Taking up your cross and carrying it is always going to be uncomfortable. We can say clearly that this current ideology of comfort is anti-Christian in its very essence. But we should point out the fact that the church, not once, ever called its followers to look for suffering, and even made it clear that they are warned not to do that. But if a person finds himself in a situation where he’s suffering, then he should bear it with courage.
Father Kirill Kaleda, quoted in Live Not by Lies by Rod Dreher, pp. 194 – 195
Tag: Russia
Live Not By Lies
… a book review, obviously.
In the West today, we are living under decadent, pre-totalitarian conditions. Social atomization, widespread loneliness, the rise of ideology, widespread loss of faith in institutions, and other factors leave society vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation to which both Russia and Germany succumbed in the previous century.
Furthermore, intellectual, cultural, academic, and corporate elites are under the sway of a left-wing political cult built around social justice. It is a militantly illiberal ideology that shares alarming commonalities with Bolshevism, including dividing humanity between the Good and the Evil. This pseudoreligion appears to meet a need for meaning and moral purpose in a post-Christian society and seeks to build a just society by demonizing, excluding, and even persecuting all who resist its harsh dogmas.
Finally, Big Business’s embrace and promotion of progressive social values and the emergence of “surveillance capitalism” — the sales-directed mining of individual data gathered by electronic devices — is preparing the West to accept a version of China’s social credit system. We are being conditioned to surrender privacy and liberties for the sake of comfort, convenience, and an artificially imposed social harmony.
This is the brave new world of the twenty-first century. It is coming, and it is coming fast. How should we resist it?
Live Not by Lies, by Rod Dreher (2020), pp. 93 – 94
A Scary Book for October
I saved this book review for October, because over here at Out of Babel we have a tradition of talking about scary things all month. Of course, this isn’t the spooky sort of scary that you might expect around Halloween. (We will get to that later, and plenty of it.) This is more realistic-scary.
Soft Totalitarianism
The main thing that scared me was the first part of Dreher’s book, titled “Soft Totalitarianism.” Dreher explains that the impetus for the book was his interviews of older folks, now living in America, who survived the Communist states in Eastern Europe. They are very concerned about the social trends they see in America, because things look familiar. They are also, of course, madly frustrated with Americans for not wanting to listen to their warnings. Nobody likes to be Cassandra. Dreher wrote the book because he thinks there is a lot we can learn from them, and from others who engaged in resistance in these countries (Dreher also traveled to Hungary, Russia, and some other former Soviet republics while doing research for this book). There are valuable lessons these folks have learned, but the learning curve is steep, and we have a limited amount of time to start putting their advice into practice.
In Chapter Two, “Our Pre-Totalitarian Culture,” Dreher gives a brief history of social conditions in Russia right before the Revolution. This includes not just former peasants who had come to the cities and were now isolated from their churches and communities, but also the idealistic, utopian thinking that was popular among intellectuals. “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy” (pp. 41 – 42).
Chapter 3 is called “Progressivism as Religion” and Chapter 4 is about the surveillance state.
I didn’t find all this scary because it was a new thought. I have read quite a bit of socialist, utopian, and progressive literature (it’s hard to avoid), either directly myself or indirectly by hearing such people as James Lindsay read it out loud and analyze it in podcasts. And I’ve read Animal Farm and The Gulag Archipelago (abridged), and Brave New World and The Giver and The Hiding Place. I know that attempts at utopia never go well, because they run contrary to human nature. This is not my first rodeo.
Except that, in a way, it is, because I’ve never actually had to live under totalitarianism, whether the hard kind or the soft kind, until quite recently. My country is sliding rapidly into soft totalitarianism, and knowing all the things I boasted of knowing in the previous paragraph is not helping one little bit to stop it. That is what is depressing (or scary, if you like), and that is what the first part of Dreher’s book forces you to look at in some detail.
It is even scarier if you have read, say in The Gulag Archipelago, about some of the extremely creative tortures that the Soviets would subject prisoners to in order to break their minds. That’s why Part 2 of Dreher’s book, “How to Live in the Truth,” ends with Chapter 10, “The Gift of Suffering.”
I Do Have One Critique
This critique should not be understood to detract from the value of Dreher’s book. I mean, five stars, absolutely. But I think it is important enough to mention because Dreher seems to confuse the meaning of a key word, which is not a good mistake to make when you are fighting propagandists.
Tamas Salyi, the Budapest teacher, says that Hungarians survived German occupation and a Soviet puppet regime, but thirty years of freedom has destroyed more cultural memory than the previous eras. “What neither Nazism or Communism could do, victorious liberal capitalism has done,” he muses.
The idea that the past and its traditions, including religion, is an intolerable burden on individual liberty has been poison for Hungarians, he believes. About progressives today, Salyi says, “I think they really believe that if they erase all memory of the past … they can write whatever they want on the blank slate. It’s not so easy to manipulate people who know who they are, rooted in tradition.”
pp. 116 – 177
See what Dreher did there? “Capitalism” is identified as “the idea that the past and its traditions, including religion, is an intolerable burden on individual liberty.”
