There is much less intellectual diversity now than there was 100 years ago

There is much, much less intellectual diversity now than there was one hundred years ago. It is impossible to imagine someone like Oswald Spengler arising in the intellectual world of today, much less his becoming a cultural sensation. The Overton window has not merely shifted Left but drastically narrowed. Even Leftists were much more interesting and diverse one hundred years ago–one cannot imagine a character like Georges Sorel in today’s world either. One hundred years ago, the ideological landscape was a dizzying array of communists, Fabian socialists, anarcho-syndicalists, guild socialists, laissez faire classical liberals, nationalist liberals, distributists, agrarians, and Carlists. And when I say that these groups existed, I mean not as a couple of isolated dissidents unable to propagate their doctrines, the way dissidents exist today, but rather that they had significant followings and were able to participate in the great debate about how society should be organized. The metaphysical debate, too, was much more open, as it was an age of positivist, but also of spiritualism, Bergsonianism, and the neo-scholastic revival. Today, we have a consensus with enthusiastic support from nearly all writers, and the few whose support is less that enthusiastic know that it is professional suicide to openly question it.

What happened? Is this just the natural evolution of intellectual life–one school wins the debate, and then consensus is achieved? One does not see nearly the same contraction between 1820 and 1920. The center shifted Left (Jacobins became Bolsheviks, and Legitimists became Social Catholics) but the spread remained wide. Arguably, the spread of beliefs had been increasing with time since the Renaissance.

Anyway, we know what happened. The communists won World War II, and imposed an ideological purge of unprecedented savagery, universality, and thoroughness. Remember, the post-war red terror that engulfed France killed far more people than the Jacobin Reign of Terror. German de-Nazification would be called an ideological tyranny if it were ever objectively described, and it brainwashed a generation of Germans. The German soul of romantic discomfort with the modern world was murdered, with disastrous consequences for European culture. Liberal democratic cosmopolitanism didn’t win any arguments; it won a war, and got to impose itself by force.

Intellectual diversity died very quickly, but not immediately. The early post-war period (late forties to early sixties) seems like a golden age to us–with the existentialism craze and the early, creative days of the New Left and the New Right; it was quite pathetic compared to the pre-war intellectual adventure, but the mindless sixties that followed make it look good in retrospect. Even seventies-to-eighties intellectual discourse, e.g. the liberal-communitarian debate, seems impressive to us. It was never allowed to have any practical consequences (communitarians would never dreamed of supporting any concrete anti-liberal measures except the socialist ones that the Left already endorsed), but it was a real debate with an actual disagreement and actual dialogue between the two sides. But even this was not sustainable. It required at least one side to implicitly disagree with some aspect of the victorious Allied consensus without acknowledging it. Critics could aways put an end to this by screaming “Fascist!”, and the accused could do nothing but surrender or enter the tiny ranks of intolerable dissent. This has, of course, devastated the intellectual Right, but it has also drastically constricted the intellectual Left, which once also had many branches that would now be accused of being “fascist”. (Actual fascists were intellectually quite eclectic.)

The first step is to acknowledge what has happened.

1. Far from “allowing previously marginalized voices”, the range of “heard” opinions today is far narrower than at any other time in modern history. Nor was the single voice allowed today absent a hundred years ago. It just wasn’t the only one.
2. This occurred not by rational persuasion but by force. “We won the war” is not an argument.
3. The constriction is continuing. It has gone far beyond what the original de-Nazifiers had planned, but it has a momentum of its own which if unchecked (and it remains unchecked) must annihilate intellectual life entirely, leaving nothing but wild or opportunistic accusations of hidden fascism.

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