more on marx

This last week, I finished reading Fado Alexandrino by Portuguese novelist Antonio Lobo Antunes. Among other things, the novel is about (and structured around) a Marxist revolution in Portugal back in the 70s. Reading this alongside Capital vol. 1 by Marx, I've been thinking about Marxism's history, and how condemnations of Marxism always entail pointing towards its bloody revolutions, Soviet Russia, Stalin, Mao, etc.

I've never read a Marxist defense of these things, which I imagine would be about as interesting/boring as hearing Christian defenses against the history that is leveled against it: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch trials, slavery, church corruption, etc. I imagine the typical responses would be the same, "That's not real Marxism," "That's not real Christianity." And then there are the historians, "Well, that's not really what happened during the Crusades," or "Well, if you look at the Inquisition in the context of 16th century Spain..." The appeal to purity or history is always a losing argument, or at best a back-pedaling argument.

What's more interesting for me is to take things full force, to say, "Yes, let's suppose all this is true, that the church really did institutionalize murder, genocide, and torture..." A better question, but one I'm not satisfied with either, is "What about Marxist ideology was useful for revolutionaries, or fascist leaders, to appropriate?"

What I think is disappointing about this last question is that it still puts the ideology first, as the motivating factor behind genocide and torture and exploitation. What's more convincing to me is that the ideology is secondary to the torture, that the torture serves as a justification for the ideology rather than the ideology for the torture....

illness

Often when I'm sick, and I've been feeling sick off and on for the last few weeks, I think of Darwin and Nietzsche. Mostly because both of them were sick for significant portions of their adult lives, chronically sick. Part of my interest here is that they had very different responses to their illness. Darwin comments often in his autobiography about what his illness prevented him from doing: prevented him from going on hikes, from getting work done, from being in society (though he sees some good in this).

Nietzsche, on the other hand, writes some about illness in Ecce Homo: "In the midst of the torments that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine, accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialectician's clarity par excellence and thought through with very cold blood matters for which under healthier circumstances I am not mountain-climber, not subtle, not cold enough." The obstructions and difficulties caused by sickness here are the very vehicle for surmounting other obstructions and difficulties....

Well, I don't think that's quite right, or quite what Nietzsche is getting at, but it's a starting point.

beards

Scottish explorer Mungo Park lived as a prisoner in Western Africa for several months in 1795. Writing about his time among the Moors he said, "if any one circumstance excited among them favourable thoughts towards my own person it was my beard, which was now grown to an enormous length, and was always beheld with approbation or envy. I believe in my conscience they thought it too good a beard for a Christian."

At least I know that if I'm ever held captive by 18th c. Moors I'll be held in high esteem.