A Red Morality?

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people. The people cannot be really happy until it has been deprived of illusory happiness by the abolition of religion.

So wrote Karl Marx 118 years ago. The Marxists duly abolished religion, and happiness reigned among the people. But in Communist Poland, and perhaps in Russia too, a dreadful question is beginning to be heard in the classrooms and corridors and the cafes where young people gather--a question with dangerous implications and unforeseeable consequences, a question that might even open a side door to that ancient troublemaker, God. The question: What is the meaning of life?

"Don't Be Angry." Poland's top Marxist philosopher, Professor Adam Schaff, 48, head of Warsaw University's philosophy department and a member of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party for the past six years, admitted last week that the question was posing a tough and touchy problem. In Paris, at the end of a three-month visit to the U.S. and France, he told about a seminar in Warsaw at which a student dropped the bombshell: "Please don't be angry, but could you explain the meaning of life, sir?"

"I first thought," said Schaff, " Is he baiting me?' But when I looked at the student and saw hundreds of pairs of eyes watching me attentively, I understood: this is serious. It was confirmed by the silence with which my explanations were followed. I admit that I was thinking out loud, and very feverishly. Until then I had rejected such subjects as so much blah-blah."

Thinking less feverishly over the following months, Communist Schaff singled out what he decided was the reason for this philosophical blind spot and did his best to indicate the cure. Communism historically has no time or place for the individual because Marx saw society as the solvent for all individual problems. Private ethical dilemmas were submerged, first because the revolution had no time for such niceties, later because they were tainted by association with "idealistic" ideologies. But Philosopher Schaff recognizes that "as long as people die, suffer, lose their loved ones, just so long will questions about the meaning of life have full rights." And, says he, Communist thinking is ill-prepared to deal with these questions. "Marxist philosophy should as quickly as possible and on as wide a scale as possible take up the problem of the human individual and his fate, previously neglected by it, though evoking such a broad response."

Values Needed. Marxists, says Schaff, must work out a system of morality on a "scientific" basis rather than accept something like the Ten Commandments because it is the will of God. A typical "scientific" criterion: one should aim for "the greatest possible happiness of the large masses--only in this way may one implement the desire for personal happiness." What if organizational discipline--the state--requires an action that the individual believes to be morally wrong, that is, against "the greatest possible happiness of the masses"?

"It is not possible to make categorical and absolute statements in this matter," Schaff admits. "In a certain sense, the individual is definitely alone--he has to make the choice, and no one can do it for him. What is needed," he adds, almost with a wistful glance over his shoulder at Moses and Christ, "is a system of values and a scale of comparison.''

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