Ideology, a systematic body of beliefs about the structure and working of society that includes a program of practical politics based on a comprehensive theory of human nature and requiring a protracted social struggle to enact.
—The New Encyclopaedia Britannica
Among the reproaches that have been leveled against me for failing to make clear my various philosophical views or commitments are those that have centered on the questions of “ideology.” These place me in some difficulty, for they bring up the question of what an ideology really is; and this propels me at once into that laborious search for categories and for the meanings of abstract words and concepts which, as it seems to me, attends all philosophical exploration and which is foreign, I am afraid, to my world of thought.
I am not sure that the word “ideology” has ever been authoritatively defined in a manner adequate to this discussion. It is obviously not a religious belief, for the element of irrational faith seems to be lacking. Equally obviously, it is not a philosophical persuasion, for its preoccupation with contemporary problems places it beyond the range of purely philosophical thought. I might try to define it as a system of secular thought about contemporary politics and social change on a level higher than just the national one, and capable of serving as a guide for public policy. And if this be a fair approximation of what ideology is generally taken to mean in contemporary Western opinion, then it is safe to say that I have no ideology at all.
I have critical reactions to the postulates and assumptions of a number of systems of thought that have, I believe, been regarded as ideological. These reactions have naturally been particularly lively in relation to Marxism, and especially to radical Marxism as manifested in the pronouncements of such men as Lenin and Stalin. These reactions were only natural and, indeed, unavoidable in anyone confronted daily over the course of several years, as was I, by the realities of Stalinist Russia. They were symbolized by the forbidding walls of the mysterious Stalinist Kremlin, visible across the square from my office windows. And because they played a prominent part in the formation of my general views about the problems of the age, they probably deserve a word or two of elucidation.
Marxism
I had at one time the impression that I was a rare bird among those who had taken a long-standing professional interest in Soviet affairs—a rare bird in the sense that I had never gone through what was often called a Marxist period, a period, that is, of fascination with, and enthusiasm for, Marxist doctrine. I had been put off at an early date by a number of the features of that doctrine: by the egregious oversimplifications with which it abounded, by the heartless rejection, and consignment to the outer depths, of entire great categories of mankind (not only the so-called bourgeoisie but all others except the “proletariat”), and, finally, by the shameless polemic exaggerations and distortions by which all this was regularly carried forward, not to mention the appalling cruelties committed in its name.
And these reactions were reinforced, as the years of life in Soviet Russia ran their course, by even more serious questionings. I recall my late friend and colleague Charles Bohlen observing on one occasion, amid the intellectual turmoil of our common confrontation in Moscow with Stalin’s communism in the days of the great and terrible purges of the 1930s, that the Communist doctrine, as we then had it before us, had no enduring future, because it had no answer to the phenomenon of death. This was a profound insight; and there was more to it than that. The Marxist outlooks included no recognition that the individual human condition embraced within itself (as was mentioned above, in chapter 2) elements of tragedy (man’s mortality was only one) that could not be overcome by even the most drastic manipulations of social environment. To suggest that profound and beneficial changes could be produced in the human condition just by changes in the ownership of industrial enterprises was, I thought, to lead people seriously astray. Men’s dilemmas went a great deal farther than that.
Ideology, Today
There were also a few critical reactions on my part to what were often regarded as other major ideological commitments of those pre–World War II days: such things as moderate socialism, liberalism, and conservatism. In general, these movements were so ill defined and confused that it was difficult to come to terms with them intellectually. Nor did my inclinations of that day, highly personal and egotistical as they were, move me greatly to this sort of contemplation. I can recall only a certain detached understanding for the more idealistic tendencies in German social democracy as I observed them from the perspectives of my various Foreign Service posts. Although I was placed on guard by the intolerance even of the moderate socialists for other classes of society than “workers,” I recognized that the latter, too, had interests and complaints that deserved respect; and I shared the socialists’ repugnance for the stuffy pretensions of much of the bourgeois society of their day. But these were all only the musings of a young man who, if he thought at all about such matters, assumed himself to be totally unengaged in the questions at issue.
