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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ:
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Morrison, professor in Slavic languages and literature at Northwestern University. And we're here today talking about his book, Wonder, Confront Certainty. Dr. Morrison, wonderful to have you today.
Gary Morson:
Well, it was wonderful to be here and thanks for inviting me.
PJ:
So normally I would start with why did you write this book? But I think what I want to start with before even that is what is a dialogue of the dead?
Gary Morson:
Oh, well, that's really a great question. It started out as a literary genre in the ancient world. And what would happen would be, the author would imagine that in Hades, people who had lived in different centuries could talk to each other and finally, you know, what happened? Could, if Alexander the Great, you know, could meet Heraclitus, if, you know, Julius Caesar could meet Alexander the Great, what would they say to each other, right? And so it was a way of posing, usually it was philosophers, and it was a way of getting them to imagine pinning each other down so they could get the full logical impact of their ideas. And It was not just that you got them to do that even though they never met in life. It was that if you're dead, you don't have to worry about the consequences of your actions. And so they were much freer to talk than anybody in life. So this became a dialogue, a literary genre, which continued. It continues right up to the present. People are still writing it. You can see its appeal. But I decided that that's how I would imagine the Russian conversation. I mean, I did literally sort of imagine Hades, but I tried to, you know, not do history, that is one after the other, but explain how they pose the ultimate questions of life, and then imagine they could all be part of the same conversation, talking with each other. And you know, the Russians have a very strong sense of their tradition. So in fact, they're doing that anyway. Sometimes when you hear, I don't know, Solzhenitsyn talk about Tolstoy, it's almost as if they were present and he was annoyed by him personally. You
PJ:
Hahaha.
Gary Morson:
know. So it didn't take that much work to do this, but that was the way I wanted to do it. Because I wasn't so much interested, I mean there was some history in the book, but I wasn't so much interested in, you know, how things developed the way a historian would. But what the Russian experience of asking ultimate questions could teach us. So, you know, and my idea was that their questions, just as they thought they were, were the eternally relevant questions that people are always going to ask, will always be there. And so, to say we're really good at asking them, we could learn something from it. And that's how I think about literature. I think about literature for me, I mean there are other ways to think about literature, but I've always thought of it as a source of wisdom. A source of wisdom in the sense that... don't get from other disciplines. I mean, you get this overlap, of course, but, you know, when a great novelist poses philosophical questions, he doesn't do it the way, let's say, an analytic philosopher would do it. And the same kinds of arguments or evidence don't work for one as work for the other. So, I don't know, I mean, the typical way a let's say a philosophical novel works, the ones that Paul Stoyan does this, they were written in England too, is you explore first, you get the character who has a certain set of beliefs, and first you explore. makes those beliefs convincing to him or her. That is, people always think it's because they're logically cogent, they're fit and evident. But there's usually strong emotional reasons in her form or personal reasons. And so you kind of show, you cast a little bit of irony on the beliefs. The world is not as simple as you think, and you don't believe in all the reasons that you think you do. And then the plot of the novel then explores what happens if you actually try to live these beliefs which are always simpler than real life and real experience in a real world and what consequences does it actually lead to? And the result is that you know the beliefs always turn out to be too simple and flawed.
PJ:
Mm.
Gary Morson:
And that's what makes novels you know really, realist novels different from other literary genres right? Like you know There's a literary genre called YouTube. journey to the perfect socialist future and you get all... In that case, the philosophical ideas are not too simple. They are the truth. And anybody who thinks that the world is complex is simply trying to mystify you so you don't see the simple truth. It's the
PJ:
Mm.
Gary Morson:
exact opposite of philosophical practice. But the great realist novels are always showing how... is too complex and there's something you forgot. You were right to ask the question, but there's something you've forgotten by being too certain. And that's sort of part of the title about certainty. Those who are certain, they have the answer. Usually ideologues, the communist philosophers did. The 19th century revolutionaries of many different beliefs did. But the great writers cultivate a spirit of wonder. That is, the world is. so complex we will never fully understand it. We can, by keep asking the questions, we will never get final answers, but we will deepen our understanding with each step.
PJ:
That's actually, I mean, I might just like steal this entire clip from you and just use it as a promo for the show, because that's the
Gary Morson:
I'm out.
PJ:
idea is from Job that the Leviathan is
Gary Morson:
Thank you.
PJ:
something that you cannot catch. So the idea of chasing the Leviathan is we're chasing the truth, but we can't ever catch it. And that's literally what
Gary Morson:
That's
PJ:
you're talking
Gary Morson:
lovely.
PJ:
about here.
Gary Morson:
That's why you have the title here.
