“Democrats spending millions to learn how to speak to ‘American Men’ and win back the working class,” the Independent reported today, with party leaders holed up “in luxury hotel rooms on a strategy codenamed SAM, or ‘Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan.'”

Yeah, that’ll work.

It’s all about style and nothing about substance. See this:

This is all about perception, not reality … Study the “syntax” of the opposition so you can try to sound like them. Watch the “tone” you use to speak. Always be aware of your “messaging.” These people have learned precisely nothing from the rise of Donald Trump. The lesson in Trump’s rise, distilled to its essence, is “be authentic.” No “messaging” massaging can be remotely helpful if you’re obviously an inauthentic liar.

Although “be authentic” is indeed part of the lesson that should have been learned, the substance of the message is very important as well. If the left was authentic it would turn even more people off.

You may not recall the meaning of the “imagology” reference in the title of this post. It refers to an idea of Milan Kundera’s that I first wrote about twenty years ago in this post. The following passage is from Kundera’s 1990 work Immortality:

For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

Public opinion polls are the critical instrument of imagology’s power, because they enable imagology to live in absolute harmony with the people. The imagologue bombards people with questions: how is the French economy prospering? is there racism in France? is racism good or bad? who is the greatest writer of all time? is Hungary in Europe or in Polynesia? which world politician is the sexiest? And since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.

But reality sometimes asserts itself and becomes stronger than imagology. It’s a constant war between the two these days.

The post Democrats cling to imagology appeared first on The New Neo.

The main thrust of Pollock’s essay is to explain that today’s radical demonstrators have been trained according to the Alinskyite rules of their elders in the Movement – the Movement being leftism in general. The basic rule is that truth doesn’t matter – “truth” is a shape-shifter that requires no consistent principles other than dedication to the left and the cause. That’s why the contradiction between, for example, upholding the rights of gay people and supporting those who would throw them off roofs can be safely ignored. It simply doesn’t matter to the left.

This isn’t really news (see this post of mine from 2009), but it’s always good to remind people. That 2009 post contains a quote from Hilton Kramer (written in 1984) that I reproduce here. It speaks of “Stalinism” but it is true of radical leftism in general, including its current manifestations:

It is in the nature of Stalinism for its adherents to make a certain kind of lying—and not only to others, but first of all to themselves—a fundamental part of their lives. It is always a mistake to assume that Stalinists do not know the truth about the political reality they espouse. If they don’t know the truth (or all of it) one day, they know it the next, and it makes absolutely no difference to them politically. For their loyalty is to something other than the truth. And no historical enormity is so great, no personal humiliation or betrayal so extreme, no crime so heinous that it cannot be assimilated into the ‘ideals’ that govern the true Stalinist mind which is impervious alike to documentary evidence and moral discrimination.

No crime so heinous that can’t be assimilated into their “ideals.” That’s a perfect description of what’s happening with the pro-Hamas crowd – although these days I might take issue with the idea that they all know the actual truth about what Hamas is and what Hamas does. I think many really are “useful idiots” – or ignorant youths who have been carefully taught by many leftist mentors who feed them lies. By the time they get to the point of demonstrating for Hamas, the lies are so entrenched that “documentary evidence” to the contrary is merely brushed away as lies.

That’s why I often use the term “Orwellian reversal” to discuss the pro-Palestinian propaganda. It’s a characteristic of the left in general, and preys on the uncurious young who swallow it whole. And why are these young people so eager to believe? I think that for many it takes the place of religion or of love of family, and it gives them a feeling of structure, meaning, and community that they haven’t gotten until now.

Which leads me to offer another quote I’ve posted on this blog many times before. It’s from Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

The pro-Hamas demonstrators are circle dancing. Their teachers have taught them lies and they believe those lies, but even evidence of truth will not sway them from the compelling and magic and satisfying dance.

The post Rules for pro-Hamas radicals: the circle dance revisited appeared first on The New Neo.

I understand it’s not a priority in conservative circles to wonder WTF happened to the Left. But, as an ex-leftist, I do.

Exactly how did the Left swivel away from the concerns of the (mostly) genuinely oppressed to this weird boutique world of mix’n’match identities, bizarrely ranked?”

I’ve concluded the Elites have beautifully coopted the Old-New-Left by way of the Social Justice Movement’s identity politics. …

Back in the 60s/70s the Left was perpetually on guard against being coopted by the Establishment to the point of paranoia.

Now the Left welcomes being coopted. It’s not a simple betrayal. Since the Left took over the academic high ground, the Elites have been indoctrinated into the Left and it became a class distinction. (Witness the BBC.)

