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Datelined September 22: “The Chinese government, under his leadership, has started putting the Communist back in the Communist Party, at least to some extent.” (BBC)
“Well I really liked this movie when I first saw it as an idealistic, hopeful, spiritual teenager. I watched it again recently and realized what a cynical, skeptical, pessimistic, agnostic, realist I’ve become in my middle age. But I watched it with my kids, and my seven year old boy was all choked up & weepy in his father’s arms at the end of the film. It got him! So, I am glad he got to see it as an innocent, hopeful child…” (footnote)
It was a fellow my age who, just this year, told me that back when he was a teenager a Catholic School girl told him her schoolmates don’t believe all that stuff. He never would have guessed. Me neither. Sometimes, we mistakenly believe the grass is greener in other schools.
Sometimes ideals, such as for communism or Islam, must be modified because they were wrong to begin with. I was about the same age as the idealistic Red Guards in China, committing their sincere yet bad atrocities… (bad enough that people kept committing suicide during the entire ten years of the Cultural Revolution) …when I was standing with a basketball at a hoop. People kept cheering as each shot, bouncing on the rim, almost went in. I didn’t tell them I was missing on purpose, to spare their feelings.
Back then, I didn’t know how much my ideals from the Holy Bible were false, because I read the good book without attending church: I didn’t role model reality from the congregation. “Beware the zeal of a new convert.” I suppose that old slogan explains why American-born Muslims in everyday life say, “Islam means peace.” Meanwhile criminals who convert while in the echo chamber of prison can express radical disagreement with my friendly neighbourhood Muslims. Too bad radicals don’t mingle more.
Meanwhile, if journalists must mingle with all political parties then they won’t join any parties. Call them political eunuchs.
It was a few weeks after that basketball hoop, avidly seeking self improvement books, wondering if I should work really hard, all day every day, just like in those Horatio Alger stories, that I chanced upon a book: It was The Conquest of Happiness, from 1930, by Nobel prize-winner Bertrand Russell. He was well known in his day for not being a Christian. In fact, he wrote a book called Why I am Not a Christian.
Well, in Happiness Russell disagreed with a hypothetical case where a man would work all day, and only take time out for his meals, solely because he needed the food, to get back to his business of fighting evil. This made sense to me, maybe. But then Russell went on to say that if a man told a woman that he wanted to marry her solely because he wanted to make her happy, not caring for himself, then—get this—she would not be altogether pleased. It was as if Russell expected all his readers back in 1930 to agree the fairer sex did not want a good, totally humble, totally selfless man. No model Christians. To an idealistic teenager, this was a surprise. Maybe, I thought, our church-going ancestors did not live on greener pastures after all.
As for those Red Guards, and my fellow intellectuals reading the good book of Marx, following their remorseless logic to commit atrocities… It was a Chinese sympathizer, a well dressed very nice writer, who spoke at the Orpheum Theatre on Granville Street one night. She pointed out that the way for intellectuals to avoid killing was to get down from their theory and into specific concrete cases. As an idealistic bookworm myself, I took Han Suyin’s advice to heart.
It would have been embarrassing advice if ever I stopped to think it was sincere teens like me who, of traitors, would “kill for peace,” or, over in Vietnam, report “We had to burn that village in order to save it.”
About three years after that day at the basketball hoop I read my first book by Ayn Rand, the huge novel Atlas Shrugged. They say you have to hear a new thing six times before it sinks in. I was a couple hundred pages into Rand’s ongoing message before I finally “got it.”
Without using the word “anti-capitalist,” Rand presents a scene where the heroine visits a businessman. Previously, the man had joined with other businessmen to form the “Anti dog eat dog league.” Without using the word “price fixing” the others democratically had voted that he should raise his prices to match everybody else. This would be the brotherly thing to do, everyone else agreed, since their businesses could not compete with his otherwise.
In Rand’s scene the businessman, facing the heroine, is slumped at his desk. With a tear glistening in his eye, he tells her he has to raise his prices. He can’t be selfish or “dog eat dog,” can he? He must agree with the majority, mustn’t he? Tears… At that point I set the book down so I could go do cartwheels. I had finally grasped the virtue of selfishness.
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Sean Crawford
October,
2021
Footnote: The truncated comment was by Serenajoy, under the film review by Roger Ebert of Field of Dreams.
