Liberalism in Dark Times

The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century

Joshua L. Cherniss

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691220949
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

A timely defense of liberalism that draws vital lessons from its greatest midcentury proponents Today, liberalism faces threats from across the political spectrum. While right-wing populists and leftist purists righteously violate liberal norms, theorists of liberalism seem to have little to say. In Liberalism in Dark Times, Joshua Cherniss issues a rousing defense of the liberal tradition, drawing on a neglected strand of liberal thought.Assaults on liberalism—a political order characterized by limits on political power and respect for individual rights—are nothing new. Early in the twentieth century, democracy was under attack around the world, with one country after another succumbing to dictatorship. While many intellectuals dismissed liberalism as outdated, unrealistic, or unworthy, a handful of writers defended and reinvigorated the liberal ideal, including Max Weber, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin—each of whom is given a compelling new assessment here.Building on the work of these thinkers, Cherniss urges us to imagine liberalism not as a set of policies but as a temperament or disposition—one marked by openness to complexity, willingness to acknowledge uncertainty, tolerance for difference, and resistance to ruthlessness. In the face of rising political fanaticism, he persuasively argues for the continuing importance of this liberal ethos.

1

“Squeamishness Is the Crime”

RUTHLESSNESS, ETHOS, AND THE CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM

Incorrect merciful impulses postpone the cleansing that precedes reform. Short-term niceties must yield to long-range necessity. Morals will be revised to meet the requirements of today. Meaningless platitudes will be pulled from tongues and minds … The greatest danger is not excessive zeal but undue hesitation … Squeamishness is the crime.¹

Anyone desiring a quiet life has done badly to be born in the twentieth century.²

Ruthlessness and the Story of Twentieth-Century Politics

Lev Zalmanovich Kopelev was, by most measures, a good man. He was also, for the first half of his life, a devout Communist. His faith in Marxism survived the punishment that his moral decency provoked. While serving as a propaganda officer and translator in World War II, Kopelev denounced the Red Army’s systematic campaign of rape and other war crimes against the vanquished population of East Prussia. This “bourgeois humanism” earned him ten years in the gulag. Released in 1954, after Stalin’s death, he rejoined the Communist Party, optimistically embracing Khrushchev’s “thaw.” After finally breaking with Communism in 1968, Kopelev sought to reckon with his earlier beliefs in several memoirs. Here he is describing his experience as a twenty-one-year-old Party activist in his hometown of Kharkov during the Holodomor, the state-imposed terror-famine of 1932–33:

I saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes … I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide. Nor did I curse those who had sent me out to take away the peasants’ grain in the winter, and in the spring to persuade the barely walking, skeleton-thin or sickly-swollen people to go into the fields in order to “fulfill the Bolshevik sowing plan.”³

How did a sensitive, morally brave young man come to act this way? Why was he unable to turn from his course?

These questions are crucial to understanding the experience of the twentieth century. Human history is full of crimes, miseries, and follies; it is futile to award comparative points for horror. Yet we should take seriously the perception, voiced by many of its participants, that the twentieth was, as Isaiah Berlin declared, “the most terrible century in Western history”—a sentiment which reflects the fact that, as Berlin’s cousin Yehudi Menuhin remarked, the century “raised the greatest hopes ever conceived by humanity, and destroyed all illusions and ideals.”⁴ (Or so it seemed: illusions, it turns out, are resilient.) The scale and intensity of suffering and degradation—especially in contrast to the expectations with which the century began, and the comfort enjoyed by many—are extraordinary; they call for explanation.⁵

This chapter offers a tour of the ethical landscape of early twentieth-century politics, and a conceptual framework for making sense of it. I first analyze the phenomenon of ruthlessness and underscore the importance of a particular sort of ruthlessness in early twentieth-century political thought. I next lay out the connection between this sort of ruthlessness and critiques of liberalism. After an excursus clarifying the concept of ethos, I highlight the way in which the assault on liberalism was inspired by disgust with liberalism as a feature of character, and the articulation of a distinctively anti-liberal ethos.

