Collectivist Dreams

by David Wemyss (December 2011)

Authority might then be taken to have been legitimated by what was eventually seen to be capable of flourishing within its bounds. However, we might not welcome where that leads.

As Kierkegaard said, you can lose your soul more easily than a banknote. But this means our star employee has lost her soul. Keeping her soul depended on retaining certain critical faculties, however nice a person everyone thought she was. Similarly, then, we may feel that the three hermits must have lost their souls, even though that is obviously not what Tolstoy intended us to think.

So perhaps we should not be surprised that, in line with the tradition of the yuvgeny, the Russian mindset can accommodate very well the idea that the reforming individual should not represent a new formulation but simply an unselfconscious source of edification for a collective, a collective that retains its unquestioned authority.

Are we content to rest with the idea that, say, what is good for Africa and what is good for the west are different? Do we want to say their needs are not interdependent? Surely most people would be outraged to think of them as different. Interdependence is a way through to reality.

yurodivy should not worry us. After all, reality is deeper than “wills asserting themselves” against it, or at least it is if you inhabit the ornate fantasy world of someone who is egalitarian first and Christian second.

The selectiveness of political memory takes some curious forms. Take, for example, 9/11. I mean the first 9/11, not the second. I am referring to the 9/11 that took place exactly 30 years before the fall of the World Trade Center, when the United States helped to violently overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende of Chile, and installed in its place an odious dictator who went on to murder far more people than died on that dreadful day in New York and Washington. How many Americans are aware of that?

The most interesting thing about that paragraph is the bogus use of the word dreadful in the penultimate sentence.

It would be easy to luxuriate in skepticism here, or even topple over into cynicism. But goodness and kindliness are still real and true, even if the rich panoply of human sympathy has been flattened out into featureless uniformity by fantasists hammering away at ersatz morality. Sometimes, at the age of fifty-seven, so bewildered by collectivist dreams that wakefulness can seem like wickedness, I waver between insouciance and despair. Happily, though, insouciance seems to be winning.

David Wemyss graduated in law from the University of Aberdeen in 1977 and worked in local government in that city until he retired in 2011 at the age of 56. He continues to live there with his wife and son. Having had four academic papers published in the British theology journal Modern Believing between 2003 and 2008, he is now developing a portfolio of essays in cultural and political criticism.

To comment on this essay, please click here.

here.

If you have enjoyed this essay and want to read more by David Wemyss, please click here.