‘Individuals are not bad, crowds are simply mad – because, in a crowd, nobody feels responsible. You can commit murders in a crowd easily, because you know the crowd is doing it and you are just a wave in it, you are not the deciding factor, so you are not responsible. Individual, alone, you feel a responsibility. You will feel guilty if you commit something. It is my observation that sin exists through crowds, no individual is ever a sinner. And individuals, even if they commit something wrong, can be taken out of it very easily; but crowds are impossible, because crowds have no souls no centers. To whom to appeal? And in all that goes on in the world – the devil, the evil forces – the crowd is in fact responsible. Nations are the devil; religious communities are the evil forces. Belief makes you a part of a bigger crowd than you, and there is a feeling of elation when you are a part of something bigger, a nation – India, or America, or England. Then you are not a tiny human being. A great energy comes to you and you feel elated. A euphoria is felt. That’s why, whenever a country is at war, people feel very euphoric, ecstatic. Suddenly their life has a meaning – they exist for the country, for the religion, for the civilization; now they have a certain goal to be achieved, and a certain treasure to be protected. Now they are no longer ordinary people, they have a great mission.’
But also…I like to think we, the people, have now felt a ‘euphoria’, a euphoria of joy, not the ‘dark maga’ group-think we are up against.
Thank you for sharing. Each time I read a column here, my reading list grows exponentially 😁
Thanks, Kim. One might include sports fandom in that -- a benign type of inclusion. Sandi B and I talked about that years ago, how MAGA appropriates a lot of sports stuff, the hats, the colors, the flags and so on...
This is an incredible piece Greg and I thank you for always teaching me something new. It's a conundrum for sure...I mean I just do not understand the Maga cult at all. I gave up trying, packed up the family, escaped Texas (the absolute gutter politically) and relocated to New Mexico. Life has become real again! All the very best to you and your family.
There was, subsequent to this I think, a famous debate between Benda and Einstein. Imagine being so sure of your intellect that you're out there debating Einstein!
In post WWI Germany, some of the landscape and most of the people were shattered. There was no money, inflation was skyrocketing when they started paying reparations - you can see it in the postage stamps of the time, overprinted with six and seven figures in German marks due to hyperinflation. At one time, one American dollar was equivalent to 4.2 trillion marks. The American law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the largest and most powerful in the world, then and now, administered the reparations; at one time they cut them in half to help the German economy, but they still were seriously afflicted. Out of this horror story came the dystopian nightmare that occupied Adolf Hitler and now Donald Trump. For Hitler, it was working the economic situation; for Trump it was a fiction, a big lie, to sucker the fools.
Trump's dystopian rhetoric, however, does not ring true whatsoever because the USA is not in a dystopian nightmare...quite the opposite. George W. Bush would note right after Trump's Inaugural speech, "Man, that's some weird shit." Bless his heart, but it was and still is 'weird shit.' Trump's rhetoric was a losing argument from the beginning...although dystopian might describe some of our current enemies quite well. There is one element in this that is directly comparable: neither Germany, nor Hitler nor Trump took responsibility for their actions. This is where the Trump cult, like the beleaguered Germans of that time, became the crowd that gave unequivocal support to something that was lie from the beginning. "I do not take responsibility!" is the clarion call of the original big lie.
In 1924 Man Ray traveled to Paris and became one of the earliest practitioners of surrealism, which can be visually described as two alien objects on an alien plain, an exploration of the unconscious expression of humans and their works. Eugene Atget photographed the old Paris of the 19th century, but he stuck with people and places that would transform as people did, a recognizable lineage. After seeing the actual prints of both these artists, I realized that they cannot be fully conveyed through the net or being reproduced because of the feeling and tactile nature of the real prints. Photographic prints are their own form. My reason for including this is that not far from the German homeland was a quite different world gearing up to the future despite its powerful visual presence in the past, and how very different they were.
Hope I didn't go too far astray, but I do go oblique sometimes, for history has its mysterious turns. Interesting books...jeez, I need to read more books...I miss the depth and the language. Good column with a lot of thought.
