Humanism and Terror

Last night I finished Merleau-Ponty's book Humanism and Terror. It's been a longstanding project of mine to understand what the hell Merleau-Ponty is talking about. His politics are an indispensable dimension of his total philosophy, so Humanism and Terror was enlightening for my slog through Phenomenology of Perception. He's a Marxist. Before this, I knew nothing intelligible about Marxism, barring Ayn Randian slander, and personal judgments of my own about the personalities of Marxist types in college. Politics is not a passion for me. As the child of divorced parents who are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, any political position I could take was a losing one. The inability to fall into any party line has been a benefit for me, in my opinion, because I think I have a clearer perspective about politics than almost everyone. I float above them like a ghost while they're dug in the trenches with guns in hand. However, this ghostly ability to pass through walls is crippling: I've never voted. As I said, politics is not a passion, it's a burden. I long for the day I can vote in good conscience.
When it comes to politics, I tend to hate almost everyone. Politics makes people deaf and dumb, stupid and awful, sectarian and inhumane. It's not an accident. The world is full of terrible things, children starving and dying, people profiting from the misery and murder of others, and anyone who sees this should become worked up into a frenzy to stop it. But frenzy never solved anything. That's the paradox of politics. You must have a surgeon's tolerance for blood, or a hitman's.
I sincerely believe that everyone wants the world to be a better place, and what they mean by "a better place" is really the same. But there are different philosophies about how to achieve this better place, and different ways to understand what this better place is, and people, being the specific individuals they are, are born into a specific family, a specific culture, and it teaches them the details of this better world, and they inherit their enemies. Politically, almost everyone is a xenophobe, because as feeling creatures they want to see the world improve and they have precisely one fragile notion of a better world, and literally everything else is a stumbling block to the eradication of evil.
Merleau-Ponty (at the time he wrote Humanism and Terror) is a Marxist, but he's ambivalent. He doesn't effuse praise on every move the Communist Party makes, and he drives home more than any other point the contingency of history. For Merleau-Ponty, contingency is the heart of everything. Every position one takes, every act, has no guarantee of success. He bemoans in the introduction to the book the stupidity of his critics who will not tolerate his ambivalent opinion and willingness to criticize the Communist Party. He reports one communist who said, "To engage in conversation is already to lay down one's arms." Throughout the book Merleau-Ponty describes the dirty reality of revolutionary politics. He is an apologist for communist violence, because he believes violence is the only way to disrupt the violence of liberalism. Liberalism, in his opinion, is a proven evil. Communism has at least the merit of not yet proving that it's evil, and of holding a noble ideal for the future of "more human relations between men." For reasons I don't understand, he sees Marxism as the only hope for the future. He goes so far as to say: "Marxism is not a philosophy of history; it is the philosophy of history and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history. After that there can be no more dreams or adventures."
Emerging from my own ambivalence, as a teenager I read The Fountainhead and was very moved by what Ayn Rand said. She was my introduction to both philosophy and politics. Nowadays I think Ayn Rand was basically an insane person, but she provided a kind of "square one" for my own politics, in the way I imagine being raised Christian would inform your thinking the rest of your life even after you leave the church. It only enforces my belief that people are born into their political prejudices. I can't help it, when it comes to communism or anti-communism, I will fall toward anti-communism. I don't like that, and that's why reading Humanism and Terror has been so enlightening. The only reason I could even take the book seriously is because I've heard it said that Merleau-Ponty ultimately rejected communism in favor of liberalism. I don't like feeling like I'm stuck in a trench. Merleau-Ponty's description of the proletariat helped me understand how someone could be a Marxist. I can't summarize what he said, but it's a beautiful vision of universal humanity (in a way) and I see how a person could stake their life on it (not that I would.)