THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
89
takes place in an "as if" spirit which brackets, or thinks away, the
fact of the cold war. The unreal quality of such thought has become
intolerable in the past few years to a new intellectual generation,
with the result that the conditions and necessities of the cold war
itself are indiscriminately denounced out of impulses very different
from those that moved some of the new generation's older mentors
who never fully surrendered their earlier illusions about Soviet Com–
munism. It is as hard not to sympathize with these impulses as it is
to accept the view of things they so often dictate. The promising
beginnings of the "New Left" in both Europe and America have
been diverted into campaigns against nuclear war and a revolutionary
romanticism inspired by Castro's Cuba. British "new leftists" have
even argued, not that Western democratic socialism may have some
relevance to the problems of the underdeveloped world, but that
Western socialists, including the British Labor Party, can learn lessons
applicable to their own national experience from Castro's brand of
authoritarian populism!
As
for campaigns against nuclear war, a
peace movement that became truly political rather than merely
agitational might prevent the possibility of a disastrous "dialectic of
the extremes" on the issues of war and peace.
Suspended between a past from which we have withdrawn
belief and a future which has lost its power to attract, we live in a
present where the values we cherish .are formal or procedural: free–
dom, cultural creativity, personal individuality, social pluralism, demo–
cratic government. Can these values flourish when the actual content
we give them in daily life is so constricted and draws so heavily on
private meanings incapable of wider generalization? Can freedom
become an innovating and revolutionary belief, rather than one that
is
merely defensive, only to people who are deprived of it? I can't
answer these questions, but the need for an exploratory Utopianism
suggesting direct political action in at least some areas of our life
is real.
This
is the value of a "politics as if" and we cannot afford
to condemn it either as dangerous apathy in the face of the nuclear
threat nor as irresponsible disaffiliation from the cold war.
There will be further discussion of these issues in future numbers
of
PRo
Comments are invited.