It might be noted that these ideologies or pseudo-ideologies of the early decades of this century have today, in any case, largely lost their reality. The extensive breakdown of the class structures of society that played so large a part in their origins has deprived them of much of their meaning. It is now hard to find, in the advanced countries of the West, any such thing as a proletariat in the sense that Marx and others conceived of it. Poor people (and worse than poor) there are indeed in the great city ghettos of this age, but few of them are industrial “workers”; and they bear little resemblance to the “proletariat” of the Marxist image of reality. And the same is true of a real “upper class,” as distinct from numbers of momentarily nouveau riche people who have neither the tradition nor the taste to replace the upper classes of previous decades and centuries and who would find it hard to duplicate the culture of those classes, in any case, within the social context of contemporary civilization. What we are confronted with today in practically all Western countries are societies composed very largely of one, vast middle class, uniform in outlook even where it is not uniform in income.
Whether this middle class has anything definable as an ideology is doubtful. Although the study and interpretation of the thought, art, and music of earlier ages proceeds on a very high level among small minorities of the population of the leading Western countries, and although there is a high degree of public exposure of this middle class to popularized versions of the history of culture in the museums, the concert halls, and the television films, it is hard to find among these broad masses any great theoretical interest in public affairs—anything, indeed, beyond the limits of a dreary and unimaginative consumerism, enlivened from time to time by accesses of anxiety in the face of anything that threatens to undermine their standard of living. The fact is that we live, at the moment, in an un-ideological age.
I have had, of course, reactions to many of the intellectual assumptions and commitments of this century, mostly those of the Western world, with which, alone, I have any familiarity. Whether these reactions would be considered to have ideological significance, or whether they would be more properly regarded as aesthetic preferences, is a fair question. I would not be offended if readers assigned them to the latter category. They cannot all be listed here. They arise in the mind daily in a multitude of connections. I might mention only three or four of them that seem closest to what might be regarded as ideological inclinations.
Growth
I react skeptically, for example, to the ideal of economic growth that preoccupies so intensively almost all thought on economic problems in the United States, and a great deal of it, I dare say, in other Western countries as well. Why growth? The assumption that without constant growth a national economy could not be what it was supposed to be—could not, that is, serve the purposes of society that it was meant to serve—seems to me without substantiation. If a given economy adequately serves, at a given time, the needs of the population, provides food and housing and consumer goods in adequate quantities to assure a healthy and comfortable life for all concerned, why should it constantly have to be growing? Would there not be something diseased, something cancerous, something open-ended and unstable, about an economy that had to be constantly growing to be seen as adequate to national needs?
Of course, to the extent that population grows, the economy has to grow with it, since there will obviously be more mouths to feed, more bodies to clothe, more shelters to be provided. But I can think of no place in the Western world or in other regions where population ought to be growing. If the preservation of this planet as a suitable habitat for civilization is the overriding imperative of our time, and if population growth is itself the greatest threat we face to the intactness of that habitat, then why should we wish to see further growth of this nature?
And what, after all, is wrong with a physically static society? That change is needed—improvement, refinement, whatever you wish to call it—is entirely clear. But “change” is not synonymous with “growth.” Qualitative growth? Yes, of course; and there is great room for it. That room will not be filled, even with the best of efforts, by our generation or our children’s or our grandchildren’s or any further generation within the range of useful human speculation. But I fail to see that it is by material expansion alone that qualitative growth will be encouraged or attained. That there will be gaps to be filled here and there in the meeting of material needs is obvious; and when they appear let them be filled. But growth per se, as an aim of all economic policy, why? Where is the end to it—and what?
Automation
I am unable to understand why a society that complains of unemployment should encourage and embrace every conceivable possibility of replacing human labor by mechanical devices. Why the robot in place of the human hand? Because it might be cheaper? A good argument perhaps in many other connections, but in this one—shameful. The aim should be, in a healthy and well-balanced society, to find useful and, if possible, creative work for every mature human being. Must that work invariably represent the cheapest way a certain thing could be done? Are there not other values to be considered? Admitting that not all consumer goods could be produced by handicraft effort, I venture to say that there are instances where they could usefully be, at least in greater measure than is the case today, and where it would be better if they were. Is any attention being given to this among those whose efforts guide the development of a modern economy?
Urban versus Rural
Similar questions involve the balance between an agricultural and an urban way of life. This is a vast subject. Countless volumes have been addressed to it; countless others remain to be written. The nature of the problem and the answers to it take different forms in different regions. This is not the place to cut deeply into the subject. I can say only this.
