Interesting Articles

[benji]

On Nepenthe:

The Crusade of Indignation
James Baldwin
The article originally appeared in the July 7, 1956, issue of The Nation.

“The love of money,” St. Paul once wrote, with a fairly typical lack of precision, “is the root of all evil.” This formulation seems to leave a great many evils out of account, and it does not even raise the question of just why the human heart, in which this love of money lives, should be so base. Nor does it raise the question of what money is, what is its power, what it means to people or states. With so many knotty questions thus neatly disposed of, people who share Paul’s attitude about money can also believe—as he, being bigoted in quite another direction, did not—that people will be made better as their economic state improves. It is an extremely attractive theory, and most of us have at one time or another espoused it.

Only—in order to bring about this economic utopia, one needs a band of people who do not care about money—or power?—who will carry out the necessary operation of taking the money from those who now have an abundance of it and distributing it among those who have too little.

In this operation—the love of money persisting so tenaciously—blood is likely to be shed. And the shedding of blood will probably prove to be the operation’s most real achievement. When things go back to what may be called normal, it will be seen that the people who were to be made better still persist in loving money and in trying—no matter what it may do to themselves, their neighbors, or their children—to make it.

...

The love of money thesis is the thesis of Daniel Guerin’s Negroes on The March, and, since I find it impossible to take the thesis seriously, I find it rather difficult to discuss the book—which is, anyway, less a discussion of the American Negro’s situation than a rather shrill diatribe against the capitalist system. No one with any pretension to intellectual honesty claims that the capitalist system is perfect, or is likely to be made so. It may indeed be doomed, and we may all be the slothful and pussy-footing creatures Mr. Guerin says we are. But his own tone is so extremely ungenerous that I cannot avoid a certain chill when I think of the probable fate of dissenters in his varicolored brave new world. Here he is on Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish social scientist whose An American Dilemma Mr. Guerin finds "feeble in interpretation". (All italics are Mr. Guerin’s). "…it does not explain how, by whom, and why race prejudice was brought into being." (It certainly does not; I, too, should like to read the book which does.) But Myrdal’s feebleness, it turns out, is blacker than mere incompetence: “Without calling into question Myrdal’s good faith, we must nevertheless make the observation that his method is quite in harmony with the concerns of those who subsidized his work and serves their interests quite well. For what did the trustees of the Carnegie Foundation actually want?” What they didn’t want was a “cause-and-effect relationship…established between capitalist oppression and race prejudice.” Bright students, or people who have heard this song before will already have guessed the reason, as follows: “…victims of race prejudice would be likely to draw conclusions dangerous to the established order.” Nor would the awakened white workers have taken long to realize that their best interests lay in black-white solidarity. Myrdal’s real task, according to Mr. Guerin, was to avoid saying anything which, by leading to such a holocaust, would displease and possibly destroy the Carnegie Foundation.

A man whose vision of the world remains as elementary as Mr. Guerin’s can scarcely be trusted to help us understand it. It is true enough, for example, as far as it goes, that slavery was established and then abolished for economic reasons; but slavery did not come into the world along with capitalism any more than race prejudice did; and it need scarcely be said, at this late date, that where capitalism has been abolished slavery and race prejudice yet remain. It is also true—again, as far as it goes —that, as Mary McLeod Bethune said, “The voice of organized labor has become one of the most powerful in the land and unless we have a part in that voice our people will not be heard.” But “our people” are then speaking as a part of organized labor. Labor’s interests may often be identical with the Negro’s interests; but Mr. Guerin fads to understand that, in the light of the white worker’s desire to achieve greater status, his aims and those of the Negro often clash quite bitterly.

All this is changing, to be sure, but so very, very slowly, and in such unexpected ways that only a madman would dare to predict the final Issue—if one can speak, in human affairs, of a final Issue. The world in which people find themselves is not simply a vindictive plot imposed on them from above; it is also the world they have helped to make. They have helped to make, and help to sustain it by sharing the assumptions which hold their world together. Mr. Guerin’s book, so far from having broken with any of the assumptions which have helped to cause such agony in the world—so far from being revolutionary or even “modern”—is a desperate cliche, is painfully, stiflingly old-fashioned. It is certainly not revolutionary today to suggest, that, whereas it was wrong for capitalists to murder workers, it is right for workers to murder capitalists; whereas it is wrong for whites to murder Negroes, Negroes may be pardoned for murdering whites. Mr. Guerin is unable to recognize a sadly persistent fact: the concepts contained in words like “freedom,” “justice,” “democracy” are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply. Since Mr. Guerin lacks any sense of history, except as something to be manipulated, and has really no respect whatever for the human personality, he is unable to give us any sense of the perpetual interaction of these forces on one another. Without this sense all states become abstractions, and lawless ones at that.

Mr. Guerin wants us all to go out right away and begin preparing for the equitable new state which will succeed to the present inequitable one; and should the present state seem reluctant to wither away, he has no objection to setting it to the torch. One of his heroes, John Brown, is one of the minor villains in J. C. Furnas’ admirable Goodbye To Uncle Tom. Mr. Furnas’ attitude can be gathered from his comment that “What Mrs. Stowe and John Brown did was not to create the forces that would free the slave but to make sure that North and South went into their crisis in the least promising state of mind.” In view of the enormous bitterness the Civil War has left us, this statement seems disquietingly close to the truth. It suggests that indignation and goodwill are not enough to make the world better. Clarity is needed, as well as charity, however difficult this may be to imagine, much less sustain, toward the other side. Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about social indignation is that it so frequently leads to the death of personal humility. Once that has happened, one has ceased to live in that world of men which one is striving so mightily to make over. One has entered into a dialogue with that terrifying deity, sometimes called History, previously, and perhaps again, to be referred to as God, to which no sacrifice in human suffering is too great.