Plurality, Free Speech, & the Captive Mind

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Over the past few years, I have become increasingly interested in, and admiring of, plurality. Plurality—a condition of society in which people who hold widely different beliefs and are committed to quite different values nevertheless find some way to live in relative peace with one another—is to be distinguished from pluralism, which may be described as a conviction that a society in which people pursue a great diversity of ends is intrinsically superior to a more unified society. That I don’t believe. I think that our society would be better off if we were all united by a deeply shared set of convictions—my convictions, as it happens. (Imagine that!) But I would want such singleness of vision to be freely chosen, which will obviously never happen. So in default of my ideal, I say: Better plurality than tyranny, and better a tyranny presided over by others than a tyranny presided over by me.

From this point of view, the most zealous on the contemporary American left and the contemporary American right have something fundamental in common: They never ask the question, “Am I fit to rule others?” I see this self-blindness not only in electoral politics but also in intra-religious and academic disputes. They take it for granted that the rightness of their convictions makes them fit: that the justice of a cause can make a perfectly straight thing out of the crooked timber of their humanity. To be sure, I continue to say, better a tyranny presided over by others than a tyranny presided over by me; but I also say, better that none of those zealots ever achieve the power they lust for—because their very confidence in their right to rule is the most absolute disqualification for rule that I can imagine. This Alexander Herzen understood.

Czesław Miłosz, a future Nobel Prize-winning poet who had just defected from Poland, began work in 1951 on a book called The Captive Mind. Even as Stalinist totalitarianism tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, many Western European intellectuals lauded the brave new world of Soviet communism as a model for overcoming “bourgeois forces,” which in their view had caused World War II. Living in Paris, Miłosz wrote his book, which was published in 1953, to warn the West of what happens to the human mind and soul in a totalitarian system. 

Miłosz knew from experience, having lived through the Communist takeover, how totalitarianism strips men and women of their liberty, transforming them into “affirmative cogs” in service of the state and obliterating what had taken centuries of Western political development to achieve. Totalitarianism not only enslaved people physically but crippled their spirit. It did so by replacing ordinary human language, in which words signify things in the outside world, with ideologically sanctioned language, in which words signify the dominant party’s ever-changing ideas of what is and is not true.

Since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, nationwide protests, which quickly turned to riots, have been hijacked by the neo-Marxist left, morphing into an all-out assault on American cities and institutions. This assault is underpinned by an audacious attempt to rewrite history that turns specific past events into weapons not only to overpower political opponents but also to recast all of American history as a litany of racial transgressions.

The radicals have turned race into a lens through which to view the country’s history, and not simply because they are obsessed with race. They have done so because it allows them to identify and separate those groups that deserve affirmation, in their view, and those that do not. What is taking place is the resegregation of America, the endpoint of which will be the rejection of everything the civil-rights movement stood for. 

America is in the throes of a destructive ideological experiment, subjected to a sweeping and increasingly state-sanctioned reordering of its collective memory, with the increasingly totalitarian left given free rein to dominate public discourse. Miłosz, who died in 2004, would see an American mind bloated by a steady diet of identity politics and group grievance served up by ideologues in schools nationwide. These ideologues have nearly succeeded in remaking our politics and culture; they are reinforced by a media in thrall to groupthink, by credentialed bureaucrats, and by politicians shaped in the monochrome factories of intellectual uniformity that are America’s institutions of higher learning. 

American society is faced with a stark binary choice. Either we push back against the unrelenting assault of the neo-Marxist narrative, or we yield to the totalitarian impulse now in full view in our politics.

