The Political Illusion, by Jacques Ellul. Knopf, $8.95
I THINK JACQUES ELLUL’s heart is in the right place. I have to say “I think” because his prose style, or at least the prose style foisted on him by Konrad Kellen, his translator, is so obfuseatory that his exact intentions are sometimes difficult to perceive. It contains words and wordorders which are not English and whole sentences like this: “Doctrine has merely reified ongoing situations insofar as the conditioning of people and the absence of any true political activity is concerned.” Trying to make sense of such stuff is like wading through thick mud. Perhaps sur-_ prisingly, the effort turns out to be well worth while. The Political Illusion is a blockbusting attack on the cant and smug self-deception which shape almost all contemporary talk and writing about politics. Ellul’s instincts may quite possibly be liberal (in the American sense); he talks about ‘“egalitarianism” and “socialist hopes” as though these were self-evidently good things in themselves. “Are we not witnessing,’ he asks, “a general trend towards statism, even in liberal, entirely democratic countries?” A conservative might carp at the word “even,’ but would have to applaud the vigor of Ellul’s disapproving affirmative. Indeed, Ellul himself is soon agreeing that “the most liberal people are the most intransigent” and explaining that “the fundamental error” of the French revolutionary philosophers was “to believe that controls over the state could be found in the state.” — He opens fire on a whole regiment of liberal platitudes. Have we “only ourselves to blame” if we neglect to take part in the processes of democratic decision-making? Not at all; the group activities which give an illusion of effective participation may not even be legitimate and certainly cannot bind those who decline to subscribe. On the contrary, individuals ought, for the sake of their spiritual health, to keep some distance away from political processes which are now, and apparently always must be, totally removed, except in words, from the real values of liberty, justice and the dignity of the human person. CAN WE ever hope, in a democracy, to be ruled by honest and capable politicians? Of course not. “The specialist in how to make a political career never will become a boon to civilization or even a good custodian of the commonwealth (even if he were to apply himself to the task, for which he would have very little time).” Is the trouble simply that some people or some nations are “not yet ready” for democracy—democracy which will necessarily emerge in the end, history’s “inevitable fruit’? The facts point in the opposite direction. Dictatorships and Communism, not democracy, are emerging as the normal situation. The future seems to be with them. (Britain and the United States, M. Ellul says, are still somewhat different, “but these countries should take care, for they are traveling along the same road.”) Does the solution lie in more “education for civil responsibilities’? Such education, like the “adjustment” about which American educationists prate, is merely a way of making the citizen conform to the state’s requirements and precluding him from true awareness or reflection. Can we look to academic sociology for guidance? No; its apparent objectivity is just a camouflage for prejudice. Should we accept that favorite liberal cliché about ourselves all being guilty when anyone commits a crime, or all responsible for famines and wars in Asia? To do so, M. Ellul contends, far from being an acceptance of responsibility is really an evasion of it. “To say that we are all murderers means, translated, that nobody is individually a murderer, i.e. that I am not a murderer.” Here, as elsewhere, he is attacking the “politization” (ghastly word) which makes people think of every situation, every problem, in political —that is, collective—terms and look always to the state for remedies. One aspect of this tendency is the “commitment” which leftish artists and writers and actors prize so highly. Politization leads necessarily, Ellul says, to a totalitarian state, which leads in turn to a system of values determined solely by what is expedient, or thought to be expedient, for the state. It means the substitution cf “social justice” for justice in the old sense, and to some very peculiar Gefinitions of freedom. EVERYONE today is supposed to be passionately interested in collective affairs, and the state is entitled, in return, to make unlimited demands oh every citizen. This political excitement, Ellul maintains, is largely spurious. Major public decisions are not really the fruit of political choice at all; they are technical and, given the universal modern hypothesis (a hypothesis shared by Communist, no less than by Western, nations) that the sole object of the state is to increase its citizens’ happiness by increasing their collective material wealth, these decisions flow ineluctably from the work of bureaucrats and experts. Neither politicians nor electors can properly grasp them or hope to influence them. To compensate for this fundamental impotence, the politicians and electors whip themselves into a great lather about ephemeral current events. This lather is magnified by the effect of mass communications, which produce “an incessant renewal ef stimuli provoking constant reactions, intensifying prejudices, hardening groups,’ with the result that nothing can be done in modern democracies unless public opinion is aroused, and, if it is aroused, moderate, equitable and provident solutions are no longer possible. Political and social problems are created by public opinion, and the weight of public opinion then paralyzes the government’s efforts to deal with them. Neither in major, nor in ephemeral, matters, therefore, is there any real choice. The Algerian affiair, for example, having been made urgent purely by propaganda, could not have been settled in 1956, when a large majority of Frenchmen were still in favor of a French Algeria, but was settled the only way possible in 1960, when an increasing number of Frenchmen had accepted the inevitability of surrender. Similarly, Ellul quotes the attempts of Britain’s Con- -servative Government in the 1950s to reverse the tide of collectivism. It proved, he says, impossible. But the continuous vivid presentation of current affairs gives people the illusion that they are involved in them and influencing them. This illusion is itself subject to censorship, partly self-imposed, partly state-controlled. Facts which run contrary to the prevailing prejudices become nonfacts. (It is unfortunate that Ellul should take as an example of “straight information” which happened to produce a strong public reaction by colliding with a well-established, stereotyped value-judgment the case of Podola, who was supposed to have been beaten up in a London police station. I am reasonably satisfied, from the evidence I’ve seen, that the beating-up never occurred except in the minds of certain newspapermen and anti-police politicians.) The politicians and the public do, therefore, to some extent restrain each other, but in the sense, not of limiting excesses, but merely of restricting—Ellul would say eliminating —choice. No minority, he says grimly, ever wants to reduce the state’s power, but rather to manipulate it. And the people, under the spell of politization, think it normal for the state’s sphere of action constantly to expand. SO WHAT is an honest man to do? Like Plato’s philosopher, he could step aside and try to shelter from the gales of the world behind a private wall; but, as politization goes further and the state’s tentacles grow longer, this becomes increasingly difficult. It is too late, Ellul concludes, to depolitize. The logic of his argument should culminate in total pessimism, but, like most writers, he feels obliged to contrive some kind of up-beat ending. So he has a suggestion to make—that we should strive to reinforce, rather than adjust out of existence, the tensions in society between one group and another, between private value-judgments and the state’s code of values. This seems a somewhat slim hope to set against the blackness of the picture Ellul has already painted. I don’t myself entirely share his pessimism. I believe men can still choose, that France was driven from Algeria and that Britain’s Conservative Government failed to dismantle the welfare state, not because of any historical determinism, but through sheer lack of will. Things could have turned out otherwise; they could turn out otherwise tomorrow when we try the game again. And even if this isn’t true, I believe that, for sanity’s sake and to give us the heart for another fight, we ought to believe that it is. Nevertheless, The Political Illusion is an impressive and intellectually invigorating book. To turn from it to a run-of-the-mill editorial or to the latest speech of almost any politician is like passing from the throb of an eagle’s wings to the twittering of sparrows.
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