Sign and Sight

Worth rereading, 3 years later, at signandsight.com:

Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?

Pascal Bruckner defends Ayaan Hirsi Ali against Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, condemning their idea of multiculturalism for chaining people to their roots.

and also the much more recent

Right life in the wrong life

Joachim Gauck talks about Ossis and Wessis, opposition, conformism, and the long-term psychological effects of a dictatorial regime. An interview with Joachim Güntner.

The decline of Russia's intellectual community

Paul Goble's Window on Eurasia has a link to an interesting essay by the Russian historian Irina Pavlova which examines the way in which Russia’s intellectual class has declined under the influence of the Soviet past and the readiness of most Russian intellectuals to put power before moral and ethical principles. Excerpt [my tr.]:

I am struck, for example, by the image that has emerged of Vladislav Surkov as the cleverest man in Russia, to whom the members of the Academy of Sciences listen with servile attention. And the "talking heads" Sergei Markov and Maxim Shevchenko, who have never done any historical research, but who give instruction to historians in how to study the famine of the early 1930s. And the specialists, rendered wise by experience, who support the chairman of the recently created Historical Memory foundation, Alexander Dyukov. With enviable fervour this young man is bringing to life a new prison-guard conception of Soviet history that is based on blind faith in the documents given to him from the archive of the FSB. And the liberals, who are placing their hopes in a new democracy led by President Medvedev. And the abuse and invective hurled at the Russian people, who don’t want democracy and support the current government. All this, in my opinion, is evidence of a profound intellectual and moral crisis, which is no less dangerous than the economic one. Whom God wishes to punish, he first deprives of reason.

Definition

LGF has a discussion of the question: What Is Fascism?

Religions

"If people would remember that all religions are no more than representations of life, they would find them, as they are, the best representations, licking Shakespeare."

- R.L. Stevenson

A state of euphoria

Alexander Dugin, interviewed on August 27, 2008 – Excerpt: [my tr.]

“ At present we are in a state of euphoria: we have defeated Georgia’s military machine, destroyed it, have recognized the our friends’ independence. Now we must hold on to that situation. But this is not a local issue. Holding on to the situation does not mean simply preventing a counter-attack by the Georgian aggressors. Now we will have to stave off a massed attack by the United States on the territory of these republics. The most difficult part is still to come: we have won a battle, but by no means the war. In order to deal with this situation, Russia must rebuild its society, its economy, its politics, its media and educational spheres – everything, in fact – along military lines. We have gone to war. We need reinforcement, the consolidation of society. We will never go back to the Russia of before August 8, 2008. We will now stand on the brink of nuclear conflict for a long time. So now, in my opinion, South Ossetia and Abkhazia will become less important than the global restructuring of the world’s architecture with which we dealing. The fate of their peoples is secondary to what now awaits the entire world. For the world stands on the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

- - - -

“The masks have fallen. We have gone to war. Now Russia must fight not only outside but also within, with its fifth column. The liberal westernizers, the employees of all the various NGOs and foundations, must now be interned. In war as in war. If prior to August 8 these people had a right to their point of view, today they have only one right: to be isolated and saved from inevitable retribution, for I do not think that in this situation the patriots will sit idly by. The hour of the patriot is at hand. The hour of revenge for the humiliation that we have endured from these citizens for more than a decade. I think that some Georgian public figures who are particularly active in Russia must also share the same fate, as they are representatives of the country with which we are at war.”

The Russian Idea

Marko Mihkelson has an interesting post (in Estonian) about the current rebirth of imperial ideology in Russia. In the context of the Russian invasion of Georgia Mihkelson mentions the "Eurasianist" ideologues of the "Russian Idea" who are now coming into their own - with official encouragement - in their native land, and quotes one fairly chilling example of such writing and thinking, which is widespread now among "intellectuals" in Russia:

"It is clear that we need the kind of idea for which one will not be sorry to give one's life. And the building of civil society, of the rule of law, of a prosperous society we find uninteresting. Indeed, we would rather squander everything and end our lives with suicide, than scrupulously count the credit and the debit, invest, corporatize, organize on cooperative lines, and so on. We find that tedious. We would rather try to absorb the enormous spaces of Siberia and the Far East, so that the islands of the Pacific Ocean become indigenously ours, we will fight for centuries with Europe for the Baltic States, and with Turkey for the Dardanelles - that is our way."

