Writers and Politics Read online

  I speak of things as they were; a change for the better may reasonably be expected as a result both of improved living standards and education levels in Ireland itself, and of the liberalizing movement in the Church as a whole since Pope John. But the rate of change is slow: the Irish Church, with that of Spain, remains the heart of darkness of the ecumenical movement.1

  Outsiders, and some insiders, have discerned in the Irish mind, as in the Polish and the Spanish, a tendency to anarchism, to rebellion for rebellion’s sake. Where it exists, and it does among intellectuals, this tendency derives, I believe, from the necessities of individual intellectual survival in communities where correct thinking is assumed to be the province of a specialized caste. If we take an intellectual to be a person who prefers to try to do his thinking for himself, even badly, rather than to delegate it to specialists trained to discharge this function with considerable subtlety, then we see that the intellectual, in a priest-led community, must develop strengthened means of defending himself. He acquires in the process special capabilities and special limitations, different from those affecting intellectuals in Protestant/agnostic countries. He is likely to set great store by irony, the versatile, durable and easily camouflaged weapon of every ideological guerrilla; he will take an almost morbid interest in hypocrisy, because of its prevalence among the better-off laity in a priest-led society, because of the natural targets it presents to irony, and perhaps above all because of its peculiar social function in subordinating the meaning of words to the practical needs of the moment. Many Anglo-Saxon intellectuals can, it seems, make reasonable allowances for this last social function, recognizing the utility of a certain amount of hypocrisy as a form of social cement. If deceit is acceptable to win a war, why should it not be equally acceptable, say, to preserve the peace? Or to ensure a greater measure of social justice or social stability? How many lies might not justifiably have been told to avert Hiroshima? Would it not be sensible to accept whole systems of mendacity if thereby the risks of a Third World War could be lessened? It is both the weakness and the strength of the intellectual brought up in a Catholic tradition2 that he finds it peculiarly hard to accept such pragmatic intimations. On the contrary, he finds it only too easy to say, ruat caelum (it is perhaps fortunate, and not accidental, that the Catholic countries today have not the material power to make the sky fall). To intellectuals brought up in Catholic communities —whether they accept or not the teaching and standards of these communities—the truth or falsehood of a given proposition is far more important than its social implications. This does not mean that there is not a great deal of dishonesty, both conscious and unconscious, among such intellectuals; there certainly is; but, whatever their personal difficulties, they will think of truth, not utility, as the essential criterion of all propositions.3

  All this has, of course, its relevance to socialism. In countries which have declared themselves irrevocably committed to socialism, the criterion, in practice, has been utility, not truth; the party press has not hesitated to lie whenever a lie might be useful; intellectuals, especially writers, have been distrusted and dragooned; hypocrisy and sycophancy in their most grovelling forms have been encouraged and rewarded; and all for—it has been hoped—the eventual greater good of the nation as a whole. It is perhaps significant that, so far, the intellectual community subjected to these conditions which has done most to resist and to change them—and to bring on a critique of them throughout much of the socialist world—has been that of Poland. That community, with its distrust of pragmatism, its training in irony, its dash of anarchism, scorn for sycophancy, and skill in undermining the structures of hypocrisy, has accomplished, and is accomplishing—despite all setbacks—an extraordinary work of liberation. By that I do not mean “rolling back the curtain,” restoring “free enterprise,” etc., but simply the setting moving, within the communist world, of currents of intellectual life which had long been blocked. Certainly the Poles alone could not have accomplished this—to the extent that it has been accomplished—but it may be doubted whether, without these indomitable frondeurs, the degree of progress in intellectual freedom attained in the past ten years could have come about.

  Now, while it would be hard to refute the theoretical proposition that the averting of a Third World War would be worth a good many lies, it is evident in practice that lies, though they may certainly help to win a war, are unlikely means of averting one. The more nearly monolithic the lie-structure of competing power-blocs, the less the possibility of communication between them, and the greater the fear which they inspire in one another. The one great peace which was brought about by the accommodation of monolithic lie-structures—the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 —lasted less than two years and provided the immediate occasion for the greatest war the world has ever known. Lies, after all, are a means of having one’s own way: of winning wars, including revolutionary and counter-revolutionary wars, cold wars and hot wars. Peaceful coexistence, which requires some degree of mutual confidence, demands ipso facto a reduction in the lie-content of human exchange. Those who would place commitment to the truth above all expediencies—even the immediate apparent interests of peace or social justice—can claim that only such a commitment can begin to provide that genuinely international, interracial and reliable language without which humanity is likely to destroy itself.

  This may be seen as an aspect of a wider phenomenon: respect for facts—and intentness on their relations—as the basis, since the emergence of our species, of our survival and success, at the expense of species dedicated to considerations of more immediate utility. And the importance of the freedoms associated with liberalism lies in the degree of protection they afford to the deployment of the peculiar faculties of homo sapiens in relation to the world and to himself. Even after revolutions and counter- revolutions, and their vociferous unanimities, man’s need to think for himself, and to hear himself thinking, reasserts itself and re-devises codes for its safe, or less precarious, fulfilment.

