About Revolutions
Frank Chodorov
[Reprinted from Chapter 3, One Is A Crowd,
published in 1952 by Devin-Adair Co., New York]
It is obvious that the world is knee-deep in a social revolution.
What is not obvious is that imbedded in the present revolution are the
seeds of another. Yet that must be so simply because it was always so.
No sooner do men settle down to a given set of ideas, a pattern of
living and of thinking, than fault-finding begins, and fault-finding
is the tap-root of revolutions.
Many reasons are offered in explanation of this mental restlessness.
One reason that will serve as well as any other is that we are born
young, very young. It is the natural business of the young mind to ask
"why," and since nobody has answered that question with
finality, the field for speculation is wide open. And so, as soon as
youth finds flaws in the going answers he makes up his own, and
because they are new, as far as he is concerned, they are guaranteed
against flaw. Somehow the flaws do show up and another generation
mounts its hobby horse in quest of the Holy Grail, the Brave New
World. Revolution is inherent in the human make-up.
Suppose we came into this world with all the disabilities and
disillusions of, say, the age of sixty. In that event, mankind would
never have moved out of its cave apartments, never would have heard of
the atom bomb or the New Deal. The only function of old men --or, at
least, their only occupation -- seems to be to find fault with the
panaceas that possessed them in their youth. The price of experience
is disillusionment. With disillusionment comes resistance to change,
and the obstinacy goes so far as to find fallacies in the infallible
panaceas of their sons. Nevertheless, youth hangs on to the ideas in
which it has a proprietary interest, and change does come.
A revolution is a thought-pattern born of curiosity and nurtured on
an ideal. Every generation thinks up its own thought-pattern, but
because the preceding generation hangs on to what it is used to, the
transition from the old to the new must be gradual. From the
perspective of history it seems that on a certain date one revolution
died and another was born. We think of the nineteenth century, with
its tradition of natural rights, and its laissez-faire doctrine, as
suddenly ushering in a reversal of the feudal tradition. But,
Voltaire, Adam Smith, Rousseau and others were plowing and planting
some time before 1800, and if you do some digging you'll find the
roots of the nineteenth century in much earlier times. Even so, while
we are enjoying, or rueing, our own revolution, it is a certainty that
youth is critical of it and is building its successor.
There is a measure of fun, if you are inclined that way, in trying to
discern in the prevailing current of ideas the direction of the next
revolution. It is an interesting game, even if you know you cannot be
on hand to say "I told you so." It is a game that takes the
bitterness out of disillusion and robs pessimism of its gloom.
The Current Tradition
Our own revolution, the one that seems to have started on the first
day of January, 1900, is identified by the doctrine of collectivism.
Briefly, the doctrine holds that improvement in our way of living is
attainable only if we discount the individual. The mass is all that
matters. The doctrine does not deny the existence of the individual,
but relegates him to the status of a means, not an end in himself. To
support itself, the doctrine insists that the individual is only the
product of his environment, which is the mass, that he could not exist
outside of it, that he could not function except as an accessory to
the mass.
The mass, on the other hand, is lacking in self-propelling force, and
needs pushing. For this purpose a political machinery comes into
existence, presumably by way of something called the democratic
process. The individual serves the march of progress by submitting
himself to the direction of that device. In the end, the doctrine
holds, the individual will prosper because of the equal distribution
of the abundance that comes from collective action.
That is the central idea of our current tradition. It is the
idealization of the mass and the negation of the individual; its
panacea, its method of realization, is political direction; its goal,
as always, is the undefined Good Society.
So dominant is this doctrine in our thinking that it amounts to a
dogma. It is implied, if not explicitly stated, in every field of
thought. The aim of pedagogy today is not to prepare the individual
for his own enjoyment of life, but enable him to better serve the mass
machine; the psychologist makes adjustment to mass-thought the measure
of healthy thinking and living; jurisprudence puts social
responsibility ahead of individual responsibility; the concern of the
scientist in the discovery of principles is secondary to his
preoccupation with mass production; the economist studies
institutions, not people; and philosophy rejects speculation as to the
nature of man or the purpose of life as effort that might better be
put to the practical problems of society. Ours is the culture of "the
all," rather than "the one."
