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PARTISAN REVIEW
Many well-meaning people want to cut this process short
in
order to educate others and elevate public opinion. They think that
books can be weapons and that one can fight with words. But
weapons and fighting belong to the activity of violence and violence,
as distinguished from power, is mute; violence begins where speech
ends. Words used for the purpose of fighting lose their quality of
speech; they become cliches. The extent to which cliches have crept
into our everyday language and discussions may well indicate the
degree to which we have not only deprived ourselves of the faculty of
speech, but are ready to use more effective means of violence than
bad books (and only bad books can be good weapons) with which
to settle our arguments.
The result of all such attempts is indoctrination.
As
an attempt
to understand it transcends the comparatively solid realm of facts
and figures, from whose infinity it seeks to escape; as a short-cut in
the transcending process itself, which is arbitrarily interrupted by
pronouncing apodictic statements as though they had the reliability
of facts and figures, it destroys the activity of understanding alto–
gether. Indoctrination is dangerous because it springs primarily from
a perversion not of knowledge but of understanding. The result of
understanding
is
meaning, which we originate in the very process of
living insofar as we try to reconcile ourselves to what we do and what
we suffer.
Indoctrination can only further the totalitarian fight against un–
derstanding and, in any case, introduces the element of violence into
the whole realm of politics. A free country will make a very poor job
of it compared with totalitarian propaganda and education; by em–
ploying and training its own "experts," who pretend to "understand"
factual information by adding a non-scientific "evaluation" to re–
search results, it can only advance those elements of totalitarian
thinking which exist today in
all
free societies.
This, however, is but one side of the matter. We cannot delay
our fight against totalitarianism until we have "understood" it,
be–
cause we do not, and cannot expect to understand it definitely as
long as it has not definitely been defeated. The understanding of
political and historical matters, since they are so profoundly and
fundamentally human, has something in common with the under–
standing of people: who somebody essentially
is,
we know only after
