Cassandra Voices

Tag: David Langwallner Public Intellectuals

  • The Journalist as Public Intellectual

    Many of those featuring in this series wrote top class journalism, including Albert Camus, Noam Chomsky, Voltaire and George Orwell. None of them, however, are pre-eminently or exclusively associated with their journalism. There is one intellectual who is however. That of course is Christopher Hitchens – the non pareil journalist of our recent age, and perhaps the last of the just.

    The purpose of this essay is not to deal with types of journalism or codes of ethics, or to deal with the complex relationship between editors and proprietors, and indeed now social media exerts control over journalism. Instead, I seek to identify which hacks, from Fleet Street or otherwise, have singularly, through the restrictions and obsession with news and sensation, stood out to become true Public Intellectuals.

    There has never been a greater need for a mass circulation public intellectual. I open this debate by suggesting five choices, at least two of whom displayed superiority in this arena to Hitchens.

    The Criteria

    A Journalist-Public Intellectual must seek the truth, understand the nature of fact-gathering and vocationally support speech rights even at the outer limits. He or she must also form a bulwark against the degradation of language. In this respect the Promethean storm of social media opens the door to ever more unregulated and unfiltered opinions, often deliberately orchestrated by far right-wing or absurd woke viewpoints to enforce wrecking ball compliance and control.

    It begs the question: compromised by corporate control how can a journalist in the mainstream press now become a Public Intellectual?

    Recently I visited my friend Patrick Healy éminence grise of Irish Public Intellectualism in Amsterdam. He is a retired professor of architecture, painter, writer and a global authority on Karl Kraus. So let us get to the first of my five choices. The first greater than Hitchens and Swift greater than all.

    1. Karl Kraus

    In my piece The Austrian Mind I omitted Kraus given the challenge of writing on him, as Jonathan Frantzen in effect suggested in his interpretation of certain of his texts in The Kraus Project (2013). How do you grapple with so protean or unclassifiable an intellect? He seems almost incomprehensible in the present age.

    Kraus acted as editor from 1899-1936 of the leading Viennese magazine Die Fackel (The Torch) which he used as his own personal soapbox. He was the exclusive writer from 1911 onwards. People feared his intemperate pen. A satirist, polemicist, aphorist and playwright, writing in the Golden Age of literary Vienna, which ended very abruptly. All shortly emigrated and dead. The fate of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth.

    His targets, not unlike the later Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, was the mediocrity of the Austrian Bourgeoisie and above all their distortion and abuse of language, particularly his fellow journalists. He could often be seen for half an hour trying to work out the insertion of a comma in Café Mozart!

    In his book on Kraus Frantzen primarily deals with an essay on the German national poet Heine, where with very effective pastiche Kraus crucifies Heine and by implication those like him, saying: ‘Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.’

    He was a scathing aphorist and two of my favourites are applicable to our own age. First, is the idea that ‘corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.’ The second is also quite relevant: ‘Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.’

    Reading the entirety of Die Fackel is an experience not unlike an extended viewing of Peter Cooke’s four great impersonations of English archetypes, judge, football manager, naturalist and rock star for the Clive Anderson show shortly before his death. Peter Cook was also Lord Gnome, the proprietor of Private Eye. He employed Ian Hislop and was by indirection a journalist and public intellectual. In fact, his impersonations, his support of and informal and sometimes formal contributions to Private Eye make him an intrinsic if not central choice.

    Krauss epic play The Last Days of Mankind (2015), which Patrick Healy has translated, is an attack on press barons, hacks facilitating, through mass orchestration, Populist bellicose hysteria, and the First World War. Its uneven tone demonstrates his evolution from aristocratic condescension to social democrat. The play is a mammoth fifteen hours long for voices or rather a voice best read by Kraus, or as a substitute Patrick, attacking stupidity in all directions.

    Die Fackel also attacks psychoanalysis as a quack science; antisemitism, though his own antisemitism as a self-loathing Jew is also evident; corruption, not least the police chief of Vienna who he forced out of office; the pan-German Populist movement; laissez-faire economic policies; and numerous other subjects.

    He dies at the very precipice of collapse, of natural causes, after a self-enforced interregnum when he suspended publication with the rise of Hitler, only for one last push of part of an extended essay The Third Walspurgers Night (1936). Its essential argument is that through their devotion to the pastime of palaver and tactics, the social democrats had facilitated Hitler’s rise and had lost all material gains. He despaired at their belief ‘they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.’ Consequently, the essay supports the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor Dollfuss, as anything other than Hitler was needed. Historic desperation.

    The opening paragraph of the essay is devastating in its implications for today I interpose.

    As to Hitler, [read Trump or any other contemporary ‘strongman’ leader] I have nothing to say. I am aware that as the upshot of extended reflection, of repeated efforts to grasp the phenomenon and the forces driving it, this falls far short of expectations. They were, after all, pitched higher than ever before at a polemicist who is popularly – but mistakenly – expected to take a stand; and who, when confronted by any evil that appeals to his temperament, has indeed been prepared to “stick his neck out”. But there are evils which not only make the neck cease to be a metaphor but may also prevent the associated, ….?

    The rest of the essay deals with the propogandists and the facilitators primarily Goebbels [read Musk, The Daily Mail, and indeed other legacy media].

    The best reading of Walpurgis Nacht as Patrick Healy suggests is that satire is as the Roman genre par excellence satura tota nostra est – and should point not only in the direction of rhetorical agility, but also use mockery, insult, indignation etc, fusing the voice of the moralist and the skill of a standup comic. Indeed, the word also a meaning of stew bringing all ingredients together.

    1. Jonathan Swift

    The only equal of Kraus as a Journalist-Public Intellectual, and thus also greater than Hitchens in the pantheon is, in my view, Swift. Incontestably, the greatest satirical essay in the English language is A Modest Proposal ((1729). Kraus was in fact pleased to be compared to Swift on the basis that false modesty was the most arch kind of hypocrisy.

