite. By drawing attention to, and

stigmatizing, the victim's disability, they serve only to confirm that he hasn't enough self-

esteem, dignity and imagination to deal responsibly with his own problems. As a corollary,

such a strategy tends to encourage self-pity and the manufacture of sensitivities without end,

promoting an autonomous culture of victims and empowering sanctimonious minorities with

unearned moral authority. Every one of us constitutes a minority of one, and no amount ofsympathy or fellow-feeling, however well-intentioned, can ever remove the pain of man's

isolation or the tragic nature of the human condition.

PC zealots hold that if we attend to minutiae, larger issues will take care of themselves, that if

(say) you proscribe ethnic humor, genocide will become, literally, unthinkable. This is the

rank fallacy of the feckless harridan who believes if she natters at her husband for dumping

his pipe dottle in the potted plants, he wouldn't dream of visiting a house of prostitution. It's

whistling in the dark. Not only does it lull society into a false sense of security, but the

persistent recourse to euphemism and circumlocution corrupts and debases language, and the

coercive atmosphere of guilt, fear and intimidation surrounding this capricious censorship

inhibits the easy give-and-take of human discourse, the life-blood of democratic institutions,and ultimately of man's own social and spiritual life.


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Recalling the strenuous schedule of examinations at the Munich Gymnasium and Zurich

Polytechnic, Albert Einstein remarked that "This coercion had such a deterring effect that,

after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems

distasteful to me for an entire year." One of the great fallacies of the apostles of sensitivity is

their implicit assumption that we are vulnerable in our affective life, when it is our cognitive

life that is at risk. Emotions and feelings are comparatively robust and self-sustaining; it is thedelicate and finely tuned instrument of reason, or our capacity to reflect, conceive and learn,

that is contingent and that requires continuous nurture.

The Persistence of Utopia

The latest cause clbre of the victims' revolution is cash reparationsfor the descendants of American slaves. With an unerring instinct for lurid

controversy, unmatched even by the tabloid press,Harper's Magazine

conducted a forum in its pages called, "The Case for Reparations." One

would have thought that the casualties of the American Civil War had gonea long way toward the cancellation of that debt. Perhaps a visit to

America's Civil War cemeteries would appease the twice- and thrice-

removed 'victims' of nineteenth century slavery. My great-grandfather, Pvt.

William J. Connor of the Eighth Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment,

took part in the bloody assault on the Second Texas Lunette at Vicksburg, and was poisoned

at a rebel drinking well at Otterville, Missouri in 1861, an injury from which he never fully

recovered. May I and my family claim an indemnity from the U.S. Government?

In a movement that is about the here and now, historical amnesia is the order of the day, and

explains why PC partisans have never bothered to deal with several inconvenient facts

surrounding Negro victimology. Consider, for example, the curious affinity of African-Americans with Islam and Islamic names. It was not Christian missionaries, but Muslims

North African Arabs and Berberswho organized and ran the black slave trade in the African

interior. Similarly, there is no linguistic evidence that 'welshing' on a debt is a slur on the

inhabitants of Wales (the verb originated in the resistance of Welsh school children to English

language instruction), yet its use is strictly forbidden by the PC handbook of theLos Angeles

Times. When the coin of the realm is moral indignation, historical truth is a devalued

currency.

Political correctness is the triumph of sensitivity over truth; but it is more than and less than

that. The following editorial appeared on May 5, 2003, in The Desert Sun, a newspaper of the

Gannet chain located in the Palm Springs area:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging thefreedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of

grievance." First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Don Quixote


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Our VoiceFind other names for Sports teams

'Redskins,' 'Braves' have no place in today's sport arenas

Those who use Indian names for mascots or sports teams probably don't intend to offendanyone, but the point is that they do. As a state, it's time to reassess our thinking and thepay heed to the sensitivities of American Indians.

The tool available to begin the sea change in actand attitudeis Assembly Bill 2115. Theproposed legislation aims to protect tribes from having names traditionally associated withIndians such as "Redskins" or "Braves" used for mascots or teams names by the state'spublic schools.

The only question here is: What took so long for such legislation to surface?

Dismissing the issue as much ado about political correctness does not eliminate the disputeor change the feeling of those American Indians truly offended. Why prolong such aneedless point of friction?

"So-called Indian mascots reduce hundreds of indigenous tribes to generic cartoons,"Cornel Pewewardy writes in "Why Educators Can't Ignore Indian Mascots." "These 'WildWest' figments of the white imagination distort both the indigenous and non-indigenouschildren's attitudes toward an oppressedand diverseminority. Schools should be placeswhere students come to unlearn the stereotypes such mascots represent"

It's been more than 30 years since the National Congress of American Indians launched acampaign to bring an end to the use of Indian sports mascots and other media stereotypes.Still, there' work to be done as is evidence by AB 2115.

There are those who trivialize the issue, saying tribes should be more concerned aboutunemployment, health care and poverty on the reservations than about sports teamcaricatures. But this issue transcends a distorted cartoon. For any student of history, it isapparent such caricatures are rife with racism. It is that simple.

The bill has support from a broad range of educational and Indian organizations, and rightlyso. According to the March issue of Sports Illustrated, 83 percent of Indian nationally wantprofessional sports teams to stop using Indian Names. How many times and in how manyways do they need to deliver that message?

The time has come for sports teams in California to stop turning to Indian-themed mascots

to generate cheers. It brings shame to the teams and to the schools. It's time to take theissue to a higher plane.

This newspaper proudly displays the First Amendment at the top of its editorial page, but it is

doubtful anyone in the editorial department has read it lately. The fact that Assembly Bill

2115 did not pass is scant consolation; a form of propaganda, PC censorship is atmospheric;

upon release it pervades the fabric of our social life and remains there like a bad odor; i.e., it

succeeds even as it fails. Like the old-style Soviet propaganda with which it has much in

common, PC censorship is not designed to advance the truth; it is an instrument of

manipulation, conditioning and control; and those who deny its influence have alreadysuccumbed to it as environment.


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Although the authors are quick to distance themselves from political correctness, this editorial

is a classic specimen of PC fascism. Notice how cleverly the reverence for the authoritarian

power of the state and the invitation to groupthink are folded into a self-congratulatory

solicitude for a penalized minority. The empathetic authors would have us believe they are

inside the minds of the 'victims,' feeling their pain and anguish (the idea being, apparently, to

inflict maximum survivor guilt on the rest of us).

