Post #379. And Artis81.

I woke up at about 3 this morning, and began to think about what I wanted to write today (of course, that was the wrong thing to do at 3 a.m.), and I figured it all out. Now, if I could only remember how I was going to say it……

I am reading The Future is History, a 2017 book by Masha Gessen, which describes the fall of the USSR, the chaos that follows, and the rise of Vladimir Putin. Gessen, as you may know, is a Russian born Jewish writer, who lives in New York and holds dual citizenship, has written a number of books and writes regularly for the New Yorker.

The Future is History is about 500 pages long, and I am only on page 125. For the first 75 pages or so, which deals with the history of the social sciences in the Soviet Union – the absence of the study of sociology, the tamping down and distortion of Freudian thinking and more – and which references totally obscure (to absolutely any American reader) Soviet academics and their fates, I was lost. Should even bother to continue reading?

But I knew I should when I saw where she was going. She was describing “homo sovieticus”, her descriptive for a person born and raised in the closed society that was the USSR, a person whose thought processes were so different from those of a member of western society, that neither can possibly fully understand how the other thinks. In other words, if you think that a Russian living under the USSR thought about life the way an American would think about life if suddenly transported to the USSR, you would be wrong. The entire way of thinking is completely different.

This, Gessen says, is why – when Gorbachev tried to open up Soviet thinking with his perestroika, he failed so completely – the majority of citizens were not ready to think the way successful perestroika would have required. They were simply confused. And they were confused when Yeltsin attacked Gorbachev, when the Russian Federation declared itself separate from the USSR, when the Soviet Republics began to split off, and when the USSR fell completely apart.

But Russian leadership was ready to move forward. And this is because, throughout the Gorbachev years, and to some extent earlier, more and more western ideas began to seep into Soviet academics, and entire species of homo sovieticus began to disappear. This, she surmises, was the real reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Educated people began to think more like westerners.

Okay, now let’s move back to something I have now written about in this blog several times: the enormous changes that have taken place in the way social studies topics are being taught at American universities. How the concepts of post-modernism, and wokeness, and decolonization have taken over the thought processes to the extent that history, government, sociology – any of the social sciences – are no longer taught the way they were taught 30 years ago and, when thinking about those subjects, the way of thinking of someone older than, say, 50 is so different from someone who is, say, 25, that we cannot even really comprehend how the other is thinking.

So, I am trying to make an analogy between the shock of the average Soviet citizen at the points Gorbachev was trying to make, and the shock of the average 50+ year old American at the way the social sciences are being taught at American universities today.

I don’t know exactly where this is going to go in Gessen’s book, since I am only on page 125 of 500. And none of us know where this is going to take us here in America either, as we, too, are only on page 125 of our own American playbook, which will have at least 500 pages, and possibly many, many more. And then things will undoubtedly turn in a different direction and the confusion will come from the thinking of generations not yet conceived when they develop still another way to look at the social sciences. Yes, as Gessen’s title says, The Future is History.

Last week, I heard a lecture sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Governmental Antisemitism Policies (ISGAP) by Prof. Ellen Cannon of Northeastern Illinois University of Chicago. Her topic, like so much I have been paying attention to, was again the teaching of the social sciences at American universities, and she too was trying to explain how it came about.

Cannon is, I think, primarily a teacher of Russian studies; she is an older woman who has been engaged in this work for decades. She was trying to explain, from a different angle, how the change in social sciences teaching came about. Until I heard her, all I had read started with Fourcault, Marcuse and Derrida, but she had a different thought. She thought it was an outgrowth of Soviet teaching of social sciences. Not that it was like Soviet teaching, but that the Soviets pioneered the concept that teaching social science was a way to support one’s way of thinking, not a way to encourage independent thinking.

When I heard Cannon, who struck me as very bright and well versed, I discounted what she said – I thought that it was unlikely that Soviet instruction had this spill over effect. But after reading Gessen, I am not so sure. Cannon may be correct.

Whatever the cause, there is much to be concerned about. As to the old adage “Is it good for the Jews?”, the answer is clearly “no”.