The monstrous expansion of cities and urban regions that has been one of the great social features of this century is simply a horror. The phenomenon is worldwide, but there is little uniformity in the forms it takes. In the less developed countries, these monstrous accumulations of human bodies, vast, dense, and festering, that go by the name of cities—these Cairos and Calcuttas and Mexico Citys and God knows how many more—are essentially the products, the hopeless and frightening products, of overpopulation. Millions of superfluous people crowd into these places, because the already overcrowded countryside seems to have no place for them or because they have the idea that life would be better and easier for them in the urban center. In the advanced countries the tendency takes other forms: notably, the development of great regions of exurbia and suburbia surrounding the city centers, regions having the drawbacks of both city and country and the virtues of neither, while the city centers are abandoned to such of the Third World elements as can crowd into them, and left to serve as the homes of crime, demoralization, misery, and degradation. Meanwhile, particularly in our own country, we stand by to witness the rapid decline of family farming and the reckless raiding and ruining of some of the finest agricultural soil on the world’s surface, partly by the developers and partly by forms of industrial farming that exploit and exhaust its fertility, with the result that we export to other parts of the world great quantities of what, in essence, is our topsoil.
Is there no way in which these great disbalances could be corrected? I see only one. It is one that could not be “engineered” or accomplished by the fiat of public authority; it is one that could only be understood and encouraged. It is the movement of as much as possible of the surplus urban population to farming areas, with the view not to these people’s becoming family farmers in the old American tradition (for most of them would be incapable of it) but rather to their embracing a life that would combine part-time industrial employment with the cultivation of small tracts of land. This would, in other words, be a way of combining what might be called backyard farming (although on tracts considerably larger than the average backyard) with a relatively undemanding part-time industrial labor. In other words: labor-intensive, not labor-saving, farming. In part, this is already taking place in some regions; but it is doing so without either guidance or encouragement from public authority.
This, in any case, is the nearest I can come to an ideological commitment in the great area of urban versus rural life and employment. But it is better, in my eyes, than a situation in which public authority shrugs its shoulders and says to itself, “Let happen what will to the greatest natural asset that American civilization possesses: namely, its magnificent endowment of fertile, life-giving land. This is none of our concern.
Free Enterprise
And finally, there is the question of free enterprise versus what would in Europe be called dirigisme, that is, governmental direction and control of the economic process. Because the Soviet experiment, based on total governmental control, ended disastrously, there has been a tendency, particularly in the United States, to reject the idea of any kind of governmental supervision of the economic process, in the spirit of “Let free enterprise carry us wherever it will; it will be all for the good.”
About this, there are two things to be said. First, there are obvious limits, partly of an environmental nature, partly of financial and social ones, beyond which free enterprise should not be permitted to go. This has become evident in a great many contemporary phenomena: among them, the recent savings and loan disaster but also the numerous obviously harmful environmental effects of a wholly unrestrained free-enterprise system. Here the duty of government is not to take charge of, or to try to direct in any way, the workings of that system but simply to make clear the limits within which free enterprise may operate and beyond which it may not.
The second point is that the need for such governmental control obviously varies with the size and importance of the economic enterprise in question. It is in the case of the small retail or personal enterprise—the country general store, the hairdresser’s establishment, the cleaner and presser, the small servicing establishment in general—that the need for any governmental laying-down of limits is smallest. It is the great industrial or financial concern for which the limits must be most carefully drawn and enforced.
The task for the governmental policymaker, whether federal or local, is to study the needs, to establish the minimal essential limits, to make these limits absolutely clear, and to enforce them firmly and consistently. And what this boils down to is that neither of these operative factors, the commercial-financial motive or the public interest, must be carried too far and permitted to disbalance the other. The proper balance between the two must be ascertained and observed; and to see that this is done is public authority’s business. Whether it is a question of pollution from a smokestack, or of the cutting of a forest, or of the disposal of noxious waste products, it is up to public authority to establish the boundary between the permissible and the impermissible—and this, from the standpoint not of this generation alone but also of those that will come after. Within these limits, God bless private enterprise; and may it prosper!
Well, enough of these aesthetic preferences. They run, almost in their entirety, against the ingrained habits and the conventional wisdom of the age. I have no illusions about the chances for any early understanding or adoption of most of them by those who constitute public authority in this country and elsewhere. There is indeed a question as to whether any democratically governed society such as our own, incapable of demanding of its people sacrifices the reasons for which are not widely visible and compelling, can cope betimes with the strains that overpopulation is placing on the environment. But that is no reason why one may not think about these matters. The historical record, after all, tells us that many impulses that led ultimately to palpable and identifiable results began with ideas that were wholly unacceptable in the climate of opinion of the period of their conception. So let these stand for whatever history wants to do with them, whether this means further consideration, or ridicule, or consignment to oblivion. Such is the normal fate of most products of human contemplation.