Statistics

"Obviously, in those parts of the world which have not yet come under the totalitarian yoke, this peculiar logic has not had all its implications worked out. The statistical method is, as it were, dumped down well outside the gates of the palace of art, but for how long? It is permissible, at least, to ask whether in this realm, as in many others, the totalitarian countries, with their brutal way of freezing out the nonconforming artist, have not merely confined themselves to drawing the proper conclusions from premises that are, in fact, accepted by everybody for whom statistics provide a sufficient criterion for the administration of human affairs."

Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. I (1950)

Creative Fidelity

"On the threshold of the catacombs which may soon swallow us up, it should be remembered that it is basically the same power of creative fidelity concentrated in more favourable times in architecture, music and poetry, which tomorrow will strengthen the fierce resolution of those who reject the consummation by themselves or others of man's denial of man, or to formulate this in a more profound way, the denial of the more than human by the less than human."

Gabriel Marcel (1940)

A Question of PC

Doris Lessing, writing in 1992, in a back-to-the-future involuntary riposte to Harold Bloom, who questioned her recent award of the Nobel Prize for Literature (this excerpt via the New York Times):

The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it.

There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care.

Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip: Leopoldo)

The Flesh

The idealist is bound in the end to substitute himself for the Mind and then we have an individual to deal with. Let us confront him with the (as he thinks) shocking spectacle of a Christian astronomer. How can an astronomer believe in the Incarnation or go to Mass? The idealist's only hope is to put up a distinction. As an astronomer, this monster (or rather this amphibian) is a man of the twentieth century and the idealist can greet him as a contemporary. As a man who believes in the Incarnation, however, and goes to Mass, he is behaving like a mediaeval or a child; and this is a pity. When we ask the philosopher to justify his extraordinary dichotomy, he may call upon Reason and Mind till he is black in the face, but he will not convince us; especially when we see that he does not scruple to use psychological and even sociological arguments to account for these survivals in the astronomer, while he absolutely forbids us turn such arguments or analyses upon himself. He is a man of 1930 from top to toe. And yet he is still invoking an eternal Mind, but a Mind which has none the less been born; who Its next incarnation will be, Heaven only knows. Frankly, I find all this extremely incoherent. If a Marxist, for example, were to tackle the idealist and tell him plainly that his Mind was a purely bourgeois product begotten of economic leisure, the idealist would have to take refuge in the realm of completely bloodless abstractions. I think myself that idealism of this kind cannot help being cornered, with concrete religious philosophy hemming it in on one side, and historical materialism on the other. For it is in fact impotent when confronted with history any real history, even if it is just the history of a single life. It has no feeling for tragedy, and (what is worse) no feeling for flesh and blood either. Personally, I think that people who substitute the Cartesian concept of matter for the richly confused idea of the flesh which is embedded in all Christian philosophy are doing anything but progressing in their metaphysics. There is an almost untouched task here, and pure metaphysicians would do well to focus all their attention upon it, or so I think: the task of describing the evolution and progressive confusion of the notions of flesh and fleshly existence in the history of philosophical thought.

At bottom, this idealism is a purely professorial doctrine, and falls directly under Schopenhauer's partially unjust criticism of the academic philosophers of his day. (It was partially unjust, because there is a real feeling for concreteness and human drama in such writers as Schelling and Hegel.)

In point of fact, philosophical idealism would very likely have had no appreciable effect upon the development of human thought, had it not found a redoubtable ally in all forms of applied science. I believe that the spirit of applied science is really in itself the most serious obstacle, for many perfectly candid minds, to the acceptance of the notion of religious life, or rather religious truth.

(from: Gabriel Marcel: Some Remarks on the Irreligion of Today, 1930)

Marxism

To my mind, the most serious objection that can be raised to such a doctrine as Marxism is this: that it can maintain itself only in the struggle for its own supremacy; as soon as it is supreme, it destroys itself and makes way for nothing better than coarse hedonism. That is why many of the young people whom you see among you today, professing to be Communists, would, I am sure, go over to the Opposition at once if Communism were to win the day.

Gabriel Marcel, 1930

Music

Consider non-representative musical expression. It is a sphere where the thing stated cannot be distinguished from the manner of stating it. In this sense and in this sense only, music has, strictly speaking, no meaning, but perhaps just because it is meaning. Explore this.

The fact is that we introduce a relation into the heart of the music, a relation between the content expressed (?) and the expression, which is of the same type as that which joins the expression to the execution. But this is an illegitimate transference. From this point of view the idea of objective music takes on a meaning, but it is a negative meaning.

