1. Introduction & Synopsis
I have a lot of books: so many, in fact, that I have run out places to put them. A year or two ago, I therefore decided that, except on occasions when I particularly wanted to read something, I would not buy any new books but would embark, instead, on a voyage of rediscovery through my existing library: a journey which has already proved remarkably instructive. For while none of the books I have been accumulating over the last five decades or so has changed during that period, I, of course, have, with the result that, on re-reading, some of the books of which I once thought highly have turned out to be slightly disappointing, while for others I have gained a new appreciation.
One such book is ‘Notes From Underground’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which I first read as an undergraduate some fifty years ago and which I thought, at the time, was both strange and fascinating but not one of literature’s ‘great’ works, as I rather grandiloquently chose to categorise certain books at that time. In fact, the only reason I chose to reread it is because I heard Jordan Petersen talking very highly of it in one of his YouTube videos and began to suspect that, as a twenty-year-old, I hadn’t really understood it, which I am now fairly certain was the case.
For those who have not read it, it is a relatively short book of around 120 pages, written in the first person by someone who never gives us his name. All we know about him of a factual nature, therefore, is that, before he decided to withdraw from society altogether – and go ‘underground’, as he puts it – he was a lowly civil servant in St. Petersburg, whose career never reached any great heights largely as a result of some rather disagreeable aspects of his character. By far the most significant of these is the fact that, while he believes himself to be intellectually superior to just about everybody else and can therefore be quite rude to those of his colleagues he regards as his intellectual inferiors, in many other respects he actually feels himself to be inferior and is very quick to take offence if he feels that he is being disparaged in any way.
One of the character traits which causes him to feel this sense of inferiority most profoundly is his inability to act spontaneously, which he attributes to the fact that, unlike ‘men of action’, as he calls them – men who never question themselves but simply act – he always questions himself and, as a consequence, often finds himself unable to act at all. This then has the further consequence that he is regularly defeated by men he regards as his inferiors, not in argument, where he is more than capable of holding his own, but in the petty confrontations of daily life, which not only leave him inwardly seething but generate an internal conflict which he is unable to resolve. For on the one hand, he firmly believes that the main reason his colleagues are able to act so freely is because they are stupid and lack self-awareness, for which he despises them. On the other hand, however, there is a part of him that actually envies them and wants to be like them, for which he therefore despises himself.
He also believes that their lack of self-awareness makes them prone to self-deception and dishonesty, which mostly manifests itself in a boastfulness in which they all support each other, thereby compounding the offence. When one of them boasts of his success with a woman of renowned beauty, for instance, far from evincing scepticism, the others merely demand more details. When one of them hints that a person of great power and influence has condescended to speak to him, the others fall over themselves in their rush to congratulate him, despite their obvious envy.
It is the superficiality of their interests and values, however, that really gets under his skin: the fact that all they really care about are the latest fashions and being seen in all the right places with all the right people, all of which, of course, costs money, making their ascent of the civil service career ladder their primary goal, which most of them pursue entirely through the use of charm, flattery and social contacts, while he who believes that he has more ability than the rest of them put together, but lacks their social skills, is consistently overlooked.
So far, therefore, this just seems like a simple case of an extremely egocentric individual who either has no friends because he is so socially inept, or is socially inept because, being so egocentric, he has no friends… or, indeed, a little of both. From what little he tells us about his background, moreover, there is probably a great deal of truth in this. For having been orphaned as a child and taken in by relatives whom he says didn’t really want him and begrudged the expense he caused them, it seems fairly clear that he was not brought up in the kind of familial and social environment which tends to produce well-adjusted young men who are able to fit in and has always, therefore, been a bit of a loner.
However, there is more to it than this, not least because he also tells us that, at one point, he did actually try to fit in and did so quite successfully. He went out drinking with the other clerks in his office, joined in their banter and was generally accepted as one of them. The problem, he tells us, is that it was all an act. He merely watched and listened to the others and then copied them. After a while, however, not only did this become both wearying and boring but he also began to despise himself for it, not only because he was being dishonest, but because he realised that those he was copying were all copying each other, too, and that their own socialisation process – their assimilation of common values and accepted forms of behaviour, including their acceptance of each other’s dishonesty and boastfulness – consisted entirely of such imitation, which meant that there wasn’t one of them who was authentically themselves. If he truly wanted to be himself, therefore, he could not be part of such a group and had to withdraw once again into his own world of brutal honesty.
Indeed, it is this that explains his lengthy disquisition on free will and determinism in the first part of the book, which, I confess, I did not fully understand when I first read it. I knew, of course, that as a devout Christian, Dostoyevsky was vehemently opposed to the materialism and scientific determinism which dominated Russian philosophical debate at that time and which he saw as leading to the kind of nihilism which would eventually result in the Russian revolutions of the 20th century – an eventuality which he accurately predicts in his novel ‘The Devils’ – but I couldn’t work out what his protracted discussion of the subject was doing in this particular context. It seemed to me a bit like that lengthy passage in ‘War and Peace’ where Tolstoy breaks off from telling his story about Pierre Bezukhov, Natasha Rostov and all the rest of his huge cast of characters and embarks on what seems to be a wholly out of place dissertation on the nature of history. Having read Dostoyevsky’s work for a second time, however, I now realise that this was completely wrong and that, as we shall see later, his disquisition on free will is actually central to the meaning of the entire book. For the moment, however, suffice it to say that one of his principal contentions the subject is that, if there is to be free will, we cannot always act in our own best interests – as the advocates of scientific determinism insisted we must always logically do – because that would mean that all our actions could be calculated and predicted and would hence be determined. By acting in a way so detrimental to his career and therefore against his own best interests, Dostoyevsky’s narrator is thus not just exercising his free will but, in a sense, asserting it.