    Swift’s essay argues, in light of a policy of Malthusian liquidation, that rather than allowing children starve to death a profit could be made that would contribute to the common weal. Apparently informed by an American friend, the author says that children make a very fine dish. A passage towards the end of the essay perfectly encapsulates much of the awfulness of that time, and our own:

    I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food, at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.

    Swift wrote other great journalistic tracts such as The Tale of The Tub (1704) and in a golden age of satire his skills were venerated. His exact contemporary Alexander Pope, particularly in his epic poem The Rape of the Lock (1717) stirring up the upper classes, was more lyrical than trenchant. In fairness Pope’s wonderful Dunciad (1728-43) castigates stupidity in all its manifest forms and is dedicated to Swift. Indeed it was possibly partly written by him. It is also apposite to our time. Two quotes suffice.

    How with less reading than makes felons scape, less human genius than God gives an ape

    And out of context but an elaboration of the above.

    To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead.

    Consider also the final book of Gulliver’s Travels, where ‘Yahoos’ – a term that has entered the lexicon as a pejorative description of humans – describes lawyers and judges in the following unflattering terms:

    Judges… are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.

    Or

    It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly.

    1. H.L. Mencken

    In Kraus’ own time only the legendary muckraking American journalist H.L. Mencken is comparable. He wrote a fantastic treatise on The American Language (1919 and revised) and was the bugbear of the American bourgeoisie of his time. In colourful terms Mencken referred to the religious right in his day as ‘gaping primates, anthropoid rabble’, and the ‘boobiesie’. Famously through the Baltimore Sun he briefed Clarence Darrow to defend the teacher accused of the criminal offence of teaching Darwinism in the Scopes Trial (1925).

    Darrow’s opponent as prosecutor was three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan won, but Darrow won the moral victory not least in his devastating cross examination of Bryan on expert lessons from the Bible. The verdict was reversed on appeal. One week later Bryan died and Mencken penned his infamous obituary of William Jennings Bryan to a chorus of disapproval. Here is a flavour of it:

    Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. … He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”

    The thread that unites Kraus, Swift, and Mencken is fearless satire and rhetoric and opinion of the most audacious type, built on the defence of rationality against institutional, governmental and fundamentalist abuse.

    1. Christopher Hitchens

    Hitchens could not write a bad sentence, a line Edmund Wilson used about Scott Fitzgerald. The towering achievement of his gifted polemics is in my view  The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001), which he argues that he ought to be arrested for war crimes. There was an equally famous and blasphemous text about the ostensibly good Mother Therese of Calcutta The Missionary Position (1995). Irreverent journalism of this type is now sorely lacking!

    1. Ryszard Kapuscinski

    The book on the Islamic Revolution in Iran Shah of Shahs (1982) or his equally famous book on the fraud that was Haille Selassie The Emperor (1978) are eye-witness accounts, and rightly lauded. He had no fear, like Hitchens, of wading into dangerous territories, but his wisdom is contained in other more reflective books.

    Whereas learning about the world is labour, and a great all consuming one at that. Most people develop quite antithetical talents, in fact-to look without seeing, to preserve oneself within oneself.
    Travels with Herodotus (2004)

    Or best of all in Imperium (1993), his best book and a summation, he writes:

    Three plagues, three contagions threaten the world. The first is the plague of nationalism. The second is the plague of racism. The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.

    All three share one trait a common denominator an aggressive all powerful total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that waits its sacrificial victims.

    The final word is left to Karl Kraus, who I regard as the second greatest journalist of all time, after Swift:

    Those who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent.


    Feature Image: Suzy Hazelwood

  • Public Intellectuals: Voltaire

    Voltaire (1694-1778) is the self-invented name of François-Marie Arouet, riffed on a childhood description of him as a determined little man. He belongs in the Panthéon in Paris, old wise and wizened, but eyes sharp and gleaming through the stone. The central figure in the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s legacy is now being systematically dismantled worldwide.

    It is notable that Black Lives Matter sought to desecrate his statue despite condemnation of slavery in his most famous book Candide (1759). It was an unjust attack, even allowing for his occasional ambiguity as a product of his times. Why not go to Monticello and attack icons of Thomas Jefferson? John F Kennedy famously said in a meeting of Nobel Prize winners in the White House: ‘there is more intellect in this room except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.’ We may not simply be desecrating statues, but also those who brought Enlightenment to the human soul.

    Voltaire’s work is eclectic and difficult to classify. His plays are rightly disparaged, though these were often his main source of income. They also brought a lengthy stay in the Bastille, as well as forced exile for over two years in London, where he got to know among others Newton and Swift. There, he wrote a celebratory text on the English, famously describing them as a nation of one hundred religions but only one sauce. He went on to popularize Newton, and is attributed with spreading the story of the apple tree.

    So, using quotations from the man himself let’s explore his central contribution.

    Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille from 16 May 1717 to 15 April 1718 in a windowless cell.
    1. Freedom Of Speech

    I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

    If we resort to ‘no platforming’ or censoring people for saying things we disagree with then all is lost. Sadly, we no longer have a polity dedicated to ideal speech, the utopia envisaged by Habermas, via Jeremy Bentham. Instead, we find a uniform, soporific social media blandness.

    Ronald Dworkin  towards the end of his illustrious career, and in response to the Danish Cartoon incident, wrote a nuanced defence of the right to offend, saying:

    Ridicule is a distinct kind of expression: its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended.

    So, in a democracy no one, however powerful or important, can have a right not to be insulted or offended.

    Thus, for example, in 2015, when 12 journalists from satirical paper Charlie Hebdo were shot in a terrorist attack, Voltaire’s Trait sur la tolerance/ Treaty on Tolerance (1763), which defends freedom of speech was drawn attention to. Protesters marched down the Boulevard Voltaire in Paris brandishing images of the great man shouting: Je suis Charlie.

