By Ian Jobling • 3/12/07
The last two columns on IW have criticized the Utopianism of our age. We saw in “The Realist Vision” how deeply engrained in our culture the Blank Slate/Noble Savage theory of human nature is. The next column, “The Truth about Human Nature,” revealed that this Utopian vision not only contradicted facts established by the human sciences, but also the very nature of life itself. Human beings do not come into the world as Blank Slates or Noble Savages; rather, our selfish genes have ensured that we are equipped with instincts that enable us to compete effectively in the struggle of life.
People are inclined to be indulgent with Utopian idealists. While they may be naïve, we think, at least their heart is in the right place. Even if their idealism is incompatible with human nature, how can we possibly object to their ambition of establishing a less competitive, more harmonious society? At worst, it seems, such people are harmless dreamers.
Such indulgence is misplaced, however, for Utopianism can be, and has been, profoundly destructive. Utopians’ belief in the perfectibility of human nature prevents us from recognizing our innate limitations. Moreover, the logic of Utopianism requires scapegoats. If human beings are meant to live in harmony with each other, someone must be to blame for our current unharmonious state. Utopians must therefore invent an agent of radical evil responsible for introducing unhappiness into the world and preventing us from being the Noble Savages we naturally are.
In The Dark Side of the Left, the historian Richard J. Ellis has insightfully analyzed the American Left’s need for scapegoats. Ellis examines a strain of “radical egalitarianism” in American culture stretching from the Abolitionists to modern-day feminists and environmentalists that aims to stamp out social hierarchy and self-seeking behavior. As Ellis says:
In its pure form, egalitarianism entails rejecting hierarchical authority as a violation of individual autonomy and equality, and repudiating self-seeking, competitive market relations for disregarding or degrading human fellowship and cooperation… . Radical egalitarians typically desire not only to ameliorate current wrongs but also to transform human beings as we know them… . The imagined future in which conflict has been banished and coercion eliminated rests upon the assumption of the transformation of human nature, or, at least, a recovering of humanity’s natural goodness.1
Believing in the Utopian potential of humanity, the Left must invent a principle of evil to explain why Utopia fails to be realized. Consequently, “the world becomes divided into the oppressor and the oppressed, the reactionary and the progressive, the corrupt and the pure.”2 In short, the good and the evil.
The Leftist need for a scapegoat is one of the reasons for the emergence for what I have called the “whites as cancer” myth. While this myth had been emerging throughout the 20th century, it came to its full flower in the New Left of the 1960s. The movement that motivated the pro-Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War student activism of the time, the New Left gave a radically anti-American and anti-white cast to American Leftism. At the heart of the New Left was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the groups of radical egalitarians that Ellis discusses.
For the SDS, America was the land of egoism. Tom Hayden, the guiding spirit behind the SDS, said in the group’s manifesto, the 1962 Port Huron Statement, that America was controlled by a “system with selfish production motives and elitist control, a system which is less welfare than war-based.” This selfish spirit of America was at the root of the institutions and ideologies that governed it.
Selfishness was behind the greedy and destructive nature of American capitalism. Capitalism had concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a small business elite and excluded “the mass of… the people from basic decisions affecting the nature of work, rewards, and opportunities.” As such, America was a land of “politics without publics.”
Selfishness was behind the “warfare state” as well. America was dominated by an “oligopolistic” “military-industrial complex” that pursued an imperialist foreign policy in order to further business interests. For the New Left, the claim that the Cold War was necessary for the defense of the free world was a sham. Rather, it was an excuse for the US government to hand out subsidies to “Big Industry” in the form of military construction bills and other defense appropriations.
The selfishness of American society had had a deadening effect on the emotions, desires, and tastes of Americans. The exclusion of Americans from decisions affecting public policy had inculcated apathy and cynicism. Due to automation and industry’s unresponsiveness to its employees, work had become “unfulfilling and victimizing.” Advertisements created “pseudo-needs” in consumers: “we learn to buy ‘smart’ things, regardless of their utility.” Americans had lost their sense of beauty because “aesthetic values are subordinated to exchange values, and writers swiftly learn to consider the commercial market.”
