The following is a commentary by George Orwell on the intellectual backing for dictatorship and oppression. It is in reaction to the 1945 publication of Arthur Koestler's book The Yogi and the Cossack, which is a collection of essays.
It first appeared in the September 1946 issue of Politics.
THERE is a theory which has not yet been accurately
formulated or given a name, but which is very widely
accepted and is brought forward whenever it is necessary
to justify some action which conflicts with the sense of
decency of the average human being. It might be called,
until some better name is found, the Theory of Catastrophic
Gradualism. According to this theory, nothing is ever
achieved without bloodshed, lies, tyranny and injustice, but
on the other hand no considerable change for the better is
to be expected as the result of even the greatest upheaval.
History necessarily proceeds by calamities, but each succeeding
age will be as bad, or nearly as bad, as the last.
One must not protest against purges, deportations, secret
police forces and so forth because this is the price that
has to be paid for progress: but on the other hand “human
nature” will always see to it that progress is slow or even
imperceptible. If you object to dictatorship you are a reactionary,
but if you expect dictatorship to produce good results you are a sentimentalist.
At present this theory is most often used to justify the
Stalin régime in the USSR, but it obviously could be— and,
given appropriate circumstances, would be— used to justify
other forms of totalitarianism. It has gained ground as
a result of the failure of the Russian Revolution— failure,
that is, in the sense that the Revolution has not fulfilled
the hopes that it aroused twenty-five years ago. In the name
of Socialism the Russian régime has committed almost every
crime that can be imagined, but at the same time its evolution is away from Socialism, unless one re-defines that word in terms that no Socialist of 1917 would have accepted. To
those who admit these facts, only two courses are open.
One is simply to repudiate the whole theory of totalitarian
ism, which few English intellectuals have the courage to do;
the other is to fall back on Catastrophic Gradualism. The
formula usually employed is “You can’t make an omelette
without breaking eggs.” And if one replies, “Yes, but
where is the omelette?”, the answer is likely to be: “Oh
well, you can’t expect everything to happen all in a
moment.”
Naturally this argument is pushed backward into history,
the design being to show that every advance was achieved
at the cost of atrocious crimes, and could not have been
achieved otherwise. The instance generally used is the over
throw of feudalism by the bourgeoisie, which is supposed
to foreshadow the overthrow of Capitalism by Socialism in
our own age. Capitalism, it is argued, was once a progressive force, and therefore its crimes were justified, or at least were unimportant. Thus, in a recent number of the New
Statesman, Mr. Kingsley Martin, reproaching Arthur Koestler for not possessing a true “historical perspective,” compared Stalin with Henry VIII. Stalin, he admitted, had
done terrible things, but on balance he had served the cause
of progress, and a few million “liquidations” must not be
allowed to obscure this fact. Similarly, Henry VIII’s
character left much to be desired, but after all he had made
possible the rise of Capitalism, and therefore on balance
could be regarded as a friend of humanity.
Now, Henry VIII has not a very close resemblance to
Stalin; Cromwell would provide a better analogy; but,
granting Henry VIII the importance given to him by Mr.
Martin, where does this argument lead? Henry VIII made
possible the rise of Capitalism, which led to the horrors of
the Industrial Revolution and thence to a cycle of enormous
wars, the next of which may well destroy civilization altogether. So, telescoping the process, we can put it like this:
“Everything is to be forgiven to Henry VIII, because it was
ultimately he who enabled us to blow ourselves to pieces
with atomic bombs.” You are led into similar absurdities
if you make Stalin responsible for our present condition
and the future which appears to lie before us, and at the
same time insist that his policies must be supported. The
motives of those English intellectuals who support the Russian dictatorship are, T think, different from what they publicly admit, but it is logical to condone tyranny and massacre if one assumes that progress is inevitable. If each
epoch is as a matter of course better than the last, then any
crime or any folly that pushes the historical process for
ward can be justified. Between, roughly, 1750 and 1930
one could be forgiven for imagining that progress of a
solid, measurable kind was taking place. Latterly, this has
become more and more difficult, whence the theory of Catastrophic Gradualism. Crime follows crime, one ruling class
replaces another, the Tower of Babel rises and falls, but
one mustn’t resist the process— indeed, one must be ready
to applaud any piece of scoundrelism that comes off— be
cause in some mystical way, in the sight of God, or perhaps
in the sight of Marx, this is Progress. The alternative would
be to stop and consider (a) to what extent as history pre
determined? and, (b) what is meant by progress? At this
point one has to call in the Yogi to correct the Commissar.