    In the treatise he argued: Oh, different worshippers of a peaceful god. …love God and your neighbour.

    Christoper Hitchens Oscar Wilde, along with others such as the English judge Stephan Sedley, have in substance also remarked that the freedom to speak inoffensively is a freedom not worth having  They are merely his intellectual offspring.

    Voltaire with Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-François de La Harpe.
    1. Religion

    If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

    The problem in this post-truth-transhumanist zeitgeist is that there exists a moral vacuum. Moral relativism and the structuralists have destroyed community, sociability and the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. The death of God in people’s lives has undermined society and social ordering. Habermas‘ most recent text in effect says so. Voltaire agrees.

    Voltaire was actually an atheist but deliberately circumspect. On his death bed he was asked did he want the services of a priest for the last rites and renounce Satan. His Delphic response was: ‘This is no time to be making new enemies.’

    Thus, the arch-rationalist and pragmatist recognised the need for doubt. He understood the need for Christian compassion and religion as a source of social order. Indeed, he famously was sceptical of certainties.

    On the brink of the destruction of the ancien regime, he spent his final twenty-five years in Ferney, a fabulous estate near the Swiss border at Geneva. It was built to some extent on the proceeds of winning the French lottery. He treated his workers admirably and built a model town, which I have had the privilege of visiting.

    Luckily, he was not around to witness the descent of the French Revolution into barbarism and terror ushered in by virulent atheists such as St Just and Robespierre.

    Indeed, Thomas Paine, the author of The Rights of Man and co-author of The French Declaration of The Rights (1793) narrowly avoided the guillotine by a mark on the wrong door at the height of the Terror.

    In the interests of balance it was worth recalling another of his aphorisms on religion:

    I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it. (Letter to Étienne Noël Danielsville, May 16, 1767)”

    and

    God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

    Voltaire at Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci, by Pierre Charles Baquoy.
    1. Miscarriages of Justice

    It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

    In the summer of 1765, in the little town of Abbeville in Picardie in northern France, three young men, Franzoi’s-Jean Lefebvre, chevalier de La Barre, Gaillard d’Alene and Charles Moisnel, were accused of sacrilege, blasphemy and irreligion. A crucifix had been damaged on a bridge leading to Abbeville. The three young men had been observed failing to doff their hats as a religious procession passed. They had been heard singing songs with pornographic allusions to the Virgin Mary. Shocking and libertine books were discovered in La Barre’s room, among them Voltaire’s Dictionarie Philosophique, printed anonymously in Geneva in 1764.

    On July 1 1766, La Barre was tortured and beheaded. His body was burnt on a pyre together with Voltaire’s Dictionary. Voltaire heard about the case in his retreat at Ferney, when the first accusations were made.

    At first, he was hopeful that the death sentence would be commuted. Later, when he learned that the execution had taken place, he was horrified. In a letter to a friend, he expressed his horror at the strange combination of frivolity and cruelty he observed in the French. After the burning and symbolic execution of his Dictionary he felt indirectly targeted and under genuine threat. Extradition in fraught times was a possibility.

    He retaliated brilliantly. In the 1769 edition of the Encyclopaedia entitled La Raison par alphabet, Voltaire includes an article on torture in which he relates La Barre’s ordeal. The prosecution mentioned this scandalous book which was later put on the Vatican’s Index Libro.

    He wrote initially in the hope of achieving a retrial. With each new attempt to intervene on behalf of the accused, Voltaire goes back to the documents, re-reading and cross-checking. As new information comes to light, he modifies his arguments, considering the potentially biased nature of the “facts” that had been presented to him.

    Noticeably Voltaire scatters them throughout his letters to friends, but also circulates them among important members of the judiciary. Luckily, he had the privilege of being on friendly terms with the powerful. Thus, he enjoyed a volatile lifelong relationship with Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great in Russia as well as the King of France. This saved his skin.

    In the Le Barre case what was at issue was not the legality of the proceedings, but the legitimacy of the judiciary.

    A crucial text Prix de la justice et de humanity (1777), describes the French justice system from the point of view of a Swiss protestant traveller in France. Yet, the last important text Voltaire wrote on the case was Le Cri du sang innocent (1775), a letter addressed to the King of France, Louis XVI, and signed by La Barre’s co-accused who had escaped to Prussia. It was a decidedly brave stance.

    He also intervened famously in the Calas affair, involving a Protestant merchant who was sentenced to death on the Wheel by the Parliament in Toulouse. and executed on March 10th, 1762 after being convicted of murdering one of his sons who had openly converted to Catholicism. Voltaire wrote to the Comte argental and Memo la Comtesse:

    …You will ask me, my divine angels, why I am so interested in this merchant of Toulouse who has been broken on the wheel. I will tell you. First, it is because I am a man. Then it is because I see how foreigners in discussing this affair condemn us. Is it necessary to make the name of France stink all over the continent…. which dishonours the whole of human nature?

    Voltaire was contacted about the case, and after initial suspicions that Calas was guilty of anti-Catholic fanaticism were dispelled by his investigations, he began a campaign to get the sentence overturned, claiming that Marc-Antoine had committed suicide because of gambling debts and being unable to finish his university studies

    Voltaire’s efforts were successful, and King Louis XV received the family and had the sentence annulled in 1764. The king fired the chief magistrate of Toulouse, and in 1765 Jean Calas was posthumously exonerated. There was also the posthumous pardon of the Comte De Lally, which led to a comment from a Swiss functionary with whom he maintained cordial but confrontational relationships: ‘You seem to attack Christianity but do the work of a Christian.’

    Portrait of Voltaire in the Palace of Versailles, 1724-1725.
    1. Post Truth

    Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

    and

    It is forbidden to kill; therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

    Is there a more apt comment on the way our post-truth disinformation society justifies genocide, racism and the exclusion and murder of the other

    Then there is the defining quote representing the motif of his career: It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

    1. Self-Care

    We also find him dispensing advice that is superior to any self-help books currently on the market, and certainly a lot better than Jordan Peterson’s

    The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.

    and

    Let us cultivate our garden.