PJ:
Yes, yes. So I really resonate with that. That's really awesome. Even as you're talking about the different genres as sources of wisdom, I've been reading kind of classics to my kids. And so
Gary Morson:
Mm-hmm.
PJ:
I've gone with fables and fairy tales, which Aesop's and Grimm's feel like they should be similar, but they're actually quite distinct, right?
Gary Morson:
No
PJ:
And
Gary Morson:
argument.
PJ:
they're both sources of wisdom, I think, in many ways, but they're very even different from like the novel. You know, like I'm reading, of course they're growing up and... Everyone's telling them you need to be fair and these sorts of things. And we read Aesop's fable and I can't remember which animal it was. There's one animal that's stronger than the other and they do a task together. I think it's the wolf and the fox. And at the end, the, the wolf's like, actually, I know this is supposed to be our reward together, but I'm just going to take it all. And the fox is like, that's not fair. And he's like, I don't care. And it's like, might makes right. And that's the end of the, and my, my kids look at each other and they're like, they look at me and they're like, that's not supposed to happen. And I'm like, But you know what? It does. Like, it's
Gary Morson:
Alright, alright,
PJ:
like...
Gary Morson:
it's not...
PJ:
And that's a totally different, like, you know, very similar to, like, kind of this utopian novels where it's like, there's a right way to do things and we will end up with this ideal. And then you have like this fable that's just like, no, sometimes the wolf just takes everything even just because he's a jerk and he can't.
Gary Morson:
Well, yeah, and it sort of teaches kids that justice is one thing and the agreements that you make with people are something else.
PJ:
Yes,
Gary Morson:
They
PJ:
yeah.
Gary Morson:
can't just rely on justice to enforce them.
PJ:
And it's funny because it seems super simple, but when you actually start breaking that down, it is quite complex, and it is something that literature provides, right? So you mentioned a little bit about Wonder, Confront, Certainty. Where did you get... How did that title come to you, and who are some of the main players in your Dialogue of the Dead? You've already mentioned some of them, but...
Gary Morson:
Well, how the title came to me, I was, you know, reading this book, I don't know, written by a Russian literature professor at the generation before me. what he called the positive hero in Russian literature. The perfect virtuous hero. Socialist realist literature, communism, it's filled with them, right? And... He's talking about that world view and what happens when someone sees things differently. And right in the middle of a paragraph he had the phrase, wonder confronts certainty. And I thought, this is the title I've been looking for 10 years. So that's why he's credited immediately, you open the book, the quotations from it. I wish he had not been dead for 40 years so we could see it. But his students are still around and they appreciate it.
PJ:
Yes, yes.
Gary Morson:
I was not his student. Then you asked, who are the writers who... Well, here's the way I basically set it up. This is a little too simple, but it's basically correct. There are two broad traditions of argument in Russia, and one are the people who are certain, one of the people who are not, right? And... people who are certain were the members of what was called the intelligentsia. Now, intelligentsia is a word we get from Russian. It was coined there about 1860. So it doesn't mean in Russian or it didn't mean in Russian what it means here. If by, you know, it doesn't mean an intellectual, right?
PJ:
Huh, okay, I was not
Gary Morson:
It's
PJ:
expecting
Gary Morson:
almost.
PJ:
that.
Gary Morson:
It's almost the exact opposite. If by an intellectual you mean someone who thinks for himself, it emphatically does not mean that. It means an ideologue who was signed on to the program, the received program of whatever radical school you belong to. Skepticism is ruled out. You have the truth. Now, you know. was really interesting how this group developed. And other societies sometimes have these, but not all. To be a member of the intelligentsia, you couldn't just, being educated didn't do it. For example, if you were not an atheist, some sort of socialist or anarchist, definitely a revolution, Harry. You couldn't be a member of the Intelligentsia. If you didn't believe that the only function of art was propaganda, you couldn't be a member of the Intelligentsia.
PJ:
Mm.