It is all so familiar: the travesty of benevolence, the asinine unction, the creepy solicitude; the

absurd demands, bogus scholarship and invented statistics provided by special interest groups

(Pewewardy is no more an anthropologist than Sports Illustratedis a scientific journal). If

Indian tribes have suddenly developed ethnic sensitivities, perhaps it is because cleverly-

worded survey questions suggest that they should. Other polls indicate that American Indians

are blandly indifferent to team logos. But what if they were not? What authority would this

give the state to dictate linguistic usage? Do American Indian tribes own the trademark rights

to these common English words? And what does the adoption of team logos like 'Aztecs,'

'Braves' and 'Redskins' have to do with crying 'fire' in a crowded theater? Surrendering

autonomy to special interest groups is hardly what the Founding Fathers had in mind whenthey framed the Bill of Rights.

All this is obvious and, hence, trivial; less obvious and trivial is the chilling effect of this

whimsical censorship on our daily lives. The most insidious effect of these proscriptions is not

that they enjoin free speech and assemblyafter all, Assembly Bill 2115 did not passbut

that they cast a shadow of inhibition over human discourse that paralyses the free flow of

ideas, making spontaneous thought all but impossible; undermining not merely the contentof

speech and thought, but the very impulse to think and speak freely, for centuries the crucial

enabling principle of democracy, and man's social and transcendental life.

On its face, the objection to team logos is absurd. This is a familiar inversion: the more

superficial the distinction, the more ferocious the moral approbrium; the more absurd the

proscription, the more effective the inhibition of thought. This is a recurrent theme in the

works of Franz Kafka, i.e. the terrifying disproportion between guilt and punishment; the

more minute and mysterious the offense, the more brutal the retribution. The sense of horror

is heightened by the surreal and arbitrary nature of the penalty meted out. In Kafka's universe

of malevolent lunacy, thought itself, not merely 'incorrect' thought, is a crime. "It is something

you do not need to know," answers K.'s lawyer when K. asks him what offense he has been

charged with in The Trial.

The use of sham research and statistics is an attempt to impart a veneer of rationality to abelief-system. Political correctness, like its collectivist ancestor, stems from a political

ideology based on a nihilistic interpretation of man. PC zealots are less concerned with the

welfare of minorities than they are with imposing their reductionist view of man on society.

The premise of this editorial is not that we should accede to the manufactured sensitivies of

minorities (this is only a tactical diversion); it is that minorities, and humanity in general, lack

the spiritual resources and imagination to deal with bad taste and vulgarity, without the

intervention of the state. That is thepremise. The effectis simpler and more lethala toxic

cloud of fear and paranoia that surrounds every impulse, thought and decision we make, to the

exclusion of thought itself; leaving us with only the nihilism and anemic social philosophy of

progressive ideologues to confront the anarchy of life. The unstated message of this editorial

is that we are all sinners in the hands of an angry Marxist God.


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Editorial pieces like the one above have been appearing in newspapers and periodicals all

over America. The editors of these publications were not acting on orders from the

Comintern, and they would probably be shocked to hear themselves described as cultural

Marxists. Political philosophy, they would say, was the furthest thing from their minds.

Let us grant this at once. Most proponents of political correctness do not consider theiradvocacy political, let alone ideological; they are simple idealists and dreamers, well-meaning

yuppies and flower children with ponytails, who believe that it is a humane and decent guide

to compassionate conduct. The immediate allure of political correctness is that it 'feels right;'

it seems to be a good idea. No reflection is called for: PC is flypaper for a new generation of

'useful idiots,' Lenin's expression for social activists living in the liberal democracies who

unwittingly advanced the cause of Communism. The impulse to censor the speech (and

thought) of others fulfills a deep human appetite for power and control inextricable from the

Communist worldview, i.e. with the 'tyranny of the proletariat.' In practice, if not theory (in its

brutal implementation if not in Party discussions in London coffee houses), Marxism is

simply another name for fascism.

Richard Rorty's Utopia of Sensitive Souls

It would be hard to find a more candid rationale for political correctness than Richard Rorty's

book, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, a candor evident in his unapologetic use of such

words as 'utopia' and 'sensitivity.' Rorty begins with the familiar nominalist argument that

such words as 'truth,' 'beauty' and 'goodness' are mere names that refer to no objective

phenomenon, and holds with the doctrine of historicism that there is no baseline humanity

below our socialization or history.

Indeed Rorty, and other Marxist thinkers like Davidson and Chomsky, would have us believe

language is some sort of irreducible activity that anchors thought and is the foundation of

human consciousness. As Davidson puts it, "speaking a language... is not a trait a man can

lose while retaining the power of thought. So there is no chance that someone can take up a

vantage point for comparing conceptual schemes by temporarily shedding his own." This

dovetails neatly with the pieties of political correctness; for if, as these theorists hold,

language is the precondition to human thought, then all that is necessary for man's moral

rehabilitation is to correct his speech.

That there are no universal human values, says Rorty, is proven by the fact that there is so

much human diversity. For example, in Western societies marital fidelity is considered the

norm, but in some Polynesian and Eskimo societies, it is not uncommon for a man to offer hiswife to a visitor for the night. So according to Rorty, rather than ask: "What is it to be a

human being?" we ought to ask: "What is it to inhabit a rich twentieth century democratic

society?" But democratic societies, even 'rich' ones, are not exceptional. Over a hundred

viable democracies have emerged in the last century, not to mention earlier prototypes:

Tribal Man

Periclean Athens

Classical Rome

The Vikings

Colonial America

Victorian England


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All of these societies were in some sense de jure democracies. Even primitive societies were

quick to see that tribal counsels shared by an inclusive membership were less controversial

than decisions arrived at by fiat. This is the practical argument Pericles made when he said

that 'democracy is everyone's business,' and in the empirical observation that, despite all its

flaws, no other political system seems to work. There is no human universal here except the

evolutionary response to employ the most useful tools at hand, like the plow. But this onlyleads to a deeper question: "Why do men refuse to yield to lawless autocracy?" And we

discover the answer in the realm of the transcendental: because their personal dignity and

their potential for spiritual growth are crushed by authoritarianism.

