PARTISAN REVIEW
beings all suffer from excessive materialism and false objectivity, where–
as subjectivity, individuality, the world of inner feeling-for only indi–
viduals
feel-still
clamor to be understood; and, for precision, this re–
quires an individual, an artistic or poetical language. The language of
the ideologies reveals this false objectivity by setting far too soon into
technicality. It is striking how soon the sense of the numinous is aroused
in those who have got inside any enclosure, how soon aroused and how
irritably; we know how easily those who are inside either the Marxian
or the Freudian pales are exasperated by the levity which their ter–
minology arouses in the illiterati of their disciplines. I have an idea
that this levity might in some cases be no mere "resistance," that, on
the contrary, it might be based on a sound instinct for detecting jargon.
For jargon is a parrotlike or mumbo jumbo imitation of the precise
classifications of the physical and mathematical sciences. A language is
a jargon when its references claim an objectivity, an agreement about
definition that does not exist. The ideologies of the '20s and '30s, the
formative period of my generation, were false and dangerous because
they falsely claimed this scientific status.
We have often been told that the chief characteristic of science
proper is that it makes exact predictions, and that the social sciences
as well as what I call the ideologies are not sciences, because human be–
havior cannot be the subject of exact prediction. I should say myself
that an ideology differs from a science-as well as from any branch
of artistic expression whether literary or otherwise-in being a propa–
gandist ethic. I must make some provisos here. All human activity
is
ethical, for everything from living to theorizing about living is based
on evaluation and choice: doing this thing rather than that, with
reasons for your choice which mayor may not be explicit. In this evalu–
ative sense, scientific thinking is ethical too: while those kinds of philo–
sophizing, among the most influential in recent decades, which have
made what they regard as scientific procedure their standard of truth,
are ethical even in my specialized usage: that is they are near-angry
exhortations to reclamation based on a low view of human nature. For
the most abstract and tautologous logic becomes the standard of truth,
and the other human mental activities are downgraded because they
are inevitably outside this pale. As Mr. Charner F. Perry entertainingly
observed not long ago--"If we have given up goodness, beauty and
parts of truth, we believe that linguistic analysis yet shall make us free."
All this looks uncommonly as if I were suggesting that all ideologies,
all intellectual systems, however "free thinking," are disguised attempts
to cope with the
intellectual
doctrine of Original Sin. And indeed it is
interesting to speculate exactly how far the century-old Christian indoc-