Gary Morson:
Then you had to look at, you had to sort of sever, it's almost like a monk, you had to sever all your ties with the rest of society and identify not as a nobleman or a member of this or that ethnic group, but as a member of the Intelligentsia. That had to be your identity. So that was a... They became the terrorists and revolutionaries and the radical journalists. And as you can imagine, that... was contrary to everything that made great art. I mean, you can't make great art if it just, we're gonna illustrate a narrow program we already know. So, you know, people like Cherubov had utter contempt for these people. Tolstoy did. Dustin Abskos not only had contempt, but he thought them extremely dangerous. He didn't have contempt, because he didn't look down on them. He thought they were really dangerous. The only one in the 19th century anywhere who foresaw what totalitarianism would be. That didn't exist. But he, you know, Saul asked, what if these people actually do gain power? What will they do? And in one of his novels, he actually describes in detail what would happen. And what he describes actually predicts, you know, the only thing it does. If it's not in Soviet totalitarianism, it was in Chinese. The Cultural Revolution is described in detail. Cambodia. And it's all there. He knew this. So you get these two rival traditions. You know, there was a critic writing in 1909 who, I love the quotation so I used it. He said, the surest gauge of the greatness of a Russian writer is the extent of his hatred for the Now, of course, that doesn't mean Telsin's in ours, but in theirs. So if you think of the history of the Russian tradition as, let's say, Lenin on one side and Tolstoy on the other. 19th century terrorists, Russia invented modern terrorism, on one side and Tolstoy, or Jacko, or Dostoevsky, on the other. Now what happens, you see, in 1917 is that one faction of the radical intelligentsia, the Bolsheviks, take over. And from that point on, the writers are not just facing another social group. They are. facing a government which is trying to put that program into effect. And so there, you get all these wonderful writers who are not official writers. They have to oppose official writers. And so that becomes this tradition. That's how you get Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak. And since the government was absolutely militant, the first principle of Bolshevism was atheism and materialism. that there was any spiritual or higher value. If you believed in a phrase that you would speak with contempt, the sanctity of human life!
PJ:
Hmm
Gary Morson:
That proved you were a believer in God, because where would the sanctity of human life come from? You're just matter, right?
PJ:
Yeah.
Gary Morson:
The idea something having higher value could only come from religion or maybe Kantian philosophy which was religion in disguise. Okay, so if you actually believe that human life was worth preserving for its own sake you were clearly an enemy You were religious, right? So you said that the atheism was a deep So it's not really surprising that if you think about it, this is the most first really officially atheist state that took it really seriously and lasted and Several of the greatest writers were Christians Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mikhail Bulgakov. And the ones who are not Christian, like the Jewish Grossman, he still believed in similar higher values that were completely opposed. So he sort of fits in the same camp, although he's not quite a Christian. He believes in the ultimate values that Christians pretty much believe in. So it's an amazing phenomenon. It only struck me while writing this book how odd it was. I always knew that the great writers were all dissidents, but that so many of them were Christian had never occurred to me.
PJ:
Hmm.
Gary Morson:
I was actually working on them. And that's really significant, because it's the opposite of what the regime was. If you're living in a society where they really take seriously the idea that people are nothing but matter, that's it. really takes materialism to an extreme that American materialists have a dream of, you begin to see why there's either that or you believe in something transcendent. God, maybe it's a Buddhist truth or a Taoist, but it can't just be matter. It can't just be matter. And that's why you get so many people. experiencing some sort of religious conversion. And the real leaders, even the ones who don't, there are memoirs of people in the Gula who remain communists and atheists, even though they've been arrested. But they acknowledged that the only people you could trust not to turn you in order to survive, steal your food or get around, were the believers. And these were atheists saying, you know, and the only people who had the courage to stand up for their convictions, even at the cost of their life, were the believers. And it didn't seem to matter what religion it was. And there were Pentecostalists and Baptists, and of course, Russian Orthodox and, you know, Jews and Muslims. It didn't seem to matter, but they believed in something, you know, that these atheists thought was crazy. they had to acknowledge that it gave them a moral fiber that the atheist didn't have. So that's really strange too. Thank you.
PJ:
Yeah, can you talk a little bit, I mean, you mentioned Dostoevsky, and you mentioned kind of that you see literature as this, I won't say alternative, one of the sources of wisdom that gets passed down through culture. Can you expound on that a little bit, even like you talk about the genius that Dostoevsky had to look ahead, and how does that translate into wisdom? How do you see that wisdom? in and through literature. Like, what does that do?