And now the Elites have eaten the Left.

Kinda brilliant in its way .

I’ll take a stab at it as well. The question interests me, too, although I was never on the left, exactly. I was merely a garden-variety liberal Democrat, now a much scarcer commodity than it was back then.

Isn’t what’s being described in that quote the usual basic trajectory of the left when it comes to power, although the details might be somewhat different? That is, to start out being the champion of the working person when the left is on the outs and trying to worm its way into power, and then to change? That early left will speak idealistically about all sorts of things, but once in power it’s the nature of the beast to do whatever it takes to – well, I’ll let Milan Kundera explain, in a quote from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

… human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”

It is very very easy for ideological fanatics to segue into tyranny when they get power.

But what of the left’s unity with “elites”? They’ve long embraced and been embraced by academics on the left, of which there are many. The academics are the vanguard, the conduit to the minds of the young, and the academics are good at justifying almost anything as long as its done by the left and for providing theories to back and promote whatever the left might want to do.

What’s harder to understand – at least on the face of it – is the left’s embrace of financial elites. But it’s always the case that they need funds, and financial elites can help provide those funds with generous donations. Also, with the advent of the internet and its growing dominance, corporations such as Facebook and Twitter (until Musk bought the latter) were near-perfect ways for leftist governments to exert censorship power beyond their wildest dreams (the left is always pro free speech until it gets into power, after which it is gung-ho for censorship).

These days the financial elites are mostly those with degrees from colleges where leftists have been doing the teaching, and thus they have already been primed to agree with the left. Plus, if a rich person feels guilty about his or her wealth, what better way to obtain a “get out of conscience-jail free” card than to support the left? Identity politics makes it that much more attractive, because the financial elites can pat themselves on the back for being free of bigotry as bigotry is defined these days.

So what we have now is the marriage of much of corporate America with the left, and because the left is in power it can give perks to its financial supporters. It makes perfect sense, really. But – although I suppose this is just quibbling – I wouldn’t say with huxley that “the Elites have eaten the Left.” I’d say that it’s the other way around, although the Elites have willingly let themselves be eaten.

The post The left and the Elites appeared first on The New Neo.

RIP Milan Kundera.

Long-time readers here probably recall that Kundera has been one of my favorite authors and almost certainly was my favorite living author, someone I’ve quoted time after time on this blog. You can find a list of these posts here; I highly recommend this one.

For me, Kundera defies description, but of course I’ll try to describe him. He was an expat Czech who had been a Communist in his youth but was a political changer. As a writer, he had one of the most distinctive “voices” ever, and that voice often stepped out of the storyline to make a point that was philosophical or historical or most likely both. Everything he wrote reflected the working of an unconventional mind and spirit, uncategorizable, playful, thoughtful, ironic, and deep.

I first read Kundera before he became famous, when excerpts from one of his works – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – appeared in The New Yorker, which I used to read assiduously. I only had to read one or two paragraphs to realize that this was a writer like no other, someone who was going to matter to me in terms of the evolution of my thinking about life and about politics and history. And so it was.

This interesting profile of Kundera, who was an elusive guy, appears in – of all places – The New Republic. I think Kundera defied all attempts to explain him.

Here’s another profile of Kundera that’s worth reading, with this quote from a 1985 interview:

“For me, indiscretion is a capital sin. Anyone who reveals someone else’s intimate life deserves to be whipped. We live in an age when private life is being destroyed. The police destroy it in Communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and their sense of it,” he told the writer Olga Carlisle. “Life when one can’t hide from the eyes of others — that is hell.”

I’ll close with a couple of quotes from Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that I’ve used on this blog:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

The post Author Milan Kundera dies at 94 appeared first on The New Neo.

I try to do about three miles of brisk walking every day for exercise. On rainy or snowy days, I’m off to the gym and its treadmill, which feels like–well, like being on a treadmill. But on beautiful days or even halfway decent days, I prefer to be outside.

I live in a beautiful area, and there are a wide variety of choices for walking. But, somehow, I almost always end up at the same place: a park by the ocean. It’s convenient, only a two-minute drive from my house. I know exactly what route to follow to get in my requisite three miles. It has just the right combination of flats and hills, sun and shade, dogs and owners, parents and children. Part of the walk lies in a wooded area, but most of it is open and within sight of the water, some cliffs and crashing waves, and even a couple of lighthouses. The sort of thing people journey to New England for from all over the world.

So, how could I ever ask for anything more?