The end-result of this kind of thinking, the practical result, is the
worship of the State. This is a necessary consequence of the
idealization of the mass, for since the mass can operate only under
political power, then that power becomes the necessary condition of
all life. It is a self-sufficient agency. It operates on a plane
higher not only than that of the individual but also higher than that
of the mass. It is not only super-personal, it is super-mass. Without
the State the mass could not function, even if it could exist. The
State, then, is the modern golden calf, with this essential
difference, that its power is demonstrable, not assumed; it can and
does guide, direct and harbor all of us. Hence, we adore it, make
sacrifices to it and never question its infallibility, even if we
detect inperfections in its hierarchy. The current president may be in
error, but the State can do no wrong.
Our Fathers' Tradition
Just how far our revolution has gone along this path is seen when we
make comparison with that of the nineteenth century. The dominant
doctrine of that era held the individual to be the be-all and end-all
of all life. He was the only reality. Society was not a thing in
itself, but was merely an agglomeration of individuals working
cooperatively for their mutual betterment; it cannot be greater than
the sum of its parts. The individual was not the product of his
environment, but the responsible master of it.
The nineteenth century had a dogma. too, and it went by the name of "unalienable
rights." These were held to be personal prerogatives, inhering in
the individual by virtue of his existence and traceable to God alone.
Government had nothing to do with rights except to see that
individuals did not transgress them; and that was the only reason for
government. Its functions were entirely negative, like a watchman's,
and when it presumed to act positively it was not minding its
business; it must be called to account.
In the practical affairs of life, doctrines and dogmas have a way of
losing their virtues; even integrated philosophies fall apart when men
start applying them. The individualism of the nineteenth century
suffered considerable mayhem, even from those who paid it most homage
-- the advocates of laissez-faire. Their insistence on their right to
do as they pleased turned out to be the right to exploit others, a
right they could not exercise without the help of the very State which
they were pledged to hold in leash. They built up the power of the
State by demanding privilege from it.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, this privilege-business had
given individualism a bad character. The reality was far short of the
earlier dream. Youth was quick to detect the fallacies in
individualism as it was practised, condemned it and went to work on a
replacement. The cure-all they hit upon was the doctrine of
equalitarianism. Curiously, they promoted this new idea in the name of
natural rights: if we are all endowed with equal quantity of natural
rights then it follows that we all have an equal right to what
everybody else has. That was, at bottom, not only a revolt against the
injustices of privilege, but also a rationalization of covetousness.
At any rate, equalitarianism called for an extension of privilege, not
the abolition of it; and since privilege is impossible without
political enforcement, the equalitarians turned to State power for
help. All kinds of reforms. were advocated, and all of them
strengthened political power at the expense of social power. It never
occurred to those who, like Dickens, struck a blow for bigger and
better "poor laws" that they were preparing the ground for
social security, which reduces the individual to wardship under the
State. Meanwhile, Karl Marx was developing his rationale for
collectivism. The collectivistic revolution was born in the matrix of
individualism.
Revolutions Breed Revolutions
That is the point to keep in mind when we speculate on the future;
that revolutions are born in revolutions. And they are always being
born. Curious youth never fails to detect inadequacies in the
tradition it inherited and is impatient to write a new formula. On
paper, the formula is always perfect, and perhaps it would work out
just as predicted if the human hand did not touch it. Take the case of
liberalism, which was the political expression of the individualistic
thought-pattern. At the beginning of the last century, when liberalism
was emerging from adolescence, its only tenet was that political
intervention in the affairs of men is bad. It traced all the
disabilities that men suffered from to the power of the State. Hence,
it advocated the whittling away of that power, without reserve, and
proposed to abolish laws, without replacement. This negativeness was
all right until the liberals got into places of power, and then it
occurred to them that a little positive action might be good; they
discovered that only the laws enacted by non-liberals were bad. The
fact is -- and this is something the State worshippers are prone to
overlook -- that the comforts, emoluments and adulation that go with
political office have great influence on political policy; for the
State consists of men, and men are, unfortunately, always human. And
so, liberalism mutated into its exact opposite by the end of the
nineteenth century. Today it is the synonym of Statism.