Gary Morson:
Well, let me just narrow literature down to realist novels for the moment. The way realist novels work, they're great innovation. I always think of it as, you know, the real inventor of this was Jane Austen, who first used this as a consistent device for a novel. There's a kind of language that they use which gets you inside the head. you not just to see what they do, but to co-experience their sequence of thoughts from within. One form of this, but not the most interesting, is stream of conscious. There are others which are much more interesting, as we have time to describe. But the whole point is that when you read, let's say, 800 pages about Anna Karenina, you have not just seen what she's done, but you have traced the sequence of her emotions. You winced, no, Dana, don't do that! Because you're living within her. What is it? What you experience is intellectual and emotional empathy for hundreds and hundreds of people with people who are very different from you, who have different beliefs, maybe a different gender, certainly a different social class and nationality. But not as an abstract principle. You need to empathize. But actually, what it feels like is empathize. And you get practice in it. You can do it for hundreds of pages. And it teaches you to see the world differently from the way you otherwise would. Because you received it from one set of eyes. But now you're practicing from another set of eyes. Only the great realist novels teach empathy in that way. And that is one of the reasons why I think literature is so important in, you know. because there is nothing else that gives you practice and empathy. And nowadays, I'm not talking about emotional empathy, but nowadays, you know, more often than not, you're not, just as in the Soviet Union, you're not supposed to empathize with wrong ideas, just our ideas. That doesn't require empathy, of course, right? Agreeing with yourself requires no effort. get you to do that. sense always subversive. Not in the sense of politically revolutionary, but in the sense that they subvert your habits of thought. They get you to see the world differently. They get you, even though if you imagine that all truth is on one side, they get you to know why a decent honorable person with different experience, because none of us have, all of our experience is partial. see things differently and think differently. You learn, I mean historians for example will tell you that to really understand another century or another culture you need not just to protect your values onto it how you would behave and what you would anticipate but you know how they did otherwise you don't understand what's going on right you know why you know If you just think of, let's say, Isaac Newton, as someone who thinks like modern scientists, but back then, you don't understand. Why did he spend most of his time doing alchemy?
PJ:
Right.
Gary Morson:
Writing interpretations of the Book of Daniel, the Book of the Apocalypse. Something very different was going on, of which that led to what we think was great scientific discoveries. But he didn't think they were the most important thing. What produced that? You see. a third century Chinese thinker posed questions that we pose but in a different frame. That's what historians will tell you, you need to learn. But literature actually gives you constant practice of doing. You know, the Russians are really good. They're a great bill of snob. And they combine it with asking philosophical questions. So you not only get the emotion, but you actually get what it is. to think philosophically. And it's straight here. Even the way they do it, characters you don't think of as philosophers still have a worldview, which is really philosophical, like Anna Karenina does. Oh, she's not a philosopher. She really has a sense of what... And she articulates it within, just not in a systematic way, but it's there, right?
PJ:
Right,
Gary Morson:
And you
PJ:
right.
Gary Morson:
can see it. You can see what the assumptions are by what she says, what she finds convincing somebody else. And you begin to see what that world is. And you know, you should be... For example, how a sequence of ideas can lead you to suicide. The wrong ideas. Which happens in a lot of Russian novels.
PJ:
Yeah, a little kind of infamous for that. It's interesting, you know, there's a, for as long as I've been a part of education, there's been a big call for critical thinking and installing
Gary Morson:
Thanks
PJ:
critical
Gary Morson:
for watching.
PJ:
thinking. And one of the things that's always been interesting to me is that any curriculum I see with that, generally, that I've been exposed to at least, is very narrow and is often very rhetorical in focus or writing in focus. But if you go into, you know, German idealist tradition, and even what you're talking about here, there's this idea of education that's meant to broaden our minds, and I don't hear that talked about much, but that's, I think, another way of, I want to make sure I'm tracking with you here, that to me also sounds like another way of talking about this empathy, that education's not just to form us for a specific spot, but it's supposed to broaden our minds so that we are better humans. And some of that, as we talk about critical thinking, is it's not just about a set of rules to follow or a set of best practices. It's also being acquainted with different grounds for conversation, different grounds for dialogue. And I think that's, a lot of times we're trained in a very specific tradition, and what happens is when we're acquainted and when we deal with different traditions, like the great Russian authors or... even reading a Chinese author from the third century. We have to adapt our ideas to an entirely different cultural ground, and it requires us to do a different form of almost creative thinking. Is that, does that match with what you're saying?
Gary Morson:
Absolutely, that's what I'm saying. And you mentioned critical thinking. You know, it sounds wonderful, critical thinking. But what it actually means in practice is believe what I do and criticize the thinking of somebody else. That is, that's what it means actually in practice, which is the exact opposite of what you might think of the phrase critical thinking, right? Similarly, when I first came to Northwestern University, sorry, 35 years ago, I was walking down the car and I saw that there was this other professor who had on her door a big sign that said question authority. And one day I was walking past and I heard her from within saying to a poor student, haven't you learned anything from my class? Question somebody else's authority is what you mean, not mine.
PJ:
Right.
Gary Morson:
That's what critical thinking is. That's not how realist novels work.
PJ:
Hmm.
Gary Morson:
They really are trying to teach you to get out of your... You will find, thus they ask, you certainly have very strong political and philosophical views. But you will find in some of these novels, characters who hold those views appearing completely...
PJ:
Yeah, a certain form of self-awareness.
