Get Down to Cases

‘WELL, here we are again,’ said my young student disconsolately. ‘Saving democracy, restoring democracy. Four points, eight points, the American Century. Do we even react like a vital body? We just keep calling for more of the same. More business, more Open Doors, more of that soothing moralism they call a religion. — But what are you grinning about?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘You just reminded me of an old line: —

‘That’s no answer.’

‘In a way it is. Your despair comes of the discovery that it’s easier to plan a good world than a good nation. That’s heavy to bear. But it’s the only discovery that measures up to the Nazis’. I have always felt a strong respect for the reserve and uncertainty, even coldness, of the younger generation. They have been waiting for something real to be revealed, maybe for some great wave that would be better than the “wave of the future.” But: meanwhile they were in mortal danger. It’s their good luck to be still free to wonder about it.’

‘Good luck plus the British.’

‘Yes. But it’s more than that. Your essential luck is Hitler himself. That man had the greatest strategic position in history, and he is gambling it away. He was able to grab truths right and left for his own use, all the promises and possibilities worked out by our civilization which were lying around like unprotected valuables. And to face the might of his armies and his ideas and his technic we had only one thing.’

‘What is that? The dignity of man?’

‘Call it that. And we knew that, because he was killing it, in his hands anything which was a truth would die. No worry about that — and also little comfort in that for the Allies as we know them.’

‘Suppose it became a well-established conviction that Hitler had tried to do the right thing in the wrong way. Someone else would start from there. And we’d be left out in the cold.’

‘I must say that a few months ago I was almost without hope for Europe and not at all reassured about the American future. The drift in the minds of young Europeans was definitely toward the German legacy. Take even a representative man of the older generation, and one of the most brilliant representatives of European liberal reason, like Ortega y Gasset. You cannot call him a great thinker, but he is one of the most sensitive and mercurial minds of our time. Well, Ortega, even from this hemisphere, has been lured into the German orbit of thought. If Hitler had vanished suddenly, any “rebuilder” of Europe looking for a new start would have had to consider only the German achievements.

‘But now things have changed. There is a completely new opening for you. Did you notice what Goebbels had to admit? “We could not stop now, even if we wanted to.” Do you realize what that means? He does, fully. It’s one of the most frightening public statements ever uttered. The Germans now know that the treatment they have meted out to the Poles would be in store for them. So they have to go all out, at the risk of total destruction. They are not out any more for some definite order. They’re not aiming at establishing something that would become a basis of settlement. They must run after victory in a desperate flight forward, with all means available, tearing down even what they themselves have built up, stoking into the furnace all they have — men, structures, values, allies, potential friends, chances, ideas. No choice. It is not in their power to weigh, to apportion, to establish an understanding with the conquered peoples. New Orders will follow each other into the hopper until the words lose their last shred of meaning. Everything has to go. In the end, there will be nothing left.’

‘That’s only a way of speaking. There will be four hundred millions of men, women, and children who manage to get along somehow. They will start rebuilding.’

‘True,’ I replied. ‘But also one of those dangerous half-truths on which the mind is apt to rest. Incredibly little is said about people when you say that they are just people. Mankind, in the old word of Humboldt, is “a variety of situations.” Each individual lives really outside himself, in his roots, in his connections, in his landscape, in his dreams, in the way he figures out his own life and the world around him. No one is a substantive and independent unit, as the liberal mind unwittingly assumes. I know it is very difficult for an American to imagine the kind of nothingness that I see coming. Even Machiavelli shrank from it: “A man should choose rather to live as a private citizen than to be a ruler through such ruin of populations.” Men emptied of their own history, with no inward past, no hope, no bearings, no foundations. . . . And it is already virtually achieved. Men still live on what is left, morally and physically, but there will be nothing left. This war is grinding the face of Europe, and it is impossible for man to live without a face.

‘Of course, as you say, there will be “something.” But what? Chaos. A desperate yearning for order, and at the same time an unbridled reliance on brutal self-justice. A passive submission, and screaming, hysterical touchiness. A need for forgetting, and the emergence of a soured national arrogance. Great new ideas on organization, and implacable local hatreds. You will be dealing with Frenchmen suspicious of executive power, of big rackets, of anything. With Spaniards, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, thinking of nothing but revenge. You will be facing Germans coming back from Russia more like wild beasts than men, after years of brutality, emptied of their frenzy, finding children they hardly know and women mated under Gestapo supervision. Just the right situation for telling them, “Now don’t do it again; go get yourselves a nice democracy.’”

‘A hell of a situation.’

