Beyond Ideology

Whole Earth, Summer, 2000 by Julius Lester

The editors of Liberation held the article for three months. Finally, I had a tense meeting with them in which they argued that the prosecution could use my article against the Panthers. Did I want that? I was asked. How many times during my years in The Movement had someone tried to control my thoughts, my words, or my deeds by saying that such-and-such would not be in the best interest of The People, that such-and-such would merely play into the hands of the "enemy," that I was being individualistic and that people in The Movement had to submit to discipline, and that their individual thoughts and lives were not as important as those of The People.

I knew only that as a writer and an intellectual, I was responsible for conveying whatever minuscule portion of the truth I could find. And as a person, my responsibility was to be as fully human as I could. Giving one's soul to ideology permitted one to rationalize murder, to attack friends, to deny the power and beauty of the erotic. Allegiance to ideology gave one permission to turn other human beings into abstractions, and as a black kid growing up under segregation in the 1940s and 1950s, I knew what being an abstraction felt like because, dear God, my soul still bled from the wounds. If I had learned nothing else, I had learned that one does not turn another human being into an abstraction without becoming an abstraction oneself, and to turn another into an abstraction is murder. I recognized, moreover, that even if murder is justified in the name of God, freedom, justice, socialism, revolution, or democracy, it is still murder.

Liberation published the article, but our relationship was over. Nevertheless, among my feelings of sadness and hurt, there was a strange, new feeling. I was free. I was free to be whoever I was and would be; and slowly and painfully in the ensuing years, I came to love all the contradictions and inconsistencies inherent in being human.

Robert Frost said that he was never a radical in his youth because he didn't want to be a conservative in his old age. I was a radical in my youth, but I have not become conservative in middle age.

I am not radical or conservative because I do not see an essential difference between the two positions, despite appearances. Both are political worldviews that divide the world into an Us against a Them. Radicals and conservatives merely disagree on who is the Them. Because I am black, because I am Jewish, I must resist the succulent temptation to define another human being as a Them, and sometimes that is very hard.

This does not mean that those responsible for the evil in South Africa should not be held accountable for their deeds. But I do not have to define another as a Them to hold him or her accountable. It is sufficient to say that they have failed, on even the most minimal level, to live humanely.

I am not politically naive about the Soviet Union, but neither do I forget that it is a nation that lost twenty million people in World War II. I cannot imagine what impact that can have on a nation's character and policies. I look at Iran and see madness, but I cannot forget the years of the Shah's reign and those of this father; and again, I cannot imagine what an impact that can have on that nation's character and policies. I am not politically naive, but I am convinced that unless I know and make a part of me the pain and suffering of another, I have no chance of comprehending his or her humanity. Trust between persons is established when each is receptive to the abiding sorrows of the other I think that may also be true for nations.