The obsessive left
Christopher Booker
I am haunted by a phrase reportedly used on Monday by Mr Clive Jenkins. Explaining to the Labour Party Conference why his union would have to vote against the Government's wages policy, he said that it was 'because of our detestation of artificial curbs'. The reason why the phrase has haunted me is that it seemed to ring a bell of strange discord with one of Mr Jenkins's more celebrated previous utterances — the immortal contribution he made a year or two ago to the World at One, during the fraternal visit to this country of Mr Shelepin. The gist of his message in that interview was that, just because the Russian way of life differed in one or two respects from ours (e.g. they do not play cricket), this was no reason to be critical of their institutions and ways of doing things. As for the particular fact that Mr Shelepin was a senior member of the KGB, we should remember that this was no different in Soviet terms from an Englishman being a member of the House of Lords.
This was perhaps a slightly curious way of putting it —after all, presumably Mr Jenkins actively detests the House of Lords almost as much as he detests 'artificial curbs', while the whole purpose of deploying the analogy was presumably to indicate to us that we should not disapprove of the KGB. Even if we take his point, however, one cannot help recalling that the KGB and institutions of its type are more obviously in the 'artificial curbs' business than any other form of institution yet dreamed up by the fertile genius of man. Where, one wonders, does Mr Jenkins draw the line? The answer to the apparent riddle is, of course, perfectly straighforward. As with all others of like mind, I suspect that Mr Jenkins is against the notion of 'artificial curbs' when they are imposed by others on him, but is in favour of them when they are applied by him or his like on others. Saying which, I am afraid we are once again back on the theme which in my recent contributions to these columns will have become somewhat familiar.
Lastweek I may have baffled a few readers with my summary attempt to analyse one of the most fascinating aspects of the psychology of left-wing politics—namely its relationship to the whole principle of 'order'. On the face of it, as I argued, the left is disposed to be against 'order', as it is against 'power'.
In psychological terms, these are both 'male' notions, relating to the 'male' functions of the psyche. The political left is consciously dominated by 'female' values — feeling, compassion, care for the underdog. This is why the left is naturally opposed to such 'male' concepts as defence, nuclear weapons, law and order, and in favour of such agreeable maternalistic concepts as health, education and welfare. But as I went on to say, so immutably structured is the psychic basis for all these things that when conscious values, in these yin and yang terms, become too one-sided, the opposing or rather balancing psychic functions do not just cease to operate altogether. The more they become repressed, the more they emerge to dominate the attitudes and behaviour of the one-sided man in ways which are perverse, or to use the technical term 'inferior'.
Now what does it mean to say that the sense of order takes on an 'inferior' form? It means that it emerges not as something helping to sustain life (as order, in its true forms, as the necessary organic framework of life, should), but in a variety of guises that are strangely rigid, mechanical and deadening. Probably there is no more obvious example of this than the conspicuous left-wing affinity for all forms of bureaucracy, for those infinite Byzantine procedures which so baffle the newcomer to any Labour Party Conference, for all that literally stupefying fog of jargon which becomes so indispensible to any practising trade union leader, Labour councillor or sectarian leftist as to be part of the very air they breathe. Nevertheless there are few more strikingly complete illustrations of this bizarre relationship between the left-wing view of the world and the 'ordering' function of the mind than those afforded by the personalities of two of the most influential men of our century, each of whom I have written about separately in these columns in the past year or two, but who in psychological terms were astonishingly similar. Although they are not normally talked about in the same context, Lev Davidovich Bronstein and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret have a great deal more in common than just the fact that they both took nom de guerre —Trotsky and Le Corbusier. Although outwardly in such different ways and contexts, each of these men grew up with an abiding and fundamental hatred of the existing order of things. Each thought that the world was in an absolutely rotten state and that (to quote Le Corbusier) 'men are dying. Society is dying'.
