Compromise And Commitment
By Gaither Stewart
08 February,
2008
Countercurrents.org
A
beginner journalist in Rome asked my advice about an upcoming interview
with a well-known media exponent and famous opportunist of Italy’s
extreme right-wing —the young lady had qualms because, as she
said, she understood nothing of politics. Well, since ignorance of
politics didn’t seem like an auspicious start, I outlined my
views on the reality of current Italian and European politics.
An intelligent person however, she framed her questions so that the
interviewee had little chance to expound his crude political theories.
Until her last question: “What did he think of the future of
our society?” At that point the dikes broke. In a rush of words
he predicted that in the not too distant future people would forget
that the atrocities of Communism, Fascism and Nazism had ever happened.
When I opined that this interview was support for burgeoning Fascism
in the world today who claim Fascism and Communism, Right and Left,
are the same, and that we should hope the atrocities of Nazism and
Stalinism would not be forgotten so easily and that she would compromise
herself by signing the article, she shrugged and said, “They
pay me.”
Ignorance of politics that conditions everything in life is lethal
for a writer, but in that context her words, “They pay me,”
were vile. She did not comprehend that journalism is compromised when
it loses its autonomy and is subjugated to political power.
It’s
true that no more than one can choose the age in which he lives can
one live without the age in which one is born; we are children of
our times … and to some degree consonant. The laws of the age
of science and technology demand agreement if not homogeneity as a
condition of existence: to work and exist means to collaborate within
a system in which the actions of each are prescribed. Action is homogenous
when it conforms to the requirements of the system.
Still, the fact is, the goals of the apparatus are seldom those of
the individual. Personal conscience is too easily reduced to conscientiousness
in the execution of one’s duties from which is born the concept
of conformist conscience. The result is the hegemony of “behavioral
psychology of adaptation”—to be increasingly less oneself
and more like everyone else. Technological society works against individual
ideas—and for homogeneity.
Being different is not only non-remunerative but also arouses suspicion.
The paradox is that authenticity—being oneself or knowing oneself,
which wise men have long prescribed—in the conformist society
becomes pathological behavior, as if being oneself were a disease.
In the darkest periods of Brezhnevian Soviet society, dissidents were
whisked away to psychiatric clinics.
Authoritarian systems rely on compromised writers to portray false
images; they fear the truthful portrayal of reality. The compromised
writer follows the victors; conformity and opportunism go hand in
hand. Inevitably he sticks to the middle; he avoids saying what he
feels for fear of his place in society. He is the conformist per se.
The compromised writer is aware that many people do not like being
told the truth and he is willing to write what he is told people want
to hear and to bend with the prevailing wind. He is a fearful writer.
Freud instructed that the things the writer is inhibited to write
are usually the most important and the things that press him the most.
Self-editing and self-censorship are not the same thing. Once the
writer stops in mid-sentence and censors something he wants to say,
something he knows he should say, for the sole reason that he might
be breaking some social-political rule of correctness, he is on his
way to compromise.
Compromise in journalism and literature leads straight to the banalities
of writing—the terrible to-do about petty problems of ordinary
existence or in its most degenerated form about the radiant futures
of totalitarian societies. The headache of choosing a vacation destination
or workers with shining eyes gazing toward the horizon of the future
cannot be a substitute for themes like injustice and human suffering.
Commitment stands at the opposite pole from compromise. The modern
concept of committed literature emerged from the conflict of 20th
century ideologies that have reflect the deep social changes of our
times—the domination of Nazism and Communism in Europe, the
victory of world Capitalism over Communism, and today the clash between
market ideology and the rich world on one hand and on the other the
growing rebellion of the impoverished four-fifths of our planet.
Today’s social situation obligates the writer to examine his
position in the world and his responsibility to other men. It obligates
the writer to approach his work in a committed way. To resist the
temptation of compromise and conformity the writer must be devoted
to autonomy. The honest writer must stand inside society—not
in the shadows of the periphery—and he must tell the truth.
I believe that commitment to truth is inherent in good writing. It
is a moral absolute. To write is to reveal an aspect of the world
in order to change it. In that respect writing is didactic.
Commitment and involvement are closely linked. However, though involvement
is inevitable for the writer, his commitment does not come about automatically.
Not all writers are even conscious of their involvement; but the committed
writer is aware of the world around him and his writing is the result
of his attitude toward it.
Thus commitment involves the writer’s trying to summarize and
then reflect through his work a picture of the human condition—which
is also social—without however losing sight of the individual.
Exponents of committed literature reject the fallacy that art is a
thing apart; despite the obstacles politics raises, writing, I believe,
is part and parcel of the social.
Writing is a social act insofar as it derives from the will to communicate
with others and from its resolve to change things. The writer wants
to remake the world.
In France, Bernard-Henri Lévy and other so-called nouveaux
philosophes, made careers debunking intellectual commitment. After
the fall of Communism in East Europe their message was that one could
no longer take socialist ideas seriously. Lévy said: “When
intellectuals let themselves believe in a community of men, they are
never far away from barbarism.”
