The Little Red Blog

"Trying To Escape the Sun"

It's time for another excursion into Russian history! Because if not us, who, and if not now, when?

“To try to escape revolution here [in 19^th-century Russia] might turn out to be as futile as trying to escape the sun.” (Marshall Berman)

In the course of his thought-provoking analysis of modernity (All That Is Solid Melts into Air), Marshall Berman discusses 19^th-century Russia, focusing on the city of St. Petersburg and on its towering literary figure, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Berman offers a summary of the events and circumstances that led to the extraordinary flourishing of literature, philosophy, theology, and political and economic thought in Russia between 1825 and 1917.  

The following is taken verbatim from the section of Berman’s book titled “The Real and the Unreal City”:

One of the crucial facts about modern Russian history is that the economy of the Russian Empire was stagnating, and in some ways even regressing, at the very moment when the economies of the Western nations were taking off and surging spectacularly ahead. Thus, until the dramatic industrial upsurge of the 1890s, Russians of the nineteenth century experienced modernization mainly as something that was not happening; or else as something that was happening far away, in realms that Russians, even when they traveled there, experienced more as fantastic anti-worlds than as social actualities; or else, where it was happening at home, as something that was happening only in the most jagged, halting, blatantly abortive or weirdly distorted ways. The anguish of backwardness and underdevelopment played a central role in Russian politics and culture, from the 1820s well into the Soviet period.

Catherine the Great [ruled 1762—1796) and her successors recoiled in horror from the revolutionary waves that swept over Europe after 1789. Except for the brief period of rapprochement between Alexander I and Napoleon, which nourished liberal and constitutional initiatives from within the imperial bureaucracy, Russia's political role throughout the nineteenth century was to be the vanguard of European counter-revolution. But this role contained paradoxes. First, it meant enlisting the ablest and most dynamic of reactionary thinkers…but this only entangled Russia more deeply in those Western impulses and energies that the government was trying to blot out. Next, the levee-en-masse against Napoleon in 1812, although it created waves of hysteria, xenophobia, obscurantism and persecution, ironically, by its very success, swept a generation of Russians--most important, a generation of young nobles and officers--into the streets of Paris, and infused the returning veterans (the protagonists of Tolstoy's War and Peace) with the very ardor for reform that they had been sent West to blot out. [Joseph] de Maistre ¹ sensed something of this paradox: on one hand, he felt, or wanted to feel, that the serene magnificence of the palaces at the city center promised shelter from the storm; on the other hand, he feared that all he had fled might be pursuing him here, not only reflected but magnified in scope by the city's vast scene. To try to escape revolution here might turn out to be as futile as trying to escape the sun.

The first spark was ignited on December 14, 1825, just after the death of Alexander I, when hundreds of reformist members of the imperial guards--the "Decembrists"--assembled around Peter's statue in Senate Square and staged a large, confused demonstration in favor of the Grand Duke Constantine and constitutional reform. The demonstration, planned as the first phase of a liberal coup d'etat, petered out fast. The demonstrators had never been able to agree on a unified program--for some, the crucial issue was a constitution and the rule of law; for others, it was federalism in the form of home rule for Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine; for still others, the emancipation of the serfs--and they had done nothing to attract support beyond their own aristocratic and military circles. Their humiliation and martyrdom--show trials, executions, mass imprisonment and Siberian exile, a whole generation decimated--ushered in thirty years of organized brutality and stupidity under the new Tsar Nicholas I.

The reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855), which began with the repression of the Decembrists and ended with military humiliation at Sevastopol, is one of the most dismal in modern Russian history. Nicholas most lasting contribution to Russian history was the development of a political police, controlled by its secret Third Section, which came to penetrate every area of Russian life, and established Russia in the European imagination as the archetypal "police state." But the trouble was not merely that Nicholas' government was cruelly repressive: that it clamped down on the serfs (about four-fifths of the population) and crushed all hopes for their liberation, repressed them with horrible brutality (there were more than six hundred peasant uprisings during Nicholas' reign; one of his achievements was to keep nearly all of them, and their repression, secret from the country as a whole); that it condemned thousands of people to death after secret trials, without even a facade of due process of law (Dostoevsky, the most illustrious, was reprieved thirty seconds before execution); that it established multiple layers of censorship, packed schools and universities with informers, eventually paralyzed the whole educational system, finally drove all thought and culture underground, into prison, or out of the country.

What was distinctive here was neither the fact of repression nor its scope--the Russian state had always treated its subjects dreadfully--but its goal. Peter the Great had murdered and terrorized in order to break open a window to Europe, to open the way to Russia's progress and growth; Nicholas and his police were repressing and brutalizing in order to close that window.

Russia, it seems, cannot stand too much modernity; for the past two hundred years (or more), every time Russia has opened a window to modernity, it has almost immediately drawn a curtain over it. 

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https://langurbansociology.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/berman_marshall_all_that_is_solid_melts_into_air_the_experience_of_modernity.pdf

¹ Joseph de Maistre was a French aristocrat and counter-revolutionary writer, one of the leading voices of what came to be called the “Counter-Enlightenment”. Having gone into exile in the wake of the French Revolution, de Maistre then served as Sardinia’s ambassador to Russia from 1802 until 1817, posted in the city of St. Petersburg.

It All Started With Ivan the Terrible

{In which I resume my random, episodic, and unguided tutorial in Russian history…}

“May I be damned! I've killed my son! I've killed my son!” (Ivan IV, Tsar of all the Russias)

First, to be fair: historians agree that “Ivan the Terrible” was more accurately “Ivan the Formidable” or “Ivan the Magnificent,” the Russian word Groznyi being less pejorative than the English word “terrible”. On the other hand, Tsar Ivan IV, especially in the later years of his reign(s), did more than enough to merit “terrible,” or at least “terrifying”. To name just one instance, he was said to have beaten his daughter-in-law so severely that it led to a miscarriage; her offense in Ivan’s eyes had been to wear “immodest clothing”. The woman’s husband--Ivan’s son, namesake, and heir—understandably took umbrage at the assault and engaged in a heated argument with his father; the result was that Ivan Groznyi struck his son in the head with a staff and killed him. ¹

Terrible, formidable, or magnificent as he may have been, Ivan was a seminal figure in Russian history, widely held to have been the first in what became a long line of autocratic and absolutist tsars. Born in 1530, he ruled Russia from 1547 until his death in 1584, though he took a couple of abdication breaks, one of which was peevish and the other more strategic. It was Ivan who, inheriting (at the age of three) the title of “Prince of Muscovy,” consolidated the Russian empire and made Moscow its capital, while warring with his neighbors, establishing control over the vast wilderness of Siberia, seizing land to dole out to chosen vassals, helping forge the chains of serfdom, and torturing and murdering thousands; he also, in his spare time, wrote poetry, composed church hymns, and was “prone to paranoia, rage, and episodic outbreaks of mental instability.” Like Walt Whitman and like Russia itself, Ivan Groznyi was large (literally as well as figuratively), he contained multitudes; for better or for worse, modern Russia began with him.

