Oh, and just for kicks, the UCF president is blaming the whole thing on “alcohol abuse”. Admittedly, if the campus police (in coordination with the ATF, note) hadn’t been hassling 20-year-olds about drinking, this wouldn’t have happened, but certain proximate causes seem rather more imperative.

My question is simply this: leaving aside the merits of the patently stupid law that says 20-year-olds can’t drink alcohol, why in the fuck is UCF sending armed, undercover police officers to crack down on underage drinking? The key here is the word “undercover”; armed cops in uniform may present their own problems, but being recognized as such usually isn’t one of them. There are certain contexts where undercover officers make some sense: drug- and prostitution-law enforcement (two other stupid laws, but we’ll let that pass), conspiracy/racketeering prevention, etc. → Personally I have serious qualms about the moral viewpoint that makes using undercover cops seem like a viable option, but, again, we’ll let that pass. However, enforcing the drinking age is not such a context; if you’re trying to make someone drunk stop drinking, you’d better either be a friend or a recognizable authority figure. The best way to prevent underage people from drinking is having lots of uniformed cops around. But that tends to be preventative rather than retaliatory, which entails better adherence but less revenue and publicity…and I see I’ve just answered my own question.

To be honest, the entire situation baffles me. My alma mater and its campus police enforced the drinking age only when the underage drunk had done something so incredibly stupid as to make the potential liabilities rather higher than could safely be ignored. The dean of students when I was there freely and openly admitted his belief that the drinking age should be 18, which was reflective of the institutional opinion generally. Everybody (okay, not the teetotalers) drank without a second thought in front of the campus police, who were at all large campus parties. Given that at least 2/3 of people at any given party were under 21, I think it’s safe to say the campus police didn’t cramp anybody’s style too much. → In a not unrelated note, I should also point out that although Sewanee was (and is) a hard-drinking school, consumption tended to proceed along safer lines than at many other colleges.

Keeping in mind that my experience may be somewhat unusual, I think it’s very interesting that underage drinking is inevitably classified as “alcohol abuse” (as, for example, quoted above). I don’t deny that alcohol can be abused and that what qualifies as abuse (in a clinical sense) may be age-dependent, but it’s pretty stupid to claim (or, rather, imply) that a 20-year-old drinking a beer is “abusing” alcohol. 12 beers in an hour, sure, but you generally don’t see undercover cops trying to bust middle-aged guys who throw down a half-case in an hour, so that argument’s out. Of course, the same inevitably goes for any use of any illegal drugs, as if smoking a bowl once a month qualified you for rehab. Ah, well. Yet another example of distorting the meaning of words to make objectively insane policy seem reasonable.

Okay, rant aside, I leave you with the following rhetorical question (poached from Balko): It appears that the Orlando cop who killed the UCF cop acted according to procedure and probably won’t be punished. If he had been a private individual with all the required licenses, would he be able to avoid jail?

The conclusion of my ruminations was that what separates the great examples of narrative art from the decent is an ability to actually illustrate convincing dynamism of character. Anybody can describe reasonably well how a personality exists in relation to its environment, but it takes a greater talent to show how it will react when that environment changes. Just as what really distinguishes science from other belief-systems is its ability not just to explain but to make predictions, so too does demonstrating verisimilitudinous character change show a deeper grasp of the true essence of character, because that too is a form of prediction as to how that character will behave under certain conditions. Of course the standards of success are more amorphous and subjective, partly because the scenarios are usually made-up, but I think that ultimately we look for, even if only subconsciously, evidence that the creator has understood the personalities that he describes sufficiently to induce deep changes in them in a believable fashion, and judge his accomplishment accordingly. Or at least I do.