    And he did so for twenty-five years.

    So, what if he was a bit of a libertine. The alt right and indeed puritanical left are very adept at confusing sexual licence with immorality.

    He also wrote science fiction. In Micromegas (1752) fiction aliens visiting earth learn that a theologian Thomas Acquinas said the universe was made uniquely for mankind they collectively erupted in laughter.

    He is really the creator of all that is now being lost. The father of constitutionalism, the rule of law, decency and anti-extremism, a hater of superstition. His scepticism still stares down from the Panthéon.

    Feature Image: Voltaire’s tomb in the Paris Panthéon

  • Public Intellectuals: Fyodor Dostoevsky

    In an age of unrestrained Russian-bashing, the figure of Fyodor Dostoevsky might seem a provocative choice for this Public Intellectual series. He remains, however, in my view, the greatest writer of prose fiction who has ever lived. His greatest novels The Devils/Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) are, frankly, unsurpassed in world literature.

    As I see it, other great Russian novels of his time, Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev and Anna Karenina (1878) by Leo Tolstoy are just a notch below; perhaps reaching the heights of Crime and Punishment (1866) or The Idiot (1869), the two lesser of his four great novels.

    This is to assume that his other works are of lesser value. Yet in the novella Notes from an Underground (1864) as well as White Knights (1848) Dostoevsky surpasses The Death of Ivan Illich (1886) by Tolstoy.

    The anti-hero of Notes from an Underground anticipates a form of government where:  

    All human actions will then of course be calculated, mathematically, like logarithm tables up to 108,000, and recorded in a calendar; or even better, well-intentioned publications will then appear … in which everything will be so precisely calculated and recorded that there will no longer be deliberate acts or adventures in the world.

    This he suggests would create a reaction, in the form of a dictator:

    I, for example, wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in the midst of all this reasonableness that is to come, suddenly and quite unaccountably some gentleman with an ignoble, or rather a reactionary and mocking physiognomy were to appear and, arms akimbo, say to us all: ‘Now, gentlemen, what about giving all this reasonableness a good kick with the sole purpose of sending all those logarithms to hell for a while so we can live for a while in accordance with our own stupid will!

    In fact, across Russian literature only Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov wrote better short story writers. Besides being a master of the short story form, Chekhov was primarily a playwright. Unprecedented in world letters, he is almost the equal of Dostoevsky, but not quite!

    In Russian letters thereafter only the great novels of Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and the Margarita (1967) and The White Guard (1925) the latter of which perfectly encapsulates – unlike our official media – the reasons for Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Many Russians (and indeed some Ukrainians) view what was the breadbasket of the Russian empire as integral to and inseparable from Russia itself.

    Portrait by Vasily Perov, c. 1872

    Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?

    In a famous monograph (1959), Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?, George Steiner argued that the two authors represent polar opposites in the Western canon, the former epic, utopian, and aspiring to achieve heaven on earth – with all its attendant dangers. The latter, for all his peasant Christianity and hatred of nihilism, asserting the pre-eminence of free will, while portraying a world beset by evil, intrigue and deceit.

    The great Russian effete of a later era Vladimir Nabokov, lecturing in exile in Columbia University claimed he despised Dostoevsky’s vulgarity and excess. Of course, unlike Nabokov, Tolstoy or Turgenev – the latter of whom Dostoevsky had a fractious relationship – Dostoevsky was not an aristocrat. He was not a blue blood. His father was a ‘mere’ country doctor, murdered after a descent into dissolution and an echo, Freud argues in Dostoevsky and Parricide (1928), of the central theme of The Brothers Karamazov. Moreover, Dostoevsky was profoundly anti-Catholic

    It should also be said that Dostoevsky was an editor, journalist, and social critic, which could be a dangerous role to play in Czarist Russia. He was really a philosopher in that all his great books are novels of ideas, and display in all its fullness the eschatological imagination. An intellectual of the highest rank, and superb jurist and penologist, not just in terms of the immense amount of attention devoted to questions of justice and the criminal process in his work – not least the trial of Dmitri Karamazov – but also heavily influenced by his penal servitude in Siberia.

    Also, uncomfortably for this writer at least, he was a deeply religious man, and there was no hypocrisy evident in this outlook. He acquired a deep religious faith from his mother during his childhood, quite contrary to the secular temper of his age. While I distrust this, I understand in Freudian terms its aetiology.

    He was, however, deeply anti-Catholic. At one point his apparetnly omniscient Idiot, Prince Myshkin exclaims:

    In my opinion Roman Catholicism isn’t even a religion, but most decidedly a continuation of the Holy Roman Empire, and everything in it is subordinate to that idea, beginning with faith. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly throne and took up the sword; and since then everything has gone on in the same way, except they’ve added lies, fraud, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, wickedness. They have trifled with the most sacred, truthful, innocent, ardent feelings of the people, have bartered it all for money, for base temporal power. And isn’t that the teachings of the Antichrist?’

    Dostoevsky, 1847.

    Early Period

    In his school years, splendidly documented by his great biographer Joseph Frank he intervened to protect children against thugs. On his way to the prestigious engineering school, where he was accepted in 1831, he was horrified by an act of savage brutality against a peasant he witnessed at a coach station. Later, through his hugely influential periodical Diary Of A Writer – not unlike Charles Dickens’ Household Words or All The Year Round towards the end of his life – he declaimed against a brutal flogging of a serf by an aristocrat, who was put on trial and justly punished. There is no doubt that from the get-go his sympathies were with the little man. Thus, like Charles Dickens he was the chronicler of his time in Time.

    Thus, for his entire life no matter how famous he became he was always an advocate for the poor, students if they had legitimate grievances, those falsely accused, unless, unforgivably, they were Jewish. Poor Folks (1845) is of course his first novel and is a huge success and a minor masterpiece. It is, however, an elaboration of that greater Russian work Dead Souls (1842) by Gogol whose awful theme is the purchasing of dead peasants’ souls for profit. The ultimate extension of the landlord class. This is again prescient for our times.