While scholarly and popular biographies of Ivan are available (see below), allow me for now to enlist Wikipedia in describing Ivan’s historic significance:

Ivan completely altered Russia's governmental structure, establishing the character of modern Russian political organization. Ivan's creation of the Oprichnina, answerable only to him, not only afforded him personal protection but curtailed the traditional powers and rights of the boyars. Henceforth, Tsarist autocracy and despotism would lie at the heart of the Russian state. Ivan bypassed the [existing] system and offered positions of power to his supporters among the minor gentry. The Empire's local administration combined both locally and centrally appointed officials; the system proved durable and practical, and sufficiently flexible to tolerate later modification.

Ivan's notorious outbursts and autocratic whims helped characterize the position of Tsar as one accountable to no earthly authority, only to God. Tsarist absolutism faced few serious challenges until the late 19th century. Ivan's legacy was manipulated by Communist Russia as a potential focus for nationalist pride; his image became closely associated with the personality cult of Joseph Stalin. While early Soviet, Marxist–Leninist historiography "attached greater significance to socio-economic forces than to political history and the role of individuals", Stalin wanted official historians to make Russia's history "comprehensible and accessible" to the populace, with an emphasis on those "great men", such as Ivan, Alexander Nevsky, and Peter the Great, who had strengthened and expanded the Russian state. In modern, post-Soviet Russia, a campaign has been run to seek the granting of sainthood to Ivan IV; the Russian Orthodox Church opposed the idea. Under Putin’s rule, the glorification of Ivan intensified, and when in 2016 a monument was unveiled to him in the city of Oryol, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church personally supported this event. ^{2 & 3}

Over the centuries, the Russian Orthodox Church may well have held a grudge against Ivan, who, as tsar, exercised absolute control over the Church as over everything else in Russia; clerics of whom he disapproved did not retain their positions, or their lives, for long. This is not to say that Ivan was not a faithful Christian; again, Wikipedia summarizes:

Ivan was a devoted follower of Christian Orthodoxy, but in his own specific manner. He placed the most emphasis on defending the divine right of the ruler to unlimited power under God. Some scholars explain the sadistic and brutal deeds of Ivan the Terrible with the religious concepts of the 16th century, which included drowning and roasting people alive or torturing victims with boiling or freezing water, corresponding to the torments of Hell, consistent with Ivan's view of being God's representative on Earth with a sacred right and duty to punish. He may also have been inspired by the model of Archangel Michael with the idea of divine punishment. ⁴

“Inspired” may not have been the word that citizens of the city of Novgorod in 1570 would have used to describe Ivan:

Ivan grew suspicious that noblemen of the wealthy city of Novgorod were planning to defect, placing the city itself into the control of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. A Novgorod citizen (Petr Volynets) warned the tsar about the alleged conspiracy (though modern historians believe that his report was false). In 1570 Ivan ordered the Oprichniki [his personal military force] to raid the city. The Oprichniki burned and pillaged Novgorod and the surrounding villages, and the city was never to regain its former prominence.

Casualty figures vary greatly from different sources. The First Pskov Chronicle estimates the number of victims at 60,000. According to the Third Novgorod Chronicle, the massacre lasted for five weeks. The massacre of Novgorod consisted of men, women and children that were tied to sleighs, then run into the freezing waters of the Volkhov River, which Ivan ordered on the basis of unproved accusations of treason. He then tortured its inhabitants and killed thousands in a pogrom; the archbishop was also hunted to death. Almost every day 500 or 600 people were killed or drowned. ⁵

If that doesn’t pique your interest in Ivan, and in Russian history, I don’t know what will.

For anyone interested in learning more about Ivan Grozyni, allow me to suggest--based on my own very limited research to date--Benson Bobrick’s Fearful Majesty, Robert Payne’s and Nikita Romanoff’s Ivan the Terrible, and Alexander Yanov’s The Origins of Autocracy: Ivan the Terrible in Russian History. 

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¹ Ilya Repin’s 1885 painting “Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son” (above) shows Ivan on the floor, mournfully cradling his mortally wounded son; the man wasn’t a monster, after all, as the epigraph to this post makes clear.

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible#Legacy

³ That Putin would be a fan of Ivan the Terrible is no surprise; “terrible” aside, Putin has followed Ivan’s example of briefly giving up power only to take it back again.

⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible#Legacy

⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible Wikipedia notes that “Many modern researchers estimate the number of victims to range from 2,000–3,000 (after the famine and epidemics of the 1560s the population of Novgorod most likely did not exceed 10,000–20,000). Many survivors were deported elsewhere.” Numbers notwithstanding, the Massacre of Novgorod shows that Ivan took seriously his role as “God’s representative on earth,” in particular “the duty to punish”.

Your Daily Blinks

“It’s not us. It’s everything around us.” {Maria, in “West Side Story”}

I do not know if this will come as good news or bad news, but Natalia Dashan (at Aeon) wants us to know that “It is not you, but existence itself, that is fundamentally unsound.” Starting from that premise, Ms. Dashan offers “some insights about the flaws with which Americans approach mental health.” In particular, she emphasizes the fact that, despite popular misconceptions to the contrary, “Most mental health care does not take place in the psychologist’s office at all – but in the way we live our lives.”

Dashan suggests that our tendency these days is to “seesaw” between our mindless daily routines and desperate attempts to alleviate boredom and/or discomfort. “Most things that people do,” she notes, “are either for survival, or else to balance out a discomfort in their brain, their soul or the Universe.” Our supposedly “normal” activities are in fact both “extremely strenuous” and increasingly bizarre:

What is normal existence? What do we spend all day doing, anyway? On average, Americans spend most of their day looking intensely at lamps--by which I mean our phones, our televisions and our computers, which can be defamiliarized as some of the most precise lighting equipment ever invented. Lounging on the couch, arms and legs bent at obtuse angles, eyes examining the lamp before them, kept inside a metal cage, without even a lampshade to filter the light. This is the average American, but it sounds more like a crazy person

In Ms. Dashan’s view, we are all caught up in a fundamental dilemma:

We put aside the most important aspects of our existence…to think about in our sporadic free moments. We impose order and reason on to the world – and anything uncontained by this reason we pass off to a different domain. But the entire struggle of our lives is to create sanity in a fundamentally insane predicament. 

For those who share Dashan’s concern, On Being Sane in Insane Places is a good resource, as is much of Philip K. Dick’s literary output (especially Valis) and that of Franz Kafka. Or you could just Netflix and chill, because whatever.  

https://aeon.co/ideas/it-is-not-you-but-existence-itself-that-is-fundamentally-unsound

In today’s dose of Russian history, Dr. Sarah J. Young briefly explains the 19^th-century Slavophile movement:

The Slavophiles were a group of thinkers who formulated their common outlook in the late 1830s and 1840s in opposition to the group who became known as the Westernizers. Their ideas grew from a sense of a crisis of identity engendered in Russia by the process of westernization…this was not just the minority concern of a few conservatives but was a major question for educated Russians more generally.