And yet, to walk along essentially the same route, day in and day out, for several years? Doesn’t it get boring?

Well, every now and then I guess it does get boring–like almost anything can, even dessert. But mostly it’s not boring at all, even though it’s the same walk and the same scene. Because, like that proverbial river that one never steps in twice, it’s somehow ever-changing.

Some of this is due to variations in light and weather. When the sun is out, the place is transformed from the landscape when the sky is overcast. The wind whips the waves on a turbulent day, which is different entirely from a calm sea. The dogs change, although not so much as the weather; the canines and their owners are nothing if not creatures of habit. The babies get older. The seasons work their magic, especially the brilliant falls.

So yes, it’s the same park and the same ocean. But it’s never really the same. And, although walking repeatedly in the same place is very different from traveling around the world and walking in a new place every day, is it really so very much less varied? It depends on the eye and mind of the beholder; the expansive imagination can find variety in small differences, and the stunted one can find boredom in vast changes.

And I submit that love is like that, too. Some people spend a lifetime with one love, one spouse; plumbing the depths of that single human being and what it means to be in an intimate relationship with him/her. Others go from relationship to relationship, never alighting with one person for very long, craving the variety.

It would seem on the face of it that the second type of person has the more exciting time in love. But it ain’t necessarily so. Either of these experiences can be boring or fascinating, depending on what we bring to it: the first experience is a universe in depth, and the second a universe in breadth. But both can contain multitudes.

I’ll let author Milan Kundera take over on the subject now, since he was actually my inspiration in the first place (from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting). Here he is describing his musicologist father who, during the last ten years of his life, had lost the ability to speak:

Throughout the ten years of his illness, Papa worked on a big book about Beethoven’s sonatas. He probably wrote a little better than he spoke, but even while writing he had more and more trouble finding words, and finally his text had become incomprehensible, consisting of nonexistent words.

He called me into his room one day. Open on the piano was the variations movement of the Opus 111 sonata. “Look,” he said, pointing to the music (he could no longer play the piano). And again, “Look,” and then, after a prolonged effort, he succeeded in saying, “Now I know!” and kept trying to explain something important to me, but his entire message consisted of unintelligible words, and seeing that I did not understand him, he looked at me in surprise and said, “That’s strange.”

I know of course what he wanted to talk about, because it was a question he had been asking himself for a long time. Variation form was Beethoven’s favorite toward the end of his life. At first glance, it seems the most superficial of forms, a simple showcase of musical technique, work better suited to a lacemaker than to a Beethoven. But Beethoven made it a sovereign form (for the first time in the history of music), inscribing in it his most beautiful meditations.

Yes, all that is well known. But Papa wanted to know how it should be understood. Why exactly choose variations? What meaning is hidden behind it?

That is why he called me into his room, pointed to the music, and said, “Now I know!”

And, somehow, Kundera the son finally understood (or thought he understood; the father wasn’t telling) what his father meant:

I am going to try to explain it with a comparison. A symphony is a musical epic. We might say that it is like a voyage leading from one thing to another, farther and farther away through the infinitude of the exterior world. Variations are like a voyage. But that voyage does not lead through the infinitude of the exterior world. In one of his pensées, Pascal says that man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the abyss of the infinitely small. The voyage of variations leads into the other infinitude, into the infinite diversity of the interior world hidden in all things.

…Variation form is the form in which the concentration is brought to its maximum; it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter. A theme for variations often consists of no more than sixteen measures. Beethoven goes inside those sixteen measures as if down a shaft leading into the interior of the earth.

The voyage into that other infinitude is no less adventurous than the voyage of the epic. It is how the physicist penetrates into the marvelous depths of the atom. With every variation Beethoven moves further and further away from the initial theme, which resembles the last variation as little as a flower its image under a microscope.

Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with its suns and stars. Much more unbearable is for him to be condemned to lack that other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach….

It is not surprising that in his later years variations become the favorite form for Beethoven, who knew all too well…that there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those sixteen measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities.

The post The theme and variations versus the symphony: on love appeared first on The New Neo.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

Every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love. They are still in a kind of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, are drawing up, like uncompromising lawyers, the detailed clauses of their contract. O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.

This next one is about leaving the leftist circle dance, something that happened to Kundera:

That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles.

ADDENDUM: I noticed in the comments a couple of people mentioning the negative aspects of circle dancing. In previous posts I’ve covered what Kundera had to say about that, but I think it’s good to include those other Kundera quotes again, because they are so good and so tragic.

Here’s one:

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.

