Why does revolution, that noble enterprise that kicks off with lofty ideals and uplifting visions of utopia, soon become terror, war, empire and authoritarianism? It’s a question I’ve often wondered about, thinking up specific causes, but, until reading Camus’ The Rebel, never found a cogent, higher level explanation.
The French revolution, lit by the shining virtues of liberty, equality, fraternity, soon became a bed of chopped heads in the Terror, followed by the Revolutionary Wars, the First French Empire, and the Napoleonic Wars.
The Russian Revolution, instead of the egalitarian communist utopia, created civil war, concentration camps and the gulag, empire building, the Great Purge, and the NKVD and the authoritarian police state.
Two examples needn’t prove a point, and you could argue that perhaps it needn’t be so – revolution needn’t necessarily be guilty of the crime charged. There are examples too, where things improved after governments were removed – Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, or South Korea’s uprising.
The counter is, though, that, the names notwithstanding, these were not revolutions in a real sense – at least not the sense I mean it in here. A ‘revolution’, as Camus writes in The Rebel, entails a vision of the world, based on ideals – absolute ideals, rather than moderate ones (not a little less unequal, but absolutely equal; not a little less slavery, but absolute liberty) – and sets about to remake the world in the name of (and, supposedly, in the vision of) these ideals. It is not, therefore, simply a change in government, nor even the bringing down of a dictatorship for a democracy, though these might be components of a revolution.
Proceeding then, with the premise that revolution, originating in and claiming to herald lofty ideals, becomes instead terror, war, empire and authoritarianism, one asks, why?
There are reasons that come to mind, simple explanations that seem to explain. The easiest is that revolutionary ideals are unrealistic, impractical – they are an ideal state, never possible to realize, meant for theory. In practice, we work towards them, coming closer and closer without ever arriving, like an asymptote of a curve. It doesn’t explain, though, why revolution may become the opposite of those ideals – terror instead of liberty, authority instead of equality.
Another is the good old cynical take, that while many chumps drink the kool-aid and fall for the idealistic propaganda revolutions market themselves under, the movers and shakers, those in charge of events, are coolly pragmatic, interested only in securing power for themselves. One elite displaces another in the guise of revolution. While plausible, though impossible to verify, I wonder if it is true. To read even a little about the leading figures of revolution, whether Robespierre or Saint-Just or Lenin or Trotsky, is to be struck by their conviction and idealism and often irrationality. Is all that a charade? Can one explain away years of grind and exile, risk to life and limb and spells of prison, and tomes of theory and principles and ideas, as a high stakes gamble for a shot at power? At the risk of naivety, I would guess not entirely.
Or is it simply that revolution is one thing, and governance another? Ideals and principles might inflame from the outside and bring down empires, but peter out in the mundane day-to-day of governance. In Kafka’s words, ‘Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy’.
Combining the banality of governance and impracticality of the ideals of revolution is the idea of sin inherent in ruling. “No one can reign innocently,” Saint-Just of French Revolution fame is supposed to have said. The very fact that one is reigning, the act of ruling, destroys the ideals the revolution espoused and brings with it sin and the loss of innocence. The boss, no matter how nice or chill, is, after all, your boss, and you can never forget that, and neither can he. And, after all, an excessively nice boss, or king, rarely lasts – his niceness is his end.
Revolutions, so far, Camus writes, if I understand rightly, have been metaphysical revolutions. One absolute ideal is replaced with another – God with reason, Church with the state, or God with history (the Marxist inevitability of history, as deterministic as divinity), and monarchy or theology with ideology.
Revolution begins with rebellion, the moral origin of revolution. What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. To not imply a renunciation is to not negate every single value, to hold on to at least something. Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.
That something is a value that must be defended, which in turn implies a limit that ought not to be breached, and thus a point after which one says, ‘so far but no farther’. This ‘no’, therefore, is also a ‘yes’. Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified. It is in this way that the rebel slave says yes and no at the same time. He affirms that there are limits and also that he suspects and wishes to preserve-the existence of certain things beyond those limits.
In Camus’ framework, nihilism is the precursor to modern revolution. It’s not something I’d have imagined myself, but, seen in the light of how he defines rebellion and revolution, it makes sense.
Turgenev describes a nihilist in Fathers and Sons – “a nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered“. In practice, however, one doesn’t live in a void – the principles already exist, all around us. Like an application with a default opt-in, principles, of whichever hue, are by default accepted – until they aren’t.
This transition from acceptance to rejection, isn’t, in practice, easily glided over. The nihilist doesn’t simply ‘not accept’ values, even at a personal level – he has to actively destroy them after denying them. When there is no moral law, one can destroy all values via the nihilism that denies everything – nothing is true, everything is permitted. Rebellion then, when it forgets its limits – the ‘yes’ that it affirmed – becomes nihilism.
In practice also, however, there is nothing as true nihilism. This is firstly because of the law of the jungle, that might makes right and “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. If everyone were to create their own values, in the absence of any restraints (and, in the absence of common values, there cannot be common restraints) there would be nothing to stop the powerful dominating the weak.
And secondly, because true nihilism would not hold even existence as a value, let alone something as arduous as revolution. Absolute nothingness precludes life itself; to deny everything without replacing it by at least something is feasible only in death. The contemporary revolution which claims to deny every value is already, in itself, a standard for judging values. Man wants to reign supreme through the revolution. But why reign supreme if nothing has any meaning? Why wish for immortality if the aspect of life is so hideous? There is no method of thought which is absolutely nihilist except, perhaps, the method that leads to suicide, any more than there is absolute materialism.
The contemporary revolution which claims to deny every value is already, in itself, a standard for judging values. Which is to say that nihilism in practice is not really the denial of all values, not a simple ‘nothingness’ that denies everything. Those ideals the revolution upholds remain after its nihilistic bout. Revolution converges around these absolute ideals, though what it shall finally lead to, Camus shows, is cynicism.
