Bulverism

Today’s instalment of Bulverism further informs the idea of looking at and looking along. The two ways of looking are enmeshed so tightly that I see humility as the only way to reconcile these experiences. Because the way we look at one another is formed entirely by the tack that we look along.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle features a number of intellectuals in a prison camp of Stalinist Russia. Each zek is in prison because of fabricated charges of anti-government tendencies. Stripped of their freedom, the zeks generally share the western attitude of disgust at Communism, each of them facing 10-20 years under the corrupt system. When I began this book, I was quite comfortable with Solzhenitsyn’s vivid account of the regime’s corruptions which confirming to me, as a westerner, that communism was a doomed system. But I became uncomfortable at the discussions that the zeks would have. Despite having their lives torn apart by a communist system, the zeks are able to carry on discussions of the pros and cons of communism. They are able to lay aside their own personal grievances and have an intelligent discussion about communism’s effects on a larger scale.

There is a possibility that by discounting your own personal experience as objectively true, you lose any conviction, and in the spirit of obsequious benevolence, validate everyone’s opinion, insisting that they could easily be right. This could even be taken to a post-modern extreme, where what is real is defined by the individual. But this relativism is dangerous because it is a masquerade. We can claim we are respecting someone’s view point by saying it is valid “for them”. But this is not a compassionate gesture but one of selfishness.

Saying that whatever one believes is right shows a profound disregard for others. It shows that we are not willing to even bother setting that person aright. Instead we are pushing them away, unwilling to challenge, or be challenged by, another’s view.
This individual isolation that relativism leads to is not what C.S. Lewis had in mind when he cautions against discounting other’s opinions. Rather, it leads to an intellectual grappling. What C.S. Lewis was talking about was the intense, late night political arguments that went on in a Russian prison camp in 1945. When opposite opinions meet, instead of mentally disqualifying their rival, they ought go at it tooth and nail.