The long view as the wrong view

Though I have it here on my shelves, it's a long time - more than 30 years in fact - since I read Leszek Kolakowski's essay 'My Correct Views on Everything' [pdf]. As its subtitle informs us, it is a rejoinder to an open letter to Kolakowski from Edward Thompson [pdf]. Both the letter and the rejoinder appeared in the Socialist Register (for 1973 and 1974 respectively).

Yesterday I came across a long passage from the Kolakowski piece reproduced on Brad DeLong's blog, and one element of it caught my attention. The passage is a striking one and sharply expressed in places - here for example:

[Y]our integrity does not allow you to sit at the same table with someone who used to work in British diplomacy.

O, blessed Innocence! You and I, we were both active in our respective Communist Parties in the 40s and 50s which means that, whatever our noble intentions and our charming ignorance (or refusal to get rid of ignorance) were, we supported, within our modest means, a regime based on mass slave labour and police terror of the worst kind in human history. Do you not think that there are many people who could refuse to sit at the same table with us on this?

But what especially caught my attention was the following:

You say... that "to a historian, fifty years is too short a time in which to judge a new social system, if such a system is arising"...

Your... comment is revealing, indeed. What is fifty years "to a historian"?

You need to go to the full passage quoted by Brad DeLong to see how Kolakowski then proceeds to evoke the meaning of those years as captured in a 'thousand stories' of Soviet prisons and concentration camps. But what struck me was his insistence on not permitting the longer view, a historian's perspective, to obscure judgement about questions of morality. I'm not interested in this by way of trying to adjudicate the overall debate between the two men. In fact, if you look directly - in Thompson's open letter - for the comment Kolakowski focuses upon, you'll see that Thompson himself points to the dimension Kolakowski might be thought to be charging him with having overlooked. Asserting that he has a difficult argument to make and that he does it 'with humility', Thompson says he will touch on two considerations, and continues:

The first, which is in a sense insulting to living and suffering people, is simply that to a historian, fifty years is too short a time in which to judge a new social system, if such a system is arising. [My italics.]

In any event, the interest this has for me is that since 9/11 I've been asking myself why sections of the left are so given to making excuses for political tyranny (among other things they shouldn't make excuses for). The answer, I'm sure, is a complex one, and I had one go at it here. The exchange between Kolakowski and Thompson brings out another point. There has been a tendency in socialist, particularly Marxist, argument to substitute the long (putatively) historical view for the normal demands of morality - whether the political morality of would-be democrats or just the ordinary morality embodied in civilized codes of human intercourse. However, what may be appropriate to a long historical judgement is not appropriate to deciding about the fate, the treatment, the rights, of individual people, or indeed groups of people, here and now. They are - or at least should be - protected by principles of morality and law from the violations to which such long judgements can lead.

Nobody needs 50 years in order to see certain things clearly, especially crimes against persons. The particular historical experience under discussion between Thompson and Kolakowski accentuates the point. How many lives and for what? Sacrificed for no more than a speculation.