By denying values, nihilism is the metaphysical revolution against God, divine authority. And by replacing values – for there can never be none – it is the substitution of man for god. When man kills God, he must become God himself. That god takes many forms. It may be sanctifying mankind in ‘the will of the people’ through a ‘social contract’, or deifying history itself as a relentless, unstoppable march over and above human wills towards the inevitable communist utopia, or worshipping dear leader under the fascist Führerprinzip. In all cases, though, the revolutionaries, having murdered God, now seek to take his place.
Revolution then, sets forth the absolute ideal, and at the same time, nihilistically destroys the limits that rebellion defends, in pursuance of that ideal. Thus, when revolution claims to create absolute justice, it justifies absolute violence – everything is permitted.
Rebellion begins with a yes and a no – a resistance against an injustice and at the same time an affirmation of limits that must be defended. Nihilism destroys those limits, even as revolution, in the name of an absolute, seeks to remake and transform the world into a utopia.
What is a utopia, though? A paradise. Not lighter chains, but liberty. And not less disparity, but equality. Paradise on earth, however, is fragile, and the subject of intrigues of ‘enemies’; therefore, ceaseless vigilance and terror is the order of the day to realize the dreams of the revolution and safeguard it from those – and there always appear to be many of the kind – who would defile it.
So much for terror and violence. But paradise is also, by its nature, difficult, if not impossible to achieve. Which means, in practice, paradise is always tentative – some distance off in the future. The present, however, must be sacrificed, one generation after the next, in the name of and for the sake of this future. Marx’s communist utopia, for example, was always deferred to the future, never negated. The inevitability of history, of ‘dialectical materialism’ was always sacrosanct, but always speculative – communism would prevail, and mark the end of history, but no one could be certain when.
Unless forcibly ended, then, revolution continues, ad nauseam – no longer in the streets, however, but in the saddle of government, as bureaucracy. ‘Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy’. What sort of bureaucracy is it, however, that upholds a day-to-day existence in the name of lofty ideals that are far from realized, even as it pretends they have been achieved, and will be even further achieved in the future, and, moreover, as it thus everything in its power to deny them? A convention that guillotines all and sundry in the name of virtue and reason, a “people’s rule’ that ships millions to the gulag as ‘enemies of the people’, or ‘national socialists’ that suppress a nation? Only a cynical one.
Cynical in the sense that it believes in nothing but itself (and, of course, in that it practices the very opposite of what it preaches). The contemporary revolution which claims to deny every value is already, in itself, a standard for judging values. It denies everything except itself. The arbiter of success, the benchmark by which anything is to be measured, is success itself. The ends justify the means.
Nazism is the paradigm of this cynicism, its most glaring example, for the reason that it was also the most brazen about it. Hitler’s words, “the victor will never be asked if he told the truth”, ironically used today to insinuate his demonization as a propaganda job by the victorious Allies, reflects in reality his overwhelming belief in success and nothing else. His words, “it is not truth that matters, but victory,” explain this simply – the victor won’t be asked if he spoke the truth, because he’s the victor, and because truth doesn’t matter.
With this belief firmly entrenched in one’s mind, and solely this belief and nothing else, one can believe anything and deny everything. “The victor will always be the judge and the vanquished will always be the accused,” Goering wrote on his indictment at Nuremberg. Whether true or not – and that is debatable – the idea of success as the basis of judgment is the idea that everything else is irrelevant. Success as the be-all and end-all means that if you are evil, and you win, your villainy is forgiven; if you are good, and you lose, your goodness doesn’t matter. With such a mindset, even a Holocaust is not beyond imagination.
What makes cynicism yet more potent is that it increases the odds of revolution’s success. The particular faction that wins out is likely the most cynical one, devoid of qualms, ready to deploy any means at its disposal. Perhaps that was also a reason for Nazism’s success at a time of communist ascendancy. Spirited ideologues may argue and split hairs about the finer shades of communism or socialism, others may cherish monarchism, but the cynic, who knows that all are matters of complete indifference, can be anything to anyone, as long as he wins. Junger drew the conclusion from his own principles that it was better to be criminal than bourgeois. Hitler… knew that to be either one or the other was a matter of complete indifference, from the moment that one ceased to believe in anything but success.
Of course, after cynicism comes the police state, necessary to uphold the so-called revolution and keep it alive, imposing its will on those it claims to liberate. And so, revolution, beginning in the idea of justice, ends with the police state; the movement to destroy a tyranny ends by establishing its own.
Finally, what then, averts this outcome? The chain from rebellion to nihilism to revolution to cynicism and the police state breaks when rebellion remembers its limits and refuses to become nihilistic. It does this by its affirmation of limits – of oneself, of others, and even of ideals. One’s own limits, as well as others’, inviolable, need to be defended, even as another’s mustn’t be violated, not even for perfection, for the most grand of ideals, and even, I think, at the cost of success, even if it makes rebellion weaker. And then affirmation also of the limits of ideals – seeking a measure of justice, but not absolute justice, recognizing that, even after rebellion, there will still be injustice.
Camus’ idea of rebellion, which is much more elegant than what I’ve written here, is also beautiful for its connection to his idea of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus. The rebel is the collective response to the absurd, as Sisyphus is the individual. The latter revolts against the world’s absurdity, meaninglessness; the former against moral absurdity, injustice. One is existential, the other ethical; one rejects suicide, the other revolution – Sisyphus refuses to kill himself, as the rebel refuses to kill others. That, however, is a complete topic in itself, perhaps even more difficult to think through than this one was.
Nihilism – Turgenev, Sade
Funny, rebel usually below revolution, french nay sire, camus inverts