The Personal is Not Political

Sadly, far too many people go off to college and are taught that their fundamental identity as a person is nothing more than the set of political beliefs they espouse. It is quite tragic.

Philip Roth explores this matter in the novel I Married a Communist. Nathan Zuckerman (Roth’s alter ego in 9 of his novels) and Murray Ringold reminisce about Murray’s younger brother and Nathan’s youthful idol, Ira, the communist of the title.

At one point, Zuckerman expresses astonishment at what he is learning from Murray:

Murray, laughing, said, “That a man has a lot of sides that are unbelievable is, I thought, the subject of your books. About a man, as your fiction tells it, everything is believable.

That sometimes we learn surprising things about people is well known. We are surprised at the particular instances, but not at the general phenomena. Obviously, people are complex and obviously we don’t know everything about anyone. So, why is this novel of discovery worth reading?

The earliest events discussed in this novel involve teenage Nathan discovering the world of politics via a book praising Thomas Paine for demanding the compete transformation of the world. He has a conversation with Murray and Ira, in which he is told that the genius of Paine “was to articulate the cause in English. The revolution was totally improvised, total disorganized. Isn’t that the sense you get from this book Nathan? Well, these guys had to find a language for their revolution. To find the words for a great purpose.”

That may be the most perfect description of the allure of developing an absolutist political self. Nathan is attracted to Ira and Ira’s communism not because of the beliefs themselves, but because of the language in which they are expressed. The language itself is stirring and new. It is exciting. It is like an entry into an adult world where childish ideas are thrown off and the world is complex and full of evil and good and there are all these magic phrases which can be used to signal that you are on the side of the righteous.

It isn’t, in other words, the ideas themselves that excite youth; it is the language expressing the ideas themselves.

When someone is first being educated and his head is becoming transformed into an arsenal armed with books, when he is young and impudent and leaping with joy to discover all the intelligence tucked away on this planet, he is apt to exaggerate the importance of the churning new reality and to deprecate as unimportant everything else.

So, what happens after that first encounter? That is exactly what this book traces. Zuckerman gets bored with the language. It takes a few years, but eventually, hearing the rhetoric repeated endlessly, the lack of any new language, becomes so boring that Zuckerman wanders off (to write a scandalous novel, as we find out in Zuckerman Unbound).

Becoming bored wasn’t the only option. Ira’s political mentor O’Day is a True Believer to the end, sacrificing everything, all of life’s comforts for the cause.

Ira tries to straddle the worlds of zealotry and comfortable living, and, well, it doesn’t work out.

Therein lies the problem. What is the proper place for one’s political beliefs? Zuckerman wanders off looking for a new language to excite him; O’Day sacrifices everything for his beliefs; Ira fails to balance the zeal of his communist political beliefs and living a normal bourgeois life with his famous wife, Eve. None of these options seem desirable.

Murray stands in for another option; keep politics in its proper place. Murray’s political beliefs seem to be vaguely leftist, probably what was once called a fellow traveler. He gets hauled before a McCarthyite committee, refuse to denounce his brother, and loses his job as a high school teacher. But, he cheerfully spends a few years as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, before being reinstated to his job as a teacher. He is married to a great wife, has a great kid, meets Zuckerman again to have the conversation in this book when he is in his eighties taking a class on Shakespeare, and then dies quietly two months later. A good life all in all.

The difference between Murray and all the other options in this book is simply that he does not let his political life control him. While Zuckerman is bouncing from one enthusiasm to the next, Murray was just going through life, observing the political scene, having strong opinions about it (he really doesn’t like Nixon), but never confusing his political beliefs with who he is.

At the end, Zuckerman seems to realize that Murray is implicitly right. Wandering out, staring at the night sky, what does he see?

Neither the ideas of their era nor the expectations of our species were determining destiny: hydrogen alone was determining destiny. There are no longer mistakes for Eve or Ira to make. There is no betrayal. There is no idealism. There are no falsehoods. There is neither conscience nor its absence. There are no mothers and daughters, no fathers and stepfathers. There are no actors. There is no class struggle. There is no discrimination or lynching or Jim Crowe, nor has there ever been. There is no injustice, nor is there justice. There are no utopias….What you see from this silent rostrum up on my mountain…is that universe into which error does not obtrude. You see the inconceivable: the colossal spectacle of no antagonism. You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand.
The stars are indispensable.

Perspective matters. This is one of the missing lessons in the modern college. It is one of the missing lessons in the world of news and social media.

I have had strong political beliefs since I was in high school. I too was wooed by the beat of the rhetoric of all these ideas and I too once thought that the political battles of the moment were life and death battles. While my political beliefs have not moderated, I have come to realize that while politics is fun and interesting and generates those incredibly marvelous debates, it really should be kept in its place.

A pleasant cup of coffee with your kid or cocktail hour with your spouse or an impassioned debate about sports with your friends, these things matter. None of these things is worth sacrificing on the altar of politics.

I Married a Communist is a curious warning tale. It is in some ways a bitter book in which Roth settles scores with his ex-wife. But Roth is too great of an artist to let the bitterness dwarf the message. Our hearts long for peace. That peace is not going to be found by constantly seeking to praise or condemn Caesar.