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COMMENTARY
December 1, 2004
The demons
"I am a sick man. ... I am a wicked man." This is how Dostoevsky's nameless anti-hero begins his Notes from Underground the prelude to a series of five extraordinary novels on the fate of modern man. Through the last decade excellent new translations of the major works of Dostoevsky and Gogol have been coming from the (married) team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. They have been making clear what other translators from whatever motive had been making opaque. Previous translators of for example the quote above avoided the word "wicked" and usually put the word "spiteful" in its place. A moral assertion was thus replaced with a psychological one. But Dostoevsky is a moral not a psychological writer and the word he used in the original Russian zloy does not mean "spiteful". It is the root of that word and it means "bad evil wicked". The word for "spiteful" is instead "zlobnyi" -- and Dostoevsky who had some idea what he was doing in the Russian language did not use it. There you have our post-modernity in a nutshell: an unthinking elision of the moral into the psychological creating a "nuance" where no nuance exists. And by so doing the previous translators externalized the evil that Dostoevsky's character had discovered in himself. The old Christian thing was to do good in the knowledge that we are capable of terrible evil. But the "new man" believes that he is good in theory and thus does not recognize the evil in his deeds. We make a desolation and call it peace. Though to be fair the anti-Bush demonstrators in Ottawa yesterday did not even make an impressive desolation. They did not have the numbers or the energy to do to Ottawa what their organizers promised. Of course security was extraordinarily tight. Yet by their threats alone they were able to summon that security and turn the long-delayed state visit of the President of what was once Canada's closest ally into a furtive eat-and-run. Said the upbeat CBC reporter: "There are people here representing a wide range of opinions from anti-globalization 'no to Star Wars' support for Palestine Marxism not to mention exclamations like 'Queers hate Bush'." . These are not in fact a wide range of opinions but rather alternative ways of articulating the same void. It is hard to imagine what President Bush or anyone could say that would please the many people in this county (or any other for that matter) who truly abhor him -- but can't explain why without using parrot-like slogans and referring knowingly to non-existent "facts". Who moreover would not even dream of formulating a coherent alternative to what the Bush administration is doing in Iraq Afghanistan Palestine or Dubuque. Not that no coherent alternative could exist. There were intelligent if finally rejected arguments made against each of Mr. Bush's decisions in turn; there is room for informed disagreement over every question of public policy from persons of goodwill. But the world is constructed in a curious way: so that goodwill and coherence tend to leave simultaneously. The people on the streets in Ottawa yesterday looking desperately for a way to harm the object of their hatred were beyond mere argument their conclusions having long preceded their premises. Nor would I suggest it is impossible to oppose Mr. Bush for good reasons. But these do not require hatred of the man. In the Congress of the United States for instance there are a couple of hundred reasonably intelligent Democrats prepared to make the case against Mr. Bush temperately most of the time. They only just lost the election. What we see on the streets of Ottawa instead is an almost pure fanaticism -- that radical spirit of alienation that ultimately motivates the Jihadis too. This nihilism is the splinter in the heart of our modernity; it rejects everything; it proposes finally nothing in its place. It is the devil himself speaking out of his void leading finally to the silence of Iago. To understand it we must look into the very faces contorted with rage and the mouths uttering the vilest obscenities. The evil is not coming from outside them: it is instead welling from the void within. And yet the tragedy of these people -- whose fanaticism puts them beyond the pale of give-and-take in party politics and whose views should they spread would take the whole democratic order down with them -- is that they know even less about themselves than they know about the world they condemn. They are angry but finally they don't know why. They don't believe in evil as a category; yet it haunts them externally on every side: "Bush" being only the straw man of the moment. And unlike the actual Mr. Bush they do not believe in grace either. They see evil everywhere. They rail and they rail. You could call them spiteful but that would be psychologizing. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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