Many thanks to my three interlocutors for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully and thoroughly to my reflections on the thirtieth anniversary of the anti-totalitarian revolution of 1989. Flagg Taylor is indeed right: this is a glorious anniversary well worth celebrating. It was and remains a victory for human liberty and dignity, a triumph of human nature (or the “human condition”) against the ideological Lie in all its manifestations, against all the myriad inhuman and suffocating mechanisms of “organized lying.” It is a commonplace among Western political philosophers and political theorists to associate totalitarianism with tyrannical monism, the forcible imposition of a single idea on the pluralism natural to a free society. This relativistic critique was championed by Isaiah Berlin and is the only kind of anti-totalitarianism tolerated by liberals. In the end, it is most inadequate.
Ideocratic regimes of the Communist type did indeed enforce an unprecedented intellectual and linguistic tyranny where ideological clichés—utterly abstract, wooden, predictable, and uniform—predominated, as Flagg Taylor well notes. But this “langue du bois,” this wooden language, was never about the imposition of truth on recalcitrant human beings and societies. Instead, it was the only means of covering over the immense chasm between the reality ordinary human beings could see before their eyes and the mendacious “second reality” so brutally imposed by totalitarian ideologies which had no respect for the structure of reality or the common world in which real human beings live and breathe and interact with other persons. The ideological Lie was ultimately ontological; it denied the personhood, the moral and political agency, of human beings who could reflect and act in accord with the full range of human motives, motives which finally transcend all socioeconomic and historical determination.
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