Socialism and the Failure of
Nerve: An Exchange
1. The N.erve of Sidney Hook
AFTER MACLEISH's
unsuccessful attempt, comes Sidney Hook's attack
on the irresponsibles and defeatists. MacLeish amalgamates the coura·
geous, truthful criticism of society by the best writers of the twenties
and thirties with social indifference, Hook amalgamates the criticism
of war as an imperialist struggle with failure of nerve and religious
hysteria. He attacks the anti-war left as Platonists, bohemians, drunkards,
lunatics and metaphysical obscurantists, and herds them with reactionary
religious thought and the enemies of progress. It is shocking that Hook,
who has insisted on intellectual decencies and democratic procedures
in
politics, should fall to this level, hut there are his words in
Pr:rrtisan
Review
for everyone to read. This is one of the minor casualties of
the
war: Sidney Hook, wounded in the head while stumbling over his own
barricade against the Trotskyists.
Let us look into this term, "failure of nerve", which serves him as
a blanket name for all that he condemns as reactionary and muddle–
headed in contemporary thjnking.
In applying it for the first time to the Hellenistic age, Gilbert
Mur·
ray meant to show that the decline of rationalism was connected with
a
loss of interest in civic responsibilities and political life. In Hook's
articles the failure of nerve is diagnosed in religious and Marxist groups
who are most energetic politically. Hook is therefore compelled to
distinguish the modern from the ancient failure of nerve by one basic
difference: that the modern nervous failures have not withdrawn from
political social affairs, although the flight from responsibility remains
the essential mark of the failure in general.
But not all the old metaphysicians and supernaturalists were polit·
ically passive; witness the Stoics. And on the other side, their mate–
rialist, anti-metaphysical opponents, the Epicureans, recommended
in·
difference to politics and social struggles. Broadly speaking, what divides
ancient from modern thinking on this matter is that antiquity did not
possess a concept of progress, based on the potentialities of science
and
social development; the surmounting of the miseries of life and
man's
natural weakness could not be conceived as a rational social activity willed
and carried through by men themselves. Hence ancient resignation to
evil
has another significance and tone, more impersonal, religious
and
fatalistic, and less disillusioned than modern pessimism, which repudiates
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