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June 01, 2024
Are intellectual discussions possible in the public square now?Translation: "Pull My Finger, Comrade!" The graphic above is from a ten year old post by OregonMuse. Miss him. Feeling Intellectual? Or Not? I passed my "can't you see how stupid this is?" limit this week. It's not just that stupid things are happening, it's that people are responding to them in such stupid ways. I thought that maybe I would try to find some more intelligible reading for the weekend, perhaps with less focus on the here and now. I found that stupid things have been happening in a number of places over a long period of time. Even in ancient Greece! I checked out the New Criterion online, and their front page featured: Lenin everlasting It's by the editors. They must think it's important. I was surprised to learn how short, yet how destructive, Lenin's time in power was. It is worth pausing to remember the hideous legacy of that ice-cold totalitarian. What we have in mind is not so much Lenin's butcher's bill as his more general modus operandi. Estimates of the number of people Lenin had tortured, maimed, and murdered vary, but are always well into the millions. But what may be just as creepy is his model of government. At the center of the totalitarian impulse is the belief that ultimately freedom belongs only to the state, that the individual should not be treated as a free actor but rather, as Lenin put it, " 'a cog and a screw' of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism." Of course, few canny bureaucrats quote Lenin today, his association with tyranny having knocked him out of the great game of political PR. We do not need to resurrect Lenin from his glass coffin. The New Criterion has a blog. This is from the entry for the May 31, 2024 Week in Review by Luke Lyman. There's a variety of things to think about which don't have a lot to do with the New York Times: On Alcibiades, Solzhenitsyn & King Charles's portrait. Ancient Greece The wisest man in all of ancient Athens -- Socrates, namely -- met Alcibiades as a young man. After their encounter, the philosopher is said to have proclaimed that the boy would grow into either a great man or a singular force of destruction. In the end, he became a little bit of both. Alcibiades, from the May 2024 issue of The Critic. The career of the aristocratic Athenian politician, lover, general and traitor Alcibiades (c. 451-404 BC) is so well documented and colourful that it would surely have spawned numerous Hollywood movies and novelistic treatments, had his name not been so long and complicated (the standard English pronunciation is Al-si-BUY-a-deez). An amazing life story. Also available in an audio version at the link. Better or worse than modern politics? "Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago at fifty" Readers will no doubt find this article's subject familiar--Gary Saul Morson took up the same topic in the most recent issue of the magazine. But no amount of praise is too much for Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece. Morson and Claremont Review of Books's Lee Edwards both identify what makes the text required reading: the book is not merely about the evils of the Soviet Union, but rather about evil itself. This is what makes it, as Daniel J. Mahoney once declared, the "most powerful antitotalitarian book ever written." But Edwards reminds us that the book had its fair share of shortsighted detractors, such as the UCLA professor J. Arch Getty, who claimed the book possessed little value for students -- an assertion that looks especially reckless now, given how little university students today seem to know of the USSR's horrors. Then again, how many of today's university students are able to read it? I have seen some comments here at AoSHQ by folks intending to finish reading the Gulag Archipelago. So here is commentary by two students of the work which may serve as inspiration. Others can learn a lot just by reading these pieces. First, Gary Saul Morson writing in New Criterion, who calls it The masterpiece of our time. When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation appeared in 1973, its impact, the author recalled, was immediate: "Like matter enveloped by antimatter, it exploded instantaneously!" The first translations into Western languages in 1974--just fifty years ago--proved almost as sensational. No longer was it so easy to cherish a sentimental attachment to communism and the ussr. In France, where Marxism had remained fashionable, the book changed the course of intellectual life, and in America it helped counter the New Left celebration of Mao, Castro, and other disciples of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Kinda puts today's censorship programs in perspective. What is the point of such cruelty? Why so many arbitrary arrests, and why so much energy spent on extracting unbelievable confessions that no one would ever see? Some have explained the system economically, as a source of slave labor, but Solzhenitsyn shows that the gigantic expense incurred by the state furnishing countless interrogators and guards, transport, watchtowers, and barbed wire ensured that the system never paid its way. What economic sense did it make to take a scientist with years of training and deport him to the far north to dig frozen earth and die soon of exhaustion and hunger? If one wanted to eliminate enemies, wouldn't it be easier just to shoot them all? And why arrest people who were completely loyal? One difference between the ussr and the Third Reich was that Germans who were neither Jews nor members of some other disfavored group, and who supported the regime, did not have to live in constant fear of arrest. This is a long and remarkable piece. Then Lee Edwards, Claremont Review of Books. Gulag Archipelago at 50 Behind a paywall, but the opening is good: American diplomat George F. Kennan considered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation to be the "most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times." In it, Solzhenitsyn exposed the vast underworld of forced labor camps stretching across the Soviet Union from Moscow to Magadan in Siberia. It's no exaggeration to say that the book was instrumental in the implosion of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991. It remains essential reading for our understanding of not just the murderous Soviet regime but of the good and evil that runs, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, "right through every human heart." "We need the King Charles portrait more than ever" You can make up your own mind about these notes. I wasn't really aware of the butterfly on the King's shoulder. Looks kinda like a Monarch - not your typical UK butterfly. Maybe King Charles felt like this at the unveiling: Another article currently featured at the New Criterion website is: The perversions of M. Foucault This is an old review of a book by a guy named Miller about Foucault, and I don't know why it has popped up for attention at this time. Maybe Foucault is receiving renewed academic attention or something. Foucault, who died of AIDS in June 1984 at the age of fifty-seven, has long been a darling of the same super-chic academic crowd that fell for deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, and other aging French imports. But where the deconstructionists specialize in the fruity idea that language refers only to itself (il n’y a pas de hors texte, in Derrida’s now-famous phrase), Foucault’s focus was Power. He came bearing the bad news in bad prose that every institution, no matter how benign it seems, is “really” a scene of unspeakable domination and subjugation; that efforts at enlightened reform—of asylums, of prisons, of society at large—have been little more than alibis for extending state power; that human relationships are, underneath it all, deadly struggles for mastery; that truth itself is merely a coefficient of coercion; “Is it surprising,” Foucault asked in Surveiller et punir (English translation: Discipline and Punish, 1977), “that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” Such “interrogations” were a terrific hit in the graduate seminar, of course. And Miller may well be right in claiming that by the time of his death Foucault was “perhaps the single most famous intellectual in the world” — famous, at least, in American universities, where hermetic arguments about sex and power are pursued with risible fecklessness by the hirsute and untidy. In all this, Foucault resembled his more talented rival and fellow left-wing activist, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose stunning career Foucault did everything he could to emulate, beginning with a stint in the French Communist Party in the early 1950s. He never quite managed it . . The will to idolize can triumph over many obstacles. There is a lot of disturbing discussion of sadomasochism in the review above - some connecting it to death - but nothing about pedophilia. Remember this video, where the first person feature in "Queer Theory Jeapardy" is Foucault - both the "Godfather of Queer Theory" and an advocate of abolishing "age of consent" laws down to infancy? Many student in this class did not want the connection between anarchy, queer theory and advocacy for pedophilia discussed. This topic seems more pertinent today than the sadomasochism discussion in 1993. But maybe there is a connection . . . I'm sorta glad that I missed learning about all of those authors in school. The reluctance of the students to hear negative information about Foucault in the video above is disturbing. Don't let people like this shut you up. Music It's the weekend! In the Mood Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend. This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.
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