World in the Grip of an Idea 1: The Idea
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In this series, Dr. Carson examines the connection between ideology and the revolutions of our time and traces the impact on several major countries and the spread of the ideas and practices around the world.
Sometimes a phrase is concocted to say something that hardly needed saying before. These phrases should be of interest, for they frequently tell us something about what is new and different to our time. Such a phrase is "displaced person." It came into currency sometime around World War II. "DP’s," they were called collectively just after World War II, people who could be seen wandering here and there across
"Displaced" is a strange word to use in connection with persons. The most common word formed from "displace" is "displacement." It is used to describe what happens, for example, when a body is placed in water. A certain volume of water is "displaced," is moved from where it was to a new location. It is a mechanical operation in character. That is why it is unusual to use such a phrase to refer to people. They have wills; they may choose; they are not something to be "displaced," as if they were water. Yet, the phrase is apt. These people were as near to being displaced as people are likely to be. They had been taken, held, and moved against their wills. The human forces that swept over them had displaced them.
Displaced Persons
The phrase, "displaced person," has fallen into disuse. Many young people may never have heard it. This is unfortunate, for it may be the best single phrase to describe much that has happened in the twentieth century. It could well be used to describe the Russian nobility who sought refuge elsewhere following or before the victory of the Red Army. Kaiser Wilhelm II became a displaced person when his government fell at the end of World War I. Many persons were displaced after that war as the boundaries in central and eastern Europe were redrawn. Most of the Jews in
I am aware, of course, that some of the peoples referred to above are not technically displaced persons; they are what is known as refugees. But they are, nonetheless, displaced persons. They have been displaced by revolutions and changes over which they had no control. They may have chosen to migrate, but they did not choose to lose their places which led them to migrate. Men are as surely displaced by revolutions as water is displaced when a ship is launched. This displacement, and the efforts to avoid displacement, are a major theme of this study.
If the idea of displacement is to serve adequately, however, it must be expanded. There is literal displacement and figurative displacement. In the figurative sense, it is possible to be displaced and yet never actually move from the original location. Partial and figurative displacement is widespread in the twentieth century. It is not as dramatic as the actual displacement but it is just as real in its own way.
Being in place for a person means being in familiar surroundings. One’s sense of being in place grows out of familiarity with the customs, the traditions, the mores, and styles and either having adjusted to or being in accord with them. The sense of being in place, too, is bolstered by control of one’s life and livelihood. Owning property actually provides a place for a person. (Our folk language recognizes this role for property by calling a homestead a "place" or, sometimes, a "home-place.") Place also has the connotation of position, as within a family, a community, an industry, or some organization. There is, too, man’s place in the chain of being ( "a little lower than the angels," it used to be held). Our sense of order, of security, and of well-being are connected with being in place. These, in turn, are essential to creativity and productivity.
Displacement by Force
The world is in the grip of an idea today. The thrust of the idea is to replace man, to remove the supports for him in the position that he occupies and to force him into a new place or configuration. The impact of the application of this idea is to displace people. The degree of the displacement is in some sort of proportion to the force exerted but in its subtler dimensions depends on the sensitivities of the persons involved.
Men resist this displacement in a variety of ways. But it is no easy matter to resist it. Resistance requires a place to stand. Any degree of displacement makes outright resistance difficult, and it becomes precarious or dangerous to resist by confrontation. As displacement becomes more pronounced, people tend to conform outwardly but to resist by evasion and by subtle attempts to manipulate power to their own advantage.
Literal displacement is easy enough to recognize. We may not be generally aware of the scale on which it has occurred in the twentieth century, but it does come to our attention from time to time in the midst of wars and revolutions as people flee from the advancing tyranny or are shoved out of their homelands. Figurative displacement, however, is not so readily discerned. After all, if people remain more or less where they have been, how could we tell that they have been displaced? The answer is this: we know it mainly by the way they behave toward the power over them. People who are being displaced in place, so to speak, attempt to thwart the displacing power by evasion and manipulation.
