Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Whale
February 6, 2022 by
Chas WalkerSNIPPETS:
Reading Moby-Dick in the era of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin,
C. L. R. James ✨ sees
Ahab as “the most dangerous and destructive social type that has ever appeared in Western Civilization.”
He argues that Melville’s genius was an almost-prophetic creative process, prefiguring twentieth-century totalitarians by perceiving both the
disruptive world changes that would produce them and the
disasters that would follow
in their wake.
For James, the core of Moby-Dick revolves around the key question of
“how the society of 💰🎩 free 😈 individualism would give birth to 🦍 totalitarianism and be
unable to defend itself against it.” ... ...
The catastrophes are upon us: all-consuming wildfires and rising tides, a resurgence of hard-right authoritarian political movements, and brutal inequalities that predated and have been compounded by an unrelenting pandemic.
Billionaires race to rocket off-planet to avoid the fate to which they would condemn the rest of us (although, as Melville would have noted with some jouissance, so far they have mostly
edged into space).
Greater disasters loom, and we brace for each successive stormfront, afraid of losing power in a literal and figurative sense.
Read more:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/02/moby-dick-herman-melville-socialism-literature