Roger Kimball, "Don't Celebrate Bastille Day," American Greatness, July 14, 2019
. . . . Unlike the American Revolution, in which the rule of law and the institutions of civil society survived the change of governments, the French Revolution was one of . . .
. . . the signal bad events in world history. It consumed civil society and the centuries-old institutions of civilization. It was an unalloyed triumph of the totalitarian spirit, and in this respect it presaged and inspired that even greater assault on decency and freedom, the Bolshevik Revolution, the opening act of one of the darkest chapters in human history. The butcher's bill for the French Revolution is many hundreds of thousands. Soviet Communism was responsible for the deaths of tens upon tens of millions and the universal immiseration of the people whose lives it controlled.
. . . .
By rights, Bastille Day should be a day of national mourning or contrition. That it is not tells us a great deal -- about the persistence of human credulousness, for example, and the folly of subordinating the imperfect, long-serving structures of civilization to the demands of impatient people infatuated by their own unquenchable sense of virtue. . . .
. . . . What could be more benign sounding than slogans about "liberty, equality, fraternity," O Citoyen, but how oppressive, how murderous, were their implementation "on the ground"? Robespierre cut to the chase when he spoke of "virtue and its emanation, terror." He knew that the index of the sort of virtue he proselytized -- a heady confection inherited from Rousseau -- was the rapidity with which le rasoir national, the guillotine, pursued its grisly business. The pursuit of virtue by communists is a hundred, a thousand times bloodier and more soul blighting.
Mr. Kimball then speculates that the totalitarian impulse stems, in part, at least, from a lack of curiosity about individual human beings.
. . . . [Although Bernie Sanders, the aging socialist Senator from Vermont who is once again running for the presidency of the United States,] had chosen to spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, he never availed himself of the opportunity of visiting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn when the great writer and moral witness was living as a refugee in Cavendish, Vermont. [Some comments] put it down to ideology, as if Sanders, a fan of the Soviet Union, made a silent protest by ignoring the famous anti-Soviet figure in his midst.
But I think the deeper reason for Sanders's neglect was a quality of the socialist or communist or revolutionary sensibility that is too little remarked. I mean its ingrained, indeed its programmatic lack of curiosity about other people.
. . . .
An important reason for this lack of curiosity (and this was something grasped by Burke and Tocqueville) is the prominent role that abstractions play in the mental and moral metabolism of the totalitarian sensibility. It was articulated with some poignancy by Rousseau who, at the end of his life, sadly observed, "I think I know man, but as for men, I know them not." Thus it should come as no surprise that Rousseau, in an influential prelude to totalitarian dramas to come, should insist that true liberty consisted in sacrificing all merely individual wills to the imperatives of a "general will" whose dictates were as preemptory as they were abstract. As [a?] sage of Geneva put it in The Social Contract, anyone who would dare to undertake the creation of a people must feel himself capable of "changing human nature." Human reality is drained of dignity and becomes material to be shaped and formed according to the schemes of utopian power. Hence the terrifying logic of Stalin's observation that a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. Revolutionaries do not trade in individuals, only masses.
I was struck by the story of Bernie Sanders's curiosity deficit because it seems to be such a widespread liability of our political class. Absorbed by their individual battles, the political actors of the establishment -- and I include here the army of consultants, lobbyists, staffers, and pundits as well as elected officials -- seem to have constructed an all-but impenetrable carapace that protects them from the unwanted intrusion of empirical reality. Their lives are given up entirely to politics. They thereby neglect the non- or pre-political reality which is the end for which politics labors, or should labor. . . .
The cruel and suffocating intrusiveness of those dystopian "experiments against reality" are not so seamlessly or so thoroughly and viciously implemented in American society. But I submit that anyone who looks around at the vast, unaccountable, self-engorging bureaucracy of the so-called administrative state, anyone who watches the ignorant and vituperative grandstanding of so many of our elected officials, cannot help but mark the parallels with the remorseless incuriosity that stood behind the totalitarian juggernaut as it systematically discounted truth for the sake of the accumulation of power. All of which is to explain why I regard Bastille Day as a sobering reminder of man's pernicious folly rather than an occasion for celebration.
Two observations by Unca D:
First, one easy-to-spot marker of the totalitarian sensibility in modern culture is a T-shirt -- or a poster or screen saver or coffee mug sporting the iconic face of Ernesto Guevara -- Che to his admirers. Think of him as the natural heir of Rousseau, Robespierre, Stalin, and Lenin. Compared to them, his cruelty and body count were minuscule, but not for lack of trying. "His homicidal idea of justice," says Alvaro Vargas Llosa, using Mr. Guevarra's own words, was "'hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.'" If you have a lingering admiration for the romantic vision of Mr. Guevara, you owe it to yourself to read Vargas, The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty.
Second, if abstracting humanity is a vice and respecting -- and being curious about -- individual human beings is a virtue, the saint in our midst is Houston-based radio talk-show host Michael Berry. On any given day, sparked by something a caller says, he will extend the call for a quarter-hour, sometimes more, to explore that caller's childhood, education, marriage, children, job, and ideas about what it takes to be a good husband or wife, father or mother, employee, and citizen. When he has finished, he has often introduced us to some admirable person, not a public figure, has made the world a better place. Mr. Berry would never have passed an opportunity to talk to Solzhenitzen, but he does his best work with common folks who, he reveals, are far from common. There's nary a totalitarian impulse in this. There's curiosity. There's respect for the particularity of a fellow human being. There's optimism and joy.
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