Thanks, Billy. Not too far astray at all! Germany during the hyperinflation period printed uniface banknotes. One the reverse, the Nazis, not then in charge, would stamp antisemitic cartoons, blaming the Jews for the reparations, when the reparations were their own fault -- payback for the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, and their own kaiser blundering into the Great War.
I read the Man Ray book, which is short and full of pictures. I've always liked him, more so now. I'd never heard of Atget, but the one influenced the other. I was only familiar with a certain phase of Man Ray's...the glass tears print.
In response to William and Greg, Atget is one of the great French photographers (in my humble opinion) in the 20th century. And Man Ray as well. If you’re not familiar with their photos, look them up asap. I think you’ll be delighted 😀
An extended understanding of the public discourse of the time to which you allude by citing Kirsch's essay (and Benda's refusal to engage with it) would provide necessary context for the point of Benda's essay which you find unconvincing. Probably the culmination of the "Jew hatred" to which Kirsch refers abounds in Celine's monstrous, anti-semitic pamphlets cited in "Benda and Celine" * in which the latter's Hitlerian view of Judaism (see Timothy Snyder's Black Earth) as destructive of Nature's ecological system as Hitler viewed it is complemented by Celine's deSade-like description of the Jews' just desserts for their alleged crime. It's no wonder that Benda would barely acknowledge Celine as a contemporary even before the holocaust animated by his school of thought.
Thanks for this, Richard. I could not open the link, so please send me the text.
I don't think Benda mentions Celine at all in TREASON. And I did not know that about him, although I never much cared for Celine, and perhaps this is why...
I looked up Benda & remember him, would like to read in the original French. Chillingly similar. I’ve been praying to St Michael to protect Ukraine for a long time. Now tRump /Vance are posting Slavakian/Russian Orthodox prayers and imagery. We better pray to St Michael as well, to spare us from the demon of tRumpism.
"MAGA is hatred, and hatred is MAGA." -- Chef's kiss!
Ron Chernow's GRANT book is 1,104 pages, and although I'm only a historical hobbyist, I can't imagine.
The phrase, "The Jewish Question," will ALWAYS send a chill down my spine.
Reading, in full, Bill Barr's speech to Notre Dame's Law School and de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, I realize now that it wasn't a speech given to a graduating class, but more a lecture given at a CATHOLIC university by an extreme CATHOLIC Attorney General, AS the Attorney General. This government official, bound by the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, was there to tell law students that HIS and THEIR religion were being undermined by secularists. He referred to the Department of Justice several times as "we're," so there is no argument that he was there speaking as a private citizen. He railed on and on about RELIGION being the ONLY moral fabric that the country can live by (and pass his "approval," I guess), and to bitch and moan about religious people being "othered" by the Great Satan that is secularism (And ALL over a gay wedding cake, I would imagine). I DID notice that in his protest of religious tradition being (rightfully) removed from public schools, he never considers OTHER religions. Oh, no, all he's thinking about is Christianity, and if you asked him, Catholicism specifically. No talk of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and all the rest. In my view, secularism is the only thing that is equal for ALL people in a democratic society, but that's way over the line for Bill Barr. GODS FORBID that religious people preserve their own times and places to practice THEIR religion and leaving the rest of us out of it. I can't imagine what this diatribe is STILL doing on the DOJ website. Doesn't Opus Dei have a website?
Sometime in the past month, I've heard of THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS, and like the John Oliver references to Leonard Leo this past week, I can't remember WHERE I saw it or heard of it. It figures. There seem to be a number of books from the early 20th century that presciently relate to now. It tells me not so much that there were a gaggle of Nostradamuses (Nostradami?) who were authors then, but that this current situation is history repeating itself, or more specifically, people like Trump and the MAGA hoard are history's gremlins -- people who pop up periodically like the black shadows who carried away lost souls in the movie, GHOST. In other words, these people need to be exposed for what they are as often as possible so they can be once again defeated by the "truth-light" they so despise.