What this also therefore tells us is that, for all his faults and failings, he is not weak. Indeed, it requires a great deal of moral courage to deliberately bring down on oneself all the derision he subsequently takes from his colleagues simply in order to not have to pretend to be something he is not. This strength of character, however, also has its dark side. For whenever he comes upon someone who is as isolated as himself but lacks this moral strength – as in the case of his one friend at school, a boy called Simonov – he tells us that he feels compelled to manipulate and control them. In fact, he tell us that this is the only kind of relationship that gives him any satisfaction, making it a kind of poetic justice, therefore, that it is actually Simonov who sets in motion the sequence of events that ultimately result in his former tormentor deciding to withdraw from relationships with others altogether.
It begins one evening when, on a whim, our hero decides to call on Simonov at his apartment, only to find that he is already entertaining two other friends from school, neither of whom our hero much liked during their former acquaintance and who certainly didn’t like him. What’s more, it would appear from their clothes that they have done considerably better in their careers than he has, a fact which they take no small pleasure in impressing upon him when, under the guise of just catching up, they ask him about his current position. In fact, it is the familiar anger he feels at their barely concealed contempt that gets him into all the trouble which soon follows.
This comes about due to the fact that, before he arrived at the apartment, the three old school friends had been in the process of planning a last dinner in St. Petersburg for a fourth friend called Zverkov, who is now an officer in the army and is being posted to the Caucasus in two days’ time. In fact, they had just got to the point of agreeing how much they should each put into the kitty when our hero interrupts them. So, with the pleasantries out of the way, they naturally return to where they had left off in their discussion by reaffirming that if they each contribute seven rubles, twenty-one rubles should be enough to put on a pretty good spread.
Feeling even further aggrieved by being so conspicuously left out of both their conversation and their future plans, however, our hero immediately responds by asking ‘Why only twenty-one? If you count me in, it will be twenty-eight rubles,’ thereby seeming to contradict my earlier assertion that he is incapable of acting spontaneously. There are, however, a number of exceptions to this rule, the most common of which arises whenever anger or indignation get the better of his impulse control, precipitating ill-considered outbursts which can lead to some very unfortunate consequences, as in this case. For even as he hears himself saying the words, he knows that he doesn’t have seven rubles and will therefore have to ask his boss for an advance on his salary, which, in itself, will result in a significant degree of self-abasement and humiliation. As soon as he sees the look of horror and consternation on the faces of the other three men, however, he knows that he cannot take his challenge back.
When he wakes up to his recklessness the following morning, the stupidity of what he has done is even more forcefully impressed upon him by the fact that he doesn’t have anything suitable to wear to such a dinner. The collar of his one and only coat is made of a rather mangy and inferior fur and his one decent pair of trousers have a stain on one of the knees. So humiliating is the prospect of appearing before the others so attired, in fact, that, for a moment, he even considers sending Simonov a note to say that he will not be able to make their engagement. At the same time, however, he knows that, if he does so, not only will he have to live with the shame of such moral cowardice for the rest of his life but he will also have to live with the knowledge of the others’ reinforced contempt for him.
With a growing sense of foreboding, he therefore makes the best of what poor wardrobe he has and goes to the restaurant at the appointed time, only to be met with his first indignity of the evening. For without telling him, the others have put back the time of the dinner by an hour, leaving him little choice but to simply sit there and wait for them under what he firmly believes are the derisive smiles of the table-laying waiters. By the time the others arrive, he is therefore already burning with both a shame and rage and persists in expressing his feelings even when Simonov explains that they were unable to advise him of the change of time because none of them had his address. To make matters worse, Zverkov, who was always one of the most popular boys at school and is someone whom our hero has always therefore hated, tries to mollify him by talking to him in an unusually friendly but rather condescending manner, thereby enraging him still further.
With such an inauspicious start, it is hardly surprising, therefore, that the evening goes steadily downhill from there, with insults, taunts and offensive remarks being thrown about on all sides until, eventually, with the dinner coming to an end, there is even talk of a duel. Not that anyone takes our hero’s drunken ravings very seriously; they merely mock him even more derisively and leave him to stew amidst the debris of the meal while they go off to visit their favourite brothel. And if that had been the end of it, nothing further would have gone amiss. Sitting alone at the table, however, our hero notices one of the waiters looking at him somewhat curiously, making him realise that everything that had been said during the dinner would have been heard by all the restaurant staff, thereby putting it into his head that, having been so publicly insulted, honour demanded that he go after his detractors and demand from Zverkov, in particular, an apology or satisfaction.
Fortunately, when he gets to the brothel to which he assumed they were headed, they are not there. Either they have gone somewhere else or they have already taken their chosen girls to individual rooms, leaving him once again to curse his indecisiveness and ineffectuality. He is just about to leave, however, when the reception area is entered by a young woman who, while not especially pretty, has a freshness and openness about her that makes him think that, were he a better man, and were she not a whore, she is just the kind of woman to whom he could imagine paying court: a pleasantly fanciful idea which takes his mind off revenge and leads him to spend what little money he has left on purchasing her services.
The next thing of which he is aware – or the next thing of which he tells us – is being woken up at two o’clock in the morning by the striking of a clock somewhere, followed by the gradual realisation that he is not alone. Turning his head to one side, he is then even more disconcerted to see her eyes steadily appraising him, fixing him with her gaze until he cannot stand it any longer and has to break the spell by asking her name.
‘Liza’, she says, which, after a few more awkward moments, prompts him to ask her where she is from, what her father does and, eventually, why she left home to come to this place: the one question, of course, which he should never have asked in that, whatever reasons she had for becoming a prostitute, she is hardly likely to want to talk about them. Because he only started asking her these questions to fill in the silence, however, and because he admits that he then became so genuinely interested in her answers that he got caught up in the conversation, he fails to notice that, throughout his inquisition, she has been getting increasingly more defensive and brusque in her answers, until he is suddenly taken aback by the fact that her answer to this last question, why she left home, is the single word ‘Because!’
Realising that he has made a mistake, he rightly senses at this point that he should probably leave. On the other hand, he has had such a dreadful evening, that he is loath to end it on yet another sour note. So he decides instead to try to win back her favour by giving her what he thinks is some well-intentioned and even fatherly advice. So he tells her, as gently as possible, that although she may be perfectly content with her situation today, this is because she is still fresh and pretty. In year or two’s time, however, she will no longer be either fresh or pretty enough for the clients of this brothel and the madam will almost certainly throw her out. Then she will have to go somewhere else – somewhere far less salubrious – and the slide to the bottom will begin.