In his much-discussed essay, Koestler is generally assumed to have come down heavily on the side of the Yogi. Actually, if one assumes the Yogi and the Commissar to be
at opposite points of the scale, Koestler is somewhat nearer
to the Commissar’s end. He believes in action, in violence
where necessary, in government, and consequently in the
shifts and compromises that are inseparable from government. He supported the war, and the Popular Front before it. Since the appearance of Fascism he has struggled against
it to the best of his ability, and for many years he was
a member of the Communist Party. The long chapter in
his book in which he criticises the USSR is even vitiated by
a lingering loyalty to his old party and by a resulting tendency to make all bad developments date from the rise of Stalin: whereas one ought, I believe, to admit that all the
seeds of evil were there from the start and that things would
not have been substantially different if Lenin or Trotsky
had remained in control. No one is less likely than Koestler
to claim that we can put everything right by watching our
navels in California. Nor is he claiming, as religious
thinkers usually do, that a “change of heart” must come
before any genuine political improvement. To quote his
own words:
“Neither the saint nor the revolutionary can save us;
only the synthesis of the two. Whether we are capable
of achieving it I do not know. But if the answer is in
the negative, there seems to- be no reasonable hope of
preventing the destruction of European civilization, either
by total war’s successor Absolute War, or by Byzantine
conquest— within the next few decades.”
That is to say, the “change of heart” must happen, but
it is not really happening unless at each step it issues in
action. On the other hand, no change in the structure of
society can by itself effect a real improvement. Socialism
used to be defined as “common ownership of the means of
production,” but it is now seen that if common ownership
means no more than centralised control, it merely paves the
way for a new form of oligarchy. Centralised control is a
necessary pre-condition of Socialism, but it no more produces Socialism than my typewriter would of itself produce this article I am writing. Throughout history, one revolution after another— although usually producing a temporary relief, such as a sick man gets by turning over in bed—has
simply led to a change of masters, because no serious effort
has been made to eliminate the power instinct: or if such an effort has been made, it has been made only by the saint, the Yogi, the man who saves his own soul at the expense of
ignoring the community. In the minds of active revolutionaries, at any rate the ones who “got there,” the longing for a just society has always been fatally mixed up with the
intention to secure power for themselves.
Koestler says that we must learn once again the technique
of contemplation, which “remains the only source of guidance in ethical dilemmas where the rule-of-thumb criteria of social utility fail.” By “contemplation” he means “the
will not to will,” the conquest of the desire for power. The
practical men have led us to the edge of the abyss, and the
intellectuals in whom acceptance of power politics has killed
first the moral sense, and then the sense of reality, are urging us to march rapidly forward without changing direction.
Koestler maintains that history is not at all moments pre
determined, but that there are turning-points at which humanity is free to choose the better or the worse road. One such turning-point (which had not appeared when he wrote
the book), is the Atomic Bomb. Either we renounce it, or
it destroys us. But renouncing it is both a moral effort and
a political effort. Koestler calls for “a new fraternity in a
new spiritual climate, whose leaders are tied by a vow of
poverty to share the life of the masses, and debarred by
the laws of the fraternity from attaining unchecked power”;
he adds, “if this seems utopian, then Socialism is a utopia.”
It may not even be a utopia— its very name may in a couple
of generations have ceased to be a memory— unless we can
escape from the folly of “realism.” But that will not hap
pen without a change in the individual heart. To that ex
tent, though no further, the Yogi is right as against the
Commissar.
