The Captive Mind Revisited
Editor's Note
Why are intellectuals — those whose thinking is supposed to be most refined — so susceptible to totalitarianism? From the Soviet Union to woke America, elite intellectuals have been among the most dedicated proponents of ideological systems totally opposed to the freedom of thought and conscience they should naturally espouse.
Ryszard Legutko revisits this question at the heart of Czesław Miłosz’s seminal book on the phenomenon among his own contemporaries (and himself). Alongside some interesting insights into Miłosz’s work, Legutko concludes that the totalitarian threat of the 21st century may be more subtle (and thus more dangerous) than that of the 20th — but that the sources of its downfall may be much the same.
Czesław Miłosz published The Captive Mind in 1953, a few years after he had abandoned Poland and sought political asylum in France. “Abandoned Poland” is not entirely an accurate phrase. After the war, Miłosz worked in the communist diplomatic service, first in Washington and later in Paris. How the Stalinist authorities ruling Poland agreed to employ him in such a capacity may seem strange today. Two factors came into play here.
First, the communists wanted to present themselves from the best side in Western countries, and they needed people with good names, not hostile to the new regime, to represent them. The communists launched a policy of buying well-known and highly reputed writers. They gave them houses, sometimes with a car and driver, additional privileges, and promises of large editions of their works. Or they employed them in the diplomatic service. This policy lasted for several years and proved quite effective.
Second, Miłosz had friends well-positioned in the new communist structure in Poland, friends from his days as a student at the Wilno University, historically Poland’s second oldest university (now in Lithuania). Among these friends, we should mention Jerzy Putrament, a mediocre writer but powerful apparatchik, one of the negative characters in The Captive Mind. In the beginning, he supported Miłosz and put him in the communist diplomatic corps. But later, he changed his mind and decided to bring Miłosz back to Poland so that he could forever enjoy a communist paradise. Miłosz saw through his colleague’s intentions and chose freedom.
The question Miłosz addressed in The Captive Mind was why the East European cultural elites, in such a significant number, gave their full-hearted support to the political system that was so unquestionably inhuman, mendacious, savage, and murderous. Why did people who should have valued freedom in particular, people whose activities derived from imagination and thinking — both, one would assume, inextricably linked to freedom — so massively endorse a system of ruthless enslavement on a grand scale? It did not require any special mental effort to see the mind-boggling wickedness of the system, but it did require a special intellectual perversion to find beauty and hope in this wickedness.
What can one say about The Captive Mind after seventy years, a rather long period for a book that initially was conceived as a pièce de circonstance? One of the most interesting parts of the book is the description of the cases of four Polish writers who were deeply immersed in communism and abased themselves to write disgraceful things. I will skip this theme, however, for the simple reason that it may be of interest to a rather small group of readers.
Instead, I focus on the main message of the book. Broadly speaking, there have been two tendencies in dealing with the totalitarian temptations of intellectuals. Some authors argue that it was the ideas that seduced or duped intellectuals. Others believe that the motives were mundane: it was the terror that did the thing, and the elites supported the system out of fear but also out of a desire for the privileges that awaited them in the new regime.
Miłosz opted for the first option and reduced the role of the mundane. I will show, however, that his analysis applied to the communism of those times was largely off the mark and resulted from his own personal entanglements. But, paradoxically, his interpretation is much more persuasive when we look at the problem of totalitarian temptations of intellectuals more broadly, especially in our times.
Now, a few words about the book. Miłosz explained his position by introducing several concepts, not always clearly defined. He wrote about communism as a New Faith, meaning a set of ideas that were to change the bourgeois capitalist world, by analogy to those propounded by the Christians who ultimately transformed the Roman Empire. According to the New Faith, not only did neutral and politically disinterested thought and art have no sense, but they were profoundly harmful to the cause.
Miłosz also wrote about the Method (capital M) the intellectuals found in the New Faith. Method referred to dialectical materialism as part of Marxism but also to dialectics, which in Marxist practice meant thinking and arguing in such a way that every fact or argument could — depending on political need — be either discredited if contradictory to the doctrine or harnessed to its service. Method gave the intellectuals a sense of self-confidence as it admitted no intellectual wavering, no ambivalence or second thoughts.
