The Politics at God's Funeral

...This book is deceptively titled...

...In the middle of his account of the Russian (nineteenth century) Empire, one stumbles across: The most impressive testimony to the collective genius of the peasantry is the Russian language itself...

...Its more speculative component, equally familiar, is that capitalism--in particular "late capitalism"--is hurrying along the decline...

...Choice...

...capitulating to it...

...The first group spoke for thousands...

...there were Bibles to rewrite, traditions to invert, whole centuries of thought to enlist in _9 the cause of liberation...

...It is not a long and systematic essay on twentieth-century Russian literature but a set of prefaces to other people's work...

...This is not to say that the material is thin or trivial...

...Thus it becomes e a s i e r for a p p a r e n t l y sane people to-excuse Stalin and even to praise him...

...There is no point in entering the sectarian debate...

...Harrington acknowledges this revival, but insists that the overall decline in religiosity "is corroborated, not contradicted, by the recent arrival of a fundamentalism whose desperate orthodoxy tries to will the departing deity back into existence...

...There is much that is convincing elsewhere as well...

...In g e n e r a l , however, these relatively short pieces are full of the sort of detailed discussion t h a t comes only from a man who knows his stuff...

...Feeling that life among Asiatic barbarians is cheap, the cliche-prone Westerner can hate Hitler with a virulence that does not extend to the late and bloodthirsty dictator of Russia and his system...

...This crisis, Harrington asserts, calls for a united front of believers and serious atheists...

...At the very outset, this provocative selfdescription poses an interesting question...

...If, as Harrington asserts (he produces no evidence for this), "late" or state-run capitalism is the culprit, then why not vigorously affirm capitalism simpliciter...

...But in the latter half of the twentieth century, when the most prominent theologians in the world are already, in Harrington's own apt phrase, "doing the work of Nictzsche in the name of Christ," what is left for an atheist theologian to do...

...an excellent and scholarly contribution to the area of strategic studies . . . The work will appeal to professionals in the field as well as to graduate and advanced undergraduate students...

...In the end, Harrington must be called to account for his own desperate "orthodoxy...

...Far from despising theology, the anti-theologians turned to it in deadly earnest and created a wholly novel tradition of secular-humanist scholarship...

...but there is an occasional oddity which appears to be the result of haste or carelessness, e.g., the opening chapter's assertion that the Russian Empire passed away with the Romanovs...

...Another prejudice or bromide has been heavily reinforced by Western media treatment of dissenters and writers such as Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn...

...Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich...

...He also cites the fact that Moral Majority candidates did rather poorly in the congressional elections of 1982...

...Even so, Hayward might have seen that such a proposition--aside from its flimsiness on primafacie grounds (collective g e n i u s ? ) - - i s a s t a l e dreg of the mystical rhetoric found in certain Russian writers of the last century, and not rare in this one...

...By these appearances, at least, religion--even in industrialized parts of the West--is surviving the best efforts of its prominent spokesmen...

...Consider his treatment of the claim, so central to the project of this book, that religiosity is declining in the West...

...the second for scores of millions...

...And so, with Feuerbach as its exemplar, the modern tradition of serious atheism took root...

...A true original, this impressive work deals with a subject that is central to military strategy yet has been little studied in itself . . . . An outstanding piece of scholarship...

...In The Politics at God's Funeral, Michael Harrington places himself within this tradition of dissent...

...By these accounts he was a formidable eccentric in the British tradition: a marvelous if erratic companion, brilliantly talented, something of a drunk and a d e p r e s s i v e , and a tremendous amateur in the b e s t sense of the word, with all his heart in his work, though lacking the c a r e e r i s t flair for slotting into a corporate environment...

...As Hayward shows, this is not exclusive to the Communist scheme of things, but goes well back into tsarist times, at least as far as Pushkin...

...1982 / paper 0-8157-0929-3 59.95 / cloth 0-8157-0930-7 526.95 Please send payment with orders to I[ I ~4 L~ THE AMERICAN SPHCTATOR . JANUARY 1984 37...

...Harrington's ringing indictraent of the Enlightenment philosophes, whose contempt for religion was equalled oily by their cynical toleration of the believing masses, is a case in point...