Who knows what revolutionary ideas youth is toying with right now? We
live entirely too close to the present to judge the direction of its
currents. We are either pessimists or optimists, and in either case
are poor witnesses. Those of us who are enamored of "the good old
times" point to the prevalence of socialistic doctrine,
particularly in class rooms and text books, as evidence that the "world
is going to hell," while the proponents of socialism take the
same evidence as proof of the immediacy of their millennium. Both
sides are probably in error. It should he remembered that the present
crop of teachers, who are also the text book writers, are the product
of the socialistic tradition built up during the early part of the
century, and are necessarily convinced of its virtue. Their denial of
natural rights, for instance, is as natural as was the espousal of
that doctrine by the teachers of 1850. However, the pessimists can
take comfort in this fact, that though the professors do exert some
influence on their students, they cannot stop curiosity. If the
history of ideas is any guide as to the future, we can be sure that a
change is in the making, that youth is brewing a revolution; it has
been at the job throughout the ages.
To predict with any accuracy the tradition of the twenty first
century would require the equipment of a prophet. But, and here again
relying on the evidence of history, we are on safe ground in
anticipating a renaissance of individualism. For, the pendulum of
socio-political thought has swung to and fro over the same arc since
men began to live in association, and there is no warrant for
believing that it will fly off in a new direction. Modern absolutism
-- going by the various names of communism, fascism, nazism or the
less frightening "controlled economy" -- is in many
superficials quite different from "the divine right of kings";
but in their common rejection of the individual the two frames of
thought are alike. Or, the individualistic doctrine of salvation that
tarnished the glory of Rome had none of the economic overtones of
nineteenth century individualism; but, the underlying idea of
salvation is the primacy of the individual, not the collectivity, and
that is the underlying idea of any form of individualism. A discarded
tradition never returns in its former garb; in fact, it takes a lot of
disrobing to recognize it. Only a historical expert can trace the New
Deal of Modern America to the New Deal of Ancient Rome, or recognize
Sparta in Moscow.
The Inevitable Future
Whatever the character of the coming revolution, it will not show
itself until the present revolution has run its course. There is some
disposition to try to stop it in its tracks, but that is in the nature
of things a futile occupation. Even the opposition to the present
collectivistic trend is tainted with it, as it must be. Those who
fight socialized medicine tooth and nail would fight equally hard
against a proposal to drop socialized education, unable to see that
both institutions are cut from the same cloth; and those who view with
alarm the teaching of collectivistic doctrine in our public school are
simply plugging for a politically managed curriculum more to their own
liking. Likewise, the "free enterprisers" rail against the
subvention of farmers but are strong for the subvention of
manufacturers through protective tariffs. We are immersed in
prevailing tradition, and until it wears itself out and is replaced by
another, nothing can be done about it. The best we can do is to find
fault, which is the necessary preliminary to the coming revolution.
Of this, however, we can be sure: enrolled in some nursery or
freshman class right now is a Voltaire, an Adam Smith, a Locke or a
Godwin, some maverick who will emerge from the herd and lead it.
Youth, as always, is in a ferment, is dissatisfied with things as are.
Well, since the only direction youth can go is away from the current
collectivistic tradition toward its opposite, those who cherish the
individualistic stock of values must try to peddle them to these
embryonic revolutionists. We must polish up our ancient arguments,
apply them to the current scene and offer them as brand new
merchandise. We must do a selling job. Youth will n6t buy us out,
lock, stock and barrel, but will be rather selective about it; they
will take what seems good to them, modernize it, build it into a
panacea and start a revolution. God bless them.
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