Another concept — perhaps the best-known one — is Ketman. Taken from Persian Islam, this concept described the game that intellectuals who knew the truth played with the authorities to hide their real views. In fear of repression, they resorted to various tricks in their statements and actions, sometimes quite complicated and subtle. In the countries of the New Faith, this practice was supposed to provide relative security against the repressive system, sometimes to cover up internal opposition, and, quite often, to build one’s self-esteem by feeling contempt for all those who sincerely believed in the communist ideology.
There is yet another term that helps to understand Miłosz’s argument: the Hegelian Bite. Although the term did not appear in the book, it accurately captured its message. Miłosz himself coined it later when commenting on The Captive Mind. The term alluded to Hegel, a German philosopher who wrote about the spirit of history revealing and simultaneously implementing the rationality of the world in the historical process. Miłosz claimed that the intellectuals, entrapped by Hegel, Marx, or anyone of that persuasion, followed their belief that the world had an objective direction of development. The New Faith identified the end of history with unswerving certitude: it was communism.
The Hegelian Bite was allegedly a convoluted reaction to the universal feeling of despair and hopelessness that came after World War II and the conviction that the war showed the moral weakness of the West. After millions of victims in the war, after the genocide at Auschwitz, few intellectuals in Eastern Europe believed that the West, which had allowed this to happen and even, to some extent, generated it, could be a model for the new post-war world. Hence, people looked to the East, to the Soviet Union. When Russia joined the Allies (after having been attacked by Hitler), her old sins were forgiven, and Stalin became one of the world’s great leaders.
Naturally, the argument that the intellectuals humbly served the totalitarian regime because they were asphyxiated by historical necessity did not appeal to everyone. One of the anti-communist Polish writers wrote sarcastically that it was not Hegel who bit but Stalin, Beria, the KGB, and their accomplices in each of the communist countries of the Soviet bloc. According to this view, there was hardly any enigma in the servility of intellectuals but simply frailty as old as the human race: fear, slavishness, the desire for privilege, voluntary self-abasement, and the inexhaustible inventiveness of self-deception. Miłosz’s Ketman was — on the same view — more his literary invention than a description of identifiable tactics some East European intellectuals actually chose to pursue.
Today’s reading of The Captive Mind indirectly confirms this opinion. The reader is struck by the loquacity of this book, but loquacity of a special kind. It is not that Miłosz had problems with the essayistic form, far from it. The point is that the reader easily notices a glaring disproportion between the long theoretical inquiry into the captive minds’ tribulations and the relative simplicity of this inquiry’s object. The book contains too many words, comments, and insights to unravel the secret that was not there.
We understand this once we realize that communism in its most ruthless form in Eastern Europe had a rather short life — from 1946 or 1947 to 1955 or 1956. Miłosz, of course, could not know how long the New Faith in its extreme form would last, but the book assumed its triumph to be final, a sort of mental earthquake or an apocalypse sweeping away culture and making obsolete the old keys to understanding the world. The minds fell into captivity, he said, because adjusting to the New Faith was the only rational thing to do, however humiliating and unpleasant. The repugnancy of the New Faith regime did not make it less powerful or its reign less inevitable.
However, the passing of those seven or, at most, ten years was enough to make Miłosz’s diabolical picture of communism look exaggerated. After 1956, the political system in Eastern Europe no longer had any mystery (not that it had had one before). Yes, many intellectuals believed it would last for a long time, but not because of the New Faith, Ketman, Method, or Hegelian Bite, but because of the Soviet tanks. The Hungarians could see it for themselves when their attempt to regain partial independence met with the invasion of the Red Army, followed by merciless and bloody reprisals. It became clear to all thinking people in Eastern Europe, including a considerable number of card-carrying communists, that the system was maintained by the political police, a well-developed and harsh apparatus of repression, censorship, fear, natural conformity, adjustment, the pressures of everyday life, and, last but not least, the Soviet Army. If, after those few years, such was the state of people’s minds, then it is clear that Miłosz’s earlier diagnosis could not have been correct. Suffice it to say that less than 30 years after the publication, John Paul II visited Poland, and the following year, the Solidarity Union was established. What had been once supposedly a diabolical system that was to transform the world fell like a house of cards.
