Shafarevich Revisited: Individuality and Dostoevsky’s Ant HillAny faultless ant hill is still infinitely less than the most flawed human being, and it is the latter that our society and institutions should empower.
By Joseph Mackinnon
April 7, 2022
It may be imprudent to refer to the work of a Soviet mathematician in these days where even the Slovenian flag cannot be flown for its use of Russian colors. Nevertheless, recognizing that a truth doesn’t cease to be true when it crosses a border, it is worthwhile revisiting the insights of Igor Shafarevich.
Like Noam Chomsky, Shafarevich is popularly regarded for his socio-cultural and political insights rather than his core expertise. (Whereas Chomsky helped revolutionize the field of linguistics, Shafarevich contributed greatly to algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory.) His political insights (i.e., Shafarevich’s takeaways from his firsthand experience of totalitarian socialism and his historical investigation of the “socialist phenomenon”) are the focus of what follows, as they shed a great deal of light on pernicious trends now underway in the West.
In The Socialist Phenomenon, an incisive book published in 1980 for which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn penned a foreword, Shafarevich looks at the genesis of socialist doctrine. In many respects, this Russian Orthodox Christian’s analysis complements Catholic conservative arch-liberal Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s in Leftism (1974), and enjoys the heightened awareness of someone who spent a lifetime steeped in socialism’s consequences.
Towards the end of the book, Shafarevich contemplates the socialist ideal’s relationship to individuality. He writes: “all elements of the socialist ideal—the abolition of private property, family, hierarchies; the hostility toward religion—could be regarded as a manifestation of one basic principle: the suppression of individuality.” This may seem an obvious claim: that a collectivist, materialist ideology motivated by a death instinct would find an enemy in the individual, in individuality. What may not be so obvious are the tactics and lengths to which the socialists would go to grind their enemies down to level—how socialists would ultimately dynamite the mountains to fill the valleys.
Shafarevich identifies some of the ways that socialist society would remedy that pesky individualism.
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Much can be said about demands now for the sameness of clothing and faces (especially in lieu of recent calls for masks to remain on), for segregated graduations at colleges, for segregated “safe spaces,” and the general increase in identitarianism (which considers persons first and foremost as members of groups rather than on their own terms) everywhere from human resources departments to the moon. Even more could be said about socialist designs to regulate our procreative functions or gloss over individual differences compounded by sex in professional sports or standardize language and morality through low standards, again to achieve the kind of sameness seen in other animal species. Nevertheless, among the ways detailed by Shafarevich above, I want to focus briefly on two: the regulation of mobility (i.e. the need for passes conferred on condition of conformity) and the state or community’s appropriation of parental responsibilities; and the politicization of artwork.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/07/shafarevich-revisited-individuality-and-dostoevskys-ant-hill/