Science and Technology
There may, I suppose, be those who will say, upon reading the above, “That is all very well; and it might have done well enough for the beginning of this century, but not for this ending of it. Where have you been during these eighty-eight years of your life? Don’t you realize that you have been living in an age of explosive advances in science and technology—advances that are changing our understanding of nature and of ourselves and of the environmental conditions of our lives? Don’t you see that these changes render most of what you are talking about irrelevant to the problems we are now beginning to encounter, and that what is required of you is not a set of views that might have fitted well the conditions of the eighteenth century, but rather one that takes account of the immense scientific advances of this age and of the technological innovations they have made possible? Where, in your outdated view of reality, is the place even for the revolutionary changes in communication introduced by the computer? Do such things not invalidate a great deal of what you are saying, or give it at least no more than a historical value, like the works of those earlier thinkers you admire?”
These are fair questions, I am sure. And here, my answers:
I admire immensely the processes and achievements of modern science. I have witnessed with profound and awed respect, albeit necessarily from a great intellectual distance, the labors of the scientists by whom I have been surrounded for forty years in the Institute for Advanced Study. I have been able to sense the greatness in what they, and many of their colleagues worldwide, were doing. I consider their pursuit of the mysteries that fascinate them to be not only a legitimate but a noble occupation for the human mind; and I perceive a certain magnificence in many of the efforts it has inspired, in so far as I can understand anything of them. God forbid that our generation should desist from these efforts or even from the educational programs on which they are based!
The Institute for Advanced Study is unique, or nearly so, in its dedication to the pursuit of pure science, divorced from any considerations of immediate practical applicability. It also takes no part in the tremendous and far-flung efforts of experimental science that are being pursued in so many parts of the world. For both of these other aspects of scientific effort—experimental science and applied science—I also concede, unstintingly, my respectful admiration. This includes particularly the great and epoch-making advances in the exploration of outer space and in the study of the composition of matter of which we read so much in the public prints.
I recognize, in other words, that within the small span of my own lifetime the parameters of our understanding of the physical environment of human life, in both its inward and its outward dimensions, have been greatly and dramatically expanded. And I share without reservation both the worldwide excitement this has aroused and the general admiration for the qualities of mind and imagination that have made it possible.
But I should make it clear that none of this—either my respect for these great scientific efforts or my enthusiasm for their continuation—rests on any belief on my part that they have yet achieved, or even promised for the future, any changes in human life that might affect the ways of looking at things reflected on these pages. For me, as for Alexander Pope and many others, the proper study of mankind has always been man; and until it can be shown to me that the scientific advances of this age have relieved man of some of the moral challenges and dilemmas which press themselves upon him, I must continue to pursue what others are at liberty to regard as my outdated ruminations and reactions.
And technological change? Ah, this is a different thing. It, too, is clearly revolutionary in the speed of its advancement in many areas. Equally clearly, it has produced significant changes in the discipline in our social and personal environment—changes of which we have no choice but to take account. But whether these changes have been beneficial ones, whether they have enriched our lives, whether they have effected any real improvement in the human condition—these are, for me, still open questions; and my answer to most of them is still a skeptical one.
In the case of the computer, for example, I can see that it renders unnecessary certain forms of financial drudgery from which in earlier ages there was no escape. In this respect its utility resembles that of the tractor which relieved the farmer of the endless drudgery of plowing, or the earth mover which made unnecessary so many heavy and exhausting efforts of human or animal muscle. But when the effects of technological innovation are only (as seems to be mainly the case with the computer) to speed the manifold processes of a life that is plainly already proceeding at a pace far too great for the health and comfort of those that live it, or where the purposes of new technology seem only to be to find out how soon and extensively human labor can be replaced by that of the machine or the electronic apparatus, and that in a society already burdened by unemployment, there my interest in it can be no more than casual. Where these are the limits, I see no significant betterment of the conditions of human life or the quality of human beings. So I can only beg leave, while watching these changes with an attentive if skeptical eye, to pursue my more traditional explorations into the problems and challenges of our time.
(PART TWO)