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As I said in the most recent post, I’m particularly drawn to ideological / philosophical conversion-experience stories, particularly when they recount conversions from collectivism to a worldview basically like my own.
I first encountered the work of Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa shortly after my own conversion in the 1980s, when much of my focus was on Latin American radicalism and those who dissented from it. I read a couple of his novels, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, and Who Killed Palomino Malerno?, as well as several magazine pieces by and about him. He was parting ways with the enthusiasms of his younger years, such as Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, and the Cuban Revolution, by the time he was producing the bulk of the body of his fiction work. Some developments that triggered the souring process included the establishment of concentration camps in Cuba, and a 1968 trip to the Soviet Union during which he saw the complete lack of vitality and hope among that nation’s populace.
As he established himself as a public intellectual, he began meeting the leading lights of, broadly speaking, the other way of seeing the world, including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
The Call of the Tribe is comprised of chapters, each of which is a short biography of a thinker who helped him flesh out a classically liberal worldview. The seven thinkers are Adam Smith, Jose Ortega y Gassett, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-Francois Revel. In each case, he looks at the thinker’s upbringing and education, any educational or governmental posts he’d held, major works, and lasting contributions to Western thought.
The figures profiled lived lives that combined cosmopolitanism and various kinds of isolation. For instance, Smith accompanied young Henry Scott on a tour of Europe, where he socialized with Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin and frequented the theater. His best friend throughout his adult life was David Hume. On the other hand, he lived long periods of his life with his mother and cousin and never married.
Vargas Llosa isn’t shy about offering tidbits of juicy gossip where he feels it can provide the reader with insights into the full human behind the philosophy. For instance, he says that Berlin’s Washington period, in the first half of the 1940s, was “full of social engagements, dinners, galas, and receptions in the highest echelons of society” and served as a “substitute for sex, of which it appears that he had little or no interest until his later years.” The exception to this was a 1945 night spent with acclaimed Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Berlin was working for the British diplomatic corps in the Soviet Union. She was twenty years his senior when he went to her Leningrad apartment. She was living in domestic exile, unable to publish. Her first husband had been shot, the third imprisoned. Her son would soon be sent to the gulag. Berlin considered it the most important night of his life. The two had a cold reunion in 1965, when she was allowed to visit Britain, visited the home of the by-now-married Berlin, and remarked that he was living in a “golden cage.”
The main thing Vargas Llosa intends to convey about each of his seven influences is the mark they left on Western thought.
From Smith, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, we are given the insight that economic order results from the millions of freely engaged-in spontaneous exchanges that take place between buyer and seller. One reason Smith championed the cause of the American colonies was that, with their prioritizing of free trade, they served as a contrast to less robust European nation-states of the day.
Vargas Llosa says that Ortega y Gassett stressed that liberalism is “above all an attitude toward life and society based on tolerance and respect, a love for culture, a desire to coexist with others and a firm defense of freedom as a supreme value.”
Hayek wanted to establish a clear distinction between classical liberalism and conservatism. He saw conservatives as being “often nationalists” who “do not understand that the ideas that are changing civilization know no borders and are equally valid in different cultures and geographical locations.” Hayek was suspicious of absolute certainty; he thought “constant doubt and self-criticism” were the stones on which we sharpen our worldviews.
Popper, a personal friend of Hayek’s, likewise saw truth as “fragile, continually under the barrage of tests and experiments that weigh it up and and seek to undermine it.” On the other hand, “Popper’s thinking is not relativistic or skeptically subjective. It has one foot in objective reality, which he recognized as independent of the human mind.”
This foundation led Popper to look askance at theories of history that see it as a script “against which individual actions cannot prevail.”
Raymond Aron was a friend from school onward of Jean-Paul Sartre. It was a peculiar friendship. Aaron was an unassuming man and a rational humanist, whereas Sartre basked in his stature as the embodiment of existentialism.
In Aaron’s major work, The Opium of the Intellectuals, he points up the contrast between left-leaning Westerners’ criticisms of their own societies, and their utter unwillingness to look squarely at the inhumanity of the regimes of which they were so enamored.
He was very much a product of the Cold War, and wrote of the stakes involved in the precarious standoff between the West and the Soviet empire. He foresaw the continuing need for conventional weapons, since the unleashing of either side’s nuclear arsenal was unthinkable.
Berlin gave us the hedgehog-and-fox formulation, which posits that people in the humanities business see the world as either explainable by a big idea that is consistently applicable, or by a succession of experiences that generate ideas. He also championed positive liberty, that is, liberty defended with an aim in mind.
Revel was mentored by Aron, and from him he developed a vehement antipathy for the Soviet Union and the effect it was having, in both countries under its control, and in the element in Western nations that saw that whole impetus as being the locus of human progress. In How Democracies Perish, a book that had a tremendous influence on Vargas Llosa, Revel gives us a bracing upside-the-head, saying that the era of democracy the world has enjoyed for a couple of centuries is an “accident” and a “parenthesis.” It would be interesting to get Revel’s take on how things have gone since the Soviet Union’s disappearance. While that agent of the corruption of the West is no more, the argument can be made that Western decline has continued apace.
With the exception of Smith, all these figures’ lifespans put them squarely in the age when totalitarianism posed a very real threat to liberal democracy. That had everything to do with the conclusions they came to about human freedom and dignity. They ranged from Christian to atheist, but all were convinced that the individual human being was of more worth than organized groups of human beings, the status of which, history shows us, is actually quite fluid.
The common thread among these figures becomes discernible within a few chapters, and stays with the reader after he or she is done. And that’s a good thing. We need as many people as possible to think - seriously - about freedom.
Very interesting. I will have to read Vargas Llosa. I’d heard about him but don’t think I’ve ever read anything by him.