On the Allure of the Right, and the Problems of "Real" History
One of the most persistent bothers of being of politically leftist leanings is the constant necessity of proving your leftist credentials to other leftists. The left, at least as far back as the French Revolution, is a fractious, unforgiving group which is endlessly ready to retract membership or split into bitter sub-groups at the slightest provocation. It is an interesting phenomenon.
Before I get too far into this, I think it is important to note that I am referring here to "left" and "right," "liberal" and "conservative" in the classical E.H. Carr sense: a general gestalt view of the global predilections of individuals and groups in relative positions on an undefined scale. I am not referring at all to the left and right in American politics--in most cases, American politics is an unequivocal exception to what I'm talking about. You do not need a lecture on the bankruptcy of American political thought, though, and I have no need to write such a thing, so let us dismiss Washington entirely and be done with it.
I have noticed a somewhat troubling shift in my intellectual paradigm over the past six or seven months. It comes out most clearly when speaking with intelligent confirmed leftists, people who I would previously enjoy talking with, since we would be in agreement on most things, and it is almost always pleasant to spend time discussing important matters with like-minded people. But lately, I find more and more a sense of disappointment in them, of dissatisfaction, of impatience, and indeed of downright disagreement. I noticed it most prominently in Bristol, talking to a highly educated old-school Marxist who stood several times for MP as some sort of socialist candidate, then again with the hard left, rabidly anti-American Iranian who I travelled Poland with, and yet again most recently with my new Bolivian-Indian, Havana-educated professor. My criticisms of their views and the way in which they express them are many, but I think I can sum them up in one general complaint: a lack of nuance.
I will provide an example. My professor was discussing yesterday the historical origins of dependency theory and using Sweden and Latvia as an example. (This was, incidentally, more than a little amusing to me, since I had just returned from Latvia about three hours before.) He said that the "Center" (his term for what is variously called "the West" or "the First World") maintains its dominance through monopoly of technology, which ensures that the "Periphery" is forced to continue producing only raw materials, which the Center buys at unfairly low prices and uses to produce its own opulence. He gave evidence of Sweden outsourcing its textile production to Latvia, but keeping its high technology production at home.
And, just as always lately, my reaction was, "Well, I'm afraid that's not entirely accurate." Latvia produces textiles because it has a comparative advantage in textile production, and does not produce high technology goods because it lacks the industrial base and skilled workforce. The Center does indeed produce many more technological innovations than the Periphery, but largely because of far better educational opportunities, greater incentives for innovation, and brain-drain pulling educated, skilled individuals out of poorer countries. But none of those things are the fault of the Center--someone who invents something profitable in Germany holds the patent not out of a malicious desire to keep poor Angolans in their place, but because he was the one who invented it and he ought to get the benefits. In the case of Latvia, if the government wants to grow its economy and eventually produce expensive technological goods, it should use the revenue generated by Swedish textile investment to build infrastructure, a sustainable agricultural base, and reputable educational facilities. It should guarantee good governance and the rule of law to encourage futher investmentand should continue to produce whatever lower-skilled goods it has a comparative advantage in until it has a skilled workforce and a solid industrial base to have a comparative advantage in more complex goods. None of those things is Sweden's responsibility.
Furthermore, the Center does not arbitrarily set global commodity prices--in fact, sometimes quite the opposite, as OPEC can easily prove. And if several poor countries do produce a given raw material and feel the Center is underpaying for it, they should follow OPEC's example and organize. Their failure to do so, and their failure to manage their output (low prices on raw materials with inelastic demand indicate overproduction, which is nobody's fault but the producers') are nobody's fault but their own.
And lastly, the Center exports quite a lot to the Periphery, and not just manufactured consumer goods. Let us not forget that Europe and the United States are net food exporters, and that a great deal of manufactured goods come from underpaid labor in the Third World. Neither could exist without the other, and to think otherwise is foolish.
Perhaps you are reeling in horror. Perhaps you are gripping the arms of your chair with white, shivering knuckles, sweat on your brow, thinking, "Herregud, who is this person and what have they done with Trevor? Has he gone to the dark side?"
I have conversations of this sort all the time and am forever receiving notes from the Official Leftist Registration Bureau revoking my card-carrying status. They hint ominously that I may be a spy, a mole, or a libertarian.
