Alan Jacobs

In The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn says that whenever people in the Soviet Union were arrested they all said the same thing: “Me? What for?” When he was arrested that’s what he said too. Then, when he was brought before an official, preparatory to being stuffed into an interrogation cell, he had some papers thrust under his nose which he was told to sign. He signed them, he says, because “I didn’t know what else to do.”

When reading this passage I think about a couple of things. First, I remember James Scott’s book Seeing Like a State and its emphasis on all the ways that modern nation-states make us “legible” to its functions – and, perhaps even more important, teach us to believe that such legibility is necessary and vital. Second, I remember the comment that the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss makes in Tristes Tropiques that throughout history the primary function of writing has been to enable slavery.

So into the belly of the beast Solzhenitsyn goes, and remains for several miserable years – but then, at a certain point, he begins what he calls his “ascent.” And the beginning of the ascent is marked by one of the most famous passages in all of twentieth century writing:

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience; how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Bless you, prison, bless you for being in my life! For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity, as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.

NOTE

If you want to know why Solzhenitsyn is truly great as a writer, you should take note of the very next sentence he writes: “(And from beyond the grave come replies: It is all very well for you to say that — you who came out of it alive!)”

It is after this that Solzhenitsyn begins to describe, not only the change in him, but the change in his relations with others. He no longer simply accepts the imposed and inflexible laws of the Gulag, he and his colleagues began to form strategies of resistance. When asked “Why did you put up with all that?” he answers that many of the prisoners did not – but it is absolutely essential, if you want to understand Solzhenitsyn, to realize that he was able to resist constructively only after he acknowledged his own personal guilt, only after he began a long process of repentance.

That is, Solzhenitsyn makes it quite clear that meaningful resistance begins with self-understanding. You can only make an intelligent attempt to alter your circumstances if you understand who you are, which means understanding that your own innate human nature is not different from that of your captors.

Sonnet 61 (2016). Linocut by Rosie Fairfax-Cholmeley

Lambeth 2022 and African Anglicanism – Covenant:

Whatever readers of this blog make of GAFCON, it constitutes a key segment of the Communion, too large to be ignored. While there is longstanding debate over whether or not the Lambeth Conference carries (or should carry) any binding authority, it has typically been taken as expressive of the mind of the Communion. The size of the Lambeth boycott, though, means that any decisions taken at Lambeth 2022 can be neither. 

One possible olive branch lies, ironically, in the ongoing tragedy facing Nigerian Anglicans who have been harshly persecuted by Islamic militants for decades. Archbishop Welby has shown commendable concern for their plight. TEC has been far less vocal on the suffering of Nigerian Anglicans than the suffering, for example, of Palestinians (aside from protest at the abduction of the Chibok girls, which happened eight years ago). Were TEC and the wider Communion to give more solid support to persecuted Nigerian Anglicans, this would both be morally right and act as an olive branch to the Nigerian church. It would show that, though absent, Nigeria’s Anglicans remain of concern to those attending the Lambeth Conference. 

Here in the U.S.A., there are no political points to be gained from compassion for Nigerians. 

It’s a newslettery morning

In Breaking Bread with the Dead, I write about Donna Haraway: 

There's a fascinating early chapter in her book on human interaction with pigeons. Of course, that interaction has been conducted largely on human terms, and Haraway wants to create two-way streets where in the past these paths ran only from humans to everything else. How to get the pigeons to participate willingly in such a project is question without an obvious answer, but it's question that Haraway feels we must ask, a because “staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all.” 

But here's the complication: Who gets included in “each other”? Besides pigeons, I mean. Haraway says explicitly that her human kin are “antiracist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, proqueer feminists of every color and from every people,” and people who share her commitment to “Make Kin Not Babies.” “Pronatalism in all its powerful guises ought to be in question almost everywhere.” 

I suspect that — to borrow a tripartite distinction from the psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander — most people who use that kind of language are fine with their ingroup (“antiracist, anticolonial, anticapitalist, proqueer feminists of every color and from every people”) and fine with the fargroup (pigeons), but the outgroup? The outgroup that lives in your city and votes in the same elections you do? Maybe not so much. Does the project of making kin extend to that couple down the street from you who have five kids, who attend a big-box evangelical church, and who voted for the wrong person in the last presidential election? And who, moreover, are a little more likely to talk back than pigeons are? (Even assuming that they might be interested in making kin with Donna Haraway, which, let's face it, is equally unlikely. Presumably they too would be more comfortable with the pigeons.) 

I thought about these issues as I read an excerpt from James Bridle’s new book: 

A system of laws and protections developed by and for humans, that places human concerns and values at its core, can never fully incorporate the needs and desires of nonhumans. These judicial efforts fall into the same category of error as the mirror test and ape sign language: the attempt to understand and account for nonhuman selfhood through the lens of our own umwelt. The fundamental otherness of the more-than-human world cannot be enfolded into such human-centric systems, any more than we can discuss jurisprudence with an oak tree. 

Legal representation, reckoning, and protection are founded upon human ideas of individuality and identity. They may prove useful when we take up the case of an individual chimp or elephant, or even a whole species, but their limits are clear when we apply them to a river, an ocean, or a forest. A plant has no “identity;” it is simply alive. The waters of the earth have no bounds. This is both ecology’s meaning and its lesson. We cannot split hairs, or rocks, or mycorrhizal roots and say: This thing here is granted personhood, and this thing not. Everything is hitched to everything else.

The enactment of a more-than-human politics calls explicitly for a politics beyond the individual, and beyond the nation-state. It calls for care, rather than legislation, to guide it. 

As regular readers might expect, this call for care, this ecological perspective, resonates powerfully with me. (It also resonates with something I wrote about in another book: Simone Weil’s insistence that if we need a collective declaration of human rights, we also, and perhaps more desperately, need a declaration of human obligations.) 

But it is curious to me that many people are willing to entertain this line of thought, are immensely sympathetic to this line of thought, who also affirm that “in relation to the mind the body has no rights”; and that a fetus in the womb is but an insignificant “clump of cells.” I don’t think you can consistently hold all those views. If you are willing to ask, “What do we owe the more-than-human world?” then, I think, you must also be willing to ask, “What do we owe the fetus in the womb? What do we owe our own bodies?” If you’re not asking these questions, then I fear that the other affirmations are empty rhetoric — a make-believe extension of agency to things you can then safely ignore. 

From my essay ”You Are Not a Server”, on Dickensian characters:

To begin to cite examples is a dangerous thing.  Once embarked on that journey, how would one end it? How could one mention the circumlocutions of Mr. Tite Barnacle without also mentioning the unctuousness of Uriah Heep, the commitment to Fact of Mr. Gradgrind, the endless compassion of Little Dorrit? Lo, I have already commenced. They are all infinitely memorable because they are all infinitely excessive; they are, as it were, nothing but surplus. They always remind us of the possibility of living at an outsize scale, of being simply more than anyone could expect, more than any reasonable person would ask for. If they seem mere caricatures, that may say something more about our crimped and confined moment than about them. They are a constant encouragement to expand rather than contract one’s options.

And that is why we need to read Dickens, now more than ever.

I published this a couple of months ago, but I don’t think I mentioned it here?