Think about it: virtually every technological innovation throughout history is due to laziness. In every case, someone got sick of doing something hard or boring and figured out some new way to do it faster or make it unnecessary to do at all. Computers are obvious: doing long division sucks, so people invented machines to do it for them. Same with the printing press: handcopying manuscripts is really tedious (not to mention hard on the carpals), so Gutenberg figured out how to make a machine do all the work. But this doesn’t just hold true for gadgets. For example, animals you’re trying to eat have a nasty tendency to run away, bite back and migrate every six months; eventually, someone got sick of all that nonsense, looked at some plants that couldn’t move or fight back and presto! agriculture was born. → Yes, I’m aware it wasn’t quite so simple To steal a line from Heinlein, “progress doesn’t come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.” → Time Enough for Love, pg. 53

Continuing this line of thought, it hardly even needs to be said that new technology proliferates and makes lives better because everybody else is just as lazy as the inventors (though, admittedly, less creative in their laziness). After all, the scientific calculator wouldn’t have sold if people liked doing long division and looking up logarithms in giant tables. Since laziness and technology are so complementary, the vast technological advances throughout human history seem only natural. → To borrow a single example from Paul Graham, “[i]n 1800 an empty plastic drink bottle with a screw top would have seemed a miracle of workmanship.”

On the other hand, politics has advanced hardly at all in the last 2500 years. In broad outline (oversimplification alert!), the only major political differences between a modern Western democracy and classical Athens are: (i) owning slaves is no longer considered couth and (ii) a higher percentage of people get to vote. (i) and (ii) are obviously important, but two major advances in 2500 years isn’t what I would call speedy progress (especially since both really only became fashionable in the last 150 years).

Now, maybe politics is an inherently more tractable problem than how to avoid boring, sweaty work. In that case, maybe the ancient Greeks already had it mostly worked out and there were only a couple of things to improve upon. Alternatively, maybe the Athenians just got lucky and guessed the answer that otherwise would have taken centuries to figure out. But neither of these answers seems likely or particularly satisfying, especially since there still seem to be lots of political problems that nobody knows how to solve.

Actually, that last phrase is a complete lie. Everybody knows how to solve all the political problems in the world and they’ll be more than happy to explain their solutions at the slightest provocation. The problem is, nobody seems to be able to implement his solution.

Why is that? Because laziness is like Kryptonite for politics. Why did Communism fail? At least half the answer is that people are much too lazy to work hard when they can do the bare minimum for the same compensation. → The other half of the answer is the “Knowledge Problem,” which has the same counter-intuitive aesthetic appeal as the notion that progress comes from laziness Why do politicians that anybody who’s paying attention knows are corrupt, dishonest and/or incompetent get elected? Because people are much too lazy to devote hundreds of hours to researching the candidates, reading position papers and thinking through the logical conclusions of a candidate’s platform. Why do monarchy, feudalism and totalitarianism fail? Because the people in charge are too lazy to formulate good policies and then stick to them; oppression and plunder are much easier. → In these contexts, it’s fashionable to call laziness “rational self-interest”, but I disagree with this convention. Not because I’m against rationalism or self-interest, but because this particular phrase obscures the issue.

The list goes on and on. Think about virtually any political problem you can come up with (Why do countries fight unnecessary wars? Why can’t we “win” the Drug War? What’s up with Social Security?) and odds are the reason the “solutions” don’t work is because they require too much hard work. Of course, the basic system in which solutions have to be implemented is already broken because it requires too much hard work, but it could be argued that the fundamental problem is cultural: being lazy seems like cheating. Since nobody wants to view himself as a cheater, I’m convinced that everybody is secretly ashamed of his laziness and, therefor, trumpets diligence and industriousness as the ideal.

I, for one, say screw that. Until we recognize that we’re all lazy bastards at heart, realize that that’s not necessarily such a bad thing and accept the implications of this fact, we’re going to continue to find political problems insoluble.

p.s. Please don’t interpret this as a “call to action” or anything silly like that. Like the man said, “I’m just sayin’, is all.”

