Fei and Berdyaev contra Dreher

Reading Rod Dreher’s repeated attempts to talk himself into supporting Trump in the upcoming presidential election and re-coining the phrasing of ‘cultural socialism’ as a thing to describe features of hypermodernity which he doesn’t like, I really don’t have much better a riposte to make than that already made by Alan Jacobs at Snakes and Ladders.

[T]he strategies that Christians and conservatives and, in general non-socialists used to survive under Soviet-sponsored socialism are likely to become immensely relevant to many American Christians and conservatives in the coming years. But that doesn’t mean that what we’re battling against is a form of socialism, cultural or otherwise. I would argue rather that it’s the ultimate extension of the free market — a kind of metaphysical capitalism.

I think Jacobs is absolutely correct here about what we might call ‘the nature of the beast’, and you don’t have to look far to find where I agree on that. It’s worse than obfuscation to deliberately mislabel a cultural phenomenon like ‘woke neoliberalism’ (or ‘woke capitalism’ or ‘metaphysical capitalism’) as any kind of socialism, a term which refers to a principle of œconomic organisation, despite some socialists perhaps being attracted to it. But here’s the thing. If you want to understand why socialism has such a strong appeal among young people, including to myself, one has to look honestly at the history of conservative thought and praxis in the Old World.

A case in point – and one which Dreher might appreciate: Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong 費孝通, who has been one of my intellectual heroes since I first picked up From the Soil. Fei Xiaotong is most famous for his defences of the peasantry and of sociology in China, for the latter of which he was branded a ‘rightist’ and subject to the brutal excesses of the Cultural Revolution – he was stripped of his academic credentials and forced to clean toilets throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The degree to which Fei actually was a rightist is a matter of some debate. In his early years, he was given to no particular political worldview unless it was a mild form of conservative Chinese patriotism – and even that was tempered by a certain cosmopolitan sensibility engendered by his education in Christian schools. Indeed, his conservatism was more of a gentle, English reformism – he modelled his intellectual course after the Russian white émigré Sergei Shirokogoroff as well as the Polish-British functionalist sociologist Bronisław Malinowski. He militated strongly against both Marxist and Whiggish forms of developmentalism, and sought to understand the institutions of indigenous, rural and agrarian societies instead on their own terms. After his visit to America, this understanding manifested itself as a kind of ‘reactionary’ tendency that led him to briefly embrace Spengler – he retreated into a critical embrace of Chinese family life and the independence of familial bonds from the state.

Fei Xiaotong, like poet and fellow Anglophile Wen Yiduo 聞一多, embraced left-wing politics fairly late in the day, and that largely in response to the corrupt, brutal, callous and authoritarian right-wing rule of the Chinese Nationalists (Guomindang 國民黨). It is really necessary to understand how hated the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 had made themselves in the 1930s and 1940s with their internal policies. Flush with American aid money, their grandees lived in luxury while peasants starved to death by the millions or were shot and bayonetted by the Japanese, against whom they fought a war that was characterised by their total lack of concern for Chinese livelihoods in bello. The Communists under Mao Zedong 毛澤東 managed to attract to themselves a great deal of sympathy by the fact that they promised to undertake the reforms that the Nationalists wouldn’t – in effect, they won by capitalising, violently, on the promises made by the father of the Nationalist Party, Sun Zhongshan 孫中山.

Fei had never been a particular fan of the Communists, or of Marxism. But, as Arkush describes, starting in the 1940s he was led more and more to embrace explicitly left-wing and socialist political positions because he was able to see, at the ground level, the impoverishing and demoralising effects Nationalist political repression, Nationalist concentration of wealth and Nationalist corruption had on peasant family life:

Fei probably only became really interested in politics during the war, in 1943 or so. As a boy and in college, he had been unconcerned with such things. He later mentioned a ‘radical atmosphere’ at the London School of Economics, but there is no indication he was caught up in it. In Peasant Life, written in 1938, he fleetingly criticised the government for its inability to carry out practical rural reforms because of spending so much money on anti-Communist campaigns, but he also suggested that political issues were unimportant, the result of mere factual misunderstandings which would be dispelled by books such as his about ‘actual conditions’. Similarly, in his articles on rural policy written during the early war years, he offered suggestions to the government, but his criticisms were mild and the tone calm.

