Liberty and prosperity thrive as the age of certainty dies

Press, 21 August 1989, Page 12

Liberty and prosperity thrive as the age of certainty dies

The “Economist” on the death of ideology

IF YOU are comfortably settled, give a sigh of gratitude, and a guilty start, that you were born when you were. Seventy-five years ago this August day your grandfathers were marching off to what they did not know would be the Great War, the smashing of the world the nineteenth century had created.

Fifty years ago your fathers were pulling on their ammunition boots in preparation for an even greater war, because of the demons unleashed by the first one. On this double anniversary of 1914 and 1939, look around you for the ghosts of the myriad unborn, whose would-be fathers and grandfathers never had the chance to give them life. God willing, the shape of the twentieth century is now fairly plain. It has been a marvellous century, until quite recently, for what man has been able to do with the material world around him. His growing command over visible matter and invisible forces has made the average Earth-citizen much richer than he was in 1900, the average West European and North American maybe five times richer, the average Japanese quite possibly 25 times.

This has helped the simultaneous spread of political freedom. The idea of democratic government, in 1900 more or less confined to the countries around the North Atlantic, has now moved into much of eastern and southern Asia, is finding new footholds in Latin America, and may be about to roll into Eastern Europe. It is true that in the late 1980 s men began to realise that they have been both greedy and careless in their pursuit of material plenty, and from now on had better pay more attention to the fate of the natural world. Still, on

the man-nature front the twentieth century has on the whole gone wonderfully well.

On the man-man front it has gone appallingly. Two world wars which between them may have killed 70 million people, and two tyrannies as ferocious as Hitlerism and Stalinism, make previous centuries seem kindly by comparison. The killing did not stop in 1945. If you realy want to spoil your repose, work out how many fingers you need to tally up, in millions, the people killed or maimed in the still-unended wars of Afghanistan, Indochina, Mozambique, the Levant. Nor has the political horror ended — the recurrent ability of people with power to whack those without it over the head. Drop in on Bucharest or Prague if thoughts of Tiananmen Square do not suffice. What is it that has made this century so bountiful and so beastly at the same time? Technology, say most people, and they are partly right. Scientists have made it possible for man to grow so much more food, and manufacture so many convenient devices; to construct machines that do much of his physical work for him; to move people and goods — and thoughts — swiftly from one place to another; and thus to ensure that nobody anywhere need be ignorant of how much nicer life can be, except in a few corners of darkness like North Korea or the middle of Africa.

Technology has hugely multiplied killing power as well. There is no evidence that ordinary men’s readiness to use violence on each other is any greater in this century than it was in the past. In some places

the opposite is probably true: in Western Europe and North America it would in 1989 be hard to collect an army for any war except one of direct self-defence, if you could not gratefully count on the sort of young men who make soldiering their profession. But when violence does get used it reaches farther, and it kills far more people. The technology of war remains obstinately lop-sided. Apart from a few faltering experiments — star wars, for instance — the means of delivering death still vastly outnumber the means of stopping it from being delivered. Even so, it remains a comfort that technology is part of the explanation of the twentieth century. This is because the wealthcreating sort of technology is now having political effects that could diminish the danger of the death-dealing sort.

In the hands of free men, technology has worked such wonders that the unfree countries of the communist world are starting to think they may have to change their ways. If Leninism does doff its cap to pluralism, the war of ideologies that has been the chief fear of the past 40 years can cease to haunt you in your beach-chair. This leads to the second cause for encouragement. Technology is not the only shaper of the twentieth century. This has also been the century of the ideologies; of two political movements that have taken two different motives for human action and twisted them into monstrous aberrations.

The twentieth century crushed the Hitlerist aberration in 1945. It may now be in the process of arguing the communist one into seeing the error of its ways. In

doing so it should take a careful look at the whole body of ideas it inherited from the eighteenth century; ideas which, directly or indirectly, have done so much to shape the way the world is now.

In the eighteenth century, men first began to feel confidence in the unaided power of the human mind. They began to believe they could open up all the mysteries of the world around them, and solve all the problems they found there. There would, in the end, be no limit to what the honest human intellect could achieve.

This was the Enlightenment, and it did throw out vast new areas of light. From here came much lucid philosophy, reams of clear-minded literature, some of the best music the world has ever produced. From here also came the great leap forward in science that made possible the technological transformation of the twentieth century. The danger was, however, visible from the start. The confidence that human beings were now placing in human self-suffi-ciency could slide into self-satis-fied arrogance. Man could become uppity, and careless.

Carelessness, you might say, caused Hitler. The countries of Europe strolled comfortably and increasingly prosperously through the nineteenth century and then, in 1914, they strolled over the precipice. The shock of 1914-1918 shattered everyone’s complacency, but in one country, Germany, it produced a primeval rejection of everything the Englightenment had stood for. Hitler dragged Germany back to a time when action emerged from the coursing of the blood, not the working

of the intellect. It took six awful years to push that beast back into its cave, and even now it may not be tamed. It is not hard to turn the everyday feeling that “we” are different from “them” into the rant that We are the Masters. Even if Germans are now cured of that, others are not.

The trouble with communism, on the other hand, was an overdose of self-confident rationalism. Marx said some sensible things about the industrial revolution, as well as some unsensible ones; but he encouraged people to think he was making politics into a science. Those who understood the science, it came to be assumed, could be sure they knew the answer to any question.

This led Lenin to set up the one-party system, and the oneparty system led to Stalinism and Stalinism led on to Brezhnevism. It has taken 70 years for even the most Intelligent men in the communist world to realise that the system they have been running is not a science, just another mistaken guess in the dark. And some healthy moral to carry away, as you head on your way to the twenty-first century? That to feel you are absolutely right about anything is a dangerous business, for yourself and for others.

That there are no Utopias: the Earth can gradually be made a more comfortable place, but it cannot be converted into heaven, either through religious fervour (Teheran papers please copy) or political arrogance (ditto, Peking and Prague and Bucharest). That there are still mysteries, which means there must always be hesitation. The triumph of the twentieth century is that it has purged itself of certainty. Copyright — The Economist