An Anatomy of Ruthlessness

Ruthlessness, as I use the word here, refers to a way of inhabiting or experiencing one’s own moral life. It involves, first, an approach to deliberation—a way of thinking about one’s actions—that disregards, suppresses, or drastically subordinates all other considerations or values to some paramount consideration, principle, or goal. Ruthlessness also involves linked features of sentiment and sensibility. First, it indicates a single-minded intentness on a single goal—what Hawthorne termed an “inveteracy of pursuit that knew neither rest nor conscience.”⁶ This lack of “conscience” indicates a further feature: an absence of reservation, remorse, or regret (or an alacrity in dismissing such feelings) when engaging in actions that harm people or violate commonly held moral standards; and a failure to perceive or consider that others may have a just grievance against one.⁷

Many people act ruthlessly, or display elements of ruthlessness in thought and feeling, some of the time. Some bring themselves, or are brought, to act ruthlessly, without developing a ruthless mind-set or disposition—or can only partially and ambivalently muster up a ruthless mind-set to match their actions (Hamlet, who is “cruel to be kind” and constantly self-questioning, embodies this partially successful ruthlessness: his conscience is continually making a “coward” of him—that is, marring his ruthless dedication to his end with paralyzing scruples). Many are indoctrinated or habituated into ruthlessness. Some embrace ruthlessness as a normative model for thought, feeling, and action, and seek to cultivate ruthlessness as an ethic or ethos in themselves and others. It is this last phenomenon that particularly interests me here.⁸

To explore the roots of this ruthlessness, let us return to Kopelev, and the question of how his humanistic idealism compelled him to serve inhumanity. Kopelev fell prey to the tyranny of doctrine: a “rationalistic fanaticism overcame my doubts, my pangs of conscience and simple feelings of sympathy, pity and shame.”⁹ This involved not only dedication to an ideal, but subscription to an ethical theory:

With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way.¹⁰

Achieving a moral goal demanded dedication, determination, a temporary suspension of humane sentiment and principles. But there was also at work the intoxicating consciousness of serving a larger cause—and the sense of certainty and moral superiority that this granted, and that those who experienced it feared losing. What Kopelev and his comrades dreaded most was “to fall into doubt or heresy and forfeit our unbounded faith.”¹¹

Two features of this sort of ruthlessness struck observers with particular force. One was the way in which those who committed heinous actions were motivated by sincere benevolence and idealism. Some, of course, were simply malevolent or power-hungry. But the peculiar horror of twentieth-century atrocities lay in the fact that some of the most ruthless proponents of terror were genuine philanthropists, motivated by passionate devotion to ideals of justice and liberation. The second was the way in which cruelty, certainty, and self-righteousness amplified one another, and allowed men to torture and kill “peacefully and with a quiet conscience, with the feeling that they had done their duty, with the smell of roasting human flesh still in their nostrils, and slept—the sleep of the innocent after a day’s work well done.”¹²

Here we observe a distinctive political-ethical phenomenon, that of ethical-ideological-political ruthlessness (I will, in what follows, generally drop this unwieldy string of qualifiers, and use “ruthlessness” as shorthand). It was ethical in arising from the conviction that ruthlessness was demanded by a correct understanding of the dictates of morality—whether because moral duties require one to act ruthlessly, or because personal qualities of hardness, resolution, and certainty are virtues. It was ideological insofar as it was inspired by belief in a (putatively infallible) theory about how the world works, and a rejection of considerations that did not “fit” the theory. It was political not only in occurring within political action, but in reflecting the conviction that ruthlessness was demanded by the conditions of political life.

