Human Utopia: The Great Liberal Death Wish

The built-in propensity of the liberal world view is to create the opposite of what is intended.

Malcolm muggeridge has completed the first two volumes of his memoirs entitled Chronicles of Wasted Time. The third volume is nearing completion. The following article, which gives a fascinating peek into the inner workings of his brilliant mind, is adapted from a speech he gave at Hillsdale College, Michigan, in 1979, and is used by permission.

One never knows what Muggeridge conceives to be the gospel. One could always wish the skeletal structure of a full-bodied evangelical faith stood out more boldly. But one is never in doubt as to what Muggeridge is against, and he is always against the right things. Like Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian of a generation ago, his diagnosis is infallible. At the very least, he knows what the sickness of man is. And in Muggeridge’s case, he points us in the right direction to find the cure. You will be amused as you read his story. But it will also strengthen your heart and mind to meet the illusions and the nonsense of our day.

—Eds.

I grew up in a little suburban house in south London. On Saturday evenings my father and his cronies would assemble in the sitting room to plan the downfall of the capitalist system and the replacement of it by one which was just, humane, egalitarian, and peaceable. I would hide in a big chair and hope not to be noticed. These were good, honest, and sincere men, and I accepted their views completely. Once they were able to shape the world as they wanted it to be, they would create a perfect state of affairs in which peace would reign, prosperity would expand, men would be brotherly and considerate, and there would be no exploitation of man by man, nor any ruthless oppression of individuals. It was a sort of spillover from the practice of nonconformist Christianity, not a brutal ideology, and I was entirely convinced that such a brotherly, contented, loving society would come to pass once they were able to establish themselves in power.

Such was my baptism into the notion of a kingdom of heaven on earth—what I was going to understand ultimately to be the great liberal death wish. Inevitably, my father’s heroes were the great intellectuals of the time, who banded themselves together in what was called the Fabian Society of which he was a very active member. All the leftist elite—Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Harold Laski—belonged to this Fabian Society, and in my father’s eyes they were princes among men. I accepted his judgment.

My first shock came at a meeting of the Fabian Society where H. G. Wells was speaking. I can remember vividly his high squeaky voice saying—and it stuck in my mind long afterward—“We haven’t got time to read the Bible. We haven’t got time to read the history of this obscure nomadic tribe in the Middle East.” Subsequently, when I learned of the things that Wells had got time for, the observation broke upon me in all its richness.

That was how my impressions of life began. In 1920, when I was 17, I went to Cambridge University. It was for me a different sort of milieu, where the word “socialist” was almost unknown. But my views about how the world was going to be made better remained firmly entrenched in the talk of my father and his cronies.

From Cambridge I went off to India to teach at a Christian college in a remote part of what was then Travancore, but is now Kerala. It was associated with the indigenous Syrian Church, an ancient church dating back to the fourth century, and now there are a million or more Syrian Christians. In its way it was quite an idyllic existence. For the first time, however, I came up against naked power, which I had never before thought of as something separate from the rest of life.

But in India—where the British raj, with a relatively few white men, ruled over three or four hundred million Indians—I came face to face with power unrelated to elections or any other representative device in the great liberal dream that became the great liberal death wish. The Indian nationalist movement was beginning, and [Mohandas] Gandhi came to the college where I was teaching. This extraordinary little gargoyle of a man appeared, and held forth, and everybody got tremendously excited. They shouted against imperialism, and the empire in which at that time the great majority of the British people firmly believed, and which they thought would continue forever.

If you ventured to say, as I did on the boat going to India, that it might come to an end before long, they laughed you to scorn, being firmly convinced that God had decided that the British should rule over a quarter of the world, and that nothing could ever change this state of affairs. This again opened up to me a new vista about what power signified, and how it worked, not as a theory, but in practice. We used to boast in those days that we had an empire on which the sun never set Now we have a commonwealth on which it never rises, and I can’t quite say which concept strikes me as being the more derisory.

I came to England and for a time taught in an elementary school in Birmingham, and married my wife Kitty. She was the niece of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, so it was like marrying into the aristocracy of the Left. After our wedding, we went off to Egypt, where I taught at the University of Cairo. It was there that the dreadful infection of journalism got into my system.