And each thought that the only hope for mankind was that the existing order should be swept away in a cataclysm (Trotsky, of course, thought that it would be enough just to sweep away all existing social and political institutions, Le Corbusier, in saying that all existing cities should be demolished, went in a sense even further —since his vision of the 'ideal city' clearly implied a new social and political order to go with it). Although both Trotsky and Le Corbusier detested existing forms of power and author ity, they both from their earliest years exhibited an almost obsessive sense of order in their own lives (e.g. the boy Bronstein's fastidious love of neatness in his surroundings and dress), and the older they grew the more marked this became (see, for instance, the astonishing passage in Le Corbusier's Vers tine Architecture entitled The Manual of the Dwelling', in which he lays down to the tiniest detail the way people should live in their houses: e.g. 'never undress in your bedroom— it is not a clean thing to do and makes the room horribly untidy'). Of course what both men wanted more than anything else in the world was to impose their own obsessive sense of order on the Whole of mankind. Trotsky's most chilling Prescription for the ideal Communist state is the passage in hfibook Terrorism and Communism, written shortly before his brutal suppression of the Kronstadt rising, in which he argues that the only way to ensure efficient industrial production is to station behind every factory a soldier with a gun. While Le Corbusier's astonishing visions of his ideal city in Urbanisme (written only a few years later), with their gigantic skyscrapers, their grids of motorways on absolutely regular geometric lines, their vast housing estates and multi-storey car parks, betray a mechanical totalitarianism in every line.
It never seemed to cross the mind of either of these men that human beings might actually find it rather tiresome to live in these humourless and completely regimented totalitarian utopias. Le Corbusier did at least recognise that we should have to work on creating 'the spirit of living in massproduction houses', although he never doubted that one day the necessary new type of man, Modular Man, would emerge, who would find life in his anthill state quite congenial. As for Trotsky, in the years when he was quietly going off his head with boredom after the excitements of overthrowing the world of 'Father' in the Revolution, he simply took it for granted that in his Communist state 'man will become immeasurably stronger, wise and subtler. . . the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx' (even presumably if this Aristotle or Goethe is just turning a factory lathe with a gun at his back). It is perhaps one of the most astonishing comments on our century that these two Plainly certifiable lunatics should have had such unbelievable influence on the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of millions of human beings. It is certainly arguable that Trotsky, as the man who gave the crucial orders for the Petrograd coup of 1917 and then saved the Revolution from its enemies in the Civil War, has been as responsible as anyone (even including Lenin) for the fact that a third of mankind today lives under Communism. And as for the influence of Le Corbusier's writings and visions, even if they were only the most complete and persuasive statement of ideas which were already bubbling around as the spirit of the age, the results of the architectural and planning ideologies which have shaped the cities of Britain and many other countries in the past twenty years provide as eloquent a testimonial to their force as one could imagine.
Now the point about both these men is that they could scarcely better exemplify what happens to human beings when the psychic relationship to 'order' becomes split off and repressed into the unconscious. Outwardly they were both men who began from the premiss that the existing order of the world, as it had evolved organically over the centuries, was utterly corrupt. They consciously therefore, in the name of 'feminine' values such as the desire to see their fellow-men living better, fuller, more cared-for lives, became rebels. But the more a man is consciously opposed to the existing order, dominated by figures symbolic of the world of 'Father', such as Czars, top-hatted bankers and stuffy town councillors of the old school (Le Corbusier's favourite hate), the more does he unconsciously develop an overpowering desire to impose a rigid, nonlife-giving 'inferior' form of order on his fellow-men as his vision of the perfect world — a desire which becomes just an expression of the ego. That is one of the reasons why Le Corbusier wished to herd his fellow human beings into that supreme architectural expression of the ego, the tower block— and why vast concrete buildings and housing estates with their mechanically-pattened windows have become so appropriately the architectural expression of socialist totalitarianism in our time, both behind the Iron Curtain and even in the cities of Britain.
It is an inescapable law of human nature that if the outward manifestations of the 'male' functions of the psyche, the 'ordering' principle and the 'power' principle, are on a conscious level rejected, then they will always ultimately return in their sinister, unconscious form — as we can see in the bureaucracies, the regimentation, the uniforms and fondness for military display of any socialist state. Indeed the next time we hear that beguiling, insinuating, 'feminine' voice of Mr Clive Jenkins declaring how much he detests 'artificial curbs', we might pause to wonder just what is going on in his unconscious.
Previous page
