Resisting Dehumanization

Michael Wreszin is a professor of American history at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the biographer of DwightMacdonald.

RIDING DON FIFTH AVENUE ON THE TOP OF A DOUBLE DECKER BUS in the midst of the Depression, Dwight Macdonald scanned the passing throng from his elevated perch and saw only "the cheap undistinguished faces" of the pedestrians. He had been researching a paper on dictatorships and their relationship to the masses. He conceded in his journal that he, like Woodrow Wilson, "combined a scorn for individuals with respect for THE PEOPLE." This careful and well-written monograph is about that ambivalence if not always intentionally so. It is a study of a serious, thoughtful group of people dedicated to finding a way to live a humane life in a terrifying world and passing it on to others. This is a published doctoral dissertation but it transcends that forbidding category because of the author's impassioned commitment to the search of his subjects. So much does he identify with them that at times he can hardly be separated from the group of intellectuals he is writing about. This is one of the charms of the book. For in our own despairing and jaded age, Sumner takes these former struggles seriously and finds a relevance and positive example for our own times.

For those despairing souls who identify with the left this is a history of a group of dedicated radical intellectuals who experience almost nothing but defeat, disillusionment and ultimate loss of hope. This story offers an example of the message in Albert Camus's novel The Plague. The struggle is endless and futile, but engaging in the struggle is what makes one human. It is the "Myth of Sisyphus." Dwight Macdonald and his circle rolled the rock and their sympathetic chronicler follows their example. For them as for us the fight was against dehumanization, against "massification," "thingification." It is the struggle of modern humans to avoid becoming superfluous. There is a widespread notion that it took the horrors of the 30s and 40s to demolish the sanguine optimism characteristic of Americans and to awaken them to the innate evil in the world. It was clear to vast numbers of people in the modern world that human life was simply not worth much. Camus described this "absurd world" to a large crowd at Columbia University in the Spring of 1946. He observed that if this dehumanized world had been caused by

the bankruptcy of a political ideology or a system of government, it would have been simple enough. But what happened came from the very root of man and society. There was no doubt about this and it was confirmed day after day not so much by the behavior of the criminals but by that of the average man. The facts showed that men deserved what was happening to them. Their way of life had so little value; and the violence of the Hitlerian negation was in itself logical. But it was unbearable and we fought it.

Not very long before Camus's observation, Irwin Edman, a lecturer in philosophy, declared after reciting the horrendous chain of events that "men in the 19th century were sad that they could no longer believe in God. They are more deeply saddened now by the fact that they can no longer believe in man."

This study is about this "terrifying world" as the meaning of events gripped the imagination of a group of young Americans and Europeans during World War II and the immediate post-war years. It focuses on a group of like-minded writers and readers brought together by Dwight and Nancy Macdonald's astonishingly, independent, radical journal, politics, from 1944 to 1949. Sumner has mastered the material, worked in the archives, thoroughly grasped the arguments and for the most part brought his characters to life intellectually. He is an intellectual historian. You seldom get to know these people personally nor do you learn much about the relationship between their public lives and their private lives. Sometimes this missing information is crucial to an understanding of their public actions. This is the nature of intellectual monographs. But if one takes ideas as seriously as Mr. Sumner, then the ideas themselves take on life and character and great interest. Reading Sumner's account makes you intimately acquainted with the ideas of significant partisans who have cast a long shadow across the intellectual history of the 20th century, not simply in the United States but in Western Europe as well.

