LETTERS

...Although they had to communicate their knowledge in a critical tone, for the first time they had the privilege of discussing these previously tabooed subjects with their students and the general audience...

...Protivism has also served to acquaint Soviet readers, if only slightly, with the major representatives of functionalism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and other contemporary ideas...

...I saw it during the first week, when people were there for their own reasons...

...They are drawn towards the sterile solipsisms of madness and drugs or the issueless pseudo-rebellions of criminality and indiscriminate sexual indulgence...

...There are skills and resources within this group that we are just beginning to recognize...

...he was astonished by Abel's comments on "the audience...

...Democracy is the worst possible form of government," as Churchill said, "except for all those others...

...It is essentially a conservative job, and perhaps a Dissent contributor finds it a bit awkward to take a conservative position...

...Editors: Lionel Abel's piece on "Marat/Sade" [Dissent, March-April 1966] was excel lent...

...the audience was by far the most peculiar I have been a member of, and it reacted quite as Abel reports his audience re acted, with spontaneous enthusiasm (and also with some loud boos...

...This new "constructive protivism" is expressed in the criticism of the concept of industrial society, in a recent article by Mitin and Semenov...

...but the possibilities inherent in all this are never exploited by Weiss, if indeed he ever recognized them...

...Or better than the criminal or the madman...

...Some observers see the dispossessed in our society as hav ing a sinister quality, mindless and cruel...

...Can one say to him that society can be perfected...

...But they contend that we must also look at the crucial differences which separate various industrial countries...

...Not reconciles them: gives an image of their coexisting in the same mad mind...

...Traditional ideological protivism now turned into "creative debunking" with the primary purpose of imparting new information...

...Whatever the sources of protivism, one can well sympathize with the Soviet scholars who are forced to resort to such subterfuges in order to advance their work...

...Abel's insight into the intellectual sources of this nihilistic exaltation of madness is very illuminating...

...Here, pretty obviously, is Lionel Abel talking with a bright, dislocated student...

...There was only one traditional solution to this problem: an ideological critique of Western ideas which would provide an opportunity for summarizing these ideas, with the excuse that they were unknown to the Soviet reader...

...What, more than taste, kept him from responding in the same way...

...May I make some observations stimulated by his ideas...

...Riessman, in particu lar, has done monumental work in this field, as his Dissent article reveals...

...I would like to dissent from Professor Feuer's view that protivism plays a negative role in the development of Soviet philosophy and social sciences...

...Baby being long overdue, the congregation of the faithful first became skeptical, then frankly disgusted...

...If yesterday's myths are today a source of embarrassment, the corrective is not creating a new myth attributing only barrenness, at best, to the dispossessed...

...Thus, one of the first critical monographs on the work of pre-Revolutionary social scientists was devoted to Maksim Kovalevsky, the Russian Empire's first and most important pioneer of objective social science and the teacher of Pitirim Sorokin...

...With Stalinism on the defensive, there still remained the problem of channeling outside information in a way that would not disturb the foundation of the Soviet system...

...Perhaps he means the statement to apply only to the disaffected young, but the tone of the passage is at the very least ambiguous in this regard...

...it encouraged one to respond sympathetically to the madness...

...In an earlier issue Dissent carried this quote from Jean Malaquais: "Once upon a time there was a myth named le proletariat...

...But then he goes on...

...It is more correct to say that political and ideological possibilities channel the ways by which scholarship can be advanced, but do not always determine such developments...

...We should be cautious in accepting the view that political and ideological requirements determine the progress of scholarship...

...The final deliverance of this epoch is that God does not exist and that human life cannot ever be perfected and hence that the madman, the criminal, and the dope addict are not inferior to the philosopher...

...They aren't just against the evils of this society or against that evil society...

...The character of the audience attend ing the play at the Martin Beck Theatre seems to have changed...

...Without having to fear for their lives, scholars now were permitted to examine the dust-covered books of the past and to become acquainted with the foreign literature of the present...

...in any event, he has not proved his case and he has to, once he raises the question...

...That is why it is so difficult to argue with a young student against taking drugs, not to speak of dissuading him from doing so...

...A serious critique, however, differs from the usual ideological attack and can be identified by the range and depth of knowledge of non-Soviet literature, by the ability to recognize significant and influential Western scholars and the separation of important scholarly works from obscure ones...