We can certainly make the argument that the growth and success of democracies in the

twentieth century was due to their inherent stability, but if we look beyond this simple

pragmatic argument we will see that this stability is based on the fact that in a free society

man is able to pursue such ideals a 'truth,' 'beauty' and 'goodness,' the metaphysical

abstractions the nominalists tell us are nothing more than irrational sentiment and estheticism.

These abstractions, Rorty tells us, belong to an obsolete paradigm:

In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away"prejudice" or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is tobe achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellowsufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing oursensitivityto the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people.[emphasis added]

This is the philosophic foundation for the victims' movement, the imaginative power to

empathize with fellow sufferers. Human solidarity, or those immutable laws by which man

interacts with his fellow man and the world around him, are a Chimaera, abstractions adduced

after the fact. We do not consult the past to create the conditions for utopia, e.g. the wisdom

of Homer, Aristotle and Blake, etc., because they spoke only to their own times, but

imaginatively project ourselves into the unique specificity of the here and now. So in addition

to public debate and reasoned discourse we are asked by a leading advocate of gay rights,

Martha C. Nussbaum, to imagine a 'humane public poetry':

The issue [of gay rights] demands more [than discussion]. It demands also an effort of culture: worksof art, high art and popular art, that touch the public imagination and inspire it to feel empathy withrelationships that are now viewed with loathing.

Thus, it is not reflection but empathy that is the magical key to the

gates of Beulah Land. But where does empathy end? It is not clear

where we should draw the line or even if there is a line. Carry thisPollyanna philosophy to its logical conclusion and we find there is no

human conduct unworthy of our empathy, no fail-safe mechanism to

prevent us from empathizing with the Devil himself. For example,

there are those who deplored the Marshall Plan as an instrument to

achieve European recovery, because it isolated the USSR and

provoked Stalin. Had it not been for the Marshall Plan, they tell us,

Stalin would have been prepared to make peace with the West

instead of being forced into aggression. This is reminiscent of the

argument that had not America imposed an oil embargo on the Japan

in 1941, Japanese militarists would not have ordered the attack on

Pearl Harbor. (Never mind that the Japanese Imperial Army had

The caption says: "With the help ofJapan, China, and Manchukuo, theworld can be in peace."


12/35

already killed ten to twenty million Chinese civilians in Manchuria and mainland China to

establish its 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere' .)

There is something perversely naive and subversive about the concept of empathy. (Uncle Joe

would have freed the Captive Nations had America appeased his volcanic paranoia?)

Something addled in its optimism about the human race. (Homosexual activists have noradical agenda to mainstream their epicene lifestyle, promote an androgynous society, and

recast American culture in a unisex straightjacket?) According to the Bodhisattvas, Gautama

Buddha, is not smiling out of a supernatural goodness of heart or a sentimental belief in the

brotherhood of man, or because he is a kindly, sensitive, empathetic being; the Buddha's smile

is an expression of his delight in the creative process of knowing. He is smiling because he

understands and sees all. Kindness is a by-product of reflection.

InAnna Karenina, when Alexy Alexandrovitch Karenin expresses his displeasure with his

son, Seryozha, for neglecting his studies, the narrator (Tolstoy) observes that

He was not a stupid boy. On the contrary, he was far cleverer than the boys his teacher held up asexamples to Seryozha. In his fathers opinion, he did not want to learn what he was taught. In realityhe could not learn that. He could not, because the claims of his own soul were more binding on himthan those claims his father and his teacher made upon him. Those claims were in opposition, and hewas in direct conflict with his education. He was nine years old; he was a child; but he knew his ownsoul, it was precious to him, he guarded it as the eyelid guards the eye, and without the key of love helet no one into his soul.

Seryozha resists the learning imposed on him by his tutors because he cannot admit anything

to his inner life that has not been sanctified by love, which, for Tolstoy, was the beginning of

all human understanding, creativity and achievement. (Or, to paraphrase Mozart: Love, not

loftiness of intelligence or imagination, is the soul of genius.). When liberal progressives like

Rorty speak of empathy, sensitivity and utopia, they are not referring to mankind's capacityfor love, but to the Promethean impulse to transcend human nature and remake society by the

sheer exertion of human will without reference to moral limits. Rorty, and the partisans of

political correctness, represent the tutor imposing an external idea on society, i.e. the timeless

myth of a terrestrial paradise, and it is because this originates from without, rather than from

within, that all utopian movements eventually fail.

In his scholarly study of cartography,Mapping Paradise: A History of

Heaven on Earth, Alessandro Scafi notes that up until the Renaissance,

Western map makers took pains to include earthly paradise on their maps of

the world. In the Medieval worldview the Garden of Eden was an actual

geographic location that was or would become heaven, the place where the

saints and mankind would find rest and repose at the end of history. In short,

the abode of the blessed was a destination, not a social engineering project.

After the Copernican Revolution there evolved, in a kind of blasphemous

mimicry, a humanistic or secular tradition of earthly paradise, Utopianism,

born of the notion that paradise was a perfect society or ideal civilization that man himself

could bring about. Thomas More coined the word, 'Utopia' (no place), for the as yet

unachieved perfect society or ideal civilization that mankind could call into being through the

agency of good works.

We are indebted to Arnold Toynbee for his analysis of millennial movements. Utopianism, hetells us, is an attempt either to recapture the past ('archaism') or scrap the past and cut short to

Arnold Toynbee


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the millennium ('futurism'), and is associated with senescent institutions and societies in

decline. Because creativity is a process that articulates itself moment by moment, societies in

a period of dynamic growth and self-discovery, e.g. such ongoing enterprises as the Periclean

Age, the Italian Quattrocento, the English Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Colonial

America, in a state of emergent evolution, do not develop according to a definitive plan, and

there is little inclination to formulate doctrines for success in the midst of success. It is onlyafter things have gone wrong, during a 'time of troubles,' that political thinkers, in a desperate

attempt to shore up the ruins of a collapsing civilization, resort to shallow prescriptive

remedies. Plato'sRepublic, a utopian manifesto that followed the catastrophe of the

Peloponnesian War, is a notorious example of this kind ofad hocpolitical thinking. Plato's

solution to Athens' social problems, of which the judicial murder of Socrates was

symptomatic, was the creation of an elite academy of philosopher-kings to the rule a state

based on the Spartan military model. Plato's preference for a regimented oligarchy was a

repudiation of the historic synthesis of democracy and culture that had made Periclean Athens

the envy of the other city-states, the political miracle Pericles called 'the education of Hellas.'

