This phenomenon is not driven only by the state (and maybe not even primarily by the state), but by private actors, especially educational institutions and big corporations.Still, I am persuaded by some recent offline conversations that framing it as socialism obscures more than it illuminates. Marxist modes of thought are great at tearing down what we have, but insofar as nobody really believes in the Revolution anymore, it doesn’t offer much to replace it. The political theorist Augusto Del Noce captured a key aspect of what we’re dealing with now when he wrote: “the new totalitarianism is very different from older forms because it is a totalitarianism of disintegration, even before being a totalitarianism of domination. Point is, there really is a lot of “socialism” in Whatever This Thing We’re Dealing With Is. These two ideas-that human problems can be solved by exclusively material remedies, but that this cannot be done without compulsion-run through Dostoevsky’s critique of socialism. French socialism, he wrote in 1877, ‘is nothing other than the compulsory union of humanity’ or, as he said, more vividly, about the slogan of Roman Catholicism, which he saw as sharing the goals of socialism, ‘ Fraternité ou la mort’ (‘Be my brother, or off with your head’). But humans are transformed not from external reasons but only from moral changes.’ In his notes for an unfinished article, ‘Socialism and Christianity,’ Dostoevsky wrote that ‘the socialists go no further than the belly.’ Lacking any spiritual basis for human brotherhood, the socialists must resort to compulsion to establish it. They conclude that having forcibly changed the economic way humans live they will achieve their goals. As Dostoevsky wrote in his notebook for 1863-1864: ‘The socialists want to regenerate humans, to liberate them, to present them without God and the family. Dismissing the essential spiritual nature of human beings, the socialists can concern themselves only with man’s material needs. Dostoevsky’s critique of socialism, then, begins with its atheism. The enmity-largely theoretical-between Christianity and the socialism of the late Belinsky and his circle, had now become a reality, and this revolutionary and atheistic doctrine the major rival of Christianity for the hearts and minds of the new generation. His remarks about it in both fiction and journalism over the next two decades are almost uniformly hostile. Returning from ten years in Siberia Dostoevsky encountered a socialism that had taken on a much more revolutionary cast. The unrepentant brawlers, thieves, and murderers with whom he spent four years were not merely innocent victims who would happily live in brotherhood and harmony once freed from repressive institutions. The theoretical notion of the fundamental goodness of human beings was now tested against the reality of human nature in the raw. The Rousseauistic view of human nature on which utopian socialism rested was severely challenged by Dostoevsky’s experience of prison in Siberia. I found this bit last night online, describing Dostoevsky’s view on socialism: One of my Orthodox professor friends here at the conference said that Dostoevsky, no aristocrat, understood this. The thing is, socialism is not only about political economy. Many of you weren’t keen on me framing this as a recrudescent socialism, because I am talking mostly about culture, not political economy. As you regular readers know, I plan to write about the warnings people living here who grew up under Soviet and Eastern European communism are now sounding about the emerging totalitarianism in our own increasingly post-liberal culture. At dinner last night with some conference-goers, I was talking about my ideas for my upcoming book. Hello from snowy and not-un-Siberia-like upstate New York, where I’m attending a conference at the Russian Orthodox monastery and seminary.
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