Gary Morson:
Yeah. you know kind of When I, let's say you pick up a novel, a realist novel, say something about George Eliot or any other great realist novels, and you know, the narrator comments, well, or the author is talking. It's not like a saint's life, where what the author says is the truth. The author presents her view as Well, this is what I believe. My view is one view among many. I know I don't have the absolute, but it's what I believe. That's a very different stance from, let's say, what a Bolshevik author was supposed to do, is because Marxism, Leninism was, period, the absolute truth that would never change. That's why it was considered far above physics. because physics is going to change, but Marxism, Leninism won't. So at very often points in Soviet history, a scientific doctrine, whether in biology, chemistry, or physics, would come into conflict with the philosophy of Marxism, Leninism. And it was always the physics or the biology that had to go. So genetics was rejected for a long time. Various series of chemistry, relativity theory was rejected for a while.
PJ:
I did not know that.
Gary Morson:
Oh, that's well, this is wonderful story. You know that the physicist Andre Sakharov later dissidents right prominent liberal dissident, who was famous for having invented the Soviet hydrogen bomb. the story of how Stalin comes to him once to talk. And he said, you know, I've been reading this new physics. Stalin, by the way, was a real intellectual. I know he's just a thug, but he was not. He was brutal, but he was not uneducated. And he's talking to Sakharov. You know, I'm reading about this new physics. And he's talking about quantum physics, notions like indeterminacy and uncertainty, which are. completely contrary to the Marxist-Leninist idea that everything can be known absolutely certain. To
PJ:
Mm-hmm.
Gary Morson:
think you can is not the equivalent of agnosticism. We're atheists, not agnostic. So he says, so isn't this contrary to Marxism-Leninism? And Sacher reports that he replied, well, you know, I'm not a philosopher. I'm just a physicist. I don't know if it's contrary, he said, but I do know you can't make a hydrogen bomb without it. Go ahead, sister.
PJ:
Yeah, right. Oh man.
Gary Morson:
It's a wonderful story.
PJ:
Yes. Like it's those little contradictions and instabilities that are drawn out by novelists, right? It's
Gary Morson:
All
PJ:
like,
Gary Morson:
right.
PJ:
well, I really disagree with this and I am certain about my disagreement, but also I need the hydrogen bomb if I'm gonna remain in power, right?
Gary Morson:
Well, there's this wonderful novel by Vasili Grosvich, called Life and Fate. Some people think it's a great novel of the 20s. I don't think it's the great, but I think it's very good. And
PJ:
Yeah.
Gary Morson:
its hero is a physicist, who has to... conflict with various official ideas. And there was many very interesting characters who are devoted communists and how they think. And you get a whole panoply of views of different ways of having wonder or certainty. It's quite beautifully done. But he makes sure to make the hero a physicist because he has to interact with notions that, well, I'm sorry. This is not Marxist. This is the. period when everything bad was thought to be Jewish. This is Talmudic, not real
PJ:
Mmm.
Gary Morson:
Martha. In other periods, there are other reasons. But he has to confront all of this. And it's really well, it's really quite beautifully done. The hero was actually based on a real physicist. But
PJ:
Oh, who is the real physicist?
Gary Morson:
no, I'm trying to remember his name. Not
PJ:
Sorry,
Gary Morson:
one
PJ:
I didn't
Gary Morson:
we
PJ:
mean
Gary Morson:
can
PJ:
to put you on the
Gary Morson:
talk
PJ:
spot.
Gary Morson:
about. I could look it up for you. I think it's had the same last name, Strom. Something like that, I could look it up.
PJ:
Yeah, yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to put you on the spot there. I did want to ask you about you go through the three types of thinkers. Do you mind kind of exploring that for us?