PC from Nursery to University

The education of America has become a lightning rod for PC revisionism, and the evolution

of the American educational system is a history of contending educational philosophies,

beginning with Ciceronian humanism, and ending with a decline into instrumentalism,

relativism, multiculturalism, and finally obscurantism (we can prescribe prophylactics for pre-

teens and they can listen to rap, but we cannot expose them to team logos).

In colonial America educational philosophy was influenced by the French encyclopedists of

the Enlightenment, of which Jefferson was the exemplar and leading advocate. Jeffersonian

democracy was based upon the Ciceronian ideal of the citizen-farmer who was an intellectualaristocrat by virtue of a classical (non-specialist) education in the humanities. As America

shifted from an agricultural to an industrial economy, another educational theory, based on

New England Calvinism, began to assert itself. According to the Calvinistic doctrine preached

by the New England divines, man was a fallible creature who could only redeem himself by

good works. This led easily to the notion that his education should be utilitarian, an idea that

dove-tailed neatly with New England's industrial bias and the logical positivism of John

Dewey. Dewey held that man was a technological unit of the state and that his training should

therefore be scientific and specialist; with a strong emphasis on something called 'critical

thinking,' as opposed to mnemonic skills. Professional educators subscribed readily to the

bold simplicity of this idea, for in it they sensed a profound correspondence to the stark

simplicity of their technocratic souls, and it has been the foundation of the Americaneducational system ever since.

The influence of Dewey has been most pronounced in the training of

secondary school teachers, where an emphasis on methodology, how to as

opposed to what, gave rise to the notorious 'life-adjustment' curriculum and

a class of dreary professional careerists who excel in pedagogic technique,

with only perfunctory attention to course content. More recently the 'life-

adjustment' curriculum has been co-opted by 'Outcome-Based Education.'

According to OBE, the test of educational efficiency no longer depends

upon the adjustment of a child to his or her environment (the central tenet of

progressive education) but upon the sense of well-being such an adjustmentJohn Dewey


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confers upon the child. In either case, the result is the same : both teacher and student are

exempted from the more strenuous disciplines of traditional learning.

At the university level, Dewey's ideas meshed neatly with the Teutonic model of inquiry

based on scientific scholarship adopted by Harvard University. The hierarchy of knowledge

achieved in fifth-century Athens, and rediscovered by secular humanists of the EuropeanRenaissance and Colonial America, was supplanted by the concept of knowledge as

asymptotic and phenomenal, a leveling of human experience to a behavioristic plane,

denuding Western culture of metaphysics. In an attempt to emulate the glamour and

ascendancy of the scientific disciplines, the American university reduced humanistic studies

to sterile specialization and pseudoscience (scientism). This has a PC correlative. For this

development not only set the stage for a decline in the prestige of humanistic studies, it

opened the way for deconstructionism, a nihilistic theory of criticism which holds that

literature is devoid of meaning. If Western literature has no meaning, then its preeminence in

the curriculum is unjustified, paving the way for multiculturalism. The goal of

deconstructionism was to dismantle Western metaphysics, but trivialization of the humanities

had already proceeded so far there is some question whether there was anything left todismantle.

After this relentless battering by the -isms (Calvinism, Progressivism, Behaviorism,

Scientism, and Deconstructionism) the failure of the American educational system was a

foregone conclusion. Math proficiency and English literacy have fallen to such low levels that

even the stolid bovines of the educational establishment have begun to bestir themselves. The

effects of a uneducated populace reverberate throughout society. The first casualties of

ignorance in a democracy are those institutions most dependent upon an educated citizenry for

their maintenance, such as the judicial system. Legal scholars, who have long bemoaned the

capricious verdicts of American juries, attribute the problem to an unwieldy legal system so

overbuilt with case precedent it is virtually unusable. But no legal system in the world would

be proof against the ignorance and ineptitude of a typical American juror.

The displacement of humanism and metaphysics by the Teuronic ideal ofWissenschaft

(scientism, and its handmaiden scientific specialization), in an increasingly secular society has

created a moral vacuum and spiritual malaise felt at every level of American life. The

American university now finds itself populated by a generation of students who are culturally

illiterate and spiritually adrift. Reared in an educational milieu of sterile methodology and

moral relativism that has trivialized its sacred texts and great books, they view their own

society as a militant technocracy rather than a universal culture, and their contempt for

Western values extends not only to its democratic institutions, but to its norms for civility aswell. As a result, the social disintegration that was once confined to the inner city, has now

invaded the genteel precincts of academia, and American campuses have become the scene of

unprecedented antisocial behavior, including an alarming increase in racial incidents and such

crimes as date-rape.

This was fertile ground for political correctness and baffled university officials have

responded in typical PC fashion. Treating symptoms, rather than causes, they called for strict

censorship of offensive speech and instituted Draconian disciplinary codes; and, in an attempt

to defuse racial tensions, implemented a multicultural curriculum. Some of these desperate ad

hoc disciplinary measures, such as Antioch College's sex code, were not only silly, they were

flagrant violations of due process, and were subsequently struck down by the Supreme Courtas unconstitutional. The humanities curriculum, already eviscerated by deconstructionism and


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'scientific' scholarship, was further debased with courses in gender-politics and black studies,

while prestigious institutions, like Stanford University, dropped their Western Culture course

requirements altogether; and today it is possible to graduate from a major American university

without having read any of the great seminal works of Western civilization.

The parallels to Plato's Republic are uncanny, but should surprise no one; while the dynamicsof social creativity are unique, the pattern of social failure is always the same. A society that

has lost touch with the dynamic vision responsible for its success is rarely able to rekindle the

creative spark from the cold ashes of failure, or even to arrest decline. Hypnotized by its own

pathology, and impatient for quick solutions, a society in decline typically undervalues its

earlier achievements. The allure of the exotic is irresistible to those who no longer understand

their cultural origins, and they cast about for solutions outside their own society. Just as Plato

rejected the achievements of Periclean Athens and turned to Sparta for inspiration, banning

poets as enemies of the state, university officials discarded the Western canon and enforced

multiculturalism with police state censorship and the suspension of due process. Instead of

reaffirming the universal values of Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian society that have bound

diverse cultures to one another for two thousand years, they promoted cultural relativism, astrategy that accelerates social collapse.

