George Santayana is a marvelous spiritual cicerone: calm, decorous, quietly insightful in prose that is as elegant as it is disabused. His most famous mot–that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”–seems especially pertinent at the present moment when a corrosive amnesia about the dangers of socialism is epidemic. Among his books, Soliloquies in England and Character and Opinion in the United States are among my favorites (I contribute an essay to a new edition of the latter that Yale University Press is bringing out later this year).
But among his supreme literary and intellectual achievements I would also place his letters. They have been published in eight plump volumes in the new MIT edition of his works. There are many, many gems there, but for the moment I want to share his tart characterization of liberalism in a letter to the magazine editor David Page in May 1937. “Ideas,” Santayana wrote
may be said to govern the world, when they are simply descriptions of the course which events have naturally taken; but to imagine that the world is governed, or ought to be governed, by a special prophetic system of demands, arbitrarily imposed, would be fanatical. Liberalism is still fanaticism, watered down. It hates the natural passions and spontaneous organization of mankind; hates tradition, religion, and patriotism: not because it sees the element of illusion inseparable from these things, but because it has a superficial affection for a certain type of comfortable, safe, irresponsible existence, proper to the second generation of classes enriched by commerce: and this pleasant ideal it expects to impose on all races and all ages for ever. That is an egregious silliness, which cannot be long-lived.
“Fanaticism, watered down,” which “hates tradition, religion, and patriotism,” not because such are human creations but because of its allegiance to “a certain type of comfortable, safe, irresponsible existence, proper to the second generation of classes enriched by commerce” which it proposes to universalize and impose everywhere. An “egregious silliness,” Santayana said, which will will perish soon. The year was 1937. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
An “egregious silliness” is right, but, as Voltaire said:”Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
The history of the 20th century was characterized by absurd movements metastasizing into murderous regimes.
“….proper to the second generation of classes enriched by commerce”
Joseph Schumpeter also warned about the sons and daughters of the affluent classes who take their wealth for granted. It allows them the luxury of embracing radical ideologies which ultimately are self destructive.
There is nothing liberal about the democratic party any more. They are the ones most blatantly looking to 20th century central planning solutions (which all failed).
I wrote this to my clients (i’m a money manager in Chicago) on October 31, 2008:
“One would think that the demise of the Eastern European police states, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the current sclerosis in diminishingly democratic Western Europe, not to mention the numerous other demonstrable failures, would have put paid to the collectivist abstractions that animate the idealist left. Not only that, even as all those experiments with socialism, communism, Communism, democratic socialism, Maoism, modern welfare-ism, and all the rest of the -isms, were found to sap the will of the people and curtail basic freedoms, the United States showed the way, creating more wealth for a broader portion of its citizenry than any nation in history. Well, here we are, appropriately, at All Hallows’ Eve, the day on which the spirits of the dead awake and haunt the world. It has become clear that no matter how many times the collectivist idea is killed, it resurrects itself to once again wreak its enervating vengeance on successful (and, of course, some not so successful) societies.”
“Egregious silliness” it certatinly is; let’s hope in the current incarnation it is indeed short-lived. I am not wildly optimistic.
Didn’t liberalism in 1937 have a different meaning than it does today? I may be completely off base, and if so I would love to be educated on the matter, but a lot of folks today describe themselves as “classical liberals”. It strikes me that Santayana’s comments, written in 1937, would be targeted at them. Today’s liberals are more in line with the radical Left, which in Santayana’s days would have been aligned with Communist movements.
Like I note, I would greatly appreciate someone to educate me on this point, if I’m completely off base (or even if I’m slightly off base).
““Fanaticism, watered down,” which “hates tradition, religion, and patriotism”
So I guess the least fascist state in the world right now is Iran, which loves its tradition (Sharia Law), its religion (Islam) and is very nationalistic and its people patriotic.
