The writer Arthur Koestler (‘Darkness at Noon) was a Marxist believer and a Party member when he visited the Soviet Union in 1932. Looking back later at his younger self, he was struck by the way in which he’d had a kind of filter, a ‘mental sorting machine’, which allowed him to justify the not-so-nice things that he had seen and to fit everything into his belief about the rightness and beneficiality of Communism. These reflections led him to thoughts on the nature of intellectually closed systems.
A closed system has three peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of casuistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself.
The orthodox Freudian school in its early stages approximated a closed system; if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian’s prompt answer was that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that you ourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious circle. Similarly, if you argued with a Stalinist that to make a pact with Hitler was not a nice thing to do he would explain that your bourgeois class-consciousness made you unable to understand the dialectics of history..
In short, the closed system excludes the possibility of objective argument by two related proceedings: (a) facts are deprived of their value as evidence by scholastic processing; (b) objections are invalidated by shifting the argument to the personal motive behind the objection. This procedure is legitimate according to the closed system’s rules of the game which, however absurd they seem to the outsider, have a great coherence and inner consistency.
The atmosphere inside the closed system is highly charged; it is an emotional hothouse. The trained, closed-minded theologian, psychoanalyst, or Marxist can at any time make mincemeat of his open-minded adversary and thus prove the superiority of his system to the world and to himself..
I’ve cited the above excerpt a number of times in the past. Given the level of ideological capture that seems to be taking place in our Western societies at present, I thought it was due for a rerun and discussion.
Why are there so many people now who are willing–even eager–to become votaries of of ideological systems? I’d suggest that several factors are operative:
First, there are a lot of people who are lonely and looking for a sense of affiliation. Relatedly, a lot of people lack a sense of meaning…which was once more often provided by traditional religions and social roles–and political activism and belief can fill this need. Sebastian Haffner, who came of age in Germany between the wars, observed this phenomenon. When the political and economic situation in that country began to stabilize–for which he credits Gustav Stresemann–most people were happy:
The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream. The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for saviors or revolutionaries. There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food and a little political boredom. Everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own taste and to find their own paths to happiness.
But a return to private life was not to everyone’s taste:
A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions. Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk…
To be precise…it was not the entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in this fashion. There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live. they began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities. It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.
I think there are a lot of people in America today, and in the West generally, who have become accustomed to having ‘the raw material for their deeper emotions’ delivered by the public sphere.
Second, for some people the desire for affiliation shades into the darker pleasure of behaving with cruelty to those outside the charmed circle…while simultaneously feeling very virtuous about their behavior. See my post Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism.
Third, people who are intelligent, but not at all creative, tend to latch on to the intellectual systems created by others and to hold to those systems create by others even more fiercely than the originators of those systems would do. This observation is from the writer Andre Maurois, and I think it is correct. I also think that the description ‘intelligent but not creative’ describes a high percentage of the current incumbents in academia and media organizations.
Your thoughts?