Why incarnational? Here I have in mind Milosz’s determination to be fleshly, concrete, and particular. An incarnational text is a world of concrete presences; it derives from an impulse to make “real” that which is symbolized or represented. A symbol, a metaphor, a figure does not stand apart from but participates in “the thing itself.” The writer aims neither for a pure realm nor an ideal form but for a way to express reverence for that which is: the feel of fresh, cold earth being squeezed through one’s fingers on a chilly spring morning; the slosh of cream from a porcelain pitcher as it pours over a bowl of strawberries; the high-pitched, insistent whistle of the tea kettle on the stove, […] I think, for example, of my favorite passage from The Captive Mind in which Milosz describes walking through a train station in Ukraine in the desperately disordered time of the beginning of World War II. He is caught up short by the following scene:

A peasant family—husband and wife and two children—had settled down by the wall. They were sitting on baskets and bundles. The wife was feeding the younger child; the husband who had a dark, wrinkled face and a black, drooping mustache was pouring tea out of a kettle into a cup for the older boy. They were whispering to each other in Polish. I gazed at them until I felt moved to the point of tears. What had stopped my steps so suddenly and touched me so profoundly was their difference. This was a human group, an island in a crowd that lacked something proper to humble, ordinary human life. The gesture of a hand pouring tea, the careful, delicate handing of the cup to the child, the worried words I guessed from the movement of their lips, their isolation, the privacy in the midst of the crowd—that is what moved me. For a moment, then, I understood something that quickly slipped from my grasp.

Perhaps, one might suggest, something about the fragility and miracle of the quotidian. Milosz is rightly celebrated for capturing such moments in his poetry, moments that quickly slip or threaten to slip from our grasp. His poems, he tells us, are encounters with the “peculiar circumstances of time and place.” This is true as well in The Captive Mind. The portrait of that forlorn bit of humanity, huddled together, uprooted, yet making and pouring tea—this, too, says something about the quotidian that can neither be added to nor subtracted from.

Flannery O’Connor’s essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” is worth bringing into play. O’Connor writes a powerful brief on behalf of “the concrete” as the distinguishing quality of fiction, or any fiction worthy of the name.

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions. It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object that they actually see.

The world of the fiction writer, says O’Connor, is “full of matter….” It cannot be unfleshed; it cannot separate spirit from matter.

The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.

O’Connor’s comments on dust and grandiosity serve as a bridge to another of Milosz’s insistencies: the terrible dangers of grand ideologies—the architechtonic schema that scorns the particular, the traditional, the given, and sees human beings as so much raw material to be whipped into some foreordained shape. Powerfully, but with a minimum of didactic and preachy finger-pointing, Milosz apprises us of the terrors of an impositional and invasive “universalism” in the form of an imperium armed, as was the Soviet Union, with a sure and certain blueprint for history and a method—“dialectical materialism”—which could turn the basest and most horrific things (mass slaughter) into the gold of some future perfect order. Hannah Arendt cautioned against the violence embedded in any such historic teleology: violence as the necessary means against which one could no more com¬plain than one would about deaths resulting from a sudden and unforeseen tornado.

The 20th-century mind has been susceptible to seduction by socio-political doctrines of this sort, hence a willingness to accept totalitarian terror for the sake of a hypothetical future. 

“Are Americans really stupid?” I was asked in Warsaw. In the voice of the man who posed the question, there was despair, as well as the hope that I would contradict him. This question reveals the attitude of the average person in the people’s democracies toward the West: it is despair mixed with a residue of hope. 

[…]

Which world is “natural”? That which existed before, or the world of war? Both are natural, if both are within the realm of one’s experience. All the concepts men live by are a product of the historic formation in which they find themselves. Fluidity and constant change are the characteristics of phenomena. And man is so plastic a being that one can even conceive of the day when a thoroughly self-respecting citizen will crawl about on all fours, sporting a tail of brightly colored feathers as a sign of conformity to the order he lives in. 

