As Solzhenitsyn also observed, most Westerners making this charge had not even read the offending passages, since the novel had not yet been translated. When The Washington Post, which had published these accusations, commissioned John Glad to translate the passages suspected of being anti-Semitic, it “was obliged to mention that he had ‘found no grounds for accusing [Solzhenitsyn] of anti-Semitism.’” Still more telling, when a translation of the expanded August 1914 finally appeared, the accusers fell silent: “All those critics seemed, in an instant, to have lost their memory.”
Despite its relentless focus on political events, The Red Wheel paradoxically instructs that politics is not the most important thing in life. To the contrary, the main cause of political horror is the overvaluing of politics itself. It is supremely dangerous to presume that if only the right social system could be established, life’s fundamental problems would be resolved. Like the great realist novelists of the nineteenth century, Solzhenitsyn believed that, as he stated in Rebuilding Russia,
“political activity is by no means the principal mode of human life…. The more energetic the political activity in a country, the greater is the loss to spiritual life. Politics must not swallow up all of a people’s spiritual and creative energies. Beyond upholding its rights, mankind must defend its soul.“
In Between Two Millstones he repeated: “Political life is not life’s most important aspect…a pure atmosphere in society cannot be created by any juridical legislation, but by moral cleansing.” Commenting on The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn explains that “no matter what depths of evil the narrative has plumbed, this must not be allowed to warp the soul of either author or reader—you must arrive at a harmonious contemplation.”
The central passage of March 1917 concerns not a historical figure’s political ruminations but the fictional Varsonofiev’s assessment of his life, with all its irretrievable mistakes and erroneous judgments that seemed so right at the time. Remembering his fervent hopes for revolution and the republic that would make life sublime, Varsonofiev now asks rhetorically:
“What could the daily political fever change for the better in the true life of men? What kind of principles could it offer that would bring us out of our emotional sufferings, our emotional evil? Was the essence of our life really political?… How could you remake the world if you couldn’t figure out your own soul?“
poiesis
A great example of how a poem can complete and surpass our attempts to define, describe.
Given this view of technology, it follows that any scientific account obscures the essential being of many things, including their nearness. So when Heidegger discusses technology and nearness, he assures us that he is not simply repeating the cliché that technology makes the world smaller. “What is decisive,” he writes, “is not that the distances are diminishing with the help of technology, but rather that nearness remains outstanding.” In order to experience nearness, we must encounter things in their truth. And no matter how much we believe that science will let us “encounter the actual in its actuality,” science only offers us representations of things. It “only ever encounters that which its manner of representation has previously admitted as a possible object for itself.”
An example from the second lecture illustrates what Heidegger means. Scientifically speaking, the distance between a house and the tree in front of it can be measured neutrally: it is thirty feet. But in our everyday lives, that distance is not as neutral, not as abstract. Instead, the distance is an aspect of our concern with the tree and the house: the experience of walking, of seeing the tree’s shape grow larger as I come closer, and of the growing separation from the home as I walk away from it. In the scientific account, “distance appears to be first achieved in an opposition” between viewer and object. By becoming indifferent to things as they concern us, by representing both the distance and the object as simple but useful mathematical entities or philosophical ideas, we lose our truest experience of nearness and distance.
Seamus Heaney:
I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.
I heard the hatchet’s differentiated
Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh
And collapse of what luxuriated
Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.
Deep planted and long gone, my coeval
Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,
Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for.
“at the root of everything”
Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.
“the terror of the mystery in the face of the neighbour”
Whether we notice it or not, we are part of a culture in which information overload leads to the cultivation of ignorance. It sounds a bit odd put like that, but the fact is that any system dealing with huge amounts of input has to select, and thus to ignore a proportion of what’s flooding in. There’s a good case for thinking that the ‘modern’ human being has lost various sensory skills that would have been active a few thousand years ago. Even today, we can still just about see in some human populations like the San in Southern Africa evidence of kinds of attunement to environmental stimuli that we just don’t have any longer.
