DANIEL BELL
551
moral man willing to sacrifice his morality in the egoistic delusion of
total despair - are the maxims that have ruled my intellectual life.
And yet, as Hegel has said, history teaches nothing to those
who think they can change "its" course. ("Examples of virtue elevate
the soul , and are applicable to the moral instruction of children.")
The corrupt romanticism of "revolution"-the moral equivalent of
war! -exerts its constant and renewed fascination. Against the
grossness of bourgeois life, as in Germany, or the slough of bureau–
cratic despond , as in Italy, the new young terrorists, like the Baader–
Meinhof gang in Germany or the Red Brigades in Italy, resort to
bombings and executions to tear down the "repressive State." And
undoubtedly, when their letters are published and their diaries are
read , we shall also have their anguished reflections about murder and
morality. The language is now hollow and stilted, a self-indulgence
of the adolescent soul. Seventy years ago, among the young Russian
terrorists , each act was undertaken in fear and trembling, for the
youthful idealist recognized that he was committing murder and
more often than not sacrificed himself suicidally in the act. Today, in
the widening gyre of terrorism, the individual sense has become
anesthetized, and terror has become a catechism of the Calibans.
I am too weary to listen, too angry to hear. Still in my mind are
the injunctions of Max Weber: "He who seeks the salvation of the
soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of
politics ." It was this quotation with which I ended my monograph in
1952 on
Marxian Socialism in the United States.
Since the death of social–
ism is the most tragic - and unacknowledged - political fact of the
twentieth century, it is an injunction to be heeded now more than
ever.