This sort of activity is by now well developed and deeply ingrained in the
It fascinated me that there were such cunning devices for foiling the authorities and that Russians, of all people, supposedly being a nation of sheep, would resort to such expedients. For the notion of the totalitarian state, perhaps useful for political scientists as a bird’s-eye view of Soviet society, misses the human quotient. It conjures up the picture of robots living a regimented existence. Most of the time, it is true, the vast majority of Russians go through the motions of publicly observing the rules. But privately, they are often exerting enormous efforts and practicing uncommon ingenuity to bend or slip through these rules for their own personal ends. "Slipping through is our national pastime," a woman lawyer smilingly commented to me.1
These people, it appears, have no hope of altering the power over them, their only hope being to carve out as much of a place for themselves as they can in hidden niches. Smith describes their attitude this way:
You also find an unbridgeable chasm between the leaders and the led: between "Them" at the top and "us" at the bottom….
For the common man, politics and the power of the leaders are like the natural elements. No ordinary mortal—worker, peasant, intellectual, Party member—dreams of doing anything about them. They are simply a given, a fact, irresistible and immutable . . .2
Something akin to this is happening in the
Many exert extensive efforts to keep as much of their income as possible. They pay lawyers, hire tax consultants, tailor their activities, arrange their accounts and investments so as to pay as little by way of taxes as possible. They seek out investments which will enable them to delay for the longest time the payment of taxes on whatever they have. They use whatever influence they can muster to get as large a tax write-off as possible in their particular undertakings. They ferret out just those investments which provide the best hedges against inflation.
Many businessmen have given up efforts to prevent government regulation of their activities. But they exert massive efforts to make these regulations work to their advantage. When there was talk of deregulation of the airline industry recently, several top executives in the industry spoke out against it. On the other hand, they do not spare expense in attempting to get advantages for their own companies, and sometimes for the whole industry. They collect reams of data, hire astute lawyers, propagandize, and otherwise seek to influence government policy in their behalf.
It is generally claimed that "white collar crimes" are on the increase in
Breaking the Rules
Americans in general often ignore or violate the rules and regulations they are supposed to observe. I had occasion recently to spend an hour or so in and about the lobby in a large hospital. There were signs all over the place: knock before entering, no smoking in this area, wear shoes and shirts for health reasons, exit here, enter there, go there, and return here, among others.
The state legislature had seen fit in its last session to make it a misdemeanor to smoke in public places where signs had been erected prohibiting it. Even so, I saw a hospital attendant dressed in white light a cigarette for a patient in such an area. Other people lighted up, too, oblivious to the law under which they might be punished. Although shoes were prescribed, a scantily clad young woman sitting in the row of chairs behind me hoisted her bare feet up on the back of the chair beside me. Other bare feet were in evidence. And, though shirts were prescribed, I had hardly gained entrance to the hospital before I saw a young man who had obviously just been treated walking down the hallway sans shirt.
There is considerable evidence that this practice of evasion has entered the legislative and executive branches of the government as well. Some members of Congress practice fairly open ways of evading the laws that they lay down for themselves. Nepotism on the staffs of Congressmen is now prohibited. Even so, Jack Anderson has reported a considerable number of instances where wives, children, and other relatives of Congressmen are employed by their colleagues or by Congressional committees. Undoubtedly such employment Is a thinly disguised evasion of the rule against nepotism.
But the best example may well be that of behavior in the Executive branch connected with the Watergate Affair. The Nixon men behaved like displaced persons. Their actions were not what we would expect of men holding the reins of political power. They were for all the world like those out of power, like petty plotters in a "banana republic" seeking to spring themselves into power by some coup. They were not confidently exercising the full powers of government to consolidate their positions within it. They went outside the government to bring in men to violate the law. Then, they attempted to conceal from the government-at-large what they were doing. It was as if they were alien to the government.