    Poor Folks was acclaimed as the first exercise in social realism, and the plight of self-abnegation before corporate feudalism. Here we find words relevant to our neoliberal age: ‘Judge whether one was right to abuse oneself for no reason and be reduced to undignified mortification.’ Today’s serfs are subject to social media targeting in an age of surveillance and consumer capitalism. Our very identities are mined for data.

    Poor Folks was followed by The Double (1846), which though not among his great novels expresses the split personality – a dominant theme in his oeuvre to come –  as later do Oscar Wilde in A Picture of Dorian Grey (1891), Robert Louis Stephenson in Jekyll and Hyde (1886), and more recently Naomi Kleins’ Doppleganger A Trip into the Mirror World.

    Vissarion Belinsky

    Belinsky

    During this early period Dostoevsky came under the influence of the intellectual Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky who was torn between the veneration of the poor – a form of Christian humanism – and an overarching commitment to materialism. The book expresses that conflict.

    The success of Poor Folk led him to being welcomed into intellectual circles. An unfortunate association with the Petrashevsky Circle, however, led to him being exiled to Siberia and then conscripted into the army. Moreover, he strongly believed he was about to be executed as the Tsar staged a mock execution of him and his co-conspirators in Samonkey Square. Interestingly, one of those involved in his persecution was Ivan Nabokov, a distant relative of Vladimir Nabokov.

    This terrifying event it is said to have turned his head grey. It scarred him for life and was fictionally recreated in The Idiot (1869). We may assume that the description of the plight of a person sentenced to death by the state in The Idiot is biographical, considering his own experience of narrowly avoiding the Czarist firing squad. By comparison with the fate of a person assailed and killed by brigands he says: ‘the whole terrible agony lies in the fact that you will most certainly not escape, and there is no greater agony than that’. He asks: ‘Who says that human nature is capable of bearing this without madness?’

    That and Siberia, where he underwent extreme hardship led to the fascination that engendered Crime and Punishment. In Siberia, as diarised by his biographer, he became less interested and mistrustful of the application of the letter, as opposed to the spirit of the law. Dostoevsky was never a literalist in legal interpretation terms, and was acutely conscious of the law’s failings. He was treated barbarically and barely survived. The law and its failings went on to dominate much of the rest of his fiction.

    He returned a felon but quickly contributed to Time magazine, along with several other journals thereafter as editor and contributor, and to his next defining book The House of The Dead (1854), which offers a far better examination of the gulags than Solzhenitsyn.

    Hans Hobern’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb.

    Nihilism

    This period of incarceration led to the development of a complex dialectic through his life. His hatred of nihilism – a phrase actually coined by Turgenev for the character Bazharov in his masterpiece Fathers and Sons (1862), alongside his warm embrace of Young Russia, a movement recalling Thomas Davis in Ireland and Disraeli in Britain. It was a progressive movement for reform in Russia, not least in seeking to ameliorate the conditions of the serfs.

    Dostoevsky despised the nihilistic attitude, expressed ironically in Turgenev’s masterpiece: ‘That is not our business let us have a grand clearance first.’

    The Russia of his lifetime, from Nicolas I onwards, was a time of great political turbulence and the development of revolutionary cabals often to reform the plight of the serfs. There was also a dialectic perfectly conveyed between Turgenev and Dostoevsky of a need for Russia to become more European. Turgenev, the aristocratic exile, argued for to become more autarchic. Dostoevsky sided with the poor folk and Mother Russia but not in a shrill way. The idea he coined, evident as early as 1861, was Pan Humanism, within a Russia influenced, but not dominated, by Westernisation.

    The success led to a degree of European decadence, and for the rest of his life he was often abroad and in debt, though finally happily married after a string of unhappy relationships to Anna, his stenographer who he adored and was most attentive to.

    What became a gambling addiction developed during his peripatetic European travels, and put enormous stress on his wife. Yet, in a moment of epiphany, after essentially losing the family silver, he finally gave it all up. His great novella The Gambler (1866) offers a frenzied portrayal of an illness, which destroys lives – as I have witnessed during my professional career. It also provides a lacerating attack on enduring national cultures. Here, Russians are portrayed as gambling riskily and haphazardly, Germans methodically and in a philistine way, while the French display an elegant decadence. How times have changed.

    Prior to The Gambler there arrived the seminal existential text, unique in his oeuvre, Notes from Underground (1865), which predates Sartre and Camus by an epoch but is no doubt influenced by Kierkegaard.

    The self-reflexiveness of the narrator in that he is both accused and accuser, torn between rational egoism and a concern for others. This is the Dostoevsky dilemma, and a prelude to the themes of the great novels to follow.

    So on to Crime and Punishment (1868), written for the establishment Russian magazine Messenger, and a final step towards financial stability. It is his most famous and widely read work. To say it is not his best work would be true, but misleading in that within it scope it remains one of the great works of European literature.

    The novel is the prototypical detective novel. Without this there is no Wilkie Collins or Raymond Chandler. The anti-hero Raskolnikov is torn between a nihilism inspiring an Übermensch sense of superiority, and a Christian piety. Here Dostoevsky anticipates the serial killers and corporate monsters of our age.

    The prosecutor Petrovich is the voice of atonement and represents Dostoevsky’s sense of guilt before God. The book is also a condemnation of extremism and lawlessness.

    When the prosecutor first hauls Raskolnikov into custody he expresses curiosity about an article that Raskolnikov wrote called ‘On Crime’, in which he suggests that certain rare individuals – the benefactors and geniuses of mankind – enjoy a right to ‘step across’ legal or moral boundaries if those boundaries act as an obstruction to the success of their idea. The prosecutor, in a much kinder way than the approach offered by Camus in The Outsider (1942) – who was hugely influenced by Dostoevsky not least in his play of The Possessed/Devils (1959) – finally forces him to confess.