And here’s another:

…[T]he Communists…had an imposing program. A plan for an entirely new world where everyone would find a place. The opponents had no great dream, only some tiresome and threadbare moral principles, with which they tried to patch the torn trousers of the established order. So it’s no surprise that the enthusiasts, the spir­ited ones, easily won out over the halfhearted and the cautious, and rapidly set about to realize their dream, that idyll of justice for all. I emphasize idyll and for all, because all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter.

There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere use­less and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea. There were people who immediately understood that they did not have the right temperament for the idyll and tried to go abroad. But since the idyll is in essence a world for all, those who tried to emigrate showed themselves to be deniers of the idyll, and instead of going abroad, they went behind bars. Thousands and tens of thousands of others soon joined them, including many Communists like the foreign minister, Clementis, who had lent his fur hat to Gottwald. Timid lovers held hands on the movie screens, adultery was harshly sup­pressed by citizens’ tribunals of honor, nightingales sang, and the body of Clements swung like a bell ring­ing in the new dawn of humanity.

And then those young, intelligent, and radical peo­ple suddenly had the strange feeling of having sent out into the world an act that had begun to lead a life of its own, had ceased to resemble the idea it was based on and did not care about those who had created it. Those young and intelligent people started to scold their act, they began to call to it, to rebuke it, to pur­sue it, to give chase to it.

ADDENDUM II: And that last paragraph, about trying to call back an act that’s regretted, reminds me of this post of mine about the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Goethe’s, “The spirits which I have summoned/I now cannot banish.”

The post More quotes from writer Milan Kundera appeared first on The New Neo.

K has a theory for this. He believes there are two planes of existence which he calls vie tragique and vie triviale. Usually we move on the trivial plane, but occasionally in moments of elation or danger, we find ourselves transferred to the plane of the vie tragique, with its non-commonsense, cosmic perspective. When we are on the trivial plane, the realities of the other appear as nonsense–as overstrung nerves and so on. When we live on the tragic plane, the realities of the other are shallow, frivolous, frivolous, trifling. But in exceptional circumstances, for instance if someone has to live through a long stretch of time in physical danger, one is placed, as it were, on the intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…I think he is right.

Then David Foster adds:

I think much Woke behavior is an effort by people to get more Vie Tragique in their lives, and this also describes those who seem to somehow *like* being afraid of Covid.

This all relates to something Sebastian Haffner noted in his memoir of life in Germany between the wars, which we’ve discussed here a few times. He said there were people who actually *did not welcome* the stabilization of politics and the economy that seemed to be happening at one point…

I think all of this is absolutely true for some people. Every now and then it happens to war veterans, as well. It’s not that they like war. It’s just that during wartime they are living on a different plane, where actions matter intensely, and the bonds forged among fellow “brothers in arms” can be much deeper. I think that perhaps firefighters, police, EMTs and emergency room workers, and in the psychology realm crisis counselors, all have some of that feeling as well.

I’m also reminded of the work of one of my favorite writers Milan Kundera. In the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being (and if you’ve only seen the movie it does not do the book justice at all) he divides the world and people into two realms, that of lightness and weight. It’s not the same as what Koestler is talking about, but I believe it’s related:

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

In another passage in his earlier work The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera deals with something resembling Koestler’s tragique/triviale “intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…” that Koestler thinks occurs if a person lives through “a long stretch of personal danger.” Kundera seems to think that it – or something resembling it – is far more common than that, in fact nearly universal:

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border; where everything – love, conviction, faith, history – no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.

But I think that both Koestler and Kundera are wrong about how common this is. I don’t think it’s as rare as Koestler seems to think, or to require living through a long stretch of personal danger. But unlike Kundera, I certainly don’t think that everyone lives so close to that border, or that it takes so very little to cross it. In this, as in almost everything, I think there is great variation, and that some people are so grounded that no matter what happens to them they remain far from that border, while for others – for unknown reasons – something in their psyche obliges them to balance on that tightrope described by Koestler, even if the outward events of their lives don’t seem remarkable or especially dangerous at all.

The post Tragique and triviale; weight and lightness appeared first on The New Neo.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

I would add that the memory involved is cultural or national memory. Personal memory doesn’t often falter in that manner (although sometimes it does). It’s the transmission of those memories and their lessons from one generation to another where the slip-up occurs.

Kundera also wrote:

The first step in liquidating a people,’ said Hubl, ‘is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.

1619 Project, anyone?

The thing about the US right now is that, without being conquered by a foreign country and without a huge majority of people supporting the left, we are currently doing it to ourselves and have for quite some time.