Ideas Have Consequences
There is an explanation for these developments, for the alienation from government, for the evasion and manipulation, for the displacement or efforts to displace which prompts it all. The explanation can be found in an idea. Ideas have consequences, the late Richard Weaver pointed out some years back in a powerful treatise on the subject. What we have been examining are consequences of an idea that efforts are being made to apply. The elective branches of the government in the
What is the idea? Can it be named? That is not so easy to answer. There are names aplenty for the movements spawned by the idea. The most commonly used generic name for the movement is socialism. Some call it by the even more inclusive name of collectivism. The more virulent wing of the movement is known as communism. Another wing is called by such varied names as evolutionary socialism, gradualism, Fabianism, democratic socialism, and so on. At a deeper level, the broad general movement is called by the somewhat more obscure name, the new humanism.
These are useful terms, and anyone writing about the idea which has the world in its grip will surely find employment for them. But they do not name the idea, though the phrase—the new humanism—may come close to it. They actually name methods and emphases, not the idea which animates them. Even communists refer to socialism as the end and think of it as the idea, but it is not. It is a means, if it is anything. This does not mean that some people do not, as individuals, confuse these means with the end and the idea. Nothing is more likely than that they would, nor more certain than that they do. But these things named are offshoots of the idea, not the idea.
Keep It Nameless
The animating idea has no name. It has no name because there is no name which its adherents accept. It is utopianism. But there is hardly a person to be found who will avow it as his belief. "Utopianism" is a contemptuous designation. In common usage, a utopian is one who is impractical and unrealistic. It has no name, probably, because to name a thing is to risk trivializing it, to profane it, to circumscribe and limit it, and to vulgarize it.
The Second Commandment prescribes that God shall not be represented by any image. There is a deep insight behind this commandment. A god who can be represented by a statue is a god among other gods. He who cannot be represented in such a way is the God, the like of which there are no other gods. Whether some such insight has prevented the idea in question from being given a generally accepted name I do not know. It makes sense, however, that if the idea were named it would become an idea among ideas. It would become an idea to be examined, to be debated, possibly to be refuted, and certainly to be scrutinized.
Such treatment, the adherents of the idea apparently resist. They resist it by focusing upon the method for realizing it rather than the animating idea. The idea itself must be an unchallenged good. It must be the pearl beyond price, the holy grail, the Covenant borne in the
Universal Harmony
The idea is this: To achieve human felicity on this earth by concerting all efforts toward its realization. This is, on its face, a most attractive idea. A host of other ideas are clustered around it, too, adding to its glow, such ideas as: harmony, brotherhood, progress, peace, prosperity, comradeship, cooperation, equality, humanitarianism, solidarity, an end to the exploitation of man by man, fulfillment through sharing in a common effort, and so on. Who would deny that it would be good if we would all work together for the felicity of all? If this but animated us, would not all those barriers fall away which now separate man from man, group from group, race from race, and nation from nation? Think of the vast amount of energy expended on our contentions with one another. What if, instead, it were constructively employed for our mutual benefit and felicity? It is, indeed, an attractive idea, one to which men of good will are disposed to give their assent.
There is, however, a rather large fly in this ointment. In fact, there may be several, but let us focus on one. There is bountiful evidence that we are not in agreement as to what would constitute our felicity. One man’s felicity is often enough another’s torment. One man’s felicity entails climbing
It is not that some of us do not share some of the same or similar preferences. It is rather that if we could be observed in the whole of our being and activity we would be seen to each have an individual pattern whose direction would be to maintain or achieve a sense of well-being or felicity. These patterns, in turn, give rise both to our achievements and to the conflicts and contests among us. Each of us appears to be determined to pursue his own well-being in his own way.
This individuality, these individual patterns, play hob with any concerted effort to achieve felicity. Utopians, or whatever they should be called, know this, of course. But they do not accept it as a permanent condition. If they did, they would have to give up their cause as hopeless at the outset. They do not conceive this individuality, this determination to pursue one’s own interest in his own way, to be rooted in human nature and the conditions of life on this planet. Indeed, except as a figure of speech, they are not inclined to recognize that there is any such thing as human nature. It is just selfishness, they think, a selfishness that is culturally induced.
