In Arthur
Koester's novel Darkness at Noon the
character N.S. Rubashov expressed his misgivings about the party he had
dedicated his life to. He declared,
"all our principles were right, but our results were wrong." He asserted, "this is a diseased
century," and, "we diagnosed the disease and its causes with
microscopic exactness, but wherever we applied the healing knife a new sore
appeared." He continued, "Our will was hard and pure, we should have
been loved by the people. But they
hate us." He asked himself,
"Why are we so odious and detested?" He concluded, "We brought you truth, and in our mouth
it sounded a lie. We brought you
freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard
the trees whither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the
future, but our tongue stammered and barked. . .”
This was the
lament of a compassionate man who believed in an elite's ability to regulate
every aspect of human existence for the betterment of mankind. It is also the lament of the current
administration. They have only the
best interests of the American people at heart. Why are they not loved? Apparently the people do not understand their beneficent
proposals. Yet the more they
explain their plans the greater the opposition becomes. Perhaps this opposition is the result
of the failure of their fundamental beliefs: the failure of Modernism. Rule by expert; this is the essence of
modernism. Modernism was defined
by Vaclav Havel, the former President of Czechoslovakia, as the belief that the
world is "a wholly knowable system governed by a finite number of
universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct for his own
benefit." It asserted that, “Man . . . was capable of objectively
describing, explaining and controlling everything that exists."
In his speech
before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Havel dated the end of the modern age
at the fall of the Soviet Empire.
Architect Charles Jencks placed it much earlier: at exactly 3:32 P.M. on
July 15, 1972. This was the moment
that the Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis, was demolished. Like the East Falls Housing Project is
Philadelphia, demolished in 2000, and the Cabrini-Green public housing project
in Chicago, the Pruitt-Igoe housing development was an example of the thousands
of housing projects constructed throughout the industrial world. Their functional design made them perfect
"machines for living in."
Unfortunately they shortly became uninhabitable. These housing projects were
representative of the failure of the modernist concept that experts could
design a system to improve human existence on a massive scale. The physical wreckage of these well
intention schemes is easy to observe.
The psychological wreckage is more difficult to discern.
These housing
projects were inspired by the work of architects like Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier worked for years to
promote a plan to demolish a large part of Paris and replace it with a
logically designed layout. He was
the man with a plan. He wrote
that, "The despot is not a man. It is the . . . correct, realistic, exact
plan . . . that will provide your solution once the problem has been posed
clearly. . . . This plan has been drawn up well away from . . . the cries of
the electorate or the laments of society's victims. It has been drawn up by
serene and lucid minds."
These "serene and lucid minds" are the same people described
by Edmund Burke: "Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a
thorough-bred metaphysician ... It is like that of the principle of evil
himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil."
Modernist plans
always entail sacrifice. "You
cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs." The novelist Upton Sinclair defended Soviet collectivization
by saying, "They drove rich peasants off the land - and sent them
wholesale to work in lumber camps and on railroads. Maybe it cost a million lives - maybe it cost five million -
but you cannot think intelligently about it unless you ask yourself how many
millions it might have cost if the changes had not been made." But as the British philosopher Isaiah
Berlin pointed out, "The eggs are broken, and the habit of breaking them
grows, but the omelette remains invisible." In the 1980s sociologist Eva Etzione-Halevy pointed out what
is becoming increasingly obvious: “the years in which the influence of the
social scientists on policy has been growing have also been the years in which
policy failures have been rife and in which a variety of formidable social
problems have been multiplying."
Malcolm Muggeridge sarcastically remarked, “As more and more money is
spent on education, illiteracy is increasing. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it didn’t end up with
virtually the whole revenue of the western countries being spend on education,
and a condition of almost total illiteracy resulting therefrom.”
What is the
alternative to rule by “serene and lucid minds?” It is a system that has proved successful for over two
hundred years. It is government
by practical people untainted by the theories of the metaphysicians. Irving
Kristol has pointed out that, “The common people . . .are not uncommonly wise,
but their experience tends to make them uncommonly sensible. They learn their economics by taking
out a mortgage, they learn their politics by watching the local school board in
action, and they learn the impossibility of ‘social engineering’ by trying to
raise their children to be decent human beings.” They are busy taking care of their small section of the
world. And for the most part, they
do it responsibly. As Thomas
Hobbes wrote, “A plain husband-man is more Prudent in the affaires of his own
house, than a Privy Counselor in the affaires of other men.”
John
Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan:
Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy, Algora Publishing.