The mind reals….
eas Liberalism as imposed order is logically no different from religion based order.Santayana disliked Liberalism as it demonized religion and tradition on revolutionary and arbitrary principles rather than as a critique of the ideals religion espouses.As for your mind ‘realing’…tolerance and charity are not Islamic virtues as compared to the Christian tradition.A cheap shot if I may say so.
Daniel Crandall: I think it’s clear from the content of the Santayana quotations above that he’s talking about what you’re calling the “leftist” (or progressive) sort of liberalism.
Indeed, when I took a course on American intellectual history in college, modern liberalism was outlined as having its genesis in the mid-to-late 19th century, and it was contrasted with classical liberalism. Classical liberals said (take William Graham Sumner, for instance) that social classes owed nothing to each other. Modern liberals, on the other hand (including the progressives of the late 19th century), imagined that the reform of humanity and society could be the next step in (directed) evolution. Of course, you can also see from that history that the Eugenics movement was a logical step in the movement known as modern liberalism, just as the fantasy that man can control the global climate is today.
#6 eas:
Perhaps you should take a closer look at Iran, Amaddinuh-bama there has stated that he wants China to serve as the model for a future Iran with just a modicum of tinkering, you know, in the, you know, shia direction.
Fascism, as in the form of totalitarian socialism enters into it when Amadinuh-bob states that the market system of china, combined with its police state and capital punishment is applied to some socialist utopian model where the Iranian state elites supply “each according to his needs”, and expect each to serve “according to his abilities.
So he is saying that a totalitarian socialist regime, which already hates tradition, religion (China is an atheist state), and patriotism can operate and exist compatibly with tradition (Sharia Law), religion (shia) and, uh well no, not patriotism, because patiotism beats in the heart of those that love the land the stand on, and as such believe in the principle of individual liberty and ownership of private property i.e. the land they love).
Liberalism was first defined by David Hume, and others, in Scotland (under English monarchy), as citizenship, with rights conferred on individual citizens by G-d; not a King, nor his government. Liberalism could not be practiced, when first conceived, until a government, without a King nor its monarchy could be established. And then government granted by consent of the governed was given certain limited authorities to rule with equal application of the law over all.
So those who lived in, and knew well, the condition of being a subject of the crown, (as opposed individual citizens of their own land, and their own government, conceived, (or perhaps found the missing link, as it were, uniting) the key principals empowering the governed, from usurpation from the government that governs by their consent: Liberal Society and Republican government, with democratic institutions. Something absent in all three quantities in Iran, or China, or Britain, and now U.S.A., as are a whole lot of other places around the earth.
So your premise, that Iran, must be the least fanatacist state is specious, to say the least. Watered down liberalism, at best is Liberalism hi-jacked, and scoured of its Liberal foundations, one and all.
Someone asked, “What was the condition Liberalism found itself in 1938?” Answer: under attack, because national and international socialism attacked individual rights to anything, as some sort of blasphemy against the state, and that the state had no other option but to wipe this Liberalist paradigm from the face of the earth, as it was such a secular sin ( for planet earth) to have indulged it for as long as it had. This was how socialist Hitler, socialist Mussolini, and socialist Stalin, and later Mao felt and dealt with Liberal societies.
I’ve always felt that the Santayana’s quotation, “Those who cannot remember History, are condemned to repeat it”, could also be stated as- “Those who do remember History are condemned to repeat it, at the hands of those who don’t.
So you’re mind reels. Over what? Certainly not history
Mr. Kimball, I believe you are oversimplifying Santayana’s politics.
First of all, you are using the “history” quote out of context. However, most people who use it do this, so it is understandable.
Second, you are quoting the letter out of context. If you printed the previous paragraph of the letter, it would not go down so well with your readers:
What Santayana was mostly opposed to was radical democracy, on the principle that it would entail imposing the will of the majority on the individual, rather than affirming a rational order rooted in tradition. This is the conservative side of Santayana that Russell Kirk emphasized.