Home » Changing a mind: more on Radical Son

Comments

Changing a mind: more on Radical Son — 12 Comments

  1. fwiw, you might want to check out “Left Illusions” by Horowitz. It’s a collection of his essays with excepts from “Radical Son “. Much of what N-NC has summarized seems quite familiar to me. It’s also got the fascinating essay “How to Make Political War”.

    yet another rice alum

  2. Richard, I agree: the Mandarin class does think Man is vile, etc…however, they’re going to reform us. That’s the whole point in their needing to run things.

    But this doesn’t change their Utopian view that we can be changed…with their help and programs, of course.
    ____________

    Neo-neocon–

    I was being careless with my choice of words there. In my own mind, fisking has become a kind of exegesis…I know it’s really taking something apart critically, but it’s morphed for me…

    BTW, there is a certain fascination in reading others’ conversion stories. The very first one is Augustine’s of course. It’s fascinating and in its own way, quite modern….in your ‘spare’ time.

  3. Oh dear, Dymphna–I’m wondering why you say “further fisking.” This post of mine wasn’t meant to be any sort of fisking at all! It’s a long-winded book, for sure, but that’s hardly a major problem, just a minor quibble. As for Horowitz’s immaturity and naivete–well, he himself admits that in the book, so my mentioning it hardly qualifies as fisking.

    I actually highly recommend the book. I am fascinated both by the tale Horowitz tells, some of it very chilling, and by the fact that he thought to tell it at all. When I began this blog with the idea of telling my own story of political change, and trying to talk about the process in more general terms, I had no idea there were books written by former radicals such as Horowitz on that very subject. I intend to try to read more—most notably, one by Norman Podhoretz entitled “Ex-Friends”.

  4. Dymphna.

    To disagree with one point:

    The Mandarin class does not believe Man is good. They think Man is stupid, violent, and vile.
    The Mandarin class thinks they themselves are good. That’s why they should be running things.

  5. The Northeast elite: I concur with the thread running thru the responses.

    Raised in the south, but spending a decade of my young adulthood in Wellesley, I lived but a stone’s throw from the judge who ordered the Boston schools desegregated (that didn’t touch Wellesley schools, though…out of ‘compassion’ we bussed in black children).

    I was a member of the ACLU and the Urban League. Went to hear both Julian Bond and Saul Alinsky speak. Especially admired Alinsky’s “radical” plans for changing our privileged ignorance.

    Now I think of such people as the Mandarin Class. They move in a tight, closed orbit composed of academia, media, and politics. Media includes film and writers. Academia includes the world of therapists.

    But enclaves of Mandarins exist not just on the coasts or in the place of their origin, the NE. These pockets occur, for the most part, wherever there is a large university. Now, having moved south again, I live near Berkeley East, the People’s Republic of Charlottesville.

    It infuriates C’ville that its congressional representative is a centrist Republican (actually he had his Horowitz Moment and moved from the Democrat party to being an Independent). No matter who they field against him, they always refuse to look at the make-up of the rest of the district. And so they lose, and bitterly.

    The conversion process itself is fascinating. Mr. Horowitz’, mine, neo-neocon’s. It is hard to give up what is so central that it feels as though it exists at the very center of being. One looks back at that younger self with very different eyes than do those who haven’t felt impelled to re-orient and re-identify.

    Haven’t read Mr. Horowitz’ book, though now I intend to…it may help me clarify the process of metamorphosis in my own political and spiritual identity.

    Witchitaboy says he would “…love to believe that Man is good and perfectible…” and there he sums it up. The Mandarin class does indeed believe that. It believes in Utopia through management of others by their betters…and we know where that leads: Utopia is merely socialism with a better tailor.

    I have come to prefer St. Paul’s view of man, seeing the chasm between what I would do and what I actually end up doing. The old idea of Original Sin — of a basic ‘fault’ in all of us — is closest to my view.

    What finally sealed it for me was reading deeply in the Object Relations view of child development. All that greed, envy, etc., was (for me) the best explanation for the mystery of being human. As Bion says somewhere, we are born already too much for ourselves to bear.

    I look forward to your further fisking of Mr. Horowitz’ book.

  6. Witchitaboy hits on something essential about American leftist attitudes when he specifies them geographically as Northeastern.

    As someone who has lived in different parts of the South his whole life, I’ve always been struck by the double-standard that exists with regard to intellectual judgement of wrongheaded beliefs when they are held by Northerners as opposed to Southerners and Mid-Westerners.

    I’d be the last one to offer any apology for the sorts of religious fundamentalism and right-wing radicalism that can be found on the margins of Middle America. But I’ve always wondered why it is that being crazy-as-hell politically or theologically is something that’s only held against you if you are a lower-class Middle-American, whereas so much that is equally crazy-as-hell is politely tolerated, even encouraged, when it comes to those like the young Horowitz who are ruling-class and Northern.

