Aleksandr Zinoviev on Convictions and Intellectual Maturity

The Russian author Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zinoviev (Александр Александрович Зиновьев) was famous in the seventies and eighties for his irreverent analysis of the Soviet system and the Soviet citizens. What he did not seem to fully realise himself, not even after he was exiled to the West in 1978, was that much of his descriptions of shortcomings of the Soviet system equally well could be applied to describe a capitalist system or in fact any human system.

We humans work according to very similar mechanisms whether we are part of a Soviet state, a Soviet communist party, a Western conservative party, a military organisation, a big corporation, a religious organisation or, sometimes, a family at a Saturday picnic in the city park.

One of my favourite passages in Zinoviev's writing is the short chapter about convictions in his Homo Sovieticus. Here it is in Charles Janson's translation:

Philosophical Convictions and Behavioural Stereotypes

And here’s yet another mystery for you: what I’m saying here doesn’t express my convictions. And, what is more, it’s only an apparent mystery: I haven’t got any convictions. I’ve only got a more or less stable reaction to everything I bump up against: a behavioural stereotype. Convictions are something Western man has, not Soviet man. Instead of having convictions the latter has a “stereotype of behaviour”. This doesn’t presuppose any convictions, and so it’s compatible with every sort of conviction. When you confuse convictions with behavioural stereotypes without convictions, you get many misunderstandings, and strange ideas arise among Westerners about Soviet behaviour. If somebody else were to say what I am saying, I would start arguing with him. If you want to get at the truth, the first thing to do is to get into an argument with yourself. But I say this not from conviction, but in order to be witty, because I am not concerned with the truth either.

If a man has convictions it is a sign that he is not intellectually mature. Convictions are only a compensation for not being able to understand a given phenomenon quickly and accurately in its concrete manifestation. They are a priory guides to how one should behave in a concrete situation without understanding its concreteness. A man with convictions is rigid, dogmatic, tedious and, as a rule, stupid. But more often convictions have no effect on people's behaviour. They merely beautify vanity, relieve unclear consciences and cover up stupidity.

And for those of you who want to attempt making friends at parties by quoting the central argument in Russian, here it is: Человек с убеждениями негибок, догматичен, зануден и, как правило, глуп. Make sure you stress the last word, глуп, pronounced "glupp". It means "stupid".

Information missing from Wikipedia

Recently I wanted to know more about Jean d'Ormesson. You know. The member of the Académie Française since 1973 and author of dozens of books, one of the more important French authors the last sixty years. Logically, I went to Wikipedia. English Wikipedia has an article of 5,775 bytes about him. To get a little more information I went to French Wikipedia, which has a much bigger article with 31,755 bytes. I read it, and re-read it, and then my mind drifted off. Suddenly there was something I wanted to know about The Simpsons. You know. That American cartoon. The Simpsons article is 122,973 bytes, four times as big as the article about d'Ormesson on French Wikipedia and more than twenty times bigger than d'Ormesson's article on English Wikipedia.

This is a cartoon, we are talking about. A television cartoon, and there is apparently twenty times more interesting things to write about it than there is about the life of an 88 year living French classic author. At least in English.

Admittedly d'Ormesson is not English and not all his books have been translated to English. So what about an English author, like Julian Barnes, winner of the Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the David Cohen prize and many others? His Wikipedia article is 18,366 bytes long - a seventh of The Simpson's article.

But that is not all. There are 45 articles about different Simpson characters and more than 500 for different Simpson episodes. Not even a dozen of Julian Barnes' books got their own Wikipedia on English Wikipedia.

I do not know what this says about Wikipedia editors, about our society and its priorities or the mechanisms behind sharing information.

But it is clear that anyone who thinks that Wikipedia already contains all needed and relevant information is much mistaken.