The Little Red Blog

The Death of Consensus Reality

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." (William Butler Yeats, 1920)

Allow me to recommend an intriguing book from 2015: Stranger Than We Can Imagine, by John Higgs, an attempt at, as the book's subtitle explains, Making sense of the twentieth century. Rather than focus, as so many have done, on the astonishing carnage of the century’s wars, revolutions, and genocides, Higgs grounds his survey in what he believes to have been “a chaotic seismic shift” in the prevailing worldview of the West, a shift which “upended all linear narratives” and undermined all established authority. The change of consciousness took place across the board: in science, art, music, and literature; in the collapse of national empires and imperial dynasties; in politics, media, education, sexual mores, gender roles, and more. The shock of the new, as it has been called, changed everything; essentially, Higgs claims, we are all modernists now.

Think of Stranger Than We Can Imagine as an attempt to flesh out Virginia Woolf’s cryptic statement, “On or about December 1910 human nature changed.” John Higgs does not assign a date to the change in worldview he documents, but he estimates it to have begun early in the last century. The radicalism of the shift cannot be overstated: beginning with Einstein’s “General Theory of Relativity,” objective truth was replaced by multiple perspectives, objective reality became subjective realities, Schrodinger’s cat was simultaneously dead and alive, and the observer was understood to influence what was being observed. Consensus reality became a matter of opinion, and there was no accepted authority to arbitrate disputes over alternative facts.

Since the publisher’s blurb (at Amazon) provides a perfectly good summary, I see no reason to reinvent the wheel:

In Stranger Than We Can Imagine, John Higgs argues that before 1900, history seemed to make sense. We can understand innovations like electricity, [mechanized] agriculture, and democracy. The twentieth century, in contrast, gave us relativity, cubism, quantum mechanics, the id, existentialism, Stalin, psychedelics, chaos mathematics, climate change, and postmodernism.

In order to understand such a disorienting barrage of unfamiliar and knotty ideas, Higgs shows us, we need to shift the framework of our interpretation and view these concepts within the context of a new kind of historical narrative. Instead of looking at it as another step forward in a stable path, we need to look at the twentieth century as a chaotic seismic shift, upending all linear narratives.

Higgs invites us along as he journeys across a century “about which we know too much” in order to grant us a new perspective on it. He brings a refreshingly non-academic, eclectic, and infectiously energetic approach to his subjects as well as a unique ability to explain how complex ideas connect and intersect—whether he’s discussing Einstein’s theories of relativity, the Beat poets' interest in Eastern thought or the bright spots and pitfalls of the American Dream.

Higgs takes us on quite a ride, one that begins with a French anarchist, Martial Bourdin, who accidentally blew himself up in 1894 while enroute, with his homemade bomb, to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. Anarchism, for John Higgs, though a 19^th-century development, could be the key word of the 20^th century, anarchism being here defined as the absence of a fixed point of reference. Higgs quotes the famed avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp on the importance of “persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference.” Ultimately, says Higgs, the theme that permeated the twentieth century was this: “A single viewpoint was insufficient to express or describe anything.” Building on Einstein’s “revolution” of relativity, Western culture seized on (or was seized by) “the idea that there was no single perspective which can be considered to be correct or true, and that our knowledge of any subject is dependent on the perspective we take.”

In which case, the individual assumed increased importance, since every individual was (or might be) an omphalos, that is, a center of reality. Higgs notes that “support for individualism had been slowly building for centuries, but few people had been willing it to take it to its logical conclusion.” That conclusion? “When the bonds of hierarchy [and authority] were shattered, you were left with the multiple perspectives of a host of separate individuals.” Inevitably, in the modern West, “the self is the focus and is given precedence over wider society.” Were modern individuals autonomous or were they atomized, or were they both at once? Higgs suspects the latter, and he offers illustrative examples from the life and works of such notables as Aleister Crowley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ayn Rand.

The pitfalls of individualism were not difficult to spot, but its largest flaw, as Higgs explained, was that its proponents believed that “an individual was a self-contained, rational agent with free will.” Alas, Higgs informs us, “The truth turned out to be considerably messier.” And on the story goes, with Freud, Jung, and other explorers of the human psyche, especially of its sordid side, demolishing the pretensions of rational selfhood. Higgs continues tracing connections in all directions—science, philosophy, art, politics, etc.—before reaching, about one-third of the way into Stranger Than We Can Imagine, this juncture:

“Genocides arose during the perfect storm of technology, nationalism, individualism, and the political rise of psychopaths [Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao]. They revealed that human beings were not the rational actors they prided themselves on being, dutifully building a better world year after year. Rationality was the product of the conscious mind, but that mind rested on the irrational foundations of the unconscious. The original was more complicated than originally assumed; if there was some form of certainty to be found in the world, it wouldn’t be found in the immaterial world of the mind.”

I will leave it, for now, at that. Stranger Than We Can Imagine is a superbly written and engrossing look at how we got here—that is, to the twenty-first century, where reality is more fractured than ever, where perspectives multiply and shift, where we might be living in a simulation, where “the simple things we see are all complicated,” and where certainty is nowhere to be found.       

Wednesday with Pascal: The Triumph of Mammon

{As I understand the provenance of the following, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat found excerpts from R.H. Tawney’s ‘Religion and the Rise of Capitalism’ stuffed into a bottle that had washed up on the banks of the Madison River near Three Forks, Montana. Who placed the pages into the bottle? How long had it been floating down the river? Where did it originate? We simply cannot know, and Pascal seems uninterested. Unusually for him, he has appended no commentary to what follows, thereby tacitly endorsing (perhaps) Tawney’s observations on the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity and Capitalism.}  

“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” (Gospel of Matthew)

From the conclusion of Richard H. Tawney’s classic Religion and the Rise of Capitalism:

Economic efficiency is a necessary element in the life of any sane and vigorous society, and only the incorrigible sentimentalist will depreciate its significance. But to convert efficiency from an instrument into a primary object is to destroy efficiency itself. For the condition of effective action in a complex civilization is cooperation. And the condition of cooperation is agreement, both as to ends to which effort should be applied, and the criteria by which its success is to be judged.

Agreement as to ends implies the acceptance of a standard of values. In a world of limited resources, where nature yields a return only to prolonged and systematic effort, such a standard must obviously take account of economic possibilities. But the standard cannot itself be merely economic, since the comparative importance of economic and of other interests—the foregoing, for example, of material goods in order to extend leisure, or develop education, or humanize toil—is precisely the point on which it is needed to throw light. It must be based on some conception of the requirements of human nature, to which the satisfaction of economic needs is evidently vital, but which demands the satisfaction of other needs as well, and which can organize its activities on a rational system only in so far as it has a clear apprehension of their relative significance.

