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Ideas are the product of people’s conscious activity. At the same time they do not constitute a sphere in which the people can act freely, without restrictions. In one way or another the world of ideas has always been bound up with the world of things—with objective reality. This is the source of the acute contradiction that determines the -4 position of the contemporary bourgeoisie in the war of ideas. On the one hand, it has never before experienced such a -4 pressing political need for reliable means of spiritually ruling the masses, for ideas that could secure for it the support of the masses. On the other hand, its ideology bears the stamp of decline and is proving to be less and less suitable for the struggle for people’s minds and hearts.

The crisis of modern bourgeois ideology expresses itself in many ways, one of them being the growing historical pessimism reflecting the position held in society by a -4 reactionary, outworn class that has no future. The attitude of bourgeois ideology to the future is usually permeated with deep-seated pessimism, with a foreboding of destruction, with apocalyptic attitudes.

p This fully applies to the bourgeois "philosophy of history”, a typical feature of which is no longer the theory of progress as enunciated by the bourgeoisie when it was young but the 107 CH. II. THE CRISIS OF BOURGEOIS IDEOLOGY ") doctrine of social stagnation and decline or, at best, of historical cycles, according to which every civilisation is doomed to destruction, to a return to its original startingpoint of development.

p This modification in the historical thinking of the bourgeoisie is now universally recognised. For evidence let us refer to the British historian Professor Edward Hallett Carr, who gives a fairly keen insight into the reasons for the pessimism of the Western "philosophy of history”; "In the nineteenth century British historians with scarcely an exception regarded the course of history as a demonstration of the principle of progress: they expressed the ideology of a society in a condition of remarkably rapid progress. History was full of meaning for British historians, so long as it seemed to be going our way; now that it has taken a wrong turning, belief in the meaning of history has become a heresy. After the First World War, Toynbee made a desperate attempt to replace a linear view of history by a cyclical theory—the characteristic ideology of a society in decline. Since Toynbee’s failure, British historians have for the most part been content to throw up their hands and declare that there is no general pattern in history at all."  [107•*  Further, Carr notes: "Nicholas I of Russia is said to have issued an order banning the word ’progress’: nowadays the philosophers and historians of Western Europe, and even the United States, have come belatedly to agree with him."  [107•** 

p Perhaps even more striking than in historical and sociological doctrines, pessimism and the loss of faith in progress are manifested in bourgeois Utopian literature. It usually describes some terrible catastrophe that wipes out mankind, or gives a picture of a degenerate society, of a callous machine civilisation that has jettisoned all human values and created a savage political regime eclipsing even the horrors of fascism.

p Small wonder that in philosophy and literary criticism this sort of literature is called “anti-utopian”. True, among bourgeois theorists there are some who have tried to 108 portray anti-utopia as a reaction to the reality of socialist society.

p It goes without saying that some anti-utopias are outright anti-communist concoctions. Take, for instance, George Orwell’s novel 1984 or Zamyatin’s We.  [108•*  But books of this sort do not change the fact that the bourgeois antiutopia is a reaction to the spiritual crisis of the capitalist world, an expression of its lack of a future, its dismal expectations, loss of faith in progress, and sometimes an attempt at a social criticism of the bourgeois way of life in which people are becoming depersonalised adjuncts of machines, a way of life that is crushing human values and leading to the degeneration of culture and a marked decline of civilisation. This sort of society is pictured in the best-known modern Utopias, beginning with the novels of Aldous Huxley, one of the founders of this genre.

p One of the best known of these books is a novel with the ironic title Brave New World that was published in 1932. But in the mid-1950s Huxley wrote another novel, Brave New World Revisited, in which he declared that all his gloomiest predictions of a society seeking to turn its members into slaves, into mental and moral degenerates incapable of the least protest and suited only for thoughtless labour were now being increasingly confirmed and would come true earlier than he had thought (formerly he said this would take several centuries). Although Huxley does not differentiate between the social forces locked in struggle in our epoch and considers that a horrible future is in store for all countries, for the entire planet, there is no doubt at all that the gloomy pictures opening before the eyes of the writer are inspired by capitalist reality. The Brave New World is above all the old, dying world of capitalism projected into the future, 109 a portrayal of what the inner logic of that system’s development is leading to.