And that's why I'm SO confident in Kamala Harris' victory in the election in 30 days. It's time for the light again. There will come a time, hopefully long after we're all dead, that the black shadows will NOT be defeated, but this ain't it. Donald Jessica Trump and the people who follow him, and the people who carry out his every id orgasm, are fools. It's going to take A LOT more organization on their part, and A LOT more complacency on the part of the truth tellers for that to happen. And that's not now. VOTE!!!
Thanks, Steve. Benda and TREASONS was quoted by Anne Applebaum somewhere recently, and there is a new translation out by David Boder (the editor of Jacobin and not the late WaPo columnist). So maybe that's where?
I have enjoyed...well, "enjoyed" is the wrong word, but it will do...reading books from this period, WW1 and Interwar. Observant people knew what was going on. But the Germans of the 1930s didn't have the example of the Germans of the 1930s, like we do. That makes the rising fascism here much much worse.
I doubt I will ever get to the Grant book, although Chernow's biography of Rockefeller is one of the best books I've ever read.
I think the intellectuals of that time were seduced by the (lovely, in theory) idea of a political system where there was no want, and everyone shared. Stalin was very good at making it seem like everything was hunky dory, of course. That doesn't excuse them, of course, but it explains their obdurate refusal to disavow Stalin. (Cummings went there and immediately called bullshit.)
I might even go so far as to compare well-intentioned folks of the 1930s who couldn't see that Stalin was bad, because of the political theory he claimed to espouse, with well-intentioned folks of our current period who can't see that Assange is bad, because they believe in free speech and oppose censorship. But Assange is only a Russian cut-out and credibly accused rapist, and he is only responsible for the deaths of the gay citizens in Islamic countries he outed; he didn't do a genocide like Stalin did. So I shall refrain. ; )
Once again a Sunday article that really got the grey cells working. Thanks. This line hit me:
"Here is a grandeur of egotism which is perhaps insufficiently appreciated.”
I think of egotism as an affliction of a person. MAGA represents egotism of the masses. Trying to understand how one person's egotistic beliefs become part of the many lead me to your:
“In a world bound together so tightly by social media, by the global economy, by a wondrous technology unthinkable to someone a century ago, even a brilliant intellectual like Julien Benda, we seem to be zooming along (or Zooming along?) a superhighway to that third science-fiction-y outcome.”
I took this to mean a good outcome, a hopeful outcome. Yet social media for all its potential to do good and it’s certainly has done good has been corrupted by the toxicity of MAGA, such that for me it underpins the negativity of egotism of the masses. In essence life is an eternal battle of good versus evil, any well intentioned invention in the wrong hands threatens the soul of humanity. Over the centuries humanity has prevailed, many times in a good way, sometimes in a not good way. The plague and pandemics were possibly inevitable results of evolution. Wars, genocide and other human created atrocities reflected the will of the few to inspire evil, only after the awakeing of the will of the many were these eradicated. On November 5th Americans will decide if the few will conquer the many. If they do, most assuredly suffering will follow, however ironically while all will suffer, those afflicted with the egotism of the masses will be the hardest hit. Such is 45's history, everyone close to him suffers while he goes along his merry way. Should they figure this out before pressing the lever or ticking the box may be our only saving grace.
Thanks, Old Man. Benda sees it as a negative outcome only, but I think that it is also in OUR power, as it was not 100 years ago, to make the outcome a positive one. I don't know that the world reduces to One World. I think, like US political parties and Cola wars, it reduces to two. But still, we ARE smart enough to save it, if we decide to work together to do so.