The man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are. Their resultant lack of imagination is appalling. Because they were born and raised in a given social order and in a given system of values, they believe that any other order must be “unnatural,” and that it cannot last because it is incompatible with human nature. But even they may one day know fire, hunger, and the sword. In all probability this is what will occur; for it is hard to believe that when one half of the world is living through terrible disasters, the other half can continue a nineteenth-century mode of life, learning about the distress of its distant fellow-men only from movies and newspapers. Recent examples teach us that this cannot be. An inhabitant of Warsaw or Budapest once looked at newsreels of bombed Spain or burning Shanghai, but in the end he learned how these and many other catastrophes appear in actuality. He read gloomy tales of the NKVD until one day he found he himself had to deal with it. If something exists in one place, it will exist everywhere. This is the conclusion he draws from his observations, and so he has no particular faith in the momentary prosperity of America. He suspects that the years 1933-45 in Europe pre-figure what will occur elsewhere.

Let us admit—and the Eastern or Central European will do so—that at this moment the superiority of the West in potential production, technology, and replacement of human hands by machines (which means the gradual effacing of the distinction between physical and mental work) is unquestionable. But, the Eastern intellectual asks, what goes on in the heads of the Western masses? Aren’t their souls asleep, and when the awakening comes, won’t it take the form of Stalinism? Isn’t Christianity dying out in the West, and aren’t its people bereft of all faith? Isn’t there a void in their heads? Don’t they fill that void with chauvinism, detective stories, and artistically worthless movies? Well then, what can the West offer us? Freedom from something is a great deal, yet not enough. It is much less than freedom for something. 

—You! the last Polish poet!—drunk, he embraced me,

My friend from the Avant-Garde, in a long military coat,

Who had lived through the war in Russia and, there, understood.

He could not have learned those things from Apollinaire,

Or Cubist manifestos, or the festivals of Paris streets.

The best cure for illusions is hunger, patience, and obedience.

In their fine capitals they still liked to talk.

Yet the twentieth century went on. It was not they

Who would decide what words were going to mean.

Everything that has happened to you until now is not so bad, and is even useful. I think the wise thing will be to ask the Lord to give you strength and understanding to bear the tribulations, and to be victorious against the temptations which have come upon you, rather than ask Him to free you from them. The reason for this is that if you stand before the throne of God crushed to the last degree by the weight of the tribulations, adding to them your own inner broken-heartedness and repentance, without any self-pity, then without fail divine Light will shine upon you.

May grace itself work, according to the will of the Holy Spirit, in a way that He alone knows, because its action varies with each man, according to his spiritual make-up and his cast of mind. In some people grace is manifested with stormy power, but in others, on the contrary, in a very delicate and gentle way. In some people grace gradually rises from a lesser to a greater measure, whereas in others it appears right from the beginning in great strength and afterwards as it were forsakes them. So, in order not to spoil the action of grace by our intervention, it is best that, praying to the Lord for mercy, and awaiting this mercy with patience, we ourselves meanwhile keep to a somewhat ordinary order of spiritual activity: to repent, to pray, to read the holy Fathers, the Gospel, to keep our mind watchful (preserving it from sinful thoughts), to give alms.

about a brave Welsh journalist in the 1930s Soviet Union who faced down Stalin and his lackey Walter Duranty, the New York Times‘s Moscow correspondent, and reported honestly on the Holodomor—the massive famine that Stalin engineered during the Great Depression. It cost the lives up to twelve million Ukrainians, whose grain was stolen from them and sold abroad.

Suffering for truth has dignity and weight; accepting lies because they make you more comfortable is contemptible. The fact that public intellectuals like Fran Maier and John Gray recognize the totalitarianism within wokeness, and how wokeness in power compels everyone to affirm lies, tells me that neither I, nor the survivors of Soviet communism who talked to me for the book, are being alarmist.

We applaud faculty members who have taken proactive rather than reactive stances, and we challenge the classics department and the University more broadly to bolster their commitments in reforming curricula, pedagogy, and hiring practices. The spirit of Katz’s writing is not new for him, the University, or the field of classics. Yet when the institutional memory of an undergraduate concentrator is so narrow, many students only realize the unique complicity of classics in white supremacy and Eurocentrism toward the end of their undergraduate education. This is beginning to change, and it must change. A list of anti-racist policy changes is currently being drafted to submit to the department, and the implementation of these policies should take center stage.

