What Solzhenitsyn called “the ideological lie” was not limited to a single country, government, or movement. And it did not, unfortunately, die off in 1989. In his new book, Daniel Mahoney presents the lie as the replacement of traditional categories of “good and evil” with “progress and reaction,” a change that ripples through political and social ideas in a way that opens the door to the replacement of truth by an imposed, false reality. Though we shouldn’t pretend that America today approaches the kind of tyranny seen in the twentieth century, we should recognize that the totalitarian impulse is alive and well. 

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The Persistence of the Ideological Lie by Daniel J. Mahoney

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy books, and culture and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty. With me today is Daniel J. Mahoney, Professor Emeritus at Assumption University, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, and a senior writer here at Law & Liberty. And he has written extensively on statesmanship, French political thought, the art of political thought of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, conservatism, religion and politics, and various themes in political philosophy. His most recent books are The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order, The Other Solzhenitsyn, The Idol of Our Age, How Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity—definitely one of my favorites—The Statesman as Thinker, and now most recently, The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now. Dr. Mahoney, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Daniel J. Mahoney:

Oh, really happy to be here, James.

James Patterson:

I can’t believe those are starting just in 2011, you were a man of great, prolific writing. How do you do it?

Daniel J. Mahoney:

Well, I’ve always been somebody who is convinced that thinking and writing go hand in hand. And so I’ve always been an extremely avid reader. So from time to time, which is every couple of years, a theme comes upon me that needs to be addressed in a more thorough and systematic way, and I pursue that subject, or I often find myself already pursuing that subject. So I’m halfway done with a book when I realize this is a book. The other thing is I like to write, and I think I’m a pretty good writer, so that makes a big difference. The writing has never been a terribly strenuous activity for me, and that helps a lot when you’re the author of a fair amount of books.

James Patterson:

That’s right. And the subject in this one is the persistence of the ideological lie. For those who even know what that is, that’s normally something we associate with communism, something in the past. So maybe explain what the ideological lie as a concept is and what it has to do with the present.

Daniel J. Mahoney:

Yeah. One of the points I make in the book, and I’ve made quite emphatically, I think since the 1990s, is we never really learned the fundamental lessons to be learned from the ideological tragedies of the last two centuries. So you might think of the period 1789 to 1989, 1991, as an age dominated increasingly by ideological threats to political civilization and the moral inheritance of the civilized world, the Western world. And I think there was a tendency on, first of all, so many intellectuals cheerleaded for these active efforts at moral and civilizational subservience. The first political pilgrim was Tom Paine. Now, Tom Paine wasn’t a complete crazy by any means, but he suffered from a syndrome, which we would see over two centuries, “pas d’ennemis à gauche,” no enemies to the left, but he was a decent man. And he goes to France and he ends up in a Jacobin prison because he thought it was an extreme measure to arrest and try and eventually execute the king and the queen and the royal children. He wanted them to come to Pennsylvania to be Republican farmers.

So we’ve always had intellectuals who thought that a more progressive and ideological version of modernity, what Eric Voegelin very suggestively is called modernity without restraint, would fulfill the promise of modernity and modern democracy. But if you look at the mainstream judgments about this ideological assault on civilization, you either had the cheerleaders who wanted democracy to become thoroughgoingly progressive. And as I say early on in the book, that was always linked to what Leo Strauss called the replacement of the perennial distinction between good and evil with the ideological distinction between progress and reaction. In other words, things were good because they were in accord with the logic of history, not because they were intrinsically meritorious or the opposite. All right, so we had these explanations. What was at stake in the age of totalitarianism, collectivism, the planned economy, dictatorship versus democracy. There’s an element of truth in all of that, but all of those explanations are superficial.

And so when we come to the revolutions of 1989, the elite consensus was that this was simply the victory of a more efficient market order over a failed planned economy or the victory of human rights over dictatorship. No one or next to no one really got to the core of what the ideological subversion of political civilization was, what thoroughgoing modernity without restraint was. And it meant when I talk about the lie, which is a concept introduced by Solzhenitsyn and others, but very widespread among thinkers in the East, Havel, Benda, even some … Boris Pasternak speaks about it and Dr. Zhivago, something much worse than dictatorship. It was the demand that human beings pretend to live in a surreal world where language had lost meaning, where facts were negated, where the distinctions between truth and falsehood and fact and fiction were essentially eliminated. And where people spoke, the French called it a “langue de bois,” a wooden language, the entirety of everyday life became permeated by lies, not lies about this policy or lies about that, but fundamental lies about the nature of reality.

So Eric Voegelin, who just happens to be better on totalitarianism than Leo Strauss, Leo Strauss, a contribution to the understanding of totalitarianism and it’s a good contribution, it’s a interpretation of a dialogue by Xenophon, the Hiero. Well, that’s a very indirect way of approaching the ideological lie. Voegelin spoke about the forcible imposition of a second reality on the only human condition we know. And I think that here we’re closer to the insights of Arendt in Origins of Totalitarianism of Orwell in 1984. Of course, the great fear all these guys had was that, in Orwell’s famous words, that the “boot” of such despotism could be stamping “on a human face—forever.” I don’t think that was ever a danger. I don’t think human nature can be fundamentally conquered once and for all, but it can be distorted, mutilated, suffocated. And I think we underestimated how long it would take for totalitarian regimes and societies to come out, to use Solzhenitsyn’s phrase “from the rubble” of totalitarianism.

And we also underestimated the, well, long and short of it, what was the dominant, or at least an effort to make sense of the age of ideology and the West’s eventual victory, which had less to do with our virtues and more to do with the intrinsic failures of totalitarianism. The major explanation was Francis Fukuyama’s, and it was that—he gave a Hegelian-Marxism interpretation—we were on the winning side of history, and history has now come to an end. And so to quote Alexandre Kojève, the Hegelian-Marxism bureaucrat and philosopher who first theorized the end of history in a Cold War context, “The universal homogenous state, the final form of government, the final form of society was liberal democracy.” So it’s kind of an inverted Marxism. We’ve arrived at the end of history, but it’s not Marxist Leninism, it’s liberal democracy. Now, that was a very troubling and superficial analysis of events, but it showed as smart as Fukuyama was and as smart as philosophically informed as his thesis was, it was just wrong in every respect.

James Patterson:

So we end up with liberal democracy all the same, and yet we still have the ideological lie, which shows, as you were describing, is that the lie is not tied to a particular enterprise or government or even a particular people or culture, rather it’s almost like a temptation, and it seems to be an elite temptation to dominate with language. How does this emerge in Western liberal democracies after we’re supposed to have learned the lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union in the Berlin Wall?

Daniel J. Mahoney:

I think our political and philosophical discourse is very confused, and I think it’s confused in part because we continue to use words like liberalism and liberal democracy to describe a intellectual, political, cultural order that has remarkably self-radicalized over the last 10 to 50, 60 years. I’m an unrepentant defender, an advocate of liberal democracy, but not liberalism as redefined by progressives. And I think this is what all of us underestimated, the r