...But these nihilists—the young intellectual disaffected nihilists—operate outside the visible political spectrum...

...In the post-Stalin era Soviet citizens have revealed an insatiable hunger for information about their country's history and the conditions in the outside world...

...Can one say to him that God exists...

...I think neither is true...

...Such a definition demands that the definer not confound his own principles with those he is defining, for this is something, like evil, which to define is to oppose...

...Why the hedge...

...The piece in answer to Hannah Arendt (also an excellent article) has involved many more acrimonious exchanges than has the Moynihan Report...

...The strategy of creative debunking makes it now possible to bring Kovalevsky's work to the attention of the younger generation who until now had heard only his name...

...nevertheless, the theatrical image was potent enough, I would guess, to account for some of the violence with which the audience reacted...

...Again no...

...This issue matters because nihilism is quite widespread nowadays, a force of some power, and it needs to be located as accurately as possible and to be defined lucidly...

...No . . . Then can one say that the philosopher is better than the drug addict...

...everything is as good as everything else so let's destroy what we can, especially distinctions and above all hierarchy of every kind...

...Such criticism is still very rare and not always easily distinguishable from other protivist literature...

...But in view of the recent historical past, protivism is more of a blessing than a curse...

...Why is Abel to say Auden is not to be respected...

...Certainly not "controversy...

...But by accepting the assumption that only on such metaphysical foundations is civilized Iife possible, Abel undercuts his own position...

...I doubt it...

...It represents faulty social science and conservative political solutions...

...On and on...

...Sade and Marat represent a divided ego: the character Sade, though legally mad, is not represented as mad in the play, any more than Marat is, though the supposed actor who plays Marat in the play within the play is a madman, a fact the play proper rapidly loses sight of...

...A generalized sympathy for another's plight is no substitute for accurate obser vation and sound analysis...

...So far so good...

...This has justified a flood of protivist literature on all conceivable subjects designed to satisfy Soviet readers' curiosity about the outside world...

...Americans are exporting a part of their own culture: freedom means my life is determined by a pervasive social manipulation...

...Every nihilist is a metaphysician balked, and it is of course true that many of the best young people are metaphysically miserable— as are many of their elders...

...According to Feuer, the Russian word "protiv," meaning "against," is used repeatedly by Soviet scholars to denounce undesirable ideas emanating from the West and is "the most characteristic word in Soviet philosophical essays...

...I think his distinction between the powerful theatricality of Brook's pro duction and the weakness of the drama Weiss wrote is accurate and his subtle analysis of the audience's response to the madness dead right...

...Abel is like a hedgehog in a swamp...

...Protivism, contrary to being an entirely negative phenomenon, is such a channel for the development and possible future flowering of Soviet philosophy and sociology...

...Applying his terms to the play—when the God who has validated reality ceases to exist, one may become a limitless solipsist like Sade, and when belief in human perfectibility dies, one may become a limitless rebel like Marat...

...They write that Soviet sociologists agree with Western scholars that socialist and capitalist in dustrial societies have many similarities which distinguish them both markedly from non-industrial countries...

...Dissent, Winter 1965...

...It is a matter of academic conjecture how strong a role the Party plays in imposing protivism on Soviet scholarly activity...

...But finally he goes too far in his argument, and I quarrel with him...

...The fact that the play within the play is supposed to have been written and directed by Sade the solipsist contributes to the notion that this is an image of a mad mind...

...Abel has made a considerable contribution to the definition but there is more to be done...

...Perhaps Abel is right and such conservative assertions are not possible unless they are metaphysically founded on belief in God or in human perfectibility...

...As the matter stands, he has drawn the line in such a way to include himself intellectually in the definition of an attitude which he repudiates emotionally — understandable enough, but bad for definition...

...It strikes me as true that the combination of revolutionary impulses with loss of faith in either God or human perfectibility has generated the enthusiasm with which so many of the au dience greeted this play as it reconciles the two...

...Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and some Stalinist institutions, at the 20th Party Congress, added a new element to the traditional practice of protivism...

...Part of the reason for these statements stems from simple mistakes that any rea sonably competent anthropologist would have avoided...

...In a bungled, only partially realized way, the performance gave a strong image (the visual elements of the performance were much the most striking) of a mind mad A la Freudisme...

...Fortunately, this tendency is being re versed lately by such writers as Frank Riessman, S. M. Miller and Herbert Gans, among others...