What he doesn’t realise, of course, is that she already knows all this and is thus already living with this dreadful reality. The last thing she needs, therefore, is some fool to lecture her on the subject. As much to shut him up as to express her scorn, she therefore tells him that he sounds like a book, not realising that this is one of the most hurtful things she could have said to him. For that, of course, is precisely what he is: ‘bookish’, which is to say incapable of talking in anything but fully formed sentences or of responding to her as a real flesh-and-blood human being.
Having been stung yet again, however, he now cannot respond in any other way than by going on the offensive. So he tells her in even more lurid detail what her slide to the bottom is going to look like: how she will probably end up in some stinking, rat-infested cellar where no decent man would ever touch her, riddled with disease and dressed in filthy rags; how, when she is eventually found dead, there will be no one to mourn her or even remember her name, because there will be no one who has ever loved her. She will just be carted off, like a piece of rubbish, to be buried in an unmarked grave.
So carried away by his own passionate eloquence does he become, in fact, that he doesn’t even notice the effect he is having her until he reaches his peroration and turns back to see that she has not only been silently crying into her pillow but gnawing so hard on one of her knuckles that she has actually drawn blood. He is so shocked by this, however, that although he knows that he ought to say something to comfort her, he is actually too scared to do so. So, like the moral coward he has suddenly become when faced with a woman’s tears, he hurriedly fumbles around for his clothes in an attempt to make a hasty retreat.
Before he can do so, however, she tells him to wait while she fetches something for him to see: a letter from a young man in her home town, who writes in very ardent terms about his affection for her, which our hero immediately recognises as sincere. What both shocks and moves him, however, is that he also realises why she wanted him to see it: to prove to him that someone does actually love her, not to prove him wrong, but rather because she cares enough about what he thinks about her to want him to see her as more than just a whore: to want him to see her, indeed, as a full human being, capable of both loving and being loved. In so doing, however, she is simultaneously recognising that he, too, is a full human being, one whose good opinion of her is important to her: a recognition which, given the confrontational nature of most of his relations with other people, so overwhelms him that he feels that he has to both acknowledge and reciprocate it in some way. And so, with nothing else to hand, he gives her his address, the unspoken implication being, of course, that if she ever needs him…
The following morning, of course, he is absolutely horrified by this further act of folly, not least because, when he looks around his dilapidated apartment, with its broken down sofa leaking stuffing from one of its seams, he cannot stand the thought of her actually seeing how he lives. For the next two days, as a result, he goes around in a state of absolute dread of her appearing unannounced at any moment. Only on the third day does he start to relax, reasoning to himself that the more time elapses, the less chance there is of her showing up. And then, that evening, as if on cue, she arrives at his door.
Having informed him of her decision to leave the brothel, his initial response is a total blank: he has no idea what to say and so rushes around arranging tea in a desperate effort to buy time. As they sit down opposite each other at the table, however, he still can’t work out why she is there or what she expects from him. Knowing that he has to say something, however, in the end he simply breaks down and tells her everything: about how he is a failure in his career; about how he is a horrible person who is unpleasant to everyone with whom he comes in contact; about how he came to be at the brothel that evening after the disastrous dinner to which he’d invited himself despite despising everyone else present; and about how he’d only told her all those things about her future because he wanted to feel better about himself by making her feel thoroughly wretched.
Expecting her to now feel as much contempt for him as he feels for himself, he is therefore astonished by the fact that when he finally looks up to meet her typically unrelenting gaze, he finds her looking at him not in shock and horror, or even pity, which, in some ways, would have been worse, but with what he clearly recognises as a combination of compassion and love.
At first, he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand how she could possibly love anyone as contemptible as he clearly is. But gradually it dawns on him that it’s because he didn’t try to brazen it out the way he suspects most of the men she has encountered would have done, which is what she really finds contemptible. It’s because he told her the truth and, in this respect, he feels a certain kinship with her, in that they both prefer truth over lies. He even begins to think that once they have been completely honest with each other, they might even have a life together. Indeed, he even starts to fantasise about what that life might be like. But even as he begins to imagine all the things they might do together, he is forced to confront yet another truth. For he knows that once they were in a life together, he would do what he always does: he would start to manipulate and control her. And then she would start to see him like every other man who has ever abused and mistreated her and, eventually, she would come to hate him, the thought of which he simply cannot stand. So he does the one thing he knows she will find unforgiveable: he gives her money… as if she were a common prostitute.
She, of course, all but throws it back in his face, before rushing to the door, leaving him to contemplate the terrible truth that he has not only just thrown away his one chance of love but, very probably, his one chance of a life. In an understandable and wholly typical moment of weakness, he therefore rushes after her. When he gets out into the street, however, there is no sign of her in the swirling snow. And it is thus with both grief and relief that he knows she is gone.
2. Deciphering the Symbolism
It is always difficult to distil the essence of an entire book in a brief synopsis, especially when the book in question is as perplexing as ‘Notes from Underground’ often is. If I have managed to convey anything of its strangely elusive character, however, I hope it lies in the sheer complexity of its central character, who is not only full of contradictions – as, of course, all real human beings are – but is someone for whom we cannot help but feel a certain sympathy, despite all his very obvious faults and failings.
Not, of course, that we should be surprised by this. After all, it is very hard to relate to any character who seems to us a little too perfect. Either we just don’t believe in them or we treat them as one-dimensional ciphers of the kind that appear in both ancient myths and comic books. In order to seem ‘real’ and enable us to identify with them, characters in any form of literature which aims at realism must therefore have their faults and failings. What is unusual about the narrator of ‘Notes from Underground’, is not just how many faults and failings he has but that we still see ourselves in him.
