Sigrid Undset Crosses Russia: The Remarkable Case of Back from the Future (1942)

The Brussels Journal ^ | 2009-03-03 | Thomas F. Bertonneau

[ihatedemocrats]

Seeing things plain, not lying to oneself, not subscribing to the delusions of others – these virtues, seemingly so simple, prove in life difficult to achieve and tricky to exercise. An inevitable imitative pressure assimilates people to one another so that mere opinion, received but never vetted, comes to function as a surrogate reality, in the cave-like error of which people stumble about their errands in a lurching mockery of witting behavior. The ancients worried about false or second-hand judgment (doxa) or about superstition. Modern people must grapple with ideology. The critique of ideology is the single most important exercise that an individual can undertake who wants to stand in truth and by his own lights against the conformist pressure of public opinion, or what dissenters nowadays call political correctness.

Norwegian author Sigrid Undset (1882–1949), born to a family of Danish freethinkers and raised in Norway in an atmosphere of urbane secularity, confronted the hollowness of that ethos in the aftermath of World War One when she shocked her familiars by embracing Roman Catholicism. If the critical writings of the Dane Georg Brandes (1842–1927) summed up the turn-of-the-century “Cultural Leftist” attitude in Scandinavia, then Undset would have represented the most decisive repudiation imaginable of Brandesian liberalism – atheistic, socialistic, scornful of inherited custom, as it was, and eager to see realized its notion (its vague notion) of a bold new political order toppling every inherited custom and evaluation. Undset championed tradition, remaining critical of any supposed liberation from norms.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

Seeing things plain, not lying to oneself, not subscribing to the delusions of others – these virtues, seemingly so simple, prove in life difficult to achieve and tricky to exercise. An inevitable imitative pressure assimilates people to one another so that mere opinion, received but never vetted, comes to function as a surrogate reality, in the cave-like error of which people stumble about their errands in a lurching mockery of witting behavior. The ancients worried about false or second-hand judgment (doxa) or about superstition. Modern people must grapple with ideology. The critique of ideology is the single most important exercise that an individual can undertake who wants to stand in truth and by his own lights against the conformist pressure of public opinion, or what dissenters nowadays call political correctness.

Beautifully stated!

[Ditto]

Good post — good read. Thanks

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

This is what the narcissistic characters in her social novels think. If only they had “more” of something – something material – they would be happy. It is sadly what neo-conservative “free marketers” in the Western nations of our own day, think. A formula – a mantra – reduces the human to mere “economics.”

Uh, no...it's that they want more of something for nothing, which is a very different matter.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

Before its defeat in 1945 and during its period of Axis cooperation, Japan would, like its enemy the Soviet Union and its ally Nazi Germany, impose a totalitarian police-state on its own people, socialize industry, and institute an absurd but imitatively wicked anti-Semitism.

Recommended read: The Fugu Plan by Marvin Tokayer.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

Back from the Future should be set against those remarkably fatuous travel books about Russia that sprouted like mushrooms in the 1930s

Recalls "Mission to Moscow" that Ayn Rand eviscerated when she spoke before HUAC.

[ihatedemocrats]

Some people are just plain lazy (often given to stealing), others are altogether irrational, and some are patriotic and productive (more, please). Neocons are not free-marketers, and are all too happy to expand the welfare state. Yes, this part of the article is trash.

Aside from this, free-marketing has been bastardized to include “free movement of labor — what we call “illegals”— to the extent that I no longer altogether support it.

[ihatedemocrats]

Thank you for the recommendation!