...There are people whom I respect who do not believe either that God exists or that society is perfectible but who can and do assert that the philosopher is better than the drug addict, the criminal, or the madman...

...his audience seemed to him to be a fairly standard Broadway audience, and they reacted in a standard Broadway manner...

...Now W. H. Auden says that God exists...

...I found the reaction of "the audience" as troubling as he did, but I also found the perform ance troubling, as he apparently did not...

...Such serious criticism also contains a plea for dialogue and debate between Soviet and non-Soviet scholars...

...Though obviously a male, the myth was believed to be pregnant with child—a well formed socialistic baby true to the Scriptures...

...The id is represented by the many mad people—sexuality by a satyriac, religion by an apostate in a straitjacket, killing by a sleepwalker, and so on down among figures of undifferentiated disorder...

...It is the vague recognition, I will not call it knowledge, that no one to be respected can answer these questions affirmatively which emboldens our contemporary youth and makes them so rash and so sad...

...I tend to take the view that, although protivism originated out of Party policies, it has developed beyond the limits desirable to most Party functionaries...

...No class is without some of those negative attributes that might be deterrent to the achieving of a democratic society...

...Editors: I'm damned if I can reconstruct the reasoning that went into the editorial caveat preceding Laura Carper's sensitive article in your last issue...

...Not everyone needs the ultimate metaphysical certainties under him to make his way through the world...

...but there are foxes who spot the swamp and circumvent it...

...As a document, The Negro Family is part of that tendency in American sociology that has characterized low income, low status groups in our society variously as authoritarian, punitive, friendless, incapable of deferring gratification, hostile, submissive, having feelings of political futility, being more suggestible, having a demonological interpretation of evil forces and (stripping us of our last positive stereotype) lacking sexual satisfaction...

...Harold Rosen berg saw it after it had been running for two and a half months and had be come fashionable...

...While criticizing the Western concept of industrial society, Mitin and Semenov perform a useful service to sociology in general by calling for the development of a more concise typology of industrial societies...

...Other more benevolently disposed ob servers see them as only benighted and stunted...

...If he means that last statement to be true—not just an accurate formulation of a certain attitude, but true, the fact of the matter—then why is he so surprised or troubled by the response to "Marat/Sade...

...The contributions of protivism can only be appreciated in a perspective of the Stalinist period, with its isolation from the outside world and, in philosophy and the social sciences, isolation from their own past...

...On the other hand, no class has a monopoly on virtue...

...As this could only be accomplished with the cooperation of our Soviet colleagues, their efforts should be welcomed...

...This manipulation is to preserve or bring certain groups to positions of power and privilege...

...from these powerful, conflicting pressures the Vietnamese soul, so to speak, inherits a thinking and affects disorder, at least temporarily, what we call insanity...

...The observer walks into a subculture with which he is not fa miliar, compares its conduct with mid dle-class norms and reaches conclusions that are very often wrong and always invidious...

...The strategy of creative debunking permitted Soviet sociologists to reach a new level in their protivist writings...

...The asylum director and his two ladies, all three foolish and stupid, strong only because they have social force on their side, represent a feeble superego...

...Protivism" is a term coined by Lewis S. Feuer to characterize the state of modern Soviet philosophy and sociology...

...Against this general configuration, which is not uncommon, it is necessary for any political radical to take a position which is relatively conservative: he must preserve the idea of society and affirm the value of social order and even of those goods, however battered and distorted, of our own dreadful society...

...The ultimate goal is to be effective in controlling the hearts and minds of people, but it is uncertain what they are to believe in...

...I found Marshall Sahlin's report: "The Destruction of Conscience in Vietnam," in the January-February Dissent, essentially a clear artistic interpretation of certain alarming facts...

...Once again, nothing very coherent comes of all this...

...In the interminable speeches, Sade is a solipsist and Marat a limitless rebel, and the two characters do not affect one another in the slightest, any more than those two philosophical positions, extremely held, can ever affect one another in reality...

...they are against society itself...

...It is unfortunate Sahlin says so little about who has power and privilege in Saigon today...

...The shaman, as America, and the evil spirit, as Communism, struggle for pos session of the soul of the Vietnamese people...

...It is now possible to encounter serious and constructive appraisals of American and generally Western ideas, which may be called "constructive protivism...

...If anything, a much sharper criticism is indicated...