BOOK REVIEW

Leszek Kolakowski, Is God Happy? Selected EssaysNew York: Basic Books, 2013. 352 pp. $28.99. ISBN: 978–0465080991

Collin May

Published online: 24 May 2013# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

When a well-known and respected author with a number ofliterary and scholarly accomplishments to his credit passesaway, it is expected that, within a few years of his death, acollection of the author’s essays will appear for publicconsumption. These collections normally include a broadrange of his work, spanning his literary career from youth toseniority. In 2009, noted Polish philosopher and historian ofideas, Leszek Kolakowski died at the age of 81 years; in2013, a collection of his essays appeared under the interrog-ative title: Is God Happy?

Kolakowski was best known in philosophic circles for hisextensive three-volume study of the origins, rise and even-tual decay of Marxism in his Main Currents of Marxismpublished between 1976 and 1978. His intimate familiaritywith Marxism, both as a theory, having been educated inPolish universities following World War II, and as praxis,having lived under a Marxist-Leninist regime, left him well-placed to write with authority on the promise and disasterMarxism wrought on the twentieth century.

But for a man like Kolakowski, Marxism alone was toonarrow a pre-occupation. It was not simply the thoughts ofMarx, nor was it the incarnation of those thoughts in thearray of Marxisms that afflicted so many and dazzled manymore, that ultimately interested this man of ideas. Marxismwas part of the western heritage, it arose, along with fas-cism, anarchism and socialism, from pressing issues beset-ting nineteenth century Europe. And despite its presumedpassing into history, something of its essence remains deep-ly imbedded in our western world even today.

It is this sober conviction, that Marxism—the blessings itannounced and the evil it delivered—goes deeper into our

western past and carries on with us into our future en-deavors, that gives these essays both their abiding currencyand their common focus.

As a collection, the book divides into three sections. Thefirst treats Marxism, socialism, the left and ideology gener-ally. The second focuses on religion, and its companiontheme—evil. The third section runs the gamut of modernconcerns, but focuses mainly on the problematic of reason,truth and the uncertainty that gnaws at our contemporarysatisfactions. In each section, the author covers his intellec-tual terrain with finesse and his well-known sense of cheek.These essays are not technical, but they are subtle, engagingand profound, appealing to an audience that seeks out hu-mane learning.

Having said that, the most obvious question surroundingthis book is: Why the title? What does God’s happiness haveto do with matters of human reason in our present age, withMarxism or even with evil since evil, one would assume,works its will on man rather than the omnipotent. Is GodHappy? is itself a title drawn from the final essay in thesecond section, the section on religion, on the absolute.

To appreciate this odd title, is to appreciate bothKolakowski’s wide-ranging mind and its attention to thewhole of western history. Even as the collection opens onthe themes of socialism and ideology, we see the authormoving to a broader plane. While manoeuvring deftly in thetechnical details of Marxist theory, Kolakowski quicklygoes to the nub of the matter. His early essays from his timeas a professor in Poland speak to the “death of gods” aseven in those post-Stalin years, the vacuous intellectual andspiritual state of life under Marxist-Leninism was readilyapparent. From here, Kolakowski’s more recent workscontained in this first section branch out and envelop westernculture, history and life.

The striking essay, “Communism as a Cultural Force”seeks to understand not simply the hideous nature of a

C. May (*)#404, 1121 – 6 Avenue SW,Calgary, AB T2P 5J4, Canadae-mail: cmay@millerthomson.com

Soc (2013) 50:422–425DOI 10.1007/s12115-013-9681-x

technical version of Marxism but how communism wasembraced by so many, and beyond that, how it truly embed-ded itself in western cultural life as a driving, and oftendominant force, something fascism and Nazism failed to dobeyond their specific countries of origin. Communismattracted a range of thinkers, artists, intellectuals. So con-vincing was its attractions that radical socialism in generalattached itself to Marxism, emerging as the brutal carrier ofsocialist revolution out of World War I. An odd fate for amovement and a theory that had little impact and fewadherents in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Inany case, Marxism and socialism became intertwined andthose ideas, that history, still determine a great deal of howwe approach the world today, even among those mindsformed long after its fall in 1989.

