A COMMUNIST ANO HIS IbEALS
so, he is animated by self-interest, because by self-interest I mean what–
ever redounds to the individual's welfare or prestige-the welfare and
prestige of his country, his class, his race, his religion, his profession,
even of his sex. Indeed, I take this to be the chief clue to the fascist
mentality-that the fascist impulse is primarily the impulse
of
self–
interest, or self-appreciation.
The idealist, on the other hand, is someone dedicated to goals
beyond self-interest. He is impelled not, like the fascist, by motives of
self-appreciation, but by the opposite. And what is the opposite of self–
appreciation?
I should like to leave this vaguely unpleasant question hanging
unanswered for a moment while I return to something I have already
mentioned-the variety of minds that are directed to social progress:
just in this country, I mean, and
in
recent decades. We are all of us
aware of how complex a business it is merely to try to distinguish
among all the various degrees of Stalinism. There are out and out
Stalinists, party members. There are out and out non-party members.
There are Stalinoids and pseudo-Stalinists and proto-Stalinists and
crypto-Stalinists. There are conscious fellow-travelers and unconscious
fellow-travelers. There are Communist liberals, both conscious and
unconscious. There are even ex-Communist communist liberals.
And what about ourselves who are just as various? Right in this
room there are no doubt representatives of every possible faction of
enlightened anti-Stalinist political opinion-radical socialists, Christian
socialists, Jeffersonian democrats, Rooseveltian democrats. There are
even some of us who have the temerity to call ourselves liberals.
If
I
venture, then, to merge all of this diversity into the single figure of the
idealist, it is clear that there will be bound to be a certain distortion of
individual truth. Yet this is what I am going to do: I am going to
draw a composite picture of contemporary idealism. Most of you are
to some degree dissident from the dominant idealism of our time-and to
you I promise to restore your full identities, as you can honestly claim
them. It is the
dominant
idealism of our time of which I am speaking.
The political idealist, then, is someone who is first and foremost
concerned with virtue. Whether he is himself religious or not-and in
most instances, he is not, although there will have been religion not
too far back in the family-he is acutely conscious of the high moral
considerations with which the religious ethic deals. He sails by the star
of the Absolute, whose light is no longer the blinding radiance of
theology, but, rather, the cool clear light of social good.
