I’ve always believed the most precious right, though not formally articulated in the Bill of Rights, is the right to be left alone. In human history it’s also the most anomalous, held in deep suspicion always by most of humanity and by each of us at least on occasion. We seem to be hardwired to distrust democracy and the sovereignty of others. Selfishness is forever subverting the dinner table and the social order. Frank Wilson reminded me of this last week when he linked to a brief video of the late Michael Crichton speaking to high-school students. I know Crichton only as a brand-name author. I’ve never read his books but have seen several of the movies adapted from them, so I was surprised by his soft-spoken thoughtfulness.
Crichton tells the kids he has become interested in why people “really want to tell other people how to behave.” Many possess, he says, “a deep and secret impulse to live in a totalitarian state.” No one who reads comments left on literary blogs or who has attended a meeting of the PTA or a congressional subcommittee can reasonably argue otherwise. I’ve been rereading Joseph Brodsky’s essays in On Grief and Reason, including his Nobel lecture from 1987. Before we start congratulating our enlightened, let-and-let-live selves, consider the words of a poet who experienced the totalitarian impulse first-hand:
“A literate, educated person, to be sure, is fully capable, after reading some political treatise or tract, of killing his like, and even of experiencing, in so doing, a rapture of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was Hitler; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men have in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list.”
As though he were administering a fast-acting antidote to moral smugness (his and ours), Brodsky quickly adds:
“What's wrong with discourses about the obvious is that they corrupt consciousness with their easiness, with the quickness with which they provide one with moral comfort, with the sensation of being right. Herein lies their temptation, similar in its nature to the temptation of a social reformer who begets this evil.”
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You've touched on a topic that's preoccupied me for the past few years -- flaring up especially during these last months of the presidential race. Adam Zagajewski has an essay in the fall issue of THREEPENNY REVIEW, available online, about Milosz. Zagajewski and other Polish poets, young at the time, sent some poems to Milosz in Berkeley for comment. His letter arrived in response. "It couldn't have been more devastating," Adam writes. "Milosz basically dismissed the whole business of socially critical art, reducing our efforts to the well-meaning but aesthetically uninteresting and totally predictable reactions of inexperienced youngsters, He extolled 'metaphysical distance' quoting Aleksander Wat's sentence on the necessity of fighting against Communism on metaphysical grounds." I think he'd agree with Brodsky that "discourses about the obvious" do indeed corrupt, if only by way of mediocrity -- but in especially perilous times, as Milosz showed us in THE CAPTIVE MIND, with fatal results.
I’ve always believed the most precious right, though not formally articulated in the Bill of Rights, is the right to be left alone. In human history it’s also the most anomalous, held in deep suspicion always by most of humanity and by each of us at least on occasion.
Funny you should mention that—it reminds me of Jonathan Rauch's "Caring for Your Introvert" in The Atlantic (see a follow-up here. There's also a book called "The Introvert Advantage" with terrible writing but some reasonable content nonetheless hiding within it.
In any event, I too value the right to be left alone, but I suspect that value is more a product of my own disposition than one universally held by humanity. I gave my freshmen "Caring for Your Introvert," as part of an assignment, and most of them either thought it applied to someone they knew or to no one. Perhaps that's a statement more about them than introversion, but I still think it an interesting datum.
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