There’s also an archive of the quotes of the day in which each quote will be listed below the date it was posted in the same format I just described; if two quotes are posted on the same day, they will appear separately. The pound sign next to the date is linked to a quasi-permanent link to that quote in case anybody wants to link to it.

Finally, there’s an RSS feed specifically for the quotes of the day and I’ve also added the quote of the day to the regular RSS feed. Getting these to work required changing my RSS feed templates by hand as well as recklessly editing my .htaccess file (and killing the entire website a couple times in the process), so let me know if they cause errors or if you’re subscribed to an RSS feed and the quote of the day doesn’t show up.

I’m using a slightly modified version of the Miniblog plugin to do all this, along with hand-editing of stylesheets, templates and the always-intimidating .htaccess file. Probably not the most elegant solution, but it seems to work so far.

Actually, it doesn’t really matter if you accept that distinction or not, because my tolerance only extends as far as those things that I don’t actually believe to be wrong. If Islam is just a belief-system, I’m tolerant of it. If it absolutely requires its believers to beat women and blow up infidels, well then I’m no longer tolerant of it. So it comes out the same in the end. But I’d still rather that actions be viewed as actions rather than just as expressions of religious belief–helps to put the emphasis back on human agency. At any rate, Europe has always had a hard time taking a nuanced attitude towards religion one way or the other. For the last hundred years France for example has been a rigidly secular state, banning religious symbols and expression in all public domain, and now some of the political conservatives are talking about swinging back the other way by subsidizing churches, synagogues and mosques. I suppose it has not occured to anyone to just tolerate religion where it arises rather than officially supporting it or trying to eradicate it.

• Katrina Help Wiki
• “Why are you still here?” “None of your fucking business.”
• Even a cop joins in the looting
• More of the same (part of an amazing Hurricane LiveJournal, with an emphasis on the “live” part)
• Video of same (WMV)
• Before/after satellite photos
• DIY drinking water
• A picture says a thousand words
• Anarchy in the French Quarter
• Colleges offering aid, housing, student transfers
• Sewanee’s Response
• Penn’s Response
• You’re not looting if you’re white
• Agence France Presse (oh the irony) pulls offensive photo
• Stolen bus first to arrive at Astrodome
• A double dose of Colby Cosh
• Civil Responsibility
• “This disaster is shaped by race”
• The totally predictable world reaction
• The last argument of kings
• Every level of authority failed
• Constantly updated news posts
• And, of course, Curt’s eloquent post

Given that I’ve been reading The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. II recently, it was inevitable that I would come across some citations that I (perhaps presumptuously) thought might be relevant; that led to an email exchange that I think is interesting more generally (and might, perhaps, inspire some interesting discussion in the comments), so I’ve unilaterally decided to reproduce it here.

Me:

The guy Solzhenitsyn mentions that I told you about is Mikhailovsky. Apparently he was crazy, but still gained some fame for a while. The relevant citation is from THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, Part III Chapter 10 (pg. 311 in Vol. II of the Westview edition):

It is worth noting how they got rid of him [Valentin Feliksovich Voino-Yasenetsky]. He had been sent to his second exile (in Archangel in 1930) not as a 58, but “for inciting to murder.” (This was a nonsensical story, according to which he had brought influence to bear on the wife and mother-in-law of the physiologist Mikhailovsky who committed suicide–and who, when already insane, had been engaged in injecting into corpses solutions which had allegedly stopped the disintegration of tissue, about which the newspapers had made a big to-do as a “triumph of Soviet science” and artificial “resurrection.”)