A little later, just before and during his trip to the United States, Fei seems to have become more concerned over the Nationalist Government’s behaviour. In April 1942, he signed with eight others a long statement protesting the harmful effects of inflation, and proposing government controls and heavy taxes on the rich… Finally, his articles from the United States praising the American war effort implicitly threw Chinese wartime policies into a bad light. In the preface to the first collection of these, dated October 1944, Fei’s disgust with the Nationalists’ corruption and demoralisation was explicit and bitter:

One thing is the same in each article, and that is that I was taking the United States as a mirror to ourselves… In their society the distance between rich and poor is decreasing because of the war, with us it is increasing daily. In order to win the war they have devoted half their citizens’ total income to military expenses, with us it is probably less than one tenth and most of the nation’s wealth is locked in foreign banks. Their sons all do military service without regard to rich or poor, high or low; we have a special class which enjoys honour without the responsibility of protecting the country. They go without coffee and meat at home so that the front lines won’t lack these; with us the rear consumes ceaselessly and frontline soldiers die on the road. The sons of their leaders are first in the line of fire; the relatives of our important people use foreign exchange to travel abroad. I need not give further examples of the difference between the two. I just want to ask, how can we be this way—are we richer, stronger, less afraid of national extinction, more shameless? What can I say?

Amazingly, the exact same criticisms that the elected ‘socialists’ in our day – Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley and others – are making about our social order, come not from Marxist principles but from the same observations that the temperamentally-conservative Fei Xiaotong was making in his day about his own country. They see a growing wealth gap; they seek to lessen it. They see capital flight; they seek to stop it. They see poor and indebted young people fighting and dying in endless wars which seem to have no point; they seek various means to end those. They see a political class immune from the consequences of its evil actions; they seek to hold it accountable. I do not share the cultural priorities of these elected officials, but I also have to acknowledge that they do not seek violent or destructive means of accomplishing these goals, but work within the legal confines of our established political system.

The end result in China, of course, was not that the Nationalists changed direction and backed down. Bending an ear to those who held that the reformers were really just Communists in disguise, the Nationalist leadership cracked down on the critical reformists and gunned down the Christian activist Li Gongpu 李公樸 and the aforementioned Wen Yiduo in cold blood on the streets of Kunming. (They had made plans to assassinate Fei Xiaotong as well, but he had fled with his family and several other reformist intellectuals to the American consulate in Kunming.) Arguably, with those and similar actions around the country, they practically handed the moral high ground over to the violent revolutionaries under Mao Zedong, and forfeited the sympathy not only of the peasantry but of the critical intelligentsia whose support they required to rule. The Nationalists had pushed Fei Xiaotong from being an apolitical sociologist with certain ‘reactionary’ sympathies hard to the left by virtue of their brutality – and he was by no means alone. Again, Arkush:

To say he [Fei] was an implacable foe of the Nationalists is not to say he was really close to the Communists in his political views. As late as 1947, he was still writing longingly about Anglo-American democracy and constitutionalism, freedom of the press and rule of law, and the peaceful democratic socialist revolution of postwar England. These political values kept him somewhat aloof from the Communists in the 1940s and were to cause friction between him and them in the 1950s. Yet, a few people who were students at the time have told me of being radicalised by Fei’s articles in the late 1940s, and it seems not unlikely that many young readers must have been encouraged to join cause with the revolution by the persuasive and popular writings of this calm and reasonable scholar about rural distress, Guomindang oppression, American international capitalist exploitation and minzhu 民主 (democracy). The disaffection of intellectuals from the Nationalist Government was a significant factor in the eventual success of the Chinese revolution, and it is worth a close look to see the process by which one so little inclined to radicalism as Fei Xiaotong came to support it.

Dreher’s book promises to be an anthology of voices from white émigrés who lived under communism and fled it, and seek to warn us of its consequences, and these voices are well worth listening to. But it strikes me that he could stand to read more carefully the experiences of not only Fei Xiaotong but also Nikolai Berdyaev and his own impressions of the Soviet revolution as he lived through it. Berdyaev, along with the rest of the Vekhi circle, bitterly opposed the revolutionaries of 1905 – it goes without saying that he was no Bolshevik and had no love for them. But as his book on The Russian Revolution written some time later made clear, he understood the 1917 revolution within its historical context in a Dickensian way, as the judgement of God upon a society which could not and would not listen to those of its members who urged timely and necessary reform within the existing rule of law. ‘Revolutions are a payment of the debts of the past.’

It therefore strikes me that if we want to avoid a violent revolution of our own – and believe me, I want to avoid a violent revolution if at all possible – then we need to start paying down those debts now. It should not be the case, but the elected ‘democratic socialists’ are the only ones right now promising to do just that. With a very few honourable exceptions on the right (such as, off the top of my head, Republican Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee) literally nobody else seems willing or able to push back on the problems of endless war; imperial overreach; a hollowed-out œconomy; a rapidly-warming planet; mountainous consumer debt; a widening wealth gap; and a callous, greedy, hubristic political class on autopilot.