Knowledge Without Knowledge

Cet article illustre parfaitement ce que je pense des intellectuels et des demi-intellectuels français (de la plupart, en tout cas) : ils sont gonflés de savoirs mais ne comprennent rien.

by Theodore Dalrymple (November 2011)


Recently I reviewed a short book by David Horowitz, a man whose has changed his political and philosophical outlook somewhat down the years, to put it no stronger. He has mellowed with age, a process that seems perfectly normal, indeed almost biological, until one remembers than not everyone does mellow with age. Some remain mired in the swamp of their youthful convictions.

As it happens, I had in my library a book edited in 1971 by Mr Horowitz, in the days when he as still a leader of the American New Left. It was a collection of essays about the life and work of Isaac Deutscher, the British Marxist biographer of Stalin and, most famously, of Trotsky. Deutscher was also a prolific journalist and essayist.

Isaac Deutscher was born in Poland, a subject of the Tsar, in 1907, and died a British citizen in 1967. His move to England in 1939 saved his life; if he had either stayed in Poland or moved to Russia (where he was offered a post at a university) he would almost certainly not have survived the war.

Deutscher was an infant prodigy, brought up as a religious Jew but losing his faith at an early age. He transferred his religious longings at about the age of twenty to the secular faith of Marxism, and never lost that faith to the day he died. Happy the man who lives in his faith, but unhappy the man who lives in a country in which his faith has become an unassailable orthodoxy.

When one reads Deutscher aware of the fact that English was his sixth or seventh language, one is truly astonished, for his prose in his sixth or seventh language is lucid and even elegant, with absolutely no hint that he is not a native-speaker, and a highly-educated one at that. As a sheer linguistic feat this is, if not completely unexampled, very remarkable indeed. Although a Marxist, he modelled himself as a stylist on Gibbon and Macaulay, and if he does not quite reach their level – well, who does nowadays?

His language was clear, but his thought was not. He was what might be called a dialectical equivocator, made dishonest by his early religious vows to Marxism. This made him unable to see or judge things in a common-sense way. His unwavering attachment to his primordial philosophical standpoint, his irrational rationalism, turned him into that most curious (and sometimes dangerous, because intellectually charismatic) figure, the brilliant fool. He was the opposite of Dr Watson who saw but did not observe: he observed, but did not see. He was the archetype of the man, so common among intellectuals, who knows much but understands little.

A good example of this capacity to misunderstand despite a great deal of knowledge occurs in his posthumous short book, Lenin’s Childhood. When he died, Deutscher was working on a projected biography of Lenin, but only the chapter devoted to Lenin’s childhood existed in anything like publishable form; it was edited by his wife and collaborator, Tamara.

From the purely literary point of view, the fragment is characteristically excellent, the very model of its type, written in beautifully balanced prose and with a judicious amount of detail. Of course, an account of so factual a matter as Lenin’s childhood must be influenced deeply by the biographer’s overall assessment of Lenin’s character and achievements, for the child is father to the man and it is the final character and achievements of that man that the childhood in part is to explain or at least prefigure. In Lenin’s case, we are interested in the childhood because of what he became, not for its own sake; and it is inevitable that we shall look for different germs of the future in it if we consider Lenin the nearest man to the devil incarnate who has ever existed from those that we shall seek if we regard him (as Deutscher did, according to his wife) as ‘the most earthly of all who have lived on this earth of man’ – clearly a religious way of putting it, incidentally. What is to be explained differs completely in the two cases: the person who thinks of Lenin as the frozen-blooded murderer who could order executions by the thousand without so much as the flicker of an eyelid will look for different things in his childhood from the person who thinks that he was the brilliant saviour of the world.

Be that as it may, there is a single reference to Dostoyevsky in the fragment that illustrates perfectly Deutscher’s learned obtuseness. Writing of Lenin’s father, an inspector of schools who was loyal to the Tsar and the Orthodox church, Deutscher says:

In his young years memories of the suppression of the Decembrist rising were still fresh and forbidding. Then came the terror that crushed the Petrashevsky circle and broke a man of Dostoyevsky’s stature.

Admittedly I do not read Russian, unlike Deutscher, but still I do not think it would be possible to write a single sentence that could misunderstand Dostoyevsky more fundamentally, completey and deeply that the second which I have just quoted. Far from breaking Dostoyevsky, his imprisonment, death sentence, reprieve and exile were the making of him, in the sense that they were the experiences upon which his subsequent philosophy, for good or evil, was based.

The reason for Deutscher’s most elementary error is obvious. Lenin was the very embodiment of precisely the kind of ruthless, murderous revolutionary to whom Dostoyevsky was drawing attention: he was the very fulfilment of Dostoyevsky’s prophecy. Dostoyevsky foresaw not by ‘scientific’ deduction, a la Marx, of course, but rather by intuition and imaginative insight into the souls of men, and he was vastly more accurate as a guide to the future than Marx ever was. But to have admitted this would have been to blow apart Deutscher’s whole world-view, the world-view that made his very considerable literary labours meaningful for him, and for which he had, when in Poland, risked his life. So he preferred to see Dostoyevsky not as a man who, as a result of his experiences (in conjunction with native talent, of course) had penetrated to what others had not penetrated, but as a broken reed, a man successfully terrorised by the powers that were. For Deutscher, Dostoyevsky wrote what he did not because he believed it to be true, or had any insight into the nature of things, but because he had been rendered neurotic and cowardly by fear. Nicholas I therefore broke Dostoyevsky, though in truth it would be more true to say that (unintentionally no doubt) he made him.