The most obvious facts are the most easily forgotten. Both the existing economic order, and too many of the projects advanced for reconstructing it, break down through their neglect of the truism that, since even quite common men have souls, no increase in material wealth will compensate them for arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair their freedom. A reasonable estimate of economic organization must allow for the fact that, unless industry is to be paralyzed by recurrent revolts on the part of outraged human nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not purely economic. A reasonable view must recognize that natural appetites may be purified or restrained, as, in fact, in some considerable measure they already have been, by being submitted to the control of some larger body of interests. The distinction made by the philosophers of classical antiquity between liberal and servile occupation; the medieval insistence that riches exist for man, not man for riches; Ruskin’s famous outburst, “there is no wealth but life”; the argument of the Socialist who urges that production should be organized for service, not for profit; are but different attempts to emphasize the instrumental character of economic activities by reference to an ideal which is held to express the true nature of man.

Of that nature and its possibilities, the Christian Church was thought, during the greater part of the period discussed in these pages, to hold a conception distinctively its own. It was therefore committed to the formulation of a social theory as a vital element in a creed concerned with the destiny of men whose character is formed, and whose spiritual potentialities are fostered or starved, by the commerce of the marketplace and the institutions of society. Stripped of the eccentricities of period and place, the Church’s philosophy had as its center a determination to assert the superiority of moral principles over economic appetites, which have their place, and an important place, in the human scheme, but which, like other natural appetites, when flattered and pampered and overfed, bring ruin to the soul and confusion to society. Its casuistry was an attempt to translate these principles into a code of practical ethics, sufficiently precise to be applied to the dusty world of warehouse and farm. Its discipline was an effort, too often corrupt and pettifogging in practice, but not ignoble in conception, to work the Christian virtues into the spotted texture of individual character and social conduct. That such a practice was often a sorry parody on theory is a truism which should need no emphasis. But in a world where principles and conduct are unequally matched, men are to be judged by their reach as well as by their grasp—by the ends at which they aim as well as by the success with which they attain them.

Circumstances alter from age to age, and the practical interpretation of moral principles must alter with them. Few who consider dispassionately the facts of social history will deny that the exploitation of the weak by the powerful has been a permanent feature in the life of most communities that the world has yet seen. But the quality in modern societies which is most sharply opposed to the teaching ascribed to Jesus consists in the assumption that the attainment of material riches is the supreme object of human endeavor and the final criterion of human success. 

Such a philosophy—plausible, militant, and not indisposed, when hard pressed, to silence criticism by persecution—may triumph or may decline. What is certain is that it is the negation of any system of thought or morals which can, except by a metaphor, be described as Christian. Compromise is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of the Roman Empire.

“Modern capitalism,” writes Mr. Keynes, “is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.” It is that whole system of appetites and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of its triumph, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest of its material environment resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. It was against that system, while still in its supple and insinuating youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask of innocence, and while its true nature was unknown even to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier ages launched their warnings and their denunciations.

The language in which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the contracts of business and the disposition of property may seem an impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agreeable failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is less pardonable to be silent than to say too much.

Wednesday with Pascal: The Wasteland of Modernity

{Hiding out somewhere in Montana’s tri-city area (Pony, Willow Creek, and Three Forks), Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has somehow come across a copy of a book by the late Ivan Ilyin, a controversial Russian philosopher. I have no idea whether Pascal agrees with Ilyin’s ideas or whether he just likes having found something by a Russian author.}

Ivan Ilyin (1883--1954) was a Russian philosopher, an opponent of Bolshevism, a Fascist sympathizer, and, at least intermittently, an anti-Semite. Ilyin had the dubious honor of having been expelled from Russia by Lenin and having fled Germany during Hitler’s regime. Ilyin’s work has been rediscovered in post-Soviet Russia, where it has influenced the likes of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Dugin, and even Vladimir Putin. The Foundation of Christian Culture was written in 1937, just before World War II. ¹ As the following excerpt indicates, the book was an indictment of secular modernity, which makes it relevant for today’s culture warriors and for the culture wars they continue waging. 

This is from Ilyin’s opening chapter:

Everything that has occurred in the twentieth century, and continues today, is proof of the fact that Christianity is suffering a crisis. Massive swathes of the population have lost their living faith and have left the Christian churches. Within the limits of what was formerly Christendom, there is a wide anti-Christian front that has tried to create an un-Christian and anti-Christian culture. This phenomenon is not a new one. The twentieth century, following in the footsteps of the nineteenth, only manifests a process that has been developing for centuries. The process of separation of culture from faith, religion, and the Church began a long time ago. It has been going on for several centuries. In Europe and America, ‘secular culture’ and secularization itself can trace their beginnings all the way to the Renaissance.

During the first millennium and a half after the birth of Christ, the situation was radically different. There could be many reasons for this. Possibly, people in general were more trusting, their spiritual makeup less complex and variegated, more instinctive, even irrational; therefore, more modest and spiritually careful. Perhaps the divine origin of the Gospel was more immediately apparent, more vividly and profoundly experienced. Perhaps man did not yet feel himself to be the master of nature, but one subjected to nature’s whims. Or maybe life was simply more chaotic and more fraught. However it may be, it was during this time period that people in Christendom considered religion to be the center of their life, its most important (or possibly its exclusive) source of existence and meaning. ²

For the last four centuries, and especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all this radically changed. Even the end of the Middle Ages contained within itself the seeds of these changes; and we are the ones having to reap what those centuries sowed.

European culture of the nineteenth century was in essence already secular and desacralized. Science, art, law, agriculture, worldview, cosmology—all these were thoroughly secularized. The culture of our own time continues this separation from Christianity, but not only from Christianity; contemporary culture is losing its religious spirit, its meaning, and its beauty. It has not turned to any new religion, nor has it even started to seek anything of the sort. Having separated from Christianity, it has gone into an a-religious, godless wasteland. Mankind has not only ceased to contemplate, develop, and preserve the experience of the Christian church, but it has brought fruit to no other religious experience at all. It has left Christianity, but it wanders the wasteland aimlessly.

____________________________________

Ivan Ilyin - Wikipedia

 ¹ According to Wikipedia, Ilyin was among those exiled by Lenin in 1923 on the famous “Philosophers’ Ship”. Wikipedia goes on to offer this fascinating report:

Until 1934, Ilyin cooperated with Nikolai Berdyaev on Russian Religious Renaissance. In “On resisting evil by force,” he advocated the use of violence in the struggle against Bolshevism, which he regarded as despotism. He criticized the anarchist and pacifist ideology of Tolstoy. He called for the courage to "arrest, condemn, and shoot," which Maxim Gorky called a "gospel of revenge"; Berdyaev compared Ilyin’s proposal to a "Cheka of God" and described it as “legalism devoid of grace”. Zinaida Gippius called Ilyin’s book "military field theology"; according to her, "Ilyin is not a philosopher who writes books, not a publicist who writes press releases: he is a man possessed running amok." In other words, he was a typical member of the Russian intelligentsia. 