    I can’t imagine an upper-middle-class dinner party anywhere at which someone would not be shouted down if they began to spout a sort of Timothy McVeigh right-wing paranoid party-line. But I also can’t envision, even in the deepest depths of the South, a comparable scene where anyone is ever taken to task for holding an equally paranoid left-wing position. There’s something slightly posh about left-wing paranoia that intimidates folks and makes them bite their tongues in its presence. It’s as if you might out yourself as vaguely declasse if you “spoke truth to power” in certain social spheres; it simply isn’t what’s done in those circles, most of which are located in the North or in upper-middle-class enclaves elsewhere that identify with Northern values. The gist of it is that if you have enough money and enough social standing, you can be as crasy-as-hell as you want to be.

    There’s been a good bit of discussion about why parts of Middle-America have drifted to the right in recent years, but not enough has been said has about why so many in the Northern upper-class have become so heavily invested in a left-wing world-view that seems seem just as pathological to those of us looking in from outside as various kinds of Middle-American weirdness may look to them from the other point of view.

  7. The book sounds fascinating, but I want to offer a caveat. For a while, Horowitz wrote a regular column for “Salon,” In reading it I discovered that although he is a remarkably graceful and evocative writer, he can be very sloppy with his facts. Several times he wrote about subjects I know something about. Each time, he seriously misrepresented factual material–either intentionally or, perhaps more likely, because he accepted distorted information from advocacy groups with axes to grind and didn’t check up on its accuracy. He is insightful in many ways, but not always, evidently, a good researcher or a careful critical thinker. So, be warned. To the extent that the book is about his own opinions and perspectives, I am sure it makes fascinating reading. To the extent that it tries to present factual history or information, though, I’d suggest that you read with care.

  8. In my unending quest to understand what these words I hear all the time, “liberal”, “leftist”, and “conservative”, actually mean, one thought which repeatedly recurs is that the differences revolve around fundamental notions of the nature of the world, of the nature of humanity, which are starkly at odds. One group believes that Man is essentially good and can be led back from his wayward path through good thoughts and deeds, through good speeches and “teach-ins”, and through good government. The other group believes that some people are simply evil and that perhaps all of us are a little evil sometimes.

    In assessing the nature of the world we always run the danger of coming to the conclusion we want to be true rather than to the conclusion that is true. The post-modern movement seems to sanction this. It boggles the mind that Northeastern Communists like Horowitz’s parents could have bought into that particular line of BS for so long, and yet so many of them evidently did. Apparently they went to their graves still True Believers.

    Again, how could Horowitz have possibly convinced himself that the “true” Left hadn’t yet been tried?

    I would dearly love to believe that Man is good, is perfectible, that anybody who says otherwise is the real problem. But my conscience prevents me from ever reaching that particular mental island, enticing though it may be.

  9. Another twist to the story of Krushchev’s speech: Soviet citizens were not allowed access to a transcript of the speech. So all discussion of it in the USSR was in terms of a Russian translation of the English translation, which was publicly available in the West. Otherwise, you would be admitting to illegal possession of State documents.

  10. The Khrushchev speech is a famous moment in leftist history, but by no means should it have been the first wake-up call to Horowitz’s parents. Remember that in the 1930s the communists had been fiercely anti-Nazi at first. Then came the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression pact, and suddenly commmunists in the US couldn’t praise the Nazis enough. Then of course came Hitler’s decision to invade Russia in June 1941, and the communists in the US were fiercely anti-Nazi again.

  11. What came to mind as I read of his conversion was the bombing of the UN headquarters building in Iraq and later the bombing of the Red Cross building, both of which had purposely distanced themselves from the US. The US had offered to provide security for the UN building but that offer was declined. That bombing was quite a bitter pill for Liberals, and many others, to swallow, as there had been a steady call and collective whine to the affect that the UN should be in charge of things. Then came the beheadings and now the bombing of civilians. The notion of these killers being insurgents is testimony to the Left still trying to justify the actions of these terrorists. How many have converted in light of 9/11 the above incidents in Iraq remains to be seen.

  12. I wasn’t at all sure why this particular incident had acted as the spark that had caused him to question his entire set of political beliefs.

    It seemed he could no longer justify his methods or goals, given a failure he could not displace or project unto someone else. Stalin’s failures were that “other generation’s” problem. He, however, was different. When faced with the personal guilt of having blood on his own hands, that was no longer enough psychologically to keep his identity stable. He would need something on the order of doublethink to recover.

    But he didn’t recover, and went into depression. Which, by falling to rock bottom, is how he realized that what he really needed to change was himself, not mankind, humanity, or the world: himself. By changing himself, perfection could be obtained, but changing humanity would not grant utopia.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>