Also, check out Part III Chapter 19 (Vol. II pgs. 523-4 of the Westview edition):

An ancient example of native [i.e. natives of the Zek Nation, that is, prisoners of Gulag] trustfulness was the hope placed in Gorky’s arrival on Solovki. But there isn’t any need to go that far back. There is an almost permanent and almost universal religion in the Archipelago; this is the faith in the so-called Amnesty. It is difficult to explain just what this is. It is not the name of a goddess, as the reader might have thought. It is something akin to the Second Coming among Christian peoples, it is a burst of such blinding radiance that the ice of the Archipelago will melt and even the islands themselves will dissolve, and all the natives will be swept on warm waves to sunny regions where they will immediately find their nearest and most beloved. Probably this is a somewhat transformed faith in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. This faith, which has never yet been confirmed by one single real miracle, is nonetheless very much alive and persistent. And just as other peoples connect their important rituals with the winter and summer solstices, so, too, the zeks mystically await (always in vain) the first days of November and May. If a south wind blows on the Archipelago, they will immediately whisper from ear to ear: “There’s bound to be an amnesty! It is already under way!” And when the winter winds set in in earnest, the zeks warm their numbed fingers by breathing on them, rub their ears, stamp up and down, and encourage one another. “That means there will be an amnesty. Otherwise we’ll freeze to ——! [Here there is an untranslatable expression.] Evidently it’s going to come now.”

The harmfulness of every religion has long since been demonstrated and proved–and we see the same thing here too. These beliefs in Amnesty seriously weaken the natives, inducing in them an uncharacteristic state of dreaminess, and there are periods of epidemic when necessary and urgent government work quite literally falls from the zeks’ hands–which, practically speaking, is the same effect as that produced by the opposite kind of rumor about ‘prisoner transports.’ For everyday construction work it is much more advantageous for the natives not to experience any ups and downs of feeling.

And the zeks also suffer from a certain national weakness, which in some incomprehensible fashion they retain despite the whole structure of their life. This is their secret thirst for justice.

(note Solzhenitsyn’s incredibly dark, if not quite cynical, sense of humor that comes through in this passage, as well as the implicit juxtaposition of the zek belief in rebirth via Amnesty with his own beliefs in a sort of Stoic spiritual regeneration. It’s also interesting that he goes on from here to cite Chekhov. In the above, all words between asterisks were italicized in the original; the first set of brackets is mine, the second is, presumably, the translator’s.)

Not sure how useful that will be for you, but it seemed like it might be relevant, so I figured I’d send it along.

Clay

Curt:

Ah, thanks for sending this to me, although one doesn’t get the sense from these passages that Solzhenitsyn exactly condones mysticism. Maybe he’s drifted since then to a stronger embrace of Russian Orthodoxy. Actually, these passages remind me of another book, and one you might check out if you find any of these half as interesting as I do, called “W ou le souvenir d’enfance,” by Georges Perec, which I read last year in France (it’s available in English as “W or the memory of childhood”). I wrote about it on the website last year, and it’s a very interesting book, which juxtaposes random memories of childhood during the war with a description of a society that has created a quasi-Olympic culture based on the worship of athletic competition, which is gradually revealed to be…well, I won’t ruin the revelatory quality of the horrifying dénouement, which is remarkable even though you see it coming from a mile away. Suffice to say, definitely parallels the gulag prisoners’ belief in “amnesty.” The book is a bit too rigidly structured, and some of the ruminations are tedious, but you should definitely check it out for the section on “W,” and it’s quite short. Most of Perec is maybe inaccessible in translation since he was a linguistic experimentalist (he once wrote an entire novel without using the letter “e”), but this one is quite easy I think. Anyway, thanks again, talk to you later,
Curt

Me:

Well, I’d say he’s certainly become more mystical since ’68, but there are definitely strains of mysticism even then. But you also have to keep in mind that his use of extremely dark sarcasm is practically omnipresent in THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. For example, when he says “The harmfulness of every religion has long since been demonstrated and proved…” he’s not being serious; unless I’m seriously misreading him, he’s parroting the Communist line to demonstrate its absurdity. Also, you have to read his thoughts on amnesty in the context of Part IV Chapter 1 (“The Ascent”), which presents the camp life as an opportunity for mental freedom and spiritual rebirth, provided that one does not accept the notion of life at any price. For example:

But it is a lie [the maxim that "the result is what counts"]! Here we have been breaking our backs for years at All-Union hard labor. Here in slow annual spirals we have been climbing up to an understanding of life–and from this height it can all be seen so clearly; It is not the result that counts! It is not the result–but the spirit! Not what–but how. Not what has been attained–but at what price.

