Each of us, through the accident of when and where we are born, marks different moments as turning points in our political or spiritual lives. For some, it is the assassination of Julius Caesar, for others, Luther’s nailing of 95 theses to a church door. For my grandfather, it was the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks – he sided with the Mensheviks and so I grew up in a strongly socialist but anti-communist home. Some marked the Moscow show trials as their turning point, for others it was the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact. For the Sunnyside Progressive School, which I attended from the time I was two until the early summer of 1940, when my parents moved to a new house in Kew Gardens Hills, it was Stalin’s murder of Trotsky in Mexico on August 21, 1940 – just too late to force me to take sides.
My own personal turning point was April 18, 1961. I went to
bed the night of the 17th thinking of myself as a left liberal and woke
up the next morning to discover that the newly elected liberal president, John
F. Kennedy, had just launched a failed invasion of Cuba. I and the other young
faculty and graduate students at Harvard who had formed a little group called
The New Left Club of Cambridge realized that we could no longer identify
ourselves as liberals. I began to call myself a Radical, but I had no idea what
that meant save that I was not any longer a supporter of the liberal wing of
the Democratic Party. It took me another 15 years and more to decide that I was
a Marxist and to know in some detail what that meant.
Those of us who are politically engagé place great store by these moments and imagine that they are
somehow unique in history, but of course they are not. This Sunday it will be
61 years since that botched invasion. How much more hopeful I was then that I
am now, despite everything
For me it was reading something, rather than an event in itself, and that was Chomsky's Deterring Democracy book, especially Chapter 1, which, if memory serves, offered a completely different take on the Cold War, and that was such an eye-opener.
ReplyDeleteFor me it was listening to Dylan's "With God on our Side" in Mike Cohen's bedroom in late 1963 or early 1964 at age 17. I had long suspected that the rationales for U.S. foreign policy were bullshit, but that song cristalized it for me, summed it up for me. It made sense to me in a way that what the mainstream media said never did.
ReplyDeleteUnquestionably for me it was reading Chomsky's and Herman's The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism in the early 1980's. I'd already read a good deal of Marx, Kropotkin, Gustav Landauer, Simone Weil, C. Wright Mills, and so forth, but none of that (except maybe Weil's essay on The Iliad) quite drove home the sheer horror of violence, including that of capitalist imperialism unleashed, and so what I then took to be the ethical and political necessity of radicalism. The only other things comparable to the intensity of the change in perspective it induced (reading of death squads and torturers trained in the U.S. at the School of the Americas) were intellectual and/or aesthetic: first seeing Cecil Taylor perform; first seeing the Merce Cunningham company; first reading Rimbaud's Illuminations; hearing Leo Steinberg lecture on Michelangelo's Doni Tondo.
ReplyDeleteMine's not as cool; it all starts with me in my late 'teens watching people argue online about religion. :) I wouldn't claim to have become "radical" so much as anti-Republican. I did eventually cool off on the anti-religious aspect (it was never really "me" in the first place), but I've remained anti-Republican, and it's been an easy decision.
ReplyDeleteI was raised by middle/upper-middle class conservative Catholics - and I was always somewhat shaky on Christianity/theism, but it held up until college, around age 19 or so. Some aggressively outspoken atheists in a couple of my online hangouts were successful in undermining my (already half-assed) religious conviction - it wasn't so much the strength and credibility of their arguments as the weakness of my self-confidence, the lameness of my rationalizations, and most especially, the novel and impressive sight of so many Cool Kids bashing the bejeezus out of religion. "Show me one piece of evidence, just one, that Jesus was a living, breathing dude," one of them said.
It seemed increasingly clear that I was on the losing side of that argument, so I figured I'd better start trying to think and talk like an atheist, or at least something approaching that end of the spectrum. After a short while, I identified the freethinkers as "my people," and noticed that the Republicans were not among them. I remember working up a rage over a Fox News segment that questioned whether "athiests" (complete with the misspelling) can be moral. Long story short, it occurred to me that the Republicans might be stubbornly, egregiously wrong about other things, too (e.g., more-or-less everything to do with human sexuality).
My reading of Peter Singer at age 22 made for another key moment. I eventually saw "my people" put in the good word for vegetarianism and animal rights. That led me to "The Singer Solution to World Poverty" (a sort of rehash of "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," appearing in Writings on an Ethical Life). I've never been very interested or informed about politics and political thought, but immediately after reading this piece, I felt that my relationship with money was reprehensibly selfish (this feeling has since subsided!); but more lastingly, I felt convinced that a modest retooling of the ways in which the rich and powerful manage the world's resources would succeed in eliminating a surprisingly vast amount (if not the entirety) of needless suffering. And as before, my old friends the Republicans were there to insist on the opposite.
For me it was the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt (Suez) in 1956 in temporal conjunction with the brutal putting down of the Hungarian rising. The first awoke my anti-nationalism and anti-imperialism (I am British). The second awoke in me the recognition that leftism comes in different varieties and that it was necessary to distinguish both more narrowly defined ideologies and partisan goals. (E.P. Thompson became a somewhat guiding light on this latter score.) I also learned that high-level conspiracies are actually sometimes entered into (Suez again, not to mention so many more down to the present) and not to jump on political bandwagons of any sort. rm
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ReplyDeleteIf one differentiates between key points in one's own life and key points in one's attitude towards the world in one's own thoughts and actions, then for my life the experience of hearing the Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach for the first time belongs in the first category. As it is said in a famous movie: From then on the worm turned in another direction. As for the "key point" of the second cathegory, I am still trying to find it.
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