Frontpage Interview’s guest today is David Solway, the award-winning author of over twenty-five books of poetry, criticism, educational theory, and travel. He is a contributor to magazines as varied as the Sewanee Review, Books in Canada, and the Partisan Review. He is the author of the new book, The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity.
FP: David Solway, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Solway: Both a pleasure and an honor.
FP: Can you give us a background in regards to your political odyssey as a member of the Political Faith up until 9/11?
Solway: As I write in the preface to The Big Lie, I was a product of the utopian 60s with its belief that all our problems could be solved by the exercise of tolerance, sympathy, openness to other's views and the practice of what I might call an oceanic love for Mother Earth and all her suffering children. Inevitably, such vast, undifferentiated sentiments led to their opposites -- narcissism, an unwavering belief in our own undoubted rectitude, political dogmatism and a lack of tolerance for all those who did not endorse our views. This is not to say that many good things did not happen, the Civil Rights movement and the anti-Vietnam protests in particular, but in the long run we became a cohort of self-righteous prigs--rampant sex not withstanding--convinced that we could change the world with our music, our slogans, our reversion to the "natural" symbolized by the long hair we grew pro forma (I had a friend who would spend hours every day sitting on the floor and willing his hair to grow), the use of herbal stimulants to help us break the mental shackles our society had imposed upon us, the flouting of normative dress codes, and our love affair with the oppressed of the world.
I was very much a part of this Arcadian Jacuzzi, a member of the approved Left, anti-American, anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian, anti-colonialist, anti-corporatist, embracing all the multicultural pieties of the times. When I was a student at Berkeley Telegraph Avenue
But none of us were much given to self-interrogation. We felt like the Fifth Monarchy men of the modern age, a new Model Army of youthful saints marching toward the dawning millennium, cherishing our quixotic dream that war, hatred and inequality could be abolished once and for all, that human being were essentially good, and that all distinctions between people could be healed and transcended. Make love, not war.
So we made love while wars proliferated across the planet. By the way, it's not all that different today, only instead of making love, we make speeches. Those on the political Left today are the heirs of the visionary 1960s, smoking a different kind of Maryjane, popping another sort of LSD, toking up on the rhetoric of climate change, of poor abused terrorists deprived of their legal rights, on the sanctity of different cultures despite their violation of human rights and the infliction of cruelty, on the need to expiate the sins of our ancestors, and so on. So instead of Mario Savio and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, we have Al Gore, Michael Moore, Jack Layton and Elizabeth
FP: The leftist who converts and leaves the Political Faith usually had a trait somewhere within him that created the fertile ground for ultimately abandoning the Party Line. What do you think was inside you that spawned the possibility for breaking with the faith?
Solway: In terms of what you might call my ideological or political conversion, there is a larger explanatory context at work here, which I don't touch upon in The Big Lie since it would have been inappropriate there. And that is the fact that in my aesthetic and poetic life, I was always a conservative, which explains why I was so unpopular for so many years among my literary peers.
One of my poetic antagonists once wrote that I was so far behind everybody else on the course that I was actually way ahead. I had strenuously insisted, in my work as a poet, my reviews, my lectures and readings, that unless one was a one-off genius like Shakespeare or Walt Whitman, one should not attempt free verse unless one had internalized all the standard poetic forms vetted by the centuries--sonnets, villanelles, rhyming couplets, blank verse, everything. For this I was practically laughed out of court and indeed, languished in the wilderness for 20 years or more. But I stuck to my guns and don't regret it for a moment for I think I have been proven right and even partially rehabilitated.
I write a lot of free verse now but only because I feel competent and able to do so without deluding myself that everything one puts down on the page is poetry by virtue of the presumably plenary fact that one is a "poet," stamped at birth with that divine entelechy. So my point is this: aesthetically, I was already an unabashed conservative; politically, what happened to me after 9/11 was not so much a conversion as a transposition, a chromatic alteration, a moving into a different key signature but retaining the original melodic line. If you read my litcrit book Director's Cut, you'll find the same passion crackling through my pages as in The Big Lie, but in the former case there was no conversion experience whatsoever. From this perspective, the latter book could be described as the playing or rewriting of a composition in a key different from the original--but in the larger sense, it's the same overarching music.
