Bolsheviks

to put that into a Kungian rule me might say

When, as a novice reporter for a communist paper, he pointed out that every word of a major story was false, the editor explained that Koestler still had the “mechanistic” outlook instead of the proper dialectical one revealing what was “objectively” happening. Once you have assimilated dialectics, Koestler explains, “you were no longer disturbed by facts,” which fell automatically into place. The only remaining difficulty was adjusting to a rapid shift in the party line.

what would Russian intellectuals do if they ever gained power? And he realized that, although his generation was not as bloodthirsty as the radicals to follow, they, and he himself, could be drawn into committing horrible crimes in the sincere conviction that they were pursuing justice. The relative moderates, who above all want to dissociate themselves from the conservatives, can always be shamed into going along with anything. It is a mistake to think that the decent people we know would never endorse, let alone commit, vile deeds. “And therein lies the real horror,” Dostoevsky explains. In Russia, and eventually everywhere,

“There are few diseases so intractable as idealism,”

He recounts the wonderful story of how, when he was a Siberian official, his boss had to reply to an official document written in bureaucratic jargon so convoluted that neither he nor his top aides could make any sense of it. It turned out that his staff contained a man who knew bureaucratic language well enough to craft a proper reply without the slightest understanding of what was being said. And so forms generate forms ad infinitum: is this not bureaucracy at its essence?

As Herzen observed, “the mysticism of the Gospel” had been replaced by “the mysticism of science.” Except that this was not real science: for one thing, it was a set of fixed dogmas rather than a process of evolving inquiry; for another, putative “social sciences” were hardly sciences at all; and for yet another, philosophical and political conclusions derived from a real science were mistakenly regarded as part of it. The theologian Vladimir Soloviev famously paraphrased the illogic of Russian radicals who derived socialism from Darwinism: “Man is descended from the apes; therefore, we must love one another.”

“Science is not a special school or doctrine,” Herzen observed, “and so it can become neither a government, an arbitrary law, nor a persecution.” Fanatics are always smuggling “pious rhetoric” into “physiological and geological lectures.” In this way, Herzen explained, they “discover” purpose and other essentially metaphysical or theological concepts in nature. They invent (and continue to invent) various God substitutes.

Liberals as well as radicals believed, and thought science confirmed, that history had an upward direction, a belief we can still detect when ideas are condemned as backward-looking or praised as “of the future,” as if later were guaranteed to be better. In several eloquent passages, Herzen (or the ironic speaker of his dialogues) insisted that “history is going nowhere.” Historical determinism, no less than “the law of progress,” is entirely false. “The disheveled improvisation of history” contains more possibilities than those actually realized: “A multitude of possibilities . . . lies slumbering at every step.”

The utopians insist that history has a goal, but if we ever reached it, Herzen observed, humanity “would have come to rest, a finished article, an absolute status quo, like the animals.” “There is no libretto,” Herzen famously concluded. “If there were a libretto, history would lose all interest, become . . . ludicrous. . . . In history, all is improvisation, all is will, all is ex tempore,” much like Herzen’s own writing.

Those who posit a goal are all too often willing to sacrifice any number of people to reach it because, however many must die, the future is infinite and so far more people will be saved.

All logic and evidence lead to skepticism, Herzen conceded, but one needs belief. “You think that doubt, calm on the surface is easy,” the old skeptic in From the Other Shore confides, “But can you know what a man, in a moment of pain, weakness, exhaustion, might not be ready to give for a belief?”