Slavophilism overall is a response to contemporary Russia in the reign of Nicholas I, but its critique is dependent on a particular interpretation of Russia’s past, and how it differs from that of the West. Riasanovsky shows that the comparison of Russia and the West developed in three stages:

“The first assumption was that of a difference in kind, of an impassable gulf between Russia and the West. Next came the belief that this fundamental difference was produced by distinct sets of spiritual principles which lay at the foundations of the two societies and determined their histories. Finally, it was natural to conclude that the true Russian principles were bound to triumph over the false ones of the West.”

The Slavophiles set up the contrast between Russia and the West as a series of binary oppositions: Russian spirit or faith stands against Western rationalism; Russian organic unity against Western individualism and fragmentation; Russian tradition and consensus against Western law imposed from above. This gave them a framework for pointing out precisely what was wrong with the West. As Riasanovsky puts it:

“They” [the West] were guilty of a multitude of sins. Egoism, communism, rationalism, sensuality, pride, affectation, superficiality, cruelty, bellicosity, exploitation, luxury, deceptiveness, rapacity, treachery, lechery, corruption, and decay were among “Their” attributes. These sins were all related, and could be deduced from a single postulate: the history of the West was nothing but a logical development of the perverse spiritual principles which formed its foundation.” 

In all things Russia is seen as being governed by custom and community, the West by abstract logic and the primacy of the individual.

Dr. Young goes on to explore the religious background, context, and implications of the Slavophile movement, and in particular the concept of sobornost, which will be worth, and will soon receive, an entire discussion of its own. You're welcome.

http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/10/24/russian-thought-lecture-2-the-slavophiles-and-russian-communality/

A Breath of Fresh Air

{Since I can’t attend the class on Russian history that was scheduled this semester at the University of Montana—foiled by social distancing!—I continue my home study program; and, in the interests of solidarity (sobornost), I will continue to share, on this blog, some of the fruits of that study. You’re welcome.}

“The name of Belinsky is known to every thinking young man, to everyone who is hungry for a breath of fresh air in the reeking bog of provincial life. There is not a country schoolmaster who does not know—and know by heart—Belinsky’s letter to Gogol.” {Ivan Aksakov, 1856}

Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848) was, in the estimate of Isaiah Berlin, “the conscience of the Russian intelligentsia…the writer who almost alone in Russia had the character and the eloquence to proclaim clearly and harshly what many felt, but either could not or would not openly declare.” ¹ My Wikipedia staff summarizes him thus:

Belinsky was the most influential of the Westernizers, especially among the younger generation. He worked primarily as a literary critic, because that area was less heavily censored than political pamphlets. He agreed with Slavophiles that society had precedence over individualism, but he insisted the society had to allow the expression of individual ideas and rights. He strongly opposed Slavophiles on the role of Orthodoxy, which he considered a retrograde force. He emphasized reason and knowledge, and attacked autocracy and theocracy. ²

Belinsky, like many of the Russian intelligentsia, was influenced by German Romanticism. “For me, to think, to feel, to understand and to suffer are one and the same thing,” he said, insisting on the indivisibility and integrity of a person’s character and life--you live what you are and you are what you live. He also dismissed the abstractions of philosophical rationalism, asking: “What is it to me that the Universal exists when the individual personality is suffering?” Adamantly, he repeated, “The fate of the individual, of the person, is more important than the fate of the whole world.”

Belinsky’s most famous written work was an open letter (published in 1847) addressed to the novelist Nikolai Gogol, upon the publication of Gogol’s Correspondence with Friends. Belinsky, who had previously admired Gogol’s work, was furious at what he saw as the retrograde views expressed in Correspondence and at Gogol’s apparent indifference to the social responsibility his literary success should have occasioned. The “Letter to Gogol” is a brief but powerful polemic; the excerpt below expresses Belinsky’s ire that Gogol had embraced Orthodoxy Christianity and had endorsed religious devotion and piety as the key to Russia’s transformation.  

From “Letter to Gogol”:

Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism or asceticism or pietism, but in the successes of civilization, enlightenment, and humanity. What she needs is not sermons (she has heard enough of them!) or prayers (she has repeated them too often!), but the awakening in the people of a sense of their human dignity lost for so many centuries amid dirt and refuse; she needs rights and laws conforming not to the preaching of the church but to common sense and justice, and their strictest possible observance. Instead of which she presents the dire spectacle of a country where men traffic in men, without even having the excuse so insidiously exploited by the American plantation owners who claim that the Negro is not a man…a country where there are not only no guarantees for individuality, honor and property, but even no police order, and where there is nothing but vast corporations of official thieves and robbers of various descriptions. The most vital national problems in Russia today are the abolition of serfdom and corporal punishment and the strictest possible observance of at least those laws that already exist. This is even realized by the government itself (which is well aware of how the landowners treat their peasants and how many of the former are annually done away with by the latter), as is proved by its timid and abortive half-measures for the relief of the white Negroes and the comical substitution of the single-lash knout by a cat-o-three tails.

Russia is by nature a profoundly atheistic people. It still retains a good deal of superstition, but not a trace of religiousness. Superstition passes with the advances of civilization, but religiousness often keeps company with them too; we have a living example of this in France, where even today there are many sincere Catholics among enlightened and educated men, and where many people who have rejected Christianity still cling stubbornly to some sort of god. The Russian people is different; mystic exaltation is not in its nature; it has too much common sense, a too lucid and positive mind, and therein, perhaps, lies the vastness of its historic destinies in the future. Religiousness has not even taken root among the clergy in it, since a few isolated and exceptional personalities distinguished for such cold ascetic contemplation prove nothing. But the majority of our clergy has always been distinguished for their fat bellies, scholastic pedantry, and savage ignorance. It is a shame to accuse it of religious intolerance and fanaticism; instead it could be praised for exemplary indifference in matters of faith. Religiosity among us appeared only in the schismatic sects who formed such a contrast in spirit to the mass of the people and who were numerically so insignificant in comparison with it.

Do you really mean to say you do not know that our clergy is held in universal contempt by Russian society and the Russian people? About whom do the Russian people tell dirty stories? Of the priest, the priest’s wife, the priest’s daughter, and the priest’s farm hand. Does not the priest in Russia represent the embodiment of gluttony, avarice, servility, and shamelessness for all Russians? Do you mean to say that you do not know all this? Strange! According to you the Russian people is the most religious in the world. That is a lie! The basis of religiousness is pietism, reverence, fear of God. Whereas the Russian man utters the name of the Lord while scratching himself somewhere. He says of the icon: If it works, pray to it; if it doesn’t, it’s good for covering pots. ³

Alexander Herzen, who first published the “Letter to Gogol,” called it “a work of genius”. Fyodor Dostoevsky, no less, was arrested and sentenced to death (later commuted to penal servitude in Siberia) for his habit of reading aloud the “Letter to Gogol” in public gatherings. Only Belinsky’s untimely death in 1848 prevented his own punishment; the chief censor at the time regretted he was unable to see Belinsky “rot in prison”. And Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) considered “Letter to Gogol” “the epitome of Belinsky’s literary activity [and] one of the finest works of the uncensored democratic press” in pre-revolutionary Russia.

