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Why do Men Revolt? - I
A political View on Crane Brinton's Concept of Social Explosion
By Laishram Omorjit
Every enthusiastic student of international politics will frankly admit that the classic statement of an all-comprehensive meaning of war of all kinds had been ferociously pronounced by one great Chinese before the birth of Jesus Christ. Sun Wu Tzu a military scientist of ancient China once remarked "know the enemy, know yourself; a hundred battles, a hundred victories".
For almost 20 centuries, the statement was consigned to the dunghill of history and only after the Eurocentric world discovered it, the ghost of Sun Wu Tzu repeatedly haunted the successive world empires of Pax Britannica, Pax Americana and possibly the short-lived Pax Nipponica. In the social revolution of modern apocalyptic history, the heaven-storming statement acts as the moving spirit animating the dialectical consciousness of the violent masterless man.
The Basic Political Instinct of a Revolutionary:
An endless cycle of unfulfilled longing propelled by an Apocalyptic Vision is probably the most widely accepted meaning of what a revolution is. "To him who makes it, a revolution becomes a reason for being, an engagement with the cosmic, an identification of the self with history; indeed a transmutation of the self. Revolutions occur when the core of that self - the self-defining characteristics of people - are threatened or demeaned do the, of course, personal processes become politicized and one wages internal war for to do other is to be less than a man". The above remark once made by David Schwartz fully echoes the enigmatic voice of the famous American historian, Crane Brinton whose ideas on the basic political instinct of a revolutionary still dominate the intellectual landscape of the so-called political violence of the world.
Crane Brinton deciphers the Anatomy of Revolution:
"Revolutions seem more likely when social classes are fairly close together than when they are far apart. Untouchables very rarely revolt against a god - given aristocracy. The revolutionary moments seem to originate in the discontents of not unprosperous people who feel restraint, cramp, annoyance, rather than downright crushing oppression. Certainly, these revolutions are not started by down and outers, by starving miserable people. These revolutionists are not worms turning, not children of despair. These revolutions are born of hope and their philosophies are formally optimistic." These are the preliminary arguments of C Brinton regarding the internal dynamics of the revolutionary consciousness.
The Spell of Active Religious Faith:
He further said "The little band of violent revolutionists who form the nucleus of all action during the Terror behave as men have been observed to behave before when under the influence of active religious faith. Independents, Jacobins, Bolsheviks all sought to make all human activity here on earth conform to an ideal pattern which like all such patterns, seems deeply rooted in their sentiments. A striking uniformity, in all these patterns is their asceticism or if you prefer, their condemnation of what we may call the minor as well as the major vices."
In his inimitable words, "Independents, Jacobins and Bolsheviks, at least during the crisis period, really make an effort to enforce behavior in literal conformity with these codes or patterns. Such an effort means stern repression of much that many men have been used to regarding as normal; it means a kind of universal tension in which the ordinary individual can never feel protected by the humble routines to which he has been formed: it means that the intricate pre-revolutionary interactions among individuals - a network which is still to the few men devoted to its intelligent study almost a complete mystery - this network is temporarily all torn apart. John Jones, the man in the street, the ordinary man, is left floundering."
The Collective Patient does seem helpless:
Crane Brinton succinctly observes, "At the crisis, the collective patient does seem helpless, thrashing his way through a delirium. The violent revolutionist tears down the noble edifice society lives in, or burns it down, and then fails to build up another, and poor human beings are left naked to the skies. That is not a good metaphor. Even at the height of a revolutionary crisis period, more of the old building is left standing than is destroyed. But the whole metaphor of the building is bad. We may take instead an analogy from the human nervous system, or think of an immensely complicated grid work of electrical communications. Society then appears as a kind of network of interactions among individuals, interactions for the most part fixed by habit, hardened and perhaps adorned as ritual, dignified into meaning and beauty by the elaborately interwoven strands of interaction we know as law, theology, metaphysics and similar noble beliefs. Now sometimes many of these interwoven strands of noble beliefs, some even of those of habit and traditions, can be cut out and other inserted.
During the crisis period of our revolutions, such process seems to have taken place; but the whole network itself seems to have been altered suddenly and radically, and even the noble beliefs tend to fit into the network in the same places.
If you kill off all the people who live within the network, you don't so much change the network of course as destroy it. This type of destruction is as yet rare in human history. Certainly in none of our revolutions was there even a very close approach to it." (Crane Brinton, the Anatomy of Revolution, Prentice Hall, Inc, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1965, pp-250-264).
If we were as stupid or as sensible as horse: In this devastating attack on the original sins of the revolutionary behavior of the four great revolutions i.e., the revolutions of England, America, France and Russia, the late American scholar during the first half of the 20th century articulated the anatomy of revolutions in our disjointed time and rewrote the quotation of an obscure Siberian cooperative leader protesting against Red and White Terror alike.
"And we ask and appeal to society, to the contending political groups and parties; when will our much-suffering Russia outlive the nightmare that is throttling it, when will deaths by violence cease? Doesn't horror seize you at the sight of the uninterrupted flow of human blood? Doesn't horror seize you at the consciousness that the deepest, most elementary basis of existence of human society are perishing; the feeling of humanity, the consciousness of the value of life, of human personality, the feeling and consciousness of the necessity of legal order in the state? Hear our cry and despair; we return to prehistoric times of the existence of the human race; we are on the verge of the death of civilization and culture; we destroy the great cause of human progress, for which many generations of our worthier ancestors labored."
Crane Brinton further expresses the dark side of the basic political instinct of a revolutionary by referring to the dialogue between Berkman the anarchist and a Bolshevik.
"Berkman the anarchist, who loathed the Russia Revolution, tells a story which may represent merely his own bias, but which may nonetheless serve as a brief symbolical conclusion to this study. Berkman says he asked a good Bolshevik acquaintance during the period of attempted complete communization under Lenin why the famous Moscow cabmen, the izvoschiks, who continued in diminished numbers to flit about Moscow and to get enormous sums in paper roubles for their services, were not nationalized like practically everything else.
The Bolshevik replied, "We found that if you don't feed human beings they continue to live somehow. But if you don't feed the horses, the stupid beasts die. That's why we don't nationalize the cabmen". That is not an altogether cheerful story, and in some ways one may regret the human capacity to live without eating. But clearly if we were as stupid-or-as sensible - as horses we should have no revolutions". Herein lies the acme of what the writer of this article would prefer to call social explosion.
(To be continued)
(The writer is a post-graduate degree holder in Political Science from Bombay University).
(Courtesy: The Imphal Free Press) |
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