Are we really influenced by Vladimir Lenin's ideas and way of seeing the world?
In this episode, I speak with Professor Gary Saul Morson about the thought of Vladamir Lenin and his New Criterion essay, "Leninthink." Morson argues that many of Lenin’s ideas still dominate our thinking and discourse including Who-Whom: adherence to politics and life as a zero-sum game, the rejection of truth, Party-ness ideology, affirmation of violence, and philosophical materialism. We also discuss moral relativism and the adherence to lying that many Western intellectuals failed to understand. Morson gives examples from Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Richard Wright's American Hunger, and G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. You may be surprised to find that "Leninthink" sounds too much like the situation we are in today.
Lenin on Morality:
“We repudiate all morality derived from non-human and non-class concepts. We say it is a deception, a fraud in the interests of landlords and capitalists. We say that morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle. . . . That is why we say that to us there is no such thing as a morality that stands outside human society; that is a fraud. To us morality is subordinated to the interests of the proletariat’s class struggle.
When people tell us about morality, we say: to a Communist all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters.
We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old…We do not believe in an eternal morality.”
Mussolini on Relativism
If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an external objective truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than fascist attitudes and activity. The modern relativist deduces that everyone is free to create for himself his own ideology and attempt to carry it out with all possible energy”
Some quotes from Lenin from Morson’s essay:
When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism. —Lenin
Introduce at once mass terror, execute and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, ex-officers, etc.
—Lenin’s instructions to authorities in Nizhnii Novgorod, August 1918
“The only choice is: either the bourgeois or the socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for humanity has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or above-class ideology). Hence to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn away from it in the slightest degree, means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.”
Lenin, Italics original
Note from Lenin:
“The kulak uprising in [your] 5 districts must be crushed without pity. . . . 1) Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Take all their grain away from them. 4) Identify hostages . . . . Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know and cry . . . . Yours, Lenin. P. S. Find tougher people
Books and Resources
Leninthink at the New Criterion
Richard Wright, American Hunger
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
G.K. Chesterton Father Brown Stories
Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us
By Schapiro, Morton, Morson, Gary Saul
Prosaics and Other Provocations: Empathy, Open Time, and the Novel (Ars Rossica)
By Morson, Gary Saul
Prosaics and Other Provocations: Empathy, Open Time, and the Novel (Ars Rossica)
By Morson, Gary Saul
By Morson, Gary Saul
Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and Peace’
By Morson, Gary Saul
Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities
By Morson, Gary Saul, Schapiro, Morton Owen
The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture
By Morson, Gary Saul
Ep. 15: Gary Saul Morson Ph.D: Thinking Like Lenin