    The Idiot (1871) is the book that pleased Dostoevsky the most – and is arguably his most disciplined novel – and there is much of him in it. The central character of Prince Myshkin was much influenced by Dostoevsky seeing Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ (1529) painting. No doubt it expresses his deep faith in the decent and Christian man.

    Yet Myshkin’s other-worldliness is the cause of his self-destruction, along with death and chaos wrought on others. The crucible of Russia at that time augments dark Dostoevsky’s mysticism. It is deeply personal and invokes his mock execution and epilepsy. It is a work that is curiously relevant to our time of vaccines, compliance and control, where 90% of humanity are to be treated as cattle, a process which can be achieved through re-education and vogueish Social Darwinism.

    Joachim Schnürle

    The Devils

    This brings us to the great citadel of world literature and in my view the greatest novel ever written The Devils (1868). At the time Dostoevsky was much influenced by the malign neglect of the civilised anarchist Herzen and his criticism that nihilists wished to abandon books, science and instead embrace destruction. Herzen in a famous polemic, echoing Dostoevsky’s own ideas I suspect, argued that Shakespeare and Raphaël were higher in the pantheon than socialism, nationalism or the emancipation of the serfs. The immediate sensation which precipitated the novels was the activities of the real life murderous Nechaev, a model for many of The Devils.

    Towards the end of The Devils, one of the conspirators Lyamshin is put on trial and asked ‘Why so many murders, scandals and outrages committed?’ He responds that it was to promote:

    the systematic undermining of every foundation, the systematic destruction of society and all its principles; to demoralize everyone and make hodge-podge of everything, and then, when society was on the point of collapse – sick, depressed, cynical and sceptical, but still with a perpetual desire for some kind of guiding principle and for self-preservation – suddenly to gain control of it.

    The novel is the greatest condemnation of extremism in the history of ideas, containing his essential credo that once you have rejected Christ it is possible to go to inordinate lengths of evil. The book provides almost a replica of the current political climate where anarchy and extremism prevail, and in the midst of it all is the crucial figure of native Dostoevsky ambivalence, Stavrogin – a man who is torn between good and bad impulses, but the nihilism and decadence prevail.

    The essential argument is that materialism, nihilism and decadence will stop at nothing and boundary after boundary will be crossed in the descent towards the personal and societal abyss.

    Dostoevsky response, or antidote, is to assert that humanity must take collective responsibility in a Christian way. Thus, when Stavrogin reveals his appalling crime to the elder Tikhon, the latter responds by asking the forgiveness of Stavrogin: ‘Having sinned, each man has sinned against all men, and each man is responsible in some way for the sins of others. There is no isolated sin. I’m a great sinner, perhaps greater than you.’

    After its publication, and his resumption of journalistic activities with The Diary of a Writer (1873-1881) he was widely acknowledged as the greatest living writer in Russia. He finally settled in his homeland, holding court both in letter and visitations to an increasingly enamoured public. In essence, he became the moral conscience of Russia.

    Though the Diary of a Writer – finally published in totality by Scribner’s – contains some of his greatest short stories. He also rages against injustice and took a keen interest in the criminal process.

    Dostoyevsky’s notes for Chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov.

    The Brothers Karamazov

    Thereafter he began his final novel The Brothers Karamazov. His sensitivity to injustice, it must be said, is afflicted with one blind spot, lest this piece be represented as hagiographical! He showed a lifelong hatred of Jews, who he and Turgenev too often caricatured, in the most vicious of terms. When a Jew was correctly acquitted, he bemoaned the verdict. In this sense he a creature of his time, but also trespassed a moral boundary.

    His antisemitism was a product of at times, a Little Russian mentality and his sense of the volk, so there is a negative and abhorrent mysticism here of old tensions, resurfacing in our age. Also, his embrace of what might be described as Populism at this stage has dangerous relevance to our time.

    Many of his great books were written like cliffhangers under enormous stress explaining the fervid prose, and as every book of his final novel – three years in genesis – came out the public reacted in a way not unlike the London public’s reaction to the death of Little Nell. His work, along with his literary peers, forged Russian consciousness, for better or worse.

    This culminated in a famous face off where all the intelligentsia of Russia attended an event to celebrate Pushkin’s anniversary. A feud had been brewing for decades between two opposite visions of Mother Russia, one represented by Turgenev with his condescending attitude towards the poor folk and his internationalism; the other by Dostoevsky who represented the Christian Tsarist nationalist strain.

    Dostoevsky’s great speech at the banquet is well worth reading. It effectively destroys the reputation of Turgenev and had the impact at the time of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream.’ It ends in a beautiful expression of compromise and Pan Humanism, envisioning a Christian Russia sympathetic to the poor, but receptive to other cultures, urging respect for tradition but acknowledging a need for reform and tolerance.

    It arrived while he was writing The Brothers Karamazov, by which time the debts, the epilepsy, the chaotic lifestyle and huge fame had taken their toll, He was writing around the clock to complete it, with old father time breathing down his neck.

    This book is a foundation stone of literate moderate civilisation, containing everything of the selfless Christianity and love he espoused, embodied in the character of Aloysha, who is a more modulated version of Myshkin from The Idiot. It contains some of the greatest passages in literature, including The Grand Inquisitor dialogue, and culminates in over one hundred pages of the trial of Dmitry Karamazov for parricide.

    It should be said that like Dickens, Dostoevsky distrusted lawyers, not least their tendency to allow their eloquence to overflow at the expense of the truth, and their blindness to the moral consequences of their action. The representation of the defence speech in Karamazov is deliberately weak. Even though, as the book makes clear, Dmitry is morally guilty for his monster father’s death, he is not legally guilty. Yet the defence lawyers seem to rely on the mercy plea, and on a confused argument suggesting implicitly some people deserve to be killed. Not exactly a full throttle defence, but one recently evident in Ireland.