...The discussion is exhilarating and frustrating by turns, for Michael Harrington, atheist and Marxist, writes with all the irony and outrage of the consummate apostate Catholic...

...Standing outside it, Hayward might have pointed to this type of guff as a necessary reminder that we are still encumbered by a popular cartoon of the Russians as whiskered or l a n t e r n - j a w e d b a r b a r i a n s using stolen technology, the natives of a semi-Asiatic world quite apart from our own...

...It follows that the products of Russian writers have a special interest for the West...

...318 pp...

...In America it was vulgarized into the image of the h a l f - s a v a g e Russian with soul, so well known in the show b u s i n e s s , popular songs, and jokes of the 1930s and 1940s...

...o f America 6-AS Randall Street Annapolis, MD 21401 (301} 267-8522 Richard K. Betts "Betts is one of the brightest and most productive of the young scholars in the national security field, and Surprise Attack may be his best work to d a t e . . . highly recommended for the advanced student, the strategist, and the policymaker...

...Above all they offer a good deal of useful background to the one a s p e c t of Russian l i t e r a t u r e which colors its appearance in the West: the peculiar relationship between writers and the political f a b r i c of society...

...It is an ideological mantra, the favorite of Marxists everywhere...

...Maryland residents please add 5% sales tax...

...it is capitalism "increasingly run by the visible hand of the state...

...Late capitalism, having done so much to destroy the spiritual fabric of Western society, has created a common enemy: "the humdrum nihilism of everyday life...

...Harrington tries to avoid this problem with an appeal to the " r e a l " Marx of humanism and toleration...

...He is, as Hans Ehrenberg once said of Feuerbach, " a true child ~ of his century": a "non-knower" (Nichtkenner) o f death, and a "misknower" (Verkenner) of evil...

...128 pages, 7x10, 31 photos...

...indeed Hitler himself was one of us, and so hideously offensive in a way that Stalin was not and is not felt to be...

...Still, a question nags the reader throughout this rich account of the Western spiritual condition: Why has Michael Harrington, atheist and Marxist, labored so long over the history of a quintessential illusion...

...Most of the religious lambs who lay willingly with Marxist lions have long since been devoured...

...Foreign Affairs...

...It is sadder still that Harrington, in his earnest call for a united 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 19~ front,-is blind to the most obvious fact of all: No modern ideology has proved so systematically hostile to religion as Marxism itself...

...In this book t h e r e is a l i t t l e l e s s care than p r a i s e . With its generous preface by Leonard Schapiro and a long, a f f e c t i o n a t e i n t r o d u c t i o n by Patricia Blake, Writers in Russia: 1917-1978 seems at first not so much a monument of scholarship as a sort of l i t e r a r y dolmen or cairn to Max Hayward himself...

...His g r e a t love was l a n g u a g e s , of which he knew several...

...Hayward himself is not always free of this...

...Less well-known, however, is the simultaneous appearance of religiosidad popular, a n anti-political and anti-intellectual devotional movement now found throughout Latin America...

...Theology, once the domain of believers, was now redefined as a secular humanism that would liberate religion from itself...

...The first serious atheists had their work cut out for them...

...This c a s t s Russia as a fundamentally u n s t a b l e society, seething with popular discontent and held t o g e t h e r only by the r u t h l e s s There was nothing civil about i t . . . By Craig/k Symonds Cartography by Wilham J. Chpson This portable guide describes each battle in an authoritative narrative keyed to 43 full page...

...When a man comes along with the singular talent for opening this difficult field to us he deserves the most generous p r a i s e , and his work ought to be handled with the g r e a t e s t care...

...P o s s i b l y our greatest problem in dealing with Russian writers is a residue of clich~ which clings to the Western perception of Russians and their culture...

...A new era in religious thought had begun...

...None other--not even the closely related Slavic languages --can match it in its breathtaking resourcefulness...

...The nerves of Russia are uncommonly important to us, and so are her social nuts and bolts, so far as we can spy them out across a wide linguistic and political abyss...

...As for the proper politics of this united front, Harrington concludes by reciting the principles, "threadbare from misuse," of democratic socialism...

