Every nation, every art has its hypocrisy. The world is fed with a little truth and a great many lies. The human mind is feeble: only rarely can it accommodate unalloyed truth; its religion, its morality, its politics, its poets, its artists, must all be presented to it enveloped in falsehoods. These lies are adapted as suits the mentality of each nation: they vary from one to the other. But these very falsehoods make it so difficult for nations to understand one another, and so easy for them to develop hatred towards one another. Truth is the same for all of us: but every nation has its own lie, and to this it applies the word idealism. Every creature therein breathes it from birth to death. It becomes a fact of life–there are only a few men of genius who can break free from it through heroic moments of crisis, when they are alone in the free world of their thoughts.
--Romain Rolland (1905)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Not a bad quote, but it's the sort of thing--question authority, don't believe the lie, civil disobedience, etc.--that always makes me suspicious. This sort of rhetoric is actually morally neutral, and can be used easily by the forces of darkness. Very often one finds that "the hidden truth" that "they" don't want you to know turns out to be paranoiac, hate-filled fantasy (everything is controlled by the Jews, or the arms dealers, or the illuminati, or reptoids disguised as humans), or some hackneyed Marxist truism. One has already seen how much the tea party folks love their own rhetoric of victimhood. Rolland himself was mostly inoffensive, though like most 1930s intellectuals he had his chosen dictator to admire (in his case, Stalin).
I was impressed by his notion that the truth in every nation is pretty much the same, and it is the lies that divide us.
I don't read it in a "question authority" sort of way, but instead as a comment about the way we mythologize ourselves and our countries. Where we see our country in the grand narrative of things.
My point would be that until the source tells you exactly what the big lie is and who is telling it, a quote like this is suspicious. Who is telling the lies that divide the nations? The source could have a nuanced and complex idea of where the fault lies, or they could simply have a paranoid one (it's the Jews, the arms dealers, the bourgeoisie, etc.).
True enough, but some things are true or interesting regardless of who says them; I have some favorite Lenin quotes. Anyway, I got this from Scott Horton's blog, http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/08/hbc-90007553, and he is full of praise for the novel it came from:
"Rolland takes dead aim at the jingoistic nationalism of the late nineteenth century and warns of the mass slaughter that it surely will (and indeed did) produce, and he does this in a work completed on the eve of the Great War."
This is one of Rolland's characters speaking:
“I love my homeland. I love it every bit as much as you love yours. But can I for the sake of that love murder innocent souls or betray my conscience? That would be a betrayal of my homeland. I number among the army of the spirit, not the army of violence.”
Post a Comment