Alter the Culture
There are three prongs to the idea which has the world in its grip. The first has already been told: To achieve human felicity on this earth by concerting all efforts to its realization. The second is now before us, and can be stated in this way: To root out, discredit, and discard all aspects of culture which cannot otherwise be altered to divest them of any role in inducing or supporting the individual’s pursuit of his own self-interest. The corollary of this is to develop an ethos which focuses attention on what is supposed to be the common good of humanity.
It is easy not to be aware of how radical socialism really is. For one thing, we have become acclimated to many ideas associated with it. For another, in lands where gradualism holds sway it is often not avowed as an ideology, and the whole pattern of activity associated with it is not perceived as stemming from it. Yet, it would probably not be possible to conceive a more radical idea than that of rooting out or altering everything in the culture that is individualistic.
Socialism is sometimes defined as the public ownership of the means of the production and distribution of goods. That is quite misleading. It is as if Christianity were defined as a belief in going to church on Sunday. The idea that, has the world in its grip, an idea which may for practical purposes be called socialism, does not simply entail the alteration of ownership; it entails the alteration of the whole cultural environment.
Use Government to Transform
How big an undertaking would this be? It is as big as, well, as big as all outdoors, or, perhaps, as big as all indoors, plus much that is outdoors as well. Man is to be transformed by the destruction or alteration of his culture. According to an old formulation, there is nature and nurture. Since nature is largely disallowed, there remains only nurture. What nurtures us, then, is the totality of the culture, as it is understood by those who hold these ideas. It is just about everything.
By what instrument is this transformation to be made? This brings us to the third prong of the idea. It is this: Government is the instrument to be used to concert all efforts behind the realization of human felicity and the necessary destruction or alteration of culture. Government was not the chosen instrument of those who forged this idea. It was quite often anathema to them. To use government to achieve human felicity would be akin to a notion such as that God should have used the Serpent as the means of redemption. The very attractiveness of the idea is that men must long to concert their efforts to achieve felicity. How could the use of force be introduced into the equation? Not by choice but out of necessity. The bent of men to pursue their own self-interest is so ingrained that only government could exorcise it. Force must be used to free men from the hold of selfishness. Hopefully, of course, government would be transformed in the process.
This, then, is a distillation of the idea that holds the world in its grip today. It is not only the idea underlying Soviet Communism or Chinese or Albanian Communism, but also the idea underlying the Fabianism of the British Labour Party, Swedish socialism, American liberalism, German Social Democracy, Canadian interventionism, and the thrust of government into people’s lives on a consistent scale everywhere in the world today. There are particular articulations of the idea which are important and will be taken up, some of them, in their place. But the important point here is that they all arise from a certain root idea. They arise from a vision of the achievement of human felicity by a concerted effort by everyone to achieve it. All of them perceive the received culture as something to be destroyed or altered, depending on the exigencies of the situation. All of them use government in their attempts to get concerted efforts.
The proof of these assertions has not yet been introduced. It will be forthcoming, so much of it as can practically be adduced. But it is necessary to have this idea before us from the beginning. A great deal of energy has gone into confusing and obscuring the nature of socialism. In some countries, measures and activities are never linked to their socialist connection by their advocates. Thus, if the connections are to be shown, it must be understood from the beginning what is to be connected. The connection is between the root idea above and the great variety of socialist efforts going on in the world.
Totalitarianism
The idea that has the world in its grip is a totalitarian idea. It does not evince itself in that way in a good many lands as yet. It may never proceed to that point in some lands, but that does not keep it from being a totalitarian idea. The totalitarianism is implicit in the idea. If all constructive activity could be concerted to the end of achieving human felicity, everyone would be under the sway of the concerting force. It would be totalitarian whether the concerting force was some world-wide government, the people, or an idea. Whether it would produce felicity or not would be a moot question, for there would be no independent judgment to determine whether it was felicity or universal torment. It is the very condition of independence that one not be completely concerted. The advancement of the idea, then, is the advancement toward totalitarianism.
