https://quillette.com/2018/12/03/the-unsafe-feminist-rebecca-
The Unsafe Feminist: Rebecca West and the ‘Bitter Rapture’ of Truth
In an era when indulgent university administrators and professors treat students like spoiled children, one longs for intellectuals who address their audience as adults. The British novelist, biographer, literary critic, travel writer and political commentator Rebecca West (1892-1983) is the tonic we need. Like other great authors of the 20th century—including George Orwell and Doris Lessing—West never received a university education. That may help explain her intellectual non-conformism and free-wheeling spirit.
West brushed against orthodoxy like barbed wire against chiffon. She was a suffragist who rejected pacifism in the First World War (and the Second); a leftist who fought communism; an internationalist who spoke up for small nations; an individualist who valued authority and tradition. West never crouched in one position. She was unflinchingly realistic. Human conflict, she said, is inescapable. It is as much a feature of art as it is of states. Eros, too, creates antagonism, for sex is dangerous. Yet human co-operation is ubiquitous. Women and men need each other, and can and do love each other. A feminism that treats women as if they were vulnerable children, and that blames a man for a woman’s own irresponsibility, was seen by West as absurd. Needless to say, her attitude to life is as far from the nursery-school feminism of today’s university—smothering, alarmist, bureaucratic—as it is possible to be.
Freedom carries obligations, West believed—the first of which is to grow up. “I believe in liberty,” she declared in a 1952 credo, particularly the liberty of a person to “be able to say and do what he wishes and what is within his power.” Because every individual is unique, each person “must know some things which are known to nobody else.” The transmission of such knowledge, which “could not be learned from any other source,” requires a space in which people are able to speak their minds.
The contrast between a state of innocence and a mature comprehension of life’s intractable demands (the “hard task of being adult,” as she put it in her 1931 book Ending in Earnest) is central to Rebecca West’s philosophy. We do not expect children to be active in politics; we protect children from politics. Nor do we consider adults who behave like children to be competent human agents. Maturity is the sine qua non of liberty because a pluralist society, unlike an authoritarian one, requires actors of independent mind who can draw a distinction between their civic responsibilities and private sentiments, who are sufficiently restrained to care for the world even as they pursue their own pleasures, and who are willing to take on onerous public burdens. Like great art, the liberal pursuit of freedom demands intelligence and discernment—a readiness “to test the veracity” of fantasies that all of us harbor to some degree and to evaluate “their importance in the light of the intellect.”
Maturity is evidenced, in short, where individuals embrace the “bitter rapture which attends the discovery of any truth,” and where they would rather be disconsolate in “communion with reality” than comforted by orthodoxy. West’s thesis is reminiscent of German social scientist Max Weber’s belief that a politics of responsibility requires “realistic passion.” What marks a mature person (ein reifer Mensch), Weber wrote in Politics as a Vocation (1919), is an attitude of principled realism enabling one to bear the perversity of the world without succumbing to cynicism.