² Ilyin could have added that village life in pre-modern Europe was arranged around liturgical calendars (e.g., feast days of saints were occasions for civic festivities); religion was not an individual matter but a communal and social obligation—dissenters, heretics, and non-conformists were met with scorn, if not worse. Local priests wielded an authority that was rarely questioned. Not surprisingly, what religious dissent there was came from the educated classes, from the leisured nobility, and from the monasteries and the universities: all of them potential sources of heterodox opinions, as they remain to this day.

Wednesday with Pascal: Separation of Church and Market

{Pascal the self-exiled existential Russian blue cat continues to submit his weekly posts. He is rumored to have settled somewhere in Montana’s famous “tri-city” area (Pony, Three Forks, and Willow Creek), also known as the “Tobacco Root Triangle,” after the nearby mountain range. Wherever he is, he continues to have a bee in his feline bonnet about capitalism, Christianity, and what he perceives as the unlikely and unholy alliance of the two.)

The British historian Richard H. Tawney (1880—1962) was a Christian Socialist ¹ whose work—including his two best known books, The Acquisitive Society and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism—was suffused with moral earnestness and a nostalgia for the Catholic integralism of the Middle Ages. ² According to Tawney, religion and moral values in medieval Europe were closely linked to economics and politics, and vice-versa; which is to say, markets were not exempt from morals. Modernity then ushered in the notion of “non-overlapping magisteria,” separate realms of authority that need not compete, argue, nor intrude upon each other’s claims, e.g., religion and science, but also religion and politics, and, crucially for Tawney’s argument, religion and economics.  

His argument was that what we might call “the separation of Church and Market” was as disastrous (morally and socially) as it was miraculous (economically). The retreat of medieval ecclesiastical authority was unquestionably a critical factor in the rise of modernity; among other things, it cleared the ground for economic expansion and for the accumulation and investment of capital. ³

Tawney believed the Reformation simultaneously weakened the Church (by turning it into churches) and strengthened the individual (“Every man his own priest”), with incalculable consequences for both:   

No one can read the economic discussions which took place between 1500 and 1550 without being struck by the constant appeal from the new and clamorous economic interests of the day to the traditional Christian morality, which in social organization, as in the relations of individuals, was still conceived to be the final authority. It was [for that reason] that the officers of the Church claimed to be heard on questions of social policy; and, however much Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists may have differed on doctrine or ecclesiastical government, they were agreed that social morality was the province of the Church, and they were prepared both to teach it, and to enforce it, when necessary, by suitable discipline.

By the middle of the seventeenth century all that was altered, [replaced by] a new world of economic, as well as of political, thought. The claim of religion to maintain rules of good conscience in economic affairs finally vanished. The attempt to maintain that there was a Christian standard of economic conduct was impossible, not only because of lay opposition, but because the division of the Churches made it evident that no common standard existed which could be enforced by ecclesiastical machinery. The doctrine that, as proved by the experience of Holland, trade and tolerance flourished together, had its practical significance in the fact that neither could prosper without large concessions to individualism.

The problem, of course, was that individuals were no longer protected, in the new dispensation, from greed and economic rapacity. The economic order was released (on its own recognizance) from the moral tutelage of the Ten Commandments and placed instead under the authority of its own newly discovered (or invented) “laws,” laws which made poverty inevitable (or so it was claimed) and amelioration of poverty impossible. The modern economy, like modern government, was conceived as “a machine that would go of itself” (the phrase comes from James Russell Lowell) so long as it was left to its own devices:

The ground which was vacated by the Christian moralist was quickly occupied by theorists of another order. The future for the next two hundred years would be not with the attempt to reaffirm the conception that a moral rule was binding on Christians in their economic transactions, but with the new science of Political Arithmetic, which asserted, at first with hesitation and then with confidence, that no moral rule beyond the letter of the law exists. Influenced in its method by the contemporary progress of mathematics and physics, it handled economic phenomena, not as a casuist concerned to distinguish right from wrong, but as a scientist, applying a new calculus to impersonal economic forces. Its method, temper, and assumptions were accepted by all educated men, including the clergy, even though its particular conclusions continued for long to be disputed. In short, there was a transition, and the intellectual and moral conversion which it produced was not less momentous than the effect of some more familiar intellectual revolutions.

Like any good Socialist, Tawney understood that man’s social environment helped form (and restrict) his ideas as well as his actions. Whatever “human nature” may be in the wild, it has long since been tamed and transformed by society and culture (including religion):

There is an evolution of ideas, as well as of organisms, and the quality of civilization depends on the transmission, less of physical qualities, than of a complex structure of habits, knowledge, and beliefs, the destruction of which would be followed within a year by the death of half the human race. Granted that the groundwork of inherited dispositions with which the individual is born has altered little in recorded history, the interests and values which compose his world have undergone a succession of revolutions. The conventional statement that human nature does not change is plausible only so long as attention is focused on those aspects of it which are least distinctively human. The wolf is today what he was when he was hunted by Nimrod. But, while men are born with many of the characteristics of wolves, man is a wolf domesticated, who both transmits the arts by which he has been partially tamed and improves upon them. He steps into a social inheritance, to which each generation adds its own contribution of good and evil, before it bequeaths it to its successors.

What we came to call Homo Economicus (Economic Man) was invented, not discovered, by capitalism’s priests and prophets, who solemnly instructed the masses that the business of modern man is business; that they must submit to the Invisible Hand; that there is no such thing as a free lunch; and that loafers and idlers, shirkers and malingerers, redistributionists and bleeding-hearted reformers are not welcome in the House of Mammon:

There is a moral and religious, as well as a material, environment which sets its stamp on the individual, even when he is least conscious of it. And the effect of changes in this environment is not less profound. The economic categories of modern society, such as property, freedom of contract and competition, are as much a part of its intellectual furniture as its political conceptions, and, together with religion, have probably been the most potent force in giving it its character. Between the conception of society as a community of unequal classes with varying functions, organized for a common end, and that which regards it as a mechanism adjusting itself through the play of economic motives to the supply of economic needs; between the idea that a man must not take advantage of his neighbor’s necessity, and the doctrine that “man’s self-love is God’s providence”; between the attitude which appeals to a religious standard to repress economic appetites, and that which regards expediency as the final criterion—there is a chasm which no theory of the permanence and ubiquity of economic interests can bridge.

If economic motives, needs, and interests are what matter most, then we modern Americans, for the past seventy years, have had our priorities in order. If we have been mistaken, however, we might want to consider re-ordering our lives accordingly.

_______________________________

R.H. Tawney quotes are from Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

H. Tawney - Wikipedia

¹ Critics who claim that “Christian Socialist” is an oxymoron demonstrate their ignorance of both Christianity and Socialism.

