Creating the "New Man": From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities

Conclusion

214 Conclusion On the threshold of the third millennium, the fate of mankind depends on an answer to the question: is it possible to transform human nature? —Mikhail Heller, Cogs in the Soviet Wheel I mmanuel Kant once contemplated that “out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”1 After completing the writing of the preceding chapters, I feel that no other statement in the history of human self-reflection—to the best of my knowledge—is more concise yet effective in expressing my sentiments at this moment. Like many of his Enlightenment contemporaries, Kant was fond of the Chinese civilization, especially its philosophy, so much so that Nietzsche once dubbed him the Chinaman of Königsberg. It remains unclear whether Kant had ever read Xunzi, the intellectual hybrid of Confucianism and Legalism, to the extent that he came to know Xunzi’s belief that rulers must use harsh measures to straighten out the human materials (which he likened to warped lumber).2 If Kant did, we have an interesting example of a cross-cultural inspiration in regard to remaking human nature; if he did not, then the point becomes even more intriguing: how is it that these two philosophers, separated by two millennia and nurtured in two completely different cultures, came to use words so nearly identical to express such a similar concern? For me, Xunzi was simply justifying the state’s coercion of human nature. Although he did not trust human nature, he did have faith in the government.The question of whether the rulers themselves might also have a twisted mind did not concern him; therefore the possibility that their moral and political enforcement might only lead their people further astray was unthinkable. But Kant sounds more reflective, and he indeed was more conservative than many of his Enlightenment colleagues, as far as the extent to which the environment could refashion human nature was concerned. For him, some “inner fastness” of the human mind could not be conditioned. Whatever the basis was for his “crooked timber” metaphor, I believe he was referring to both the materials and the craftsman. The materials were like warped timber, arousing dissatisfaction or even loathing at the prospect of Conclusion 215 straightening them out; even if the craftsman’s mind was better formed than his materials, nothing outstanding and enduring could be expected to result from this experiment. In this sense, the history of the communist “new man” experiment started with the impulse justified by Xunzi’s sanguine belief, but in the end it got closer to Kant’s pessimistic observation, especially as more and more shocking episodes about the moral quality of many communist leaders have been revealed and entered our historical awareness. From a vantage point of living in the postcommunist era, apparently we have no reason to believe that, after decades of state engineering to reshape human nature, the Russians , Chinese, and Cubans are now morally better than most peoples in the world. Even in the 1930s and the 1960s, when those governments were claiming that the new man was being born and many in the West believed that was so, the image of the new man was still essentially a hyperbolic sketch consisting of more wish and fiction than reality, as the previous chapters have shown. But the task of a historical study is not simply to announce the failure of the creation of the new man or to denounce such efforts and enforcements as arbitrary, tyrannical, or even inhuman; it is acknowledged, though, that a historian’s approach cannot be entirely objective or value-free, and that a certain degree of moral evaluation is always inevitable as long as the subject involves human intent and action to forcibly change others’ lives. In this regard, the communist experiment has no lack of harsh critiques. Even the most revered communist hero, Che Guevara, who set himself apart from most communist leaders by establishing himself as an example of selfsacrifice , receives judgments such as “Guevara’s desire for the development of the New Man,I believe,comes from his need to control the lives of others, [and] his urge to power.”3 Throughout my research and writing of this book, I have come to believe that, like many other massive but futile and even harmful human endeavors, the goal of making people better or more virtuous—based on faith in human malleability and perfectibility, justified by ideological, moral, or spiritual concepts, and accomplished through political...