In Response to "Discredited Beliefs"

"In the real world as [Karl] Popper knew perfectly well, the response of the scientist who has proposed that all swans are white when a black swan appears is not to say cheerfully 'Wrong again!' It is to say, 'You call that a swan?'"

— Adam Gopnik, "The Porcupine," The New Yorker (1 April 2002)

I write in response to Peter Kenez's amusing and restrained, but lethal essay about how students of communism have dealt with the beliefs that they — or perhaps I should say "we" — held before the Soviet Union collapsed. About those unfortunates who actually lived under communism, I have little to add to what he has said. I will concentrate on my colleagues and contemporaries, with whose situation I am more intimately familiar.

Peter Kenez's essay has some of the tonic quality that conversation with him has always had for his friends: the pleasures of bold but informed speculation, the stimulation of the occasional counter-factual, the generally low-keyed linkage of our individual, private lives with the terrible public events of our era, a mordant appreciation of the human comedy.

I find nothing to quarrel with in what he has written. Academics and politicians are not like Brendan Behan or Dylan Thomas. They generally prefer to present a carefully turned out self to the world — to appear balanced, humane, wise and far-sighted, if not actually prescient. There is ample precedent for the refusal of scholars and politicians alike to scrutinize their pasts for errors, great or small. Thinking about what Kenez had written, I found myself wondering who first said "never apologize, never explain." Google comes up with a number of suggestions: Talleyrand, Disraeli, Evelyn Waugh. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, on the other hand, gives a remarkably, implausibly recent source: John Wayne, in a wonderful 1949 movie, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. These figures, all men and all of a certain cast of mind, were not given to public introspection, let alone self-criticism. But women are not always anxious to retrace their steps either. Jeane Kirkpatrick was sure that it was only authoritarian regimes of some traditional type that could evolve into democracies. The totalitarian states were our unchanging enemies. Then it turned out otherwise. Ultimately she gave Gorbachev, whom she called a "sport" in the Soviet system, credit for ending totalitarianism there. Nevertheless, she showed no interest in revisiting her former certainties. As Kenez observes, "[W]e want to maintain a continuum, and we are unwilling to dismiss and discard our own past" (375) — or do anything to diminish its luster.

Kenez may not take full account in his essay of how many people in fact abandoned communism, long before it was on its last legs, although he knows this aspect of the story well. As François Furet pointed out in his last book, a central aspect of the history of communism is the history of disillusioned departures from it. "Even when the movement was quite young and Lenin was still alive," he wrote, "the European Left already included thousands of former Communists who had lost their illusions and their hopes. Throughout the 20th century, Communism has been like a house that each generation has gone in or out of, according to circumstances." ¹ Many of those who left the house were quite willing to say some mea culpas, to write books with titles like Darkness at Noon or The God that Failed.

Confession of error is especially difficult in political matters that are connected to our deepest beliefs. The second half of the 20th century saw, successively, the radicalism of the 1960s and the profound conservative backlash, which has left the center of the American political spectrum so far to the right in our time. Over the course of those decades in particular, the debate about the nature of communism became closely connected with even broader debates about whether a more egalitarian society was desirable and could be...