The dangerous and disturbing thing about our present situation, though, is that we end up not simply failing to notice things about our overall physical environment (bad enough, in all conscience) but failing to see the distinctiveness and mysteriousness of human agents. When we speak about seeing the ‘image of God’ in human beings, we don’t (or we shouldn’t!) mean that in certain respects like freedom and intelligence human beings are ‘quite like’ God. It’s more that when I really look at another human being I’m faced with something so different from me and so unfathomable that it’s like looking into the unfathomable and endless mystery of God. I can’t own it, I can’t predict its future, I can’t reproduce its inner workings.
It’s the very opposite of ‘algorithm’ thinking. It’s tied up with the revolutionary biblical idea that everyone has an unrepeatable gift to give to the community of God’s children; and with the rather stunning biblical image of a God who ‘calls the stars by name’ – a God who is completely committed to a unique relationship with every being that has been created. This is the God who is a loving and patient witness to the whole of the history of each one of us – who, in St Augustine’s phrase, is always at home in us, even when we are far away from ourselves and from reality.
A really human and humane education – let alone a Christian education – should be turning our minds and imaginations back to this dimension of wonder at the unfathomable differences of which the world is composed. It’s all the more shabby and scandalous that anyone should think we can deal with educational discernment by means of statistical calculation; and all the more necessary for communities of faith to hold on stubbornly to that conviction about the divine image – what a modern Russian saint called the ‘terror’ of the mystery in the face of the neighbour, which is also the doorway into the terrible and glorious mystery of God.
international neighbors
The problem arises in the assumption that culture, including religious culture, must of its essence be monolithic and that it can be maintained only through legal coercion – or, in the case of Ukraine, violent, unprincipled and unbridled aggression.
But we might do worse than ask why non-Western cultures so fear being sucked into what they consider a moral vacuum. If all they see is a series of reactive demands for emancipation acted out against a backdrop of consumerism and obsession with material growth, the suspicion and hostility is a bit more intelligible. What do we in the shrinking “liberal” world think emancipation is for? Perhaps it is for the liberation of all individuals to collaborate in a positive social project, in a society of sustainable and fair distribution of goods. Perhaps it is for the construction of a social order in which our interdependence, national and international, is more fully acknowledged.
Solidarity with Ukraine involves sanctions that will cost us as well as Russians – decisions that will affect our reliance on oil and gas and open our doors to more refugees. If we are willing to accept these consequences for the sake of a positive vision of interdependence and justice, we shall have a more compelling narrative to oppose the dramatic, even apocalyptic, myths arising elsewhere in the world.
Unwelcome neighbours, after all, tend not simply to disappear; in which case, we must work out how we live respectfully with them. One thing that might be said in response to Patriarch Kirill is that neighbours have to be loved, not terrorised into resentful silence – a matter on which the God first acknowledged in Kyiv in 988 had a good deal to say.
the death of proceduralism
It is safe to say that we find less to laugh at together now, when, as the cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han wrote in In the Swarm, our unit of political events has become the shitstorm. The desire to cancel (or to cancel cancellation) is not a desire to win a discussion but to obliterate it in perceived response to Total Emergency. Our condition of permanent freakout consists in the inability to distinguish between exception and reliable rule—in the inability to judge the magnitude or significance of events relative to some common sense. Each extreme summons and creates itself in response to its compensatory extreme (such that, e.g., more registered Democrats than Republicans have heard of QAnon). It is true that more voices can publicly express their views than before, but it has come at the cost of the public conversation itself. Opinions are no longer “representative” because there are few or no remaining organs of the center’s representation. The idea of the center itself has been weaponized into the false equivalence that there are good people on both sides of every issue—never mind what it is. Not all disagreements can or should rise to the level of debate. But this is precisely pluralism’s Achilles’ heel—its inability to dismiss its enemies without contradicting its commitment to free speech—and the basis on which it continues to be degraded from within.
