The Thinking Reed

The propaganda machine continues and even intensifies its activity, people go on, from inertia, using the familiar ideological clichés… without appreciating (for the time being) their intellectual bankruptcy, but these clichés have already lost their emotional appeal — they leave people indifferent, or even irritate them.

Disappointment with the ruling ideology, the inflation of ideological values, is chiefly felt in a negative way, as a sense of devastation, lack of ideals, absence of prospects, ideological disorder. People who cannot think historically see nothing positive in this process of disintegration and look with yearning to the past. But this disintegration is a necessary precondition for the birth of new symbols of faith and action. Disappointment [the Russian word means, literally, ‘taking away the cup’] is always agonizing, but it alone enables one to see the world as it really is, without any mythological bandages over our eyes.59

This process can last a long time, but this duration has its advantages. Gnedin wrote about that in his article with the symbolic title ‘Lost Illusions and Discovered Hopes’.60 The longer the calm and submissiveness of the working masses continues, the mightier and more deafening will be the eventual explosion. Where the philistine sees inactivity on the part of the people and omnipotence on that of the regime, in fact the revolutionary forces are accumulating. The situation is comparable to the compression of steam in a closed cylinder. Where there are no safety valves it is not apparent that pressure is increasing inside the cylinder. Outwardly all is calm, but the tension grows until the steam bursts the cylinder. A revolutionary crisis arrives. As they sense this, the rulers may intensify repression. In the new conditions, however, that has the opposite result to the one they expect: ‘In relatively calm periods this can be advantageous to a reactionary government, but, at a time of political crisis, to intensify repression merely strengthens the forces of resistance.’61 Thus a crisis of ideas and a period of stagnation should not be regarded as a catastrophe. On the contrary, society’s spiritual crisis foreshadows renewal. The intelligentsia had to stand firm spiritually and be ready for the coming battles.

In a period of stagnation reason’s chief weapon is irony. Kon calls for a distinction to be made between the ‘wilful irony’ of the middle strata ‘who want, while doing nothing, to enjoy all the world’s blessings and to feel that they are superior to everything around them — what Heinrich Boll aptly called “a drug for the privileged”’ — and the tragic irony of the real intelligentsia. The nearer the crisis approaches, the quicker this demarcation becomes manifest. The irony of the left-wing intellectuals is constructive; it is ideological, akin to Hegel’s negation, for it underlies every spiritual creation. The wilful irony of the middle strata expresses soullessness and ideological futility. The crisis of ideas is not a justification for lack of ideals. On the contrary, it obliges us to seek new positive values. Kon wrote: