DISILLUSIONMENT AND PARTIAL ANSWERS
the differences between American democracy and Russian totalitarian–
ism
seem paltry indeed. Mter
all,
by concentrating on visionary ends
and dismissing the concrete problem of means as mere low-grade
practicality, it is easy enough to reach a position of high-minded in–
transigence that holds out for nothing less than the complete integra–
tion of human personality and the satisfaction of human wants with–
out any sort of coercion or frustration. Moreover, these belated
anarcho-utopians maintain that a society as splendid as that can be
achieved without the aid of science and an advanced industrial tech–
nology. So far as they are concerned the disgrace of the atom bomb
suffices to put the ban on science and technology! One might have
thought that if anything had been established in our time it is that
socialism is extremely difficult to come by even under the most fav–
orable material conditions, such as prevail in this country, for exam–
ple; and surely the totalitarian abortion that Bolshevism produced
must remain forever incomprehensible if one declines to take into
account the calamitous backwardness of the Russian economy. Never–
theless, Macdonald and his co-thinkers now assure us that socialism
is possible irrespective of the economic environment. Why not? Any–
thing is possible, if in your refusal of reality and in the absence of
any sense of method in social analysis you unconsciously
acc~;pt
the
most inane and hollow of all the assumptions of "progressivism"-the
assumption of the original goodness of human nature, a piece of
Rousseauistic naivete that the horrors of the twentieth century should
by now have compelled even the most sanguine forward-lookers to
abandon.
Macdonald was no sooner done with the Bolshevik Utopia, in
its Trotskyite edition, than he began searching for a likely substitute
among the odds and ends of older and even moldier Utopias; and
now, impelled by excessive ideological strivings, he regularly goes
further in his argumentation than he really wants to go, for at some
point in
his
advance toward excess he must have realized that the
politically intelligible and feasible has somehow escaped him for good
and all. Heinrich Heine, badgered by the more fanatical ideologues
of his time to join them in their follies, once remarked with his usual
perspicacity that "he who dares not go so far as
his
heart bids
him
and
reason permits is a poltroon, but he who goes further than he wants
to go is a slave." Enslavement of the mind through ideologies is one
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