(Vol. II, pg. 609 of Westlake edition)

Clay

Curt:

True, but you could (and this is the reason I mentioned “W”) read this as evidence of the way that superstitious fatalism can imprison men far more effectively than any coercion. The prisoners, with their belief in “Amnesty,” put all their hopes upon the whim of the authorities. Maybe Solzhenitsyn sees an existential consolation in hope springing up without any foundation, but that position implicitly cedes to the authorities the same power and authority that the Greek gods had over Sisyphus. And that passivity is of course one of the major hallmarks of belief in resurrection. But anyway, thanks for the heads-up, talk to you later,
Curt

Me:

Maybe I’m misreading what you’re saying, but Solzhenitsyn doesn’t agree with the baseless hope in amnesty, either. To coin a phrase, he is (or, at least presents himself in GULAG as) a mystic realist. His perspective on the Gulag is that the prisoner will best serve himself by accepting what has happened, knowing that amnesty is a fantasy and that, most likely, he’ll be sentenced to a second term after the first is up. Within those bounds, however, he has the freedom to think and say more or less as he pleases, which is more than people “in freedom” can say, since they must constantly monitor their speech and even thoughts to avoid being reported to the authorities. That’s the realist part. The mystical part comes from Solzhenitsyn’s belief that a person who accepts that reality, who refuses to mortgage his conscience for more food, easier work or even his life and, most importantly, recognizes that, although he isn’t guilty of any valid crime against the state, he is not innocent of sin can achieve a sort of spiritual rebirth in the form of self-knowledge.

[Dr. Boris Nikolayevich Kornfeld's last words before having his skull bashed in in a Gulag hospital bed early the next morning:] “And on the whole, do you know, I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.”

[...]

And so it happened that Kornfeld’s prophetic words were his last words on earth. And, directed to me, they lay upon me as an inheritance. You cannot brush off that kind of inheritance by shrugging your shoulders.

But by that time I myself had matured to similar thoughts.

I would have been inclined to endow his words with the significance of a universal law of life. However, one can get all tangled up that way. One would have to admit that on that basis those who had been punished even more cruelly than with prison–those shot, burned at the stake–were some sort of super-evildoers. (And yet…the innocent are those who get punished moest zealously of all.) And what would one then have to say about our so evident torturers: Why does not fate punish them? Why do they prosper?

(And the only solution to this would be that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but…in the development of the soul. From that point of view our torturers have been punished most horribly of all: they are turning into swine, they are departing downward from humanity. From that point of view punishment is inflicted on those whose development…holds out hope.)

But there was something in Kornfeld’s words that touched a sensitive chord, and that I accept quite completely for myself. And many will accept the same for themselves.

In the seventh year of my imprisonment I had gone over and re-examined my life quite enough and had come to understand why everything had happened to me: both prison and, as an additional piece of ballast, my malignant tumor. And I would not have murmured even if all that punishment had been considered inadequate.

Punishment? But…whose?

Well, just think about that–whose?

I lay there a long time in that recovery room from which Kornfeld had gone forth to his death, and all alone during sleepless nights I pondered with astonishment my own life and the turns it had taken. In accordance with my established camp custom I set down my thoughts in rhymed verse–so as to remember them. And the most accurate thing is to cite them here–just as they came from the pillow of a hospital patient, when the hard-labor camp was still shuddering outside the windows in the wake of a revolt.

When was it that I completely
Scattered the good seeds, one and all?
For after all I spent my boyhood
In the bright singing of Thy temples.