I’ll give Isaiah Berlin the last word: “The lasting effect of Belinsky’s work was in altering, and altering irretrievably, the moral and social outlook of the leading younger writers and thinkers of his time. He altered the quality and the tone both of the experience and of the expression of so much Russian thought and feeling…he committed himself to a very specific vision of the truth and to a very specific set of moral principles to govern both thought and action.”

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¹ Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vissarion_Belinsky

³ https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/works/belinsky/gogol.htm

 

"One had to wake up"

Petr Chaadaev (1794-1846) is considered one of the seminal figures of the 19^th-century Russian intelligentsia. ¹ In the words of Russia scholar Sarah J. Young, “Beginning his writing in the late 1820s, in the aftermath of the failed Decembrist revolt of 1825, and in the early years of Nicholas I’s reign, which saw a crackdown on political activity outside the government, Chaadaev’s work articulated crucial questions about Russia’s position and destiny that resonated within the growing sense of crisis and impotence being experienced Russia’s educated elite.” ²

My research team at Wikipedia offers this helpful summary: 

Chaadaev wrote eight "Philosophical Letters" about Russia in French between 1826-1831, which circulated among intellectuals in Russia in manuscript form for many years. They comprise an indictment of Russian culture for its laggard role far behind the leaders of Western civilization. He cast doubt on the greatness of the Russian past, and ridiculed Orthodoxy for failing to provide a sound spiritual basis for the Russian mind. He extolled the achievements of Europe, especially in rational and logical thought, its progressive spirit, its leadership in science, and indeed its leadership on the path to freedom. The Russian government saw his ideas as dangerous and unsound. After some were published, they were all banned by the censorship process. Because there was nothing to charge him with, Chaadaev was declared legally insane and put under constant medical supervision. ³

The Russian intelligentsia veered between a Slavophilic veneration of Russia as a chosen nation destined to change the world and a national self-loathing rooted in feelings of inferiority vis a vis the developed West; and these polarized tendencies were often found in the work of one and the same writer. The following excerpt from Petr Chaadaev’s “First Philosophical Letter” (written 1829, published 1836) is, on the surface, an example of Russian self-criticism, but it is not hard to sense Chaadaev’s love for, and fierce loyalty to, his native land, despite its manifest shortcomings:   

It is one of the most deplorable traits of our strange civilization that we are still discovering truths that are commonplace even among peoples much less advanced than we. This is because we have never moved in concert with the other peoples. We are not a part of any of the great families of the human race; we are neither of the West nor of the East, and we have not the traditions of either. We stand, as it were, outside of time, the universal education of mankind has not touched us.

Look around you. Everyone seems to have one foot in the air. One would think that we are all in transit. No one has a fixed sphere of existence; there are no proper habits, no rules that govern anything. We do not even have homes; there is nothing to tie us down, nothing that arouses our sympathies and affections, nothing enduring, nothing lasting. Everything passes, flows away, leaving no trace either outside or within us. In our homes, we are like guests; to our families, we are like strangers; and in our cities we seem like nomads, more so than those who wander our steppes, for they are more attached to their deserts than we are to our towns...

Our memories reach back no further than yesterday; we are, as it were, strangers to ourselves. We move through time in such a singular manner that, as we advance, the past is lost to us forever. That is but a natural consequence of a culture that consists entirely of imports and imitation. Among us there is no internal development, no natural progress; new ideas sweep out the old, because they are not derived from the old but tumble down upon us from who knows where. We absorb all our ideas ready-made, and therefore the indelible trace left in the mind by a progressive movement of ideas, which gives it strength, does not shape our intellect. We grow, but we do not mature; we move, but along a crooked path, that is, one that does not lead to the desired goal. We are like children who have not been taught to think for themselves: when they become adults, they have nothing of their their own--all their knowledge is on the surface of their being, their soul is not within them. That is precisely our situation

Peoples, like individuals, are moral beings. Their education takes centuries, as it takes years for that of persons. In a way, one could say that we are an exception among peoples. We are one of those nations which do not seem to be an integral part of the human race but exist only in order to teach some great lesson to the world.

Lest that last sentence seem ambiguous, it is universally agreed that the “great lesson” that Chaadaev had in mind was simply: don’t be like Russia.

According to Sarah Young, “The First Philosophical Letter is paradoxical in its importance for the development of Russian intellectual culture, because its main point is the denial that there is any value whatsoever to be found in Russian culture or history – and it was the crisis implied by this denial that created the impact the letter had.” Alexander Herzen, one of the founders of Russian socialism, called the First Philosophical Letter “a shot that rang out in the dark night; whether it was something foundering that proclaimed its own wreck, whether it was a signal, a cry for help, whether it was news of the dawn or news that there would not be one—it was all the same: one had to wake up.” 

The more I read of nineteenth-century Russia, the more I see that country at that time as having been much like first-century Palestine, the era of Jesus and Paul, which was described by Donald Akenson as having comprised “A mental world so rich with ideas, prophets, factions, priests, savants and god-drunk fanatics that it was the equivalent of a night-sky kept alight by thousands and thousands of fire-flies, brief-lived, incandescent, luminous…there were scores of interesting components lying around the shop-floor of the [ancient] religious world, and these were put together in inventions so ingenious that it makes one shake one’s head in continual wonder.” {from Donald Akenson, Saint Saul}

The wonder in this case is not that Russia eventually exploded into staggering violence; the wonder is that it didn’t happen sooner.

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¹ The Russian intelligentsia, according to Isaiah Berlin, “set the moral tone for the kind of talk and action which continued through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until the final climax in 1917…they set in train ideas destined to have cataclysmic effects not merely in Russia itself, but far beyond her borders. The concept of intelligentsia must not be confused with the notion of intellectuals. Its members thought of themselves as united by something more than mere interest in ideas; they conceived themselves as being a dedicated order, almost a secular priesthood, devoted to the spreading of a specific attitude to life, something like a gospel.”

² http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2012/10/10/russian-thought-lecture-1-petr-chaadaev-and-the-russian-question/ Dr. Young has helpfully reprinted, on her website, a series of her lectures (from 2012 and prior) on modern Russian thought. The name of her course (at University College London) was “The Person, Love and Utopia in Russian Thought”. I must immediately arrange to travel back in time so I can attend that class (and, not incidentally, to get away from COVID-19).