This is barking mad. The Classics studies Greek and Roman cultures. How on earth could it not be “Eurocentric” and still be the classics? In what conceivable sense are the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans “white”? It’s ideological insanity—and it is being taken up in the Princeton Classics Department.

In January 2019, I wrote a longish post about wokeness coming to the field of Classics. It included a statement by Prof. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a black colleague of Katz’s at Princeton, who claimed that the field of Classics is unsalvageably racist, and that it must be destroyed. What kind of insane institution employs a scholar who wants to destroy his field?! You can read Peralta’s entire rant here. And if you don’t think he wants to destroy the field, read his last line to the Chronicle of Higher Education here. 

It would appear that this radicalization is well underway at Princeton. Who knows what is going to happen to Joshua Katz? It’s hard to see how he could keep working in that department, or why he would want to, as it appears the department is going to empower radicals like Prof. Padilla Peralta and ideologized white allies like Brooke Holmes to wreck the discipline and remake it according to ideological criteria. This is a warning to aspiring Classics scholars: stay away from Princeton, for the rot has set in.

The Ethiopian Forest Churches are exactly what the Benedict Option should look like on a conceptual scale: it is not a fleeing from the world but a conserving of the good, true, and beautiful—the faith—from all that would consume it. As one person in the video says: we build walls not to keep people out, but to prevent the destruction of what is within.

The essay’s author wonders if the church forests are “signs of retreat.” But Dr. Wassie tells him they are like arks. We learn later in the essay that the trees can jump the walls, and grow the church forest outward. But first, you have to build the wall to allow the church forest to recover its strength.

Boy oh boy, did I ever love that short film and essay! Ryan Fehrmann is right: this is exactly what we want to do with the Benedict Option. If I had known these things existed, I would have traveled to Ethiopia to write a chapter for the book about them. The spiritual desertification we’re living through in the West has been caused by the forces of modernity. The only way we are going to preserve what remains is by building (porous) walls, to keep what is holy holy. Dr. Wassie hopes that by saving the remaining church forests, in time they will expand, and regenerate the great forests that used to cover Ethiopia. So too with our spiritual forests in the West, right? And not just in the West, but everywhere the withering hand of modernity has touched.

the goal of the 1619 Project—as stated by NYT Magazine editor Jake Silverstein—is to “reframe” American history around 1619 as the founding year of the nation, not 1776. No serious person denies the horror of slavery, or its importance to American history. If that’s all the 1619 Project was about—drawing attention to the importance of slavery, and the black experience to American history—who could complain? What makes the 1619 Project stand out is its radical claim that the point of America’s founding was to enslave Africans.

It is simply not true. The reason we’re talking about it now is that Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, is sponsoring legislation that would prohibit the use of federal tax dollars to teach the 1619 Project in American classrooms. Whether or not such legislation is wise is certainly debatable. What’s caused the ruckus is this section from a story in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette:

In the interview, Cotton said the role of slavery can’t be overlooked.

“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.

Instead of portraying America as “an irredeemably corrupt, rotten and racist country,” the nation should be viewed “as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind,” Cotton said.

This is being wildly misconstrued as some sort of justification for slavery. What Cotton is saying simply is that the United States could not have existed if the non-slave states had not agreed to accept the slave states. It was a doomed compromise, a one we eventually had to go to war over, but it launched the country. Cotton is pointing out the tragic nature of the compromise that made America possible as a nation united under the Constitution. He is not defending slavery, which would be as insane morally as it would be politically. He is repeating a similar point that Abraham Lincoln made in an 1855 letter to Joshua Speed, a friend of his who owned slaves:

You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union.

It is virtually impossible to view one oppression, such as sexism or homophobia, in isolation because they are all connected: sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, ableism, anti-Semitism, ageism. They are linked by a common origin-economic power and control-and by common methods of limiting, controlling and destroying lives. There is no hierarchy of oppressions. Each is terrible and destructive. To eliminate one oppression successfully, a movement has to include work to eliminate them all or else success will always be limited and incomplete.