"Well," I find myself having to say, "I'm afraid that's not entirely accurate." I don't much like the economic system I've briefly described above, and the things I've said the Latvian government should do are just the recommendations I'd make if they want to build a modern Western economy. They aren't necessarily what I would do if I were named Grand High Mufti of Latvia tomorrow, nor do I think they would bring about a utopia for all Latvians immediately. There must be degrees of nuance.
And this is what I find the Left so often seems to lack. The Left is so uncompromising, so committed to their personal view of utopia that anyone who does not share their vision and their passion for it is a threat to it--and since utopia is the goal, anyone threatening it is a perfidious, misanthropic, inhuman beast indeed.
Uncompromising utopianism brings with it yet another problem: reality. I encounter this a lot when talking about the hegemony of the United States. Certainly I think the United States does terrible things and has done terrible things throughout its history, and many of the aspects of its hegemony are regrettable, unfortunate, and objectionable. I agree with many leftists on this, then ask what they would do to fix the problem. Those of them who have answers (and they are few) tend to say things along the lines of "Well, America should get out of Iraq/Afghanistan/everywhere." Their solution to the problems of American hegemony is that America should just stop being the hegemon.
Well, I sigh, I'm afraid that's not entirely feasible. Someone has to be the hegemon. If not America, perhaps you would prefer China or Russia? And what do you suppose would happen if American dollars pulled out of the global economy, American firms stopped investing in foreign countries, American ships and planes stopped policing the seas, and American troops stopped sitting on every potential trouble spot in the world? Empires, you see, can only be assessed in a comparative sense: against each other and against anarchy. I have read history and I have concluded that their presence is greater than their absence, and their absence is not tenable because it means only "the state of fighting over who will be the hegemon" and with modern miltiary capability, this is no longer a viable option. It is the character of the empire that matters, and of all the empires that have ever existed in the world, the American, for all its faults (and indeed they are many), is easily the most benign. Can it improve? Of course, and it should. And indeed, in my view, it must if it is to keep its place.
Of course there is more nuance here. If I were the leader of, say, Ecuador, I would do everything I could to assert and ensure my country's independence. But I would recognize the simple fact of American power and use it to the best of my abilities. I am not arguing necessarily that American hegemony is good or bad, just that it is and will continue to be, and for change to take place this must be recognized. All-or-nothing utopianism is foolishness. At its best it is ineffectual, at its worst, it is dangerous.
Unfortunately, as Carr rightly pointed out, the Left seems to suffer from a preponderance of intellect, but a paucity of judgment and compromise. The Left is very, very smart--unfortunately, that intellect seems to produce more small mildly-skilled leaders than followers, and instead of one person with a vision and ten thousand people following him (as on the Right), you have ten thousand people with ten thousand visions, all of them unwilling to compromise and all of them believing the others are traitors and enemy collaborators. This, I would suggest, is even true in the United States, to the extent that we have a Left at all, and is certainly true among the myriad tiny parties of the far Left (yes, I'm looking at YOU, Socialist International).
Beyond the problem of judgment, though, is a flaw in the great edifice of the Leftist Intellect, and that is the flaw of what I will call the problem of "real" history. This is the pernicious, persistent habit to believe that "what you read in history books" is nothing but a collection of lies designed to serve the Establishment (or the bourgeoisie, or the Center, or whoever) and that you have to find accounts of "what really happened" because "history is always written by the winners."
Sigh. Well, I'm afraid that's not entirely accurate. Certainly the First World has produced by far the majority of the world's scholarship--not just in history, but in all areas. It has also produced by far the majority of the world's literature, art, music, film, architecture, technology, and philosophy. But it is absurd to believe that every historian everywhere in the First World writes with the same viewpoint towards the same ends. Name virtually any history book in existence and there will almost certainly be another which attacks its thesis and posits a different one, and yet another which builds on one or the other, and then many years later one more which is based on new information and indicates that everybody was half right and half wrong the whole time. There is very little consensus among historians on much of anything except the hard, proven, indisputable facts. "What you read in history books" can be anything, depending on which ones you read. I tend to read several disagreeing accounts and consequently tend to think I have a pretty good grasp of a given subject.