Gary Morson:
Sure, this is what I'm dealing with in the pre-revolutionary period. I'm trying to give a portrait of, so you don't just think these are abstract, ideas that are walking around with bodies of guys, but real people. I talk about three types of Russian thinkers, what their personalities were like and how they thought. Three broad types that constantly will occur. repeated over and over again that are described in memoirs and fiction, you know, and everyone recognizes it. I call the first one the wanderer, and that was a type that, you know, if you were uneducated, you were the type that, you know, pilgrims, but there were a lot of people who did this, you know, in the Middle Ages, they were in Western Europe, people would go from shrine to shrine. That was going on in Russianizing century. There were a lot of them, looking for some sort of, in Russia, of course, ultimate truth. But if you were intellectual, you didn't go from shrine to shrine. You went from philosophy to philosophy, each one promising to answer all the questions of existence. And what a wanderer would do, there are check of stories describing such people, is they would be absolutely certain of one philosophy, and then they would be disillusioned. Now what they never did was think, oh. Maybe the truth is not in a single philosophy. Maybe the world is too complete. No, no, they just link to another philosophy. There's never a moment of skepticism. There's a moment of disillusionment. But never skepticism, and disillusionment lasts only until you get another philosophy, which isn't very long. So this time, I give porkers, they're amazingly interesting people. Sometimes absolutely brilliant. Russia's greatest literary critic was one of those. He was constantly going from ideology to ideology. And he was quite self-aware. One of my favorite lines is when he says, you know, if I had the power, it would go really badly with someone who thought the way I did six months ago. Okay. It never leads to skepticism or humility. So that's one type of thinking. And there's another type of thinking that I call the idealist. And these are different because there are two types of these. But what they all do is they don't go from idea to idea. They cling to one idea forever. So the model for them that was always used was Don Quixote. Tugendgivism, essay. So. And no matter what the disillusionment is, it's be like, evil magicians made it look that way, just the way Don's game, except it's not evil magicians. They would claim to the idea. And the other guy was one who also could have only one idea, but wouldn't face disillusionment and had to come to it. Those were. the most common type of those were the populace, who in this, the term, another term we get from Russia, they were, they believed that all the virtue lay with the simple Russians, these peasants. And so they got all these philosophies based on it, and they would then, they would go to the countryside and they would find that they were cruel, brutal, drunken, you know, do. terrible thing to each other. I don't really not support widows and orphans, but kill them or take advantage. I mean, it was awful. I don't know what they actually found. As one of them said, I saw nothing but swinishness. And then he tries at one point to... Now listen, if the peasants are all good and this is what the peasants do, maybe that's what true morality is, so he adopts swine and stork. I mean, he does everything, but nothing works, right? And he has wonderful stories in this guy. Clearly autobiographical, but he, wow, to give it short, he went mad. And he wound up thinking that he was a pig, that is all the swinish there. He took a letter and became a pig in his own mind. A lot of these populists went mad. Some of them were brilliant writers. And again, Chekhov has a story about one of them. Some of them committed suicide. Others became alcoholics. So that's the second type, the idealist, right? And the third type is what I call the revolutionist. Now, a revolutionist is not just a revolutionary. A revolutionist is someone who loves revolution or terrorism for their own sake, the thrill of it, right? The sense that you are beyond good and evil, that you can, you know. kill, you could do anything, that you are a god, or that the intensity that comes from, you know, you could be killed any minute during a terrorist attack. The thrill of being in your life on the line, there are a lot of these, some of them are different motives, but the point was that you were a revolutionary for your own sake. This is the people who created the modern terrorist movement in Russia. You know, Russia is the first country where you ask a young man or woman, well, what do you want to be when you grow up? They might say, terrorists. It was a respectable occupation, sometimes passed on from, you know, generation to generation. The whole family is the terrorist from generation to generation. The Lenins were one of them, right? And not by no means the only. The Lenins' siblings were terrorists, revolutionaries. lot of these families. And of course it was a, you know, a very dangerous occupation. You may not live long, but it was a highly respectable. The only one occupation that, you know, had more respect or as much respect in Russia was writer, because you know Russians adore literature. It's the purpose of existence, is literature. So I discovered while doing my work that there was this one terror, the most famous terrorist of his day, killed a lot of prominent people. named Boris Savinikov. And he was also a novelist. And he wrote novels about terrorism. And one of them has since been translated. Most of them have not. But I realized reading his memoirs and his novels and all about him, I couldn't tell whether he wrote novels to dramatize his terrorist activities or he became a terrorist of material for novels. He kept clippings of both his activities, his use of his books and his use of his terrorism. He kept them together. So this is the other type. He would do for any, he didn't care what the philosophy was. This kind of populism, this kind of socialism, he'd be a terrorist for anybody. It didn't matter. Terrorism was a goal. You start with the welfare of the people is the goal, so revolution is the means. Then revolution becomes the goal in itself, and terrorism becomes the means. And then terrorism becomes the goal in itself. It keeps going like that. the three types that they appear over and over in the literature. And the writers are fascinated with these types. They see them around them all the time. What is very often the case in Russia is that people who you think are very dangerous, crazy, cruel ideas are geniuses who are highly creative, highly creative thinkers. That goes right up to the present by the way.
PJ:
Yeah. Even as you're talking here, absolutely fascinating.
Gary Morson:
Thank you.
PJ:
I didn't realize that terrorism had been invented this way in Russia.
Gary Morson:
Well, there have
PJ:
But
Gary Morson:
been earlier terrorists, but this is a movement of the sort, not just a few terrorists over here, but a whole social
PJ:
Yeah,
Gary Morson:
need.