These developments have already acquired an alarming momentum and are probably beyond

immediate remedy. Is there a way to reverse the process social disintegration? We can no

more control the course of social pathology than we can govern the human passions that drive

it; the corruption of a society's cultural values is only noticed after it is far advanced; changing

direction is somewhat analogous to reversing the course of a supertanker.

But there must be a start. Sometimes understanding a phenomenon removes the need to

control it; for when we become aware of the hidden workings of such a process, it no longer

has the power to impose itself on our unconscious life. Traditional societies turned to their

gods in a time of crisis; a modern society consults its visionaries and artists. It is a

commonplace that a gifted novelist can tell us more about our social history in a single work

of fiction than is available to us on the sagging bookshelves of social science; literary

techniques and poetic imagination afford a wealth of insight into social pathology and provide

us with an intimate and penetrating understanding of our society. Comparing documentary

history to the human history revealed by literary imagination, Joseph Conrad wrote:

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on

firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena,

whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwritingon second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth.

What is more, literary works, and especially the novel, provide us not only with the most

accurate social history of the times, but in their power to reveal the metaphysics of human

existence in poetic expression, they are semi-religious documents and sacred texts in their

own right, inspirational moral guides to human conduct. If the words 'Apostolic succession'

have any real meaning to the modern world, it is in reference to the works of its literary

artists. Homer'sIliadwas just such a document, rich in universal wisdom, poetic perception,

and lessons in noble conduct and self-sacrifice, and a testimonial to the tragic nature of the

human condition. No one has has better expressed this than Thomas Mann in his introduction

toAnna Karenina:


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Art is the most beautiful, the most pungent, the most joyous and most reverent of symbols for

all man's super-rational striving toward the good, toward truth and toward perfection. And the

breath of the surging sea of epic art would not so stirringly expand our breasts, did it not bring

with it the pungent in invigorating roots of the spiritual and the divine.

We get a notion of who we are as we read and absorb these literary artifacts of the past andpresent. That Western dramatists, novelists and poets constitute a natural succession of the

Twelve Apostles was first suggested by George Santayana:

Religion and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merely in the way in which they attach

to practical affairs. Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it

merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry.

Utopian Visionaries in History and Literature

We find that the utopian visionary is well-represented in Western literature, and includes such

worthies as Don Quixote and Candide. But for a more contemporary example, we turn to

Kurtz in Joseph Conrad'sHeart Of Darkness, a novel as harrowing in its moral power as a

Biblical parable. Kurtz is of particular interest, because in him Conrad has evoked the

definitive utopian visionary of modern times, and a close reading of the narrative yields

significant insight into the utopian mind. But before turning to Conrad's novel, it might be

useful to establish a historical context for the problem. History has a way of revealing the

arbitrary, and at times unsavory, origins of our most cherished beliefs; and an investigation of

the ancestry of a compelling political idea often serves to qualify the enthusiasm of even its

most ardent partisans.

One of the most influential utopian thinkers in recent history is Francis Bacon.HisNew Atlantis described an ideal society based on reason, and it is still

regarded by many as the original blueprint for the West's spectacular advances

in science and technology. "The end of our Foundation," says one of the

guiding Fathers, "is knowledge of causes and secret motions of things; and

enlarging the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."

Bacon believed in the perfectibility of man, and that it could be achieved by a

balanced education in the arts and the sciences. Like all utopians, he was

convinced he could bring about such a society in his own time, and to that end

he petitioned the Crown for funds to establish colleges and educate a cadre of leaders. He

was, of course, rebuffed. King James, chronically short of revenue, had his hands full with the

Parliament, and man's mastery of the physical universe and "the effecting of all thingspossible," would have to wait a few centuries. Not surprisingly, some of the leading intellects

of Bacon's time were unsympathetic to his ideas. It was to a gift copy of Bacon's Novum

Organum that Sir Edward Coke had scornfully affixed the celebrated couplet:

It deserveth not to be read in Schooles

But to be freighted in the ship of Fooles.

No matter. The cause of science and human progress has never had a more eloquent

spokesman, and Bacon had thrown open a magical casement on the future.

Francis Bacon


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Bacon's belief in the utility of 'an achieved body of truth' and 'collective

wisdom' and the Promethean gift of science, was to bring him into conflict

with another utopian, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What Bacon had seen as

Divine instruments to aid man in a Sisyphean struggle to master his soul and

unlock the mysteries of the universe, Rousseau had seen as an impertinent

intrusion into God's domain and a profane disruption of the cosmicharmonies. What Bacon had seen as the gradual and painstaking evolution of

man from barbarism to Godly perfection, Rousseau had viewed as 'an

artificial pageant of blood and butcheries perpetrated by "a few mad,

designing, or ambitious priests." ' Like Bacon, Rousseau believed in the perfectibility of man,

but he was convinced that it could, and must be achieved without the intervention of society.

Man's works, generated by ego, artifice and guile, had only brought about his enslavement;

his manifest duty was to disinter his soul from the detritus of civilization and rediscover his

lost innocence in direct communion with Nature. At war with reason, Rousseau believed man

must exorcise the accumulated knowledge of the collective past and cleanse his soul of all

civilizing influences; and if he was willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater, it wasbecause centuries of war and religious strife had convinced him that the baby was stillborn.

His program to recapture lost innocence of childhood and put man back in touch with the

primal forces of the universe evolved into the doctrine of the 'noble savage' and the re-

creation of society in the image of man's original state.

The 'noble savage' was a picturesque construct of Rousseau's that bore little resemblance to

the real thing. But it was from the vantage of this fiction that he launched his attack on

civilization. What Rousseau failed to realize was that his paradisiacal vision of primitive

nobility, was as much a symptom of corruption as the civilized institutions he abhorred. His

critique of civilization and embrace of Romantic barbarity led later to savage assaults on

human decency, masquerading as movements of liberation ('a pageant of blood and

butcheries' Rousseau had not anticipated).

