Anti-Revolutionaries

This is the age of revolution, in word even more than in deed. Scarcely a publication can be picked up that does not issue a call for revolution in something: art or education, politics or sex, work or play. Yet amid the now commonplace advocacy of upheaval are quieter appeals to reason that suggest revolution is not all it is reputed to be, that continuity may be preferable to crisis, that peaceful accommodation with one's fellow man may prove to be more fruitful than clobbering him--or even calling him names.

The writers who prefer rationality to revolution are by no means traditionally conservative. In the Sunday New York Times Magazine last month, Benjamin DeMott, chairman of the English department at Amherst, explored the casually violent language of the revolutionary-minded. Among his specimens:

"The family is the American Fascism."--Paul Goodman.

"The white race is the cancer of history."--Susan Sontag.

"Senator McCarthy is one of the Senate's few intellectuals and one of its most obvious hypocrites; the two go hand in hand."--Andrew Kopkind.

To DeMott, this emotional response constitutes a severe case of overkill: "Fits of fury that plucked out eyes from severed heads." It is as if, speculates DeMott, "fury seemed a possible substitute for moral clarity and worth."

Reasserting the Past. A chief characteristic of today's revolutionaries, thinks Zbigniew Brzezinski, professor of government at Columbia, is that they don't really know what they want--other than violent change. Current protesters and rioters, writes Brzezinski in The New Republic, have much in common with the Luddites or Chartists of 19th century England, or even with the National Socialists and Fascists of this century. Unable to cope with the complexities of the present, many of them try desperately to reassert simplistic values of the past. What passes for revolution in their case, says Brzezinski, is nothing more than counterrevolution.

The reasons that are commonly advanced to explain present-day revolutionary action are not persuasive to James Q. Wilson, professor of government at Harvard. Revolutions are commonly thought to be triggered by "material deprivation or unresponsive governments," he writes in the New York Times Magazine. Actually, the more people get, says Wilson, the more they demand. "Competition for leadership among dissident groups will inevitably generate ever more extreme demands faster than less extreme requests are filled." If anything is to blame for revolution, thinks Wilson, it may be prosperity, which has freed an ever increasing number of people, educated and not so educated, to participate in the political process. In this situation, government cannot act hastily. "Concessions sufficient to induce one side to abandon violence might be sufficient to induce the other side to resort to violence. Only when it is clear that neither side can gain through violent protest does the resort to such forms of protest cease."

One trait of today's revolutionaries is a rather indiscriminate hero worship, a tendency examined by Anthony Hartley, editor of Interplay magazine, in this month's Encounter. Reviewing Andre Malraux's recently published Anti-Memoirs, Hartley is disturbed by the brilliant author's adulation of Mao Tse-tung, an adulation shared by less talented New Leftists. By making Mao out to be a hero despite his mass murders and tyranny, Malraux, says Hartley, strays far beyond the "carefully developed rationalism and emphasis on individual rights of modern Western industrial society." Continues Hartley: a "charismatic, quasi-religious style of leadership, the communion between the masses and a revered father figure, the irrational appeal that moves nations, the sense of a destiny transcending the individual"--all of this is a far cry from freedom and democracy, words that are also beloved of revolutionaries. "The sense of historic destiny that attends this type of communion between the great man and his followers" may be attractive, but is not necessarily desirable, as the "whole history of the 20th century shows."

Seat of Evil. The revolutionary habit may get ominously out of hand, thinks Diplomat-Historian George Kennan, who has written on the subject in various publications. Violent protest, he says, amounts to "intimidation and blackmail"; if tolerated, it leads to dictatorship. "I have seen more harm done in this world by those who tried to storm the bastions of society in the name of Utopian beliefs, who were determined to achieve the elimination of all evil and the realization of the millennium within their own time, than by all the humble efforts of those who have tried to create a little order and civility and affection within their own intimate entourage, even at the cost of tolerating a great deal of evil in the public domain." The revolutionaries, Kennan continues, have not been able to face a "vitally important truth"; namely, that the "decisive seat of evil in this world is not in the social and political institutions and not even, as a rule, in the ill will or iniquities of statesmen but simply in the weakness and imperfection of the human soul itself, and by that I mean literally every soul, including my own and that of the student militant at the gate."

The disquieting thing about today's revolutionaries is that many of them could not care less about traditional good and evil. Their vision is apocalyptic--a final upheaval to cleanse the human race. This "unspeakably powerful metaphor" dominates much of contemporary thinking, writes Novelist Earl Rovit (A Far Cry) in The American Scholar. "It invites all men to become saints or prophets. Its fashion of assault is omnivorous, uncompromising and treacherously sophisticated. It has fathered the movement for silence and outrage in the arts; for anarchy and violence in social and political affairs; for polymorphous perversity in psychology, religion and metaphysics. Ultimately--and it is never less than ultimate--it will accept nothing save spontaneity, immediacy of response, and the obliteration of all stabilities."

People yearn for ultimate upheaval, says Rovit, because they believe it will restore "innocence and purity" to the world, or to the nation or to art. Yet it may be destruction that really attracts them. Their basic attitude is not that they "want to break windows in order to let the fresh air in," says Rovit; the fact is they are "hopelessly in love with the sound of smashing glass." Not trusting to his own instincts with the confidence of the revolutionaries, he confesses that "I find myself casting about for some secure resting place for my spirit. I am ready to enunciate a homily on the sanctity of compromise, of humility, of that acceptance of limitation that is the strategy of humor."

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