Bookish subtleties sparkled brightly,
Piercing my arrogant brain,
The secrets of the world were…in my grasp,
Life’s destiny…as pliable as wax.

Blood seethed–and every swirl
Gleamed iridescently before me,
Without a rumble the building of my faith
Quietly crumbled within my heart.

But passing here between being and nothingness,
Stumbling and clutching at the edge,
I look behind me with a grateful tremor
Upon the life that I have lived.

Not with good judgment nor with desire
Are its twists and turns illumined.
But with the even glow of the Higher Meaning
Which became apparent to me only later on.

And now with measureing cup returned to me,
Scooping up the living water,
God of the Universe! I believe again!
Though I renounced You, You were with me!

Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself or my strivings. What had seemed for so long to be beneficial now turned out in actuality to be fatal, and I had been striving to go in the opposite direction to taht which was truly necessary to me. But just as the waves of the sea knock the inexperienced swimmer off his feet and keep tossing him back onto the shore, so also was I painfully tossed back on dry land by the blows of misfortune. And it was only because of this that I was able to travel the path which I had always really wanted to travel.

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful success I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between politial parties either–but right through every human heart–and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmend by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…and unuprooted small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.

The Nuremberg Trials have to be regarded as one of the special achievements of the twentieth century: they killed the very idea of evil, though they killed very few of the people who had been infected with it. (Of course, Stalin deserves no credit here. He would have preferred to explain less and shoot more.) And if by the twenty-first century humanity has not yet blown itself up and has not suffocated itself–perhaps it is this direction that will triumph?

Yes, and if it does not triumph–then all humanity’s history will have turned out to be an empty exercise in marking time, without the tiniest mite of meaning! Whither and to what end will we otherwise be moving? To beat the enemy over the head with a club–even cavement knew that.

“Know thyself!” There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: “So were we any better?”

When people express vexation, in my presence, over the West’s tendency to crumble, its political shortsightedness, its divisiveness, its confusion–I recall too: “Were we, before passing through the Archipelago, more steadfast? Firmer in our thoughts?”

And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: “Bless you, prison!”

Lev Tolstoi was right when he dreamed of being put in prison. At a certain moment that giant began to dry up. He actually needed prison as a drought needs a shower of rain!

All the writers who wrote about prison but who did not themselves serve time there considered it their duty to express sympathy for prisoners and to curse prison. I…have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation:

“Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”

(And from beyond the grave come replies: It is very well for you to say that–when you came out of it alive!)”

(Part IV, Chapter I; Vol. II, pgs. 612-617 of Westlake edition)

Again, I may be misunderstanding you, but, if not, that should give you the basic idea,

Clay

Curt:

No, I agree, but maybe this is just one of those misunderstandings that develop around certain words. For me, the process of self-regeneration that Solzhenitsyn is describing (and maybe what Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky had in mind as well) is practically the opposite of mysticism. It seems to me that mysticism, which my computer’s dictionary defines as the “belief that union with or absorbtion into the Diety or the absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender” is essentially superstitious, pretty much passive by definition. In mysticism the means of transformation are outside, in what Solzhenitsyn seems to have in mind they are inside.
It seems to me that what he is describing is almost stoic, existentialist (only think how similar his description of the prisoners’ sense of guilt resembles Kafka’s description in “The Trial”!), an internally motivated process, not self-surrender but rather self-creation. Maybe it is this diffusion into the metaphorical that has made the concept of resurrection so tenacious and, like Christianity itself, impossible to bring to a critical moment. In any case, in Solzhenitsyn, just as in Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the idea of resurrection has become rationalized, or at least humanized. Anyway, later,
Curt

(note that somewhere along the way Westview became Westlake in my citations)

My response is that, given the definition of mysticism cited above, Solzhenitsyn is a mystic, as he does indeed believe that “spiritual knowledge…may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender.” The contemplation part is evident given what I’ve quoted above; the more controversial aspect of this contention is that self-surrender is a component of Solzhenitsyn’s “Ascent”. In fact, this probably boils down to which you think has temporal priority in Solzhenitsyn’s model: the zek’s acceptance of his punishment or his (more or less rational) re-examination of his life. I would tend to argue that neither has absolute priority over the other, but rather that the two are ongoing processes that operate in parallel and, therefore, that the re-examination Solzhenitsyn talks about requires that the zek has (at least to some extent) already started to accept his punishment.

