Coles R., The_Secular

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work on character types, that the mind responds sig-
nificantly to the social forces of a society as well as the
particular dynamics of this or that family, and he had
also anticipated by several years Erik H. Erikson s simi-
lar line of reasoning in Childhood and Society (1950).
Orwell, the idiosyncratic, levelheaded agnostic and
skeptic, was crankily contemptuous of principalities
and powers, including his own socialist brethren. He
looked askance at the modern state, and the corporate
world, and, especially, the media so much under the
control of one or the other of those two. But his picture
of the future was based on gloomy conjecture rather
than on substantial experience. In contrast, Milosz s
The Captive Mind draws on a prophetic poet s daily
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WHERE WE ARE HEADED
contact with a Stalinism terribly triumphant after the
Second World War. Indeed, only five years after 1984
was published, Milosz would make this crucial compar-
ative observation in The Captive Mind:
The citizen of the people s democracies is immune to
the kind of neurosis that takes such manifold forms in
capitalist countries. In the West, a man subconsciously
regards society as unrelated to him. Society indicates
the limits he must not exceed; in exchange for this
he receives a guarantee that no one will meddle exces-
sively in his affairs. If he loses it s his own fault; let psy-
choanalysis help him. In the East there is no boundary
between man and society. His game, and whether he
loses or wins, is a public matter. He is never alone. If
he loses it is not because of indifference on the part of
his environment, but because the environment keeps
him under such minute scrutiny. Neuroses as they
are known in the West result, above all, from man s
aloofness; so even if they were allowed to practice, psy-
choanalysts would not earn a plum, in the people s
democracies.
Here categorical assertion, even in supremely sensi-
tive and accomplished hands, proves as inadequate as
futurist fiction, such as 1984. It is worth noting, how-
ever, that Orwell the polemical essayist (and, during the
Second World War, unashamed propagandist for Great
Britain, no matter his egalitarian misgivings) was
shrewdly unwilling to engage in the kind of unqualified
analysis that tempts Milosz in the above statement,
whose simplifications, however, bear their own story:
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CHAPTER IV
the scarcely suppressed anxiety and anger of a private
person who sees firsthand and everywhere the mono-
lithic state moving in, stifling any and all expressions
of particular souls in favor of the rehearsed slogans, ex-
hortative always, of officialdom. We in the West, now,
have the privilege of noticing, right off, and in comfort-
able retrospect, the exaggerations of such a midcentury
description of what Churchill s fall of the iron curtain
meant for the psychology of millions. We can, with jus-
tification, remind ourselves repeatedly that we, too, are
not immune to the strong, if less explicit and uniformed
and politically engineered, influences abroad in our re-
spective (capitalist, democratic) lands. Still, for Milosz
the quantitative had become qualitative, and he surely
had every right to worry: a secular, political Superego
hugely watchful, able to exact a good deal of compli-
ance from the instinctual life of a people, and able to
command from the Ego every bit of responsive adher-
ence, at first perhaps out of an edgy, reluctant awareness
of realpolitik, and, eventually, with the unwilling, re-
flexic alacrity of true indoctrination so the parents
of Milosz s age must have worriedly foreseen as their
children s fate, or that of their children s children. How
long, Milosz must have wondered, would his fellow
Polish citizens stay even remotely loyal in their heads
and hearts, never mind their Sunday habits, to the
Catholic Church, in the face of the overwhelming pres-
ence of a totalitarian regime in their lives, its authority
everywhere in evidence: on the radio and television, in
the newspapers and magazines, in the schools and
universities, on constant public display through well-
organized parades, through the sight, all the time, of the
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WHERE WE ARE HEADED
police, the army, the hovering helicopters and zooming
bombers and fighters of the air force?
We know decades later that Orwell s fictional night-
mare, and that of Milosz (based, again, on experience,
on direct observation rather than futurist alarm) have
not come to pass a function of a political and religious [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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