  Unfortunately, as parsons and schoolmasters know, there is something both ludicrous and nightmarish about feeling oneself called on to uphold such a taken-for-granted virtue as commitment to truth. The Good Soldier Schweik put his stubby finger on it:

  … Schweik, according to where the lieutenant happened to be, faced eyes right or eyes left with such an emphatic expression of innocence on his face that Lieutenant Lukash looked at the carpet as he remarked:

  “Yes, I must have everything clean and tidy. And I can’t stand lies. Honesty’s the thing for me. I hate a lie and I punish it without mercy. Is that clear?”

  “Beg to report, sir, it’s quite clear. The worst thing a man can do is to tell lies. As soon as he begins to get in a muddle and contradict himself, he’s done for. I think it’s always best to be straightforward and own up, and if I’ve done anything wrong, I just come and say: ‘Beg to report, sir, I’ve done so-and-so.’ Oh yes, honesty’s a very fine thing, because it pays in the long run. An honest man’s respected everywhere; he’s satisfied with himself, and he feels like a new-born babe when he goes to bed and can say: ‘Well, I’ve been honest again to-day.’”

  During this speech Lieutenant Lukash sat on a chair, looking at Schweik’s boots and thinking to himself:

  “Ye gods, I suppose I often talk twaddle like that, only perhaps I put it a bit differently.”

  No one who has read that passage can ever again address, say, an undergraduate audience on the subject of veracity, without looking nervously round in fear of finding a certain potato-face, beaming with insufferable approbation.

  If one perseveres in “twaddle”—hoping, like poor Lieutenant Lukash, that one may “put it a bit differently”—it is from a quasi-organic necessity. This is an age of propaganda; all of us who work with words are awash with propaganda, our own and that of others, open and covert. One can hardly fail to have—unless one has ceased to be moved by any human cause—what J. B. Yeats called “a touch of the propaganda fiend” in one’s own writi
ng. And yet one also feels the need for an effort of decontamination, the elimination of the lies, not merely of one’s political enemies but also of one’s political friends and—a more difficult and longer-term task—of one’s own. One can come to feel that this effort of personal intellectual survival is a tiny part of the human effort of survival, in which intellectual integrity must remain an essential element.

  The essays, articles, reviews and lectures which make up this book contain “touches of the propaganda fiend,” efforts at decontamination and occasional attacks of Schweikian “twaddle.” They were written at different times, most of them during the past five years, and for different publics: several of them were written—in response to what Dr. Leavis has scornfully called “the exigencies of weekly journalism”—for readers of the two principal English intellectual weeklies; a few were written for a similar public in New York; some for radio listeners in Ireland; and some for university audiences in England and in West and East Africa. Many of them are concerned with writers, and with the visions of society we have through them; some deal with cultural-political phenomena, the activities of periodicals and pamphleteers; some directly with contemporary politics, the United Nations, Africa. Such a collection can have no greater degree of unity than is conferred by the continuity of the writer’s preoccupations—or obsessions—some of which I have tried to assemble in this introduction.

  All criticism, all political analysis, involves a quest for truth, but few critics, few analysts, could give a philosophically respectable or coherent answer to the question: what is truth? Yet we can identify lies readily enough, and can reasonably hope that, when we have chipped away at these, what remains will be closer to the indefinable truth. A certain amount of chipping away goes on in the pages that follow. It will be seen that the chipping is mainly, though not exclusively, at the expense—or for the benefit —of Western cultural and political edifices. There are, I think, adequate reasons for this. The English-speaking critic and analyst is—or should be—led to criticize and analyze the phenomena of his own contemporary culture, which is increasingly dominated by values prevalent in the United States of America. The distortions and misleading façades which he will most often encounter —I use this verb advisedly—are pro-American and anti-communist distortions and façades. He will of course be aware that in the communist world, and in the poor world of Asia and Africa, there are also distortions and façades, usually much more blatant, and therefore less insidious, than those prevalent in the West. As far as outside criticism can do something to demolish the mendacities of the communist world and the poor world, that effort is being vigorously made by many writers, and I have not felt any great need to add my amateur efforts to those of the numerous professional critics of communist practice. My own guess is that the liberation of the communist world, and of the poor world, from their crude forms of mendacity, will have to proceed from within and that the liberation of the Western world from its subtler and perhaps deadlier forms of mendacity will also have to proceed from within. Whether these liberations make much progress or not will obviously depend mainly on mighty economic and social forces, but also a little on the efforts of individuals. From the other side we can hear a few writers, Poles, Russians, Hungarians and others, busily chipping away. Our applause can neither encourage nor help them. What might help would be that, from our own side also, should be heard the sound of chipping.