³ Not lacking for a sense of humor, Chaadaev titled one of his later writings “Apologia for a Madman”.              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Chaadayev

Red Threads (Mostly)

{Reflecting my current infatuation with Russia, I offer here a few choice excerpts on the subject.}

Lev Shestov  (1866-1938) has been called a Russian version of Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. He is considered, depending on whom you consult, to have been an existentialist, an irrationalist, a prophet, and/or a crank; no less than Isaiah Berlin regarded Shestov (along with Alexander Herzen) as one of modern Russia's greatest thinkers.  The following caustic critique of his native land is from Shestov's Nothing Is Impossible (1905), the book that first established his reputation:

Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar. Culture is an age-long development, and sudden grafting of it upon a race rarely succeeds. To us in Russia, civilization came suddenly, while we were still savages…we quickly submitted. In a short time we were swallowing in enormous doses those poisons which Europe had been gradually accustoming herself to, gradually assimilating through centuries. Thanks to which, the transplanting of civilization into Russia turns out to be no mild affair. A Russian had only to catch a whiff of European atmosphere, and his head began to swim. He interpreted in his own way, savage-like, whatever he heard of western success. Hearing about railways, agricultural machines, schools, municipalities, his imagination painted miracles: universal happiness, boundless freedom, paradise, wings, etc. And the more impossible his dreams, the more eager he was to believe them real.

Europe had dropped miracles ages ago; she contented herself with ideals. It is we in Russia who will go on confusing miracles with ideals, as if the two were identical, whereas they have nothing to do with each other. As a matter of fact, just because Europe had ceased to believe in miracles, and realized that all human problems resolve down to mere arrangements here on earth, ideas and ideals had been invented. But the Russian bear crept out of his hole and strolled to Europe for the elixir of life, the flying carpet, the seven-leagued shoes, and so on, thinking in all his naivete that railroads and electricity were signs that the old nurse never told a lie in her fairy tales…

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I have frequently mentioned Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) in previous posts. Berdyaev was a member of the Russian intelligentsia sent into exile in 1922, at Lenin’s order, on what has come to be known as “the philosophers’ ship”. The following is a reflection from Berdyaev on the Russian people’s yearning for sobornost, a kind of “collective, organic” solidarity, something more than self-centered individualism and less than mindless collectivism:

The Russian people are informed by a peculiar, instinctive tendency to collectivism—a collectivism, however, which should not be understood primarily in political or sociological terms. It would be more accurate to speak of a tendency to communism, implying as it does not a mere collection of people, but their communion with one another. We never knew or experienced individualism in the Western sense of the word, as formulated in the humanist civilization of Europe; but this did not prevent us from deeply appreciating the problem of the relation between personality and universal social harmony. No one, in fact, has stated this problem with the power of, e.g., Dostoevsky and Belinsky. [Russian writers and thinkers], whatever the differences of their respective positions, were concerned with the relation of the collective, organic and ‘soborny’ culture to the individualistic culture of the West. But Russian practice was, more often than not, illustrative of distorted and falsified ‘sobornost’. Russian Communism is a travesty of ‘sobornost,’ inasmuch as it subjects the creative freedom of man to the demands of a collectivized and mechanized society. And the Russians go on dreaming of ‘sobornost’ which would embody the integral unity of freedom and communion in religious, social, political and cultural relations.

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Steven Marks’ How Russia Shaped the Modern World includes cultural as well as political developments in making a convincing case for its titular claim. Marks acknowledges that the Russian influence has been, shall we say, a mixed blessing, but he nonetheless insists it has been substantial:

Anxiously searching for alternatives to the rationalism, materialism, or hegemony of the West, a portion of humanity turned to Russia for inspiration. Through its charismatic calls to justice, the creative genius of its artists and writers, and its extremist and utopian rejection of the West, Russia helped to configure some of the pivotal features of the modern era. Its thinkers bred a bewildering array of political arrangements and cultural expressions, constructive and destructive, entertaining and vile, positive and negative. All were manifestations of the antimodern rebellious mood that was prevalent among large segments of the world’s intelligentsias. What Russian ideas offered them was a way of either rejecting the contemporary world altogether or following a non-Western path to modernity…more often than not, radicals everywhere responded to the Russians’ programmatic critique of Western modernity in like fashion, with ambivalence, if not revulsion, toward capitalism, imperialism, and liberal politics.

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Finally, a non-Russia-related item: it appears I am not alone in my quest to understand the notion of “spirit” or, as it is sometimes called, “soul”. John Cottingham, for one, has written an entire book on the subject, In Search of the Soul; he also offers, at Aeon, a brief essay suggesting that—all spookiness, supernaturalism, and metaphysics aside—“soul” is shorthand for “our true selves, the selves we were meant to be. This is what the search for the soul amounts to; and it is here, if there is a meaning to human life, that such meaning must be sought.”

That’s all well and good, but we shouldn’t let Cottingham off the hook so easily—he has, after all, smuggled teleology into his explanation (“the selves we were meant to be”) without explaining its basis. Who, or what, decided or decides what we were “meant to be” or that we were even “meant to be” any particular “selves” at all? The idea that each of us has a “true self” we should try “to realize,” as Cottingham frames it, is incoherent without some teleological foundation, whether biological (as in Aristotle) or religious (as in Judeo-Christian belief).  

If we believe our very existence in the universe is mere accident; and if we therefore rule out all teleological claims; we can still say that “soul” stands for “the better angels of our nature”. Saying that doesn’t require us to believe in literal, supernatural “angels”; but it does compel us to grapple with what we mean by “our nature” and to weigh competing claims about what constitutes (or should constitute) “better”.

Deedle-deedle queep, as they say…  

Don't Forget the Forgotten Man!

(“The Forgotten Man”: painting by Jon McNaughton in 2011, marking a tragic moment in American history: the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The titular figure sits in front, slumped and despondent over the fact that Obamacare doctors may at any time order him to be forcibly sterilized; though the procedure will at least be covered by insurance--so, thanks, Obama!)

“The Forgotten Man is the man who is never thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, social speculator and philanthropist…” William Graham Sumner, “The Forgotten Man” (1883)

 “Who is the forgotten man...? I know him as intimately as my own undershirt. He is the fellow that is trying to get along without public relief... In the meantime the taxpayers go on supporting many that would not work if they had jobs.” (Unknown, quoted by Amity Shlaes in The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression)

“Trump’s not taking any crap. I mean, he’s taking on political correctness; he’s taking fights that a lot of people want to see fought. The forgotten man that he speaks to is a person that finally feels like they’re being taken seriously, they’re being paid attention to. And Trump is concerned about their issues.” Paul Ryan (June 2019)

The “Forgotten Man” was the creation of William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), one of the most influential of America’s social commentators/critics of the 19^th century; for what it’s worth, Sumner avoided service in the Civil War by paying $250 (borrowed from a friend) to have someone else serve in his place—that sort of thing being legal in the day. Freed from his civic obligation, Sumner then headed off to Europe, subsidized by his father and some friends, where he studied in Switzerland, in Germany, and at Oxford in England. Returning home, he became an ordained Episcopal priest in New Haven, Connecticut and spent his professional life teaching, preaching, and lecturing at Yale, where he was, by all accounts, enormously popular.