p Modern bourgeois Utopian literature is being created by authors of different calibre. But they are united by their deep-rooted pessimism and sense of helplessness. Capitalism has nothing it can offer people, and the future it holds out to them is totally inacceptable—such, whether these authors like it or not, is the conclusion to be drawn from the contemporary philosophies and the modern Utopian literature of bourgeois society.

p The stamp of a profound ideological crisis lies on every aspect of the spiritual life of modern capitalism. Instead of helping to understand reality and giving expression to the urgent tasks of social development, the ideas and doctrines of the bourgeoisie are increasingly trying to defend and justify the outworn social patterns and institutions hindering progress. In philosophy this finds expression in the fact that despite the existence of numerous trends and schools, a dominant position has been firmly seized by different variants of idealism and irrationalism ranging from subtle theories wearing the mask of a science to overtly mystical and religious doctrines.

p Explaining the political implications of the attack on the mind and scientific knowledge in current spiritual life Henry M. Magid, a lecturer at the University of New York City, wrote that "the aim of philosophy is truth; the aim of society is self-preservation" and hence the need to draw a boundary for the pursuit of truth. He noted that "society in the interest of self-preservation, or well-being, or justice, may feel, and perhaps rightly, that it is necessary to limit the pursuit of knowledge because the pursuit of knowledge as the highest goal from the human perspective almost always contains the seeds of subversion from the political perspective”. On the basis of this contention he formulates the following three objectives of political philosophy.

p First, "education for loyalty”. “(The young are taken in hand before they can have achieved intellectual maturity and critical skill, and they are taught how to be loyal and what to be loyal to.”)

Second, "education for the elite or education for leadership" of those to whom the ruling class entrusts social affairs.

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p And, third and last, "education for understanding”, i.e., to help the elite, the rulers themselves, to master the art and science of administration.  [110•* 

p Symptomatic changes have occurred in bourgeois ideology’s attitude to man and human nature. Ideas and theories portraying human nature as the focus of base instincts and bestial inclinations are becoming widespread. With the help of these ideas and theories bourgeois ideologists are not only trying to absolve the capitalist system of its intrinsic social vices but justifying imperialism’s inherent turn towards political reaction. They contend that inasmuch as in their actions the masses are guided by destructive instincts, the task of political power is to “curb” man, to “manipulate” the masses. "Let us not try to persuade ourselves”, declared Gabriel Marcel, the French existentialist, "that it is possible to educate the masses; this is an internal contradiction. Only the individual, to be more exact, the personality, is educable. Outside that there is only place for training."  [110•** 

p The crisis and ideological impoverishment of present-day bourgeois socio-political thought are frequently given the disguise of new "scientific methods" and masked through the accentuation of the applied basis in social science. But, as a rule, this is a screen for sociology’s departure from the basic problems of social life to a study of problems that have nothing to do with the fundamental issues of social reorganisation. This evolution of bourgeois social thought is extremely indicative. Its origins are the sharp social criticism and substantiation of the revolutionary changes, points typical of the bourgeoisie in its youth, when it preached the doctrines of social agreement, the sovereignty of the people and the inalienable rights and liberties of man. Following the bourgeois-democratic revolutions bourgeois sociology turned towards a kind of reformism, to the charting of programmes of reforms that would “improve” the existing system and bring about the triumph of the ideals of these revolutions.

p But even that tradition, started by Herbert Spenser and Auguste Comte, is now dying away. Bourgeois sociology is 111 now engaged in an open apology of reactionary policies (racist theories, geopolitics, neo-Malthusianism, and so on), while ancillary applied research is used as a means to help the capitalist state govern society. Characterising these changes, the well-known American sociologist C. Wright Mills says that "sociology has lost its reforming push; its tendencies toward fragmentary problems and scattered causation have been conservatively turned to the use of corporation, army, and state".  [111•* 

p The ideological crisis is seen not only in bourgeois philosophy, sociology and social thought but also in bourgeois culture. Decadence, a morbid interest in bestial instincts and forms of behaviour, violence and depravity have become the inevitable bedfellows of the “cultural” life of modern bourgeois society. These ugly phenomena on no account represent the general state of affairs. Among broad sections of the population there is a growing interest in real culture and art. But parallel with this, mounting efforts are being made by those who profit by the production of substitutes of culture to poison the minds of millions upon millions of people with these substitutes.

Present-day bourgeois ideology provides abundant evidence of capitalism’s deadly social illness. Capitalism is being overwhelmed by fear of the future, by fear of reality, by fear of reason and by fear of man.