² “Integralism” is an ideology which advocates “the integration of religious authority and political power.” How this differs from theocracy is not altogether clear; in any case, integralism (in some modified form) has its champions even today—the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule of Harvard University, for one. Adrian Vermeule - Wikipedia

³ I am no scriptural exegete, but was not Jesus referring to “the accumulation and investment of capital” when he warned listeners not to “pile up treasure on earth”? Had Jesus been economically literate rather than merely divine, he could have included, in his Sermon on the Mount, the maxim, “A rising tide lifts all boats,” a phrase his closest followers, most of whom were fishermen, would certainly have understood.

Wednesday with Pascal: Law and Justice, Custom and Reason

How just is Justice, and how reasonable is Reason? Such were the questions that kept the mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal awake at night. In his own words:

On what shall man found the order of the world which he would govern? Shall it be on the caprice of each individual? What confusion! Shall it be on justice? Man is ignorant of it.

Whose justice? Is there a universally agreed-upon definition, one not limited by culture, era, religious beliefs, etc.? There is not:

Certainly had he known it, man would not have established this maxim, the most general of all that obtain among men, that each should follow the custom of his own country. The glory of true equity would have brought all nations under subjection, and legislators would not have taken as their model the fancies and caprice of Persians and Germans instead of this unchanging justice. We should have seen it set up in all the States on earth and in all times; whereas we see neither justice nor injustice which does not change its nature with change in climate. Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence; a meridian decides the truth. Fundamental laws change after a few years of possession; right has its epochs; the entry of Saturn into the Lion marks to us the origin of such and such a crime. A strange justice that is bounded by a river! Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other side.

Was Pascal promoting relativism? Not at all: he was merely acknowledging its existence and its consequences. The vagaries of birth—where one is born, and when, and to whom—determine the “justice” under which one lives and the “reason” by which it in turn is justified.

Men admit that justice does not consist in these customs, but that it resides in natural laws, common to every country.

Or so some insist, invoking a fiction they call “natural law” and decreeing its universality. Unfortunately, these advocates disagree among themselves over the nature of “natural law,” as well as its details; such disagreement tends to undermine confidence in their various assertions.

While natural law enthusiasts argue, humanly defined (and contested) “justice” goes on its multifarious ways:

They would certainly maintain it obstinately, if reckless chance which has distributed human laws had encountered even one which was universal; but the farce is that the caprice of men has so many vagaries that there is no such law. Theft, incest, infanticide, parricide, have all had a place among virtuous actions.

Pascal omitted “slavery” from his litany of legalized outrages, perhaps because enlightened opinion had not, in his time, found slavery outrageous.

Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?

Tell it to the Marines; or, for that matter, to the armies, navies, air forces, legions, battalions, and hordes, all of which have fought on command of their kings, queens, emperors, presidents, tsars, and rulers. Yet Pascal was correct: war is ridiculous, as is what Mark Twain called “the damned human race.”

Meanwhile, Reason, far from rescuing us, merely adds to the confusion:

Doubtless there are natural laws; but good reason once corrupted has corrupted all. The result of this confusion is that one affirms the essence of justice to be the authority of the legislator; another, the interest of the sovereign; another, present custom, and so on.

Pascal could have added, “another affirms the authority of the priest or the infallibility of the pope”; but, as a Catholic, he was understandably wary of doing so.

Joseph de Maistre, a 19^th-century voice of reaction (and himself a Catholic), concurred with Pascal: reason is not to be trusted, insisted de Maistre, because it is promiscuous, unstable, malleable, and easily purchased by the highest bidder. Reason is no more than sophistry—at least, in the hands of a sophist, and aren’t we all sophists when we want to be? Reason is better at tearing down than at building up:

Nothing, according to reason alone, is just in itself; all changes with time. Custom creates the whole of equity, for the simple reason that it is accepted. It is the mystical foundation of its authority; whoever carries it back to first principles destroys it. Nothing is so faulty as those laws which correct faults. He who obeys them because they are just, obeys a justice which is imaginary, and not the essence of law; it is quite self-contained, it is law and nothing more. He who will examine its motive will find it so feeble and so trifling that if he be not accustomed to contemplate the wonders of human imagination, he will marvel that one century has gained for it so much pomp and reverence.

Joseph de Maistre, too, insisted on “the mystical principle of authority” and on the inadvisability of examining authority’s claims too closely. Ignore the man behind the curtain, he counseled; accept on faith whatever the accepted authority says. Maistre’s skepticism about human reason (in the wake of the French Revolution) was part of what is called the Counter-Enlightenment, aka “the Age of Reaction”.

Pascal, however, got there first:

The art of opposition and of revolution is to unsettle established customs, sounding them even to their source, to point out their want of authority and justice. We must, it is said, get back to the natural and fundamental laws of the State, which an unjust custom has abolished. It is a game certain to result in the loss of all; nothing will be just on the balance. Yet people readily lend their ear to such arguments. They shake off the yoke as soon as they recognize it; and the great profit by their ruin, and by that of these curious investigators of accepted customs.

Conservatives, traditionalists, and reactionaries agree: “sounding” the basis of authority, even if it enables people to recognize the “yoke” they are under, is counterproductive at best and self-destructive at worst. Revolutions do not work; that, at least, was the verdict of Pascal.

And yet, as Pascal conceded, “custom” by itself is vulnerable to the assaults of Reason. Therefore, custom must be buttressed by benign deceit:   

But, from a contrary mistake, men sometimes think they can justly do everything which is not without an example. That is why the wisest of legislators said that it was necessary to deceive men for their own good. We must not see the fact of usurpation; law was once introduced without reason and has since become reasonable. We must make it regarded as authoritative, eternal, and conceal its origin, if we do not wish that it should soon come to an end.

Thus, the “noble lie” and the “founding myth”: Aeneas, Romulus and Remus, Cincinnatus, etc. In (perhaps) less credulous modern times, we settle for the likes of George Washington and the cherry tree, a merely moralistic fable that falls far short of myth—but we make do, telling ourselves that America is a godly nation entrusted with a godly mission.

Pascal, it seems, must be credited with having acknowledged the “vagaries” and “caprice” of human laws and institutions, while simultaneously having doubted the capacity of Reason to resolve them. He saw humanity as caught between irrational traditions and unreliable Reason, and he found refuge—for himself, at least—in faith and in what we can call “the willing suspension of disbelief”.

The problem, of course, is that it is one thing to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good novel or a blockbuster film; it is quite another thing to suspend it when what is at stake are the real lives of real people. 

