LONDON LETTER
81
when their wishes are realizable. But a truly objective approach is almost
impossible, because in one form or another almost everyone is a nation–
alist. Leftwing intellectuals do not think of themselves as nationalists,
because as a rule they transfer their loyalty to some foreign country,
such as the USSR, or indulge it in a merely negative form, in hatred
of their own country and its rulers. But their outlook is essentially
nationaJ..ist, in that they think entirely in terms of power politics and
competitive prestige. In looking at any situation they do not say, "What
are the facts? What are the probabilities," but, "How can I make it
appear to myself and others that my faction is getting the better of some
rival faction?" To a Stalinist it js
impossible
that Stalin could ever be
wrong, and to a Trotskyist it is equally impossible that Stalin could
ever be right. So also with Anarchists, Pacifists, Tories or what-have-you.
And the atomization of the world, the lack of any real contact between
one country and another, makes delusions eas,ier to preserve. To an
astonishing extent it is impossible to discover what is happening outside
one's own immediate circle. An illustration of this is that no one, so far
as I know, can calculate the casualties in the present war within ten
millions. But one expects governments and newspapers to tell lies. What
is worse, to me, is the contempt even of intellectuals for objective truth
so long as their own brand of nationalism is being boosted. The most
intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, of disre–
garding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society
repartees, or swallowing baseless rumors and of looking on indifferently
while h,istory is falsified. All these mental vices spring ultimately from
the nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product
of fear and of the ghastly emptiness of machine civilization. But at any
rate it is not surprising that in our age the followers of Marx have! not
been much more successful as prophets than the followers of Nostra–
damus.
I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are,
but that it involves a
moral
effort. One cannot get away from one's
own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and
make allowance for them. I have made attempts to do this, especially
latterly, and for that reason I think the later ones among my letters
to you, roughly speaking from the middle of 1942 onwards, give a more
truthful picture of developments in Britain thari the earlier ones. As
this letter has been largely a tirade against the leftwing intelligentsia,
I would like to add, without flattery, that judging from such American
periodicals as I see, the mental atmosphere in the USA is still a good
deal more breathable than it is in England.
I began this letter three days ago. World-shaking events are hap–
pening all over the place, but in London nothing new. The change-over
from the blackout to the so-called dim-out has made no difference as
yet. The streets are still inky dark. On and off it is beastly cold and it