‘Yes, but also an immense possibility. That is where your sense of an indeterminate future might come in. Of course victorious powers have crushing momentum; they cannot concern themselves with individual situations. What great powers can do is to ensure order and living conditions over great areas, in overall arrangements. But they will have to set up authorities for that end. What comes with it, also unavoidably, is a kind of WPA attitude, a tendency to bank on some expedient ideology that will support the framework. Collectivist, managerial, liberal — the words don’t mean much anyway. But the work must go on. Inside that emergency framework, then, the protectors will expect a democracy to come up.’

‘Suppose it doesn’t?’ And by now my student was in earnest.

‘But it will. We must believe that the forms of democracy are the only ones that present a show of legitimacy. All forces and denominations will be struggling for that magic term — if only to resolve the general panic. What I suggest is that right there is the danger point. There is no clear idea in the process, and you cannot give it. Europe has been ground down and pushed around into mass situations. Any kind of normalcy restored from above will be on a new mass basis. Problems involving huge numbers have to be solved, and the statesman is in the position of the physicist dealing with the molecular theory of gases: only statistical averages come under consideration. But, since men are not molecules, what is bound to happen is that the individual will become illegible, even to himself; he will recede into obscurity. You will have the pretense of a democracy in a basically anarchic reality. And meanwhile you will feel that you are dealing with something you know less and less, vast, dark, and threatening, like the ocean at night.’

He looked at me with a strained and puzzled expression.

‘Then you say we are right in not wanting to run the world. I’ve always felt that the most we could do was to supply a minimum of overhead organization and let nations choose for themselves. This time, though, we’d insist on certain guarantees.’

‘You are talking like the wise and prudent,’ I said. ‘And guarantees would be all right. Not many would mind that. But you see how you’re already laying down a Diktat, all unawares. If you say nations, it’ll have to be nations. What the Big Man says goes, at least for a time. And they will all be clinging to your coattails. And there are so many people over there who simply pray that the magic wand will bring back things just as they were before the nightmare. Which means before Munich.’

‘Before Vienna, you mean.’

‘Oh, really it would have to be before Manchukuo. And of course before Versailles. Which means before 1914. It went like a run in a stocking. If ever anything evinced and proved conclusively a disinclination to subsist, it is the entities that you mean by nations. Germany solved that problem for you. There is no more going back. That’s the end to that story. Even the United States of Europe, under your direct control, would be a step forward from there.’

‘But, if not nations, then for heaven’s sake what? ‘

‘It is not the word “nation” that I object to. But the way you use that word suggests only one meaning to my mind: “Why don’t you go back to what you used to be and leave us in peace?” Which is a truly liberal attitude. People over there won’t be slow in getting that meaning. It only shows up your inner contradiction: you feel that your faith is crying out for some real federative structure, but you refuse to envisage its consequences. You will neither put up nor shut up. In the end you will be indistinguishable from the average interventionist, who thinks of the good old League of Nations with teeth in it.’

‘I guess you’re right. But if the average interventionist is apt to make a mess of things, how do you think the average doubter has a chance?’

‘I simply mean that the American without preconceived ideas might contribute a certain element of understanding and restraint that is very necessary. It’s going to be a difficult job anyway. The “Britannistic” idea of civilization is universal enough for us all. But it implies a definite concept of society; and on that you’re by way of feeling pretty insecure yourselves. Which at least is better than the British leftwingers who think they know. But when it comes to facing actual responsibilities, you’ll feel exasperated because you’re trying to press home you don’t know exactly what, and the other people will find you crude, and you’ll get mad at their criticism — with quite good reason, too, because you have a right to feel that your kind of society is a working concern. Over here. That is because you have more political maturity than almost any other nation. But political maturity happens to be one thing you cannot transmit, and so I predict mutual grievances and great miscomprehension.’

‘That’s what worries me. We’d have to show them that we respect them, first of all.’

‘Now that’s just it. Respect is a great thing, but it’s apt to pall at times. Things have got more serious than that. Europeans would find it easier to understand the Churchill pride —’

‘You mean that you’d rather have us imperialists?’

‘No. You don’t want to go after customers with dive bombers. I am simply suggesting that such a frigid liberal correctness may be humane, but it isn’t quite human. Now get this straight. I think I understand the historical roots of your attitude. America is the place of men who turned their backs on the Old World and its ways; it has a national recoil complex. This complex finds expression in a certain shrinking from what the ancients would have called the forms of magnanimity. It’s a recent development, I should say; for in Franklin’s and Jefferson’s style those forms still ring powerfully. Now the Western World is one great family: it would grant you certain trappings of empire, if only you would come back, speak as man to man and not as one hemisphere to another.

