FEELING AND IDEOLOGY
I wonder whether after all the author of
The Towers of Trebizond
does not mean
nice
rather than good? She personally subscribes, I be–
lieve, to a kind of liberalism and a kind of Christianity which have not,
in either case, the exclusiveness and finality of a system. They are "way
of life" rather than ideology. They belong to a special and intimate
tradition of family and friendship, a Liberalism Whiggish rather than
Jacobin, a Christianity which is humanistic after the personal relations
ideal of the Bloomsbury Group. These people were too well-bred to
include you by blandishments or to exclude you with threats. In an
inevitable reaction, they have been adequately cursed for their aes–
theticism, their drawing room detachment and even downright ladylike–
ness. I think they were no worse than most and better than some.
They had some very civilized ideas about the kind of sympathetic con–
tact which could be made between two or more persons who saw each
other often, or had even decided to spend their lives together. But they
also had an illusion that a "world" like theirs in which "everyone" knew
"everyone" else, was rather like the Greek city-state. Perhaps it was–
and that was the danger: it was more exclusive than they knew and
in the same sort of way; it shut out ordinary people and angry passions
from consciousness. Freud was one of their textbooks, but they were
not necessarily able to recognize that as human beings they were not
always "nice." (And the fact that Freud preached a doctrine of am–
bivalence does not by any means show that he was able to take it to
himself-which goes for all of us, including myself.) The Group, how–
ever, were not ideologues; they spent very little time in telling other
people what they ought to be like. But even now the stilI sad music
of such "Humanities" as theirs cannot be heard for the ideologies, the
watertight systems, on one side or the other, which organized the major
part of intellectual life in Britain, as elsewhere, between the wars.
Ideologies have common characteristics which distinguish them from
what I should like to call philosophy. They are all based somewhere on
an assumption that human ambivalence is a mistake and ought to be
cured. They all also assume that people can be argued out of this
radical paradox of feeling, that sometimes one likes people and some–
times one dislikes them-the same people. All the ideologies assume that
there must be some people one always wants to be with, either in
mind or body or both, and that they provide the very people you want:
it is only a question of realization. Since the opposition, the paradox,
is a natural fact, the ideologies are all obliged to obliterate it by ra–
tionalizing and projecting it; this works out as telling you that there
are some beings who are totally bad, you don't want them at all: the
role of the Devil. And so ideologies manifest themselves as exclusive