FP: So let’s talk about 9/11, which, as you mention, was the main development which triggered your conversion. How and why did 9/11 make you have second thoughts about your world outlook?
Solway: I was vacationing on a small Greek island when the unthinkable happened. Watching the images flickering on the TV in the portside cafe where I was breakfasting, I thought this was nothing more than a re-run of a Grade B Hollywood war move or CIA thriller--until a newscaster appeared on the screen and announced what had occurred in New York City
At first, like everybody else, I was completely stunned. And then, unaccountably, an involuntary question formed itself in my mind: Am I responsible? It was as if I had been jolted awake from a long, Rip Van Winkle-like, political slumber. Just as, within moments, the movie on the screen had been transmuted into reality on the ground, so in the same way I felt as if I had been suddenly lifted out of the ideological movie in which I had been living all my adult life into the real world of violence, terror and the "clash of civilizations" which I had so studiously avoided up until then. That was the moment I left the 1960s. I suddenly recalled that resonant phrase from John Donne's 17th Devotion, "No man is an island entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." The small island I was sojourning on was a part of the great city where people were dying, and the person I had been, content for so long to remain in a state of denial, was a part of the world where atrocities are committed without let or hindrance and the pieties of sweet mutuality were little more than a snare and a delusion. And since I was now marooned on the island, all air and sea traffic having been suspended, I decided this was the time, the interregnum, in which to submit myself to a stringent and unsentimental Cartesian-like self-interrogation.
What had gone wrong with my world-view? Why did the world not behave as my congenial assumptions and political convictions dictated that it should? Why did I consistently vote Left as if by instinct? Why was I anti-American and pro-Palestinian? Why did I believe that an enemy was just a friend we had not done enough for? What did I know? The result of this painful self-inquisition was the determination to re-educate myself, to examine my principles and premises, to ground them in impartial knowledge, which led to a five-year study program and ultimately to the book I wrote. And I must say, it was written against the grain, for the conclusions I was coming to violated everything I had held sacred. But if I was not to go on deceiving myself and living happily in a lie, in a state of comfortable self-delusion, I would have no choice but to abide by my findings. My hair was not as long as it was in the 60s, but it was still long enough to clutch and drag myself out of the utopian pacifist fantasy in which I had malingered.
FP: When a member of the Political Faith leaves the ranks, he always loses many, if not all, of his “friends.” In my own life experience of being surrounded by leftists, I have observed that their friendships are not really based on what they actually like about each other, but are simply based on how much their views on the world conform to one another’s. The moment you abandon the main ingredients of the faith, you become a non-person. Can you share a little bit about your own experience with your second thoughts and how they affected your membership in your “community”? Did many/some of your leftist friends abandon you? Was this development a susprise to you? Hurtful to you?
Also, have you made any inroads in leftist ranks? Are any segments of the Left receptive to your message?
Solway: To begin with, it’s important to point out that I was never what you might call a hard-core true-believer absolutely committed Leftist. I was certainly never a Marxist. It’s a question of degree. I could be described, rather, as having been generally sympathetic to the precepts and ideals of the Left. I voted with the socialists, I marched in lockstep with Peace Now, I expressed the proper opinions at parties and gatherings, I accepted the roster of convenient “bad guys” who were all on the political Right.
But unlike, say, David Horowitz, Nick Cohen or Christopher Hitchens, I didn’t spend all that much time thinking or writing about political issues. I regarded myself as a poet of the lyrical persuasion and therefore devoted most of my time to writing and reading poetry—later I got into education theory and produced several books on the subject as a way of amortizing the years I suspected I had wasted as a teacher, and then into literary criticism since I felt poets were obliged to make themselves intelligible.
Politics, for me, consisted of a series of appropriate gestures and unexceptionable utterances, of a more or less demonstrable left-of-center tropism, and of course I read all the intellectually-certified gurus, Chomsky and Said in particular, with some enthusiasm. This was par for the course. You might say I belonged to what Milosz called the ketman society—he defined ketman as the false stance adopted by a person “in order to find himself at one with others, in order not to be alone.” Which is another way of saying that, although I was not a card-carrying member of the sinister cadre, I adhered to a pervasive culture of Leftist thinking predicated on the evasion of unpalatable truths. Let’s say I was a member of the soft Left who was not particularly interested in examining his political reflexes but could be counted on at election time. I was not an epicurean dabbler but neither was I a zealot.