...Harrington's purpose is to explore "the political consequences of the disappearance of the Judeo-Christian God"wa disappearance which, in his view, cannot be understood apart from the machinations of "late capitalism...

...Among these Russian took pride of place, and with it he developed his superb gift for translation...

...He was the c o - t r a n s l a t o r of Doctor Zhivago (in which the c h a r a c t e r of Lara was based on Ivinskaya) and of Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright living in Europe...

...Working with others he also provided versions of writing by Mayakovsky, Isaac Babel, Yevgeny Schwartz and (among others) later authors like Andrei Amalrik and Andrei Sinyavsky...

...Their numbers make a bitter mockery of any call, however well-intentioned, for future coalitions of this sort...

...He is a self-styled atheist and "cultural Catholic," a "pious man of deep faith, but not in the supernatural...

...After all, Hitler's victims were mostly from among our sort...

...It is a familiar lament--or was, until evidence mounted of the American fundamentalist revival...

...His exploration ranges over two centuries of obituaries for the dying God: from the German metaphysicians, who cast Him out in the name of idealism, to the theologians of today, who report the latest non-sighting of the deus absconditus...

...through him we know Olga Ivinskaya's A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak...

...This type of special pleading 'is understandable in a man who has spent far more time inside books than among Russian peasants...

...Or why not argue, as does Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, that a free market economy, conjoined with democracy, has proved the only system in the world which safeguards religion itself...

...it is jesuitical...

...Michael Harrington cannot answer these questions, for he has not really told us what "late capitalism" is...

...I t is a deceptively simple argument because Harrington's premises, speculative at best, are also contentious-when, indeed, they are not contradicted by the facts...

...Perspective...

...It can help to explain, for instance, why the liquidation of tens of millions of Russians carries less emotional impact in the West than the murder of six million Jews by Middle European Germans...

...Ideal for battlefield hikinp~ classroom study, or as a gift to that Ctvll War buff in your family...

...Only $11.95 Please add $1 75 for each book ordered to cover shippmgand handling...

...The answer, of course, is politics...

...Harrington's case for the steady erosion of religiosity becomes weaker still if we consider--as he does not--the condition of the Church elsewhere in the West...

...This is not the reasoning of a sociologist...

...He gave us the English versions of Nadezhda Mandelstam's great memoirs, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned...

...As Paul Johnson notes in his recent book, Modern Times: While theologians at the Universities of Tiibingen and Utrecht were diminishing the total of Christian belief, strange charismatics in the slums of Mexico City and San Paulo, of Recife and R i o . . . were adding to it...

...There is much here to warm the hearts (and fuel the prejudices) of those who still harbor misgivings about Protestant existentialism and Vatican II...

...It is true that liberation theology, itself an example of diluted (if not decaying) belief, has attracted a following throughout Central America and Brazil...

...Late capitalism" is defined only once in 308 pages...

...Here, Harrington misses the point completely...

...Vtsa [] MasterCard Card Number Expires Cardholder's Signature The Nautical & Aviation P u b l i s b l n g Co...

...In his Heidelberg lectures of 1848, Ludwig Feuerbach announced his principal aim: to change "the friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, worshippers into worke r s . . . Christians, who on their own confession are half-animal and halfangel, into men--whole men...

...Of course, Hardngton's argument is not simply empirical...

...This is not a nitty, minor point...

...It is sad to see debate so quickly foreclosed...

...they must commit themselves to a "common transcendental which is neither supernatural nor anti-supernatural...

...the " o t h e r " Marx has had his theoreticians and his day...

...The answer, like his argument throughout, is deceptively simple...

...And if he did, we may be sure, his politics would lead him off the path of reason and into the poppy fields of Marxist taxonomy...

...two-color maps...

...Thus the eighth chapter of his book, "God's Christian Burial," is perhaps the most incisive and scathing treatment to date of certain custodians of Christian orthodoxy-those who responded to modernity by Mary Tedeschi is Assistant Managing Editor of the Public Interest...

...As Marx himself argued against Bruno Bauer, it is the very separation of church and state which allows American society to be the most religious in the world...