If Miłosz’s diagnosis was off the mark, it means that the true anti-communists — patriots, ordinary people protecting the heritage of their ancestors, priests who maintained faith in the Gospel and organized parish communities, and so many other groups and persons who despised the New Faith, rejected it, opposed it as much as possible, and counted on it eventually being annihilated — were right and the believers in the New Faith were wrong.
It was hard not to despise the New Faith, after all. The intellectual and artistic production of that period reached an incredible level of crudeness, offending the most elementary aesthetic sensibilities. A few years later, another great Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert, who never made any compromises with communism, expressed this in a frequently quoted poem: “It did not take any great character our refusal dissent and persistence / we had a scrap of necessary courage but essentially it was a matter of taste.”
The Captive Mind not only found some serious thought-provoking acrobatics in the intellectuals’ involvement in this crude production; it also expressed contempt for those who displayed “refusal dissent and persistence,” all those anti-communists, reactionaries, patriots, and the like. Of a representative of these groups, Miłosz wrote:
He despairingly repeats ‘honor,’ ‘fatherland,’ ‘nation,’ ‘freedom,’ without comprehending that for people living in a changed (and daily changing) situation, these abstractions take on a concrete and totally different meaning than before. Because they so define a reactionary, dialecticians consider him a mentally inferior, and therefore not very dangerous, creature.
A reader might assume that the above quotation expresses an opinion of a New Faith intellectual and that Miłosz simply reconstructed it. But this is not true. Unfortunately, Miłosz himself was also bitten by Hegel, and he could have espoused the quoted view without reservation. We can substantiate this with irrefutable evidence of Miłosz’s own words. Years ago, correspondence was published between Miłosz, who had already been in exile at that time, and Melchior Wańkowicz, a Polish writer who would not return from that exile until 1958. Wańkowicz was quite critical of Miłosz’s ambivalent attitude. And he was right. The attitude toward the New Faith attributed in The Captive Mind to the New Faith intellectual was, to some non-negligible extent, Miłosz’s own attitude.
Let us take the above quoted phrase about the intellectual inferiority of patriots and conservatives in relation to communists. In a letter to Wańkowicz, Miłosz wrote:
The communists in France have the most outstanding minds and discuss problems that Polish emigrants have never dreamed of. Among the students of the Sorbonne, if someone is not a communist, they are treated like a poor idiot. … In fact, I have never met such pure people as some Polish communists.
Ironically, one could say that it is a great pity that nothing valuable produced by those most outstanding French minds has survived, and what has survived is worthless. About communists being “such pure people,” no comment is necessary.
Or let us take Miłosz’s argument about historical necessity that supposedly gave the New-Faith people an advantage over others because they understood the apocalyptic, and therefore irreversible, nature of the communist change. In The Captive Mind, we find the following passage:
The Method exerts a magnetic influence on contemporary man because it alone emphasizes, as has never before been done, the fluidity and interdependence of phenomena. Since the people of the twentieth century find themselves in social circumstances where even the dullest mind can see that ‘naturalness’ is being replaced by fluidity and interdependence, thinking in categories of motion seems to be the surest means of seizing reality in the act.
In a letter to Wańkowicz, Miłosz made the following remark about the Soviet occupation of Poland: “It is not true that this is simply the partition of Poland – there is such a transformation that no one will recognize her [Poland], it is an event in motion; and it will get back at all those who cannot adapt their minds to understand events in motion.” Even the phrases in both quotes are almost identical.
Does this mean that the analysis of the captive minds stemmed from false assumptions, and the author’s intention was mainly to find some subtle and intellectually compelling justification for his own involvement in communism? Not entirely.
After and despite these critical remarks, Miłosz should be given justice. Although terror and cowardice played a more prominent role in the degradation of East European intellectuals than ideas, it would be untrue to claim that ideas had no impact on the enslavement of minds. To see that such a claim would be untrue, it is enough to look at the conduct of intellectuals in Western Europe or America in the times covered by the book and in places where there was no terror or censorship and where information about communist crimes was widely available. Western sympathizers of communism fell into a state of mental collapse of their own accord and precisely under the influence of ideas. The totalitarian temptation among intellectuals turned out to be so strong that it not only survived communism but, in recent decades, has shown a clear upward trend, both in terms of the number of those affected and the increase in repression against the opponents.