Social evolution demands globalism. We're waiting for the hundredth monkey to realise this. That's when humanity will save itself. I love your writing, sometimes it gives delicious shivers. Until Tuesday, then
I take a certain comfort from a hundred-year-old prediction of today’s political and societal woes, and even from Old Testament writings thousands of years old about cruel leaders, because they confirm that we’ve gotten through, and beyond, this mess many times before. Your statement that “it’s not just Trump,” where you list many other current political ‘leaders’ who are decidedly cruel, brings up an assertion that has haunted me recently: Dr Bandy Lee’s claim that psychosis is contagious. Lee, who is president of the World Mental Health Coalition led a group of psychiatrists, psychologists and other specialists who questioned Trump’s mental fitness for office in a book that she edited called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. She recently wrote Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul. (Full disclosure: I have not read either book, but I have watched a lot from her and about her work on YouTube.) To me, this concept of contagion explains the MAGA cult mentality and the effect that it has had on our entire population better than anything else I’ve been able to get my mind around. It’s a disease that millions have succumbed to and the rest of us are fighting. But we’ll get through it. We always have.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as the French put it. When I wrote my Byzantine novel, I approached history with the idea that humans have always been the same, and that, with the exception of some color here and there, always have the same values, ambitions, needs, desires, etc.
I am waiting for the "The Emperor is naked!" moment. I've been waiting for years now. I have long thought that when Trump falls -- and he will -- he will fall fast. I hope that is the case, and I hope it's soon!
Greg, I read your essays here so often with high pleasure because you have the always-increasing breadth of knowledge, of joyous discovery of the true lifelong reader. This one may be your best yet. We can pay attention to everything here but I look right now at the "mystic pacifism" “the pacifism which is solely animated by a blind hatred of war and refuses to inquire whether a war is just or not, whether those fighting [are] the attackers or the defenders, whether they wanted war or only submit to it.”
As spurious as that was in WW2, in addition to seeing how immoral it is when applied to the premature insistence on "peace" in Ukraine, we can see its equivalent in the demands for a ceasefire in Israel's war against Hamas & Hezbollah. When the task of burying the terrorists is done, a pax romana would be better than none.
So much more to unwrap in today's essay that in the moment, I might as well stop here. Thanks for it.
Thanks, Richard. I was also blown away by the "mystic pacifism" idea, which I have never seen articulated in quite that way. That's why I included it in the piece, even though it doesn't really tie into the rest of it. Ukraine's war is existential. It's that simple. Why would they surrender? We wouldn't. or, I'd like to think we wouldn't.
There are a lot of interesting ideas in TREASON. I don't agree with all of it, but certainly worth reading.
Of course more often than not, that "mystic pacificism" is a transparent ruse to cover up an attempt to help the party losing a war, to avoid its complete defeat.
I always learn something new from you Greg. This was almost overload for me today though. The horrible disaster in my hometown and region has me sort of other directed. Have been trying to help bat down all the BS from the useless maga mob and their god awful leader. If people want to know how things would be if trump were in charge, imagine recovering from Helene without FEMA, the national guard(if Robinson was governor), all the soldiers from Ft. Liberty. I shudder to think. We cannot let Trump happen to this country ever again! We just can’t.
The NC damage is so awful. And the MAGA misinformation campaign is just...they have no bottom, these people. They will exploit anything: natural disasters, pandemics. Whatever it takes. And yet his lemmings follow him. It boggles the mind...
I think I recall the end of that lemming's story being that the lemmings followed the leader off a cliff. A myth, but a comforting image for the rest of the country.
Whenever I think of MAGA:
‘Individuals are not bad, crowds are simply mad – because, in a crowd, nobody feels responsible. You can commit murders in a crowd easily, because you know the crowd is doing it and you are just a wave in it, you are not the deciding factor, so you are not responsible. Individual, alone, you feel a responsibility. You will feel guilty if you commit something. It is my observation that sin exists through crowds, no individual is ever a sinner. And individuals, even if they commit something wrong, can be taken out of it very easily; but crowds are impossible, because crowds have no souls no centers. To whom to appeal? And in all that goes on in the world – the devil, the evil forces – the crowd is in fact responsible. Nations are the devil; religious communities are the evil forces. Belief makes you a part of a bigger crowd than you, and there is a feeling of elation when you are a part of something bigger, a nation – India, or America, or England. Then you are not a tiny human being. A great energy comes to you and you feel elated. A euphoria is felt. That’s why, whenever a country is at war, people feel very euphoric, ecstatic. Suddenly their life has a meaning – they exist for the country, for the religion, for the civilization; now they have a certain goal to be achieved, and a certain treasure to be protected. Now they are no longer ordinary people, they have a great mission.’