So what remains of this Marxism that became the hall-mark of socialist revolution? On the one hand, Kolakowskipoints to the indelible mark it made on the left. Buthere we must be careful. Communism itself—real livedcommunism—was a political game on a grand scale, playedoften by the hawks, as Kowlakowski calls them. At the sametime, there were many “fellow travellers”, those on the leftwho sympathized with communism. These were the “but-terflies”; useful idiots in the West who could be relied on bySoviet apparatchiks to come to their defence, but otherwisewere disregarded and disdained by the hawks. The odd pointthat Kolakowski emphasizes is that many an ex-communistsaw the error of his ways. There are numerous works bydisillusioned communists from the Soviet Union and itssatellites. By contrast, Kolakowski points out that, to hisknowledge, there has not been a substantial work by anyoneon the progressive left accounting for the failures of thebutterflies. Progressivism, for the most part, and despitesome accommodations to the victory of western capitalistforms, has merrily gone on its way as though the intellectu-al, moral and political failings of one of western man’sbloodiest periods, was simply a blip on the radar screen.For progressives, the unity of egalitarian humanity remainsjust over the next rise.

But to fail to see that progressivism was ensnared inmuch more than a blip, to fail to bring such underlyingentanglements to light, leaves us in the West still veryentangled. And the nature of the entanglement is, as manyobservers have underlined, the lie. The lie, made famous bySolzhenitsyn, and many others, is now almost synonymouswith the all-encompassing structure of Soviet life, its abys-mal decay, cloaked in the lie that would torture reason to itsbreaking point as total oppression wrapped itself in therhetoric of total liberation. As Kolakowski puts the matter:“We have lived through the experience of totalitarian re-gimes. What was new in them was not genocide, or evenideological genocide, so much as the successful technique oftotal intellectual appropriation.”

Total intellectual appropriation; going straight for thesoul as Tocqueville adroitly described it long before itshowed its true colors. This is the key element that renderstotalitarianism total: it fabricated, and continues to fabricate,a completely self-evident, hence purely objective and im-mediate explanation of all human processes and instances. Itmakes everything intelligible according to its mechanisms,and nothing that is or is becoming escapes its grasp. It atonce accounts for each fact, while absolutizing its ownproject as the only rational moral value. The universalcomes entirely into view.

And from here we move almost naturally into thetopic of religion. From a religious perspective, and mostcertainly from that of the Christian view on the world,the purely rational effort to make evident the universaland the absolute runs straight into teeth of evil, that moststubborn of realities.

For all his fame as a commentator on contemporaryMarxism, Kolakowski wrote extensively on religion, espe-cially Christianity, and on the problem of evil. In the essay“Leibniz and Job: The Metaphysics of Evil and the Experi-ence of Evil”, Kolakowski surveys the various approachesto this weighty topic. From the notion that it is the mereprivation of the good, to evil as an entity on par with thegood, to the outright denial that there is any meaningfuldistinction between the evil and the good, Kolakowksimoves deftly through each response. Regardless of theapproach, evil comes to light as a problem, perhaps morefor man than any being, precisely because it is what escapesus, what we cannot explain. Christian theologians alwaysfaced the dicey topic of why God allowed evil by placing itin the context of free will: God must allow evil in order forhumans to exercise free will. In effect, God who is thesource of all being, must allow that which is wholly contraryto being to come into being in order to allow we humans tochoose, to activate our reason.

And so the argument goes, but it is largely elusive be-cause it is difficult to reconcile the universal perfection ofGod with the presence of evil, to reconcile the metaphysicsof evil with the experience of evil. But Kolakowski is notsimply asking us to remember recent evil done in the nameof communism and fascism, to localize it to the twentiethcentury, and let humanity go happily on its way to unity.Even today, despite our most self-righteous intentions, evilpersists unabated, because it is the inexplicable, the indeter-minate, what cannot be systematized. He sees that the evildone in the twentieth century on such a total and massivescale served the purpose of overcoming the prior evilworked by modern individualist capitalism; by the modernworld in which we all live. And that brings us to modernityitself and its own efforts at bidding farewell to evil.

Modernity is, once again, a vast topic. Its exact meaning,its intentions and its effects are still disputed. Why it arose,

Soc (2013) 50:422–425 423

what it opposed and what it proposed, are contentious;Kolakowski avers to this when he notes that some seemodernity as a wholesale attack on Christianity and clas-sical reason, while others see it more as Christian caritassecularized. In any case, what comes into focus in thethird group of essays is the decay of reason in modernity,of truth, of truth as adequatio in Kolakowski’s words.Modernity is well-known as the attempt to rationalizethe world, to bring it under universal and necessary me-chanical laws, which, when applied to matter, wouldbanish the old superstitions of both Christ and Plato.Precisely, to master the unintelligible, to redeem evil.