Even this, however, should not totally surprise us. For in a creating a character who embodies so many failings or ‘sins’, as Dostoyevsky, himself, would have undoubtedly referred to them, the author presents us with a reflection of ourselves with which nearly all of us can identify in some regard. Indeed, it’s for this reason that Dostoyevsky does not give him a name. For he intended him to be all of us: ‘Everyman’.
His purpose in creating such a character, however, was not show us how no one is beyond redemption – including, therefore, ourselves – but rather to show us what we have to do to be redeemed. For in line with his earlier disquisition on free will and determinism, according to Dostoyevsky, redemption is not something that is granted to us or even something that we earn, but something that is actually achieved through the exercise of free will itself. For it is only by deliberately – of our own free will – sacrificing our own interests to those of another that we transcend the selfishness from which all our sins flow, thereby saving us from ourselves by this very act.
Of course, it may be argued that when Liza offers herself to Dostoyevsky’s narrator, he is not completely acting against his own best interests in driving her away. For he knows that if he accepts her and inflicts himself upon her, eventually she will come to hate him and then he, in all probability, will come to hate himself. Not only do men who exert tyrannical control over their women rarely sacrifice immediate gratification to avoid such long-term consequences, however, but the argument rather assumes what it would have us conclude: that we only ever do good things if they are either in our best interest or if they make us feel good about ourselves. Experience suggests, however, that while doing good things may well make us feel good and may even, at times, be in our best interest, such considerations seldom figure prominently in our reasons for doing them.
It may also be argued that in driving Liza way, Dostoyevsky’s narrator may well be condemning her to the very fate he prophesied in their one night together and is not therefore acting in her best interest. Dostoyevsky, however, would argue that if his central character has free will, then so does Liza, who has already exercised that free will in choosing to leave the brothel. In fact, she has already shown immense moral courage by making this choice, and although her way forward may not be easy, Dostoyevsky would further argue that facing life’s difficulties with free will is what being fully human is all about.
My reason for dwelling on these three key concepts of free will, sacrifice and redemption, however, is not just to further elucidate Dostoyevsky’s moral philosophy and Christian perspective, but also to provide the necessary context for properly understanding ‘Notes from Underground’ itself. For while the book can be read simply as a work of psychological realism – which, today, is how it is usually read – when Dostoyevsky wrote it, most people would have read it as a Christian allegory. In fact, it is only when one reads it as such that its plot ceases to consist merely of a series of random events strung loosely together by the rancorous impulses of its central character and takes on a recognisable structure. Even then, however, working out the book’s overall meaning, or even just interpreting its main scenes is not easy.
Take, for instance, Zverkov’s last dinner in St. Petersburg, which Dostoyevsky clearly intended to be read as the ‘Last Supper’. Even though there are only five people seated at the table, however, it is very difficult to work out who is who. Given that it is Zverkov’s last supper, one might suppose, for instance, that he is Christ and Dostoyevsky’s narrator is Judas Iscariot. Not only is Zverkov the vainest and most superficial braggart in the room, however, but it is Dostoyevsky’s narrator, of course, who ends up sacrificing himself.
Then there is the problem of the resurrection that doesn’t actually happen. For when Liza (Mary Magdalene) comes to see the narrator three days later, offering him not just love but life, instead of rising up from the grave, he chooses to remain underground, in his tomb. In sacrificing himself for her, indeed, he seems to choose death, which makes perfect sense in its own terms but is a little difficult to square with the standard Easter message.
Not, of course, that any of this need be a problem for the modern reader. After all, allegories do not have to map isomorphically onto what they are allegories of. In fact, Dostoyevsky actually makes use this formal flexibility by conflating two different biblical events in the book’s last scene, which can not only be read as Mary Magdalene visiting Christ’s tomb on Easter morning but as Christ himself wrestling with his forthcoming sacrifice three nights earlier in the Garden of Gethsemane. Indeed, it could be argued that this second way of interpreting the scene is the more important of the two. For like Christ, himself, Dostoyevsky’s narrator does not want to sacrifice himself – it wouldn’t be a sacrifice if he did – he simply knows that he has to.
With respect to the meaning of the book as a whole, moreover, it is part of the great richness of Dostoyevsky’s work that it not only has multiple layers of meaning but that there are ambiguities within each layer, with the result that one could probably read ‘Notes from Underground’ a dozen times and read something different into it each time. The real problem for the modern reader, therefore, is not the book’s ambiguity or formal complexity but the far more fundamental question as to why, in the 21st century, we should read it at all. After all, Christian allegories and discussions of free will belong, like Dostoyevsky himself, to the mid-19th century. What relevance have these things for us today? The answer, however, lies within yet another layer of meaning. For while the book can be read as both a work of psychological realism and a Christian allegory, it can also be read as a work of political philosophy, one specifically dealing with the problem of nihilism, which it could be said lies right at the heart of the west’s current cultural malaise.
3. Nihilism & Mental Health
Anyone who has ever been to St. Petersburg will know that, architecturally, it is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. This is largely due to the fact that Peter the Great, who founded the city, decreed that, apart from St. Isaac’s Cathedral, no building should be taller than the royal palace. Two of the city’s most outstanding landmarks, as a consequence, are indeed St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the Winter Palace, representing Church and State respectively. One of the strangest things about ‘Notes from Underground’ therefore – a novel set in St. Petersburg – is that no mention is made of either of these landmarks or of the institutions they represent.
Despite being a Christian allegory, no one ever goes to church, for instance, there are no references to Christian holidays or the Christian calendar in general and there are no members of the clergy among its characters. What’s even more odd, however, is that although most of the characters are civil servants, the situation is much the same with respect to government. Not only are we not told in which ministries the characters work or where these ministries are physically located – whether in the Winter Palace, itself, or in the surrounding buildings – but we are not even told what each of the characters actually does.
Nor are we told very much about the characters’ personal lives. Indeed, it is almost as if they do not have personal lives. None of them are married or have children, for instance, and neither of the two main characters have any contact with any other family members. Like the church and state, the family is thus also completely missing. Because all the characters are either civil servants or soldiers, moreover, none of them are involved in running a business or, indeed, in any form of economic activity which might lead to greater prosperity in the future. In short, all of the institutions which would normally lend purpose and meaning to people’s lives – the church, the state, the family and purposeful economic activity – are absent.
