Fire in the Mind

Not so long ago, the most we had to fear--so we were told--was boredom. In that far-off era, the quietly apocalyptic fall of the Berlin Wall had shown the future lay with “democratic capitalism.” With the worldwide triumph of democracy and free markets would come the only evil we should fear--the boredom that follows the end of history. To be sure, from the start there were many who warned against this farrago of sub-Marxian historical determinism and right-wing hubris. In Europe, Asia and the United States, old-fashioned liberals, unreconstructed Social Democrats and traditional conservatives were at one in cautioning that the collapse of communism was not an unmixed blessing. They pointed out that the disintegration of empires is commonly attended with some disorder and that failed tyrannies are not always followed by flourishing democracies. These skeptical voices were heard widely, even if they failed to chasten the callow hopes that animated Western policies throughout the ‘90s. Yet few of them noted the most striking feature of the end-of-history view of the world, which was its radical utopianism.

The idea that the defeat of a single oppressive regime could remove from the world the chief causes of war and the dangerous appeal of dictatorship betrays an astonishing ignorance of history. But historical myopia is an integral part of the worldview which came to prevail in the parties of the Right that dominated political life in the West during the ‘80s. By the end of that decade, in Britain, the United States and several other Western countries, the Right had been captured by an anachronistic species of free-market utopianism. The ragbag of skepticism, Augustinian suspicion of human motives and grudging accommodation to the modern age that had done service as a conservative philosophy for a century or more were thrown aside, and the parties of the Right embraced the crackpot certainties of Herbert Spencer and Ayn Rand. Neoliberalism shaped the worldview and policies of once-conservative parties, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries. Though they had once been stoic partisans of human imperfection, they became ranting evangelists for global capitalism. Though they had practiced a politics of small gains, modest expectations and preparation for adversity, now they encouraged voters to believe that the secret of unending prosperity had been found. The utopian impulse, which the fall of communism had crushed on the Left, reemerged with undiminished vigor among the promoters of the free market. Utopia had found a home on the Right.

It was a curious spectacle. Grizzled politicians listened respectfully as neoliberal ideologues, fresh-faced from their think tanks, assured them that countries in which civil institutions had been repressed for generations, that had scarcely or never known democratic government and which had few historical memories of capitalism in any of its varieties would soon be “free-market democracies.” The scarred histories of many of these countries were passed over, if they were remembered at all, as irrelevant in the new world that the fall of communism had brought forth. Their unresolved territorial rivalries; their legacy of ethnic hatreds; the disastrous communist inheritance of moral and ecological devastation; the eternal strategic imperatives of geography--these daunting obstacles to transition and reconstruction were consigned, with scarcely a passing thought, to the rubbish heap of history.

The rapid transition to post-historical tranquillity of the post-communist countries was guaranteed by a formidable array of programs and devices. Constitutions were scribbled on the backs of envelopes during hasty flights to unfamiliar capitals; independent central banks conjured up to restrain the predations of untrustworthy local politicians and ambitious privatizations of state assets were confidently scheduled. Without contributing much in the way of real assistance, the West drafted in their best and brightest. The post-communist countries embarked on a grand experiment in utopian social engineering, not altogether dissimilar to that which had been imposed upon them in the name of Marxism some decades before.

That conservative governments and parties (supposedly inured by their traditions and outlook to the intractibilities of history) should have been caught up in this frenzy is curious enough. Still more curious is the fact that the notion that the world was about to converge on liberal democracy and the free market went unrecognized as the stuff of utopian fantasy. Instead, in much the way that communism had done in the 1930s, market utopianism became the illusion of the age. Widely disseminated in the business school jargon of globalization, it was soon the common sense of hard-nosed CEOs. A quintessentially utopian theory became a touchstone of sound judgment. By the end of the ‘90s, it was entrenched as unchallengeable orthodoxy not only on the Right but in the ranks of the newly modernizing Center-Left. By now, Western democracies have lost the sense of history that is needed if unrealizable visions are to be distinguished from realistic possibilities. Most intellectuals and opinion formers accepted the end of ideology as an accomplished fact. Some found little cause for regret in it. Neoconservatives welcomed it, looking with quiet satisfaction at the collapse of radical thinking on the Left. Others--chiefly ex-leftists and disillusioned liberals--viewed it as inaugurating an age of political banality. Few thought to question whether utopian, ideological politics had actually been left behind. Indeed, in the late ‘90s, as the Asian economic crisis reinforced the illusion of a worldwide convergence on the free market, market utopianism has been given another lease on life.

