Irving Howe
FREEDOM AND THE ASHCAN OF HISTORY
Those who cannot remember the past are
doomed to repeat
it--Santayana
If
one's first response to Mr. Deutscher's essay is a rush of
feeling which I shall keep myself from describing, one's second response
is a kind of gratitude:
g.ood, let it all come out into the open.
For Mr.
Deutscher is an authoritative spokesman for a political-intellectual ten–
dency of growing importance; only babes will suppose his attack on
Pasternak to involve serious literary issues: it is neither more nor less
than a political act.
As long as Soviet Russia remains a powerful state, and no matter
how often it displays its contempt for freedom, it will exert an attraction
for Western intellectuals, particularly those "authoritarians of the left"
who have replaced the dimmed fraternal sentiments of their youth with
a hard-headed valuation of industrial power. Among the French this
takes the form of a rationalist dementia cut off, on principle, from
the domain of fact; among the British, a gentlemanly tolerance for
"those chaps"; among Germans, a commitment to the asserted
logos
of
History which moral experience seems unable to deflect; and among
Americans a managerial
cameraderie
resting upon a joint esteem for
the gestures of power, the wonders of technology, and bureaucratic plan–
ning (the fetishism of the plan having, in our time, replaced the fetish–
ism of commodities).
These converging sentiments make up together what might
be
called
a
new conciliationism
in regard to the Communist dictatorship. Among
intellectuals a major symptom of this is the desire to add to the un–
disputed necessity for political coexistence an attitude that might be
called moral coexistence. And since
Doctor Zhivago
has already pro–
viaed a decisive test for many people-for men in power like Khrush–
chev, for men out of power like the "revisionist" writers of Poland who
recently acclaimed the book-so, through what might
be
called the
