Either the human mind
has a natural bent towards binary oppositions or else it is the instinct of the
herd to seek them out, or both. Some are short lived and abandoned, others long
lasting and fiercely embraced. They create problems of one kind of another,
thanks to that wretched thing called “reality”.
So the doctrine of
Heaven and Hell is no sooner promulgated than some wit points out that human
beings - real people - are rarely, if ever, paragons of virtue or totally sunk
in vice but rather a very ordinary mixture of good and bad. So how are they to
be divided when the path branches up to Heaven or down to Hell? Enter the
theologians, a new caste of men (and I write men deliberately) brought into being by the advent of written-down
religions and only too happy to engage with any problem which would help keep them in employment for a couple of
millennia. Even today, the government of my country thinks the vexatious
problem of Heaven and Hell important enough to pay decent taxpayer-funded
salaries to the experts. One day, take a look online at just how many Christian
theologians the universities of Oxford and Cambridge still find room for. They
provide excellent board too; and at high table the toast is to the Awkward
Squad which keeps them in business.
One potential solution
has been around for a very long time: Purgatory is the place where the problem
of shades of grey is dealt with before a Final Solution is arrived at. But to
the original objector, this is not so much solution as the ever-popular
alternative of kicking the can down the road.
The Final Solution
usually identified by those words was a rather shorter lived binary - twenty
five years, max? - created by Germany’s National Socialists who having divided
the world into Aryans and Jews faced a similar problem: some Aryans weren’t
quite Aryan (maybe they had a bit of Slav about them) and some Jews were a bit
Aryan, like those who had won the Iron Cross in World War One or who had one
Aryan parent. The problem clearly needed to be turned over to the experts, in this
case biologians and such like who might be able to give decisive answers - by
which I mean answers which could be converted into useable bureaucratic forms.
Hopefully, the experts could spin a convincing yarn to explain what quantum of
Aryan blood in a person was needed to successfully dominate Jewish (or Slavic,
though it never quite came to that) blood, and did it matter if it was in the
male line or the female line, and so on. Nowadays, people with such scientific
tastes have to look elsewhere for employment; maybe in the booming industry of
conspiracy theories.
Running the Nazis a
close second during more or less the same period were the Communists who had
their own rival binary which divided the world into Capitalists and Workers,
Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. Unfortunately, this was another case where Two
Sizes Fits All clearly did not work, though perhaps it could be made to work.
Stalin thought so: you just had to kill a lot of people. He reached that
conclusion before Hitler reached his. This was another case where a cadre of
experts was brought into being (or elbowed their way forward), the Marxist
theoreticians tasked with the Problem of the peasantry and the Problem of the
petty bourgeoisie, to name but the two principal ones. The theoreticians
flourished in Russia and Germany and later France where the French government
funded university departments of philosophy and sociology where these tough
problems were traditionally chewed over amidst the smoke of state-owned and
life expectancy-reducing Gauloises. I
did recently try to re-read some of the solutions they came up with; if you
have studied theology, or have a taste for it, you will enjoy these books which
move concepts and scholastic distinctions around as if on some chessboard,
everything agreeably fact-free. Try Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (1975) [1].
Stalin had to fight an
uphill struggle, largely because in 1921-22 Lenin U-turned and pushed through a
New Economic Policy to replace the disaster of War Communism. Between1921 and
1928 the NEP brought economic recovery to the new Soviet Union - but at a
price. Stalin didn’t like what he saw. Capitalism was making a re-entry through
trade if not through industry (which remained in state hands); a class of petty
bourgeois self-employed artisans and traders, the NEP-men, emerged who were not
only not proletarians but also had the wrong ideas, whose “subjective”
consciousness was not and could not be that of a Good Communist. Stalin, with
the benefit of theological training, decided to apply the original Marxist
binary, Proletarian or Bourgeois, without fudge and do what no one else had
ever really dared: criminalise all self-employment and turn all those traders
and craft workers into state employees, dependent on the state for their wages,
their housing, and their ration coupons. Either you complied or you became a
black marketeer - as former NEP-men often did, the ration coupons leaving much
to be desired[2].
In all three cases
sketched above, intellectual labour is deployed in the service of
practically-oriented politics. The priests sought hegemony over their flocks in
the form of compliant behaviour and financial offerings; Heaven and Hell were
the carrot and stick. Hitler wanted a Judenfrei
world for reasons which may be a bit more obscure. Stalin wanted to run the
whole panoptical show and turning everyone into a state employee, a prisoner,
or a dead body pretty much achieved that goal. The white-collar theologians,
biologians, Marxians have - for the most part - been compliant ancillary help
to all such endeavours.
It is easy to add to
the list of such binaries …. but don’t get me started. We all wish for
certainties and easy allegiances when, really, they are only to be found in
mathematics. When we do our sums, at least there a simple binary really does
apply. Either we get them right or we get them wrong. We have culture wars
because people missed their vocation as accountants.
[1] And for an alternative approach
from the same period, I recommend The
Petite Bourgeoisie, edited by Frank Bechhofer and Brian Elliott (1981) and
especially the chapter “Artisanal Bakery in France …” by Daniel Bertaux and
Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame.
[2] The peasants and
the pen-pushers were also nationalised, though some of them too became black marketeers,
the pen-pushers falling into that category when they circulated poems under the
counter or just read them to friends. You could lose your life for doing that,
as did Osip Mandelstam for the Stalin
Epigram of 1933.
