ARTICLES
JANUARY 2005 ARTICLES
Contents © 2005
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
It Makes One Jumpy
Who Was Saul Alinsky?
BY CHRISTOPHER ZEHNDER
"Is the archdiocese in bed with Communists?" So I began an article (in the December 2004 Mission) on the social action group One L.A., which has drawn Catholic membership and praise from Cardinal Roger Mahony himself. I know not what readers thought, but my answer to the question was, "no" -- at least as far as bona fide Marxist Communism is concerned.
But the fact that One L.A. was formed under the auspices of the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation gave me pause. I have heard too much (from hostile sources, it is true) about the dark underside of the foundation and its founder, Saul Alinsky. Alinsky, who from the 1930s until his death in 1973 organized various grassroots organizations, including the United Farm Workers, has been painted as the Reddest of Red saboteurs. Though posing as a champion of the poor and oppressed, it is charged, Alinsky was in reality a subverter of morality who manipulated people, institutions, and morality itself for his own ends. A serious charge, bespattering not only the reputation of the man but the organizations and groups that have followed his inspiration.
But is the charge true? To find out, I read Alinsky's 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, a sort of primer on how to be a successful agitator. I also found an interview with Alinsky conducted by Playboy only a year before his death. What proved fascinating -- and enlightening -- was a series of letters (written between 1945 and 1971) between Alinsky and the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, the mentor of Pope Paul VI. To my surprise, Alinsky and Maritain were the closest of friends.
I have read articles attacking Alinsky; I have in years past received letters from Mission readers concerning him. Basically, the charges resolve themselves, thus: Alinsky was a Marxist; he was a Machiavellian seeker after power; he was a moral relativist, believing the end justifies the use of any means; he pushed a class-based conception of society. In Rules for Radicals, one can find documented bases for these charges. The difficulty I found, however, was in how to interpret Alinsky's statements.
To begin with, Alinsky, despite his warm friendship with and admiration for Maritain, was no Christian. He was a secular Jew; really, an agnostic who, until his death, it seems, was uncertain of an afterlife. This puts in some perspective his nod in Rules for Radicals to Lucifer, "the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom." In a 1960 letter to Maritain, Alinsky calls himself a "congenital heretic." In Rules for Radicals, he says the true organizer is a "questioner," for whom "nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defies any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search for ideas no matter where they may lead." This is also Alinksy's self image.
As such, Alinsky could never be a Marxist. Though he worked with Communists in the '30s ("anybody who tells you he was active in progressive causes in those days and never worked with the Reds is a goddamn liar," he said), he could not accept the doctrinaire in Marxism. To Playboy, Alinsky confessed, "I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is ... 'that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right.' If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated." Though this would mark Alinsky as a relativist, in Playboy he did admit to one "fixed truth" -- the only one he said he possessed: "a belief in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act freely and the power to control their own destinies, they'll generally reach the right decisions.... You should never have an ideology more specific than that of the founding fathers: 'For the general welfare.' That's where I parted company with the Communists in the Thirties, and that's where I stay parted from them today."
It is unclear, however, how deep Alinsky's relativism runs. The Playboy quote above is almost verbatim stated in Rules; but there, Alinsky is speaking of the "political relativist." Though unshackled by "dogma," the radical, says Alinsky, organizes people to "meet each unforeseeable future crisis as they move ahead in their eternal search for those values of equality, justice, freedom, peace, a deep concern for the preciousness of human life, and all those rights and values propounded by Judaeo-Christianity and the democratic political tradition." These "values" for Alinsky have the character of absolutes.
But, in terms of politics, Alinsky believed in seeing the world "as it is" -- "an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest." Thus, his attempt, in Rules, to describe "how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of these circumstances in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life." "The Prince," said Alinsky, "was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away." For Alinsky, it was foolish to ask the poor not to seek power to seize hold of the rights which the rich, by power, denied them. "To attempt to operate on a good-will rather than on a power basis would be to attempt something that the world has not yet experienced," Alinsky said in Rules.
In organizing the Have-Nots for power, the radical activist, Alinsky said, cannot be too scrupulous in his use of means. "In action," he said in Rules, "one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one's individual conscience and the good of mankind. The choice must always be for the latter. Action is for mass salvation and not for the individual's personal salvation. He who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience has a peculiar conception of 'personal salvation'; he doesn't care enough for people to be 'corrupted' for them." In this context, Alinsky quotes Maritain: "the fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not virtue, but a way of escaping virtue."
