Demons

‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I heard an interesting story recently concerning the former vice-chancellor of my alma mater and Africa’s most highly rated university, the University of Cape Town.

Max Price’s tenure as the leader of the university came during radical student protests that left a trail of death and destruction, ostensibly for the cause of the abolition of all tuition fees and ‘decolonisation’.

Price notoriously tried to ‘ride the tiger’, supporting the protests whilst trying to channel their ‘energy’.

But it turns out his support and acquiescence went deeper than initially thought…

I heard this story from an acquaintance who attended the launch of Price’s book, ‘Statues and Storms’.

The protests had begun when a 30-year-old student, Chumani Maxwele, flung faeces at a statue of Cecil Rhodes on campus. But it now turns out this student was already personally well-known to Price.

Maxwele had first come to prominence for being roughed up by presidential bodyguards after giving the middle finger to then-president Jacob Zuma’s motorcade. Price then, curiously, made the effort to visit Maxwele, and subsequently organised funding for him to join the university as a student.

The shit-throwing happens soon after…

When I heard this story, I immediately thought of the novel Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky, in which a major plot-point is the naive mentoring of radicals by ‘enlightened liberals’…

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Two men predicted the coming nihilism of the twentieth century decades in advance: the totalitarian wars, the loss of faith, and the sense of despair that were all about to dismantle civilization.

One was Nietzsche, the other Dostoevsky.

The two are often opposed: Nietzsche the faithless; Dostoevsky the prophet of a ‘Russian Christ’, a redeemer after the coming chaos. I have argued before (particularly in my doctoral thesis) that the two are more alike than we would think. Nietzsche described Dostoevsky, after all, as “the only psychologist from whom I’ve anything to learn.”

I have written before on Nietzsche’s prescience, notably for Panda, on viewing the covid event through a Nietzschean lens. 

Here, I would like to examine Dostoevsky as a prophet of our age, by means of his great novel, Demons.

In it, Dostoevsky poses and answers a question: how does a society fall apart? 

The answer is that there is nothing more powerful in any given nation than sets of ideas which can take possession, like demons, of a few committed men and women, and prepare them to die for a cause, a cause that justifies their own sense of despair. But these ideas are not simply intellectual. They are spiritual, even biological, a kind of plague. In short, demons.

And, paradoxically, at least for many modern readers, for Dostoevsky these demons were summoned by Enlightenment thinkers, by ‘rationalism’. Communism, ultimately, is the child of ‘free-thinking’ liberalism, the naive belief that society can be built by reason alone, by a secular ‘humanitarianism’.

For once you call all order and goodness into question, what is left to do but build your own Babel by your own lights, at whatever cost? Driving out all meaning does not create a neutral space for collective inquiry, but a vacuum, a wound, a portal.

Demons is set in a small town just outside St Petersburg, in which a band of nihilistic terrorists attempt to spark a nationwide revolt against the Tsar, the idea of a Russian nation, and the Russian Orthodox Church.

The revolt does not succeed, but in laying out a tale of how it almost did, Dostoevsky prophesies the future of his country – literally. At one point he has a manic Lenin look-alike take the podium at a political event – “a man of about forty, bald front and back, with a grayish little beard, who...keeps raising his fist over his head and bringing it down as if crushing some adversary to dust.”