Kidding Oneself . . .

I touched in passing in my last posting on what is nowadays the cliché of the middle-class revolutionary—though of course it wasn’t always a cliché. For example, of the twelve members of the central committee of the Bolshevik Party at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, as listed by E. H. Carr (The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. 1, Pelican 1966), the majority were from a middle-class or prosperous farming (or, in one case, even, an aristocratic) background. A somewhat greater majority might be categorized as intellectuals, in that at some stage or other they had attended university.

Nor were the Bolsheviks the sole organisation that might be categorized in this way. Nineteenth-century Russia was possessed of any number of middle-class individuals and movements with an interest in reforming or revolutionising society. The Bolsheviks just happened to be the ones who reached up from the scrum to grab the brass ring.

The most interesting of such movements was the Narodniks, who saw the peasantry as potentially the main progressive force in Russian society, and who instituted a movement back to the land on the part of thousands of idealists, all with the ostensible aim of radicalizing the peasantry.

I say ostensible aim, for beneath it there seems to have lurked an almost mystical fascination with the peasantry and with peasant life. Disguised as a revolutionary movement, what often seems to have been afoot was a middle-class search for authenticity—for the holy grail of something uncontaminated, organic and true surviving from an earlier and holier age.

Now in the Himalayas, where there is no naturally occurring salt, it is said that cattle will follow people in order to lick their sweat. Now, being cattle, there is obviously no great logical process going on here—beyond some instinctive recognition of the need for salt and some sensed recognition that salt can be got from sweat.

I would suggest something of the same scenario in relation to the Narodniks . . . there was of course a process of reasoning involved in their situation; but a process of reasoning that was, in fact, and often unknownt to itself, knitting, at least partially, a rational garment to disguise an unconscious yearning of the human soul—or at least the spiritually disenfranchised soul of the middle-class intellectual.

James Burnham, in his book, Suicide of the West (John Day, 1964), gives a more conventional argument for the liberal social and political engagement of our time:

“The guilt of the liberal [over being indulged and pampered as children] causes him to feel obligated to try and do something about any and every social problem, to cure every social evil . . . even if he has no knowledge of the suitable medicine, or for that matter, of the nature of the disease; he must do something about the social problems even when there is no objective reason to believe that what he does can solve the problem – when, in fact, it may well aggravate the problem instead of solving it.”

As far as it goes, I think that Burnham’s analysis is correct enough. The problem is that it does not go far enough. I suspect that underlying many of the orientations of the modern middle-class liberal—indeed, underlying many of the orientations of modern life in general—there is hidden the same search for personal authenticity as lay at the root of narodism.

How to explain what it means to suffer from a lack of authenticity? . . .

Firstly, it is a lack, every bit as much a lack as that which drives the cattle of the Himalayas to harass travellers. And just as unconscious in its operation, too—or, in human terms, perhaps semi-conscious.

In a way, it is the opposite of experiencing a phantom limb—that sense or pattern of wholeness that persists despite the fact of an amputation. In the case of the lack of authenticity, it is the nagging sense of something missing that one cannot quite put one’s finger on. It might be described as the psychic equivalent of body dysphoria (a relation of body dysmorphia).

It is a fretful sense of incompleteness, of in some way your life falling short of the hidden pattern of what it is to be human or happy or fulfilled, or even real—and all despite the fact that, as in some obsessive dream, you can count over and over through the elements that go to make up your ordinary human existence and seem to find nothing missing.

As I say, this lack of authenticity, this search for authenticity, seems an almost generalized condition of the modern developed world. But it is in terms of what we might call the disaffected middle-class—or the disaffected children of the middle class—that it is most clearly to be seen, and in a way that is most subversive of the theories of secular liberalism. Here we have people who are unhappy, yet on the secularist agenda have no right to be unhappy, enjoying as they do, and as they have done for most of the past fifty years, prosperity and stability and opportunity and the freedom to pursue pleasure.

In a paradoxical way, it might seem that, like the proverbial Chinese meal, the greater one’s access to material goods the greater the underlying emptiness that is ultimately revealed. Betrayed by their faith, or the faith of their parents, in material prosperity, disaffected youth turn instead to political and social activism, or the quietism of a drug-fuelled hedonism. And contrary to what it might seem, the one is not necessarily superior to the other. Both are ways of achieving roughly the same end.

The turn to political and social activism by the disaffected young over the past fifty or so years, is, I would suggest, in general less a matter of altruism or social guilt than a more roundabout way of seeking self-validation. What the druggie seeks to achieve through the pipe or the needle, the activist seeks to achieve through social and political engagement—a sense of oneness with the universe, an end to the dissonance he or she feels in relation to life as it is currently lived.

The politically and socially active (in the liberal and left-wing sense of the terms) deceive themselves when they think that they are doing things for the poor or the oppressed or the working class. Rather their activism is often a device for coming into contact with the poor etc., in their search, like the narodniks with the peasantry, for some bedrock of authenticity, some point of balance, some place of absolute truth, where they can firmly place their feet amid the crazy and undependable relativism of the rest of the world.

As I say, the whole process is analogous to that of cattle in the Himalayas—except with the cattle there is no mistake: they sense what they need and sense how to get it. It is with people that the process becomes complicated and the possibility—the guarantee—of self-deception comes into play.