If one knows anything about Russian history, what is even more remarkable is that none of the characters appear to have any political views, the absence of which is particularly odd in a Russian novel published in 1864, just eight years after Russia’s catastrophic defeat in the Crimean war, which not only reduced the country’s influence abroad but led to increasingly strident calls for reform at home, culminating in the publication of ‘What is to be done?’ by Nikolay Chernyshevsky in 1863, to which ‘Notes from Underground’ is effectively Dostoyevsky’s reply. Instead of having his characters debate the many issues raised in Chernyshevsky’ book, however, Dostoyevsky chooses to deliver his repost by simply presenting us with a world in which the only values that exist are those which flow from the scientific materialism Chernyshevsky advocated. Look, he is saying, this is what you get if you abandon all traditional values in favour of this entirely materialist world view: a world in which the only things people care about are being seen in the right places with the right people in order to make the necessary social contacts to progress their totally empty careers and so make lots of money. The result is that most of the characters are completely empty shells who spend most of their time whoring, drinking and boasting about how well they are doing materially.
What this tells us, therefore, is that ‘Notes from Underground’ is not really about Russia in 1864; it’s about what Dostoyevsky thought Russia might become if it went down a particular road and what Britain and most of Europe has actually become in the last half century or so. Just look at the UK. Church attendance has been declining steadily since the 1960s and is now largely the preserve of a rapidly disappearing generation of baby-boomers. Love of country is generally derided and anyone who expresses any form of nationalism is increasingly liable to imprisonment for racist ‘hate speech’. With a fertility rate of less than 1.5, families are getting smaller and smaller, with many people choosing not to get married at all, most couples only having one child, and many children finding themselves with only one parent. Last but not least, most of our industry has fallen to foreign competition, many if not most of our young people choose to study for degrees which do not lead to any gainful employment and anyone who learns a trade or tries to start a small business is hobbled by taxes and bureaucratic regulations.
Even if our largely materialist approach to life has thus led to a decline in many aspects of life which we used to regard as important, this does not mean, of course, that the quality of our lives has necessarily been diminished. After all, most people today would say that, given the choice, they would much prefer to be living now, in the 21st century, with all it material benefits, than in the 1950s, when the standard of living was much lower. ‘Standard of living’, however, as measured in economic terms, is not the same as ‘quality of life’ as measured in terms of our wellbeing, including our mental wellbeing, which, according to most of the available the evidence, has deteriorated significantly in recent years, especially among the young. According to data collected by the American College Health Association, for instance, between 2010 and 2018, the percentage of US undergraduates diagnosed with anxiety increased from roughly 10% to nearly 25%, while the increase in those diagnosed with depression rose from 10% to 20%.
That’s not to say, of course, that this deterioration in our mental health can be directly attributed to a decline in traditional values. Indeed, that would be a very radical claim to make. Without the institutions of church, state and the family to foster and pass on traditional values, however, the main source from which we now acquire our values is, of course, the media, which, in the case of most young people, largely means social media, where how one looks, what one wears and how one thinks are collectively determined by the various social and cultural groups to which one subscribes and which act very much like echo or mirroring chambers. In ‘Freedom & Identity’, in fact, I actually compared them to murmurations of starlings – ‘those vast flocks of birds which gather in the autumnal twilight, darting one way and then the other, continually morphing into different shapes before settling on a particular roost for the night’ – the fundamental similarity between the two being that, within these formations or social groups, there is no single agency that determines the group’s movements, every single bird both influencing and being influenced by the others.
While this may sound invitingly democratic, however – and much to be preferred to a society governed by fixed and immutable rules – one of its most common effects is just the kind of mob rule described in ‘Notes from Underground’, where the narrator is ostracised by his colleagues because he does not conform to the group ethos. The only difference is that, on the internet, the pressure to conform is made even greater by the need felt by so many of us to make our lives meaningful by chronicling them in both words and pictures for public consumption, thereby laying ourselves open to the disapproval and even ridicule of others. This, in turn, then leads us to present only the most idealised version of ourselves to the world, which, in itself, is not just a cause of self-deception and dishonesty but of anxiety, in case we slip up and post something on social media we should not, which, given the ever-shifting sands of public opinion, is always a possibility.
Not, of course, that we can be sure that our addiction to social media is the sole or even primary cause of the documented increase in cases of anxiety or that there may not be other contributing factors. According to American psychologist Jonathan Haidt, however, in his latest book ‘The Anxious Generation’, the one change in our environment which correlates most closely with the increased diagnosis of anxiety is the increased use of smartphones to access the internet, which not only facilitates an increase in the use of social media but of other online applications as well, all of which take time away from real life social interactions and therefore inhibit normal social development among the young, especially during puberty.
Haidt emphasises this latter point because, at a time in their lives when young people are or should be going through a major phase of resocialisation, establishing new forms of relationship, not just with the opposite sex but with their parents and society as a whole, not only are many of them side-tracked into solitary activities such as playing computer games, but what little interaction they do have with each other is now very often mediated by the smartphone screen. Instead of dealing with each other face to face, they communicate through texts and selected images which actually erect a protective barrier between them, not only fostering a defensive dishonesty – it being a lot easier to lie to someone if one is not actually facing them – but preventing them from taking the visual clues from each other that would normally lead to them bringing their behaviour into line with what is socially acceptable.
This then not only makes them prone to social blunders, but hesitant and unsure of themselves in social situations, with the result that they then try to avoid social interaction as much as possible, making them even more socially inept and anxious when forced into dealing with others at a personal level, all of which chronic conditions are, of course, exhibited by the narrator of ‘Notes from Underground’.