That is not what capitalism is. Capitalism is the idea that every person ought to be able to own private property, charge for their own products or labor, and buy and sell freely. How do I know this? Because according to Marx, “Communism can be summed up in one sentence: the abolition of private property.”
I have written before about how belief in private property and free markets does not imply belief in a vast, radically individualistic, consumerist culture. In fact, if you want to have a humble, grounded life, one that remembers the past, honors traditions, works the land, etc., then private property is absolutely essential.
Of course, we live in a fallen world, so no matter what legal and economic system is in place, there will arise corruption and abuses within it. That does not (necessarily) mean that it is an evil totalitarian system, nor that its laws are inherently unjust. However, what I’ve noticed is that when the average person, speaking or writing casually, says “capitalism,” it usually carries negative connotations, meaning either:
- corruption
- consumerism
- unjust practices
- … or, in this case, radical individualism
In fact, “capitalism” is used in exactly this equivocal way by people who want to abolish private property. They use it to imply that all the human ills don’t just occur in a system with private property, but are actually the result of it, and that getting rid of private property would also get rid of corruption, consumerism, etc.
When you conflate capitalism with something else, like radical individualism, it leads to sloppy thinking, as in Dreher’s paragraph above, where one second, he is blaming capitalism for causing Hungarians to forget their traditions, and a few sentences later it’s “progressives today,” who are in fact all the sworn enemies of capitalism.
This is too important a word to give up, and I’m disappointed that Dreher hasn’t taken the time to define his terms more carefully. However, despite that minor-yet-important complaint, this is a helpful book. Researching it cannot have been enjoyable, and it contains vital information about what previous generations have learned from living under totalitarian regimes … information that it might be just as well to have a hard copy of, so that it doesn’t go down the memory hole.
Quote: “That’s A Bad Sign”
An old man wearing a flat cap overhears Matthew translating the Russian [on the memorial to those executed by the NKVD] for me. He sidles over, introduces himself as Vladimir Alexandrovich, and asks what brings us to Budovo today. Matthew tells him that his American friend is here to learn about the communist era, because emigres in the West see signs of its potential rebirth there.
Like what? asks Vladimir Alexandrovich. I tell him about people afraid of losing their jobs for dissenting from left-wing ideology.
“Losing jobs?” he says. “That’s a bad sign. It can happen again, you know.”
Live Not By Lies, by Rod Dreher, pp. 123 – 124
Real Prehistoric Jewelry This Time
So, it looks like Denisovans made lovely jewelry, including drilling fine holes.
Or, at least, such were found in the cave they inhabited for a while.
Think they were human?
And I wonder why they were living in a cave in Siberia, and what happened that caused them to abandon their jewelry there?
Sobering
I finally finished reading the abridged version of The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The abridged version is 470 pages long, and it still gives the impression that we are only scratching the surface of all that happened with the camp system in the century since the Russian Revolution. Solzhenitsyn himself writes with regret about the fact that his account is sadly incomplete:
Those whom I asked to take on particular chapters would not do so, but instead offered stories, written or oral, for me to use as I pleased. What we really needed was a well-staffed office. [But] not only could I not spread myself like this; I had to conceal the project itself, my letters, my materials, to disperse them, to do everything in deepest secrecy. I even had to camouflage the time I spent working on the book with what looked like work on other things.
I must explain that never once did this whole book, in all its parts, lie on the same desk at the same time! In September, 1965, when work on the Archipelago was at its most intensive, I suffered a setback: my archive was raided and a novel impounded. At this point the parts of the Archipelago were already written, and the materials for the other parts, were scattered, and never reassembled: I could not take the risk, especially when all the names were given correctly.
I have stopped work on the book not because I regard it as finished, but because I cannot spend any more of my life on it. Besides begging for indulgence, I want to cry aloud: When the time and the opportunity comes, gather together, all you friends who have survived and know the story well, and write your own commentaries … Only then will the book be definitive. God bless the work!
The full list of those without whom this book could not have been written, or revised, or kept safe cannot yet be entrusted to paper. They know who they are. They have my homage.
pp. 469 – 472
No Triumph Here
There are many words that could be used to describe the experience of reading this book. Horrifying, overwhelming, and in parts, inspiring. But I have chosen sobering because that is the overall impression that it left with me. No book about the systematic arrest, imprisonment, degradation, and murder of millions of people — and the suppression of their stories — can end on a triumphant note. Even when the triumph that has happened is that their stories have finally been told:
We could not foresee what it would be like: how for no visible compelling reason the earth would shudder and give, how the gates of the abyss would briefly, grudgingly part so that two or three birds of truth would fly out before they slammed to, to stay shut for a long time to come. So many of my predecessors had not been able to finish writing, or to preserve what they had written, or to crawl or scramble to safety — but I had this good fortune: to thrust the first handful of truth through the open jaws of the iron gates before they slammed shut again.
Like matter enveloped by antimatter, it exploded instantaneously!
Only too rarely do our fellow countrymen have a chance to speak their mind … and former prisoners still more rarely. Their faith had proved false, their hopes had been cheated so often — yet now they believed that the era of truth was really beginning, that at last it was possible to speak and write boldly!