Self-made man that he was (with a little help from his friends and family), Sumner was an advocate of laissez faire economics and, according to some, a “social Darwinist”. ¹ That latter designation may or may not have been accurate, but regardless, Sumner’s description and defense of America’s Forgotten Man lives on.

As the Paul Ryan quote above indicates, the Forgotten Man’s descendants are now Trump voters, because in Trump they trust and because Trump takes them and their issues seriously (meaning, he caters to their prejudices); meanwhile, the populist artist Jon McNaughton chronicles for the ages this unlikely alliance of a bombastic, self-promoting New York City plutocrat with “economically disenfranchised” blue-collar Americans in flyover country.   

Since the Forgotten Man is now a pivotal slice of America’s demographic and electoral pies, here is an excerpt from William Graham Sumner’s memorable brief (written in 1883) on his behalf:

Now you know that ‘the poor and the weak’ are constantly put forward as objects of public interest and public obligation; but except the pauper, the man who cannot earn his living or pay his way, there is no possible definition of a ‘poor’ man, and except a man who is incapacitated by vice or by physical infirmity, there is no definition of a ‘weak’ man. The paupers and the physically incapacitated are an inevitable charge on society. But the weak who constantly arouse the pity of humanitarians and philanthropists are the shiftless, the imprudent, the negligent, the impractical, and the inefficient, or they are the idle, the intemperate, the extravagant, and the vicious. Now the troubles of these persons are constantly forced upon public attention, as if they and their interests deserved especial consideration, and a great portion of all organized and unorganized effort for the common welfare consists of attempts to relieve these classes of people…

Whatever capital you divert to the support of a shiftless and good-for-nothing person is so much diverted from some other employment, and that means from someone else…capital is force. If it goes one way it cannot go another. If you give a loaf to a pauper, you cannot give the same loaf to a laborer. Now this other man, this laborer, who would have got it had it not been for the charitable sentiment which bestowed it on a worthless member of society, is the Forgotten Man. The philanthropists and humanitarians have their minds all full of the wretched and miserable whose case appeals to compassion, attacks the sympathies, takes possession of the imagination, and excites the emotions. They push on towards the quickest and easiest remedies and they forget the real victim.

Now who is the Forgotten Man? He is the simple, honest laborer, ready to earn his living by productive work. We pass him by because he is independent, self-supporting, and asks no favors. He does not appeal to the emotions or excite the sentiments. He only wants to make a contract and fulfill it, with respect on both sides and favor on neither side. He must get his living out of the capital of the country. The larger the capital is, the better living he can get. Every particle of capital which is wasted on the vicious, the idle, and the shiftless is so much taken from the capital available to reward the productive and independent laborer.

We stand with our backs to the productive and independent laborer all the time. We do not remember him because he makes no clamor; but I appeal to you whether he is not the man who ought to be remembered first of all, and whether, on any sound social theory, we ought not to protect him against the burdens of the good-for-nothing…

Every man is bound to take care of himself and his family and to do his share in the work of society. It is totally false that one who has done so is bound to bear the care and charge of those who are wretched because they have not done so. The silly popular notion is that the beggars live at the expense of the rich, but the truth is that those who eat and produce not, live at the expense of those who labor and produce. ² The next time that you are tempted to [contribute] to a charity…I ask you to stop and remember the Forgotten Man and understand that if you put your [money] in a savings bank it will go to swell the capital of the country which is available for division amongst those who, while they earn it, will reproduce it with increase.

Or you could give your money to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, I suppose, so that Trump can continue his tireless work on behalf of Vladimir Putin the Forgotten Man: and if you believe that, then Maria Butina, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Roger Stone would like to talk to you about some amazing deals they have to offer.  

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¹ Was William Graham Sumner a “social Darwinist”? Judge for yourself: “If we let nature alone, she cures vice by the most frightful penalties. It may shock you to hear me say it, but when you get over the shock, it will do you good to think of it: a drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be. Nature is working away at him to get him out of the way, just as she sets up her processes of dissolution to remove whatever is a failure in its line.” I wonder if nature was able to remove the “failure” who took Sumner’s place in the Union army, or whether that hapless soul survived the war only to become one more drunkard in the gutter?

² “Useless eaters” is the current term of art for what Sumner called “those who eat and produce not.” Its origin is uncertain, but it is reminiscent of Nazi terminology such as “Life unworthy of life,” “human ballast,” “empty shells of human beings,” etc. For his part, President Trump employs such phrases as “human scum” and “s--thole countries”; he also particularly likes using the word “animal” to describe Mexicans, and words like “sick,” “evil,” and “treasonous” to describe his political opponents. The Forgotten Man is apparently fond of invective.   

Tangled Up in Red

The silver lining to the omnipresent cloud of my vast ignorance is that I really can learn something every day. Recently, for instance, I have learned of the historical existence of Bertram David Wolfe (1896-1977), known to friends as “Bert” and known to history as one of the founders, in 1919, of the Communist Party of America; he helped start the CPA’s first newspaper (The Communist World) and later—after a period of exile in Mexico and then deportation back to the United States—he was named National Director of Agitation and Propaganda for the Workers (Communist) Party of America.

What a long, strange trip Bert Wolfe’s life turned out to be: expelled from the Communist Party for opposing Joseph Stalin’s insistence on personal control of all things Communist, he then helped found the Communist Party (Opposition) and the International Communist Opposition—it’s a wonder he didn’t meet the grim fate of Leon Trotsky and so many of Stalin’s real and perceived enemies. Instead, Wolfe lived to change his political views and to become an influential anti-Communist voice, working for Radio Free Europe, teaching at Stanford University, and, in 1973, signing the Humanist Manifesto.

I’ve learned of Bertram Wolfe while researching Russian history—sparked by my interest in the Russian theologian Nikolai Berdyaev—and the origin of the 1917 Russian revolution and Bolshevik coup. Wolfe, it happens, wrote several books about Russia, in both his Communist and his post-Communist phases. He published Three Who Made a Revolution in 1948—he was no longer a Communist—and while its focus is Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, the ruling troika of Bolshevism, it begins with an overview of Russian history and especially of the dramatic upheavals of the nineteenth century which prepared the ground, if not the world, for the drama of 1917.