Reductive, to say the least. No less than an apology for totalitarianism.
Lévy and friends became opportunistic journalists and found
easy targets among French committed writers: they said that Sartre
had after all flirted with terrorists of the German Baader-Meinhof
Gang and Régis Debray trained in guerrilla warfare in Bolivia
with Che Guevara. Post-commitment intellectuals find themselves in
the blind alley of having to try to justify social injustice. Conformists
under the guise of free marketers tell us that rich countries have
no responsibility for problems of the Third World—as if we didn’t
all belong to the same world.
According to the Russian Communist theorist Georgy Plekhanov, “the
belief in art for art’s sake arises when artists and people
keenly interested in art are hopelessly out of harmony with their
social environment.” It has been said that art for art’s
sake is the attempt to instill ideal life in one who has no real life
and is an admission that the human race has outgrown the artist.
Here fiction and journalism are linked. Instead of the “radiant
future,” committed writing depicts the lives of other people,
however ugly or illuminating. It contains both human truths and human
potential. Since my daughter’s measles or a flat tire on the
way shopping are boring and their presentation in fiction is mere
recording, the literary author must instead total up and interpret
human experience.
I personally want to see the heroic in a fictional hero, but I don’t
want lies. I want the hero to offer me counsel on how to live better.
On the other hand, to describe poor people as happy simply because
they finally have shoes is nonsensical. The portrayal of the masses
as happy because a new political party is in power is deceit.
Similarly I find the depiction of globalization of economy and capital
as the spread of democracy, security, and well being not only absurd
but also immoral and evil. War is not peace. Disasters will always
be disasters. And it is insane to call catastrophes victories for
mankind.
The road of commitment is lined by the canonical names of literary
history. At the time of the French Revolution, Wordsworth wrote his
greatest poems like “The Ruined Cottage” and “The
Old Cumberland Beggar”— which depict the sufferings of
the English lower classes. Shelley—labeled by Harold Bloom the
Leon Trotsky of his day—and Keats and Hazlitt, realized Wordsworth’s
genius for teaching and instilling in others sympathy for all those
in distress. For Wordsworth, counted genius, transcendence and his
personal epiphanies. He was forever the stranger. An aura of otherworldliness
marked his genius and rankled his contemporaries because he spoke
from the beyond. But through all his strangeness, he cared.
They all care, the committed writers. Commitment may be expressed
also in the writer’s search in himself for authenticity, reaching
deep into himself to the place where truth lies. As Saul Bellow writes
in his essay, “The Sealed Treasure”, the only thing we
can be in this world is human. And we all care about truth, freedom
and wisdom.
Just as did writers in totalitarian societies—Fascist, Nazi,
Communist, Fundamentalist—also writers in today’s market
economies ineluctably face the choice between compromise and freedom.
Yet, art does not need a revolution to be real art. It does not even
require political freedom. One can’t tell real writers what
to do. For true art, party ideology or party discipline or political
correctness does not exist.
Many people turn up their noses at the word extreme. They don’t
trust it. It is a dangerous word. Extreme provokes displeasure and
doubt, for even worse extremism is hovering nearby.
Alberto Moravia stressed that the writer is obliged to be extreme.
No great writer, he says, was not extreme. That is, sincere. Can one
think that Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Nietzsche
and Ibsen, were not extreme, that is, sincere, in the deepest sense
of true to themselves? With sincerity in mind Gabriel García
Márquez taught his students of journalism to cultivate bias.
To risk. To be committed. We have to reject measure, that beloved
rule of creative writing classes, as we are obligated to reject social
conformity and political correctness.
Asked what the writer is to do, Albert Camus suggests in The Myth
of Sisyphus—written in 1940 amidst the European disaster but
no less applicable today: “The tyrannies of today are improved;
they no longer admit of silence or neutrality. One has to take a stand,
to be either for or against. Well, in that case, I am against.”
Here, two more words about committed literature, which is often accused
of being political writing. Honest committed writers reply that moral
conflicts of the day have a political background and that nearly every
aspect of our lives is related to politics. As the case of the young
journalist I mentioned above shows, an understanding of politics is
fundamental in order to understand what the writer must oppose and
what he can defend.
Understanding politics does not mean participation in politics; literary
writers are not much good at it anyway. Chekhov advised writers to
“engage in politics only enough to protect themselves from politics….
A bit of ideology and being up to date is most apropos.”
The enormity of universal problems today has overwhelmed the objection
that modern society has made the concept of literary commitment obsolete.
On the contrary, it seems. Not only social problems like alienation
but also questions of truth and freedom, war and peace, market economy
and poverty, the environment and scientific advances, underline the
heightened need for socially aware committed literature.
Committed writers believe that human freedom itself is a social conquest
and must be constantly reclaimed. Good writers are aware of the danger
of forgetting literature in the name of commitment. Unlike writers
of compromise, they succeed in overcoming the threat through their
ethical-aesthetical approach to their work: all in all, after everything
is considered, they don’t believe that anything can replace
good literature.