PJ:
can you contextualize that for me a little bit? Cause I'm trying to, like, you know, you're talking about they're killing people, they're doing it for the sake of a movement. Can you give us some, maybe some stories about what that would look like? Cause I'm trying to picture in my head a little
Gary Morson:
Thanks
PJ:
bit
Gary Morson:
for
PJ:
more
Gary Morson:
watching!
PJ:
concretely what you're talking about when you say terrorist.
Gary Morson:
Well, you know, it starts out in a relatively simple way. What you want to do is kill prominent government officials. And in the 1870s, you had this group of people who would, you know, they drove ways of stalking them and eventually, you know, throwing bombs and killing them. And they eventually, their goal was eventually to kill the czar, and they did in 1881. They blew him up with a bomb. You know, it was like their 15th try and why, you know, the government was so incompetent as not to, you know, test him. I mean, there was one time that they decided they were going to kill him by blowing up the entire palace that he was in. And everybody in it at the same time and still him alone with it. And you know, so the way they did it was kind of... police were checking anyone who went into the building, but not the tradesmen who were working in the basement. Well, the guy came in as a tradesman and every day he brought in a little bit of explosive. One day he lit it and it blew up the whole, you know, whole... Ballrooms were destroyed and everybody in them, right? I mean, children were killed. The Tsar's children were thrown far away. They weren't killed, but they were hurt. But the Tsar happened to have just stepped out for a minute, so he wasn't killed. Lots of other people were, right? But they find
PJ:
What would...
Gary Morson:
that
PJ:
Good.
Gary Morson:
in the 90s and the beginning of 20th century, it became a mass movement. It wasn't just a few cells. It was thousands of people who would do things like throw bombs laced with nails into cafes to see how the foul bourgeois will squirm, as one of them put it. I mean, You know, anyone who could be identified as having a connection to the government, even a post-op clerk, would not, would either be bombed or be def- nothing they loved to do was throw sulfuric acid in their face. You ever see somebody after that, they look, you know, they're a picture, right?
PJ:
Oh no.
Gary Morson:
And, you know, it was, I mean, one of my favorite, there were more terrorist attacks than traffic accidents, okay? And- One of my favorite stories is a provincial newspaper where one of the reporters asked the editor, you know, the new governor has just been appointed, shall we run his biography? And the answer is no, save it for the obituary.
PJ:
Mm. Yeah.
Gary Morson:
It's not gonna be very long.
PJ:
He's right.
Gary Morson:
So this is what the culture of terrorism was like in the beginning of the 20th century. That's what, you know, it was extraordinary. Never anything like that. And now, when the Bolsheviks took over, the terrorists, including the ones who were not Bolsheviks, but belong to other ideologies, Lenin was shooting everybody who didn't belong to his party. The other socialists, the liberal. But the terrorists found employment with him, working for the Chekhov, the secret police. He hired them. They knew what they were doing. They wouldn't be squeamish. So they all have found employment. Well, who do they care who they're killing? This is terrorism, right?
PJ:
And that's, I think I was struggling
Gary Morson:
Thank you.
PJ:
and it's become clear as you're talking about, what's the difference between like a terrorist and an assassin, right? Is this the emotional effect and even like you've mentioned a little bit of this emphasis on the media and is that part of the outgrowth of some of the technology like spreading like the press?
Gary Morson:
Yeah, it is. I mean assassins typically they've adjusted for a long time. The point is simply You are the target is a particular person and you want to get rid of that person, you know The story, you know about how the word assassin comes is you know, it's a medieval word Muslim word for derived from hashish because they get these people to go and miss their life Hashish or assassins They existed for a long time, but a terrorist is trying to frighten all, not just kill a single person, but frighten all of society. You blow up a whole palace to kill your god, right? You throw bombs into cafes. That's an assassinized terrorist, right?
PJ:
Right, or the sulfuric acid, which is not a, it's more about
Gary Morson:
Thank
PJ:
the
Gary Morson:
you.
PJ:
fear and the disfigurement than the death. Wow.
Gary Morson:
And the pro, you didn't have to really, really do anything to get that sort of treatment, right? In fact, they were, they supported themselves by robberies. They called them expropriations to make it sound better. But there was so many of these expropriations that the criminal gangs started claiming that they were not stealing, they were doing. expropriations. So it was very hard to tell who were the, you know, the revolutionaries engaged in robbery and who were the robbers. And in fact, sometimes they were the same person. You know, okay, I'll give this much to the party and take this much for myself. You know, it's a fascinating, you know, there's a wonderful book about this written about 20 years ago by a historian. shout to kill about Russian revolutionary terrorism in this period. It's a wonderful book. It's absolutely riveting. But then, you know, starting with that, I read their memoirs, you know, and, you know, their novels, and they wrote them, you know. Sarmichov was not the only terrorist who wrote novels and memoirs, you know. This is Russia, right? You know, where you have to
PJ:
That's
Gary Morson:
purposefully
PJ:
what you do.