Darwin's discovery that man had evolved from lower animals, 'red in tooth and claw,' not only

forced the Church to re-examine the dogmas of the Creation, it made sentimental nonsense of

Rousseau's nave view of nature as the cradle of innocence. Nevertheless, Rousseau hadhappened upon a profound poetic truth, one that was to exert a powerful influence on the

Romantic imagination down to our own time, that 'the child is father to the man.' That man's

spiritual life proceeds from the rapt wonder, enchantment and simplicity of childhood is

foreshadowed in Christ's instruction to his disciples:

Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me; for of such is the Kingdom of

Heaven. . . . Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the

Kingdom of Heaven.

Unfortunately, the apotheosis of nature held many dangers, for with the passive merging of

man with nature came the extinction the ego and of individual consciousness, and by

implication the reduction of man to a functional unit of an absolutist society, the paradigm for

modern Twentieth Century collectivism. Nature conceived as a picturesque object of

sentimental idolatry was essentially a rejection of human genius, a form of spiritual lobotomy

and moral deprivation; and the doctrine of the 'noble savage,' and its implicit message of anti-

intellectualism, held the seeds for a Romantic nihilism that was to exercise a less than salutaryeffect on Rousseau's disciples: two hundred years later 'innocent' children would be

Jean-Jacques Rousseau


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suffocating adults with plastic bags in the killing fields of Cambodia. It is to this nihilism that

John Stuart Mill refers in his Chapters On Socialism:

If appearances can be trusted the animating principle of too many of the revolutionary

Socialists is hate; a very excusable hatred of existing evils, which would vent itself by putting

an end to the present system at all costs even to those who suffer by it, in the hope that out ofchaos would arise a better Kosmos.

It is the fatal notion that, if we could somehow eliminate all trace of civilization and start with

a blank page, we could create a perfect society, or as Joseph Conrad said, 'the strange

conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human

institutions.' As V.S. Naipaul has observed, the 'wish to wipe out and undo' has been the

hallmark of some of the bloodiest 'revolutions' in recent history:

A rebellion like this occurred after independence. It was led by Pierre Mulele, a former

minister of education, who, after a long march through the country, camped at Stanleyville

and established a reign of terror. Everyone who could read and write had been taken out tothe little park and shot; everyone who wore a tie had been shot. These were the stories about

Mulele that were circulating in neighboring Uganda in 1966, nearly two years after the

rebellion had been put down . . . . Nine thousand people are said to have died in Mulele's

rebellion. What did Mulele want? What was the purpose of the killings? The forty-year-old

African who had spent some time in the United States laughed and said, "Nobody knows. He

was against everything. He wanted to start again from the beginning."

During the French Revolution, there was interesting exchange of words between Lavoisier's

counsel and the judge at his trial. When the councel said: "You are condemning a great

scholar!" the judge replied: "The Republic does not need scholars." Rousseau's apologists

insist that these enormities came about as a simplistic interpretation of his ideas and that he

would have been appalled by these ritual butcheries; but the fact remains that Robespierre and

Pol Pot did not invoke the writings Voltaire or Thomas Paine to justify their slaughter of the

intelligentsia, but those of Rousseau.

If the dictatorship of the proletariat is absolute, then any violent act committed in it's nameis permissible. But this violence is ritualistic: the ambushes, beheadings, eviscerations ofthe innocent, obviously serve no social end; they are essentially primitive human sacrificesto appease the rain gods or stave off plague. The Left has an atavistic streak, a puritanicalsuperstition that human sacrifice, or to used the Marxist term, 'purification,' is required for

the Marxist-Leninist nod of approval, the necessary and sufficient condition to achieveutopia. Death on less than a massive scale isn't meaningful enough for Communismcan't really be Communism, can it?

According to the recent biography of Mao Tse-Tung, Mao, the Unknown Story, by JungChang and Jon Halliday, Mao was rotten to the core and harbored "a love for bloodthirstythuggery," blithely predicting that during the Great Leap Forward "half of China may wellhave to die." This turned out to be a bit of an exaggeration: only 38 million people died ofstarvation and overwork in the purifying flame of social revolution.

We are the hollow men. . .


19/35

But the Mulele revolt was a mere tremor compared to the human disaster that preceded itsome sixty years beforethe methodical enslavement and extermination of millions of

Congolese by Leopold II of Belgium. This was an unprecedented human catastrophe. History

had seen whole cities put to the sword and witnessed enormities of unparalleled savagery, but

never one of this scale nor one committed by a 'civilized' European power.

Hired on as the skipper of a paddle steamer by Leopold's Royal Belgium trading company,

Conrad was to become a firsthand witness to this apocalyptic event, an evil so morally

shocking in its extent that it was to permanently transform him (he would later remark that up

until his Congo experience, he had been living in a dream world). His health broken by fever,

Conrad returned to England after only a few months in the Congo. But there would be eight

years of searing meditation before he was able to assimilate the trauma of this experience and

explore its meaning inHeart Of Darkness.

There has been much speculation about Kurtz's true identity. In Conrad's

own words,Heart Of Darkness is a "histoire farouche d'un journalist quidevient chef de station l'intrieur et se fait adorer par une tribu desauvages."[a wild story about a journalist who became a chief of station in

the interior and made himself adored by a tribe of savages]. On this

showing, Kurtz could have been the rogue trader-explorer-journalist Henry

Stanley. There are also obvious parallels with the buccaneering exploits of

the 'White Rajahs' of Sarawak, and in particular with Charles-Marie David

de Mayrna and his brief reign as the 'King of the Sedang.' But with therecent publication of Adam Hochschild 's book,King Leopold's Ghost, we discover that

Conrad probably knew of, and may even have crossed paths with, a Captain Lon Rom, oneof Leopold's most notorious officers. Like Kurtz, Rom wrote for publication, painted, dabbled

in science, and decorated his fence palings with the heads of African tribesmen.