Even so, that is not the connection nor the impact that will occupy most of our attention. Nowhere has there been sufficient success in applying the idea that a people could be said to have concerted their efforts. What has happened, and is happening, is a struggle within lands where the efforts have been made to apply the idea. It is a struggle between men bent on pursuing their own self-interest and the rulers who are attempting to make them serve some other interest. It is the great undeclared war of our era, a war in which many of those most tenaciously defending themselves openly profess the social emphasis of the rulers. It is, in its deeper dimensions, the struggle of those being displaced against their displacers.
The impact which shall most occupy our attention is displacement. The attempt to remove the basis of individuality evinces itself as an assault upon the inherited culture. Indeed, all that has been inherited from the past becomes suspect to those under the sway of the idea, whether it should be called culture or not. The received social arrangements, the place of women in society, the place of men in society, the religious tradition, customs, habits, venerable modes of address and ways of acting, everything which could conceivably give support to individuality comes under attack. The result is displacement.
Any man’s actual as well as sense of place is culturally (as socialists use the word) derived. It is dependent upon the estimate of those among whom he lives and works. It relies upon continuity with the past. It is buttressed by family ties, duties, obligations, and achievements. His property, his savings, that which is owed to him and which he owes give solidity and backing to him. The teachings of his childhood have helped to form him. His religion may well provide him with transcendental support for his beliefs. A part of his definition as a being is that he is male or female with the meaning that has been packed into his understanding of the role of these. All the familiar adjuncts of his being—music, paintings, books, working instruments, language, furniture, and what not—are cultural artifacts which confirm and bolster his place.
Breaking the Ties
The thrust of revolution in our time, and gradualism is piecemeal revolution, is not simply to divest us of ownership or control of our property. It is that, of course, but it is so much more. It is to divest us of our received culture. It is to break the ties that bind the members of family to one another. It is to sever religion from education. It is to interpenetrate every relationship with the power of the state, not in support of the individual but to have the relation determined by social imperatives. It is to so alter the familiar adjuncts to our being that they are no longer ours but belong to something beyond us. It is to blur the distinctions between male and female, to merge the concept of adult and child, to cut away the authority of culture, and to leave us naked.
The near perfect symbol of what is aimed at is public nudity. Clothes do serve some useful purposes: to keep us warm in some climes, to shield us from the burning rays of the sun in others, and pockets are convenient places to store odds and ends. Aside from that, though, clothes are emblems of all the received culture by which we maintain our privacy, define our status, and establish our independent realm. To be naked in public means to most of us to be exposed and helpless. Our last defenses are gone; we are at the mercy of all who behold us.
Those who claim that nudity would free us do not understand the matter well. To be disrobed in public no more frees us than to be plucked frees a chicken or to have the hair scraped off frees a hog. Just as the removal of their natural covering prepares animals to be consumed so the removal of the clothes of a person makes him available to be used by others. The removal of cultural protection is the prelude to tyranny.
Naked in Public
Two nineteenth-century fantasies come to mind. The first was written by the beloved teller of fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen, called "The Emperor’s New Clothes." Men posing as clothiers appeared before the emperor and promised to make new clothes for him. But they warned that anyone who was not suited to his job would be unable to see them. The word spread both that the emperor was to get new clothes and that they would be invisible to those unsuited to their work. On the appointed day, an elaborate charade got underway. The non-clothes had been delivered to the palace. Yet neither those appointed to dress him nor the emperor himself would admit that there were no clothes; they went through the motions of dressing him and he of admiring his new haberdashery. The farce continued even when the emperor went before the public in a parade. At first, all pretended that the emperor was fully clothed, for none wished to admit the possibility that he alone could not see them because he was unsuited to his job. At last, however, a child, who would hardly be intimidated by this possibility, declared that the emperor had no clothes. That blew the cover, as we would say, or rather the lack of cover, and others could admit also that the emperor had no clothes.
