[lbo-talk] Robert Frost Defends Robespierre, Lenin, Mao

Joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Sun Apr 26 22:41:21 PDT 2009


Robert Wood writes:

"What I have found fascinating with this conversation is that the option that Trotsky was a profoundly contradictory individual seems to be off the table."

Exactly. But this might be a bit overwhelming for most of the intelligentia. Orwell has some interesting comments about this in "Inside the Whale":

"As early as 1934 or 1935 it was considered eccentric in literary circles not to be more or less 'left'. Between 1935 and 1939 the Communist Party had an almost irresistible fascination for any writer under forty. It became as normal to hear that so-and-so had 'joined' as it had been a few years earlier, when Roman Catholicism was fashionable, to hear that So-and-so had 'been received'. For about three years, in fact, the central stream of English literature was more or less directly under Communist control.

....

But why did these young men turn towards anything so alien as Russian Communism? Why should /writers/ be attracted by a form of socialism that makes mental honesty impossible? The explanation really lies in something that had already made itself felt before the slump and before Hitler: middle-class unemployment.

Unemployment is not merely a matter of not having a job. Most people can /get/ a job of sorts, even at the worst of times. The trouble was that by about 1930 there was no activity, except perhaps scientific research, the arts, and left-wing politics, that a thinking person could believe in. The debunking of Western civilization had reached its Climax and 'disillusionment' was immensely widespread. Who now could take it for granted to go through life in the ordinary middle-class way, as a soldier, a clergyman, a stockbroker, an Indian Civil Servant, or what-not? And how many of the values by which our grandfathers lived could not be taken seriously? Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity of marriage, the Old School Tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline---anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes. But what do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for /something to believe in/. There had been a sort of false dawn a few years earlier when numbers of young intellectuals, including several quite gifted writers (Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Hollis, and others), had fled into the Catholic Church. It is significant that these people went almost invariably to the Roman Church and not, for instance, to the C. of E., the Greek Church, or the Protestants sects. They went, that is, to the Church with a world-wide organization, the one with a rigid discipline, the one with power and prestige behind it. Perhaps it is even worth noticing that the only latter-day convert of really first-rate gifts, Eliot, has embraced not Romanism but Anglo-Catholicism, the ecclesiastical equivalent of Trotskyism. But I do not think one need look farther than this for the reason why the young writers of the thirties flocked into or towards the Communist Party. It was simply something to believe in. Here was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline. Here was a Fatherland and---at any rate since 1935 or thereabouts---a Füehrer. All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory---all in one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, saviour---all in one word, Stalin. God-Stalin. The devil-Hitler. Heaven-Moscow. Hell-Berlin. All the gaps were filled up."

We are taught to think of people who use their brains are more likely to be independent, "free-thinking" and "open minded" than those who do manual work. Orwell suggests that this is not the case. That, if anything, the intelligentia is as conformist than the rest. After all, does not school actually reward obedience above everything else? Is not most education various forms of training: in the humanities, a training in accepted trends. And remember; academics never leave school.

Some years ago I read 72 books about John Donne, as part of the due discipline preceding my dissertation. I was shocked to find maybe three good books in all of that. One was a dissertation on Donne's prosody, written in 1911. It was a magnificent piece of scholarship, with deep implications for understanding Donne and his place in the English renaissance. It was not mentioned by a single critic in all of the Donne criticism I have ever read. The Donne books were divided into categories dictated more by fashion than by scholarship or anything like "free thought." I forget now what the categories were, but they spanned about a generation a piece, during which, everyone more or less wrote a variation on the prevailing orthodoxy.

Intellectuals get paid for thinking, but that does not mean they enjoy it or know much what to do with it. It is a form of social currency, that's all.

You look at a man like Trotsky and because he does not satisfy your requirement that he behave in an exemplary fashion -- according to the current ideal -- you call him a tyrant or a jerk. If he were a perfect figure, that would make our work easier: all we'd have to do is follow orders--as Orwell notes. The anger comes from the fact that we have to do our own work and that we are ashamed that we are angry and frustrated over that.

I highly recommend "Inside the Whale." One of the best things Orwell wrote.

http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/orwellg/index.htm

Orwell's observations are timely. We are about to witness another long period of middle-class unemployment.

Joanna



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