The post Milan Kundera on national memory appeared first on The New Neo.

Maybe it’s always timely.]

I’ve quoted the following excerpt before, because it’s one of my very favorites. It’s from the Czech author Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which he wrote in the late 1970s:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

I first came across The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in an excerpt published in The New Yorker around the time of the book’s English publication, 1980. The first paragraph of the book in its New Yorker version hit me with great force as soon as I read it, which is unusual for me. I understood immediately that I was in the presence of brilliance of a particular and unusual sort, a writer who said things in a way that resonated deeply with me. The work managed to mix political and philosophical observations with a fanciful fictional narrative (not exactly a novel but rather a series of linked and unconventional stories) all told in the idiosyncratic and blunt voice of an exceedingly perceptive and reflective author.

I’ll leave it to another perceptive and reflective author—John Updike, in his original review of the book—to describe it:

This book…is brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out…

…[T]he mirror does not so readily give back validation with this playful book, more than a collection of seven stories yet certainly no novel, by an expatriate Czech resident in France, fascinated by sex, and prone to sudden, if graceful, skips into autobiography, abstract rumination, and recent Czech history. Milan Kundera, he tells us, was as a young man among that moiety of Czechs–“the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half”–who cheered the accession of the Communists to power in February 1948. He was then among the tens of thousands rapidly disillusioned by the harsh oppressions of the new regime: “And suddenly those young, intelligent radicals had the strange feeling of having sent something into the world, a deed of their own making, which had taken on a life of its own, lost all resemblance to the original idea, and totally ignored the originators of the idea. So those young, intelligent radicals started shouting to their deed, calling it back, scolding it, chasing it, hunting it down.”

Kundera’s prose presents a surface like that of a shattered mirror, where brightly mirroring fragments lie mixed with pieces of lusterless silvering. The Communists idyll he youthfully believed in seems somehow to exist for him still, though mockingly and excludingly. He never asks himself—the most interesting political question of the century–why a plausible and necessarily redistribution of wealth should, in its Communist form, demand such an exorbitant sacrifice of individual freedom? Why must the idyll turn, not merely less than idyll, but nightmare?

The position of a writer from the Socialist world in the West cannot but be uncomfortable. He cannot but despise us for our cheap freedoms, our more subtle enslavements; and we it may be, cannot but condescend to his discovery, at such heavy cost to his life, of lessons that Messrs. Churchill and Truman so roundly read to us 35 years ago.

That probably tells you more about Updike’s politics and quality of mind (see much more here) than about Kundera. However, I actually think that, although Kundera doesn’t directly spell out the answer to that “most interesting political question of the century,” the answer is inherent in everything he writes. In fact, come think of it, the answer is even subtly implied in that paragraph I quoted at the outset of this post, and it resides in that single word “forced.” In the inevitably vain effort to realize a dream that goes against human nature and reality, one must force compliance or abandon the dream. That necessity for force appeals to the worst in human nature and ultimately attracts the worst human beings rather than the best.

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This isn’t about Trump and Baltimore’s rats, although that’s one of many recent incidents that sparked the train of thought that led to this post. The furor that ensued after Trump’s rat tweet reminded me of a principle I first learned not long after 9/11, which is that PC thought leads away from the ability to deal with a problem.

Speech doesn’t solve things. But speech can make it more difficult to solve things, if a certain way of looking at something become verboten.

I’m not calling for a free-for-all of abusive speech or racist speech or hyperbole. But when (for example) the connection between extreme fundamentalist versions of Islam and terrorism could not be voiced without an answering scream of “Islamophobia,” when no black person can be criticized without the response of “Racist!” towards the one voicing the critique, when a rat-infested crime-ridden city such as Baltimore can’t be described that way because it happens to be run by Democrats and has a large black population—then we have a problem that leads us to be unable to ever go about trying to solve those problems.

But these days a truth—for example, “there are a lot of rats in Baltimore, and the city has failed to deal with the problem”—takes a back seat to the implications some people draw from that truth, although not necessarily one the speaker expresses or means to express. It is the listener who insists on hearing criticism of a black person as inevitably racist when nothing racial has been said. It is the listener who imagines that accurately describing the specific city of Baltimore and its rats negatively are speaking out against black communities in some general way.

I am reminded of a quote I’ve discussed before, written by Czech author Milan Kundera, in which he coins the phrase “imagology.” The quote is from the book Immortality, and it bears repeating:

…[C]ommunists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

…[S]ince for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.

That book was written in 1988.

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