Robin Varghese at 3 Quarks Daily posts part of a commencement address from Joseph Brodsky, dating from 1984. First, who’s Mr. Brodsky? From Wikipedia:
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky[2] (/ˈbrɒdski/; Russian: Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский, IPA: [ɪˈosʲɪf ɐlʲɪˈksandrəvʲɪtɕ ˈbrotskʲɪj] (
listen); 24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996) was a Russian and American poet and essayist.
Born in Leningrad in 1940, Brodsky ran afoul of Soviet authorities and was expelled (“strongly advised” to emigrate) from the Soviet Union in 1972, settling in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught thereafter at universities including those at Yale, Cambridge and Michigan.
Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity”.[3] He was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1991.
His commencement address has to do with the nature of Evil:
A prudent thing to do, therefore, would be to subject your notions of good to the closest possible scrutiny, to go, so to speak, through your entire wardrobe checking which of your clothes may fit a stranger. That, of course, may turn into a full-time occupation, and well it should. You’ll be surprised how many things you considered your own and good can easily fit, without much adjustment, your enemy. You may even start to wonder whether he is not your mirror image, for the most interesting thing about Evil is that it is wholly human. To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one’s notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future, etc. One of the surest signs of danger here is the number of those who share your views, not so much because unanimity has a knack of degenerating into uniformity as because of the probability—implicit in great numbers—that noble sentiment is being faked.
Examination of one’s foundations and assumptions is always difficult but often instructive and entertaining – if one’s ego has been firmly encaged and placed in a local volcano. Mr. Brodsky has a lot of meat and gristle and is fun to read.
Let’s take his statement about “things you considered your own and good can easily fit, without much adjustment, your enemy.” Without straining too hard, we can see how this fits with the notion that objects lack moral dimension; only humans (or perhaps sentient beings) have moral dimensions, since they make choices. Once we realize that most tangible created objects can be used by people regardless of their moral orientation, this statement shouldn’t surprise us; but it’s a wonderful reminder concerning how the creation of things is, typically but not always, easy for anyone to use, not just the righteous, well-meaning. Earlier commentary here and here.
But far more important is his specification that things may include intellectual abstractions: “To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one’s notion of social justice, public conscience, a better future.” Such abstractions often overtly state the goodness of their intentions, so this is all the more unsettling. It also brings a few thoughts to mind …
When it comes to groups of people, they often band together to attempt to accomplish something beyond the abilities of a single individual. If we use the word herd in place of group, then we realize that sometimes simple survival is beyond the individual, while, as a group, survival then becomes possible; it’s one of many survival strategies. In this, I think Mr. Brodsky exhibits a fear of the capabilities of people in groups, especially when they are mislead, which may in turn be a symptom of his environment during his upbringing. But there is no denying that some groups are subverted into, for want of a better word, evil.
If we continue our analogy to herds, there’s an interesting thought to be derived, which may be embodied in the single word baitball; alternatively, if we wish to avoid changing our terminology yet again, we can refer to the Native American hunting technique of using buffalo jumps. In both of these hunting techniques, the tendency of the individuals to band together in a herd is used against them. In the former, the fish are forced to school together in a spherical ball and abandon the tactics usually available to the school, at which time the predators attack using techniques that differ from hunting individuals. For example, whales:
Some whales lunge feed on bait balls.[8] Lunge feeding is an extreme feeding method, in which the whale accelerates from below a bait ball to a high velocity and then opens its mouth to a large gape angle. This generates the water pressure required to expand its mouth and engulf and filter a huge amount of water and fish. Lunge feeding by rorquals, a family of huge baleen whales that includes the blue whale, is said to be the largest biomechanical event on Earth.[9]
A buffalo jump is the use of cliffs in the killing of bison en masse. The bison are herded using various techniques, such as drive lanes and faux bison, so that they encounter the cliffs at sufficient speed that they cannot stop and end up, at best, with broken legs; the hunters then close in for the kill of the crippled animals.
The point in these two examples is that the strategy of individuals forming a herd for the purpose of survival is subverted by the predators to make feeding and hunting a more efficient event. Perhaps I stretch a point, but I suggest we can see the same evolution in action with groups of people; they band together for one greater purpose or another, only to have the predators, which we may equate to evil in this one explanatory instance, use this behavior to achieve their own counter-purposes. The purposes are also analogical – generally, the theft of labor, of genius, of productivity. One might speculate that the Russian people came together, partially under the leadership of V. I. Lenin and his compatriots, to toss out the Czar and related nobility, only to find themselves once again virtually enslaved by the Communist Party as the Party learned to take control of the local soviets and subvert them from their original purposes to the purposes of the State, through the use of propaganda, spies, and the threat of force.