What this tells us, therefore, is that it is not smartphone technology, itself, that is the real problem. The technology merely gets in the way and prevents something from happening that needs to happen. The real problem, as Haidt himself admits, is a failure of socialisation, which, for the individual, often starts well before puberty – during the first phase of socialisation in childhood, in fact – while for us collectively, as a society, it actually started long before the introduction of smartphones, back in the 1980s, when, for reasons to which I shall return shortly, parents in the English speaking world, in particular, began to restrict the amount of time their children spent in unsupervised outdoor play.
The significance of this is that it was during unsupervised outdoor play that the children of most previous generations learnt, not just how to get along with each other, but how to hold their own in the rough and tumble of childhood competition, which is an equally important part of the socialisation process. The question, therefore, is why parents started placing these restriction on their children during the 1980s. And it is here that I think Haidt gets it wrong. For despite the lack of any statistical evidence to support his hypothesis, as Haidt himself admits, he primarily attributes the imposition of these restrictions to media-fuelled fears for children’s safety. Having been the father of small children myself during this period, however, I believe that there are two far more plausible explanations as to why children experienced far less free association from the 1980s onwards than they had previously enjoyed.
The first of these is the reduction in the size of the average family, which, in itself, of course, would have had a negative effect on children’s socialisation. In fact, when I was growing up, it was simply accepted as matter of fact that an only child was more likely to be a problem than a child with multiple siblings. For not having learnt to play with other children at home, such children nearly always expected and demanded far more attention from adults. They also tended to have a problem with such social niceties as sharing, about which the parents of large families were usually extremely strict, not least because children who didn’t share and ‘play nice’ caused friction and hence disruption throughout the entire household.
The mothers of large families also had more incentive to encourage unsupervised outdoor play. When I was a child, for instance, mothers would tell their children to go out and play simply to get them out from under their feet.
The second reason why children had far less unsupervised play from the 1980s onwards, however, is that, by then, most mothers went out to work, leaving their children with a child minder or at some form of kindergarten, both of which were paid to supervise the children in their care, which usually entailed organising activities to keep them busy and entertained while stopping them from fighting. Instead of allowing them to devise their own games and sort things out between themselves, a supervising adult was thus always there to do it for them, thereby preventing them from learning the necessary social skills that would put them at ease socially when entering the next phase of socialisation during puberty.
The result is that many teenagers today much prefer texting or responding to posts on social media than talking to each other face to face and, even then, tend to congregate in online groups of like-minded individuals who support rather than challenge each other. This, however, creates a vicious circle in which anyone who makes them feel uncomfortable is excluded from the group, thereby making them even less able to deal with challenging situations. Indeed, it is this that Jonathan Haidt believes has led to students demanding safe spaces on college campuses, where the problem simply continues in a downward spiral in which these same students then demand protection from just such people as Jonathan Haidt, whom they see as a threat precisely because he and other psychologists such as Jordan Petersen understand what has gone wrong in these students’ lives, to which the victims themselves, of course, do not want to admit, in that that would present them with just the kind of challenging situation they want to avoid.
The problem with this kind of avoidance strategy, however, is that it makes those who adopt it unfit for almost anything in life. For not only are they plagued by anxiety that someone will eventually burst their protective bubble but, trapped inside it, they inevitably become self-absorbed, overly self-conscious and totally selfish, just like the narrator of ‘Notes from Underground’. Of course, they will deny this, especially the idea that they are selfish, citing their adherence to such selfless ‘causes’ as saving the planet and fighting racism. Not only will none of these causes every really demand anything from them, however, but they are all just sticking plasters designed to disguise the fact that those who pursue them have no real purpose of their own, being especially unfit for that which, throughout history, has given more people purpose and meaning in life than anything else: the raising of a family.
Indeed, it is for this reason that the decline of the family is almost certainly the most destructive of all the consequences which nihilism produces. For while a loss of belief in either one’s religion or one’s country are essentially intellectual and may therefore be reversed by a change in the direction of public opinion and sentiment, the reduction in the size of the family, which many people voluntarily chose in the 1980s because of the freedom and material benefits it brought them, has now produced a generation of young people who are having even less children, not primarily out of choice, but simply because they are ill-equipped to be parents, a state of affairs which is not so easily reversed.
Indeed, it raises the question as to whether we have already gone too far down this road for there to be any way back for us: a question which one can only really approach historically by asking whether any country has ever recovered from such a morally degenerate state. Rather surprisingly, however, the answer is yes! What’s more, the country in question, of course, is Russia.
4. The Way Back
Dostoyevsky had three main fears with respect to Russia’s embrace of scientific materialism and the kind of social reforms demanded by Nikolay Chernyshevsky in ‘What is to be done?’ The first was that these reforms would be undertaken for the wrong reasons.
Take, for instance, the abolition of serfdom, which no one today would question if it simply meant freeing people to live lives of their own choosing. And, indeed, this was at least part of the intention when the first major round of land reforms was introduced by Pyotr Stolypin after the failed revolution of 1905. In order to reduce disaffection amongst the peasantry and also increase food production, his government instituted a scheme in which small farms of up to 8 acres or 3.2 hectares were awarded to those serfs deemed capable of running them effectively. This, however, was not the intention of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, who advocated the abolition serfdom simply because it kept people tied to the land when they could be more productively employed in industry. His intention was rather to boost industrial production so as to compete more effectively with Britain and France and thus avoid another humiliating defeat of the kind experienced in Crimea.
In fact, it was for this very same reason that, twenty-five years later, Stalin actually abolished the small independent farmers, known as Kulaks, whom Stolypin had created: because he wanted to concentrate Russia’s resources on further rapid industrialisation and thought that food production would actually be increased by herding the Kulaks onto collective farms where, of course, all the incentives they had previously had to produce more food instantly evaporated. With industrial centres still remaining the priority when it came to supplies of food, the result was a catastrophic famine in the country’s main agricultural regions in which between 5.7 million and 8.7 million people died.
For neither Chernyshevsky nor Stalin, therefore, did the abolition of serfdom have anything to do with giving people freedom; it was all about engineering a more efficient economic machine in which people were mere cogs to be deployed as those in charge saw fit.
