George Kennan's Conservative Pessimism

George Kennan was a strange character. A brilliant diplomat and the main architect of America's strategy of containment toward the Soviet Union, he came across in public as confident and optimistic. But really he seemed so prescient at many times in his life because he always assumed the worst was going to happen. He told everyone that Stalin would enslave eastern Europe, for example, and feared from the beginning that involvement in Vietnam would lead to catastrophe. Now that his diaries have been published, we can see that he operated for his whole life under a grim suspicion that nuclear war was inevitable:

The danger of collective catastrophe . . . is so great as to be in part a certainty.

When he wasn't obsessing about nuclear war, he was fretting over environmental collapse, the dilution of the Anglo-Saxon race by blacks and Hispanic immigrants, the collapse of old institutions, and the general decline of civilization. From Fareed Zakaria's review:

“I cannot help but regret that I did not live 50 or 100 years sooner,” he wrote in one of his entries. “Life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. We know too many cities to be able to grow into any of them, . . . too many friends to have any real friendships, too many books to know any of them well, and the quality of our impressions gives way to the quantity, so that life begins to seem like a movie, with hundreds of kaleidoscopic scenes flashing on and off our field of perception, gone before we have time to consider them.” . . .

Kennan mourned the loss of small communities with their sense of common purpose. In 1938, while working at the State Department, he took a brief leave and bicycled through rural Wisconsin, the state he grew up in, and recalled how the small villages he moved through had often rallied together, in the wake of floods, hurricanes and war, and how modern life, with its emphasis on individualism, was eroding that sense of solidarity. Seventeen years later, he surveyed his country — the booming, urbanizing America of the 1950s — with disgust: “I could leave it without a pang: the endless streams of cars, the bored, set faces behind the windshield, the chrome, the asphalt, the advertising, the television sets, the filling stations, the hot-dog stands, the barren business centers, the suburban brick boxes, the country clubs, the bars and grills, the empty activity.”

He saw a dark side in almost all the advances of modern life, especially cars and airplanes. . . . “Flying (but particularly the airports) puts me into the nearest thing to a wholly psychotic depression,” he explained.

Interesting that a man so wrapped in gloomy fantasies, so detached from his own time and so disgusted by most of what was happening around him, was still able to achieve so much as a public figure. Kennan's life also shows the  folly of trying to explain any thoughtful person by the left-right dichotomy. In the part of politics with which he was most involved, American foreign policy, he was often portrayed as a man of the left because he opposed war and supported diplomacy. But his diaries confirm the suspicion liberals always had of him, that even when he took their side he was not really their friend. He was in everything a deeply conservative person, especially in his fears about what was happening to everything he valued in life.