Turning aside from the honorable occupation of teaching, I started writing articles about the wrongs of the Egyptian people, how they were clamoring, and rightly so, for a democratic setup, and how they would never be satisfied with less than one man-one vote and all that went therewith. I never heard any Egyptian say that this was his position, but I used to watch those old pashas in Groppi’s café smoking their hubble-bubble pipes, and imagined that under their tar-booshes was a strong feeling that they would never for an instant countenance anything less than full representative government. That at least was what I wrote in my articles, and they went flying over to England like homing pigeons and in through the windows of the Guardian office in Manchester, at that time the high citadel of liberalism where The Truth was expounded and enlightenment reigned. These were the golden days of liberalism when the Manchester Guardian was widely read, and even believed.

My first day there somehow symbolized the whole experience. I was asked to write a short leader of about 120 words on corporal punishment. At some headmasters conference, it seemed, words had been spoken about corporal punishment and I was to produce appropriate comment. So I put my head into the room next to mine, and asked the man who was working there: “What’s our line on corporal punishment?”

Without looking up from his typewriter, he replied: “The same as capital, only more so.”

So I knew exactly what to tap out, you see. That was how I got into the shocking habit of pontificating about what was going on in the world, observing that the Greeks did not seem to want an orderly government, or that one despaired sometimes of the Irish having any concern for law and order—all weighty pronouncements tapped out on a typewriter, deriving from nowhere, and for all one knew, concerning no one.

We were required to end anything we wrote on a hopeful note, because liberalism is a hopeful creed. So however appalling and black the situation we described, we would always conclude with some sentence like: “It is greatly to be hoped that moderate men of all shades of opinion will draw together, and that wiser councils may yet prevail.” How many times I gave expression to such jejune hopes!

I soon grew weary of this, because it seemed to me that immoderate men were rather strongly in evidence, and I couldn’t see that wiser councils were prevailing anywhere. The depression was on by that time, and it seemed as though our whole way of life was cracking up. I looked across at the USSR with a sort of longing, thinking that there was an alternative, some other way in which people could live. I managed to maneuver matters so that I was sent to Moscow as the Guardian correspondent, arriving there fully prepared to see in the Soviet regime the answer to all our troubles. In a very short time, however, I discovered that though it might be an answer, it was a very unattractive one.

It’s difficult to convey to you what a shock this was. What I had supposed to be the new brotherly way of life my father had imagined long before was on examination an appalling tyranny, in which the only thing that mattered, the only reality, was power. So again, like the British raj in India, I was confronted in the USSR with power as the absolute and ultimate arbiter.

I came to reflect afterward that this was simply the famous lines in the Magnificat working out: “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek,” whereupon, of course, the humble and meek become mighty in their turn and have to be put down. That is just history: people achieve power, exercise power, abuse power, are booted out of power, and then it all begins again.

That, however, was a thing one could take in one’s stride. What touched off my sense that Western man was, as it were, sleepwalking into his own ruin was not so much what was happening in the USSR but the extraordinary performance of the liberal intelligentsia, who, in those days, flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca. They were one and all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there. Clergymen walked serenely and happily through the antigod museums, politicians claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet economy. They all wrote articles in this sense which we resident journalists knew were completely nonsensical. How could this be? How could this extraordinary credulity exist in the minds of people who were adulated by one and all as maestros of discernment and judgment? At that moment I began to get the feeling that a liberal view of life was not what I’d supposed it to be—a creative movement which would shape the future—but rather a sort of death wish. How otherwise could you explain how people, in their own country ardent for equality, bitter opponents of capital prison, supporters, in fact, of every good cause, should in the USSR prostrate themselves before a regime ruled over brutally, oppressively, and arbitrarily by a privileged party oligarchy? I still ponder over the mystery of how men displaying critical intelligence in other fields could be so astonishingly deluded.

We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves by competing with one another as to who could foist upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most outrageous fantasy. We would tell them, for instance, that the shortage of milk in Moscow was entirely due to the fact that all milk was given nursing mothers—things like that. If they put it in the articles they subsequently wrote, then you’d score a point. One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building socialism that they just wouldn’t rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in.

I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant. That’s when I began to think seriously about the great liberal death wish.

In 1945, I tried to sort out my thoughts about the great wave of optimism that followed the Second World War—for me, a repeat performance. I realized that, in the name of progress and compassion, terrible things were going to be done. There was a built-in propensity in this liberal world view whereby the opposite of what was intended came to pass.

Take the case of education. Education was the great mumbo-jumbo of progress, the assumption being that educating people would make them grow better and better, more and more objective and intelligent. Actually, as more and more money is spent on education, illiteracy is increasing.