‘Having renounced such a form as would give you a full-bodied reality in the eyes of the world, your personage splits into confusing aspects. At one time you’ll appear as the starry-eyed crusader, at another as the policeman with the big stick. You will feed the babies and cram them with vitamins until they come out at their ears, and you will wash and scrub everyone around to an intolerable state of discomfort, and then you will see to it that nations get democracies and ask for loans and raise their standards of living. The masses will stare at you in cross-eyed puzzlement; in the end they will shrug their shoulders and decide that this is one more big racket.’

‘But what can we do, if we are insecure and if we do think of the good life in terms of raw materials and the gold exchange standard? There you are.’

‘That’s a strange idea of your national character. If you are insecure it’s largely because you try to think like that. And it makes you afraid both of losing your democracy at home and of having revolution in Europe. You believe yourselves caught between the devil and the deep sea, and so you retire into diplomacy — which is, as the wise man said, the lowest form of politeness, because it misquotes the greatest number of people. And so you resort to power policy and premeditation, to stuffy doctrines and government professors. You come forward with Victorian ideas for society and Edwardian ideas for economy. So you’ll be looking desperately for the solid middle class that forms a nation as you mean it, and despair at finding only its shadow. And you’ll raise and enthrone again the ghost of Parliaments, of social democracy, of trade-unions and manufacturers’ associations. For so long as it lasts. Then it will all explode in your face.

‘I wish you would realize that the revolution you dread has already taken place. It began with the invention of the steam engine and it never stopped. And now it is Hitler who is the revolution; he is pushing it down to its ultimate consequences — to total annihilation. He is the triumph and conclusion of all the theories of action that were developed in Europe. He is activism itself. After him there will be no idea left that can be used up for action. There will be nothing left to revolutionize. Only panic and anarchy.

‘Well, now, there is your chance. You come in when everything is lost. You can restore innocence to action, and rightness to repose. You have it in you; it is a kind of elemental brotherhood, simple but very secure. You contribute that to each other without noticing it. Why don’t you do it to others? The Quakers can do it, but what they mean is not enough. Social service does something, but it is by far not enough.’

‘Then what?’

‘Just the direct approach. There’s only one man I know who has stated what Europe needs, and that man is an American. Do you remember E. B. White’s ideas about intervention? “The technic of military science will be to meddle with other people’s affairs frequently, gallantly, and without warning — but with no ulterior motive. All branches of the service will be shifty, unpredictable, and arbitrary. Equipment will be the most modern and fierce obtainable. The army will be as reckless as a suicide squad, as shifty as an American backfield, as merciful as the Red Cross, as relentless as the Northwest Mounted Police, as swift and terrible as a tank division, as merciful and tender as Tarzan, as chivalrous as a knight.”

‘You think it funny? Instead of putting your hope in the Weygands and Francos, suppose you had taken the situation in your own hands. Imagine the American battle fleet (nothing less, of course) appearing suddenly before Cadiz or Algiers — or even Palermo — with aircraft carriers, tanks, invasion barges. Imagine landing parties, under cover of the guns, holding up the garrison, bringing in provisions, raiding concentration camps, raining big cheeses over the countryside from hedge-hopping planes — do you think it would still be the Axis that called the tune down there?

‘Do you see what I mean now in the case of a victory? The same combination of qualities. It is not a matter of official promises that nobody believes, but of individual initiative. It’s not a matter of discussing how we’ll kick the Germans when they are down, but of giving normative value to certain normal things. It is not a matter of plans and programs, but of seeing what people can really accept, what groups and communal structures have already formed, what good minds have found out under the experience of great suffering. People by now have the need of something so miraculous that practical reason and worldly wisdom would vanish on it like a drop of water on red-hot iron. Only friendship and simplicity can be as miraculous as that. Of course not the Rotarian variety. It would involve understanding, and ruthless candor, and a religious way of life.

‘Suppose individual people start looking for what they can do. Suppose you start working out in individual discussions, over there, what were the essential falsities that were spread around, what are the simple truths that were not really forgotten, as many say, but counterfeited and exploited. What is not remembered in all the planning, I should rather say, is that justice and truth can be fruitful only as free elements.’

‘Wait,’ he said, with sudden concern. ‘Haven’t we sort of forgotten the Communists?’

‘I was thinking of your victory, you know. If it’s really yours, it can’t be theirs. If you let it slip, it’s anybody’s, in this mad world of ours.—Well, here’s where I get off. Good night.’