So, to Mr. Brodsky, how does one vaccinate against Evil?
By the same token, the surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn’t be happy with. Something, in other words, that can’t be shared, like your own skin—not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. Its proclivity for such things has to do presumably with its innate insecurity, but this realization, again, is of small comfort when Evil triumphs.
Again, lots of meat and thoughts.
First up, I’m drawn to his statement, “Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets.” I’ve watched the degradation of the Republican Party since the mid-90s, as their positions become more extreme, their ideas thinner and less frequent, their positions as rigid as a dancer’s backbone, and their fingers planted firmly in their ears. But why? I’ve wondered.
Well, ever hear the acronym RINO? It’s Republicans in Name Only, and is used by conservative Republicans against the moderates to chisel them from the mainstream of the party, and then eject them into the formless political void. I’ve become convinced that it is one of main operational mechanisms that is “purifying”, if I may use the term without laughing, the GOP into nothingness, splitting off non-conforming members on less and less significant features until all the RINO-users are pointing at each other, spitting their potent curse in confidence; ideological purity, to use Mr. Brodsky’s fine phrase. Indeed, let’s look at that entire sentence, where we find mechanisms listed. At first, I thought that the mechanisms made it easier to magnify the effect of evil (although it’s never evil in their minds); but perhaps the alternative is even more important: the process itself becomes the thing. The balance sheet MUST balance, no matter what might be the human cost; the army must be drilled, the Party must be pure – all without reference to the humans ground to bits by each. Perhaps that’s where the greatest evil lies.
And yet, in my observation, one of the characteristics of real Evil is its tendency to self-destruct. What seems to have been the point of the Soviet Union? Accumulation of power by any means necessary – including the exile and/or assassination of rivals, no matter how personally competent, and useful to the State, they might have been. We saw this with Stalin, most vividly, but no doubt others, such as Andropov, also involved themselves in such activities. An evil organization often becomes a concourse for the ambitions of the individuals, channeled above the needs of the group. J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series features a faceless, redemptionless evil named Sauron, and his realm is less concerned about keeping out those outside, than keeping those inside within: the locks at the castle walls are installed such that the inmates cannot manipulate them. So, in this sense, the situation may be self-correcting – but at what cost to the individuals who must co-exist with it?
Mr. Brodsky inveighs against the herd, against the group. His definition of evil may drive his reaction:
I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control. No amount of good nature or cunning calculations will prevent this encounter. In fact, the more calculating, the more cautious you are, the greater is the likelihood of this rendezvous, the harder its impact. Such is the structure of life that what we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good. You never see it crossing your threshold announcing itself: “Hi, I’m Evil!” That, of course, indicates its secondary nature, but the comfort one may derive from this observation gets dulled by its frequency.
So the bank robber, even the serial killer, is not truly evil in this context; it’s the social institution which he sees as more evil, potentially, than the guy skinning people for lampshades. The government, the church, the political groups: they would all seem candidates for potentially embodying evil.
All that said, there is a personal connection for me: I’ve always found it hard to join groups. I’ve really only managed to really join a single pre-existing group, the US Fencing Assocation; other memberships are symbolic, in which the contribution of my money is made in hopes that it will help enable the group in question to better society in some way. I’ve often blamed this reluctance in equal parts shyness, introversion, and awareness of history – of how groups of people can perpetrate murder, mayhem, and massacre, all without feeling hardly a shred of guilt. From the Nazi party to the Comanches to the Texans taking revenge on the Comanches to the Inquisition to the lynchings in the American South, I suppose I read about most of them (the Comanches were just last year, actually) with too-young and impressionable of a mind; when the churches came calling, I rejected them as dangerous.
Mr. Brodsky hopes to forestall Evil, or great Evil, by forestalling the creation of groups of people. Perhaps he achieved a little of his purpose, in the literal creation of groups; but, to draw another analogy, consider the creation of the engine. At one time, farms & travel were achieved by horse. The engine then replaced, not the horse, but the entire herd of horses; the herd was placed under the control of the farmer, or traveler, in a metaphorical way.
The analogy is this: the replacement of the group of people with computers, with automation, or with sentient machines. The value of the individual to the group is mostly contained in the services he or she provides: computer programmer, hunter, farmer, farrier, metalsmith. As the computing machine becomes more powerful, does this enable its human owner to sport it about as the equivalent of a group? Is Mr. Brodsky’s hope itself then subverted by the computing power we’ve so fervently pursued?