Paul Klee, The Limits of Reason

Saturday Lecture: Contempt of the World

{The following is from Jean Delumeau’s “Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13^th through 18^th Centuries.” The fact that I am reading, much less referencing, such a book should tell you more about me than you wanted to know. In any case, Delumeau also authored the exemplary “History of Paradise,” which I highly recommend.}

Jean Delumeau, from Sin and Fear:

By the fourth century, the Christian theory of contempt for the world was already fully developed. St. Augustine’s prolific writings sometimes painted a slightly less pessimistic picture; nonetheless, St. Augustine himself was convinced of “the decrepitude of the world.” What was the use, therefore, of becoming attached to “vain and harmful things” that could only give rise to:

“bitter worries, disorders, afflictions, fears, mad joys, dissensions, trials, wars, ambushes, rages, enmities, duplicities, flatteries, frauds, theft, pillage, treachery, pride, ambition, envy, homicides, parricides, cruelty, savagery, perversity, lust, rudeness, impudence, lewdness, debaucheries, adulteries, incest, and so many violations and effronteries against the nature of both sexes that one blushes to name them; sacrileges, heresies, blasphemies, perjuries, oppressions of the innocent, calumnies, deceptions, prevarications, robberies, and many other crimes which do not come to mind but which are nevertheless ever present in this sad human life.”

The Christian doctrine of detachment from the world most often ended up as an accusation of the world, insofar as the earth men lived on was also the earth men sinned on.

Certain oppositions help to define the doctrine of ‘contemptus mundi,’ since this doctrine was dominated by conflicts—between time and eternity, multiplicity and unity, exterior and interior, vanity and truth, earth and heaven, body and soul, pleasure and virtue, flesh and spirit. First and foremost, the world is vain because it is ephemeral. The monk Jean de Fecamp (1078) confessed: “All that I see saddens me. Everything I hear about transitory things weighs upon me.” In one of his laments, he elaborates upon Ecclesiastes in terms that will remain virtually unchanged right up to the fifteenth century:

“Alas man, alas woman, alas unhappy man. Why do you love the goods and chattels of this earth, which will perish? Vanity of vanities, all that exists under the sun is vanity. Like the flower and the grass is the glory of this world. The world will pass, and so will desire.”

The saintly monk Anselm of Canterbury (died 1109) drew the same conclusion, a conclusion imposed by the fear of passing time: “No one can love both earthly and eternal things at the same time. Say with the blessed apostle Paul, ‘The world is crucified for me and I am crucified for the world,’ and like this same apostle look at all transitory things as if they were dung.” In the same spirit, the hermit Peter Damian (died 1072) concluded a sermon with an exhortation to “scorn all this is visible.”

The transitory nature of life was thus linked to its sadness. This connection was a constant of the ‘contemptus mundi’ and it ran counter to Horace’s ‘carpe diem’. Peter Damian incessantly decried “the miserable condition of man.” Jean de Fecamp affirmed that life is “very evil and unhappy” and that man is “full of misery [and] lives in sorrow.” Around 1045, another monk, Hermann Contract, wrote “An Exhortatory Poem on the Contempt for the World” where he enumerated the worries, sadness, problems, sicknesses, fears, ills, and sufferings that fill existence. He also cited pell-mell the dangers and aggressions that persecute man: worms, serpents, beasts of all kinds, birds, cold, heat, hunger, thirst, water, fire, wind, earth, violence, thunder, lightning, accidents, poisons, deceit, discord, amputations, war, captivity, slavery, and countless diseases. ¹

In this view, Earth is ‘a vale of tears,’ a ‘desert,’ an ‘exile’ which cannot be over-depreciated in comparison with the blessed life, the ‘sure life, tranquil life, beautiful life, pure life.’ ² An anonymous poet of the twelfth century wrote:

“Life, stupid thing / Accepted only by fools, / I reject you with all my heart. / You are full of filth. / With all my heart I reject you. / I prefer to undergo death, / O life, rather than serve you.”

In short, the secular world has no meaning. The activities inherent to man’s earthly condition belong to a vacuum of anti-values, just as nature is emptied of its worth and all worldly pleasures are repudiated as being unhealthy.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Delumeau I note with admiration that M. Delumeau once held the Chair of the History of Religious Mentalities.

¹ Herr Contract may have cribbed his list from Augustine, though he omitted the latter’s multiple references to erectile dysfunction. One can summarize Christian pessimism as “Life’s a bitch, and then you die”; it’s also kind of like “The food here is awful, and the portions are so small.”    

² The gnostic temperament, if not the gnostic cosmology, was never lacking in Christianity.

 

Wednesday with Pascal: None Dare Call It Paranoia

{It is unlike Pascal the existential Russian blue cat to take an interest in politics or current events, but it seems that his ongoing self-imposed exile has deprived him of his access to arcane philosophical works; as a result, he is now a mere pundit.}

{The italicized passages below are from the 1949 book “Prophets of Deceit,” about which more anon. The non-italicized remarks are mine (i.e., Pascal’s).}

"Paranoia strikes deep; into your life it will creep. It starts when you're always afraid..." (Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth")

Stop me if you’ve heard this, or something very much like this, before:

When will the plain, ordinary, sincere, sheeplike people of America awaken to the fact that their common affairs are being arranged and run for them by aliens, Communists, crackpots, refugees, renegades, Socialists, termites, and traitors? These alien enemies of America are like the parasitic insect which lays his egg inside the cocoon of a butterfly, devours the larvae and, when the cocoon opens, instead of a butterfly we find a pest, a parasite.

This is a clever scheme and if the American people don’t get busy and fight it the whole vicious thing will be slipped over on you without your knowing what hit you. A comprehensive and carefully planned conspiracy, directed by a powerfully organized clique, and operating through official and semiofficial channels is the ever-lurking enemy of the people’s liberty.

Our enemies are fiends, and they will stop at nothing, so be prepared:

The tactics employed by these usurpers of American liberties will be to create horror and panic by exhibitions of maximum brutalities. It will be only ordinary sense at the first announcements of trouble for all householders to have several large receptacles for storing drinking water on their premises so that ravages of thirst may not add to the general ordeal.

We will be dismissed by the lamestream pundits and by all who drink the Kool Aid:

They will say we are crackpots. They will say that this program will appeal only to the lunatic fringe. Surely it is not lunacy to seek the truth. Or is it?

Decent, honest American businessmen cower in fear, beset by bureaucratic tyranny:

What’s wrong? I’ll tell you what is wrong. We have robbed man of his liberty. We have imprisoned him behind the iron bars of bureaucratic persecution. We have taunted the American businessman until he is afraid to sign his name to a paycheck for fear he is violating some bureaucratic rule that will call for the surrender of a bond, the appearance before a committee, the persecution before some Washington board, or even imprisonment.

The “3 R’s” used to be reading, writing, and arithmetic, but now they are “Racketeers, Radicals, and Reds”:

While we have dissipated and persecuted management, we have stood idly by and watched a gang of racketeers, radicals, and conspirators regiment our workers in the name of organized labor into a dues-paying conspiracy designed in Moscow to recruit workers for what they hope would become the American Red Revolution.

