When dumb stuff happened on the way to the revolution
New boss just like the old boss—unless we vote out the latest, aspiring, pronouned Chairman Xi/Xe/Xim/Xir
The Anglosphere has been smoldering for some time, and one can find any volume of commentary rationalizing how and why it caught fire. Choose your -ism: Marxism, Cultural Marxism, Foucauldian post-modernism. Throw in the Gramscian “long march through the institutions” and say something about the Frankfurt School. But, aren’t we over-thinking this?
I am going to suggest that these -isms amount to exercises in Connect-the-dots-Determinism: connect dots, real or imagined, and ascribe causes, mostly imagined. Yet, in the view of the true believers, the dots illuminate the shining path (taken thus far) to the Chiliasm, the absorbing state of the world in which they finally get to implement their Year Zero, their vision of Heaven on Earth.
“Absorbing state” means that, like Hotel California, we all get to check-in—indeed, we get forced to check-in—but the proprietors endeavor to never let us check-out. None of us gets to vote on the matter. Rather, we are all just on this ride to the end of history through no doing of our own.
That said, “connecting the dots” can sometimes make for an interesting exercise. This crazy thing happened, then that thing, and then that thing, the entire sequence ultimately resulting in some insane event that should never have been permitted to happen. And, even if we were to have operationalized “best practices” or to have dutifully followed The Science™, then the greater the likelihood that something really crazy did have to happen in to order to yield that insane result. How else, for example, could the shooter in Butler, Pennsylvania have managed to secure an unobstructed line-of-fire within 150 yards of Donald Trump? A sequence of dumb, unlikely or nefarious stuff had to come together.
But, no less often, connecting dots may not teach us anything… other than the fact that the trajectories of actual history may reveal themselves to be beyond imagination. Dumb, unlikely stuff has to come together. We never could have or would have guessed what dumb, unlikely stuff would have to come together to yield a result that we also could not have imagined. And, yet, things happen, and the fact that they happen reveals that there is some mysterious logic to it all. One can always go back and connect the dots. But, so what?
On my reading, “So what?” is the main conclusion I get out of Gary Saul Morson’s essay, “The Greatest of All Novels” (2019) about Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Rationalizing sequences of dots under the guise of The Science™ is one thing. Projecting the next dot to fall into place—that makes for a fraught affair. But, as Morson himself observes, Tolstoy would often suggest that something inscrutable would happen, and our ride along a scientifically-engineered trajectory would get knocked off track. In a track titled “The Revolution Was Postponed Because of Rain” (lyrics here) from the album Cool And Steady And Easy (1994), the band The Brooklyn Funk Essentials was making fun of just that kind of thing:
The underlying
Immediate
Political
Socio-economic
And trigger mechanism causes
Were all in place when
Some nee-gro or the other got hungry
Had to stop at the McDonald's
Had to get on the line
With the new trainee cashier
"Uhh, where's the button for the fries?"
So we missed the bus...
The band did this at a time when the -isms of our age were just starting to get a hold beyond academic circles.
Meanwhile, in Red Plenty (2012), Francis Spufford reveals appreciation for the accidents of history. As of 1914, he suggested, “The Bolsheviks had no chance of influencing events, and certainly no chance at getting anywhere near political power, until the First World War turned Russian society upside down.”
In the chaos and economic collapse following the overthrow of the Tsar by disorganised liberals, they were able to use the discipline of the cult’s membership to mount a coup d’état — and then to finesse themselves into the leadership of all those in Russia who were resisting the armed return of the old regime. Suddenly, a small collection of fanatics and opportunists found themselves running the country… (p. 86)
And, so, it was through a sequence of unlikely events that Lenin and his cabal of cranks and malcontents came to rule over the shell of a shattered empire. But history makes it all seem deterministic. This happened, and this happened, and then that happened. But, it didn’t have to be that way. Some other faction could just have well managed to securely ensconce itself in power. The Bolsheviks could have been frozen out—dispatched to Siberia, say—and Russian society could have set off down a path other than the path less taken of Soviet self-abnegation.
In his 1901 essay “What is to be done?” Lenin argued that he and his people would have to do some consciousness-raising among the workers. He rued the fact that, thus far, the workers had demonstrated themselves to be nothing more than NPC’s when, in his view, they should come to recognize their pivotal role in inducing the Revolution and setting society down the shining path to the Communist Chiliasm. But, by the time the actual revolution rolled around—a revolution in which he and his people were but marginal figures—he had determined that the way to inspire the NPC’s to do his faction’s bidding was to stop over-thinking the matter. Resort to cheap sloganeering. Appeal to the workers’ most immediate interests and desires. Hence “Peace, Land, Bread!” Don’t bore people with sermons about Hegelian world historical processes. Just promise to deliver the goods. The people are a pragmatic bunch.
It worked. Lenin and his people may have not had much of a hand in getting the revolution going, but they managed to exploit the instability and insert themselves into power. Russia then became subject to one-party rule. Going forward, all political competition would be contained within the party, and that competition would be restricted to whomever a powerful faction of party cadres would allow to enter their ranks. No one else would get a vote or even have the option of formally organizing a competing party. Anyone attempting to organize an opposition would be frozen out of society.