The journalist Ryszard Kapuściński wrote that television created the conditions for perestroika: Once TV revealed the workings of the Kremlin, a state built on terror, ignorance, and mystification melted away. So too did cable television first melt away the comity of the US Congress. Just as Supreme Court confirmations are now extended miniseries, the appearance of cable news and the televising of congressional proceedings changed the audience and therefore the practice of government, since representatives were no longer speaking to each other, but to the news. (It is no accident, in this regard, that the Supreme Court, the untelevised branch, remains the branch of government with relatively the most prestige.) Minute and partisan coverage is delegitimizing not because politicians and justices can no longer hide their sins, but because it selects for objects of attention that are widely and readily arresting (zingers, epic fails, the optics of personality). Our politicians must begin to act for us, and then we enjoy despising them for it.
Then we were digitized. The printed word was the center’s creative organ: In order to be widely read, newspapers educated and formed their wide readership. The digital word, by contrast, disrupts the center by casting our political life into specific kinds of polarized turmoil. Congressional gridlock has less to do with representatives’ orneriness than with their discovery that the performance of opposition is a more direct avenue to winning votes than watered-down, level-headed compromise. What’s more, reality partisanship—the operatic clash of franchised revanche—is fun, because it’s much spicier to school others than to learn anything from them. Say what you will, American politics is awfully entertaining. (Were you able to follow Germany’s recent elections in close detail? All those people who go to the same tailor making aggressively reasonable suggestions about the finer points of European fiscal rules? That highly efficient national process, the acme of whose wit is the phrase “Jamaica coalition”? Nor I.) When Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tub-thump, they do so with the intent of whipping their bases into righteous frenzy; they do not argue to persuade but For The Win. The one is an entertainer playing on our resentment; the other embodies the glamor brand of Instagrammed high ground. Both are political pornographers, prisoners of the roles they exemplify for our asking. The medium is the banter; the outrage is the message.
The conditions that govern communication also govern authoritative knowledge more generally. The notion of the center suggests overlap, cooperation, and accommodation; it demands a shared structure of authority to adjudicate differences. It is telling, by contrast, that the political struggles that most exercise us have settled on binary issues that are framed to admit of no compromise: the reality or unreality of climate change, the permissibility of abortion at any stage, the possession of guns of any kind, the effectiveness of vaccines or mask wearing, the need for reparations as a remedy for racial disparity, the funding or defunding of the police, whether the border should be completely open or completely walled off. I don’t say that these aren’t questions of serious moment to every citizen, but that their fault lines have been continually rewritten into a binary code that serves to aggravate difference. They have been reformulated so as not to be debated or responsive to new reasons. Discussion is possible only on the basis of partial agreement and common first principles, but where there are no widely acknowledged institutional umpires—either because such umpires have discredited themselves, or because our notion of credibility has become more exacting, or because there are too many alternative umpires—it no longer makes sense to speak of “public debate” or “public opinion,” or even to regard the emergence of bipartisan consensus as a good thing.
Even with the necessary disclaimers, the essay can tend, as almost all lamentations do, toward that false nostalgia. But it’s worth the entire read, all of which, and more, is infuriatingly easily summed up:
Every one of us knows at heart that it is better to persuade, to discuss, to befriend, to reach across the aisle—how else can we really know whether we are right? But it’s become too easy and too entertaining not to, to the point that a whole manner of political life has grown up to gratify the peremptory vindication of our view, to witness and to share our rage.
would that it were so simple
If Russian history teaches anything, it is that such “moral clarity” has no limits. If all right is on one side, then anything—literally anything—one says or does is justified. Indeed, to stop short of the most extreme measures is to indulge evil, which means risking the charge of complicity. When Stalin sent local officials quotas of people to be arrested, they responded by demanding still higher quotas. It was the safest thing to do to prove one’s loyalty. No one ever secured his position by calling for less severity to enemies. When everything is black and white, sooner or later everyone is at risk.
