Contra Mundum
By Frank Paine
I owe the concept of Contra Mundum to my Pomfret School Humanities teacher, Hagop Merjian. Hagop used to talk about people who systematically and consistently argued, spoke or wrote against the spirit of their age (“contra mundum”=”against the world”). He seemed to admire these people in a way, but at the same time, he used to wonder how they could continue to do that. I got the impression that he thought that they suffered.
It’s over forty years since I studied under Hagop, and I’ve continued to think about the problem he raised. These years of pondering have given rise to a project, to which I’ve been arrogant enough to assign the same name. The concept behind this project is largely biographical. If I live long enough, it is my hope to complete a publishable work detailing as much as is interesting and relevant from the stories of the lives of a select group of people, and attempt to draw some conclusions about them.
What I am seeking from this blog is suggestions as to other names to include in my “sample” of contra mundum practitioners—it badly needs to be expanded (see below)--and in general, ideas and commentary on the subject at hand. All ideas will be welcome, provided they are expressed civilly. In addition, there is a huge amount of material to be reviewed and evaluated (hence the above reference to mortality), and I would listen with pleasure to offers of assistance with the research. However, “Nothing ventured, nothing earned”, to coin a most unoriginal phrase, so I will continue the project even if there are no such offers.
As with anyone having pretenses to being scientific, I have a hypothesis that I am testing, which is that people practicing “contra mundum” didn’t necessarily suffer, but generally did experience stress symptoms, and lost out in conventional wordly terms to people much inferior to themselves—if that is suffering, so be it.
I need to be careful here. I am in no way conducting a popularity contest, or even an assessment of likeability. One of the group I have so far selected, for example, was quite a ruthless dictator who sneered at bourgeois morality.
The group I have selected consists, so far, of only four names. I would like to expand it, as one problem is that three of the names are from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The fourth is from well before the Christian era, so there is a huge gap to be filled
I’m sure that you are dying for me to reveal the four names.
The first is the philosopher, Socrates. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of biographical information about outside the dialogues of Plato. Even these dialogues suffer from unclear authorship: that is, it is hard to distinguish what represents Socrates’ thinking, and what represents Plato’s thinking. Nevertheless, there are certain of the dialogues that seem to tell a story, and it is that story that I am focusing on, in which, Socrates gives up his case to a group of people much inferior to him.
The second is Vladimir Ilyitch Ulanov, better known by his conspiratorial code name of “Lenin”. He, obviously, is (or at least became—the earlier part of his life is by far the most interesting) the ruthless dictator referenced above. There is vastly much more material available about him than about Socrates, and I have only scratched the surface of it so far. Lenin was a scholar, an intellectual, and a compulsive revolutionary: i.e. a most unlikely person to succeed politically, and yet, he did. I would argue that his “success” was largely a matter of luck, and indeed, his successor, Stalin (another code name meaning “man of steel”), was a vastly inferior human being, and a far worse dictator. I have been much taken by Lenin’s wife’s comment to Trotsky in 1926 (two years after Lenin’s death) that “If Valodya were alive today, he would be in prison.” In other words, he would have lost out to Stalin.
The third person is comparatively obscure, as many will not recognize his name. He is Ludwig von Mises, one of the leading economists of the so-called “Austrian” school. In his case there is also a large amount of material, though relatively little of it is biographical. By this I mean that though there is a biography available, as well as his own memoirs and his wife’s recollections, the bulk of the material is his own works. They are not easy, and they are big—he had a high standard of scholarship. In any case, he was one of the very few consistent and unrelenting defenders of capitalism and critics of socialism (or even interventionism) in the 20th century. He suffered for it in terms of both blows to his career and to his pocketbook, and yet he remained insistent.
The last is the philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, best known for the notion of “God is dead”. I believe that his association with this phrase is really unfortunate, as the phrase is a misleading indicator of what Nietzsche was actually about. Like von Mises, the bulk of the relevant material is his own works, but there is a limited amount of material about his life available. In any case, Nietzsche pretty much stood alone in his philosophical message, and his life was a litany of stress symptoms. Parenthetically, it is not so well known that Nietzsche was also a composer of music, though people disagree about its quality.
© Frank Paine, 2009.