Urban elites must be toppled from their lofty perches:

We are going to take this government out of the hands of these city-slickers and give it back to the people that still believe that 2 and 2 is 4, that God is in his heaven, and the Bible is the Word. Down must come those who live in luxury, the laws that have protected the favored few, and those politicians who are disloyal to the voters! Whenever a legislative body meets, liberties of the people are endangered by subtle and active interests. Lust for power, financial and political, is the ever-lurking enemy of the people’s liberty.

The corruptions of Liberalism are responsible for our plight:

There is a deserved odium resting upon the word “liberal.” Whether applied to Religion, Morals, or Politics, “Liberalism” is destructive of all fundamental values. In matters pertaining to Religion, Liberalism leads to Atheism. In Morals, it leads to Nudism. In Politics, it leads to Anarchy. In the framework of a democracy the great mass of decent people does not realize what is going on when its interests are betrayed. Today is a day to return to the high road, to the main road that leads to the preservation of our democracy and to the traditions of our republic.

“They” get rich while we starve and suffer:

Alien-minded plutocrats roll in wealth, bathe in liquor, surround themselves with the seduced daughters of America, and cooperate in all schemes to build up pro-Communist and anti-Christian sentiment. America, the vain; America, the proud; America, the nation of gluttons and spenders and drinkers. When Harry Hopkins got married, Mr. Bernard Baruch arranged the party. There were seven kinds of meat served — twenty-two kinds of food, and it had cost Barney Baruch $122 a plate; and they drank of the vintage of ’26. ¹ You talk about the drunken orgies of history—we expect Capone to live like that, but I will not be governed by a man like that. That’s what they do not want me to say. That’s why I am such a bad man. Because I say what you all want to say and haven’t got the guts to say.

We face danger but we cannot remain silent:

We are risking our lives to write a new page in American history. We propose without further ado, without equivocation, without any silly sentimentality sometimes known as Tolerance, to emasculate the debauchers within the social body and reestablish America on a basis where this spoliation can never again be repeated. We are coming to the crossroads where we must decide whether we are going to preserve law and order and decency or whether we are going to be sold down the river to these Red traitors who are undermining America.

Thus, the persistent and predictable rant of the American right-wing populist, minus the overt anti-Semitism and racism that often accompanied his rhetoric. Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, co-authors of Prophets of Deceit (1949), insisted that “The italicized speech is a composite of actual statements made by American agitators. Except for the punctuation, everything—words, thoughts, appeals—is all theirs.” I have no reason to doubt it, having been privy to similar rantings for decades, e.g., “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” That quote helped sink Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid, but the attitude it expressed lies at the heart of post-1964 conservatism, albeit slightly paraphrased: “Extremism in demonizing liberals is no vice. Moderation in political dog-whistling is no virtue.”  

Prophets of Deceit was, of course, a product of its time, written immediately after World War II while the world was still attempting to comprehend the horror of the Holocaust. The book was edited by Max Horkheimer, one of the founders of the now notorious Frankfurt School; the authors’ left-wing slant was therefore not surprising. As the above excerpt indicates, Lowenthal and Guterman focused on right-wing populist and conspiracist rabble-rousing; left-wing agitation was not their subject. 

Such caveats and qualifications aside, it remains the case that today’s “MAGA” movement, at least at the edges—I am being kind here, as the “MAGA” rot has spread from the edges to the center in the past decade—is recycling decades-old tropes and is doing so with the benefit of communications media previously unavailable and an unrivaled propaganda network.

According to Wikipedia, “Harvard lecturer Charles Clavey believes ‘Prophets of Deceit’ offers the most striking insights into current illiberal movements such as Trumpism.” ² I cannot think of a better reason for procuring a copy of the Lowenthal—Guterman opus and reading it carefully. As much as we would like to put “Trumpism” behind us (and into the dustbin of history where it belongs), I do not think we are out of the political woods just yet--not by a long shot.

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For more on Prophets of Deceit (which is available online at the Internet Archive), see: Prophets of Deceit - Wikipedia

¹ Harry Hopkins was a key advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s; naturally, right-wing critics accused him of being pro-Soviet Union or even a Soviet spy. Harry Hopkins - Wikipedia Bernard Baruch was a wealthy financier who advised both President Woodrow Wilson (during World War I) and FDR (during World War II). Critics of Baruch charged him with war profiteering. Bernard Baruch - Wikipedia

² Read Charles Clavey’s essay here: Donald Trump, Our Prophet of Deceit - Boston Review

 

On the Bookshelf

{No, I haven’t read these books, but they’re on my current list of ‘must reads,’ which is practically the same as having read them. Besides, I’ve got the publishers’ summaries right in front of me, and I’m sure those are entirely accurate and objective.}

Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

According to its publisher, Empireland is “brilliantly illuminating” as well as “revelatory and lucid”. The author’s thesis is that “much of what we consider to be modern Britain is actually rooted in its imperial past.” Every nation has skeletons in its closet, and Britain is no exception; what slavery is to the United States, colonialism and empire are to Britain, which no doubt explains why, for the most part, “empire itself is a subject that is shockingly obscured from view,” despite the fact that “Empire informs nearly everything, from common thought processes to the routines that shape everyday life, from the foundation of the National Health Service to the nature of racism in the U.K., from the British distrust of intellectuals in public life to the exceptionalism that permeated the campaign for Brexit and the government’s early response to the Covid crisis.”

Alas, the lesson Sanghera draws from his investigation is banal: “Cultivating a new, more honest relationship to the past is essential for moving forward.” I’m sure that’s true, and I’m sure that Empireland offers plenty of grist for the mill of revisionist history; but since most people side with Henry “History is bunk” Ford, I don’t know how far forward the book can move us. For that matter, I’m not sure how far forward most of us want to go. 

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David Corn, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy

David Corn is Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, a prominent left-wing publication. ¹ His American Psychosis purportedly “offers readers a brisk, can-you-believe-it journey through the netherworld of far-right irrationality and the Republican Party’s interactions with the darkest forces in America.” Corn “reveals the hidden history of how the Party of Lincoln forged alliances with extremists, kooks, racists, and conspiracy-mongers and fostered fear, anger, and resentment to win elections—and how this led to Donald Trump’s triumph and the transformation of the GOP into a Trump personality cult that foments and bolsters the crazy and dangerous excesses of the right.”

TBH, this sounds like Rick Perlstein redux (Before the Storm, Nixonland, and Reaganland), less a “hidden history” than a retracing of familiar ground. American Psychosis “covers the last seven decades. From McCarthyism to the John Birch Society to segregationists to the New Right to the religious right to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to the militia movement to Fox News to Sarah Palin to the Tea Party to Trumpism, the Republican Party has deliberately nurtured and exploited rightwing fear and loathing fueled by paranoia, grievance, and tribalism.” What a long, strange trip it’s been, and it’s not over yet by a long shot.