The following excerpt from Wolfe is, in my admittedly unlearned estimate, an eloquent, powerful, and not unsympathetic summary of the growing ferment among the Russian intelligentsia in the decades preceding the revolution. From Three Who Made a Revolution:

The last four decades of the nineteenth century, and the first two of the twentieth, were bright with the hopes of ‘loosening of the bonds’ [of the past]. Not stagnation, but the very rapidity and unevenness of change made increasingly intolerable all that was left of the old order. All through the latter half of the nineteenth century it continued to disintegrate, yet a new Russia seemed powerless to be born. Gradually, a sense of impending doom took possession of the ruling class and of the Court. The reform movement spread from the top downward, the history of the century presenting itself as a progressive widening of the circle of those who felt that change was necessary, and an increasing audacity in their conceptions of the nature of that change...Russian public opinion took as its banner the words of a Dostoevsky: “In all things I go to the uttermost extreme; my life long I have never been acquainted with moderation.”

The cement which bound [the intelligentsia] together was a common alienation from existing society, and a common belief in the sovereign efficacy of ideas as shapers of life. They lived precariously suspended as in a void, between an uncomprehending autocratic monarchy above and an uncomprehending, unenlightened mass below. Their mission as independent thinkers was to be critics of the world in which they had no place and prophets of a world that had not yet come into being, and might have no place for them either.

[The intelligentsia] were lawyers without practice, teachers without schools, graduate clerics without benefices and often without religion, chemists without laboratories, technicians, engineers, statisticians for whom industry as yet had no need, journalists without a public, politicians without parties, sociologists and statesmen rejected by the state and ignored by the people. They anticipated and oversupplied in advance the requirements of a world that was too slow in coming into being, and sought to serve a folk that had no use for their services. In the decaying feudal order they found neither scope nor promise; in the gross, timid, and backward mercantile bourgeoisie neither economic support nor inspiration; in the slumbering people no echo to their ardent cries. Even while they sought to serve the unreceptive present, at heart they were the servants of the future. With all their being they longed for its coming, and all possible and impossible futures for Russia mingled together in their dreams...

Their very culture was a source of torment to them. Their inherited or acquired privileges burdened them with a sense of guilt. How could they enjoy things of the spirit while around them the people remained in darkness and Russia decayed? Their deep love of their native land was transformed into a passionate hatred of all that was evil, backward, and degrading in it, and into a fierce belief in the nobility of its future destiny and mission in the world.

Over and over again they solved in agonizing theory the problems they were forbidden to touch in practice. They constructed grand systems, vast as Russia, embracing the whole of humanity…each decade, each half-decade saw a completely new version of that evangel of universal salvation: through science, through the negation of tradition and convention, through literature and criticism, through nonresistance to evil, through a return to primitive Christianity, through the village commune, through love of the people and adoption of their way of life, through anarchism, agrarian socialism, Marxism—whatever the gospel of the moment, its disciples were ready to live by it and die for it and remake the world utterly in its image.

Not having much to live by, they acquired the power of living by ideas alone. “The thoroughly true-to-type intolerance of the Russian intelligentsia,” observes Berdyaev, “was self-protective; only so could it preserve itself in a hostile world; only thanks to fanaticism could it weather persecution.”

It was a fanaticism that served as a surrogate for the older religions. It idealized Russia, the peasant, the proletariat, science, the machine. It made a true gospel of its particular brand of salvation. It possessed singleness, exclusivism, dogma, orthodoxy, heresy, renegation, schism, excommunication, prophets, disciples, vocation, asceticism, sacrifice, the ability to suffer all things for the sake of the faith. Heresy or rival doctrine was worse than ignorance; it was apostasy.

There’s a throwaway line in Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” where Dylan observes “There was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air…” I don’t know about Russian cafes, but there’s no question that, from about 1825 (the Decembrist uprising) to 1917, the air in Russia was thick with hopes and fears of revolution. When revolution finally came—well, someone should write a song about it: “Tangled Up in Red”.

The Forgotten Promise of Christian Socialism

With Bernie Sanders fighting for the Democratic presidential nomination, it’s de rigueur to criticize (or to demonize) Socialism. Even if, god forbid, you happen to be in favor of some version of it, you are expected to acknowledge that the American people will never stand for Socialism, so there’s no point in discussing it publicly or taking it seriously, much less in nominating a self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialist” for high office—even one like Sanders, whose actual policy proposals are no further to the political left than those of, say, Senator Hubert Humphrey circa 1964.

And yet, a mere one hundred years ago, in America and elsewhere, Socialism of one kind or another appeared not just likely but inevitable. Following the Great War and the Russian Revolution, capitalism seemed discredited and, more to the point, exhausted. A new way forward had to be found, a new “social imaginary” or at least a new principle of social and economic organization. Religious and secular thinkers alike sought to respond to the crisis; the “social gospel” of Walter Rauschenbusch was one Christian response, as Eugene McCarraher has chronicled in his book Christian Critics. Various strains of Socialism were in the air and under consideration, even in the churches.

The "Synopsis" I’ve reproduced below is from a book titled The Return of Christendom, published in 1922; the “Synopsis” itself is a preliminary manifesto of sorts, written by one M.B. Beckitt. As the book’s title indicates, the several contributors (who included G.K. Chesterton), in the immediate wake of war and revolution, were urging a deeper and more widespread commitment to Christianity, while at the same time acknowledging “the deplorable failure of the Church to exhibit the reality of brotherhood and to stand for its principles of justice and love.” Reading it over now, I don’t believe that their critique of industrial modernity is unduly compromised by sectarianism; and their emphasis on the redemptive role of “labor” and “vocation” remains relevant regardless of one’s religious or non-religious inclinations. Which is to say: you don’t have to pine for the return of Christendom to appreciate the values that inform Burkitt’s “Synopsis”.

{I have mostly “de-Christianized” the language (though obviously not the title) of the “Synopsis” so as not to trigger any religion-averse readers. The Little Red Blog is committed to remaining a safe space for all.}

The Idea of Christendom in Relation to Modern Society: Synopsis

[Modernity] has been rendered incomprehensible by: (1) the subjection of the community to capitalist Industrialism, and (2) the distortion of property by plutocracy. These processes are not fortuitous in their origin; they arose because the mediaeval standards of Vocation and Fraternity had been destroyed. Specifically: industrialism testifies "sacramentally" to the moral hideousness of capitalism; plutocracy degrades property from a means of livelihood and service into an instrument of avarice; the worship of gain becomes a religion, leading to the denial and frustration of [traditional] ideals and claims.

The capitalist system is threatening to collapse from its inherent rottenness. The War—and the seeming inevitability of further world-wars —has shattered the myth of a beneficent Progress; shattered the stability of international capitalism; shattered the belief in the purely political and disinterested character of the State by disclosing the interdependence of plutocracy and State-power. All these effects of the War have been confirmed by the nature of the "Peace."

Finally, the result has been shattering to the complacency of thousands: this is not necessarily a bad thing, and it may even prove a unique opportunity. If plutocracy's dominion holds so little promise, an alternative to it must be sought out and pursued. Hence men will turn naturally to those who already challenge capitalism—the forces of "Labor."