Secondly, the fact that a theory or analysis emerges from the West doesn't make it wrong, nor does the fact that a theory emerges from the Third World mean that it is right. My professor lauded the dependency theory at some length because it was the first to originate in the Periphery...which means nothing as to its accuracy. A claim made in London is no more or less valid than one made in Havana based solely on its geographical position, any more than a claim made in Ouagadougou is more valid than one made in Chittagong. They both carry the same burden of proof.
Thirdly, the idea that "history is always written by the winners" is preposterous. The classic historic example of this phenomenon is the Roman annihilation of Carthage in 146 BC and the eradication of all Carthaginian sources. This would seem to be the perfect example of history being written by the winners. Yet we know all about the destruction of Carthage, we know about the Punic Wars, and virtually all modern accounts indicate Hannibal as a great and courageous leader, the Carthaginians as a strong challenger to Roman dominance, and the Roman response as atrocious and cruel.
This claim also tends to be met by an oddly contradictory one: that despite the idea that "history is always written by the winners," we can never trust what the winners actually say, but must instead look for the "real" (usually "economic") reason for historical events (usually "wars"). I intend to write a lengthy critique of the purely economic interpretation of history eventually, but now is not the time. Suffice it to say that if there were purely economic reasons for, say, the war in the Sudan in 1898, one would think that even if British government documents indicate that it was but one of many concerns (to be expected, you see, as part of the conspiracy to hide the true intent) that such motivations would show up in private letters or diaries which were never meant to be published. Instead, economics consistently shows up as but one of several strategic considerations, quite subordinate to geostrategy. If I see official records, private letters, diaries, newspaper articles, memoirs, and history books indicating one thing, I am willing to admit that there may be another, deeper explanation, but the burden of proof for that explanation will be high indeed.
Regarding the problem of victors writing history, I am often countered with the claim that "there could be all sorts of genocides and massacres and wars that we never hear about because the winners successfully eliminated all records." Yeah, maybe. I know about a whole lot of genocides and massacres and wars--enough to make it quite clear that every country and nation in the world has had blood on its hands at one time or another. And anyway, that simply is not an intellectually tenable position--it's a Donald Rumsfeld argument: "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence." I mean, I have no evidence that there is a giant planet full of hyper-intelligent purple cows who ride pogo-sticks made of chocolate and control the minds of all the world's leaders and it would be quite silly of me to proceed on the assumption that all astronomy is nonsense because it fails to mention such a planet.
There is an even greater danger here, I think. The undercurrent to this argument is the idea that somehow there is nothing to be learned from reading history. It is all lies, all propaganda, all designed to serve the Powers That Be, none of it "real." This is rank stupidity. Those seeking to change the world must first understand it--and understand it accurately--
and this is done through reading history. Every great leftist thinker has read a hell of a lot of history, and we should all know and appreciate the fates of those who did not. And even if these books and analyses were all lies, is the Left so fragile that it cannot survive contact with opposing viewpoints? Is it so easily persuaded that it will be immediately corrupted? I cannot imagine that this is so, because if it is, the Left is nothing but uncompromising utopian dogma chaotically reeling from one Thermidor to another as they blunder into power through the momentary incompetence of the Right. This cannot be so.
The Left, above all, must know history. The revolutionary must know history, and through his study of history, the revolutionary must know the value and utility of conservatism. After all, the most successful revolutionaries have been conservatives: I point to Bismarck as the penultimate example. The revolutionary must appreciate the constant, inevitable danger of Thermidor, because his revolution will reach it eventually, as certainly as history repeats itself. I ascribe the vast, chronic failure of revolutions to actually deliver the utopias they promise to their leaders' failure to properly read and understand history. We cannot afford to continue to make that mistake. We must take the virtues of the Right and be willing to put them into place the instant we are in power. Revolution alone is too dangerous, too mindless, to unpredictable, and the idea of perpetuating it any longer than necessary is folly and has been the death of many an uncompromising revolutionary. A revolution should be as short, bloodless, and controlled as possible and should exist only to bring the revolutionary to power, to there carry out his vision through the slower, measured, nuanced machinery of conservatism. Distasteful? Certainly, but preferable to Stalin, Mao, the Reign of Terror, and the wild excesses which lead to civil war and counterrevolution. It is only through the proper application of conservatism that revolution can be successful.