Conrad's characters could germinate from a random scrap of conversation, a name or a news

item; so the person who actually sparked the novelist's imagination was probably an obscure

agent by the name of Georges Antoine Klein, a Frenchman who worked for an ivory trading

company at Stanley Falls, who had fallen ill at his station and died aboard the steamboat

Conrad piloted on the Congo River. Little else is known of the mysterious Klein, and it is

doubtful that he provided more than a few of the story's incidental features. Here is Conrad's

description of Leggatt in The Secret Sharer: "He had rather regular features; a good mouth; a

smooth square forehead; no growth on his cheeks; a small brown mustache, and a well-

shaped, round chin." But aside from the observation that he was very tall, we have no physical

description of Kurtz, which would suggest he was a composite, possibly of Antoine Klein,Lon Rom, and the Irish liberal Roger Casement, with whom Conrad had struck up anacquaintance at Matadi.

It would have been interesting to listen in on Conrad's conversations with the Irish patriot and

humanitarian; he took few notes but tells us significantly that Casement had 'a touch of the

conquistdore' in him. Kurtz and Casement share other traits: Casement was a tall charismatic

figure with a mellifluous speaking voice. And like Kurtz, he was a man of humble origin

imbued with liberal sympathies, particularly the cause (of human progress). Both men were

attracted to the romance and mystery of Africa, and excited by the prospect of nation-building

and bringing civilization to the Belgian Congo (a country roughly the size of western Europe).

It is probably no coincidence that both Kurtz and Casement are journalists. Raised in a

household of Polish nobles, Conrad harbored an aristocrat's contempt and distrust for the

King Leopold II


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press, and considered it less a catalyst for democracy than a tool used by populist demagogues

to dupe and manipulate the semi-educated masses.

So, let us speculate thatKlein (a German synonym forKurz) provided the name and narrative

seed, Leon Rom (angel of death) the savage vision, and Roger Casement (emissary of

progress) the utopian ideology that constitute the unique personality of Kurtz. Rom andCasement stood, of course, at opposite ends of the moral spectrum, but it took Conrad's

penetrating gaze to reveal that Rom's stark inhumanity and Casement's liberal sympathies

could, and often did, coexist in the same mind.Heart of Darkness is without question a

landmark of literary and moral imagination, and the high place it occupies in the Western

canon is due in no small part to the novelist's fearless examination of 'the sinister impulses

that lurk innoble intentions.' This was indeed disturbing terra incognita, and its exploration

by Conrad was to permanently transform Western literature.

It is curious that Kurtz, one of the most celebrated characters in modern

fictionT. S. Eliot invokes his name at the beginning ofThe Hollow Men

is also one of the most abstract, and there are times when he seems less aperson than a symbolic presence. Our encounter with Kurtz (or Klein-Rom-

Casement) is muffled by the passage of time, the remote geography, and

Conrad's layered narrative style. He comes to us second-hand, by way of a

friend of the narrator, the familiar Charlie Marlow, on the cruising yawl

Nellie, and much of what Marlow learns of Kurtz comes through the

accounts of others. When finally he does meet him, after an arduous passage

upriver, Kurtz is dying of fever and is only accessible during brief moments of coherence in a

haze of delirium. Marlow is by this time himself feverish and has only a precarious grip on

reality, so that our picture of the protagonist resembles the phantasmagoria and hurly-burly of

a fever dream, more like the ghost of Hamlet's father than Hamlet.

Marlow is able to maintain his mental equilibrium amidst the lunatic greed of the ivory agents

('the pilgrims') by patching up his tinpot paddle steamer, and by the chance discovery of a

book in a riverside hut some fifty miles below the inner station:

It was an extraordinary find. Its title was, "An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship," by a

man Towser, Towsonsome such nameMaster in his Majesty's Navy. The matter looked

dreary reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of figures, and the

copy was sixty years old. I handled this amazing antiquity with the greatest possible

tenderness, lest it should dissolve in my hands. Within, Towson or Towser was inquiring

earnestly into the breaking strain of ships' chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not avery enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a singleness of intention, an

honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages, thought

out so many years ago, luminous with another than a professional light. The simple old

sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in

delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real.

At first glance this excursion into marine lore seems a puzzling digression from the narrative

thrust of the novel, but thematically it is central. For Conrad, there was no higher calling than

the sea. He believed that shipboard discipline, the hardships of life at sea and the dangers of

sailing fragile wooden ships across the storm-tossed oceans of the globe, had transformed

England's lower classes into a race of noble seafarers, and that this was the making of hisadopted country both as a political entity, the conscience of Europe, and a moral cynosure of

Roger Casement


21/35

the world. His friend, H.G. Wells, was to ridicule this extravagant notion as a nave andfanciful literary affectation. But time has sided with Conrad: modern historians are in general

agreement that the ordeal of transmarine migration is a revitalizing influence, and that the

demands of seamanship and shipboard cooperation, which are contractual in nature, became

the cultural bedrock of England's democratic institutions, and constituted the spiritual

discipline that released the Angles and Jutes, and later the Normans and Danes, from theancient bonds of tribal kinship and oriental despotism that enslaved the continental states,

including Conrad's native Poland, for centuries after England had achieved parliamentary

government. 'The simple old sailor,' Towser or Towson, is not introduced for atmospheric

effect, but as an admonitory presence and symbol of probity, in stark contrast to the Pilgrims'

and their mad scramble for loot.

Much of what we learn of Kurtz is related to Marlow by the ivory agent's

devoted companion, a Shakespearean court jester (fool to the monarchic

Kurtz) accoutered in harlequin patches, who is the son of a Russian

Orthodox arch-priest. Kurtz's own genealogy is at one with the patchwork

of his young Russian assistant: A German with a half-English mother andhalf-French father. "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,"

Marlow tells us significantly. Prodigiously gifted, he is an accomplished

musician, artist, and writer and speaker of electrifying eloquence, and even

his enemies in the trading company acknowledge that he is a 'universal

genius.' Why has such a man journeyed to the vast wilderness of an

unexplored country? We learn that the aristocratic family of his intended

spouse disapproves of his impoverished circumstances, and he is forced,

like many talented men of his time, to seek his fortune in the colonies.

