260
SIDNEY HOOK
is
au fond
the consequence of a frustrated religious yearning for a cosmos
that embodies a consoling ethos.
The danger of the wholesale negations of metaphysical rebellion
is that it blinds us to the real alternatives our sorry world still provides.
Its political wisdom tends to run out in variations of the cry: "The
world stinks!" We don't need Miss Sontag to tell us this. Her philosophy
doesn't remove the stink.
If
anything it makes it worse, for it seems to
imply that because the world stinks, there is no need for plumbing.
Marx, "that fink," was no simpleminded believer in inevitable
progress. He was aware of the ambiguities and tragedies of history. He
does not spare his criticism of the harsh features of British colonialism
but neither does he glorify the rule it overthrew.
1
4. No intellectual worthy of the name can give a blank check to the
Johnson administration or any administration. But it seems to me to be
foolish and irresponsible to make a principle out of blank refusal to
cooperate with or to endorse the position of the Administration on all
questions because of disagreement with its policy on some. The life of
intelligence consists in making relevant discriminations. But there are
some issues that are more important to the country than the prestige
of the occupant of the White House whoever he be. A person convinced
1.
English interference . . . dissolved these small, semi-barbarian, semi-civilized
communities ... and thus produced the greatest, and so to speak, the only
social
revolution ever heard of
in
Asia.
Now, sickening as it must be to human feelings to witness those myriads of
industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and
dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual memo
bers losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary
means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village communities,
inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of
Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest
possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it
beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies,
We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable
patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of e'mpires, the perpetration of un–
speakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other
consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless
prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that
this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence
evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces
of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindustan, We must
not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of
caste, and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead
of elevating man into the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a
self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought
about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that
man the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman,
the
~onkey,
and Sabbala, the cow
[New York
Daily
Tribune, 6/25/1853).