Russell Jacoby is among those who bemoan the disappearance of utopian vision in contemporary politics. In a spirited, engaging and provocative book, “The End of Utopia,” Jacoby seeks to defend the utopian political imagination and expose the poverty of spirit that goes with what he sees as the dominant political culture of pragmatism. For Jacoby the dearth of utopian aspiration in the post-Cold War West is the central fact of political life. “World events and the Zeitgeist,” he writes, “militate against the utopian spirit--and have for decades. If not murderous, utopianism seems unfashionable, impractical and pointless. Its sources in imagination and hope have withered.” As Jacoby notes, in our “era of political resignation and fatigue,” we are not materially worse off than we were 30 years ago. Yet the spirit of utopian hope has been replaced by muddled incrementalism and serious political debate stifled by grubby scandal mongering. What accounts for this sad decline?

The reader will find an answer nowhere in the pages of “The End of Utopia.” The book is not so much an analysis of our current political condition as an unforgiving survey of recent intellectual fads and fallacies. Postmodernism, multiculturalism, anti-elitism in universities--these familiar bugbears are caustically dissected and scathingly dismissed. No one can read Jacoby’s account of contemporary academic absurdities without instruction and amusement. Even so, it does not amount to the diagnosis of the state of politics that the book promises. Partly this is because Jacoby’s focus is so largely American. Many of the recent writers he cites are American; nearly all are English-speaking. Moreover, despite the high level of generality with which Jacoby treats them, the issues these writers address belong chiefly to recent domestic American controversy. Consider multiculturalism. From a historical point of view, it is an ancient condition. The Roman, Ottoman, Hapsburg and British empires were all multinational regimes, in which different peoples coexisted without sharing much of a common culture. Though it has long been out of fashion as a form of governance and none of its historical embodiments was free from flaws, the institution of empire may be in for a revival as offering an alternative--at least in the broader sweep of history--to the hideous politics of blood and soil that has returned to parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. Yet, because (following most other recent writers on the subject) Jacoby treats multiculturalism primarily as an episode in a debate about American national identity, any larger and longer perspective is lost.

Where Jacoby does develop an argument at the level promised by the subject matter of the book his conclusions are highly questionable. Thus, in the book’s last chapter, “Retail Sanity and Wholesale Madness,” Jacoby confronts the principal objection to the utopian impulse in politics--that, in the 20th century at any rate, it has been a cause of millions of deaths. Assessing the numbers of human beings killed by organized violence and specifying the particular causes of their deaths is not easily done. Jacoby contends that anti-utopian political thought has focused on the toll of death resulting from communist regimes, giving insufficient attention to the millions exterminated by the Nazis and in the many smaller racist and nationalist massacres of this century. It is an eminently reasonable point. Still, it does not clearly warrant Jacoby’s strong claim that “[m]ore blood has been shed in the twentieth century on behalf of bureaucratic calculation, racial purity, ethnic solidarity, nationalism, religious sectarianism and revenge than utopia.” Even if such an assessment can finally be made, it raises several crucial questions: What was the nature of the Nazi regime, such that it could commit the worst crime in what Isaiah Berlin rightly called “the worst century in history”? Can it reasonably be denied that Nazism was at least in part a type of utopianism, deriving from eugenic theories and racial pseudo-science? Cannot utopianism serve horribly reactionary causes as well as the cause of progress?

Pursuing his argument that responsibility for 20th century political violence cannot be laid at the door of utopianism, Jacoby asks, “How are the two world wars related to utopianism?” Once again, it is a thoroughly pertinent question. Yet it raises a further question--one concerning the role of utopian ideas in the failure to prevent racist and ethnic massacres. Repeatedly in the 20th century, liberal societies have been led into danger by the utopian faith that their values were spreading inexorably across the world. For many years, the full scale of the loss of life by political terror in communist countries was not perceived by Western liberals: They could not bring themselves to accept that a political project with roots deeply in the Enlightenment could be implicated in such horrors. Similarly, liberal opinion was slow to grasp the enormity of the Nazi danger, partly because the very possibility of such a regime establishing itself in modern Europe ran counter to the liberal idea of progress. Again, few liberals grasped that the fall of communism could trigger ethnic cleansing. That Jacoby does not confront the mixed liberal record is a disabling weakness because it suggests that a major cause of the vulnerability of liberal cultures is their continuing confusion of utopian hopes with historic realities.

“The End of Utopia” is an arrestingly readable tract for the times. Yet it contrives to miss the chief political fact of the age, which is the ruinous hegemony of neoliberal ideology. It is the pervasive influence of this utopian worldview, rather than any deficiency in utopian imagination, that is presently the chief weakness of liberal societies. The absurd notion that history has come to an end has left us ill-prepared for its savage resumption. There is nothing in the neoliberal scenario about long and bloody wars or the renaissance of nationalist dictatorship. But as sealed trains, mass executions and the deportation of entire peoples return in Europe, we have worse to fear than banality or boredom.