Miłosz’s description of an ideological trap was largely correct. This trap, it will be recalled, was based on two basic presuppositions. The first is that we live in a time of breakthrough, in which everything old loses its legitimacy and is annihilated by the influence of change (“ideas in motion”). The second presupposition says that the changes that are taking place are inevitable, and therefore, no force can stop or reverse them (“the Hegelian Bite”).
Let us look at our times and at the dominant left-wing liberal ideology — today’s Neo-New Faith — and we will see that both presuppositions are there in full force. What we today call wokeism and political correctness have grown out of them, and without them, they would not have appealed to so many minds.
Those who preach them perceive our epoch as both the twilight age and the dawn age. We had the end of history, the end of great narratives, and a culture of exhaustion. We have postmodernism, post-politics, post-culture, post-truth, post-metaphysics, post-philosophy. It seems as though we are reaching the end of what started in Greece, Jerusalem, and Rome. Until the era of today’s emancipation, the entire history of the Western world was a history of universal discrimination: colonialism, sexism, racism, misogyny, binarism, Eurocentrism, phallocentrism, logocentrism, homophobia, populism, bigotry, fascism, nationalism, transphobia, and dozens of other sins. And this world has ended — or, rather, is ending — due to the revolution in customs, morals, and technology and to the ongoing victories of feminists, LGBT groups, and their comrades-in-arms in the fight for human rights.
The second assumption also holds today: changes are believed to be irreversible. The concept of “nature,” which animated the old structure of Western culture, has been demystified and subverted. What Miłosz said in 1953, that “naturalness is being replaced by fluidity,” has in our times become an essential constituent of the new orthodoxy. Whoever dares to deny today that nature has once and for all evaporated falls into serious trouble. We have been repeatedly told that there is nothing natural in family, distinction between male and female, morality, human reflexes, and empirical evidence, and that to say otherwise is like saying that we can recreate eggs from an omelet.
Let us note that the talk about fluidity and “ideas in motion” started well before The Captive Mind, as early as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolsheviks also denied that there was anything natural, the only exception — not surprisingly — being the two sexes. But the fluidity attributed to the new world — whetherBolshevik, Stalinist, or liberal-leftist — should not confuse us. Fluidity may be fluid, but there is always Method that infallibly indicates what must be done, and whoever does not comply must be punished. Ideas may be in motion, but an intellectual must not move and must be tough in defense of the Neo-New Faith and unrelenting toward its opponents. Inconsistency? It does not matter, because consistency belonged to a world of the past that the Neo-New Faith has declared dead and buried.
What is an intellectual to do in such a cultural environment? Who will want to defend a world that supposedly no longer exists or nature that the most outstanding minds of France and beyond have nullified, a world that fed on discrimination against countless groups? As in Miłosz’s time, someone who would stand by the old notions must surely seem to most of these outstanding minds a poor idiot and a contemptible reactionary.
History is repeating itself. As in the past, today’s intellectual decency and respect for truth are with those who reject the Neo-New Faith and are immune to new versions of the Hegelian Bite, not with those who attempt to enforce new ideology and who kowtow with awe to the allegedly implacable verdicts of progress.
The Neo-New Faith has turned out equally degrading as the New Faith of old and for the same reason: woke production in art and thought is marked by incredible crudeness and, like in communist intellectual output, its ideological message is scant and pathetically repetitive. Whatever the adherents to the Neo-New Faith touch upon – whether Homer, mathematics, biology, or philosophy – they always come up with the identical conclusion about someone discriminating against someone else, or somebody emancipating oneself from somebody else, or both. In the prevailing ideological language, mendacious to the core, this insulting-to-human-intelligence message that Neo-Method generates is called “openness.”
Those who have refused any concession to Neo-New Faith could, like Herbert, say that their refusal required, perhaps, a scrap of necessary courage, but essentially, it is a matter of taste. Rejecting Neo-New Faith on aesthetic grounds is obviously not enough, but it is a natural first step, after which other steps are sure to follow.