But is the term 'expression* really one that can still be used with regard to music? Could there really still be expression when we can no longer speak of content expressed a content distinct from the expression itself? I think the notion of essence, anyhow so difficult to define, might be introduced here. There is an essence of Schubert, of the later Beethoven, of the later Fauré, etc. The expression would then be the opening-up of the essence to itself. I believe this is the idea to be explored. Combine the idea of essence with the idea of universe. The essence regarded as the highest point of a certain universe. It is almost impossible here to make abstraction from the metaphor of 'the summit', and this is the metaphor whose roots could usefully be laid bare. The idea of'the summit* could perhaps be replaced by that of 'the centre. In both cases there is a periphery, or to put it more accurately, precincts (zones of encroachment).

Gabriel Marcel, A Metaphysical Diary (1928-1933), tr. Katharine Farrer (1949)

Executioner's Sacrament

The Ostrobothnian publishing firm Skrivor has released Gösta Ågren’s latest collection of essays. It’s hard to give the savour of the title – von Bödelns nattvard - in English. Doubling as the name of the final essay in the volume it sets the general tone. ‘von Bödeln’ – a childhood misreading or mishearing of the name of the Swedish General von Döbeln – suggests the presence of a nightmarish executioner-figure who comes to represent all the evil of the world. Not that the subjects of the essays are particularly morbid in themselves – they range from discussions of the Old Testament and the Greek tragedies to an exploration of aspects of the life of William Shakespeare, an analysis of the genesis and history of Nordic runes, a tour of the Spanish Inquisition, and a study of Aztec religion. While there is a general preoccupation with world history, the book never loses its Finnish and Finland-Swedish cultural focus, the voice of one Finland-Swedish author in particular – Hans Ruin – providing almost what amounts to a running commentary on the rest of the meditative ‘action’. Ruin, who lived in Germany during the 1930s and witnessed the rise of Nazism, is cast in the role of the author’s alter ego. In quotation he presents apprehensions about the future of the world and humanity similar to those that are current among many observers today. Ågren sees the greatest danger now, as then, in what he perceives as a collective desire for certainty and order amidst apparent chaos. Yet while the essays tend towards the rejection of Plan as solution, they are nonetheless arranged within a cosmological framework that can only be called religious. This apparent contradiction gives the book a circular feel, not unlike the effect of Ågren’s poetry, with its contiguity of the autobiographical and the universal, its consciousness of ritual, and its awareness of the cycles of individual life and human history as being essentially interrelated.

Miracles

I was thinking, too, that the credibility of miracles is positively demonstrated by such facts as the conversion of Claudel or Maritain. That these events can be believed in, is absolutely undeniable. Now nobody can think that these men believed without adequate facts to go upon. So taking their belief as a base, we must ask on what conditions it is possible, we must rise from the fact to the conditions on which it depends. This is the best and only way for genuine religious reflection to take.
------
Deep down beneath the critical attitude to the Gospel stories, is the implicit assertion 'It oughtn't to have happened like that.' In other words, we inwardly sketch the idea with really paralysing presumption and folly of what revelation ought to have been like. And I have a very strong suspicion that in this criticism there is always the idea 'this can't be true,' so that of course one must be able to pick holes, find contradictions, etc. It seems to me that this laying down of law by the individual consciousness ought to be rejected in principle. The Gospel words, in fact: 'become as little children.' Glorious words, but quite unintelligible to anyone who believes that there is an intrinsic value in maturity.

Gabriel Marcel, A Metaphysical Diary (1928-1933), tr. Katharine Farrer (1949)

Space and Time

An idea came to me in the Luxembourg, and I will put it down at once. At bottom, space and time are in a way the forms of temptation. Pride and false humility combine in the act of recognising our insignificance when compared with the infinity of space and time, for we are then claiming to put ourselves in imagination on the same plane as this pair of infinites, realised as objects of knowledge. Our heads are turned by such an approximation to God. Return to the here and now, which recover an unparalleled dignity and worth. This for later examination. Too tired tonight to write any more.

Gabriel Marcel, A Metaphysical Diary (1928-1933), tr. Katharine Farrer (1949)

A Theory of Evil

It is a serious error, if I am not mistaken, to treat time as a mode of apprehension. For one is then forced to consider it also as the order according to which the subject apprehends himself, and he can only do this by breaking away from himself, as it were, and mentally severing the fundamental engagement which makes him what he is. (I take the word 'engagement' here to represent both 'involvement' and 'committal'.)