The stability of capitalism is not only impaired by its inherent rottenness and its loss of prestige, but for the further reason that the workers are increasingly organizing to transcend the status to which it condemns them. In view of Labor's resistance to it, capitalism has no future. Yet Labor, while strengthening its resistance, is bewildered and confused by the possibilities to which its successful opposition points. It is so because it lacks any constructive Idea adequate to embody and achieve its aspirations, hence it fears to find itself baffled by the very completeness of its opportunity. Its categories of thought and its spiritual values are fatally entangled with the ideology of capitalist society: this is true of both its reformist and revolutionary sections. Its intellectual subservience to the assumptions of a profiteering "economic science" render it incapable of developing a constructive program.

Yet the Labor movement is something we cannot disregard and of which we must never despair, for with all its limitations it is (1) a reply to the pretensions of plutocracy; (2) a real democracy; and (3) potentially, an engine of emancipation.

Bolshevism attempts to beat capitalism at its own game by mastering and improving upon capitalist methods. Its unifying principle is the "proletariat," and the basis of its social policy is proletarian dictatorship. The conception of "proletarianism" includes a false [conception] of Equality and the subjection of Liberty and Fraternity. Instead, the circumference of capitalist organization becomes the center of the new society. A free social order cannot be evolved from this inhuman distortion.

The primary need of the workers' crusade is not any practical program but the inspiration of an all-sufficing Idea…not only an ideal for the whole social order, but one which would restore to the individual the conviction of Vocation and of personal activity that could be offered to the glory of God. This ideal cannot be immediately attained; but by the construction of a new social order, built as a clear challenge to plutocracy, an arena would be gradually created in which all men could come to the realization of the Kingdom of God, to which their efforts were making an infinitesimal, but vital, contribution. ¹

Modern defenders of capitalism have no idea how lucky they are that Franklin Roosevelt, along with a strong early-20^th-century labor movement, saved American capitalism from itself. The authors of The Return of Christendom, writing a decade before Roosevelt took office, clearly thought the capitalist system was beyond saving; I have reproduced the “Synopsis” here not as an historical curiosity, but as a reminder that Socialism, despite the opprobrium it currently incurs, has a respectable ancestry and even, in some ways, a religious upbringing.

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¹ Feel free to substitute “Kingdom of Man” for “Kingdom of God” if you prefer.

I Think, Therefore, I Blog

What follows are my entirely unsystematic (and unsolicited) thoughts on a variety of random matters. You're welcome.

• Is it possible that, upon taking office, Donald Trump simply misunderstood the adage about the presidency being a “bully pulpit”?
• Why doesn’t Chuck Schumer just shut up? And why are people on the Left defending his indefensible rhetoric directed at Supreme Court justices: “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions”? For those who say that Schumer was threatening dire political and electoral consequences, allow me to point out that Supreme Court justices are not elected, do not stand for re-election, and serve for life. I defy any Democrat or liberal partisan to substitute “Ginsburg” and “Sotomayor” (for “Gorsuch” and “Kavanaugh”) in Schumer’s statement, imagine that the words came from Donald Trump, and tell me honestly that you wouldn’t find the comment reprehensible—and stupid.
• If Bernie Sanders does not win the Democratic nomination, I fear for the health and safety of Nathan Robinson, editor of Current Affairs. Someone needs to keep an eye on that man; he’s sounding increasingly unhinged.
• Jessie Waters, at Fox News, says that, if he contracts the coronavirus, he’ll “beat it” simply through the power of positive thinking. Since 98% or so of people infected with the virus survive it, I’d say that the odds are in Waters’ favor.
• Is it at all worrying, or is it merely awkward, that Joe Biden confused his wife with his sister when introducing them at a rally? (In fairness, I once referred to my oldest daughter Kelly as my son Brian’s mother; but I wasn’t running for president.)
• Given the age of the remaining presidential candidates, it’s clear that we Baby Boomers will relinquish power only when it’s pried from our cold, dead, tie-dyed fingers.
• Before anyone gets too excited about Steve Bullock’s impending run for the Senate here in Montana, they should familiarize themselves with Bullock’s disgraceful (and/or inept) handling, as Montana’s governor, of mental-health funding.
• Why is it that any proposed discussion of “mental health” inevitably turns into a discussion of mental illness?
• As we approach the start of Daylight Savings Time, we will no doubt hear the usual calls for its abolition. That’s fine, but I’d like to go a step further: we should abolish the whole standardized “time zones” scheme and let localities figure out their own times. Yes, the result would be chaos, but in the best possible sense of the word.
• George Packer has written a revealing and dispiriting article about Donald Trump’s “bull in a china shop” assault on our government: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/how-to-destroy-a-government/606793/
• Maybe I’m just projecting my own neuroses, but Netflix’s “Locke and Key” has a creepy subtext in which the show’s 8-year-old protagonist is pitted against a female antagonist who is chockful of dark erotic energy.
• Netflix’s “Trotsky” features plenty of gratuitous sex as well as non-gratuitous violence and a number of ghosts; it also offers hilarious caricatures of both Lenin and Stalin—the latter does everything but twirl his mustache and mutter “Curses! Foiled again!” whenever Trotsky gets the better of him.
• Amazon Prime’s “Hunters” has some effective moments—how could it not, with its “Holocaust survivors vs. Nazis” theme? Unfortunately, it too often botches its efforts to balance humor with drama, and, in the end, it goes so far over the top that it’s impossible to take seriously. Nevertheless, it calls attention to the very real, very troubling history of “Operation Paperclip,” which you can read about here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
• I’m very excited to find that Netflix is now offering new seasons of both “Altered Carbon” and “Babylon Berlin,” two stylish noir-style dramas, one set in a dystopian future and the other in an equally dystopian past.
• Finally, in line with my current obsession area of interest, this reflection by Nikolai Berdyaev on the 1917 Russian Revolution: “The misfortune of the Russian Revolution did not lie in that it came too early, but in that it came too late. [It] had gathered momentum during the preceding hundred years; it had behind it a great tradition of heroic and implacable struggle against oppression, and many revolutionary movements gave impetus to its eventual outbreak…the Bolsheviks did not so much prepare a revolution as make use of a moment when everything got out of hand…a large element in [the Revolution] was a fateful, negative outburst of elemental and, indeed, demonic forces. [Revolutionary leaders] gave the impression of being in the grip of some superior, irrational power, of a fate entirely beyond their control.”

Berdyaev, a believer in Orthodox Christianity, laid the ultimate blame for the revolution on the failure of Christianity: “The supreme responsibility [for the Revolution] lies with historical Christianity and with Christians, who have failed to fulfil their duty. Communism was for me from the very start a challenge and a reminder of an unfulfilled Christian duty. Christians ought to have embodied the truth of communism: had they done so its falsehood would never have won the day. Communism marked a crisis of Christianity as well as of humanism.”