Dostoyevsky’s second fear was that although many people would go along with these attempts to engineer a functionally perfect society – especially those at the top who benefit materially from this arrangement, like most of the characters in ‘Notes from Underground’– there would be others who, valuing age-old customs and traditions, would have to be coerced or even forced into compliance, and even then there would be some, like the narrator of ‘Notes from Underground’, who would refuse out of pure contrariness. Unlike his narrator, however, who is merely ostracised for his refusal to go along with everyone else, Dostoyevsky knew that, in the real world, run by social engineers who would have little regard for cogs that didn’t fit, such obduracy could well be treated far more harshly.
His biggest fear, however, was that those behind the reforms would use them to appropriate power for themselves, not just in order to obtain the material benefits which generally flow from holding power, but because, in a world stripped of everything else of value, power would be all that was left to give life meaning. I say this because while, today, it is mostly celebrity that makes one a ‘somebody’ rather than a ‘nobody’ – driving even those in power to act more like celebrities – before the age of mass media, it was power alone that had this power. For whether out of love or fear, it was to those in power that others looked up, thereby actually conferring power upon them, the circularity of this relationship being most perfectly demonstrated by Nikolay Stavrogin, the leader of the band of anarchists in ‘The Devils’, who does not actually believe in the anarchist cause or, indeed, in anything at all except power, which he is able to wield both because of the force of his personality and because this in itself makes the others look up to him.
Mercifully, none of Dostoyevsky’s fears were actually realised in his lifetime. It was thirty-six years after his death before the Soviet Union set about building its perfect utopian society from which all human faults and failings would be eliminated. The problem was, of course, that, like the narrator of ‘Notes from Underground’, all human beings have their faults and failings – it’s what makes us human – and when we cannot be redeemed by either reason or force, reason itself dictates, therefore, that we, ourselves, must be eliminated. The inevitable result was that ten million Russians ended up being worked and/or starved to death in forced labour camps in some of the most inhospitable places on earth, most of them on the orders of a man who had risen to power on the sheer ruthlessness of his preparedness to use it, the murder of ten million of his fellow countrymen being a small price to pay for his consequent immortality.
Having descended to such nihilistic depths, indeed, one wonders how the Russians could have ever got themselves out of it. The answer, however, does not make for easy reading. For while the collapse of Soviet Union was largely precipitated by the increasing failures of it centrally planned and hierarchically managed economy, the most catastrophic consequence of the country’s subsequent political disintegration was that its already fragile economy then totally fell to pieces. For with too few people on the ground used to acting on their own initiative, when instructions stopped coming down from above, everything just ground to a halt: parts weren’t delivered to factories, food wasn’t delivered to shops and despite a rapidly growing black market – run largely by criminal gangs who drove up prices beyond what most people could afford – people began to starve.
During the 1990s, average life expectancy actually fell by five years, which may not seem very much but is really quite extraordinary. For while higher mortality rates during this period were certainly skewed towards certain age groups – the very elderly, for instance – given that a fall in average life expectancy of five years in a population of around 120 million amounts a total expected loss of 600 million years of life across the population as a whole, this burden cannot have fallen solely on the very old. Indeed, there were premature deaths across every age group, from the very old to the very young, with a lot of young people actually committing suicide.
Nor was the situation ameliorated to any great extent by western aid, which was mostly directed towards the privatisation of previously state-owned industries through the provision of loans to those managers and officials who were in a position to buy and run them. The problem was that, even including a $2.5 billion aid package from the USA, the collective west could not provide enough such loans to privatise the entire Russian economy at its true worth. The result was that most state-owned industries were sold off at massive discounts. In 1995, for instance, Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, two of the most well-known beneficiaries of this bonanza, bought the state-owned oil company Sibneft for $200 million. Ten years later, Abramovich sold his share of the company alone for $13 billion.
With such huge fortunes to be made from what was effectively the looting of Russian state assets, this then set off a huge wave of corruption among the officials administering the sales. For if a purchaser wanted his bid for a business to succeed, there were often dozens of palms to be greased, with sums running into millions. Nor was it just Russians who were involved. Western corporations also now descended on Russia in order to buy up Russian businesses on the cheap. And while it was the Russian state which garnered the proceeds from these sales, there was hardly a single person in government who wasn’t getting rich.
From the perspective of those in the US administration who subscribed to the Wolfowitz Doctrine –that Russia should never again be allowed to rise to the status of a super power – the chaos into which Russia consequently descended, both as a result of this widespread corruption and the consequent lawlessness to which it gave rise, must have seemed like the perfect solution, explaining in no small measure why they so fervently supported the alcoholic and totally incompetent Boris Yeltsin who, as president, presided over this dystopian nightmare. For the ordinary Russian citizen, however, it was as close to hell on earth as it could possibly have got.
In a twist of fate which Dostoyevsky would have almost certainly attributed to divine intervention, however, in his last year in office, Yeltsin did something so uncharacteristically thoughtful and judicious that it almost redeemed his entire presidency. For in August 1999, he appointed the relatively unknown but highly intelligent, fiercely patriotic and utterly incorruptible Vladimir Putin as his Prime Minister, thereby paving the way for him to become President the following year when Yeltsin, himself, retired.
Nor did Putin waste any time in beginning the task of cleaning up the mess Russia was in and going after those he deemed responsible. His first target was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had purchased Yukos Oil under the US ‘loans for shares’ deal and was thought to be worth around $50 billion, making him the richest man in Russia and the perfect candidate for the example Putin intended to make of him. For in what was clearly intended as a message to all the other so-called oligarchs who had plundered Russia’s wealth, he not only had Khodorkovsky arrested, tried and imprisoned for fraud and tax evasion but then had Yukos Oil sold off at a price so low that the proceeds only just covered its former owner’s unpaid tax bill, thereby leaving him with absolutely nothing.
