Notes from Mordor

While scrolling YouTube on the Moscow subway the other day, I came upon a video of four body-language experts analysing the court testimonies of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. They thought he was telling the truth and she was lying, but their analysis conveyed the sense that we are automata whose conscious intentions have a peripheral relationship to what our bodies say. I found myself extrapolating from this to the news from Ukraine. The visceral speech of conscripts talking about the reality of combat, and the strategic utterances of politicians who send them into harm’s way, appear like froth on the surface of something that is indifferent to our personal values. Hegel called it History; Heidegger called it Being; Rust Cohle called it a thresher.

In Gaelic, a language and culture that was systematically extirpated by British colonists over four centuries before being artificially revived by Irish nationalists in the twentieth century, the words ‘cur isteach’ (pronounced ‘kur ishtock’) mean ‘put in’. Cur Isteach has become a codename among some of my friends as uncertainty about Russian attitudes to us have made us hesitant to be overheard discussing their leader in public. Meanwhile, the young men being turned into what Céline called “battle sausage” a few hundred miles away are a silent rebuke to efforts at conducting business-as-usual. Recognising this, several art galleries in Moscow have shut their doors, though state TV channels continue to broadcast trailers for a jazz festival featuring beautiful-people singing and playing the trombone.

Such are the human contradictions within Russia, a place that in the Western media can seem like a J. R. R. Tolkien creation. I’ve encountered more anti-Western xenophobia living in famously safe cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and Singapore than in Moscow or Tyumen. I was in Ireland renewing my visa when the “special military operation” broke out, and was worried that things would be different when I came back. The people I see in the street are unreadable, but the other day I went to a Starbucks-type café in central Moscow called Cofix and ordered an Americano from a sullen goth teenager in my bad Russian. As I turned away, I said “spasibo” and she muttered “thanks,” alleviating for a moment my paranoia about simmering resentment towards foreigners.

It may be that the climate will become less hospitable as the effects of sanctions worsen, but for now everything seems fine. I live near a large military complex and regularly walk the dog through a residential area occupied by the families of military personnel. There are more soldiers around than formerly, but I haven’t seen a single ‘Z’ sign in a car window or painted on a wall in this area, though the residents of an apartment block in a nearby area coordinated to create the letter Z with the lights in their windows yesterday evening. On a trip to Food City I saw a Z traced in the dirt on the back of a truck which somebody else had turned into a square with an X in the middle. However, it sounds as if beyond the major cities Cur Isteach fans are in a clear majority, having been persuaded that he’s just responding to NATO aggression.

Although there’s something grotesquely misjudged about going to art galleries in the context of what’s happening just down the road, in private art can be a consolation, not because it offers any solutions, but because it makes you feel less alone. Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, which I memorised as a teenager in the 1980s when we were also fearful of nuclear war, has been in my mind a lot lately. Arnold was a conservative but not a Tory and has as much in common with Russian as with contemporary Western mores. Although loyal to the Liberal Party, he set himself against mainstream liberalism which then as now was distinguished by its schismatic energies. At that time, however, they were expressed through religion and class rather than race and gender ideology.

In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold talks about the liberal obsession with “machinery”, by which he means not just the infrastructure of the industrial revolution, but the multifarious liturgies that nonconformist Protestants counterposed to the Anglican liturgy in their “hole-and-corner” churches. He thought they should conform to the Anglican compromise for the sake of national unity, even if it was less than perfect. Within it, he thought, a national culture could be fostered that was expressive of “sweetness and light” rather than the sterile formalisms of liturgical pedants, the identity politicians of his day. However, it was the external threat from Germany in the first years of the twentieth century rather than the Anglican communion that ultimately pulled British society together.

Again today, despite its fissiparous tendencies, the Western liberal-conservative nexus has shown remarkable unity in opposing Russia over Ukraine. This tends to support something I’ve argued in the past: that the messiness and bad temper of so much Western political life is just how pluralist democracies work. It looks as if Cur Isteach misread these things as signs of the West’s inherent weakness when it’s possible that they concealed its strength. Russia has its own kind of strength, based in a quasi-religious national mythos, and liberals’ continuing sense of whether there is any progress in human affairs may depend on who comes out of this existential conflict as the victor.

A stalemate or a defeat for the West would support Arnold’s vision in Dover Beach where he sees no real difference between Sophocles’ time and his own and finds consolation only in the privacy of his marriage. He sees in the rise of scientific rationalism the disappearance of any collective or transcendent source of consolation. However, like a Greek tragedy the poem subverts its own pessimism, by embodying the sublimity that can emerge from the “darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.” This is not religious salvation, but it is still an assertion of our dual nature as beings who are capable of good and evil, and an encouragement to try to be on the side of good, which of course even bad people tend to think they’re doing.

If moral behaviour has reference to a transcendent source, it can only be as an expression of a soul possessed of free will. If on the other hand it’s just a Darwinian adaptation, then the moral difference between any two human actors has a mechanistic explanation. However, since neither body-language analysts nor sociobiologists are smart enough to describe the mechanism comprehensively, any more than physicists can see what’s going on at the quantum level where there appear to be some phenomena that are not effects, we live the ambiguity about whether we’re angels, demons, or automata. That said, it might be argued that if you’re a Western rightist who regards Cur Isteach as a luminary figure there are only two alternatives for you.

The reactionary elements in nineteenth-century Britain were called Barbarians in Arnold’s terminology. They were aristocrats with money and hereditary status but no sense of class solidarity or social responsibility. Middle-class liberals he called Philistines; they were upwardly mobile with materialistic values and were short on aesthetic sensibility. Each of them has analogues in both Russia and the West today and is distinct from those whom Arnold called the Populace and Hillary Clinton calls Deplorables. Arnold’s conservatism aimed not to preserve the hereditary privileges of one of these classes, nor to transform society through revolution, but to unite all in a vision loosely based on Plato’s Republic, whose telos is a higher consciousness in which the anarchy of human life can be made coherent, at least for fleeting moments.

He was a school inspector by profession, and moderately authoritarian, but his philosophy is anti-totalitarian. He believes in the sanctity of the private sphere, the importance of beauty in everyday life, and the need for meaningful diversity in human society. He didn’t write off his enemies in the Liberal Party, whose materialist life philosophy he called Hebraism, but thought they needed to be balanced by his own Hellenism. He was a dialectical thinker of a different cast from his contemporary Karl Marx. Marx was a utopian materialist, but Arnold was a pragmatic idealist. He had higher goals and lower expectations for his fellow humans than the average radical of the left or right. He deserves to be read as widely as the likes of Foucault or Dugin whose anti-human visions lurk behind the contending parties in the current insanity.