by Roger Kimball
Earlier this month, I went to an event sponsored by the White House to commemorate the centennial of the birth of Whittaker Chambers, the man who revealed Alger Hiss to be a Soviet agent. Chambers chronicled his own part in the Hiss case in “Witness” (1952), that amazing book which is part spy thriller, part autobiography and — not least — part meditation on the spiritual prospects of Western civilization.
In Washington, before an audience of about 150 people, four distinguished commentators paid homage to Chambers: the columnist Robert Novak; the writer Ralph de Toledano; William F. Buckley Jr., who enlisted Chambers to write for National Review when he started it in 1955; and Sam Tanenhaus, whose acclaimed biography of Chambers appeared in 1997.
Most people familiar with the Hiss case remember Chambers as a ferocious anticommunist. He was that. But as all four speakers noted, Chambers was also a deeply religious man whose opposition to communism flowed from his understanding of man's place in the universe.
In the extraordinary “Letter to My Children” that prefaces “Witness,” Chambers insisted that the essence of communism lay not in its economics, its political system or even its tyranny. The essence of communism was its vision of mankind emancipated from God. Communism embodied what Chambers called “man's second oldest faith,” “the great alternative faith” articulated by the serpent's promise to Eve in the garden of Eden: “Ye shall be as gods.”
What results from this project of self-deification? Dostoevsky famously wrote that “if God does not exist, everything is permissible.” Chambers certainly would have agreed. Communism, which made a religion of atheism, promulgated a ruthless utopianism — a view of human beings as the raw material of history and, of course, of the vanguard who would usher it in.
I suspect that many people who think of themselves as conservative today will be unhappy to be reminded of the religious dimension of Chambers's thought. For many conservatives, Chambers's exposure of Hiss as a spy was a fine thing. But they find disquieting his insistence that communism was “the most revolutionary party in history” because “it has posed in practical form the most revolutionary question in history: God or man?”
Such a statement is disquieting partly because, as Chambers saw, communism has no monopoly on the process of self-deification. At the heart of “Witness” was a warning about “the extent to which the Western world shares communism's materialist vision.” Chambers spoke in this context of the “road that the logic of technological civilization points out.”
Back in the 17th century, René Descartes promised that science would someday render man “the master and possessor of nature.” The staggering strides in science and technology since Descartes's time show that he was not making an idle boast. But with such mastery comes the temptation of triumphalism: the belief that every human problem, that life itself, is susceptible to mankind's ingenuity and control.
Chambers's revelation about the nature of communism flashed upon him one day while gazing at his infant daughter in her high chair: “My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear — those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: 'No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.'”
Such intuitions about design have been a staple of the religious imagination from time immemorial. They form an antidote to hubris. They are also widely ridiculed today by scientists for whom the whole question of design is moot because they view the universe as a randomly generated agglomeration whose only arbiter is, in Chambers's phrase, “Almighty Man.” One need think only of the controversy swirling around the technologies of genetic engineering to understand how a vision of Almighty Man now weaves itself into the fabric of our everyday life.
At the end of his great three-volume study, “Main Currents of Marxism,” the philosopher Lezsek Kolakowski observed that “the self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression, has ended in the same way as all such attempts, whether individual or collective: it has revealed itself as the farcical aspect of human bondage.”
The nagging question with which “Witness” leaves us is to what extent we, too — we Westerners, we proponents of liberal democracy, we acolytes of technological progress — are implicated in that melancholy farce.
(This article is a product of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty — www.acton.org, 161 Ottawa NW, Suite 301, Grand Rapids, MI 49503 — and is reprinted with permission.)