But also…I like to think we, the people, have now felt a ‘euphoria’, a euphoria of joy, not the ‘dark maga’ group-think we are up against.
Thank you for sharing. Each time I read a column here, my reading list grows exponentially 😁
It's all about the locus of identity.
Thanks, Kim. One might include sports fandom in that -- a benign type of inclusion. Sandi B and I talked about that years ago, how MAGA appropriates a lot of sports stuff, the hats, the colors, the flags and so on...
You need a palate cleanser! Read the Michael Chabon book next.
I've read it before, and it's AMAZING. I leant my copy and picked up a new one!
This is an incredible piece Greg and I thank you for always teaching me something new. It's a conundrum for sure...I mean I just do not understand the Maga cult at all. I gave up trying, packed up the family, escaped Texas (the absolute gutter politically) and relocated to New Mexico. Life has become real again! All the very best to you and your family.
Thanks, Helen. It's so sad, what's happened in Texas. So many good, cool people there, and these monsters in charge. I'm glad you made it out.
"Perfect war"
Atomic bomb!
Greg turn off the TV and read this book again and then go deep into Oppenheimer and Einstein.
ALSO
Albert Camus understood Julien Benda.
There was, subsequent to this I think, a famous debate between Benda and Einstein. Imagine being so sure of your intellect that you're out there debating Einstein!
Another terrific read. Billserle.com
Thanks, Bill!
In post WWI Germany, some of the landscape and most of the people were shattered. There was no money, inflation was skyrocketing when they started paying reparations - you can see it in the postage stamps of the time, overprinted with six and seven figures in German marks due to hyperinflation. At one time, one American dollar was equivalent to 4.2 trillion marks. The American law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the largest and most powerful in the world, then and now, administered the reparations; at one time they cut them in half to help the German economy, but they still were seriously afflicted. Out of this horror story came the dystopian nightmare that occupied Adolf Hitler and now Donald Trump. For Hitler, it was working the economic situation; for Trump it was a fiction, a big lie, to sucker the fools.
Trump's dystopian rhetoric, however, does not ring true whatsoever because the USA is not in a dystopian nightmare...quite the opposite. George W. Bush would note right after Trump's Inaugural speech, "Man, that's some weird shit." Bless his heart, but it was and still is 'weird shit.' Trump's rhetoric was a losing argument from the beginning...although dystopian might describe some of our current enemies quite well. There is one element in this that is directly comparable: neither Germany, nor Hitler nor Trump took responsibility for their actions. This is where the Trump cult, like the beleaguered Germans of that time, became the crowd that gave unequivocal support to something that was lie from the beginning. "I do not take responsibility!" is the clarion call of the original big lie.
In 1924 Man Ray traveled to Paris and became one of the earliest practitioners of surrealism, which can be visually described as two alien objects on an alien plain, an exploration of the unconscious expression of humans and their works. Eugene Atget photographed the old Paris of the 19th century, but he stuck with people and places that would transform as people did, a recognizable lineage. After seeing the actual prints of both these artists, I realized that they cannot be fully conveyed through the net or being reproduced because of the feeling and tactile nature of the real prints. Photographic prints are their own form. My reason for including this is that not far from the German homeland was a quite different world gearing up to the future despite its powerful visual presence in the past, and how very different they were.
Hope I didn't go too far astray, but I do go oblique sometimes, for history has its mysterious turns. Interesting books...jeez, I need to read more books...I miss the depth and the language. Good column with a lot of thought.
Thanks, Billy. Not too far astray at all! Germany during the hyperinflation period printed uniface banknotes. One the reverse, the Nazis, not then in charge, would stamp antisemitic cartoons, blaming the Jews for the reparations, when the reparations were their own fault -- payback for the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, and their own kaiser blundering into the Great War.