First there are the Macdonalds, Dwight and Nancy, who is every bit as important as he in terms of building the intellectual community in which these people lived. She was, as he once conceded, the unknown soldier of the enterprise. There are also the well known "New York Intellectuals": Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, Lionel Abel, Sidney Hook, Mary McCarthy, Daniel Bell, Paul Goodman, Hannah Arendt, James T. Farrell, C. Wright Mills, and many more. And there are the Europeans: Nicola Chiaromonte, the most important, was the life-long friend and collaborator of Macdonald's; Andrea Caffi, a legendary intellectual vagabond of Russian and Italian descent; Niccola Tucci, a sardonically whimsical Italian, formerly a propagandist in the Mussolini government; Victor Serge, a Belgian revolutionary of the 1917 era, member of the Soviet Communist International and subsequently driven into exile in Mexico where he remained in close touch with the politics circle. But most important to Sumner, after Nicola Chiaromonte, is Albert Camus. Camus's actual connection to Macdonald and politics may be a bit more tenuous than the relationship described by Sumner; they were hardly friends or even associates. However, Sumner is rightfully interested in the similarity of their feelings and their notions about how to challenge the dehumanization of the modern world. There are countless other French and European writers and intellectuals who contribute to the magazine or pass through the close knit world of the politics circle. Given the opportunity, Sumner invariably provides an informative profile.

FOR SUMNER, AS WELL AS HIS SUBJECTS, THE LETHAL POWER of the modern nation state demands resistance. It often seemed, as he points out, that it was either collaboration or resistance to these partisans. After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Macdonald went so far as to say that

We must 'get' the nation state before it 'gets' us. . . Every individual had better begin thinking 'dangerous thoughts' about sabotage, resistance, rebellion, and the fraternity of all men everywhere.

This hyperbole may illustrate what Robert Westbrook, another contemporary Macdonaldite, has described as "the politics of fearful anticipation," in which, as Sumner points out, there is a fuzzy line between "cautionary metaphor and reality." It is also often the mark of a world where words do duty for things. Sumner is right on target when he notes rather wistfully that the problem of "connecting talk to some kind of action" continued to "bedevil Macdonald" and the circle throughout the post-war years. But Macdonald's rhetoric did express some of the major themes of this book. The "we" is addressed, obviously, to a relatively small group of what Sumner describes as "ideologically homeless dissidents. . . people with unpopular political ideas." Can such an isolated and alien group "foment real change in a world of unparalleled state power and mass apathy?" Sumner's entire book addresses that crucial question. He is mainly interested in the political potential of dissidence and negativism against the prevailing powers. This is a study, almost a tract at times, concerning the possibility of local community associations, "grassroots fraternities," "pockets of resistance," "small heretical groups" to challenge the status quo and literally change the world. In Macdonald's "Root is Man" essay, published in 1944, he envisioned such intimate groups of like-minded negativists who would, as Camus had called for, "consistently oppose to power the force of example; to authority exhortation, to insult, friendly reasoning; to trickery, simple honor."

Such a stance obviously poses serious contradictions. The message of nearly all these radicals is that mass organization is not only not possible but not even desirable. For many, expecting an alliance with a militant class conscious working class had become a chimera. Dwight had only a fleeting positive relationship with the working class in the late 30s. Whatever hope lay in that quarter was pretty well dashed when there was so little resistance to the conservative power of the United States after the war and what he viewed as the compromising docility of the American labor movement. Sumner is sensitive to this obvious dilemma and critical first of members of the French resistance for "dismissing the 'masses' and withdrawing from political debate." They should have met the obligation to continue trying to connect with the public, to create an agenda and a "national-popular," idiom that spoke in a more positive, specific way to its needs and desires -- in short to build a viable alternative to the mainstream choices.

Labor's failure to resist in Europe soon became the politics line. By the end of 1944, Dwight and his colleagues had given up on the class struggle. Dwight never tired of returning to Trotsky's revealing assertion that if the proletariat failed to fulfill its revolutionary mission "then nothing else would remain except openly to recognize that the socialist program based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society ended as a utopia." There had been no revolution and only Marxist ideologues waited upon such an event. To one politics reader Dwight wrote in June of 1946: "It is my opinion that serious political action toward socialism is not possible on a party or mass basis and that we must begin again in a much more modest and directly personal way." This was not only Macdonald's message, it was the message of Chiaromonte, Andrea Caffi, Albert Camus and pretty much the implicit message of Gregory Sumner and the group of contemporary communitarians with whom he is intellectually allied -- Jeffrey Isaac, Casey Blake, both mentors, and Vaclav Havel who takes the place of Albert Camus.