But Maritain did not hold that one may do immoral acts for morally desirable ends. In a 1971 letter to Alinsky, "Old Jacques" gently corrects his friend. "The very circumstances [of an act]," Maritain said, "may change the moral character and the moral essence of an action." Thus, killing in self-defense may be moral, "an act of justice," while murder or assassination are not. "It seems to me," wrote Maritain, "that in your book the philosophical truth in question, essential as it may be, is hardly emphasized or taken into consideration." [Emphasis in original.]
Indeed, for Rules seeks to lay out how men act, not how they should act. And since, Alinsky says, in the real world, one cannot always act in ways one wants to, if the majority interest is at stake, he is willing to do what he normally would shrink from doing. "To me ethics is doing what is best for the most," he says. He points out that everyone justifies means by ends. He uses the bombing of Hiroshima as an example. The only reason why it is criticized, he says, is because it is seen as unnecessary. But what if the bomb were introduced at the inception of the war? What if its use could have ended the war early and saved countless lives? Then, said Alinsky, the bombing "would have been universally heralded as a just retribution of Hell-fire, and brimstone." (As it is, incidentally, by many conservative critics of Alinksy.)
"In a fight almost anything goes," Alinsky asserted. "It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt." [Emphasis in original.] But not anything goes. "What if the program of the local people offends the rights of other groups, for reasons of color, religion, economic status, or politics? Should this program be accepted just because it is their program?" Alinsky asks in Rules. "The answer," he says, "is categorically no. Always remember that 'the guiding star is "the dignity of the individual."'" But what does go? If one were a member of the underground resistance to Hitler, Alinsky notes elsewhere in Rules, "then you adopted the means of assassination, terror, property destruction, the bombing of tunnels and trains, kidnapping, and the willingness to sacrifice innocent hostages to the end of defeating the Nazis." Would Alinsky justify these means? It is unclear. His observation was to illustrate his "second rule of the ethics of means and ends" -- "that the judgment of the ethics of means is dependent on the political position of those sitting in judgment." As with his other rules, he offers this one as a description of how men act in the "real world," not as a moral prescription.
One cannot deny that Alinsky's ethics are sub-Christian. For instance, he notes in Rules his belief "that birth control and abortion are personal rights to be exercised by the individual." Indeed, despite his evocation of the "general welfare," his morality seems ultimately individualistic. This does not detract necessarily from much of his practical prescriptions on how to bring about social change -- prescriptions Jacques Maritain praised. In fact, Maritain was generally fulsome in his praise of Rules. "I regard the book as history-making; and, in my opinion, the quite new ways you are opening in your final pages ... have crucial importance," he wrote Alinsky in 1971.
But Maritain was not blind to the dark side of Alinsky's thought. "An incurable idealist," is what the old philosopher called Alinsky, and "a heroic witness of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and true democracy for which you're are ready to die." But like a disappointed idealist, Alinksy too easily fell into cynicism. Maritain hinted at this: "you are right in despising rhetorical and vain exhortations to mutual love. The fact is that nothing has ever been accomplished for justice in the world if not by men burning with real love." [Emphasis in original,]
In a 1964 letter to Alinsky, Maritain had given his critique of a book "inspired by your work and your ideas" -- a critique that seems a veiled criticism of Alinsky himself. The book, said Maritain, "is a great book, despite its lacks. What lacks? Disregarding of moral power and the power of love." While it is true, says Maritan, that "in the temporal realm (civilization) it is normal to aim primarily at power in the ordinary sense (implying coercion, pressure) ... such power will inevitably become corrupted if the only incorruptible power, the power of love, is not quickening the whole business."
In his 1971 letter, Maritain expresses well what perhaps is the reaction of many who have read Alinsky. "Seeking one's own intellectual liberation in an infinite proliferation of antinomies is madness on the level of philosophical thought," Maritain says to his friend. "But on the level of pure action a kind of boldness in practical self-contradiction is probably, as you suggest, the sign of a healthy and fecund mind.
"Yet," Maritain confesses, "it makes me jumpy."