If you haven’t read Rick Perlstein, American Psychosis should live up to its billing as a “gripping tale” of how the likes of Donald Trump managed to be taken seriously by, at last count, 75 million American voters. The fact that Rachel Maddow praises the book should be sufficient imprimatur for Corn’s intended audience.

______________________________________________

¹ Caveat emptor: according to at least one reviewer, Corn has “a history of stretching the truth.”  

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Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell

The story told from the outside by David Corn is told here by Tim Miller from the inside. In Why We Did It, “former Republican political operative Tim Miller answers the question no one else has fully grappled with: Why did normal people go along with the worst of Trumpism?” ¹

In Why We Did It, “Miller conducts his own forensic study on the pungent carcass of the party he used to love, cutting into all the hubris, ambition, idiocy, desperation, and self-deception for everyone to see. In a bracingly honest reflection on both his own past work for the Republican Party and the contortions of his former peers in the GOP establishment, Miller draws a straight line between the actions of the 2000s GOP to the Republican political class's Trumpian takeover, including the horrors of January 6th.”

It appears that Miller has joined the ranks of Republican operatives—e.g., Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace, Michael Steele, and David Frum, to name a few—who have belatedly discovered that tolerating the likes of Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann only encouraged the idea that voting for Donald Trump made perfect sense. For years, Miller and the others had no trouble with Rush Limbaugh’s radio rantings, Glenn Beck’s conspiracist antics, or the lunacies of Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity; but, for them, Donald Trump was simply a bridge too far.

Anyway:

From ruminations on the mental jujitsu that allowed him as a gay man to justify becoming a hitman for homophobes, to astonishingly raw interviews with former colleagues who jumped on the Trump Train, Miller diagrams the flattering and delusional stories GOP operatives tell themselves so they can sleep at night. Why We Did It is a vital, darkly satirical warning that all the narcissistic justifications that got us to this place still thrive within the Republican party, which means they will continue to make the same mistakes and political calculations that got us here, with disastrous consequences for the nation.

If it helps, Nicolle Wallace likes the book.

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¹ Why do good citizens allow evil things to be done in their name? This scene from the film Judgment at Nuremberg is instructive:

(27) Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) - Burt Lancaster Monologue - YouTube

For those of you who favor the written word, here is the text: American Rhetoric: Movie Speech from Judgment at Nuremberg - Ernst Janning Confesses his Guilt to the Tribunal 

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Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland

Dr. Jonathan Metzl goes beyond the familiar “What’s the matter with Kansas?” meme and asks, “What’s the matter with white Americans?” It turns out that the demographic in question frequently allows politics to cloud its judgment on matters of health and safety: for instance, by rejecting Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan when it was repackaged as Barack Obama’s healthcare plan, by refusing Medicaid expansion, or by swilling hydroxychloroquine to ward off COVID while rejecting medically recommended methods of minimizing the risk of infection.   

Metzl’s narrative details how, “In election after election, conservative white Americans have embraced politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But the policies that result place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, Dr. Metzl examines how racial resentment has fueled pro-gun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. He shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates."

Recent studies (too recent to be referenced in Dying of Whiteness) have shown that white Americans’ resistance to vaccines and to pandemic risk-reduction measures led to unexpectedly (and unnecessarily) higher mortality rates, especially in “Red” (Republican) states. Such an outcome is sadly ironic for a political party that calls itself “pro-life.”

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Stuart Jeffries, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Post-Modern

Stuart Jeffries is a British journalist who wrote Grand Hotel Abyss, a highly entertaining history of the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt scholars were pioneers of post-modernism, celebrated (or vilified) for bringing Marxism up to date and using it to radicalize cultural studies the way Marx had radicalized economics.

In other words, Stuart Jeffries knows the territory. That familiarity has enabled him to write “a brilliant history of a dangerous idea, [sketching] a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and continues to the present.” His working assumption is that “Post-modernity is the creative destruction that has shattered our present times into fragments. It dynamited modernism which had dominated the western world for most of the 20th century. Post-modernism stood for everything modernism rejected: fun, exuberance, irresponsibility. It was also the forcing ground of the 'post-truth', by means of which Western values got turned upside down."

For all that, writes Jeffries, the underlying reality of post-modernism has mostly escaped notice: “Beneath its glitzy surface, post-modernism had a dirty secret: it was the fig leaf for a rapacious new kind of capitalism.” Just as consumer capitalism (“Have it your way” and “We put you in the driver’s seat”) enshrined consumer choice as the ‘summum bonum,’ postmodernism—rejecting objective Truth, orthodox canons, and established narratives—enshrined epistemological variety, diversity of perspectives, and previously marginalized narratives.     

Can postmodernism be both Marxist and capitalist? Is consumer capitalism the same thing as postmodernism? Can't we have our cake and eat it too? We will just have to read Everything, All the Time, Everywhere if we are to sort that out.

Saturday Lecture: Inventing Ideology

{Best known as an expert on Marxism and a biographer of Marx, David McLellan has also written about the life and thought of Simone Weil (Utopian Pessimism), about Christianity and politics (Unto Caesar), and about the rise of ideologies in the modern world—that last being the topic of this morning’s brief lecture.}   

David McLellan, from Ideology:

The history of the concept of ideology is the history of various attempts to find a firm Archimedean point outside the sphere of ideological discourse, an immovable spot from which to observe the levers of ideology at work. In the Enlightenment (rationalist, empiricist) tradition, trust has been placed in an objective science of society which would unmask the irrationality of ideological conceptions. Marxist tradition has consisted in the search for a particular group or class whose representatives would have a peculiar vocation for non-ideological thought.

Both traditions envisage the possibility of a society without ideology— whether a capitalist society where the self-evident norms of a rational market economy will impose themselves, or a Marxist society where ideology seen as bulwark of class power will no longer be necessary. But the specter of the relativism of all claims to truth, which has plagued humankind at least since Plato’s Protagoras denied the possibility of objective truth, refuses to be laid. Any examination of ideology makes it difficult to avoid the rueful conclusion that all views about ideology are themselves ideological; but avoided it must be—or at least modified by saying that some views are more ideological than others. For the simple thought that all views are ideological encounters two difficulties: first, that it borders on the vacuous, since it is so all-embracing as to be almost meaningless; secondly, and more damagingly, it contains the same logical absurdity as the declaration of Epimenides the Cretan who declared that all Cretans were liars.