How do you justify running a Baptist university according to this Marxist framework (that is, the idea that all social phenomena must be understood as economic at base)? Something has to give. Read the entire essay, and understand that this is what the president of Baylor is urging students to read in order to understand themselves and their institution better. If Pharr’s analysis is correct, then the only thing to do is to dismantle Baylor as it historically has existed. In order to eliminate racism, then every other -ism must also be eliminated in order to create utopia.

This is not Oberlin or UC Berkeley. This is Baylor, in Waco. Are there no Christian resources that Baylor’s students might read to gain a better understanding of the sin of racism? Isn’t it interesting that Baylor’s president turned to these particular sources—truly poisonous ones, in my view—to inspire student reflection about racism?

It’s important for traditional Christians and conservatives to know what’s going on in our institutions, and not to make any assumptions based on past experience or wishful thinking.

The survey found that many Americans think a person’s private political donations should impact their employment. Nearly a quarter (22%) of Americans would support firing a business executive who personally donates to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign. Even more, 31% support firing a business executive who donates to Donald Trump’s re‐election campaign.

Support rises among political subgroups. Support increases to 50% of strong liberals who support firing executives who personally donate to Trump. And more than a third (36%) of strong conservatives support firing an executive for donating to Biden’s presidential campaign.

Young Americans are also more likely than older Americans to support punishing people at work for personal donations to Trump. Forty‐four percent (44%) of Americans under 30 support firing executives if they donate to Trump. This share declines to 22% among those over 55 years old—a 20‐point difference. An age gap also exists for Biden donors, but is less pronounced. Twenty‐seven percent (27%) of Americans under 30 support firing executives who donate to Biden compared to 20% of those over 55—a 7‐point difference.

Firing people for donating to either a Republican or a Democratic presidential candidate! Making it impossible for them to earn bread for their families. What kind of sick country are these people—especially young people—creating for us all?

The only number I would feel comfortable with on either side is zero percent.

What is wrong with us? This is awful. I do not want to live in a country in which anybody, left or right, has to live in fear of losing his or her job because of their political contributions or opinions. […]

Again: this is not sustainable. We cannot stay together as a democratic country if people are so damn afraid of each other, and of speaking their minds. The Cato survey shows that these fears are by no means baseless. It ought to appall each and every one of us that so many Americans are so afraid of either exercising free speech, or tolerating free speech.

The “red” in “Red Terror” refers to the Bolsheviks, also known as “reds”. But it can also refer to the bloodshed unleashed by the Red Terror, under “hard” Soviet totalitarianism.

I call what’s being done here, and will expand, the “Pink Terror”—“pink” because it refers to the softness of the totalitarianism today’s left is imposing. There will not be executions. No one will be sent to the gulag. But it will be totalitarianism, in that there will be only one permitted way to think and speak about things, and it will be based largely on a Marxist concept of justice. All you need to know is to which race (or class, gender, or religion) to which a person belongs to know what is justice in their case. Dissent will not be tolerated, as dissent is an expression of privilege, which must be eliminated for society to be just.

Moreover, this is totalitarian because every aspect of life will be subject to monitoring and judgment by the pink commissars. Again, blood will not be shed—but jobs and livelihoods will be lost, free speech and thought will be curtailed, even eliminated, and dissidents will be turned into pariahs.

One distinctive aspect of our present and coming soft totalitarianism is that it is not being imposed (at this point) by the State—a significant difference from the old, hard totalitarianism. Rather, it is coming through private institutions and corporations. The State does not need to impose these orthodoxies; institutions of civil society and private business are doing it on their own.

It became clearer to me that in progressive Newspeak, tolerance requires intolerance, inclusion requires exclusion, non-discrimination requires discrimination, love means hate, and hate means love.