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
On the totalitarian's continued relevance.

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.

We were reminded of this when, late last year, Miguel Cardona, President Biden's secretary of education, gave a talk to explain education-department priorities. Promoting a kinder, friendlier department, he said, "I think it was President Reagan [who] said, 'We're from the government. We're here to help.'"

We suppose that was intended to be reassuring. What Reagan actually said, however, as was pointed out about ten thousand times on social media, was the opposite. "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.' "

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.

But is he completely gone? One of the most depressing recent spectacles has been the rehabilitation of people and movements that, just a few years back, seemed safely consigned to the underworld. But watching Eloi-like college students praising Hamas, chanting genocidal formulae such as "From the river to the sea," even excusing the incontinent maunderings of Osama bin Laden, makes us wonder whether any enormity is sufficiently grave to overcome the moral anesthesia of the entitled class. Someone once described the on-again, off-again socialist Philip Rahv as a "born-again Leninist" -- their number, it turns out, is legion.

Which is why we predict an effort, perhaps sotto voce at first, to rehabilitate Lenin. After all, he articulated exactly the desire of everyone, from the creepy Doyen of Davos, Klaus Schwab, on down, who tells you that he's from the global government and he's here to help. . .

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).

His popularity, duplicity and unwavering self-regard make for ready points of comparison with modern politicians. The sheer amount of historical detail attached to his story is reflected in Aristotle's comment in his Poetics: "Poetry is more scientific and serious than history, because it offers general truths whilst history gives particular facts . . . A 'particular fact' is what Alcibiades did or what was done to him."

We know about "what Alcibiades did and what was done to him" from several authoritative ancient writers. The most entertaining portrayal, however, is that of the philosopher Plato

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"
Lee Edwards, Claremont Review of Books

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.

What was it that made this book so effective? And what did Solzhenitsyn mean by calling it "literary," even though everything in it was factual? To answer these questions is to grasp why Gulag towers over all other works of the Soviet period and, indeed, over all literature since the middle of the twentieth century.

Before Solzhenitsyn, Western intellectuals of course knew that the Soviet regime had been "repressive," but for the most part they imagined that all that had ended decades ago. So it was shocking when the book described how it had to be written secretly, with parts scattered so that not everything could be seized in a single raid. Solzhenitsyn offered an apology for the work's lack of polish: "I must explain that never once did this whole book . . . lie on the same desk at the same time!"

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.

Soviet terror was an end in itself. Torture alone was not cruel enough, Solzhenitsyn points out. No, the goal was absolute dehumanization, reducing people to quivering masses of flesh who had forgotten who they were and who had lost the ability to feel normal emotions one by one until only anger was left. George Orwell understood this aspect of the regime as other Western observers did not. The new society, O'Brien explains to Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is

the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. . . . Always, at every moment, there will be . . . the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face - - forever.

Why doesn't Solzhenitsyn's catalogue of horrors grow boring? You read three long volumes about boots trampling on human faces and your attention never flags. One reason is that Solzhenitsyn, like Edward Gibbon, is a master of ironic narration. At times, the book is unexpectedly funny. Along with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it stands as one of the great satires of world literature.

But it is the nature of Solzhenitsyn's "experiment in literary investigation" that best explains why this book remains riveting. Gulag is structured as what might be called a collective autobiography.

This is a long and remarkable piece.

Then Lee Edwards, Claremont Review of Books. Gulag Archipelago at 50
The masterpiece that helped topple the USSR.

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."

A Day in the Life

The history of the Gulag Archipelago begins in the closing months of World War II when a decorated Soviet captain of artillery, corresponding with a childhood friend, criticized Stalin for "betraying the cause of the Revolution." For "counter-revolutionary crimes," Captain Solzhenitsyn was sentenced in July 1945 . . .

"We need the King Charles portrait more than ever"
Alexander Poots, UnHerd

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
by
Roger Kimball
March 1993

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.

Last week's thread, May 25, It's Memorial Day Weekend!

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 11:09 AM

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