FP: Ok, so expand a bit on your journey post-9/11 in this context.
Solway: After 9/11, I recognized that the day had come to repudiate the frivolity of my soi-disant civics, such as they were. I had to get serious. I realized that one could not honorably continue to contemplate aesthetic issues, write poetry, do literary criticism in a political vacuum. I understood, however belatedly, that I was implicated in history, that the act of writing poetry did not occur in some timeless dimension occupied by seraphs and the spirits of the unborn but was enabled by the very political and historical world to which I responded as if by rote.
This did not mean that I would have to start theorizing in my poetry about specifically social or political themes. Indeed, when poets undertake to do so, they tend to produce what I’ve dubbed the “higher drivel”—even Seamus Heaney is no exception here—or generally make a hash of it—look at Yeats, Eliot or Pound, who all ended up flirting with fascism. (In Pound’s case, he married it.) But it did mean that I would have to learn about time rather than eternity, that poetry and literature did not exhaust the whole of life, that one was immersed in the world of practical affairs regardless of how one affected to scant or diminish it, in short, that one had a responsibility to one’s society, to one’s culture and civilization, that demanded a certain lucidity and a commitment to acting decisively and courageously in the very maelstrom of historical events. And it meant that when I turned to prose, I would have to be exceedingly careful not to succumb to the demagogic impulse that seems native to the writing of poetry—a good poem is like a society of words that needs to be controlled from above and pitilessly, even despotically, whipped into shape. The world of human relations is a different thing entirely.
FP: So when you took these new steps, what happened to your place in your community?
Solway: As I pursued my “course of study” and began writing The Big Lie, I came to see that I was increasingly at odds with the majority of my peers and colleagues, my fellow teachers and poets, and even with many of my friends. They seemed to me like highly intelligent people who, resembling Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay, could not think past Q. Not all, of course, but way too many.
During the last American election, one of my good friends began calling me “Bushy,” as if that epithet settled my apostasy. Very few could believe that in the last two Canadian elections, I actually had the temerity to vote for Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party. Such, presumably, was an infallible sign of either betrayal or dementia. Another colleague, with whom I had collaborated on a prolonged literary venture, took issue with the pro-Israeli position I was developing as I read into the authentic history of the
At the same time, I must say that I had by now grown precision callouses. The fury with which the Canadian literary community greeted Director’s Cut inured me to the ad hominem censure I was getting. And as a poet I had always gone my own way, bucking the trends, left out of the major anthologies, denounced in review after review. I had already been baptized in the fires of indifference or contempt, so when it came to charting a political path that eventuated in my being considered as a cultural picaroon or some sort of loony renegade, I didn’t much care. I could not assume that I had acquired that mysterious property called “truth” but I felt that I was close to something like credible verisimilitude. This gave me the strength to blaze my own trail and to articulate my point of view despite the hostility or misprision I had to deal with now. And besides, I still had several close friends who had come round to my way of thinking or who were already there, and every now and then a new recruit joins our contingent of subversives.
FP: So what do you think explains the Left’s overall position in this War on Terror? The Left has always postured as this great defender of gay rights, women’s rights, minority rights and of human rights in general. Yet now it sides with -- and even cheers for -- an ugly and pernicious ideology that is the most gay-hating, women-hating and minority-hating force on the face of the earth. For instance, you don’t know how many leftist feminists I have spoken with in the last few years and have, for hours, listened to their diatribes on women’s rights, but the moment I begin to express the pain in my heart for the victims of Islamic gender apartheid, the suffering of the victims of honor killings, female genital mutilation, forced marriages, forced segregation and veiling etc., these feminists’ eyes glaze over and their silence is deafening. If anything, they begin to indignantly defend the systems that perpetrate these barbarities against women. What gives? What is the psychology here in your opinion?
Solway: Let me start by trying to establish a general framework in which to park my reply to your question. The threat environment in which we are now living is double-edged for we are not only under attack from without but sabotaged from within by a media-and-intellectual fifth column with an animus against its own culture, and by a huge “peace constituency” that struts in tandem with it, chanting with Tennyson’s moribund Lotos-eaters “What pleasure can we have/To war with evil?”
