Letter #108: Ugly Commies

It’s on purpose.

Meister Klavan,

All this talk of ugliness naturally has me thinking about Commies. Not just because internet Marxists these days tend to be hilariously globular and misshapen, although I do find that amusing. Imagine being part of a movement where Leon Trotsky counts as relatively easy on the eyes.

But Trotsky’s original brand of old-fashioned Russian Marxism, unlike the grade-school crayon version we call “woke,” can actually help clarify some things. Namely, it can help us see why truly radical movements always end up smeared in ugliness and filth. They have to.

Overturning an established order means rejecting even its basic categories. And as you write, “the problem the radical faces is that the system he is rebelling against is the very system that shaped the terms of his rebellion.”

In our original essay for this site, you suggested we include Dostoevsky’s prophetic observation from The Brothers Karamazov: in any serious effort to smother Christian sentiment, “the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law.” Not just “something else”: the exact contrary.

If you’re really committed to the bit—and Trotsky was nothing if not committed—you have to insist unblinkingly that what Christianity calls good, you call evil. Before you can achieve what Nietzsche referred to as the “transvaluation of all values,” you have to make a special show of casting off the pre-existing values that defined what went before.

From within a Christian culture this effort can only look hideous and vile, by definition. True to form, Trotsky maintained that the burdens he intended to cast aside included the moral absolutes of Christian teaching: “As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the ‘sanctity of human life.’” Having defined revolution in itself as the good, he was left to choke down, as best he could, any lingering disgust at the carnage it would take to forge ahead.

And he was right in this much: the “sanctity of human life” is not just a matter of obvious intuition. It was not apparent to the Spartans who pitched their weaklings off of cliffs, or the Mesopotamian kings who dragged servants with them into mass graves. We inherit our alarm at these enormities from a tradition, the one Trotsky derided as “Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker.” I would just call it “Judeo-Christian.” The image of God in man is something we had to learn to see.

We can’t unsee it, not really, though we’re jolly well making a go of it. The moral revolution effected by Christianity has yet to be surpassed or superseded by anything but horror and grotesquerie.

But that does leave us with a question: what next? Does moral progress end with the last chapter of Revelation, and we’re just supposed to twiddle our thumbs until prophecy turns into news? Or, if we refrain from yanking up the tree by the roots, can we expect it to bear new fruit?

Love,
Spencer