One of Deutscher’s collections of essays, always intensely readable, was called Heretics and Renegades (published, of course, by a capitalist outfit – but then, as Lenin said, the capitalists will sell you the very rope with which you can hang them).

The title – from 1955 - is instructive. Four legs good, two legs bad: for Deutscher, the correct slogan was heretics good, renegades bad. It wasn’t difficult to see why he should have believed this.

He regarded himself as a heretic but not a renegade. He was a heretic because he adhered neither to the catholic church of Stalinism, nor to the protestant one of Trotskyism, but rather insisted that he was the one true Marxist, the only other communicant of his church, at least until he was taken up (rather to his surprise and delight) by the students at Berkeley and elsewhere in the United States, and also by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, through his wife, Tamara.

A heretic for him was therefore a hero, he being one of course; but a renegade, the person who had once been a communist but had abjured the faith altogether, was, in Islamic terms, an apostate. The first essay in the book is an extended review of the famous book The God that Failed, a collection of six essays by ex-communist intellectuals who explain their renunciation of the faith altogether – for Deutscher renegades all. For them, it was not only that communism failed completely to live up to its ideals, but that its ideals were wrong and therefore intimately and inextricably related to the horrors that followed.

For Deutscher, by contrast, the ideal of a society in which people were completely undifferentiated by class, in which a spontaneous abundance arose in which people produced for use and not for profit, in which no one exercised more power than any other person, remained not what it always was, an adolescent and not terribly intelligent dream, but real, something directly to be aimed at; and never mind if people initially possessed of this vision (the product, usually, of profound and often unbalanced resentment) had so far killed millions of people. They had merely gone about it the wrong way. Deutscher, the most egocentric of men despite a pretended humility, would show them the right way:

He [the ex-communist renegade] no longer throws out the the dirty water of the Russian revolution to protect the baby; he discovers that the baby is a monster than must be strangled.

The death of tens of millions becomes mere dirty bath-water; the baby – presumably the core of the Soviet Union, its ideal, not its practice – is still beautiful.

Deutscher reproached the renegades of The God that Failed for their tendency to abstraction, of uninterest in concrete realities of the world around them, but you can’t get much more abstract than calling mass famines, purges, the gulag, mere dirty water. It is no surprise, perhaps, that a man who can do so has about as much sense of proportion as a young child from whose hand a toy is removed. In his essay, Post-Stalinist Ferment of Ideas, Deutscher has this to say:

Having for decades lived under its own (triumphant!) brand of McCarthyism with its loyalty tests, charges of un-Bolshevik activities, witch-hunts and purges, terroristic suspicion and suspicious terrorism, Soviet society is now driven by self-preservation to try and regain initiative and freedom of decision and action.

The suggestio falsi in this is that the Soviet Union was in some way imitating McCarthyism; the suppressio veri is that, even taken at its worst (thousands of people dismissed from their jobs, for example), McCarthyism is not to be compared with (say) the forced construction of the White Sea Canal, in which up to 100,000 people died, just one – of many - of the episodes of Soviet de facto mass murder. It is difficult not to conclude from the passage I have just quoted that Deutscher was not an unprincipled liar – in defence of his principles.

In his review of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, titled The Mysticism of Cruelty, Deutscher says that it ‘is in effect not so much a warning as a piercing shriek.’ In the course of the essay, he says of the Great Purges in Stalin’s Russia:

To be sure, the events were highly ‘irrational;’ but he who because of this treats them irrationally is very much like the psychiatrist whose mind becomes unhinged by dwelling too closely with insanity.

To reduce the Great Purges to the status of events, a word that applies to all human happenings whatsoever, is to deny their exceptional or special historical significance, again with the motive of preserving the beautiful, rosy baby of Deutscher’s absurd and shallow ideals. Deutscher’s use of quotation marks suggests that he thinks the Great Purges were rational, which in a sense they were: that is to say they served the purpose of concentrating Stalin’s power, even if the accusations in the purges were themselves absurd and without empirical foundation (not, of course, that the accused men were therefore admirable men, very far from it).

Now in a sense all human desires, in the last resort, are irrational, or rather arational (what cannot by definition be rational cannot by definition be irrational). But to suggest that treating the purges as irrational is itself a sign almost of madness is to accept the purges’ ratio. Deutscher’s objection to murderous purges was really that the wrong people were purged, not to the murderousness.

Deutscher was a fine example of the scholar who knew a lot and understood little (including, or especially, himself). A man may smile and smile and be a villain. A man may read and read, and experience and experience, and understand nothing.