Many years ago, when I was first studying the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who would prove to be one of my most lasting intellectual heroes, my chief guides were Caryl Emerson and Gary Saul Morson, especially in this book. Morson, who teaches Russian and Slavic Studies at Northwestern, has since become one of the essential voices of our time, and I especially commend to you this new essay by him: it synthesizes some very powerful ideas pioneered by Dostoevsky (and to a somewhat lesser extent Tolstoy) and later developed by Bakhtin, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Chief among them are, first, the danger of claiming an alibi:
Ideology works by giving people what Mikhail Bakhtin called an “alibi”: they imagine that they act not personally, but “representatively.” That is, it is not I who am doing these things, it is the Party or History or some other abstraction acting through me.
But the central fact of human life, in Bakhtin’s view, is that “there is no alibi.” Human life is always lived in a state of “non-alibi.” People must “sign” their actions. When Klara, in Solzhenitsyn’s novel In the First Circle, is distressed by Bolshevik cruelty, Ernst answers “gently but firmly, … ‘Who is doing these things? Who wants to do them? It is History. History does what it wants.’” Klara is satisfied with this answer.
But this is not a claim that what Bakhtin calls a “responsible” or “answerable” person can ever accept. Indeed, for Bakhtin genuine personhood is dependent on “answerability.”
Second (and directly following), the dangers of packaged beliefs:
When one adopts an ideology, one usually accepts it as a whole; one does not then examine each of the conclusions it entails. And that can be true even for political belief systems much less consistent or thought-through than Soviet Marxism. I am referring to a phenomenon we see all around us: people who accept their beliefs as a package. If you know what they think about climate change, you know their position on abortion, though there is no logical connection between the two issues. When people think this way, no arguments about any particular issue can matter, because package thinkers do not arrive at their position by examining pros and cons. All that matters is that the position is part of the package. When evidence against that position arises, they do not ask whether they should change their mind. Instead, they learn what they are supposed to say to defend the package position. […]
Package believers make only one choice: which package to buy. Consider Tolstoy’s description of how Stiva, Anna Karenina’s brother, arrives at his views. Stiva, we are told, “had not chosen his political opinions; … [they] had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were in style.” Once Stiva chose the liberal side, his entire intellectual wardrobe was determined.
The whole essay is immensely insightful, but these are the two essential points — for me, anyway. It occurs to me that what I am always trying to do in my writing, and especially on my blog, where I work through ideas that have not yet reached full coherence, is (a) to be fully answerable for my thoughts and (b) to refuse the “packages” — which is to say, the tribalism, the Inner-Ring-ism — of our moment.
As a Christian, I take — or should take, should always strive to take — Jesus Christ as my model in these matters, for he was answerable for his every word and every deed, and refused every package offered to him. Indeed, it was this principled answerability that led people to say of him that “he speaks as one with authority, not like the scribes and Pharisees” (Matthew 7:28–29; Mark 1:22). I don’t seek to speak with such authority, but I do hope to be faithful to that example in my own small way.
And you certainly don’t have to be a Christian to see why the pursuit of those two goals would be an excellent thing for everyone who hopes to move, persuade, or instruct.
Those of you who support me in this endeavor — financially, yes, but in other ways as well — help to give me the required courage, courage (or, in classic Christian theology fortitude) being another theme of Morson’s essay, and indeed the one virtue (as has often been noted) required for the cultivation of any of the others. Thank you, thank you.
And Angus, who is not sensitive to religious diversity, wishes you a very merry Christmas.