“If only it were so simple!” reflected Alexander Solzhenitsyn about such thinking. If only it were a matter of good people always doing good things confronting evil people and those directly or indirectly aiding them. Such thinking is not only profoundly dangerous, it also fundamentally misunderstands the very nature of moral judgment. The more serious the question, the more, not less, care should be taken in addressing it. And we must never forget, as Solzhenitsyn frequently observed, that “the line dividing good from evil” runs not between one people or one class and another. Rather, it “cuts through every human heart.”
claritatem belli
Money clarifies; so does war. As I write these words, news reports say that China may be willing to give military as well economic support to Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. If that happens, certain dominos will or will not fall. Will the United States impose economic sanctions against China? If the possibility is mooted, what will Apple Inc. (for example) say about that? And what will its customers say? We support Ukraine, we say so all the time; we’re willing to send money and offer military support, but can we do without iPhones? Or, if Apple is willing and able to move its manufacturing elsewhere, would we be willing to pay double what we currently pay?
The full implications of our involvement in a truly global economic order have long been invisible to us, because such invisibility has been in the interests of those who most profit from that order. Over the next few months and years, on multiple fronts, what was invisible will become all too visible, and we will be faced with choices that so far we have been able to avoid. Like my former student, we’ll have to confront the chasm between our self-conception and our actual behavior. How will we bridge that chasm? And how happy will we be with ourselves when our choices are made? Money clarifies; so does war.
(nearly) doomed to excuses
We have tasted the worst of ourselves; we have had to look at the vilest we are capable of – mass murder by technological skill. And we will probably then either put enormous energy into denying this (and blaming others) or adopt a negative and cynical approach to our shared humanity, in which everything comes down to competitions for power.
It’s hard to quarrel with the implication that the advent of the nuclear age has introduced higher levels of both denial and cynicism into our public life and our expectations of humanity; we don’t have far to look for examples. But Knox steers us towards the key point here. We are capable of horrors – Belsen, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Rwanda and Srebrenica. But we see these as horrors precisely because we know that not one of them was forced on us, not one of them was inevitable. We chose. And to say we made a dreadful choice is also to know that there were other choices that were possible. We are not doomed to evil. The problem is that we are seduced by it, reassured by it, fascinated by it, and all too ready to gloss over it and justify it when it suits us. It’s not that we need to be liberated from an iron necessity. It’s tougher than that: we need to be liberated from an addiction that we always seem to be eager either to deny or to rationalize. We can’t see straight or think straight.
Williams, in a previous chapter of the same book:
St Paul tells us to be ‘transformed by the renewing of our minds’ (Romans 12.2). And in the discussion that follows in his letter to the Romans, he makes clear that this is essentially about learning the habits that will create trust, minimize resentment and rivalry, and dissolve our greedy longing to occupy the high ground at our neighbour’s expense. Transformation is the process of growing into a state in which this is second nature to us – a state in which we are so deeply attentive to the practical and psychological needs of those around us, so unfussed about our own status, so liberated from the longing to save and solve everything by our own wisdom and heroism, that we instinctively speak and act in ways that give life to the neighbour. This, for Paul, is what it is to live in Christ and to let Christ live in us – the Christ who is uniquely, freely and eternally attentive to the world’s needs at every level.
Growing into this is a long and frankly painful business.
What’s the rate?
Buried in a human neck, a bullet looks like an eye, sewn in,
an eye looking back at one’s fate.
Who shot him there? Who gave the order, which man?
Who will bury him, and what’s the rate?
When it comes to humanity, war is the beginning and end.
Whoever attacks you, don’t turn your back.
Says the Lord: For my people are foolish, they have not known me,
they are silly children and they have no understanding.
But the children feel as strong as their machinery,
mass-produced, with plenty of seamstresses for repairing:
some ladies patch holes, others fix neck bones,
still more sew on buttons that were torn away from hands.
And the Lord says: They are wise in doing evil — but,
says the Lord — they do not know how to do good.
But the children, if they survive, say it was luck,
and if they die, they think that was yesterday,
today is another day,
and the seamstresses stand with a shroud, telling them, “Put this on.”
How long must we put up with the flags, the trumpets calling us into the fray?
What beast has awakened? Where did our special forces land?
Who shot that man in the back? Who gave the command?
Who will bury him, and what’s the rate?