LEFT OUT TWO:

Marx, Hubbard, and the Totalitarian Impulse (Robert McHenry, August 20, 2009, The American)

As is well known, Marx was deeply influenced by, though later critical of, Georg Hegel’s brand of German idealist philosophy. But while he gave up the central tenet of what we might call capital-I Idealism in favor of materialism, he remained a man of ideas, and he retained the epistemological method of his predecessors, which might be summarized thus: to discover the true nature of reality, sit quietly and think very hard. Marx did a good deal of his sitting in the British Museum, where quiet is strictly enforced. What he thought hard about was chiefly history and economics, and what he concluded was that they are governed by certain laws that had thitherto eluded discovery.

It is interesting to imagine how he discerned those laws. The past might best be thought of as a gigantic Jackson Pollock canvas. The job of the historian is to decide which few of those myriad dots and splotches and swirly drips are of significance and then to describe how they are related. The possibilities are innumerable, and each one is quite simply an invention. What’s a fellow with strong ideas to do? It helps to be smart, of course, but smart alone will not do much more than generate yet another Ph.D. dissertation. To really put your marks on things you need confidence and a certain sort of blindness. Reinhold Niebuhr explained (in The Irony of American History):

The inhumanities of our day, which modern tyrannies exhibit in the nth degree, are due to an idealism in which reason is turned into unreason because it is not conscious of the contingent character of the presuppositions with which the reasoning process begins, and in which idealism is transmuted into inhumanity because the idealist seeks to comprehend the whole realm of ends from his standpoint.

Marx had that confidence, in the degree the Greeks called hubris and identified as the source of tragedy. He had that trick of mind that looks upon an idea that it has spawned and sees that it is good. Better than good: True, with a capital T, then, now, and for always. He sat there in the British Museum and decided the he, alone, saw the true pattern in the dots and swirls, and so he worked out the laws that had and must always govern all of human history. He never betrayed a hint of a doubt that he might be, in any way, wrong about anything. How could he be wrong, after all, about ideas that were so clear, so galvanizing, so congenial to his prejudices? The balance of his career was spent in organizing ways to forward the operation of those laws, although it is by no means clear why it is that any such iron and immutable laws would need the help of an impecunious journalist, or (once it had been properly instructed by himself) of a worldwide proletariat.

Try to put by the shock of bathos now as we shift our view from that quiet reading room in sooty 19th-century London to a sailing boat off the coast of post-World War II California. The fellow in the jaunty cap is Hubbard. He is thinking, too, if not very hard or quietly. He is dreaming up a system of mental discipline that he will later declare to be “a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire.” There’s your confidence, vast but not so much a case of hubris as of chutzpah. He will go on to found a movement that will call itself a religion when it is convenient but at other times will be “an applied religious philosophy.” In either case it will describe the whole of human history more or less as Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout might have, and it will make lots and lots of money.

Gotta add Freud and Darwin.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 25, 2009 11:15 PM