The result, however, was that modernity devastated thevery notions of reason and truth altogether. From themoment Hume, for conservative purposes, launched hisattacks on causality and knowledge of general proposi-tions, modernity turned on its own. Truth as adequatio, asthe capacity for humans living in common to arrive atreasoned agreement on norms of behaviour, stood littlechance. From there, it was a quick step to Marxist regimesthat subsumed truth under the aims of the revolution, ofhistory, of the redemption of society by total intellectualappropriation, to the absolute truth.

The twentieth century was the political battlegroundwhere ideological extremes engaged one another, and wegenerally believe that the battle ended relatively well; thatdemocracy won out. And we believe that truth and reason,or at least of a sort sufficient to recognize the universality ofhuman equality and the advance of science and commerce,have survived.

But the overall effect of Kolakowski’s essays is toprod us with profound doubt on this matter. Today, webelieve we have made progress, with our human rights,our inclusivness, our community, our transparency, ac-countability and equality: we believe ourselves free of“total intellectual appropriation.” But in our worldobsessed by recognition of endlessly multiplying identi-ties as our absolute value and economic facts as unal-terable necessity, there is very little room for our humanreason to operate, especially in the public, in the polit-ical realm.

Does this mean we are heading toward a Tocquevilliansoft-tyranny without seeing the writing on the wall, orsomething even worse? Kolakowski’s final words in theclosing essay of this volume leave us with an impressionof his views: “Our sky is never entirely unclouded; it wasever thus, and people have always known it. I do not say thatwe are rushing towards catastrophe; only that, like Alice, wemust make a huge effort and run very fast to stay in the sameplace.”

This statement caps off a discussion of the potential forwestern civilization to once again become enamoured ofideological terrors as so much of it was in the twentieth

century. Kolakowski suggests that the materials for terrorhave always been at our disposal and any symbol, includ-ing the idea of equality, can become a means for totali-tarian excess. But, as Kolakowski notes, today we mustrun very fast just to avoid falling back into the totalitarianquagmire. Why is this? Precisely because of the darknessinto which we have cast reason and truth, and because ofthe tools we have constructed in support of total intellec-tual appropriation. These remain our contemporary situa-tion, however much we progressives would like tocongratulate ourselves on our successes.

So would Kolakowski have us turn back into the armsof the Church, or some ancient ideal of classical reason?That is not his prescription in these essays. After all, onemust note his praise for the goals of nineteenth centurysocialism, and his wavering as to whether modernity issimply reducible to its hostility to Christianity, as ifmodern achievements in terms of political rights andequality are nugatory. And one could argue that moder-nity itself has been chastened by its history and its out-comes though on its own, it apparently lacks the tools todeal with the irreducibility of evil. But on this score,Christianity, in its heyday, was hardly more successful,though it has resources as regards evil that elude themodern world, specifically a very fulsome view of manas more than economic necessity and the recognition ofrights.

Our contemporary intellectual appropriation is totalizingand it is global, and perhaps one could legitimately contendthat it can only be met on this vast plain by that other mucholder universal institution: the Christian Church, the City ofGod in its Roman form. And one can again argue that theRoman Catholic Church has itself been chastened by mo-dernity, and even made its peace with it in a more sensibleway than its progressive critics who pander to our contem-porary prejudices.

Still, Kolakowski does not let us rest satisfied by thesentimentality of retreat into the arms of ecclesiastic au-thority. Because once again, evil persists for Kolakowskiin a real sense. Kolakowski is not simply content with theChristian responses to evil, in large part because he ismeasuring these responses by the most desirable humangood: happiness. Hence the title Is God Happy? And theanswer: no, God is not happy. God may be blessed, buthappiness is a human desire, and even to dwell in bless-edness with God is not pure happiness for humans sincethere is still a remainder in hell. There have been manyattempts to realize happiness, and all are failures in theirown way. Much of western history swirls around theseattempts: pax romana, Christendom, the rights of man, theworkers’ utopia, the new world order. Kolakowski’s finalwords on the matter are among his best, coming from thefinal paragraph of the essay, Is God Happy?

424 Soc (2013) 50:422–425

Happiness is something we can imagine but not expe-rience. If we imagine that hell and purgatory are nolonger in operation and that all human beings, everysingle one without exception, have been saved by Godand are now enjoying celestial bliss, lacking nothing,perfectly satisfied, without pain or death, then we canimagine that their happiness is real and that the sor-rows and suffering of the past have been forgotten.

Such a condition can be imagined, but it has neverbeen seen. It has never been seen.

Collin May is a corporate and securities lawyer practising in Calgary,Alberta. Educated at Harvard, Paris and Dalhousie Law School, Collinhas published numerous book reviews on works in political philosophyand history.

Soc (2013) 50:422–425 425