The SDS tied all of the negative effects of American egoism to whiteness. “Our America is still white,” the $Port Huron Statement$ declared ominously—in the coming years, the Left would work to change that! White Americans, said the New Left, were responsible for the poverty and illiteracy of blacks. “While hungry nonwhites [in the European colonies] around the world assume rightful dominance, the majority of Americans fight to keep integrated housing out of the suburbs.” The desire of most American whites to remain separate from non-whites was a sign of the cowardice and small-mindedness induced by capitalism.
White, like might, makes right in America today. Not knowing the “nonwhite,” however, the white knows something less than himself. Not comfortable around “different people,” he reclines in whiteness instead of preparing for diversity.
Similarly, America was holding back non-whites around the world. The “military-industrial complex” installed regimes friendly to American business and suppressed communist movements that were in the interests of the people.
It was only white America and the other imperialist powers of the West that were afflicted with such soul-destroying egoism. For the New Left, non-whites were Noble Savages whose authenticity represented an alternative to “the system.” The manifesto called nonwhites America’s “greatest nonconformists” and stated, “The counter-impulse to life and creation are superbly manifest in the revolutionary feelings of many Asian, African, and Latin American peoples.”
Ellis provides copious proof of the New Left’s absurdly romantic view of non-whites. These student activists believed that non-whites’ freedom from competitive egoism also freed them from the conflicts, repressions, and hypocrisy that scarred the West. Hayden wrote elsewhere, for example, that Southern blacks were capable of an authentic “humanism” that was “immune to the ravages of a competitive society.” The hallmarks of this non-competitive society were an “honesty” and “insight” that those whose minds had been formed by mainstream, white America’s “framework of lies” could not achieve. Rural blacks were, according to another New Left writer, “simple people living lives of relative inner peace, love, honor, courage, and humor.” The authenticity of blacks made them the natural moral leaders of America. According to activist Casey Hayden, Tom’s wife:
[Blacks] were first in our value system. They were first because they were redeemed already, purified by their suffering, and they could therefore take the lead in the redemption of us all.
The authenticity of blacks was rooted in their closeness to nature. Writing of blacks in the rural South, another activist wrote they “maintained a closeness with the earth [and] a closeness with each other” that was absent from the majority American culture.3
The New Left portrayed the North Vietnamese in the same way. Former SDS president Todd Gitlin says in his history of the period that the Vietnamese seemed to his set “a species apart, a virtual new breed of human, not only representative of the will of their populations … but a model for the world’s revolutionary future: even our own.”4 For Tom Hayden, the Vietnamese were “the most extraordinary people now living in the world, setting a new standard of morality and sacrifice for the whole world.” The Vietnamese were “whole” human beings, rather than “split” like commercialized Westerners. Their “human socialism,” said Hayden, “was evident in unembarrassed hand clasps among men; the poetry and song at the center of man-woman relationships; the freedom to weep which we observed in everyone from guerillas to generals, from peasants to factory workers.”5 New Leftists found it easy to sweep aside the North Vietnamese history of mass murder and prison camps in their eagerness to believe in Utopia.
It was this atmosphere that made possible the statement by Susan Sontag, herself a New Left intellectual, with which this site began. Here is the complete quote:
The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself6.
Such unbalanced pronouncements are the inevitable consequence of the Utopian’s need for a scapegoat.
The naivete of 1960s Leftism is commonly recognized today. Certainly, neither the North Vietnamese, nor American blacks turned out to be Noble Savages—far from it! However, the spirit of the New Left lives on in the “whites as cancer” myth. A Realist Vision that recognizes egoism as intrinsic to humanity is the cure for the crude good vs. evil worldview of the Left. Certainly, whites are not plaster saints: we have pursued our interests in the past, just as every other race has. However, a fair analysis shows we have also pursued our interests more humanely and more productively than other races, and that is why we deserve to be recognized as the race of compassion and accomplishment.