Three doctrinal elements were central to the articulation of ruthlessness as a political ethic: end-maximalism, historicism, and realism. End-maximalism starts from an absolute, uncompromising commitment to achieving a particular end. The end-maximalist evaluates courses of action solely in terms of their (anticipated) contribution to realizing this end. All other considerations—the action’s other consequences, or its intrinsic moral quality—are treated as irrelevant. In seeking to abolish “all the evils of the present and finally establish a free world,” Stephen Spender wrote (characterizing his support for Communism in the 1930s), “one did not have to consider, except from the point of view of their effectiveness, the means which were used nor the fate of individuals.”¹³ This goes beyond more moderate forms of consequentialism, insofar as the means are not merely subordinate to the end at which they aim; they actually “have no moral weight and do not enter into the moral scales.”¹⁴

Historicism, as understood by Karl Popper and others,¹⁵ holds that history follows a discernible pattern, perception of which provides the key to acting correctly. The direction and ultimate outcome of history gives meaning to past and present, and an assurance of the future; it is the measure of value, without which judgments are merely emotional responses, and actions, “dreams and adventures.”¹⁶ By subordinating present to future and persons to process, historicism undermines concern with the responsibility and the well-being of present-day individuals. In making history the measure of morality, it fosters worship of efficacy and success. It also encourages an emulation of History’s ruthlessness. As a character in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon says, History is “an inhumane, unscrupulous builder, mixing its mortar of lies, blood and mud.”¹⁷ So must he who would make history be.

Historicism played a role in liberal thought as well—sometimes with similarly ruthless results, as it was deployed to justify imperial rule, state-building, and the agonies of economic “development.” Tempered liberalism’s turn against theories of historical progress and toward historical skepticism reflected not only intellectual doubts, but moral repulsion at the callousness of earlier liberal historicism. But the historical philosophies of anti-liberal ideologies went further, and more readily justified ruthlessness, by embracing an “apocalyptic” sense of the present as a crucial crisis point in the process of historical unfolding.¹⁸ This lends particular urgency to immediate conflicts and choices, and justifies drastic action as both necessary and limited: ruthlessness, called for by the exceptional moment, can be abandoned with a sigh of relief once the moment has passed. In this view, the future looms as a time of vindication, which will retroactively absolve the sins and salve the sufferings of the present. The early Nazi leader Gregor Strasser contrasted the “confusion” and “decay” of the recent past with the “new world” that Nazism would create;¹⁹ the Bolsheviks juxtaposed a vision of genuine freedom, democracy, fellow-feeling, and community with a vivid perception of the “abomination” of contemporary capitalism and imperialism—and declared that “[t]o make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him, And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron.”²⁰

A third element was “political realism.” This involved both a perception of political reality and a conception of the normative standards appropriate to politics. On the “realist” view, politics is a process of struggle, success in which requires the often harsh and underhanded use of “power” (understood as the ability to make others do one’s will, often through the threat or use of force). Normatively, politics is ethically “autonomous,” subject to a set of normative standards drastically different from those of private life.²¹ These standards are consequentialist: the ability to achieve desirable political ends is, for the ideological realist, the sole criterion for evaluating the value of political actions. Realists differ over the proper ends of politics: we may distinguish between “idealist realists,” for whom the final end of politics is the achievement of some moral ideal; “reason-of-state realists,” for whom it is the defense of the nation-state and the increase of its power relative to other states; and “nihilist realists...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Sources, Citations, and Abbreviations
• Introduction. The Vices of Virtue: Liberalism and the Problem of Ruthlessness
• 1. “Squeamishness Is the Crime”: Ruthlessness, Ethos, and the Critique of Liberalism
• 2. Between Tragedy and Utopia: Weber and Lukács on Ethics and Politics
• 3. A Just Man: Albert Camus and the Search for a Decent Heroism
• 4. The “Morality of Prudence” and the Fertility of Doubt: Raymond Aron’s Defense of a Realist Liberalism
• 5. Against Cynicism and Sentimentality: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Chastened Liberal Realism
• 6. “The Courage of … Our Doubts and Uncertainties”: Isaiah Berlin, Ethical Moderation, and Liberal Ethos
• Conclusion. Good Characters for Good Liberals?: Ethos and the Reconstruction of Liberalism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index