THIS RAISES ANOTHER SERIOUS CONTRADICTION if one is thinking about a viable political program for confronting the iniquities of the capitalist status quo. Sumner is very sensitive to the inherent elitism in much of this politically minimalist stand. Macdonald in particular, had always harbored a kind of Brook Farm fantasy about a comforting protective society of friends who would retire to a rural commune and "live together a life such as few could live in this rotten age." He wrote a schoolboy friend "By God we have a group as talented, as full of intellectual and artistic juice as any in these United States." He was sure they could create a community "where people of wit, intelligence, understanding [could] live together." In those early years Macdonald was thinking of a literary, artistic community. But after his radicalization, brought about primarily by Nancy Macdonald, he thought frequently of small communities of radical friends who, through serious discussion, could build an example-setting community living a humane life.

Briefly the Trotskyist movement seemed a possibility and so did the small group around the Partisan Review, although he quickly learned that those intellectual street fighters were hardly what one would call friends. Factional bitterness and internecine warfare always seemed to frustrate Macdonald s aims. Macdonald had a habit of quickly becoming his own organization's most persistent critic. Immediately after joining the Trotskyist Workers Party he attacked Trotsky, its international leader. Finally he established politics and during its brief tenure he and Nancy did create the kind of intimate organization in which he took such pleasure. But he was its sole editor. The circle of contributors and readers was a relatively elite group. There were no bars to membership but the journal's appeal did not go far beyond a relatively educated, politically sophisticated readership.

Sumner makes a good deal of two efforts to transcend the rhetoric of dissent and create practical political agencies. One was the Politics Package Project designed to aid beleaguered intellectuals in war-torn Europe by sending them life-giving aid in the form of food, clothing, money and intellectual sustenance since the American government wasn't doing it. On the contrary, Dwight charged that the U. S. government was helping to starve them. Sumner is right that the Package Project was an important and successful enterprise, "energizing the politics community and fostering lasting transatlantic ties even as it helped alleviate a desperate human tragedy." But of course it was small scale, it "lacked by itself sufficient ideological content" to form the basis for a third camp movement challenging superpower control and domination of political life. One adherent of the Marxist wing of the politics readership dismissed the project as "an attempt to bail out the ocean with a thimble." Again it was minimalist; it served human needs but made no challenge to established structures.

The other attempt was the establishment, through the leadership of Nicola Chiaromonte and Mary McCarthy, of Europe-America Groups, again designed to create a cosmopolitan international community of intellectuals. It would hopefully begin, in Camus's words, a "civilization du dialogue" against the Cold War and its leading antagonists. Sumner deals with this failed attempt at some length but concedes that it never really got off the ground largely due to constant factional disputes. An interesting one he ignores is an exchange between Macdonald and Chiaromonte over the nature of Soviet totalitarianism. Dwight's obsessive anti-Stalinism, which insisted that Stalinism was the main enemy to a peaceful world, did not sit well in Paris where such rhetoric smacked of the United States State Department. Chiaromonte had to plead with Dwight to stop such a manichean black and white analysis and recognize the grey side of both the Soviet Union and the United States, which was the only rational position for a third camp person to take. The whole concept of Europe America Groups was to provide a haven for critics of both Cold War superpowers. But Dwight was approaching the point of fear, despair and disillusionment that led him to "Choose the West" in a famous debate with Norman Mailer.