I read the Man Ray book, which is short and full of pictures. I've always liked him, more so now. I'd never heard of Atget, but the one influenced the other. I was only familiar with a certain phase of Man Ray's...the glass tears print.
In response to William and Greg, Atget is one of the great French photographers (in my humble opinion) in the 20th century. And Man Ray as well. If you’re not familiar with their photos, look them up asap. I think you’ll be delighted 😀
An extended understanding of the public discourse of the time to which you allude by citing Kirsch's essay (and Benda's refusal to engage with it) would provide necessary context for the point of Benda's essay which you find unconvincing. Probably the culmination of the "Jew hatred" to which Kirsch refers abounds in Celine's monstrous, anti-semitic pamphlets cited in "Benda and Celine" * in which the latter's Hitlerian view of Judaism (see Timothy Snyder's Black Earth) as destructive of Nature's ecological system as Hitler viewed it is complemented by Celine's deSade-like description of the Jews' just desserts for their alleged crime. It's no wonder that Benda would barely acknowledge Celine as a contemporary even before the holocaust animated by his school of thought.
* https://lafrancebyzantine.blogspot.com/2018/01/celine-et-benda.
html. I have translated it at https://d.docs.live.net/191b8ef62d385bcd/Céline%20et%20Benda.docx
But I'm not sure it's accessible via that link. If you send an email address to me at richismo@yahoo.com I will send you the full translation text.
Thanks for this, Richard. I could not open the link, so please send me the text.
I don't think Benda mentions Celine at all in TREASON. And I did not know that about him, although I never much cared for Celine, and perhaps this is why...
To what address should I send it.? It's too long to post here.
I gave you my email address so you don't have to post a private email address here.
I looked up Benda & remember him, would like to read in the original French. Chillingly similar. I’ve been praying to St Michael to protect Ukraine for a long time. Now tRump /Vance are posting Slavakian/Russian Orthodox prayers and imagery. We better pray to St Michael as well, to spare us from the demon of tRumpism.
https://lafrancebyzantine.blogspot.com/2018/01/celine-et-benda.
It's a short book, and I wonder if the French version is available online somewhere...
We need the help of all the saints we can get. Maybe not the saint who founded Opus Dei, though. He can stay home.
Stray thoughts:
"MAGA is hatred, and hatred is MAGA." -- Chef's kiss!
Ron Chernow's GRANT book is 1,104 pages, and although I'm only a historical hobbyist, I can't imagine.
The phrase, "The Jewish Question," will ALWAYS send a chill down my spine.
Reading, in full, Bill Barr's speech to Notre Dame's Law School and de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, I realize now that it wasn't a speech given to a graduating class, but more a lecture given at a CATHOLIC university by an extreme CATHOLIC Attorney General, AS the Attorney General. This government official, bound by the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, was there to tell law students that HIS and THEIR religion were being undermined by secularists. He referred to the Department of Justice several times as "we're," so there is no argument that he was there speaking as a private citizen. He railed on and on about RELIGION being the ONLY moral fabric that the country can live by (and pass his "approval," I guess), and to bitch and moan about religious people being "othered" by the Great Satan that is secularism (And ALL over a gay wedding cake, I would imagine). I DID notice that in his protest of religious tradition being (rightfully) removed from public schools, he never considers OTHER religions. Oh, no, all he's thinking about is Christianity, and if you asked him, Catholicism specifically. No talk of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and all the rest. In my view, secularism is the only thing that is equal for ALL people in a democratic society, but that's way over the line for Bill Barr. GODS FORBID that religious people preserve their own times and places to practice THEIR religion and leaving the rest of us out of it. I can't imagine what this diatribe is STILL doing on the DOJ website. Doesn't Opus Dei have a website?