And they were disappointed, of course, for the hundredth time …
When Krushchev, wiping the tear from his eye, gave permission for the publication of [my novel about the gulags] Ivan Denisovich, he was quite sure that it was about Stalin’s camps, that he had none of his own.
I myself was taken by surprise when I received a stream of letters — from present-day zeks [prisoners]. These letters, too, were a single many-throated cry. But a cry that said, “What about us!!??” And the zeks set up a howl: What do you mean, never happen again? We’re here inside now, and our conditions are just the same!
“Nothing has changed since Ivan Denisovich’s time” — the message was the same in letters from many different places. “Any zek who reads your book will feel bitterness and disgust because everything is just as it was.” “What has changed, if all the laws providing for twenty-five years’ imprisonment issued under Stalin are still in force?”
After reading all these letters, I who had been thinking myself a hero saw that I hadn’t a leg to stand on: in ten years I had lost my vital link with the Archipelago.
pp. 451 – 453
Human Psychology is Universal
Though I have never lived under an oppressive socialist regime, many parts of this book felt familiar because human psychology is the same. For example, in an early chapter Solzhenitsyn describes how common it was for people to be arrested because they had been accused or betrayed by a jealous spouse. A man secretly accuses another man who he suspects is having an affair with his wife. A wife accuses her husband so she can get rid of him and live with her lover. This is the same phenomenon we now see on campuses where bitter exes will use the university’s sexual-harassment reporting system to take revenge on each other. And it’s not just about women vs. men: I recently saw a case where a lesbian used it to take down her ex, who happened to be a professor, after the relationship went sour. The problem is that when you set up a bureaucratic “justice” system that can be easily used to ruin people, the temptation to use it on your personal enemies is almost overwhelming.
Here are some other things that felt oddly familiar: When Solzhenitsyn’s book A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich came out, the Soviet newspapers grudgingly praised it: “an explosion of newspaper articles — written with gritted teeth, with ill-concealed hatred and resentment: an explosion of official praise that left a sour taste in my mouth” (p. 451). This, in turn, caused former prisoners to assume that the book was not an actual expose, but rather “controlled opposition” put out by the regime as more propaganda.
“The prolonged absence of any free exchange of information within a country opens up a gulf of incomprehension between whole groups of the population, between millions and millions. We simply cease to be a single people, for we speak, indeed, different languages.” (p. 432)
The mildest and at the same time most widespread form of betrayal was not to do anything bad directly, but just not to notice the doomed person next to one, not to help him, to turn away one’s face, to shrink back. They had arrested a neighbor, your comrade at work, or even your close friend. You kept silence. You acted as if you had not noticed. (For you could not afford to lose your current job!) And then it was announced at work, at the general meeting, that the person who had disappeared the day before was … an inveterate enemy of the people. And you, who had bent your back beside him for twenty years at the same desk, now by your noble silence (or even by your condemning speech!), had to show how hostile you were to his crimes.
p. 323
May God Prepare Our Hearts
Because if we ever face anything like this, our own character will be our downfall.
Those people became corrupted in camp who had already been corrupted out in freedom or who were ready for it. Because people are corrupted in freedom too, sometimes even more effectively than in camp.
If a person went swiftly bad in camp, what it might mean was that he had not just gone bad, but that that inner foulness which had not previously been needed had disclosed itself.
Yes, camp corruption was a mass phenomenon. But not only because the camps were awful, but because in addition we Soviet people stepped upon the soil of the Archipelago spiritually disarmed …
p. 319
When people express vexation, in my presence, over the West’s tendency to crumble, its political shortsightedness, its divisiveness, its confusion — I recall too: “Were we, before passing through the Archipelago, more steadfast? Firmer in our thoughts?”
And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: “Bless you, prison!”
p. 313
Beautiful Description from a Horrifying Book
On the White Sea, where the nights are white for half a year at a time, Bolshoi Solovetsky Island lifts its white churches from the water within the ring of its bouldered kremlin walls, rusty-red from the lichens which have struck root there — and the grayish-white Solovetsky seagulls hover continuously over the kremlin and screech.
“In all this brightness it is as if there were so sin present … It is as if nature here had not yet matured to the point of sin” is how the writer Prishvin perceived the Solovetsky Islands.
Without us these isles rose from the sea; without us they acquired a couple of hundred lakes replete with fish; without our help they were settled by capercaillies, hares, and deer, while foxes, wolves, and other beasts of prey never ever appeared there.
The glaciers came and went, the granite boulders littered the shores of the lakes; the lakes froze during the Solovetsky winter nights, the sea howled under the wind and was covered with an icy sludge and in places froze; the northern lights blazed across half the sky; and it grew bright once again and warm once again, and the fir trees grew and thickened, and the birds cackled and called, and the young deer trumpeted — and the planet circled through all world history, and kingdoms fell and rose, and here there were still no beasts of prey and no human being.
Half a hundred years after the Battle of Kulikovo Field and half a thousand years before the GPU, the monks Savvaty and German crossed the mother-of-pearl sea in a tiny boat and came to look on this island without a beast of prey as sacred. The Solovetsky Monastery began with them …
The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, abridged version, pp. 181 – 182
Out of Babel 