This is the point of what I was trying to say yesterday afternoon,when I reflected that time is the very form of experimental activity. And from this point of view, to take up once more the metaphor of the absolute improvisation (a metaphor which seems to me inexhaustible) one finds oneself thinking like this. To transcend time is not to raise ourselves, as we can do at any moment, to the actually empty idea of a totum simul empty because it remains outside us and thereby becomes in some way devitalised. By no means. It is rather to participate more and more actively in the creative intention that quickens the whole: in other words, to raise ourselves to levels from which the succession seems less and less given, levels from which a 'cinematographic' representation of events looks more and more inadequate, and ceases in the long run to be even possible.

I think this is of the utmost importance. There, and perhaps only there, is the way open from creative evolution to a religious philosophy,but this way can only be taken through a concrete dialectic of participation.

I believe also, though I cannot yet establish it, that we have here the basis for a Theory of Evil, which would maintain its reality without denying its contingency.

Gabriel Marcel, A Metaphysical Diary (1928-1933), tr. Katharine Farrer (1949)

Forward, generation of Putin!

LiveJournal blogger publicoffender has posted an English translation - with full illustrations - of a Nashi (Putin Youth Group) brochure distributed on the streets of Moscow about a month ago. With its its strong anti-Americanism and futuristic design and content, it very much resembles Italian fascist literature of the 1930s.

Update: the item has now been given “protected” status on LiveJournal - so it can’t be accessed by most people. However, Google Cache still has a copy.

Hat tip: Kalle Kniivilä

The "Other" Nashists

In an interesting article published - somewhat incongruously - in the pages of the RIA Novosti website, Leonid Radzikhovsky has commented on the irony of the fact that the actions and ideology of one of Russia’s principal opposition movements, the National Bolshevik Party, differ little from those of its opponents, the government-controlled Nashi youth movement. He notes that

the opposition is essentially identified with the most aggressively anti-Western part of [Russian] state ideology. Only “minus the corruption”…

Russian scientists clash with Kremlin

Last month, a full meeting of Russia’s Academy of Sciences passed an almost unanimous vote for a charter that would preserve its autonomy. Now the Kremlin is trying to challenge that decision on the grounds that the scientists and their work are needed to develop the country’s commercial and industrial base, The Sunday Telegraph reports:

Prof Vitaly Ginzburg, who is 90 yet still academically active, said Mr Putin’s Russia was worse than Stalin’s Soviet Union. “Of course, in Stalin’s times the Academy was under the control of the central committee of the Communist Party,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

“But in those days you could come up with an idea and create - that’s how we put the first Sputnik satellite into space. Now the government thinks science must bring only income and profit, which is absurd.”

He added: “Of course it is about Putin. Our democracy is far from ideal.”

Eurasianism: a Link to the Soviet Past

In Chechnya Weekly, Marlene Laruelle writes about the Eurasianist philosophy of Alexander Dugin and its relation to Russian government policy in Chechnya and the North Caucasus. In doing so she shows, among other things, that the Kremlin’s current moves towards a rapprochement with Asia may be influenced by thinking that derives not only from Dugin’s mystical ideology, but also from the distinctly unmystical and realpolitik-based heritage of Russia’s Soviet past. An excerpt from the conclusion:

It is difficult to determine the real influence that Dugin’s ideas have on the Kremlin. His Center for Geopolitical Expertise claims to be working for the Presidential Administration, the government, the Federation Council and the Duma. Dugin may have also written analytical briefs and contributed to the development of Russia’s national security doctrine. He appears to have ties to Kremlin “strategist” and Presidential Administration Advisor Gleb Pavlovski. Therefore, it is possible that his stance on Chechnya has been adopted by certain individuals within the Kremlin. Indeed, his convictions on how the federal structure should be reorganized correspond to the changes being implemented by Putin (e.g. reducing the autonomy given to national republics by merging them into larger regional unities; reaffirming Chechen society’s right to religious and cultural but not to political autonomy). However, Dugin is not the only one to have considered these questions. Yevgeny Primakov, for example, has expressed a desire for rapprochement with Asian countries, and, in particular, with the India-China-Iran triangle. This desire itself harks back to former Soviet traditions still present, for example, in Russian Orientalist milieus. So although Dugin holds views on this subject similar to those expressed by Primakov, the latter is inspired by a “great power” Soviet culture, not by Dugin. It is therefore probable that the “polit-technologs” of the Presidential Administration are also inspired by such Soviet traditions internal to Party and State apparatuses and not simply by Dugin himself.