Back to the Classics #3

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic Nonfiction. I taught English in Riga, Latvia from 1994 to 1998. I worked with local English teachers, mainly female, in their late 20s to late 30s. Having studied the enemy language of English from their teens, they had established their rebellious, defiant stances early on; as just a high school student, one had actively joined demonstrations for independence. They had things to say about Latvian intellectuals who had toed the line in order to secure nice apartments, travel opportunities, access to top-notch medical care, prestigious schools for their kids, and sweet jobs suddenly finding themselves scrambling when freedom-loving Latvians restored their independence in 1990.

The Captive Mind – Czeslaw Milosz

This excellent collection of essays analyzes the process of mental enslavement of society (especially writers) in a totalitarian state. Milosz extensively and aptly describes the mental contortions of ketman - the act of paying lip service to The System while concealing secret opposition. Ketman is dressed up in reasons national, artistic, professional, skeptical, metaphysical, and ethical. There’s even a ketman dolled up like revolutionary purity. It’s not simply hypocrisy – it works so well that the deceiver slides into a really weird mental space:

To say something is white when one thinks it black, to smile inwardly when one is outwardly solemn, to hate when one manifests love, to know when one pretends not to know, and thus to play one’s adversary for a fool (even as he is playing you for one) – these actions lead one to prize one’s own cunning above all else. Success in the game becomes a source of satisfaction.

Milosz devotes chapters to four writers in an attempt to present their motivations for active compliance with the communist authorities in postwar Poland. Recall that Poland was the most devastated country to stagger out of WWII. Lots of people felt that the Polish people could not just pick up where the left off in the 1939. 

Besides, the subjects of the four case studies -- Jerzy “Alpha” Andrzejewski (Ashes and Diamonds), Tadeusz “Beta” Borowski (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen), Jerzy “Gamma” Putrament (poet, man of letters) and Konstanty Ildefons “Delta” Gałczyński (poet, humorist) -- stand as examples of the hundreds of surviving intellectuals who collaborated with Moscow to advance their careers and publish books. People were not presented with a lot of choices: get with the program or endure limited access to jobs, apartments, education, medical care, good prospects, etc.     

Miłosz mixes criticism and sympathy to show the gradual enslavement of minds by communist buzzing about History, Dialectical Materialism, Contradictions and all that lifeless gobbledygook about the new social and political reality and rosy future it’s supposed to usher. The alternative – exile, emigration, and a whole lot worse - was a sterile vacuum for creative writers  - especially poets - not able to stay in their own country, write in their own language, for their natural audiences.

This is a thought-provoking and still relevant book worth reading as a warning against totalitarian systems of thought. It can also be read as a work more about cognitive psychology than politics. People will believe in anything - anything! from Bigfoot to Nazis in Ukraine to mind-controlling chips in vaccines - and twisted are the mental hoops they'll jump through to establish and maintain a belief. 

It should be read by anyone who is or aspires to be an intellectual, even if they are an American, i.e., a person who would say out loud “I want to be an intellectual” only under the most excruciating torture.  Like fiction, the question that this non-fiction work makes us ask ourselves is, “What would we do in such situations ourselves?”