Sometime in the past month, I've heard of THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS, and like the John Oliver references to Leonard Leo this past week, I can't remember WHERE I saw it or heard of it. It figures. There seem to be a number of books from the early 20th century that presciently relate to now. It tells me not so much that there were a gaggle of Nostradamuses (Nostradami?) who were authors then, but that this current situation is history repeating itself, or more specifically, people like Trump and the MAGA hoard are history's gremlins -- people who pop up periodically like the black shadows who carried away lost souls in the movie, GHOST. In other words, these people need to be exposed for what they are as often as possible so they can be once again defeated by the "truth-light" they so despise.
And that's why I'm SO confident in Kamala Harris' victory in the election in 30 days. It's time for the light again. There will come a time, hopefully long after we're all dead, that the black shadows will NOT be defeated, but this ain't it. Donald Jessica Trump and the people who follow him, and the people who carry out his every id orgasm, are fools. It's going to take A LOT more organization on their part, and A LOT more complacency on the part of the truth tellers for that to happen. And that's not now. VOTE!!!
Thanks, Steve. Benda and TREASONS was quoted by Anne Applebaum somewhere recently, and there is a new translation out by David Boder (the editor of Jacobin and not the late WaPo columnist). So maybe that's where?
I have enjoyed...well, "enjoyed" is the wrong word, but it will do...reading books from this period, WW1 and Interwar. Observant people knew what was going on. But the Germans of the 1930s didn't have the example of the Germans of the 1930s, like we do. That makes the rising fascism here much much worse.
I doubt I will ever get to the Grant book, although Chernow's biography of Rockefeller is one of the best books I've ever read.
But keep in mind Camus parted ways with Benda and Sartre over Stalin.
I think the intellectuals of that time were seduced by the (lovely, in theory) idea of a political system where there was no want, and everyone shared. Stalin was very good at making it seem like everything was hunky dory, of course. That doesn't excuse them, of course, but it explains their obdurate refusal to disavow Stalin. (Cummings went there and immediately called bullshit.)
I might even go so far as to compare well-intentioned folks of the 1930s who couldn't see that Stalin was bad, because of the political theory he claimed to espouse, with well-intentioned folks of our current period who can't see that Assange is bad, because they believe in free speech and oppose censorship. But Assange is only a Russian cut-out and credibly accused rapist, and he is only responsible for the deaths of the gay citizens in Islamic countries he outed; he didn't do a genocide like Stalin did. So I shall refrain. ; )
Assange.
I'll welcome the proof.
I've read cummings on Russia
I have Cummings complete works including the Enormous Room.
Once again a Sunday article that really got the grey cells working. Thanks. This line hit me:
"Here is a grandeur of egotism which is perhaps insufficiently appreciated.”
I think of egotism as an affliction of a person. MAGA represents egotism of the masses. Trying to understand how one person's egotistic beliefs become part of the many lead me to your:
“In a world bound together so tightly by social media, by the global economy, by a wondrous technology unthinkable to someone a century ago, even a brilliant intellectual like Julien Benda, we seem to be zooming along (or Zooming along?) a superhighway to that third science-fiction-y outcome.”
I took this to mean a good outcome, a hopeful outcome. Yet social media for all its potential to do good and it’s certainly has done good has been corrupted by the toxicity of MAGA, such that for me it underpins the negativity of egotism of the masses. In essence life is an eternal battle of good versus evil, any well intentioned invention in the wrong hands threatens the soul of humanity. Over the centuries humanity has prevailed, many times in a good way, sometimes in a not good way. The plague and pandemics were possibly inevitable results of evolution. Wars, genocide and other human created atrocities reflected the will of the few to inspire evil, only after the awakeing of the will of the many were these eradicated. On November 5th Americans will decide if the few will conquer the many. If they do, most assuredly suffering will follow, however ironically while all will suffer, those afflicted with the egotism of the masses will be the hardest hit. Such is 45's history, everyone close to him suffers while he goes along his merry way. Should they figure this out before pressing the lever or ticking the box may be our only saving grace.