Meanwhile, our friends over at Jacobin seem to nurse and cherish their misty version of “the Soviet legacy,” an important aspect of which is “the notional idea of a more equal society.” So, we can all wear Maoist tunics and stand in line for our government block of cheese…?
Not more than a few days earlier, Gary Saul Morson took up the matter of Zombie Communism: Why does the “specter of Communism” (as the young Marx and Engels called it in The Communist Manifesto) keep coming back, and why, historically, has it always turned into such a nasty affair instead of some Heaven on Earth?
Morson poses one candidate answer to both questions: The nastiness is a feature, not a bug. It’s what makes the revolution revolutionary. In Maoist terms, for example, the nastiness has included tearing down the Four Olds: “old ideas, culture, customs and habits of mind.” But replace the “old” things with what new, shiny stuff?
In an essay titled “The Beginning and End of Postmodern America,” Joshua Mitchell makes contact with the new stuff, and argues that the new stuff is really quite old and stuffy. I am really not up on my Nietzsche, but here goes: The wayfaring Greeks and Macedonians under Alexander the Great launched the Hellenization of the Eastern Mediterranean, and it was within a Hellenized Judaism that Christianity emerged. (That bit about Hellenization is all on me until I do further reading on the matter.) But, enter Nietzche: the peoples of the pre-Socratic (pre-Alexandrian) world embraced the impermanence of everything. The world was in flux. One might, for example, be tending to one’s own business in one’s village when raiders sweep in and take everyone away in slavery. Flux. No hard feelings. No disrespect. It was just the way of the universe. And flux creates demand for ήρωες (heroes) who can face up to it and adapt. But, the post-Socratics (most famously Plato in Republic) take up the question of designing institutions. Can institutions contain the flux? And, once one starts down the path of designing institutions, one might get caught up in “optimal design”: Can we engineer Heaven on Earth? Might we yet design our way to the end of history? Can we induce the Chiliasm?
The Nietzchean response might be that we really can’t deliver the Chiliasm, an absorbing state in which we insulate ourselves from the flux. The flux will yet catch up with us. Yesterday’s Four Olds will eventually give way to Four New ways of doing things. Again, that is just the way of the universe. But, wait? Is there not some body of immutable “Olds”—great truths—around which we can organize our thinking and our endeavors in institutional design? The Gospel of John opens, “In the beginning there was the Word [the Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Logos does not count? No. That kind of thing is just a constructed truth. It is constructed as a refuge for “weak souls.”
Note this business of constructed truth. It amounts to an inversion of the Nicene Creed in that constructed truth is truth “made not begotten” as opposed to eternal truth “begotten not made.” But, once we get into the business of constructing truths, we can start thinking about the Revolution. First, of course, we need to construct our own, alternative truth so we know what we are going to replace the Four Olds with. All well and good, but, it is about here where the erstwhile revolutionaries of our day deviate from the Nietzchean Creed: They endeavor to dictate the Chiliasm on their terms. Their terms amount to their own made-not-begotten truths. The problem is that The Flux will yet catch up with them as some new generation of revolutionaries dismiss the old generation’s truths as the Four Olds and forcibly institute their own new, constructed truths. There is no history-ending Chiliasm… Alas, The Flux is a harsh, fickle and unforgiving mistress. The Flux is a b*****.
As of right now, I’d be tempted to frame Joshua Mitchell’s main proposition as: Today’s erstwhile revolutionaries are not very revolutionary at all. They’re kind of boring, really. It might have been revolutionary 2,000 years ago to even pose the idea of substituting the ethos of “the Strong Horse”—might makes right!—with a Judeo/Christian ethos that elevates the “weak” and the “oppressed” over the established powers. But, the revolutionaries then assert that there are no universal values or truth out there other than the arbitrary exercise of raw power. That bit about the weak and the oppressed was just something we revolutionaries use to seize that power. And, once in power, we will thus have set ourselves up as the Strong Horse, and we will then impose our parochial concept of an enduring, flux-resistant Heaven on Earth. Worst of all, they reveal their weakness (in Nietzchean terms) in pining for their flux-resistant Heaven.
To recount: The Revolution amounts to appealing to a Judeo-Christian ethos to justify implementing a primitive, tribalistic regime all the while claiming that the new regime will converge on an absorbing state. That state will become manifest as “a city upon a hill,” the apotheosis of human society.
Good luck with that. Indeed, this kind of thing has been attempted before, long before Marx and Engels announced in 1848 that the “specter of Communism” had begun to haunt Europe. English Puritans, for example, had the decency to recognize their Judeo-Christian heritage well before they had set off for the New World so that they might construct their own “city upon a hill.” But, a funny thing happened on the way to their own revolution. With dexterity no greater than that of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow—the cow of legend that tipped over a kerosene lamp and set off the great fire that burned down the city of Chicago—the Puritans sparked a revolution in individual rights. (I post an essay each Thanksgiving about exactly that.) That bit about burning witches and religious wars got to be a little much. And, yet, if anything haunts us, it may not be Zombie Communism but the Zombie impulse to Purify… according to someone’s arbitrary concept of what constitutes purity. Indeed, mind who’s holding the match.
