Roger Scruton, Mindless Optimism and the IMT

The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope : Roger Scruton :  9781848872011 : Blackwell's
Roger Scruton’s brilliant book, The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope

Months after leaving the International Marxist Tendency, I discovered the work of Roger Scruton – or rather, rediscovered it. Scruton, who died in January 2020, had been an old hero of mine from when I had thought of myself as a conservative. After his death, I felt a tinge of sadness, suppressed because of my involvement in the cult. On the day his death was announced, I believe I was returning from having given a talk at the Birmingham Marxist Society. I went onto YouTube and began watching a Dutch documentary from the 2000s in which he was featured. The whole thing was quite novel for me – I suspect because the Anglosphere no longer does this sorts of long-form, high-brow broadcasting quite so much. It was almost two hours of Scruton at his home or out hunting, waxing lyrical about philosophy, art, religion, culture and all the things he held dear. BBC would never air such a thing, not just because Scruton was an evil Tory but because their audience is unlikely to have the intellect or the attention span to absorb it. Instead they would rather churn out stuff like EastEnders. (Apologies to all those who enjoy EastEnders.) I remember sharing a post on Facebook to the effect that Scruton may have been an evil reactionary, but his 2009 BBC documentary on the decline of art was magnificent. The truth is I couldn’t bring myself to hate the guy. He was a great mind. A ‘class enemy’, but a great mind all the same. Two months later, I had left the cult. I could not have foreseen it at the time. Perhaps the two things are connected. After all, I still listened to ‘heretics’ like Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Murray from time to time, so is it any surprise? Maybe I wasn’t a good Marxist after all. I have read that one part of rescuing people from a cult is reintroducing them to their pre-cult past. I never really broke from it entirely, and therefore, a ‘relapse’ into reaction was always on the cards.

One of the many books I ordered during that long summer of recovery was Scruton’s The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope, from 2010. In it, he talks about the virtues of a cautious approach to politics and society, which treasures openness, dialogue and a civilised acceptance of differences, as well as a respect for the inheritance of the past and the rejection of drastic change or top-down social engineering projects. It is a blend of the thoughts of Burke, Hayek, Oakeshott and others, as well as Scruton’s own contributions. It was great validation for me, because one thing I had struggled with in the IMT was the obsessive, mindless optimism that was inculcated into all of us. In the IMT, I was indoctrinated to believe that ‘Marxists should be optimists’ and that the dialectic of history ensured our victory. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky had all prophesied the final triumph of the working-class and of socialism. There was therefore no excuse for feeling downhearted, frustrated or disappointed at events. We would rarely, if ever, admit to setbacks. We would set absurd, Stalinist targets that involved doubling the membership or pushing towards a weekly paper. This attitude also involved Stalinist lies about how successful we had been, as well as assurances that more success was in our future. This mindless optimism made no room for critical thinking or scepticism. There was no room for re-evaluation, for reconsideration of certain tactics or slogans or methods of organisation. All this was anathema to us. Militant had the same problems, which led to the eventual downfall of the organisation. The IMT’s account of the split gives the strong impression of a leadership which had become blind to reality and was convinced that it was on the cusp of the British revolution. Only a minority within the leadership could see things more clearly (though they had their own delusions). Of course, when the Minority split from the Majority and founded the IMT, they replicated all the same problems in their organisation, in the belief that they would not go the same way. How little things change.

The idea that you have to be optimistic all the time is absurd. Sometimes pessimism is justified, and a sober look at reality is vital for the heath of any individual and any political project. Blind optimism is what gave us the horrors of Stalinism. If Lenin had spent even five minutes thinking about the possible consequences of his actions, instead of blithely assuming that his coup would be followed immediately by a Europe-wide revolution, the Russian Communists would not have ended up having to deal with civil war, international isolation and the disasters of forced collectivisation and bureaucratic tyranny. I remember a conversation with the regional full-timer prior to my leaving, when I raised the issue of how we could be so sure that a future revolution would not result in another abortion. He said that there was no guarantee, and that we had to hope for the best possible objective conditions. In other words, luck. We had to have blind faith that the objective conditions in future revolutions would be better. In other words, discount the possibilities of civil war, international isolation, massive death and destruction and the traumatising of an entire society for generations. This is the fruit of blind optimism. And yet Marxism is meant to be ‘science’. What kind of science neglects this kind of basic, rational, cost-benefit calculation?

Even when I was in the organisation, there were moments when I resented this patronising and somewhat dangerous demand to be optimistic at all times, even when it was unjustified. My natural pessimism put me at odds with the organisational culture that demanded this preposterous self-delusion at every turn. It was with a feeling of vindication that I read Scruton’s powerful last words in The Uses of Pessimism:

‘…a community without conviction, in which nobody believes he has the divine right or the historical duty to make war on those who disagree with him: a community in which irony flourishes and forgiveness has a chance. Of course, such a community does not entirely lack conviction. It depends on constraints, on a sense of life’s meaning and on the quiet faith that maintains those things in being through hardship and strain. But it will be profoundly opposed to the “life of conviction”, in which an overarching commitment obliterates the hesitations which are the best we can hope for, when addressing the long-term future of mankind.

The worst are precisely those who wish to sweep away the settled community of strangers, and to impose in its place either a divinely ordered “brotherhood”, or the conscripted unity of a society at war. The best are those who are no more convinced about anything, than they are convinced that convictions should not matter. Robespierre, Lenin, Hitler, Sartre, Mao and Bin Laden do not share many features. But they are united in one thing, which is the “passionate intensity” that comes from demanding conviction and unity in the place of settlement and doubts.’ (pp.224-225)

What Scruton was indicting is precisely the attitude that characterised life in the IMT. Blind faith, naive optimism and complete ideological unity around the ‘program’, the ‘line’, the ‘correct ideas’. This impeded the more thoughtful attitude that is necessary for the success of any project, political or otherwise. Anyone who asked difficult questions, like myself, was quickly shown the door. There was no room for doubters, no room for pessimists, no room for ‘conservatives’. At last I embraced what I really was – a conservative – and accepted the label of pessimist, reactionary and ‘petty-bourgeois sceptic’ with pride. In these ideologically polarised times, scepticism and pessimism is what we need in place of blind allegiance to this or that cause, to this or that set of slogans or societal projects. Human ills will not be solved by wishful thinking. The Russian Communists found out the hard way that blind optimism and sheer willpower is not sufficient to remake a whole society on the basis of Marxist idealism. Try as they might, they could not make the planned economy work. They could not make people internationalists rather than patriots who loved their own culture and national heritage first. They could not make people irreligious, for people clung to religion all the more in times of stress, and Communism itself tried to make itself a secular religion. They could not make people unselfish or anti-capitalist, as black marketing, smuggling and kickbacks were rife, and people exploited what loopholes they could to feed their families rather than suffer in the name of social solidarity. The ‘objective conditions’ that caused Russian communism to fail were human nature and social and economic reality. These are not unique to Russia, but are obstacles to the establishment of utopia in any country in the world. There is no context in which the communist experiment could have succeeded. It has not worked in Russia, or Cuba, or Benin, or Ethiopia, or China, or Cambodia or Chile or Venezuela. There is no reason to believe that doing the same damn thing again will see a different outcome. Let us heed the wisdom of Scruton and other conservative pessimists and think twice before embarking upon dangerous projects of social reconstruction heedless of the consequences.