New Horizons

The last several months have been a period of discovery. I have delved deep into Dostoevsky, I am now discovering the magic of Thomas Hardy, and I am probing the wisdom of George Eliot. I am acquiring the rudiments of a literary education. In the sphere of music, I am working my way through the symphonies of Mahler and Beethoven. I am cleansing my soul through culture. The time and energy I wasted on Trotskyism is now being directed towards an aesthetic ideal. During my two and a half years of membership, I neglected culture and became a brute who only lived for revolution. This shall be the case no longer.

I have been thinking to myself, if all the passion and obsession that Trots show over their sacred texts and hallowed and obscure writings, was shown towards genuine works of wisdom and great art by people like Homer, Tolstoy, Chekhov etc, how much better off would they be? How much more cultured they would be, how much nobler, how much more of an insight into the human psyche they would have. You will learn more about human nature from reading The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from Underground or Tess of the D’Urbervilles than you could possibly glean from the scatterbrained observations of Marx and Engels. Marxism has always neglected the inner life. All that matters is socio-economic transformation. Dostoevsky predicted the horrors of Bolshevism fifty years in advance with his novel Demons, and he did this not using ‘dialectical materialism’, but through his sophisticated understanding of human psychology, and his own personal experience among revolutionary circles during his misguided youth. Dostoevsky is the noblest ‘renegade’ that ever was, because of how he used his ordeal among these fanatics to develop self-knowledge and a greater knowledge of the psychology of the revolutionary as a social type. No one, to my knowledge, has bested him in this.

Culture transcends, and is superior to, politics. Shakespeare is appreciated by men and women of all political traditions, because of the timeless truths of his philosophy and his representation of humanity in his plays. No amount of sordid cancellation attempts by the social justice warriors of our day and age will succeed in effacing him from the cultural commonplace book of mankind. No matter how much this or that author is denounced as politically incorrect, we will continue to read and be inspired by them in the absence of a totalitarian power which actively seeks to ban their books and forbid us from studying them.

I have been having so much fun with my new cultural endeavours that I do not have the time or the inclination to read any of the garbage on the IMT website, or even post on this blog. Every time I think of posting something, I think to myself that the time is better spent reading. I think I have now reached the point where I am slowly but surely moving on from these horrors, and look back upon them as a very small and unfortunate episode in my life, among many other unhappy events. I keep thinking that the time I spent reading Marx and Engels and Lenin and Trotsky is time I could have spent on my degree, time I could have spent reading truly great writers, time I could have spent among people who weren’t fanatics. But that time is past, and I have now, so instead of backward glances of regret, it is best to move forward in a spirit of cautious optimism and a thirst for fresh knowledge. If I have anything to say to my ex-comrades now, it is in this scene from Dostoevsky’s Demons, where Stepan Trofimovich renounces revolution in favour of aestheticism:

“Ladies and gentlemen, [speaking of revolutionary papers] I have solved the whole mystery. The whole mystery of their effect lies – in their stupidity!” (His eyes began to flash.) “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, were it an intentional stupidity, counterfeited out of calculation – oh, that would even be a stroke of genius! But we must do them full justice: they have not counterfeited anything. This is the shortest, the barest, the most simplehearted stupidity – c’est la betise dans son essence la plus pure, quelque chose comme un simple chimique. Were it just a drop more intelligently expressed, everyone would see at once all the poverty of this short stupidity. But now everyone stands perplexed: no one believes it can be so elementally stupid. ‘It can’t be that there’s nothing more to it,’ everyone says to himself, and looks for a secret, sees a mystery, tries to read between the lines – the effect is achieved! Oh, never before has stupidity received so grand a reward, though it has so often deserved it…For, en paranthèse, stupidity, like the loftiest genius, is equally useful in the destinies of mankind…”

…”Messieurs, the last word in this matter is all-forgiveness. I, an obsolete old man, I solemnly declare that the spirit of life blows as ever and the life force is not exhausted in the younger generation. The enthusiasm of modern youth is as pure and bright as in our time. Only one thing has happened: the displacing of purposes, the replacing of one beauty by another! The whole perplexity lies in just what is more beautiful: Shakespeare or boots, Raphael or petroleum?”

…”And I proclaim,” Stepan Trofimovich shrieked, in the last extremity of passion, “and I proclaim that Shakespeare and Raphael are higher than the emancipation of the serfs, higher than nationality, higher than socialism, higher than the younger generation, higher than chemistry, higher than almost all mankind, for they are already the fruit, the real fruit of all mankind, and maybe the highest fruit there ever may be! A form of beauty already achieved, without the achievement of which I might not even consent to live…Oh, God!” he clapsed his hands, “ten years ago I cried out in the same way from a platform in Petersburg, exactly the same things and in the same words, and in exactly the same way they understood nothing, they laughed and hissed, as now; short people, do you know that mankind can live without the Englishman, it can live without Germany, it can live only too well without the Russian man, it can live without science, without bread, and it only cannot live without beauty, for then there would be nothing at all to do in the world! The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here! Science itself would not stand for a minute without beauty – are you aware of that, you who are laughing? – it would turn into boorishness, you couldn’t invent the nail!…I will not yield!” he cried absurdly in conclusion, and banged his fist on the table with all his might.

That is probably my favourite scene in the whole novel. Needless to say, you will have to read the whole novel yourself to appreciate it.

Like Ivan Karamazov, I once believed that ‘everything is permitted’ when it came to furthering the cause of revolution. Like Ivan, I came to the point where I could no longer accept this. I cannot accept that the individual may be crushed, that art may be obliterated, that genius may be stultified and exterminated (as Pyotr Stepanovich advocates in Demons) in the name of building a new society, which is what Marxism requires. When Trotsky attacks ‘petty-bourgeois intellectuals’ and insulted Victor Serge by saying that he had too much of an artist’s attitude to revolutionary discipline, he is echoing the philistine garbage of the revolutionaries in Demons – of Pyotr Stepanovich, Shigalyov and the seminarian who attacks Stepan Trofimovich at Yulia Mihailovna’s fete. Critical thinking, the creative spirit, experimentation with different attitudes and points of view (what Keats calls ‘negative capability’) is not compatible with the dogmatism and fanaticism of revolutionary socialism, which demands an attitude of inflexibility and fanatical intoxication that one associates with religious sects like the Jesuits, or with a cult like the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Imagine if such people got hold of society. They would turn us all into robots. I am reminded of an episode I read about in Utopia in Power, in which a Bolshevik militant during the civil war killed themselves, unable to bear the monstrous actions demanded in the name of building the new society. He was not the only person to end up in this situation. Had any of the Bolsheviks read of the fate of Raskolnikov, or Stavrogin, or Ivan Karamazov, they would have understood all too well. I will never bow down to any totalitarian power or ideology, I will never surrender my sacred and absolute individuality to any man, woman, or group, and I would rather die alone than be a member of such a disgusting, satanic and criminal group as the International Marxist Tendency. Long live art and individualism!