The second fantasy is from Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle’s satirical treatise on clothes. First, Carlyle imagines the king bereft of his clothes in public:
"What would Majesty do, could such an accident befall in reality; should the buttons all simultaneously start, and the solid wool evaporate, in very Deed, as here in Dream? Ach Gott! How each skulks into the nearest hiding place; their high State Tragedy … becomes a Pickleherring-Farce to weep at, which is the worst kind of Farce; the tables (according to Horace), and with them, the whole fabric of Government, Legislation, Property, Police, and Civilized Society, are dissolved, in wails and howls."
He continues with a vision of the House of Lords in a similar state:
Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords? Imagination … recoils on itself, and will not forward with the picture.3
Neither of these fine writers lived to learn of the shocking denouement to their fantasies in the real life drama of twentieth-century revolution, a denouement, let it be said, which neither could have intended nor have wittingly contributed. Nonetheless, the brutal murder of Czar Nicholas II of
Nicholas, his arm still around Alexis, began to rise from his chair to protect his wife and son. He had just time to say "What . ..?" before Yurovsky pointed his revolver directly at the Tsar’s head and fired. Nicholas died instantly. Alexandra had time only to raise her hand and make the sign of the cross before she too was killed by a single bullet. Olga, Tatiana and Marie, standing behind their mother, were hit and died quickly. Botkin, Kharitonov and Trupp also fell in the hail of bullets. Demidova, the maid, survived the first volley, and rather than reload, the executioners took rifles from the next room and pursued her, stabbing with bayonets. Screaming, running back and forth along the wall like a trapped animal, she tried to fend them off with the cushion. At last she fell, pierced by bayonets more than thirty times. Jimmy the spaniel was killed when his head was crushed by a rifle butt.
The room, filled with the smoke and stench of gunpowder, became suddenly quiet. Blood was running in streams from the bodies on the floor. Then there was a movement and a low groan. Alexis [heir to the throne, afflicted during his brief life with crippling hemophilia], lying on the floor still in the arms of the Tsar, feebly moved his hand to clutch his father’s coat. Savagely, one of the executioners kicked the Tsarevich in the head with his heavy boot. Yurovsky stepped up and fired two shots into the boy’s ear. Just at that moment, Anastasia, who had only fainted, regained consciousness and screamed. With bayonets and rifle butts, the entire band turned on her. In a moment, she too lay still. It was ended.4
Life was ended, but not the gruesome scenario. The bodies were wrapped in sheets, loaded on a truck, and taken to another location. There they were dismembered with saws and axes, burned, and their bones dissolved with acid. What remained was then thrown down a mine shaft. This ghoulish undertaking had taken the better part of three days. Though these murders had only been initially authorized by a local soviet’s ruling body, their acts were subsequently approved by the Presidium of the
Without Cultural Raiment
It may be amusing to fantasize about emperors without their clothes. But there is nothing amusing about emperors, or, for that matter, kings, or members of the House of Lords, or chambermaids, or even cocker spaniels bereft of the cultural raiment which secures their places and provides protection. Without his cultural apparel, every man is exposed. He is a displaced person, even as the survivors of the Romanov family became displaced persons during and after the Bolshevik Revolution in
The idea that has the world in its grip tends to make displaced persons of everyone. It does so because it fuels the assault on culture, upon religion and morality, upon civilization itself. As these are taken away, or lose their vitality, men lose even the means by which they can defend themselves. In some lands, the displacement has been dramatic and drastic. Refugees from these lands now reside in new lands and seek to make places for themselves. In other lands, the displacement is more gradual and has not yet assumed the guise of direct brutality. The more thoroughly the idea is applied, however, the more the grip will tighten.
The world is not, however, simply in the grip of a general idea. It is in the grip of variations of the idea from land to land, as these have been shaped and applied by a variety of leaders from different backgrounds. We must turn now to particular developments of the idea.
Next: 2. Marxism: Revolutionary Socialism.
1′Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York: Quadrangle, 1976), pp. 9-10.
²Ibid., p. 255.
3Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1908), p. 46.
4Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (New York: Dell, 1967), p. 515.