  Legon, January 16, 1965 CONOR CRUISE O’BRIEN

  1 The criticisms made or implied in this passage refer to the social, cultural and political activities of the Irish Bishops now most prominent and to their spokesmen, not to the whole clergy, in which there is a strong current of sympathy with the ecumenical movement, and not at all to the Irish clergy abroad, many of the best of whom can be regarded, not only as missionaries, but as ecclesiastical émigrés from the morose surveillance of their home Hierarchy.

  2 This is true of the present writer only in a broad sense. I come of a Catholic family with a number of vigorously agnostic members, including my father; from the age of ten on I attended a non-Catholic school; I then was admitted to “the Protestant University,” Trinity College. But everything in Ireland, including Irish agnosticism, is profoundly affected by the Catholic environment and tradition.

  3 This runs counter to a received opinion, especially as concerns the Jesuits and their pupils. The above generalizations refer, however, only to intellectuals and especially to writers. The most famous Irish pupil of the Jesuits, James Joyce, was distinguished, not by any of the devious peculiarities normally attributed to Jesuit education, but by a rigorous intellectual integrity, probably unequalled by any writer of the present century. Of course he rejected much of what the Jesuits told him.

  I

  AMERICA

  THE NEW YORKER

  A recent issue of The New Yorker carried a full-page colour advertisement showing the back of a man looking out to sea, where a sailing ship is foundering in a purple storm. The man is wearing a bowler hat and a black suit; the set of his shoulders is military or paranoid, his arms hang stiffly at his side; what can be seen of his head is spongy and striated like a tree fungus; and across his back, about the level of the base of the lungs, are a Vienna roll and a sherry glass containing a colourless liquid. Below this picture, attributed to René Magritte, is the legend:

  John Milton on the victory of truth.

  Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously … to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter. (Areopagitica, 1644) Great Ideas of Western Man … one of a series. (Container Corporation of America)

  At the side of the picture is a longer text which reads in part:

  This is Truth, mysterious … He is in truth somebody; there are in him two elements simple and pure … to wit, a loaf of bread and a glass of water. The person who is vested with Truth is impassive. He gives the feeling that the spectacle of the unleashed forces of evil has no power to infringe upon his integrity. The contrast between the firmness of this personage and the disorder, the fury, of the elements, is the same as the contrast between the doctrinary tempests unleashed against the Truth of which Milton was thinking.

  Neither Milton nor the Container Corporation would “make” The New Yorker on the merits of their prose alone, yet their conjunction is in some ways characteristic of the culture which has produced The New Yorker. The canners’ commentary on Milton sets out rather plainly two of that magazine’s basic assumptions. The first is that the standpoint of the detached observer is particularly meritorious, and close to the truth. “So Truth be in the field,” said Milton; but the admen’s fungoid effigy of Milton’s Truth is not in the field—he is behind a parapet firmly watching other people drown. The second assumption is that the standpoint of the detached observer is associated with successful commercial activity. As the canners’ publicity encapsulates the Areopagitica and other Great Ideas of Western Man, so The New Yorker’s own prose runs in a thin channel between thick rich banks of advertising.

  When “the doctrinary tempests” of McCarthyism were unleashed, the editorial policy of The New Yorker—though not the tendency of New Yorker writers—was to say as little as possible about it and let truth and falsehood do their grappling somewhere else, out of earshot of the advertisers. This policy was laid down by Harold Ross, builder and editor of the magazine, whose biography has now been written by Mr. James Thurber.* “Harold Ross,” Mr. Thurber tells us, “inherently cautious, fundamentally conservative, stuck resolutely to his original belief that the New Yorker was not a magazine designed to stem tides, join crusades, or take political stands. He was not going to print a lot of ‘social-conscious stuff,’ because his intuition told him that, if he did, he would be overwhelmed by it…. He didn’t encourage, he even discouraged, pieces on McCarthyism …”

  Since Ross’s death in 1951, the magazine under William Shawn�
�s editorship has changed in minor ways: certain verbal quirks, mainly “plain man” gestures, are no longer inflicted on contributors’ prose; there are fewer commas and less prudishness; writing is less nervous and more relaxed (not altogether a gain). But basically The New Yorker remains what Ross made it. It still wants, as it did in his day, “superior prose, funny drawings and sound journalism, without propaganda.” Its many admirers still think of it as being, in the words of a provincial tribute which Ross valued enough to frame, “a supposedly ‘funny’ magazine doing one of the most intelligent, honest, public-spirited jobs, a service to civilization, that has ever been rendered by any one publication.” Any reader of The New Yorker will give at least two cheers for that sentiment; but those who give two and those who give three are apt to regard each other with suspicion if not with aversion. “Are we important?” Ross once asked Thurber. And to this, even a two-cheer man would have to answer, with some reluctance, “Yes.” The magazine has published, over more than thirty years, too much good writing, too many brilliant drawings, for any other answer to be possible. The New Yorker is an important part, not only of American culture, but of Western culture generally.