The issue has everything to do with the advancement of Islam on the world stage today, which is nothing less than a godsend to a febrile Western intellectual constituency consumed by guilt for its own colonial past, suspicious of its own cultural patrimony, wedded to the notion, as Eric Voegelin says, of a “mysterious evolution of mankind toward peace and world order without relation to the structure of the field of existential forces,” hungering to embrace a new theology in which the complexities of life and the turbulence of history have been simplified by dogmatic fiat. It is almost as if we have grown tired of struggling, of thinking, of accepting the necessity of sacrifice, of making the hard choices on which the survival of a civilization depends, and are now—in Spengler’s words—wishing ourselves “back into the dark.” We have, I fear, entered into a condition of mass delirium, the latest instalment of “the pursuit of the millennium.”
The gross capitulation of our intellectual and political classes to the forces of unreason abroad in the world is probably most evident in Europe . It appears that Nietzsche’s “good Europeans,” who were supposed to escape their national identities and foster a higher mode of inclusiveness, are on the road to imminent extinction. Some have now become good Muslims; many others will find themselves in the course of time as nominal Muslims under an alien hegemony. The process is in full swing.
How else explain the fact that a survey conducted by the U.K. France Spain Great Britain Somalia Ethiopia Somalia Europe clearly sided with the Jihadist enemy, as it has consistently in the Middle East as well. “This is the way the world ends,” wrote T.S. Eliot, “not with a bang but a whimper.” It is hard to escape the conviction that Europe ’s whimpering destiny is both inexorable and merited.
FP: So where does your own country, Canada
Solway: Canada
Although the 1988 Canadian Immigration Act made Canada the first country in the world to officially recognize cultural diversity, it is, and has been for some time now, merely a distant province of the New Europe, its foreign policy of the last years tied to that of France and Germany (and the United Nations) and its internal policy in matters of immigration looking to the Dutch model, which gives every sign of having run its course.
Ignoring the supple manoeuvring of the enemy within and the gathering storm of the enemy without, we concentrate instead on tiny tempests in the nanny-state teapot, cozily swaddled within the cocoon of our facile self-preoccupations. The majority of those who constitute our political elite would steer the country toward a flaccid accommodation with a grimly Hobbesian world, seconded by our dial-a-cause literary organizations with no grip on the way things are. A new government may, hopefully, alter this trend, but the malaise is deep-seated. A telling illustration of this penchant for denial, this flight from reality, was the repealing of anti-terror legislation in the recent parliament at the hands of the pacifist opposition parties, an act for which we are likely to pay a heavy price in the future.
Canada is not only an incoherent country but a country gone soft, more than half its citizenry believing that world peace is achievable through parliamentary posturing, expressions of highfalutin sentiment, unquestioning support for the corrupt and ineffectual U.N., the admission in principle of the equality of all cultural perspectives (with two exceptions: our own and Judaism’s), the enunciation of good intentions and impetuous calls for immediate ceasefire. It is a country that has enfeebled its military to the point at which, as historian Jack Granatstein has pointed out in Whose War Is It?, it would be unable to respond effectively to a national catastrophe. It is a country which believes that soldiers are meant to keep the peace even if there is no peace to keep, but that they are certainly not meant to risk their lives on the battlefield. The job of the army is to build schools, hospitals and bridges, but not to prevent the enemy from blowing them up the moment they are in place. Canadians tend to be deeply concerned that the terrorist detainees in Afghanistan—those who plant roadside bombs, kill wantonly, mutilate and behead—may not be receiving proper treatment from the Afghan authorities to whom they have been turned over. That these are members of the same Taliban organization which sheltered al-Qaeda and enthusiastically endorsed and abetted its project to murder and maim as many innocent civilians as possible, including those who piously wish to defend the terrorists’ rights and wellbeing, seems of little or no importance.
The Canadian mood or outlook, however, is only a specification of a much larger affliction. Perhaps the depletion of the “First World” gene pool after the two world wars, remarked on by many writers and historians, explains to some extent the growing Western spectacle of frugal intelligence evinced by both the general populace and its consular echelon of mainly leftist intellectuals puffing their junk ideology—the “cognitive degeneration” and “intellectual dry rot” that Conor Cruise O’Brien has chillingly diagnosed in On The Eve Of The Millennium.
