Beyond Ideology

Whole Earth,  Summer, 2000  by Julius Lester

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Wasn't the role of the intellectual simply that--to have second thoughts and ask good questions? But an intellectual could not do that if he or she felt guilty about being an intellectual, if she or he found virtue only in something called the "working class" or something even more amorphous called "The People." The intellectual had to realize that to think and feel what had not yet been thought or felt was also work, though the hands remained uncalloused and the armpits were devoid of perspiration.

In his very fine novel, An Admirable Woman [David R. Godine, 1988], the late Arthur Cohen has his heroine say:

   The mind has its work and its materials; it has no choice in this respect.
   It can do nothing else but work properly--balancing thrust with caution,
   intuition with verification, argument with detail, interpretation with
   groundwork, grand truth with the webbing of subtle argument. The working of
   the mind is a slow and patient procedure. It cannot be rushed.... Clarity
   is the moral Duster of the mind.

This was our birthright as intellectuals, but to possess it we needed to withstand the terror, loneliness, and isolation inherent in intellectual life. The intellectual must be an Outsider because only from the outside can one see clearly what is occurring on the inside. We succumbed to the understandable human need to be at the party, standing beside the fireplace, drinking hot cider.

Such failings were predictable because it is only a short step from idealism to ideology. Both hold out the promise of giving life meaning; both promise to shelter us from the uncertainties and anxieties of self-knowledge. Ideology does not permit second thoughts, however, because ideology is a cosmology, answering all questions, past, present, and future. Eventually, thoughts become unnecessary, even first thoughts, and the struggle to be human is scorned as individualism. The factionalism and political name-calling that had alienated so many of us from the Old Left became the language of the Black Movement and the New Left.

In the spring of 1969, SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) passed a resolution asserting that the Black Panther Party was the "vanguard" of the Black Movement, the true representative of revolutionary nationalism. In my weekly column in The Guardian, I objected and wrote, in part: "What is at issue here is the correct relationship a white radical organization should have to the black revolutionary movement. By presuming to know what program, ideology, military strategy, and what particular organizations best serve the interest of the black community," SDS was being "more white than revolutionary."

Two weeks later The Guardian published a response by Kathleen Cleaver, the Panther "Minister of Communications." Among other things, she called me a "counterrevolutionary," "a fool" peddling "madness," and a "racist," and ended with these eloquent words: "Fuck Julius Lester. All power to the people!"

I did not understand. I remembered Kathleen from when she had come to work in the Atlanta SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) office, a young woman with a big grin and a lot of enthusiasm. We were pals, in the best sense of that word, able to laugh and play together. What had happened to her? What was happening to us all? Why did Kathleen need me to agree with her? Why did the blacks need me to leave my wife so they could be black? But when the personal became political, persons ceased to exist. When persons cease to exist, war is imminent.