The Europe America Groups also suffered from the kind of "insular elitism" that Sumner is clearly aware of. He questions politics' constant portrait of "a barren domestic landscape" of "coopted workers" and "mesmerized masses." While admiring Andrea Caffi, he refers to his absurd portrait of "sheeplike hordes." But despite these observations and the record of failure to achieve an effective cosmopolitan movement of dissent, Sumner remains a dedicated advocate of a "decentered pluralistic politics of 'limits' that contrasted sharply with the statist alternatives commonly associated with the post-war years." Even though the politics circle succumbed to an "oasis psychology" he believes that the ideas of the group deserve a new look because we are in a current crisis similar to that faced by the post-World War II intellectuals -- "the anti-humane dynamics of high technology and bureaucratic organization, the dangerous centralization of economic and political power" and, most important, the isolation and alienation of average citizens from any meaningful sense of control over decisions which affect their lives. Macdonald's insights into the possibilities of "informal, transnational lines of dialogue and friendship 'outside' traditional structures of authority" have not, he believes, lost their relevance.

SUMNER IS A PART OF A SMALL BAND OF COMMUNITARIANS who have accepted a Niebuhrian view of human potential, are deeply aware of human frailty and like one of their most articulate spokesmen, Jeffrey Isaac, a political scientist at Indiana, are skeptical of almost any form of mass politics. To the question, repeatedly asked throughout this study: "What can a small number of heretics do to nurture humanist values in such a forbidding climate? It is these communitarians' hope that they can follow Andrea Caffi's vision. The answer lies outside of conventional mass politics and in the "patient efforts to rebuild an autonomous public life by a few scattered individuals and groups, who might find in a resolute pessimism about the immediate future the courage not to despair of the eternal 'good cause of man.'" One can only entertain what Isaacs calls "local responses" to immediate problems "the solutions of which are at best "partial, fractious and in many ways unsatisfying." This is reminiscent of the Niebuhrian observation that "nothing worth doing can be done in a life time." Surely it is the sign of a liberalism in retreat which would be an understatement of the present situation.

Sumner, like this reviewer, can never resolve the inevitable contradiction between the penetrating and negativistic criticism of Dwight and many in his circle and the absolute need to engage in a more open, receptive and essential "grassroots movement building." As the editor of politics Macdonald insisted that the post-war society had reached such an extreme of "rationalized lunacy" that the only hope lay in a band of "specialists in abuse, technicians of vilification, expert mudslingers." As one of the most prescient and penetrating critics of American society he honed those skills. His forte was not any kind of movement-building. That takes very different kinds of skills. A real movement leading to change probably demands both devastating critics and movement-building leadership. But they are unlikely to be found in the same person. Nor can Sumner work out the obvious contradiction between Macdonald's libertarian individualism and his obvious desire to see a genuine community consciousness that goes beyond such precious communities as Wellfleet, Massachusetts, East Hampton Long Island or Bocca di Magre on the sea coast in Italy, all his summer retreats far from the "madding crowd."

Mary McCarthy understood the contradiction between the rarified discussions of the need for radical social change combined with a contempt for the potential encroachment of the masses and the "spreading ooze" of their mass culture. She spoofed this conflict in Oasis but also in the Hounds of Summer in which she has a sardonic account of her and Dwight's attempt to retard the arrival of more ordinary Italian citizens, a kind of intellectual improvement association. It is not dissimilar to the struggle of property owners to prevent a bridge being built to Fire Island for fear that the metropolitan transit company would soon be bringing out the day-tripping masses. These are the obvious ironies of those who would change the world but not be of it. Gregory Sumner is acutely aware of them. His own intelligence and sophistication make it impossible for him to offer a resolution, for after all even Marx had contempt for the "idiocy" of the peasants. Dwight often expressed a similar contempt. In addition Dwight was an outsider in any community he ever had anything to do with. Like the other Marx, Groucho, he suspected any organization that would have him as a member. That is what makes him so interesting and even lovable. But he and his kind with their frequent "creative mistakes" are only a necessary ingredient in the complex mix of forces and talents that bring about genuine social change. Resting our future in small groups of "resolute pessimists" outside of politics and history is a leap of faith, even if it is made on Kierkegaard's "far side of despair," that I for one can't make.

Contents of No. 22