As Mark Steyn argued in America Alone, the United States Syria
Former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, co-author of the Baker-Hamilton report from the Iraq Study Group which recommends nothing less than appeasement of the enemy, is a partner in the law firm defending Saudi Arabia
For a brief time, the American President seemed one of the few Western political leaders aware of the enormous issues at stake. Perhaps he will re-awaken before it is too late. He may surprise us yet with an act of courage and political realism of which most European and many American statesmen and legislators are deplorably incapable. Then again, he may not. In any case, for the moment the American political elite may not be in great shape, but compared to its subfusc European counterparts it glimmers in the night. This, I admit, is not saying very much, but in a bad situation, the sitting American President, for all his evident shortcomings and planning deficiencies, is the best we’ve got.
But I’m afraid that hope is in short supply. Contemporary intellectuals seem no less retarded than their precursors, taking their cue from the ineffable Bertrand Russell who in a 1937 speech declared that “Britain
We are equally busy surrendering the cognitive palladium on which the safety of the city depends, prostrating ourselves in servile propitiation before an enemy who schemes our destruction. A recent article in Books in Canada, where I am an associate editor, shows just how omnipresent and unthinking such an attitude has become. In a review of Elizabeth Young-Bruel’s Why Arendt Matters, Canadian writer George Featherling takes for granted the popular cliché of American turpitude, wondering what Arendt “would make of the current United States with its torture policies, secret trials, and secret prisons” and of “a world in which Russia and China would often seem to be the voices of moderation.”
This is standard fare in current intellectual discourse—the imperceptive, thoughtless, rote-inspired and thoroughly misguided parroting of received ideas, the refusal to see there is a war going on, and the coronary inclination to collapse into the arms of those who succour the enemy as the “voices of moderation.” The Russian voice of moderation, we might recall, colluded with Saddam Hussein on the future construction of an oil pipeline, builds and supplies Iran Syria Darfur genocide in order to preserve its oil contracts with the Sudanese regime, keeps North Korea
Were our obeisant intellectuals living in Russia or China and speaking then of their own countries, they would learn very quickly all about “torture policies, secret trials, and secret prisons,” not as epithets they can fling at the one nation that garrisons their right to the exercise of fanciful denunciation but as the kind of real-life experience from which they have been blessedly spared. A book just published by a retired civil servant, Robert Rapley, develops this animus even further. In Witch Hunts: From Salem to Guantanamo Bay, Rapley argues that the witch has today mutated into the terrorist, and that Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Salem
The house of Western culture is in profound disarray as nations forget or suppress their history—the tendency in Britain to drop the Crusades and the Holocaust from the highschool curriculum is only the most recent instance of this deliberate courting of amnesia—and the leftist academic elite goes so far as to rewrite or reinterpret whatever fragments of the historical record happen to remain in order to conform to an ideological agenda. Our revisionist professoriate has come to behave like Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the 1989 film Batman, trashing the Flugelheim Museum in Gotham City to the sound of raucous transistor music—Flugelheim: “home of wings,” which have been thoroughly clipped, as the emblematic avian plunges to earth; or the demon Belphegor laying waste to the Louvre in the iconic movies circulated in France. The repository of the past has been vandalized. According to the the 19th century occultist Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, Belphegor was Hell’s ambassador to France; the Joker is the plenipotentiary of the intellectual Left to 21rst century Western civilization, committed to the task of erasing or retranscribing memory. The joke is on all of us.
What seems to have happened is this. Islam is on the rise and we, or far too many of us, now find ourselves envying a culture which, in its family and tribal life, enjoys the benefits of asabiyah (Arabic: group feeling) and the communal solidarity that we have forfeited to the hedonistic and centrifugal effects of modernity. Despite the internecine violence between doctrinal camps in the Muslim world, the interior dynamic at the level of the social group is one of homogeneity and consensus identity. We, however, live in an ideological world that has traced a single line of development from Leninism to Feminism, turning the personal relations in which actual life is experienced into soulless and formulaic abstractions, whether on the ideological battlefield, in social legislation, in the cultural mosh pit or in the iridescent bubble of the university seminar.