Fully sentient of his powers and impatient to make his mark on the world, he decides to try his

hand at commerce. Says Kurtz: 'You show them you have in you something that is really

profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability.' Rather than

confront the shabby commercial values of his time (the proper destiny of genius), he chooses

to exempt himself from the obscurity of poverty and the opprobrium of his fiancesbourgeois family to become an ivory agent. Kurtz's moral ruin is prefigured in his childish

and quixotic pursuit of conflicting goals; his first act of violence is, thus, against himself, a

self-inflicted spiritual wound and act of self-betrayal from which his subsequent crimes take

their rationale and momentum (what inNostromo Conrad described as "the picturesque

extreme of wrong-headedness into which an honest, almost sacred, conviction may drive a

man").

Kurtz is not without a higher calling. A precursor to Albert Schweitzer, he describes himself,

in an unintentional lampoon of King Leopold's pious humanitarian cant, as an 'emissary of

pity, science and progress,' with 'vast plans' for the Belgian trading company. "Each station,"

he tells the company directors in Brussels, "should be like a beacon on the road towards better

things, a center for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing."

Despite his credentials as a humanitarian and a crusader for human progress, disturbing

rumors about Kurtz have reached the base camp (Stanley Pool), sufficient to give even the

company director (a man who inspired uneasiness in all) misgivings. He grudgingly admits

that Kurtz has collected more ivory than all the other agents combined, but considers his

methods unsound and unorthodox. Just how unorthodox we learn when Marlow scans the

Captain Leon Rom


22/35

buildings of the inner station with his glass, and ornamental knobs on stakes expand on

magnification into human heads.

"I am not disclosing any trade secrets. In fact, the manager said afterwards that Mr. Kurtz's

methods had ruined the district. I have no opinion on that point, but I want you clearly to

understand that there was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They onlyshowed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was

something wanting in himsome small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could

not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I

can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at lastonly at the very last. But the wilderness

had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic

invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things

of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitudeand the whisper

had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the

core. I put down the glass, and the head that had appeared near enough to be spoken to

seemed at once to have leaped away from me into inaccessible distance."

There is, Marlow tells us with deliberate understatement, something wanting in a man who

decorates his yard posts with human heads. Kurtz, we learn, is not only a commercial agent of

transcendent virtue, but a respository of monstrous passions; a man who could discourse on

'love, justice and the conduct of life' with his faithful Russian companion one moment, and

conduct murderous raids on the neighboring villages for ivory the next; i.e., Kurtz exhibits all

the powers of dissociation and unblinking self-contradiction found in children and in

criminals. Conrad sets himself to explore one of the great moral paradoxes of modern times:

how an 'emissary of pity' becomes a pitiless brigand, and what role his lofty ideals played in

accelerating his precipitous fall from grace.

Kurtz belonged to a class of men who, to

use Dostoevky's words, 'have only to feel

the faintest stirring of some kindly and

humanitarian emotion to persuade

themselves that they stand in the

foremost rank of culture.' But noble

deeds are not always accompanied by

noble feelings. True moral conduct is the

product of a rigorous soul-searching, of a

strenuous and exhausting moral struggle.

Kurtz is a humanitarian dilettante, aconnoisseur of sensation who seeks and

expects the splendors of moral exaltation

to validate his sense of self-importance

and romantic self-image; and who, when

these fail to sustain him, yields to the

exhilaration of power. Both autocrat and utopian visionary are promiscuous devotees of

sensation and intoxication, and savor the exhiliration that accompanies the pursuit of noble

causes and the quest for power with impartial zeal, so that any moral distinctions that separate

the two are blurred by their quest for personal identity.

This is the theme of Conrad's political novel, Under Western Eyes (which, like Victory,proved to be eerily prophetic of twentieth century social upheaval). Conrad, a Pole who

"the sinister impulses that lurk innoble intentions"

"We must be aware of the dangers which lie in ourmost generous wishes. Some paradox of our natureleads us, when once we have made our fellow menthe objects of our enlightened interest, to go on tomake them objects of our pity, then of our wisdom,ultimately of our coercion." Lionel Trilling

Kurtz is reminiscent of Paul Muniment, the chemistand social reformer in Henry James's novel, The

Princess Casamassima. In Muniment, says Trilling,a genuine idealism coexists with a secret desire forpersonal power. He is the idealist who takeslicense from his ideals for the unrestrained exerciseof power.


23/35

understood the slavic character well, examines the personal and philosophic motivations of

lawless tyrants and oppressed revolutionaries in Czarist Russia, and comes to the conclusion

that there is little difference between the two, i.e. that autocrat and social revolutionary are

both malefactors involved in the orchestration of criminal enterprises. Helplessly addicted to

indiscriminate sensation, Kurtz fancies himself an altruistic liberal, but cultivates the

adoration of a tribe of savages; i.e. he enjoys the exaltation of noble aspirations while it suitshim, but yields to the temptations naked power without scruple the moment he encounters the

evitable frustrations that attend the pursuit of ambitious social goals. Mortified by failure and

driven by an insatiable appetite for glamour, he discards the mask of passionate humanitarian

and adopts the role of the ruthless autocrat, accepting the truth of whatever sensation happens

to validate his romantic self-image. Sainted benefactor of mankind intoxicated with the

ravishments of progressivism (Roger Casement), or hell-for-leather adventurer and pitiless

brigand (Lon Rom)it is all one to Kurtz. Obsessed with fantasies of greatness, andenslaved by vanity and immediate personal gratification, as opposed to rigorous moral

principle, he is 'hollow to the core.'

Conrad divided criminals into two classes: common and uncommon. The common criminalis, of course, the familiar career recidivist who is felonious by habit, e.g. the incorrigible

second- or third-generation thief for whom crime is a way of life. The uncommon criminal is

a first-time offender who commits a situational crime in a moment of weakness. While

Conrad's portraits of common criminals, like Martin Recardo, are adroit and fully rounded,

they serve mostly as foils for uncommon criminals, and his narratives revolve around men

who blunder into criminal conduct under extreme adversity, men of a superior stripe but in

whom an unexpected and harsh turn of events has exposed some hidden moral flaw,

protagonists like Lord Jim, Leggett, Kerain and Kurtz himself. If Conrad is sympathetic with

uncommon criminals, perhaps it is because he saw so much of himself in them. After all, this

was a man who had, in his early twenties, run guns for the Carlists in Spain and had tried to

discharge his gambling debts by putting a bullet through his heart. Suicide was con

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o Politicni Korektnosti in Doris Lessing

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