Before I get too far into this, I think it is important to note that I am referring here to "left" and "right," "liberal" and "conservative" in the classical E.H. Carr sense: a general gestalt view of the global predilections of individuals and groups in relative positions on an undefined scale. I am not referring at all to the left and right in American politics--in most cases, American politics is an unequivocal exception to what I'm talking about. You do not need a lecture on the bankruptcy of American political thought, though, and I have no need to write such a thing, so let us dismiss Washington entirely and be done with it.
I have noticed a somewhat troubling shift in my intellectual paradigm over the past six or seven months. It comes out most clearly when speaking with intelligent confirmed leftists, people who I would previously enjoy talking with, since we would be in agreement on most things, and it is almost always pleasant to spend time discussing important matters with like-minded people. But lately, I find more and more a sense of disappointment in them, of dissatisfaction, of impatience, and indeed of downright disagreement. I noticed it most prominently in Bristol, talking to a highly educated old-school Marxist who stood several times for MP as some sort of socialist candidate, then again with the hard left, rabidly anti-American Iranian who I travelled Poland with, and yet again most recently with my new Bolivian-Indian, Havana-educated professor. My criticisms of their views and the way in which they express them are many, but I think I can sum them up in one general complaint: a lack of nuance.
I will provide an example. My professor was discussing yesterday the historical origins of dependency theory and using Sweden and Latvia as an example. (This was, incidentally, more than a little amusing to me, since I had just returned from Latvia about three hours before.) He said that the "Center" (his term for what is variously called "the West" or "the First World") maintains its dominance through monopoly of technology, which ensures that the "Periphery" is forced to continue producing only raw materials, which the Center buys at unfairly low prices and uses to produce its own opulence. He gave evidence of Sweden outsourcing its textile production to Latvia, but keeping its high technology production at home.
And, just as always lately, my reaction was, "Well, I'm afraid that's not entirely accurate." Latvia produces textiles because it has a comparative advantage in textile production, and does not produce high technology goods because it lacks the industrial base and skilled workforce. The Center does indeed produce many more technological innovations than the Periphery, but largely because of far better educational opportunities, greater incentives for innovation, and brain-drain pulling educated, skilled individuals out of poorer countries. But none of those things are the fault of the Center--someone who invents something profitable in Germany holds the patent not out of a malicious desire to keep poor Angolans in their place, but because he was the one who invented it and he ought to get the benefits. In the case of Latvia, if the government wants to grow its economy and eventually produce expensive technological goods, it should use the revenue generated by Swedish textile investment to build infrastructure, a sustainable agricultural base, and reputable educational facilities. It should guarantee good governance and the rule of law to encourage futher investmentand should continue to produce whatever lower-skilled goods it has a comparative advantage in until it has a skilled workforce and a solid industrial base to have a comparative advantage in more complex goods. None of those things is Sweden's responsibility.
Furthermore, the Center does not arbitrarily set global commodity prices--in fact, sometimes quite the opposite, as OPEC can easily prove. And if several poor countries do produce a given raw material and feel the Center is underpaying for it, they should follow OPEC's example and organize. Their failure to do so, and their failure to manage their output (low prices on raw materials with inelastic demand indicate overproduction, which is nobody's fault but the producers') are nobody's fault but their own.
And lastly, the Center exports quite a lot to the Periphery, and not just manufactured consumer goods. Let us not forget that Europe and the United States are net food exporters, and that a great deal of manufactured goods come from underpaid labor in the Third World. Neither could exist without the other, and to think otherwise is foolish.
Perhaps you are reeling in horror. Perhaps you are gripping the arms of your chair with white, shivering knuckles, sweat on your brow, thinking, "Herregud, who is this person and what have they done with Trevor? Has he gone to the dark side?"
I have conversations of this sort all the time and am forever receiving notes from the Official Leftist Registration Bureau revoking my card-carrying status. They hint ominously that I may be a spy, a mole, or a libertarian.
