Thursday, August 28, 2014

A Personal History of Ideas

One thing that jumps out immediately from reading Isaiah Berlin and his take on the Russian intelligentsia is that they really cared about ideas.  Even though in terms of their overall proportion of the population, the Russian intelligentsia was relatively small (certainly smaller than that in the U.S. in the mid 20th Century for example, though possibly approaching the proportion in 21st Century America) but they had an outsized impact on their society.  They also took things to extremes.  Some American and European commentators contend this is because Western ideas like liberty were so alien to the "Russian soul" that it was no wonder they twisted them.  This is quite condescending and probably untrue.  At the same time, it is depressing how willing so many Russians are so supportive of Putin and his totalitarian ways.  Yet one finds a similar follow the leader mentality on all ends of the political spectrum in North America.  (Nonetheless, research in evolutionary behaviour does tend to find more "loyalty" amongst those of a conservative bent, since it is a part of their worldview.  It is kind of sad that a very large portion of humanity are still little more than pack dogs.)

I still care about ideas (and certainly Berlin still thought they mattered a great deal), even though it seems an uphill battle in contemporary society.  Some days I still probably care more about abstract ideas than about actual people.  And when I care about people it is mostly thinking of them in the abstract and groups rather than in the specific.  (I think this is a tendency among progressives, but I digress...)  This is not an unknown phenomena: Chapter 4 of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov addresses this in a sideways manner, though it is the cold Ivan speaking and not the more centered Alyosha: "One can love one's neighbours in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it's almost impossible."  When I read these Russian works, I was young enough to identify closely with the trouble souls like Ivan and Rodion (not that I would have gotten into such a fix) and even Turgenev's Bazarov.  (Speaking of consequences, I did take things too far in college bull sessions (at least verbally) and it cost me all my friends and acquaintances from that era.)   Now I have gained the wisdom to see that 1) almost any philosophical or political system pushed to its logical limits becomes intractable and 2) that there is a huge variety in tastes and trying to craft a single "solution" that will work for all people is impossible, I realize the limits of ideas in their practical application.  It is humbling or at least should be.  If philosopher and politicians did not attempt such sweeping solutions and stayed more grounded in their attempts to improve their own corner of the world, in general the world would be a better place.  And certainly aiming to be more empathetic and understanding why not everyone shares your views and convictions would be truly amazing, almost miraculous in today's hyper-partisan era where almost everyone seems to be inhabiting an echo chamber of their own choosing.  Now whether adopting this more constrained (and humbled?) vision will cause me to rethink my connections to Ivan or Bazarov is an interesting question.  I should be coming up to Fathers and Sons around Thanksgiving, and I'll see how it strikes me then.

What I do know is that people who are primarily abstract thinkers -- and who are not grounded by the responsibility of implementing their ideas -- tend to get very extreme.  They also create a lot of schisms.  We saw this among the Russian political thinkers (with Stoppard brilliantly reflecting Berlin in The Coast of Utopia) and their literary counterparts.*  I really had no idea until recently that Turgenev and Dostoevsky had such a difficult relationship, all due to their intellectual differences.  That is in part why I am going to focus on the Russians so intently for a while.  So that's my own "Instead of an Introduction" (which is how Dostoevsky opens The Demons) and it will serve as the entry point to however many posts I actually write to cover these Russians.  I'm not planning on reviewing everything, though I will certainly post when I feel so moved.

* And don't get me started on university professors, particularly those in the social sciences and the humanities. The joke about the fights [in academic departments] being so bitter because the stakes are so low is oh, so true. I suppose I am more than a little jaded, since I am a failed academic, but I can't help but think Yeats nailed this group so long ago in "The Scholars": Bald heads forgetful of their sins, / ...  / All shuffle there; all cough in ink; / All wear the carpet with their shoes; / All think what other people think ...  And yet -- as sad as it is to view dried up academics who studied the world rather than living it, it is even more pathetic to encounter the agéd scholar who wants to prove that he (or she, but mostly he) is still relevant  (or even worse hip or "with it").

** The title of this post is a semi-intentional mirroring of Jorge Luis Borges' A Personal Anthology and A Universal History of Infamy.  While my deepest affinity tend to be with the fairly pessimistic ideas put forth by Russians authors such as Dostoevsky and Turgenev (and the darker aspects of Bulgakov) as well as Kafka, there is another part that is attracted to more purely diverting game-like works (as long as they are semi-philosophical), like Borges' short stories or Calvino's Invisible Cities or Perec's A Void.  Thus, there is always a tension between these poles and some effort to not take things too seriously but also not too lightly.

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