That a sense of deep insecurity should become the paramount emotional factor in our lives is in no way remarkable. For this reason, we prize the enemy for possessing what we ourselves are missing. His surplus of energy, conviction and asabiyah may replenish us by osmosis. In this regard there is little difference between common folk and the “thinking classes,” although the latter carry the white flag aloft, articulating an abject surrender as a triumph of the mind. It is no accident that New York Times journalist Andrea Elliott won a Pulitzer Prize for a three-part story, entitled “An Imam in America,” extolling Sheik Reda Shata and his Islamic Society of Bay Ridge mosque without mentioning the anti-Jewish ravings spewing from its pulpit over the years, the incitement that led to the killing of Jewish teenager Ari Halberstam, or the fact that Shata memorialized Palestinian suicide bomber Reem al-Reyashi and praised Hamas in one of his sermons, referring to its “martyred” leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as a “lion of Palestine.”
It is tempting to speculate that the Muslim congregant, the eloquent Imam, the jihadist, even the Palestinian gunman are only the latest incarnation of the anthropolgical romance with the “pure primitive” who redeems us from our own evolved complexities and etiolated belief-systems. The new aborigine, as the contemporary embodiment of the Noble Savage invented by European exploration, thus acts as the counterfoil to our own repressed and guilt-ridden civilization. The enemy who commands our sympathies becomes the heroicizing projection of our own bad conscience. Because he possesses what we lack and desire, we are willing to live in a state of contradiction and hasten to pardon his atrocities. Thus feminists will wink at the monstrous usage of infibrilation.
Advocates of human rights will by their silence endorse honour killings and repressive theocratic legislation. Journalists will massage the news to the advantage of an avowed antagonist. Intellectuals will justify the carnage that is visited upon us as legitimate retribution for our manifold sins. The enemy has become our redeemer as we have become his accomplice. We forgive his violence—indeed, we covet it—since it fills the void of our own epicene weakness, supplying that which we condemn in ourselves and yet secretly wish we had the virility to glorify and enact. This is perhaps why the terrorists, the fanatics, and the autocratic ethos of Islam are admired by so many Western liberals. They are Viagra for the impotent.
FP: So are you still a man of the Left? Or are you a conservative/neo-Conservative? Would you like to be welcomed by Conservatives into their “camp”? Or do you remain also quite anti-Conservative? Are you perhaps, simply, an ex-leftist who doesn’t really fall under any labels? In other words: what do you consider yourself to be on the political spectrum (if you consider that there is a spectrum)?
Solway: I don’t define myself in terms of political chirality—Left or Right. I use terms such as “Left” and “Right,” or “Liberal” and “Conservative,” as a form of shorthand, since we must communicate with one another more or less efficiently and not like Swift’s projectors in the Academy of Lagado
So if after study and thought I find that Alan Dershowitz is better informed and more trustworthy than Jimmy Carter, that Joan Peters is a far better scholar than Noam Chomsky and that the latter is a monumental charlatan, that the tested John McCain has more to recommend him than the callow Barack Obama, that Pierre Trudeau and Paul Martin were unmitigated disasters, that Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party are more astute and conscientious than Stéphane Dion and the Liberal Party, that Robert Fisk and Tony Judt are partisan simplifiers and that Alain Finkielkraut and Shmuel Trigano have a far more capable and comprehensive grasp of historical complexity, and so on, I have no alternative but to state my position unequivocally.
According to a recent poll, 67% of Canadians believe that our presence in Afghanistan
FP: Looking back at the Cold War now, do you think you may have been mistaken regarding some of your views of America’s and the West’s confrontation with Soviet/communist totalitarianism?
Solway: At first blush, this may appear paradoxical. Although I might have been plausibly described as a “man of the Left,” I could only look with bewilderment at my bright university friends who believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat, who droned on endlessly about Hegel’s Aufhebung and pored over maps of The Phenomenology of Mind, who nodded sagely when discussing the Dialectic, and who were convinced that the nakedly totalitarian regimes in Russia and China represented the emancipatory future of the human race.