Now there’s this strange state of affairs of what I’ve called the “humane holocaust”—this dreadful slaughter that began with 50 million babies and will undoubtedly be extended to the senile old and the mentally afflicted and mongoloid children because of the great cost of maintaining them. Long before the Nazis got into power in Germany, a great propaganda campaign was undertaken in order to sterilize people who were considered to be useless or a liability to society, and after that to introduce what they called “mercy killing.” This happened long before the Nazis set up their extermination camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere, and was based upon the highest humanitarian considerations. It is not true that the German Holocaust was simply a war crime as it was judged to be at Nuremberg. It was based on a perfectly coherent, legally enacted decree approved and operated by the German medical profession before the Nazis took over power. In our mad world, it takes about 30 years to transform a war crime into a compassionate act.

Now if, as I fear, this compassionate or humane holocaust gains momentum, it will put the German Holocaust in the shade. You see what I’m getting at? On a basis of liberal-humanism, there is no creature in the universe greater than man, and the future of the human race rests only with human beings themselves, which leads infallibly to some sort of suicidal situation. The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite.

This leads me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept of a Being greater than themselves, and of a purpose that transcends their own egoistic or greedy desires. Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a Creator who has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the megalomania of which we’ve seen so many manifestations in our time—the crazy dictators, the lunacies of the rich or the celebrated. Alternatively, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being animals. The Holocaust is just one example of this irresistible process.

This isn’t actually despairing conclusion; the fact that we can’t work out the liberal dream in practical terms is not bad news, but good news. If we could work it out, life would be too banal, too tenth-rate to be worth bothering about. Apart from that, we have been given the most extraordinary sign of the truth of things, which I continually find myself thinking about. This is that the most perfect and beautiful expressions of man’s spiritual aspirations come not from the liberal dream in any of its manifestations, but from people in the forced labor camps of the USSR.

Yugoslav writer Mihajlo Jihajlov, who spent some years in a prison in Yugoslavia, cites case after case in his book Underground Notes of people who, like Solzhenitsyn, say that enlightenment came to them in the forced labor camps. They understood what freedom was when they had lost their freedom; they understood the purpose of life when they seemed to have no future. They say, moreover, that when it is a question of choosing whether to save your soul or your body, the man who chooses to save his soul gathers strength thereby to go on living, whereas the man who chooses to save his body at the expense of his soul loses both body and soul. This fufills exactly what our Lord said: he who hates his life in this world shall keep his life for all eternity, and he who loves his life in this world will assuredly lose it. That’s where I see the light in our darkness.

I feel strongly at the end of my life that nothing can happen to us in any circumstances that is not part of God’s purpose for us. Therefore, we have nothing to fear except that we should rebel against his purpose, that we should fail to detect it and fail to establish some sort of relationship with him and his divine will. On that basis, there can be no black despair, no throwing in of our hand. We can watch the institutions and social structures of our time collapse—and I think you who are young are fated to watch them collapse—and we can reckon with what seems like an irresistably growing power of materialism and materialist societies.

But that is not the end of the story. As Saint Augustine said when he received the news in Carthage that Rome had been sacked: “Well, if that’s happened, it’s a great catastrophe, but we must never forget that the earthly cities that men build they destroy, but there is also the city of God which men didn’t build and can’t destroy.”

When you’re old, as I am, there are all sorts of extremely pleasant things that happen to you. For one, you realize that history is nonsense. But the pleasantest thing of all is that you wake up in the night and you find that you are half in and half out of your battered old carcass. It seems quite a tossup whether you go back and resume full occupancy of your mortal body, or make off toward the bright glow you see in the sky, the lights of the city of God. In this limbo between life and death, you know beyond any shadow of doubt that, as an infinitesimal particle of God’s creation, you are a participant in God’s purpose for his creation, and that that purpose is loving and not hating, is creative and not destructive, is everlasting and not temporal, is universal and not particular. With this certainty comes an extraordinary sense of comfort and joy.

Nothing need shake that feeling; all the happenings in this world, including the most terrible disasters and suffering, will be seen in eternity as in some mysterious way a blessing, as a part of God’s love. Only insofar as we belong to that love does our existence here have any reality or any worth. The rest is fantasy—whether the fantasy of power that we see in the authoritarian states around us, or the fantasy of the great liberal death wish in terms of affluence and self-indulgence. The essential and necessary feature of life is to know reality, which means knowing God. Otherwise our mortal existence is, as Saint Teresa of Avila said, no more than a night in a second-class hotel.

During his long career, Malcolm Muggeridge has, among many things, been a journalist, author, lecturer, novelist, British Intelligence agent during World War II, and editor of Punch. He lives in Roberts-bridge, Sussex, England.

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