Fearing that they would be next, many of the other oligarchs, including Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, consequently fled to London, where their billions were welcomed with open arms by the City’s banks, but where they were constantly followed and harassed by the FSB in what was clearly part of a well worked-out plan. For instead of going after those oligarchs who remained in Russia in the way he had dealt with Khodorkovsky, Putin offered them a deal in which they would be allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains as long as they made annual, ‘voluntary’ contributions to the Russian treasury, an arrangement which even those in London were eventually forced to accept if they wanted to avoid spending the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders.
His next target was Viktor Chernomyrdin, a former Prime Minister under Yeltsin, whom Yeltsin had appointed chairman of Gazprom, the massive state-owned energy company which had been set up by the Soviet Union in 1965 in order to exploit Russia’s huge reserves of natural gas. So large were these reserves, in fact, that there was no chance of any one single person or even a consortium buying the company as a whole. When it came to privatization, therefore, it was decided that 15% of the shares should be given to the corporation’s employees, 45% sold to the general public – with 747,000 people taking up the offer – while the remaining minority stake of 40% would be kept by the state. Given the atmosphere of rampant corruption at that time, however, it didn’t take long for the board of directors, including the chairman, Viktor Chernomyrdin, and the Chief Executive Officer, Rem Viakhirev, to start channelling funds and assets to other gas trading companies owned by themselves or their families, with the result that the shareholders, including the state, never actually received any dividends.
Putin’s first step, therefore, was to replace Chernomyrdin and Viakhirev with Dmitry Medvedev and Alexei Miller, both of whom had worked for him in St. Petersburg and were part of a small but growing team of trusted and able individuals whom Putin has collected around him over the years and which has been a vital factor in Russia’s recovery. He also made Gazprom a ‘National Champion’: one of a small group of companies which, while still public corporations, were selected to work alongside government in rebuilding the Russian economy. In fact, Gazprom has probably played as big a role in this as the government itself, becoming the world’s largest producer of natural gas and building a network of pipelines spanning thousands of miles in order to supply customers in both Europe and Asia. As such, it has more or less come to symbolise Russia’s industrial transformation from corrupt basket case to economic superpower over the last twenty-five years.
Nor is natural gas the only commodity in which Russia is now a world leader. Under Putin’s stewardship, it has also become the world’s largest exporter of ammonium nitrate fertilisers, its second largest exporter of wheat and its fourth largest producer of nickel, as well as being among the world’s top ten exporters of iron and steel, aluminium, uranium, oil, corn, soybeans and copper. By the time of its invasion of Ukraine, in fact, Russia had become the biggest exporter of commodities in the world and, despite western sanctions over the war, its economy is still expected to grow by around 3.2% this year.
The real significance of this economic transformation, however, is not just that Russia now has the economic strength to withstand almost anything the west can throw at it, but that after the terrible years of the 1990s, when many Russians actually lost faith in their country, Russians now have a new self-confidence which is probably greater than at any time in their history.
However, it is not just economic resurgence that has had this effect on how Russians feel about themselves and their country. Another important factor has been the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, which, despite having been suppressed under communism, managed to survive, not only because it always had friends in various parts of the establishment, but because, for many Russians, attending covert church services constituted one of the few ways in which they could defy Soviet rule. The result is that most Russians today have immense respect for the Church, not only because it was always there for them, even in their darkest hour, but because it is also now seen as both a repository and expression of Russian culture and tradition, the Church and State having once again come together to form a new Russian nationalism.
In fact, the only institution in Russia which still hasn’t fully recovered from its lost decade is the family. This, however, is largely due to the fact that it wasn’t just average life expectancy that fell during the 1990s but the national birth rate, with so few children being born that there are now fewer women of child-bearing age than would normally be the case in a population of this size, with the further result that the current birth rate is also abnormally low.
There are, however, a number of positive factors that would indicate a possible recovery in the birth rate in the near future. One of the most important of these is the continuing popularity of marriage, with nearly twice as many people per thousand getting married each year in Russia as in the UK, for instance. Even more significantly, most Russians still believe that the primary purpose of marriage is to provide a socially and economically stable environment for the raising of children. Given the economic recovery of recent years, this has led to a far more confident attitude towards having larger families, which is supported by both the Church and the State: the state providing substantial tax breaks and benefits for couples with more than one child, while the Church constantly champions family values in its teaching.
In fact, it is the way in which these three pillars of Russian society – the Church, State and Family – all support each other that has almost certainly been key to Russia’s successful recovery. The country’s economic resurgence has of course played a major part – particularly in making families economically secure enough to have more children – but without the faith of ordinary people in their country’s future, along with their consequent willingness to work for that future, it is questionable whether Russia’s economic transformation would have been as rapid and as all-pervasive as it has been.
The key to all of this, however, as Dostoyevsky understood, is that people first have to believe that there is more to life than mere material benefits. Our problem in the west is that most of us, today, do not. In the UK in particular, for instance, we don’t believe in our country. Not only do we not believe that we will ever again be as economically successful as we once were, but we are actually ashamed of our previous economic success, denouncing our former selves as industrial polluters and colonial racists. What’s more, our country does not believe in us. It doesn’t care that we have stopped having children, for instance, because it believes that we are fungible and can be replaced by cheap immigrants. Worse still, we believe it, too, and no longer care that, by the end of this century, those who have been the native inhabitants of these islands for the last thousand years or so will have become a minority in their own country. Indeed, it’s another reason why we’ve stopped having children. It’s not just because we can’t afford the and are no longer equipped to be parents; it is also because we see no future for them.
That’s not to say, of course, that for us there is no way back. When economic adversity strikes, however, it will be much harder for us to withstand it than it was for the Russians in the 1990s, not least because, when the material benefits dry up, we will have far less to fall back on. Worse still, stuck in our materialist mind set, we will almost certainly continue to seek materialist solutions to our problems, unable to understand that, for a society to be materially sound, it first has to be morally sound. And it is our inability to comprehend this that is probably our biggest problem. For even if some billionaire philanthropist were to distribute copies of ‘Notes from Underground’ all across Britain, it is highly unlikely that many people would actually understand it, raising the question, therefore, as to whether the book really is relevant to us today: a question which, in itself, is more than a little disheartening.
