Elitism, Nihilism, and Vorotyntsev-ism in Politics
This year, more so than most, the elections for high office in the United States highlight Benjamin Franklin’s post-constitutional-convention remark that you, the citizens of the erstwhile colonies, now have “a Republic, if you can keep it.” Among the types of radicalism that would fundamentally alter the United States Constitution is one that found historical expression in the intelligentsia of late 19th and early 20th century Russia, where intelligentsia is a term of social and political art discussed below. Right now, three weeks before Election Day 2020, voters may wish to incorporate the following analysis into their electoral deliberations.
The Northwestern professor, Gary Saul Morson, has vividly portrayed pre-revolutionary Russia while reviewing the background of the word intelligentsia, which was coined about the year 1860 in order to refer to an elite class based on three criteria. First, each member of the intelligentsia, referred to as an intelligent, agreed to identify himself with this progressive class in preference to any traditionally defined social, professional, ethnic, or religious class. Second, each intelligent devoted himself or herself to a rigorous personal regimen of “puritanical dissoluteness” or “nihilistic moralism,” ignoring its implied irony and inventing a meaning of life independent of tradition. Third, each intelligent accepted a set of destructive beliefs - - be they populist, Marxist, or anarchist - - that were taken to be scientifically underwritten, absolutely certain, and completely obligatory; thereby “checking the boxes” for some fashionable modern ideas while remaining oblivious to their many implied contradictions of history or logic: An intelligent accepted atheism on faith, became spiritually devoted to materialism, and chose to embrace determinism. An intelligent committed himself or herself to “science,” construed as a metaphysical system in which the world worked by purposeless forces that nevertheless aimed at utopia; and detected a profound syllogism in the statement “Man is descended from apes; therefore, love one another.”
With regard to nihilism, one must be aware of possible equivocation: Philosophical nihilism is an extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence and that “All is unreality or illusion.” On the other hand, historical nihilism can refer to the extreme Russian political viewpoint, dating from the late 19th century, that disapproved of the entire established social order and sought to overthrow it. Destruction of existing society was regarded as the first step towards the utopia that would quickly arise were it not for the baleful effect of current social arrangements.
Morson reports that between 1900 and 1917 in late-Tsarist, pre-revolutionary Russia there were tens of thousands of acts of terrorism, arson, robbery, and murder. How did educated liberal Russian society, in thrall as it was to the intelligentsia, respond to this scourge? A Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadet Party) was set up in the Duma (legislature formed in 1905), but official Kadet publications never condemned political assassination or terrorism. In the words of one liberal, “Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!” Solzhenitsyn’s novel November 1916 portrays a gathering of Kadet liberals and the visiting Colonel Georgi Vorotyntsev. When Vorotyntsev ventured the slightest deviation from the Kadet party line, the room fell eerily silent. As if hypnotized, Vorotyntsev said no more, “not because he felt he was wrong, but out of fear of saying something reactionary.” As a professor later explained to him, “In educated Russian society … by no means every view may be expressed … [and] the more ‘liberated’ the company, the more heavily this tacit prohibition weighs on it.” Such ingrained self-censorship, or Vorotyntsev effect, severely limited public speech on important issues.
Morson reveals the moral cowardice of pre-Revolutionary Russian liberals, who signed petitions they did not agree with; supported anarchists’ demands to abolish the police despite foreseeable, looming disaster; agreed that socialism would cure all societal ills with alacrity; and obeyed the maxim “Better to side with people a mile to one’s left than be associated with anyone one inch to one’s right.”
Morson notes that the terror of the French Revolution was eventually stopped by the fall of Robespierre and the rise of Napoleon. But in Russia, Stalin proclaimed an intensification of class struggle even after the Russian Revolution had ended, leading to innumerable executions and exiles to the Gulag, not to mention purges, show trials, and induced famine. Giving in to illiberal forces ensures their longevity.
Recently, more than a century after liberal opinion in late-Tsarist Russia fell over itself to support various socialist, Marxist, and anarchist initiatives, the Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield has well described the latest emanation of the Vorotyntsev effect in the United States: “We live in a society where racism is not, and cannot be, openly professed … [yet] ‘systemic racism’ supposedly persists … [in a] paradox of a racist society without racists.” If a modern Vorotyntsev would venture, during polite conversation, the slightest deviation from the progressive view of “systemic racism,” then the ensuing, eerie silence would quickly bid him to say no more, lest he say something reactionary. Adapting the Russian professor’s advice, “In educated American society … by no means every view may be expressed … [and] the more ‘progressive’ the company, the more heavily this tacit prohibition weighs on it.”
Mansfield observes that systemic racism is taken to be unconscious, but that “it is strange to describe an unconscious effect as racism, for an ism is an opinion, a doctrine, not a mere condition.” Systemic racism is said to be the bad result of behavior heretofore regarded as good, but now revealed to be illicit privilege rather than just reward. On the other hand, why should anyone feel guilty about an accusation of “privilege” if a system beyond anyone’s intentions creates that privilege? It seems that charges of “systemic racism” are meant as a way to avoid arguments over the nature and application of justice. “More affirmative action and more subsidies - - what can they do that will now help instead of hurt? Call them ‘reparations’ - - will that do any good?” Mansfield concludes that “‘Systematic racism’ is a bogus description that issues in an accusation made in doubtful faith [and] that contradicts itself.” Nevertheless, Mansfield finds that theories of “systematic racism” are so widely held as to require polite disputation.
Combining the insights presented by Morson and Mansfield, one concludes that it is high time to uphold the original intentions of Colonel Georgi Vorotyntsev!
(Postscript #1: Exactly one week after the original Mansfield article, the WSJ published seven replies (“Replying to Mansfield on Systemic Racism”) expressing a spectrum of opinions that generally, but not always, agreed with Mansfield’s analysis.)
(Postscript #2: The next blog posting in this series is currently expected to appear on January 1 or February 1, 2021.)