Thanks, Old Man. Benda sees it as a negative outcome only, but I think that it is also in OUR power, as it was not 100 years ago, to make the outcome a positive one. I don't know that the world reduces to One World. I think, like US political parties and Cola wars, it reduces to two. But still, we ARE smart enough to save it, if we decide to work together to do so.
Fingers crossed it may be so
Social evolution demands globalism. We're waiting for the hundredth monkey to realise this. That's when humanity will save itself. I love your writing, sometimes it gives delicious shivers. Until Tuesday, then
Thanks so much, Meemaw.
I take a certain comfort from a hundred-year-old prediction of today’s political and societal woes, and even from Old Testament writings thousands of years old about cruel leaders, because they confirm that we’ve gotten through, and beyond, this mess many times before. Your statement that “it’s not just Trump,” where you list many other current political ‘leaders’ who are decidedly cruel, brings up an assertion that has haunted me recently: Dr Bandy Lee’s claim that psychosis is contagious. Lee, who is president of the World Mental Health Coalition led a group of psychiatrists, psychologists and other specialists who questioned Trump’s mental fitness for office in a book that she edited called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. She recently wrote Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul. (Full disclosure: I have not read either book, but I have watched a lot from her and about her work on YouTube.) To me, this concept of contagion explains the MAGA cult mentality and the effect that it has had on our entire population better than anything else I’ve been able to get my mind around. It’s a disease that millions have succumbed to and the rest of us are fighting. But we’ll get through it. We always have.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as the French put it. When I wrote my Byzantine novel, I approached history with the idea that humans have always been the same, and that, with the exception of some color here and there, always have the same values, ambitions, needs, desires, etc.
I am waiting for the "The Emperor is naked!" moment. I've been waiting for years now. I have long thought that when Trump falls -- and he will -- he will fall fast. I hope that is the case, and I hope it's soon!
Greg, I read your essays here so often with high pleasure because you have the always-increasing breadth of knowledge, of joyous discovery of the true lifelong reader. This one may be your best yet. We can pay attention to everything here but I look right now at the "mystic pacifism" “the pacifism which is solely animated by a blind hatred of war and refuses to inquire whether a war is just or not, whether those fighting [are] the attackers or the defenders, whether they wanted war or only submit to it.”
As spurious as that was in WW2, in addition to seeing how immoral it is when applied to the premature insistence on "peace" in Ukraine, we can see its equivalent in the demands for a ceasefire in Israel's war against Hamas & Hezbollah. When the task of burying the terrorists is done, a pax romana would be better than none.
So much more to unwrap in today's essay that in the moment, I might as well stop here. Thanks for it.
Thanks, Richard. I was also blown away by the "mystic pacifism" idea, which I have never seen articulated in quite that way. That's why I included it in the piece, even though it doesn't really tie into the rest of it. Ukraine's war is existential. It's that simple. Why would they surrender? We wouldn't. or, I'd like to think we wouldn't.
There are a lot of interesting ideas in TREASON. I don't agree with all of it, but certainly worth reading.
Of course more often than not, that "mystic pacificism" is a transparent ruse to cover up an attempt to help the party losing a war, to avoid its complete defeat.
I always learn something new from you Greg. This was almost overload for me today though. The horrible disaster in my hometown and region has me sort of other directed. Have been trying to help bat down all the BS from the useless maga mob and their god awful leader. If people want to know how things would be if trump were in charge, imagine recovering from Helene without FEMA, the national guard(if Robinson was governor), all the soldiers from Ft. Liberty. I shudder to think. We cannot let Trump happen to this country ever again! We just can’t.
The NC damage is so awful. And the MAGA misinformation campaign is just...they have no bottom, these people. They will exploit anything: natural disasters, pandemics. Whatever it takes. And yet his lemmings follow him. It boggles the mind...
I think I recall the end of that lemming's story being that the lemmings followed the leader off a cliff. A myth, but a comforting image for the rest of the country.
Here's the translated Celine and Benda.
https://richardturyn.substack.com/p/translation-of-celine-et-benda?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1334748&post_id=149985455&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=ejfg&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email