Gary Morson:
write this literature.
PJ:
Right, and I wanna be respectful of your time, but I did wanna especially ask, as you talk about timeless questions, one of the first that you mentioned, and I think is just really on point for what we've talked about today, is what can't theory account for?
Gary Morson:
Yeah, the third part of the book, which is about half of it, is it's been set up before by what people were like and all the big questions that I talked about. And then I go through how they argue about it. So one of them is, at the reconsolary, what is the role of theory in life? Is theory like hard science? Can it be a hard social science? Question which is not very much with us, right? that determines everything in life that the laws of physics do. And this theory there will take precedence over specific events. You know, if you're a physicist, you're not interested in a particular event, you're interested in the laws governing them, right? And you know, the same with if you're a social scientist, the people conform to the laws, if you really got a science. Or is that? can it be? This is what Leo Tolstoy argued. He gave, and Dostoevsky too, why there could never be a social science. It's not that we don't have one yet. And listen, think about the number of people from the 70th century, you know, in our time, you know, not just Marx, but Freud thought he had a hard science. And, you know, more recently Jared Diamond thinks he has a hard science. And there are a lot of economists who think that economics is a hard science. It's a dream. Just what Newton did. did for the planets, we can do. And the Russians, there are a lot of Russians like that, but there are also a lot who are like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky who give very principled reasons why, let's say, contingency is absolutely ineradicable, or other reasons why human beings will never be subject to it. I mean, in Tolstoy's novel War and Peace, he does it by having the generals who are, the Russian generals there, all believe they have a social science, a science of warfare. And Tolstoy makes it clear he means to refer to any possible social, and they all plan battles, and they say, every contingency has been foreseen. We can plan them down, scientists. And they lose. They lose. And then do they... say, oh, well, maybe we don't have a sun. No, no, no. And he gives all the excuses that people always give. I don't know. You make a prediction about what the temperature in the air is going to be in a certain time, and it turns out to be wrong. I mean, do you say, yeah, well, we basically are right in our picture, but we need a little more work on the particulars. No, no, no. You just ignore it, or you explain it away. And the same with economists. Well, yeah, no, no. didn't predict that recession, true, but now we've modified the theories that we could have predicted. You have all these excuses. You know, you want to say, listen, any cockamamie theory can predict the past. The test is whether you're rigged the future. But people don't, because the dream is so strong that knowledge to be real has to resemble physics or mathematics. Real humanistic knowledge, real knowledge of society, is not at all like that. It involves wisdom, not hard science. Aristotle was very clear about this. There are two types of knowledge. And Ethics, for example, he says, does not resemble mathematics, because there's always an exception. There's always something that doesn't quite fit. The contingencies can't be foreseen. That's why you need wisdom. And he says, you know, this is why... Young people are going to become fabulous mathematicians, but they never become good at ethics because it relies on a lot of experience and being wrong a lot and reflecting on it. And of course, old people usually don't do that either, but they could do it. And so, right?
PJ:
Ha ha ha.
Gary Morson:
The only people who could be good at ethics are old people who have had the experience and reflected properly on it, right? But that's not true with mathematics or physics, right? Right? And so, you have this sense of two kinds of knowledge. can't be one of Aristotle's favorite phrases, on the whole and for the most part. Mathematicians don't speak of on the whole and for the most part the angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees. You wouldn't understand mathematics if you did that, if you said something like that. But the Russian novelists are in a world of...
PJ:
One, let me say, first of all, I have really enjoyed this conversation. If, as our audience goes out for this week, and this is often one of my most frustrating questions, I know that, but what is one takeaway that you could give them to just think about through the week from our discussion today?
Gary Morson:
Oh, that's interesting. Well... to think about ethical questions. How certain can you be of the answer? I have a whole couple of chapters on ethics. How certain can you be of the answers? What are the dangers of being too certain? And how can you learn from... getting inside the head and soul of someone who sees differently. What's the benefit of thinking, you know, maybe sometimes people disagree, not because they're evil, but because they're experienced. And maybe I can learn. I might not change my mind, but maybe I can learn something, right? Deepen my mind, even if not change it, right? What's the advantage of doing that? And is there actually an ethical imperative to do that? when you're dealing with ethics or anything else. That's a key question. And just raising the question about how far when you do this is, I think, one of the great lessons that literature has to teach.
PJ:
Dr. Morrison, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on today. Thank you.
Gary Morson:
Oh, it's a real pleasure being here. You ask great questions. Thank you so much. Good.