Either way, though, there’s no doubt in my mind that what Solzhenitsyn’s talking about is primarily self-creation and so does contrast with the self-denying mysticism of, say, Saint John of the Cross. → 1. Though it’s important to note that even Saint John’s mysticism isn’t entirely passive; the “amada” still has to climb that “secreta escala disfrazada” on her own
2. Of course, to paraphrase the cliché, every act of creation is also an act of destruction, so one can’t entirely disentangle self-creation from self-denial And I would also agree with the assertion that Solzhenitsyn’s version of mysticism (or spirituality, if you reject my self-surrender argument) is a rationalized and almost stoical variant (and, hence, his conception of resurrection is also rationalized).

In one respect, though, Roth seems to have hit upon an important point, namely that the radicalism of the ’60′s, far from being somehow an invasion of American ideals, was in fact very much an expression of them. That radicalism was really more social than political–simply the belief in revolution didn’t quite adequately capture it. It was the explosion of an unusually large youth population just at the point they all came of age, an inter-generational conflict in effect between children and parents, the rupture of the family all over, and this is at the core of the novel as well. Maybe the search for independence and autonomy, which is at the root of much of what is distinctive about American history and society, after having lost the frontier and thus the ability to realize it geographically, next sought to do so socially through a break with the surroundings into which one was born. Certainly the ritual of ostentatiously, even violently breaking with the family, often by clearly defining differences in taste, habits and even morals, has become virtually de rigueur in America. This must have been rather shocking to immigrant families who thought that they could cherry-pick the financial opportunity and independence of American life while avoiding its atomizing effect.

But of course this is partly why people seem to like the place so much. You can’t find that kind of decayed elegance amidst the bland efficiency of most American cities. Its stagnation, which has helped to seal its doom, is surely also what has helped it to preserve its antiquated charm. New Orleans is no more ludicrous as an urban project than Venice, which similarly owes its beautifully preserved state to the absurdity of its situation. And, quite frankly, New Orleans today may not be much more economically necessary. Sure in the 19th century it made sense to have a big city in the delta for trade, but with the power and reach of global communication today one doesn’t necessarily need a teeming metropolis at every port–things can be controlled more from afar. Since New Orleans hasn’t made itself particularly economically necessary in any other way (the gas and petroleum industries certainly don’t require big population centers), I have a hard time imgaining that the motivation will exist to completely rebuild even if the money could be procured for it. It’s not even of much value as a symbolic statement à la the WTC even aside from the massively greater cost–it probably won’t do much good to make a show of defiance to a hurricane. Sure, there is probably considerable enthusiasm for preserving what can be–no one wants to lose Bourbon Street or Le Vieux Carré–but everything that is worth preserving that hasn’t been so far probably can’t really be recreated in any case. But of course historical tourist New Orleans is the only part of the city that has escaped relatively unscathed, as amazing as it is that the engineering and planning knowledge of two hundred years ago has apparently trumped that of our own times. So it may be that the most desirable part of the city to save is also the only feasible one to maintain–I can’t imagine that even the most thick-headed bureaucrat could manage to leave hurricanes out of their calculations for the future now. I don’t recommend or desire that the city should become Williamsburg or even Charleston, but on the other hand all of this has probably only accelerated a process which was well underway–the signficant reduction of New Orleans as a major metropolis–and so maybe the decline or revival of the city is beyond anyone’s conscious control.