Finding Forster.

• Author: Buruma, Ian
• Position: E. M. Forster on liberalism

In 1935, the stakes could not have been higher. Hitler ruled Germany. Mussolini had been in power for thirteen years. Civil war was brewing in Spain. Stalin was poised to begin his bloodiest purges in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, in Paris, Louis Aragon, Andre Gide, Ilya Ehrenburg and other intellectuals organized an International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture.

For the stakes of culture, too, were high, not least in Paris, where Ehrenburg, a fervent Communist, was beaten up in the street by Andre Breton, the surrealist writer, for having denounced all art that was not suitably proletarian. The defense of culture at the writers' congress was in fact synonymous with the defense against fascism. That is, it was a conference firmly of the left. Ehrenburg had his little moment of vengeance; Breton was excluded.

The English novelist E. M. Forster, one of the speakers at the Palais de la Mutualite (others included Heinrich Mann, Isaac Babel, Bertolt Brecht, Boris Pasternak and Tristan Tzara), soon got bored with the overheated leftist rhetoric. Forster recalled having "to sit through many eulogies of Soviet culture, and to hear the name of Karl Marx detonate again and again like a well-placed charge, and draw after it the falling masonry of applause."

No wonder his speech on the importance of free expression failed to excite the crowd of fellow intellectuals. He must have cut a quaintly old-fashioned figure, dressed in his tweed suit, talking about literature in a soft, reedy voice. The leftists regarded him as a bourgeois individualist, hopelessly out of touch with the important struggles of his time. In the account of one sympathetic observer: "It was as if the audience considered Mr. Forster and all his kind ... already as extinct as the dodo." (1)

In truth, Forster was anything but an old fuddy-duddy. His defense of literary freedom was sparked by a strong desire for sexual freedom, in his own case, freedom for homosexuals. But he was undeniably a champion of individual liberty rather than something so abstract as the people's revolution. Forster was a liberal. Perhaps the term humanist would be better. "Liberalism" is open to conflicting interpretations. In the United States it is associated with leftism, and the view that the state should play a powerful role in building a more equal society. In Europe, the classic sense of liberalism means the exact opposite--conservative, laissez-faire economics. But liberalism for Forster and others of his ilk is as much a state of mind as a political program, something that might be described best in three key words: (individual) freedom, moderation and tolerance--themes that are much under attack these days, not just from Islamist and other religious fanatics, but also from some of those who have set themselves up as defenders of the West against the Islamic threat.

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In 1935, as now, this type of liberalism was under fire from both political extremes. Though in our current moment--in the wake of the death of Marxism--certainly more from the right than the left. But the lines of attack are similar. First of all, from the radical point of view, moderation--toujours pas de zele, in the phrase of Talleyrand, avoid zeal at all costs--is soft, wishy-washy and hopelessly inadequate in the war against fascism, for the rebirth of the race, the reconquista of the true faith, the proletarian revolution or whatnot. There appears to be nothing heroic about moderation or tolerance; on the contrary, they are antiheroic. The liberal temperament lacks Romantic appeal. And the stress on individual liberty, instead of collective progress or national vigor, smacks of bourgeois complacency. A radical cause demands sacrifice. The typical bourgeois is assumed to be too addicted to his comfort to sacrifice anything, least of all his own life.

I believe it was Werner Sombart (1863-1941), a German thinker of the early twentieth century, who coined the phrase Komfartismus, and he did not mean anything positive. It was certainly the French radical lawyer Jacques Verges who once described social democracy as disgusting and debased because of its banality, its lack of grandeur. (2) The search for happiness, he said, is typical of bourgeois social democracy, thus despicable. A radical leftist himself, Verges was inspired in this attitude by one of the extreme right-wing assassins of Walter Rathenau, the liberal German foreign minister in the Weimar period. In the words of the murderer, a young naval officer: "I fight to give the people a destiny but not to give them happiness." Here is the antiliberal stance in a nutshell.

But liberalism is also denounced by others as a fraud; to their mind, liberals pretend to be tolerant and moderate, with a real agenda of protecting their own elitist interests. Tolerance, such antiliberals claim, suggests an attitude of superiority. You tolerate, but are not prepared to engage seriously with people and views you consider to be beneath you. And moderation is a deliberate ploy to neutralize...