    Dostoyevsky identifies a broad moral continuum between a capacity for the highest and basest thoughts and deeds. If any character represents the views of Dostoyevsky himself it is perhaps the chief prosecutor Ippolit Krillovitch, who, uncannily, like the author, dies within a few months of the novel’s central events: the apparent patricide, and aftermath, of the wily and debauched Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. His sons represent different faces of a timeless character, and in the ensuing trial Krillovitch draws attention to the inadequacies of each. So searing are the insights that Dimitri is prompted to thank his own prosecutor, admitting that he: ‘told me a lot about myself that I didn’t know’.

    Krillovitch describes those of the Karmazov ilk as having: ‘natures with such a broad sweep… capable of encompassing all manner of opposites, of contemplating both extremes at one and the same time – that which is above us, the extremity of the loftiest ideals, and that which is below us, the extremity of the most iniquitous degradation.’ He adds: ‘others have their Hamlets; so far, we Russians have only our Karamazovs.’ That Karamazov archetype surely extends beyond Russia.

    The reception to The Brothers Karamazov was ecstatic, and his finances looked permanently healthy, but accounts of the time show how frail he had become. The multiple social engagement at this stage were not helpful and a stroke occurred after some final pieces in Diary of a Writer, many published after his death.

    All of Russia mourned the death of a man who had been sent to Siberia. They had lost their great writer and intellect.

    Dostoevsky’s funeral,

    Legacy

    For our present age there is much to ponder over Dostoyevksy’s legacy. First is the need for the assertion of Christian, or humanist values. This includes the establishment of community, even if, as I would argue, this remains secular in its guidance. Moreover, we must protect the poor, the falsely accused and the defenceless. Moral nihilism in all its guises must also be opposed. And the devastating effect of extremism should be portrayed.

    We should also be alive to the excesses of Dostoevsky in a tendency towards Populism, veneration of an abstract volk and the denunciation of minorities, including Jews.

    Overall, he stands as the greatest intellect literature has produced, a mystic and theoretician, as well as a practical journalist. Moreover, the novels contain far more insightful philosophy than most arid books of philosophy,

    Along with Leonardo da Vinci, and even more so than Shakespeare, I would go so far as to say that he is the greatest genius that has ever drawn breath. I suspect he would have been distrustful of da Vinci’s cosmopolitanism and veneration of science. Sparks will surely fly if they ever meet!

  • J. G. Ballard: Foreshadowing Collapse

    The fusion of mood and setting, the mapping of a landscape of the troubled mind – that is what really matters in Ballard.
    Martin Amis

    I have been drawing attention for some time to the disintegration of a neo-liberal world order. The pandemic has delivered the coup de grâce, but the fighter’s limbs had been flailing around like jelly for some time.

    The disease arrived at the perfect pitch of lethality to lay low Western societies drowning in casino capitalism, religious fundamentalism and post-truth delusions. An unravelling natural world, confronting climate change and over-exploitation seems to have cast a last shot at redemption against the latter day conquistadors of Goldman Sachs, and their kind. A multi-variant insidious viral strain has emerged, against which there is no conclusively effective pharmaceutical remedy or long-term immunity.

    Covid-19 has wreaked most devastation in countries worst afflicted by the Financial Crash beginning in 2008; the Southern fringe of Europe and especially the U.S. U.K., and Ireland; the underlying health of these populations already undermined by ‘lifestyle’ diseases – especially the stress of living in permanent income insecurity.

    Only a few small Western nations preserving vestiges of a Post-War II Keynesian compromise between capitalism and socialism have rejected a feudal property market and death-on-the-instalment-plan living standards. Scandinavian outliers and New Zealand have avoided both excess death and dehumanisation of lasting lockdowns, or Chinese totalitarianism.

    In these islands of civilisation there exists sufficient social solidarity, trust in state institutions and a bedrock of economic security for carriers of the disease to isolate voluntarily. Elsewhere, it goes against the grain of pernicious neoliberalism to jeopardise one’s income or sacrifice hedonistic freedoms for the greater good.

    For the most part, Ireland differs from the U.S. insofar as rather than religious zealotry, a corporate fundamentalism – with an all-consuming cost-benefit analysis of life –  is the dominant paradigm. Among a shrinking Irish ruling class dull anti-intellectualism incubated on the rugby pitches of UCD holds sway, and is muscularly enforced in the Four Courts.

    Now, across the world, neoliberalism is giving way to its nasty ideological cousin, neoconservatism, wherein the forces of the state enforce a near permanent lockdown that draws more and more into the financial abyss, while a servile media provides the necessary distraction.

    Under lockdown we seem to be entering the territory of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

    There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.

    Empire of the Sun

    Marooned in leafy Surrey as a barrister-in-law in the south of England during this Covid period I have borne witness to the U.K.’s profoundest Post-War crisis, with deaths per capita from the disease among the highest in the world; although when one takes account of the relative age of each population, Ireland has experienced almost as high a toll. And at least in the U.K. real debate has raged around the erosion of civil liberties attendant to lockdowns; however hypocritical it may be for ideologues of the neoliberal order to reject the lethal fruit of their politics.

    Now, surveying the scene, it strikes me that in numerous works J.G. Ballard anticipated a major meltdown.

    Ballard was irretrievably damaged as a young boy by internment under the Japanese in Shanghai during World War II. This is vividly captured in the memoir Empire of the Sun (1984) that Stephen Spielberg made into an Oscar-winning film.

    The work details executions, casual brutality and dehumanising conditions. Like other Concentration Camp survivors, besides the lifelong trauma, Ballard clearly appreciated the fragility of life thereafter, motivating him to produce almost twenty novels, as well as numerous short stories and works of non-fiction. It also lowered his opinion of humanity, or rather revealed what each of us is capable of doing to one another.

    As John Gray put it:

    His traumatic childhood left him with the conviction – fully corroborated by events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – that order in society has no more substance or solidity than a rackety stage set.