Don’t ask me why or how, but I saw through all this nonsense from the start. Indeed, I abhored that species of ideological plastination that would preserve such collectivist aberrations intact. The totalitarian option left me cold and I knew as if instinctively that a command economy, a top-down state apparatus and a managerial hierarchy scaffolded by an elaborate police network was infinitely worse than the laissez-faire society to whose underclass my own life had been initially consigned. The fact that I grew up poor did not lead to resentment, only to anxiety. Sure, I was anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-corporatist, sabbatarian and the rest of it, but I was not a “revolutionary,” a “worker” for the people, a “spokeman” for the inarticulate masses.
I accepted the principles of social equality and the redistribution of wealth and held for many years to a naïve view of human perfectibility, but I never joined the Orthodox Church of the sanctimonious and the obsessed. Riding the great egalitarian train to the liberated future, I was content to remain in the caboose. I had no interest in the Black Panther movement when I was at Berkeley, preferring to participate in hijinks like throwing Chancellor Clark Kerr out of Sproul Hall. The Little Red Book bored me to tears. The God that Failed came as no revelation to me. When I read it as a young student, I could only blink and ask “what else is new?” I could never figure out how Jean-Paul Sartre could have been such an unreconstructed idiot.
So I was never a Bolshi. My “socialism” went back to the Book of Amos in the Hebrew scripture, where the Lord promised to “smite the winter house with the summer house” so that “the houses of ivory shall perish, and the great houses shall have an end,” which seemed a noble and high-minded program we could leave to Divine dispensation. This spared me the distraction of having to do something on my own tab, except talk, X the ballot and occasionally march. And, of course, feel good about myself. In effect, my “socialism” consisted mainly of sentiments that expressed themselves in voting patterns, of a vague belief in the tenets of the welfare state and the rosy denouement of the peace narrative, and of an unreflected alliance with those of my intellectual cohort who slagged America, vilified Israel, vacationed in Cuba, and canonized Franz Fanon, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. And yet, for me, these names and faces were not so much luminaries in the firmament as icons stencilled on t-shirts. My proclivities may have been leftward, but I thoroughly enjoyed Woody Allen’s Bananas. But the point is, when it came to Stalin and Mao, I was not deceived. The horrors they unleashed and the spectacle of degradation exhibited by those who genuflected before them were too obvious not to notice.
FP: Do you still believe in socialism/the utopian dream or any aspects of it? Or do you recognize/perceive that the totalitarianism and terror of the Marxist experiment in its earthly incarnation is rooted in the idea itself?
Solway: The road to Heaven-on-earth passes through Hell and never re-emerges. This is the great lesson of the 20th century. All Utopian thought is deeply flawed, rooted in the Arcadian prepossession of the Western imagination, always sailing to Cythera and breaking up on the shoals. But the issue is even larger than this. The human mind is shadowed by mortality and wishes only to escape its condition, sometimes through the medium of love, sometimes through the promise of faith, most often through one or another form of forgetfulness—drugs, entertainment, even war. We kill because we have to die.
As for the Utopian passion, it is only a reflection of this need for pyschic manumission. And, plainly, all such efforts are ultimately bound to fail. We cannot transcend our inherent debilities. Cruelty, fear, loneliness, aggression, envy, the temptations of authority are mitochondrial givens. For the fact is that whatever “human nature” may be, it cannot be radically transformed, only to some extent modified. Politically speaking, barring the introduction of a new molecule into the gene plasm, we will have to make do with humility, a sense of limitation and a healthy dose of self-distrust. This does not mean that we cannot take sides—indeed, we must if we are to defend our nation, community, family or, for that matter, our very integrity—but we should always be ready to reconsider and adapt when new circumstances announce themselves or new information comes to light.
Devotion to a cause does not preclude the retention of a certain cognitive flexibility. And in terms of social and political advocacy dedicated to improving the life of society, Karl Popper was absolutely correct when he wrote in The Open Society and Its Enemies that beneficial and enduring social change can only occur through a process of “piecemeal social engineering.” To rephrase Alexander Pope’s aphorism, we must not rush in where only angels do not fear to tread.
FP: David Solway, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview. It was an honor to speak with you and to get an insight into your fascinating and also courageous political odyssey.
Solway: Thank you, Jamie, for having given me the opportunity.
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