"Well," I find myself having to say, "I'm afraid that's not entirely accurate." I don't much like the economic system I've briefly described above, and the things I've said the Latvian government should do are just the recommendations I'd make if they want to build a modern Western economy. They aren't necessarily what I would do if I were named Grand High Mufti of Latvia tomorrow, nor do I think they would bring about a utopia for all Latvians immediately. There must be degrees of nuance.
And this is what I find the Left so often seems to lack. The Left is so uncompromising, so committed to their personal view of utopia that anyone who does not share their vision and their passion for it is a threat to it--and since utopia is the goal, anyone threatening it is a perfidious, misanthropic, inhuman beast indeed.
Uncompromising utopianism brings with it yet another problem: reality. I encounter this a lot when talking about the hegemony of the United States. Certainly I think the United States does terrible things and has done terrible things throughout its history, and many of the aspects of its hegemony are regrettable, unfortunate, and objectionable. I agree with many leftists on this, then ask what they would do to fix the problem. Those of them who have answers (and they are few) tend to say things along the lines of "Well, America should get out of Iraq/Afghanistan/everywhere." Their solution to the problems of American hegemony is that America should just stop being the hegemon.
Well, I sigh, I'm afraid that's not entirely feasible. Someone has to be the hegemon. If not America, perhaps you would prefer China or Russia? And what do you suppose would happen if American dollars pulled out of the global economy, American firms stopped investing in foreign countries, American ships and planes stopped policing the seas, and American troops stopped sitting on every potential trouble spot in the world? Empires, you see, can only be assessed in a comparative sense: against each other and against anarchy. I have read history and I have concluded that their presence is greater than their absence, and their absence is not tenable because it means only "the state of fighting over who will be the hegemon" and with modern miltiary capability, this is no longer a viable option. It is the character of the empire that matters, and of all the empires that have ever existed in the world, the American, for all its faults (and indeed they are many), is easily the most benign. Can it improve? Of course, and it should. And indeed, in my view, it must if it is to keep its place.
Of course there is more nuance here. If I were the leader of, say, Ecuador, I would do everything I could to assert and ensure my country's independence. But I would recognize the simple fact of American power and use it to the best of my abilities. I am not arguing necessarily that American hegemony is good or bad, just that it is and will continue to be, and for change to take place this must be recognized. All-or-nothing utopianism is foolishness. At its best it is ineffectual, at its worst, it is dangerous.
Unfortunately, as Carr rightly pointed out, the Left seems to suffer from a preponderance of intellect, but a paucity of judgment and compromise. The Left is very, very smart--unfortunately, that intellect seems to produce more small mildly-skilled leaders than followers, and instead of one person with a vision and ten thousand people following him (as on the Right), you have ten thousand people with ten thousand visions, all of them unwilling to compromise and all of them believing the others are traitors and enemy collaborators. This, I would suggest, is even true in the United States, to the extent that we have a Left at all, and is certainly true among the myriad tiny parties of the far Left (yes, I'm looking at YOU, Socialist International).
Beyond the problem of judgment, though, is a flaw in the great edifice of the Leftist Intellect, and that is the flaw of what I will call the problem of "real" history. This is the pernicious, persistent habit to believe that "what you read in history books" is nothing but a collection of lies designed to serve the Establishment (or the bourgeoisie, or the Center, or whoever) and that you have to find accounts of "what really happened" because "history is always written by the winners."
Sigh. Well, I'm afraid that's not entirely accurate. Certainly the First World has produced by far the majority of the world's scholarship--not just in history, but in all areas. It has also produced by far the majority of the world's literature, art, music, film, architecture, technology, and philosophy. But it is absurd to believe that every historian everywhere in the First World writes with the same viewpoint towards the same ends. Name virtually any history book in existence and there will almost certainly be another which attacks its thesis and posits a different one, and yet another which builds on one or the other, and then many years later one more which is based on new information and indicates that everybody was half right and half wrong the whole time. There is very little consensus among historians on much of anything except the hard, proven, indisputable facts. "What you read in history books" can be anything, depending on which ones you read. I tend to read several disagreeing accounts and consequently tend to think I have a pretty good grasp of a given subject.