The term ‘ideology’ is less than 200 years old. It is the product of the social, political, and intellectual upheavals that accompanied the Industrial Revolution: the spread of democratic ideals, the politics of mass movements, the idea that, since we have made the world, we can also remake it. According to Jurgen Habermas, these new worldviews ‘emerge from the critique of dogmatism and claim a scientific character…they replace traditional legitimations of power by appearing in the mantle of modern science and by deriving their justification from the critique of ideology. Ideologies, then, are coeval with the critique of ideologies.’

Traditional beliefs tend to be static and to rely on a restricted, hierarchically structured, source of authority. But as the power of tradition wanes, so ideas are opened up to contestation and begin to compete. ¹ The myths of the past served mostly to promote values around which societies could integrate and continue as coherent entities: myths did not compete. Ideas, on the other hand, were the products of an increasingly pluralist society and were associated with rival groups whose sectional interests they served. Whereas traditional religion concentrated on the interaction between the everyday life of individuals and the sacredness of an other-worldly dimension, the secularized universe of ideology concerned itself with public projects of this-worldly transformation to be legitimized by apparently self-justifying appeals to science and reason.

The organizing myths of past societies were inherited, and constituted a given framework that transcended the social world; ideologies are typically our own creation drawn from painstaking investigations of our own societies. This tendency is, in turn, enhanced by the increased democratization of the political process. The Industrial Revolution also involved a communications revolution in which literacy expanded enormously, in parallel with the unprecedented cheapness of books and newspapers. The increase in information available, and the fact that it emerged from highly divergent sources, meant that its interpretation became problematic; competing frameworks, representing different interests, emerged to make sense of all the new material.

But these frameworks, or ideologies, in spite of their inevitably partial origin, had to have a universal appeal; for, with the increased participation of the masses in politics, persuasion rather than mere command was the order of the day. In the age of liberty, fraternity, and equality, the only approaches that could even aspire to universal acceptance were those based on the apparently universal ideas of reason and science.

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David McLellan (political scientist) - Wikipedia

¹ Ideas freely compete in their very own marketplace, or so we are told. The seemingly innocuous phrase “the marketplace of ideas” is usually uttered without acknowledging that marketplaces tend to be rife with fraud, deception, cheats, swindles, price-fixing, profiteering, and attempts to seize control over (that is, to monopolize) entire industries. The marketplace of ideas is no exception: ergo, 'Caveat emptor.' [Noted by The Little Red Blog and not by David McLellan]

Due to unforeseen supply-chain issues, the marketplace is temporarily out of ideas.

How Wrong Can You Be?

{My disappointment with Dawn in Russia cannot be overstated. The comparison that comes to mind is my disillusionment upon reading the aging Maxim Gorky’s pathetic attempts in the 1930s to ingratiate himself with Stalin. Why does God allow smart people to write, say, and believe so many stupid things?}

Waldo Frank began Dawn in Russia musing about whether a collectivized society such as the Bolsheviks hoped to create would have room for an extraordinary individual like Alexandra Kollontai. By the time his tour of the Soviet Union existed, Frank had his answer:

Theoretically, the individual in Russia can scarcely be said to exist. The ideal of collective social progress is so dominant that it might be called the sole value. The value of immediate individual experience is discounted: and of course, at least theoretically, this deprives social value of Its fundamental integer, personal value. This fallacy is a heritage (like almost all the present ideology of Russia) from nineteenth-century bourgeois Europe: a heritage aggravated by the "war-condition" of Russia.”

In Frank’s view, the discounting of individuality was, like the Red Terror, a mere wartime inconvenience to be chalked up to the influence of “nineteenth-century bourgeois Europe”. However invidious it seemed, it would be just a passing phase: “But actually, this anti-individualism is not a danger,” Frank predicted, “for it is a theory that does not work.” In fact, he confidently declared, “Persons thrive better today in the true collectivism of Russia than they do in the false individualism of the United States. The Russian woman, in town and collective farm, is being freed of her immemorial slavery to Kinder, Kiiche, Kirche. The family is not disappearing in the Soviet Union; it is being spiritualized, it is becoming less a matter of a private kitchen where a woman endlessly presides over a private set of pots and pans, and more the human relationship between a man, his wife, and their children. Even if the child lives in a creche and the parents work in factories, the family need not die; particularly as the workers’ hours of leisure are increased. Family may become less an economic and sexual compulsion, more a flower of the conscious will and of active love: more intimate and more essential.”

Frank was correct; under Stalin, the Russian family did not disappear—merely millions of family members, never to be heard from again. Meanwhile, Frank foresaw a glorious future for the Soviet experiment:

I see no cause for fearing that a collectivist society would impede the growth of real individuals. Indeed, when I consider the aesthetic and spiritual genius of the Russian people, I am tempted to predict that their socialist society, if it be permitted healthily to evolve, will within a generation give birth to a new individualistic movement probably in literature, philosophy, and psychology. And this movement will be toward a true individualism, in which the social basis and texture of the real person will be understood. 

Soviet Communism was not perfect, of course; into every Utopia a little rain must fall. Waldo Frank warned that “The danger signals of the present time are the absolute centralization of power, the tendency toward piece-work payment, the economic privileges of the [elite], and the settling down of officeholders who already are called in certain places the ‘Soviet bourgeoisie.’ The argument that these evils are transitional can be answered only by time.” No mention of gulags or purges, of the starvation of millions, or of the boundless cruelties of a paranoid tyrant who resembled, more than anyone, Ivan the Terrible. Such dangers were unforeseen by Frank; he had his eye instead on the bourgeois officials who were “settling down” into staid bureaucratic routine.

The big question, of course, was, would Communism survive? Frank wanted it to, but he knew it would be a struggle, and not just against the capitalist nations. Maintaining revolutionary solidarity was essential; “What would happen,” Frank wondered, “if Russia lost the spirit of Communism, and hardened into an industrialized collectivist order, regimented by a new ruling caste?” He had an answer, which was not, as it has turned out, far off the mark: “Russia would become a menace: an engine of irresistible might (mechanized and well fueled) which its rulers could direct in conquest against Orient and Europe.” But Frank would not allow negativity to have the last word; “This supposition,” he wrote, “disregards the human nature of the Russian peoples. ¹ It disregards the truth that Russia has had a Communist Revolution because Communism bespeaks its native genius.” ²  

Despite his rose-colored spectacles, Waldo Frank was precisely right on at least one point: “If Communism fails of its promise, the nationalities of the Soviet Union would probably fall apart.”

We now return to our regularly scheduled Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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¹ But Frank had already told us that “Russian human nature” would change under Communism.

² To clarify: Russia had a Communist revolution because Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were more formidable, more determined, better prepared, and more ruthless than Kerensky, Milyukov, and Prince Trubetskoy; oh, and because the Germans helped finance the Bolshevik cause. If the revolution “bespoke” anything, it bespoke not the “Russian genius” but what Pushkin called “the Russian riot, senseless and cruel.”