    Empire of the Sun is, however, atypical of his oeuvre, as the novels unveil differing dystopian visions. His books are often classified as science fiction, but the writing is of a higher literary calibre than that label would imply, and real possibilities are only slightly exaggerated.

    Image: Daniel Mc Auley

    The Drowned World

    Two early novels The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought (1964) anticipate an environmental apocalypse, although as Martin Amis points out, only The Drought attributes the cause to the Greenhouse Effect.

    The Drowned World is set among the last remnants of humanity, where foodstuffs and water are in short supply. In isolation, strange delusions and inner conflicts emerge among the characters, tendencies we may recognise in ourselves during this period of confinement.

    The ‘hero,’ biologist Dr Robert Kerans, finds:

    His unconscious was rapidly becoming a well-stocked pantheon of tutelary phobias and obsessions, homing on to his already over-burdened psyche like lost telepaths. Sooner or later the archetypes themselves would become restive and start fighting each other, anima against persona, ego against id….

    Under the strain of dislocation a new form of humanity is emerging that appears to be a regression towards Cro-Magnon Man:

    The growing isolation and self-containment, exhibited by the other members of the unit and from which only the buoyant Riggs seemed immune reminded Kerans of the slackening metabolism and biological withdrawal of all animal forms about to undergo a major metamorphosis … withdrawal was symptomatic not of a formant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment.

    We may hope our contemporary metamorphosis under lockdown may prepare us for a radically new environment, and that we do not, as in the novel, depart on a suicidal mission, like Kerans, ‘A second Adam searching for the forgotten paradise of the reborn sun.’

    Alas the signs are not good as resources dwindle and trickle down trickles out, while our natural inclination towards sociability is undermined by social distancing, enforced by the law.

    Image from 1980: Dublin City Library And Archive.

    Unlimited Dream Company

    The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) is a veiled attack on suburban U.K. consumerism. The cold metallic buildings have created a consumer-induced comma punctuated by visits to shopping centres and theme parks. A series of memorable passages evoke the scene:

    The pavements were deserted, the well-tended gardens like miniature memorial parks consecrated to the household gods of the television set and dishwasher.

    And,

    They sat in the sunlight with numerals on their windshields, the advance guard of a digital universe in which everything would be tagged and numbered, a doomsday catalogue listing each stone and grain of sand under my feet, each eager poppy.

    The ghostlike narrator, anti-hero, or hero – it is unclear – Blake is a fiendish Pied Piper of Hamlyn with sexual designs on the entire population of men, women and children, who he aims to liberate by teaching them to fly:

    I had taught them to fly, by guiding them through the doors of my body, and now they would make their own way to the sun.

    Like any demagogue intoxicated by his own rhetoric he believes that evil in this world will give way to paradise in the next:

    I was certain now that vice in this world was a metaphor for virtue in the next, and that only through the most extreme of those metaphors would I make my escape.

    It is no accident according to John Gray that the narrator’s name is Blake. In a letter, the poet William Blake declared ‘to the eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is imagination itself.’ Thus the character of Blake finds:

    Already I was thinking of my next vision, certain now that it would not be a dream at all, but a reordering of reality in the service of a greater and more truthful design, where the most bizarre appetites and the most wayward impulses would find their true meaning.

    Ballard is suggesting that our dominant consumerism is the living death of a theme-park existence, where all forms culture – or should that be infotainment – has been appropriated, packaged and commodified. This social structure is easily manipulated by the spin merchants that promise flight for all.

    Image: Fellipe Lopes

    Millennium People and Crash

    In a sense, Ballard expressly anticipates the current madness in a later novel Millennium People (2003), as the dark age he referenced is readily apparent – collective hysteria and a sequence of witch hunts.

    Millennium People finds members of the middle class resorting to irresponsible revolutionary and terrorist activities. Half-baked as it is, the approach of the terrorists in the novel seems akin to the well-intentioned, but largely irrelevant enterprise of Extinction Rebellion.

    Ballard is suggesting that the chattering class have lost their sense of civic responsibility and display an absurd sense of entitlement; a process that has only accelerated in recent times with income structures collapsing before our eyes.

    The most controversial book, and a delicate exercise in the boundaries of fiction and bad taste – not unlike Pasolini’s film Salo (1975) – is Crash (1973), which depicts the fetishist behaviour of those who get their thrills out of being involved in car crashes.

    The book acts as a metaphor for a thrill-seeking culture that seeks artificial stimulation. Glorification of death and suicidal ideation is evident in contemporary devotion to a blood sport such as MMA, and ‘heroes’ like Conor McGregor.

    Hugo Darnaut’s 1885 Ideal picture from the Stone Age.

    Mass Media Infection

    Several of Ballard’s works refer to our current Post-Truth loss of reason, as well as the onset of various witch hunts. This latter is apparent in the Blairite reforms of the criminal justice system, which brought a return to social primitivism.

    The Drowned World’s suggestion of a human reversion to Cro-Magnon Man now appears more and more prescient. Neoliberalism followed by neoconservatism will lead to social primitivism amidst the unravelling of civilisation. This is apparent in the lapse towards authoritarianism in Hungary and Italy; not to mention Mussolini-lite Varadkar in Ireland, the nastier Trump and the insidiously clownish Johnson. And as in Ballard’s imagination, professional standards are breaking down under the strain.

    Finally, in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) Ballard is rightly credited with predicting the Reagan presidency, but in that extended series of essays the overarching theme is how the mass media has infected us all like a virus, leading to docile stupidity or inanity, and inaction through manipulation; such is life, such is the virus.

    What we now see is bland consumeristic compliance, fetishistic behaviour, random acts of violence, witch hunts, and media manipulation preceding societal and ecological meltdown; where Millennium People engage in tokenistic act of self-sabotage, as they endeavour to subvert the inevitable.

    Featured Image: An aerial view of housing developments near Markham, Ontario