Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
But if you do, how can you say whether your life might have turned out differently? For me, it was a stark choice: Accept the absolute limits on human hope or adhere to the destructive fantasy of change.
Oct 25, 1999 | The other day I received an e-mail from a stranger posing two questions that have been on my mind for some time; thus his message seemed uncannily personal.
"I was curious," the writer said, "if you have ever looked at your political 'apostasy' and wondered whether, if circumstances had been different -- if you had not been involved with the Panthers or if your friend had not been murdered by them -- you would still be a Marxist today. Was your apostasy a result of an inexorable intellectual development, or were you forced into your second thoughts?"
In one form or another, this is a question just about everyone gets around to asking. If circumstances had been different, would my life have turned out differently? It is a question as old as philosophy -- the puzzle of determinism and free will.
Not everyone, of course, experiences such a dramatic turning point in their lives as I did 25 years ago when the Black Panthers murdered Betty Van Patter. But we all can identify choices or decisions that changed our lives, moments when we suddenly set out on a new course. Each time these kinds of changes occur, they raise the question: Are they essential to our being, or only secondary to who and what we are?
In my case, I simply don't know whether the intensity of my ideological transformation would have been the same had it not been provoked by an act of criminal brutality committed by my political allies and friends.
But I am confident that the change would have come, in any case. I have many friends and acquaintances who had similar "second thoughts," in which they found themselves rejecting the ideas and understandings that motivated them when they were young, and I have no reason to suppose it would have been different for me.
In fact, one of the first pieces I wrote about the incident that changed my political life was an article called "Why I Am No Longer a Leftist" in 1986 in the Village Voice. It drew explicit parallels between the crime the Panthers had committed and the much larger, more famous crimes that the left itself had committed, and that had caused people like me to reconsider our beliefs.
As a leftist I had developed habits of mind that caused me to look at "classes" rather than individuals, at social structures and paradigms rather than events and personalities that could be viewed as incidental or unique. This outlook led me to analyze my own awakening to decide whether it was a characteristic or merely a contingent event before I could allow its lessons to affect my outlook as a whole. In the article I wrote for the Village Voice, as in my memoir, "Radical Son," I attempted to make that analysis.
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