Secondly, the fact that a theory or analysis emerges from the West doesn't make it wrong, nor does the fact that a theory emerges from the Third World mean that it is right. My professor lauded the dependency theory at some length because it was the first to originate in the Periphery...which means nothing as to its accuracy. A claim made in London is no more or less valid than one made in Havana based solely on its geographical position, any more than a claim made in Ouagadougou is more valid than one made in Chittagong. They both carry the same burden of proof.
Thirdly, the idea that "history is always written by the winners" is preposterous. The classic historic example of this phenomenon is the Roman annihilation of Carthage in 146 BC and the eradication of all Carthaginian sources. This would seem to be the perfect example of history being written by the winners. Yet we know all about the destruction of Carthage, we know about the Punic Wars, and virtually all modern accounts indicate Hannibal as a great and courageous leader, the Carthaginians as a strong challenger to Roman dominance, and the Roman response as atrocious and cruel.
This claim also tends to be met by an oddly contradictory one: that despite the idea that "history is always written by the winners," we can never trust what the winners actually say, but must instead look for the "real" (usually "economic") reason for historical events (usually "wars"). I intend to write a lengthy critique of the purely economic interpretation of history eventually, but now is not the time. Suffice it to say that if there were purely economic reasons for, say, the war in the Sudan in 1898, one would think that even if British government documents indicate that it was but one of many concerns (to be expected, you see, as part of the conspiracy to hide the true intent) that such motivations would show up in private letters or diaries which were never meant to be published. Instead, economics consistently shows up as but one of several strategic considerations, quite subordinate to geostrategy. If I see official records, private letters, diaries, newspaper articles, memoirs, and history books indicating one thing, I am willing to admit that there may be another, deeper explanation, but the burden of proof for that explanation will be high indeed.
Regarding the problem of victors writing history, I am often countered with the claim that "there could be all sorts of genocides and massacres and wars that we never hear about because the winners successfully eliminated all records." Yeah, maybe. I know about a whole lot of genocides and massacres and wars--enough to make it quite clear that every country and nation in the world has had blood on its hands at one time or another. And anyway, that simply is not an intellectually tenable position--it's a Donald Rumsfeld argument: "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence." I mean, I have no evidence that there is a giant planet full of hyper-intelligent purple cows who ride pogo-sticks made of chocolate and control the minds of all the world's leaders and it would be quite silly of me to proceed on the assumption that all astronomy is nonsense because it fails to mention such a planet.
There is an even greater danger here, I think. The undercurrent to this argument is the idea that somehow there is nothing to be learned from reading history. It is all lies, all propaganda, all designed to serve the Powers That Be, none of it "real." This is rank stupidity. Those seeking to change the world must first understand it--and understand it accurately--
and this is done through reading history. Every great leftist thinker has read a hell of a lot of history, and we should all know and appreciate the fates of those who did not. And even if these books and analyses were all lies, is the Left so fragile that it cannot survive contact with opposing viewpoints? Is it so easily persuaded that it will be immediately corrupted? I cannot imagine that this is so, because if it is, the Left is nothing but uncompromising utopian dogma chaotically reeling from one Thermidor to another as they blunder into power through the momentary incompetence of the Right. This cannot be so.
The Left, above all, must know history. The revolutionary must know history, and through his study of history, the revolutionary must know the value and utility of conservatism. After all, the most successful revolutionaries have been conservatives: I point to Bismarck as the penultimate example. The revolutionary must appreciate the constant, inevitable danger of Thermidor, because his revolution will reach it eventually, as certainly as history repeats itself. I ascribe the vast, chronic failure of revolutions to actually deliver the utopias they promise to their leaders' failure to properly read and understand history. We cannot afford to continue to make that mistake. We must take the virtues of the Right and be willing to put them into place the instant we are in power. Revolution alone is too dangerous, too mindless, to unpredictable, and the idea of perpetuating it any longer than necessary is folly and has been the death of many an uncompromising revolutionary. A revolution should be as short, bloodless, and controlled as possible and should exist only to bring the revolutionary to power, to there carry out his vision through the slower, measured, nuanced machinery of conservatism. Distasteful? Certainly, but preferable to Stalin, Mao, the Reign of Terror, and the wild excesses which lead to civil war and counterrevolution. It is only through the proper application of conservatism that revolution can be successful.
posted by Eccarius at 8:13 AM
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