{"id":1521,"date":"2010-09-19T08:29:13","date_gmt":"2010-09-19T08:29:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=1521"},"modified":"2014-03-06T11:37:10","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T16:37:10","slug":"judt-on-milosz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=1521","title":{"rendered":"Judt on Milosz"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t think I had read anything of Tony Judt’s writing until I revived my long-lapsed subscription to NYRB a year ago, just in time to catch his riveting last pieces. I’ve begun his Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945<\/b>, and it’ll take a while to absorb its immensity. In the most recent NYRB there’s a piece on Milosz’s Captive Minds<\/b> (fortunately not behind the paywall<\/a> and well worth reading in its entirety) that reminds me of things I should have been paying attention to, or should at least have encountered. Judt unpacks the (originally Arabic) concept of ‘Ketman’:<\/p>\n

The second image is that of \u201cKetman,\u201d borrowed from Arthur de Gobineau\u2019s Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia, in which the French traveler reports the Persian phenomenon of elective identities. Those who have internalized the way of being called \u201cKetman\u201d can live with the contradictions of saying one thing and believing another, adapting freely to each new requirement of their rulers while believing that they have preserved somewhere within themselves the autonomy of a free thinker\u2014or at any rate a thinker who has freely chosen to subordinate himself to the ideas and dictates of others.
\nKetman, in Miłosz\u2019s words, \u201cbrings comfort, fostering dreams of what might be, and even the enclosing fence affords the solace of reverie.\u201d Writing for the desk drawer becomes a sign of inner liberty. At least his audience would take him seriously if only they could read him…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Judt describes his own history of teaching Milosz to American students:<\/p>\n

\nAnd indeed, when I first taught the book in the 1970s, I spent most of my time explaining to would-be radical students just why a \u201ccaptive mind\u201d was not a good thing. Thirty years on, my young audience is simply mystified: Why would someone sell his soul to any idea, much less a repressive one? By the turn of the twenty-first century, few of my North American students had ever met a Marxist. A self-abnegating commitment to a secular faith was beyond their imaginative reach<\/b>. When I started out, my challenge was to explain why people became disillusioned with Marxism; today, the insuperable hurdle one faces is explaining the illusion itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At this point I started to anticipate his argument, thinking “but isn’t this just what they’ve done themselves?”, but I was unprepared for the clarity with which Judt sums it up:<\/p>\n

Today, we can still hear sputtering echoes of the attempt to reignite the cold war around a crusade against \u201cIslamo-fascism.\u201d But the true mental captivity of our time lies elsewhere. Our contemporary faith in \u201cthe market\u201d rigorously tracks its radical nineteenth-century doppelgänger\u2014the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History. Just as the hapless British Labour chancellor in 1929\u20131931, Philip Snowden, threw up his hands in the face of the Depression and declared that there was no point opposing the ineluctable laws of capitalism, so Europe\u2019s leaders today scuttle into budgetary austerity to appease \u201cthe markets.\u201d
\nBut \u201cthe market\u201d\u2014like \u201cdialectical materialism\u201d\u2014is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers\u2014mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers\u2014who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.
\nAbove all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives<\/b>. We know perfectly well that untrammeled faith in unregulated markets kills: the rigid application of what was until recently the \u201cWashington consensus\u201d in vulnerable developing countries\u2014with its emphasis on tight fiscal policy, privatization, low tariffs, and deregulation\u2014has destroyed millions of livelihoods. Meanwhile, the stringent \u201ccommercial terms\u201d on which vital pharmaceuticals are made available has drastically reduced life expectancy in many places. But in Margaret Thatcher\u2019s deathless phrase, \u201cthere is no alternative.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t think I had read anything of Tony Judt’s writing until I revived my long-lapsed subscription to NYRB a year ago, just in time to catch his riveting last pieces. I’ve begun his Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, and it’ll take a while to absorb its immensity. In the most recent NYRB […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-argybargy","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1521"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2326,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1521\/revisions\/2326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}