Customer Reviews

The Captive Mind (Penguin Modern Classics)

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In the forward to this remarkable book Milosz writes that he wants to give the totalitarian point of view "in his own words, from his own point of view." The result is this ambitious, fascinating tour of the human mind twisted by the lies of the culture that surroundes it. It's a schizophrenic place that resembles the scarier novels of the noir writer Jim Thompson. There's nothing solid to cling to; everything dissolves into fear and loathing. Milosz turns his poetical gifts to the case studies of several Polish intellectuals who became entangled with the Communist party. Milosz doesn't name them but one is clearly Tadeusz Borowski, the author of the Holocaust short story collection "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen." The title of that book in Polish was "The Stony World", which reflected how Borowski, an Auschwitz survivor, came to see the world--as dominated by force, without effective moral constraint. Milosz depicts Borowski as a man who sought shelter under the protection of the strongest earthly power available--the Communists--but was unable finally to justify the price of that loyalty (he committed suicide.) What keeps someone from succumbing to "Ketman" (the two-facedness that Orwell called "double-think?) Milosz implies the answer is religious faith, which allows one to trust in an objective truth beyond the lies and terror of the stony world (he was a devout Catholic.) This book is a must read for anyone who wants to keep the world from stealing his soul.

Never have I read a more vivid and convincing thesis defending the virtues of intellectual freedom. Though frequently difficult to read--the author (or the translator) shifts frequently from first to second to third person (and back again) in mid paragraph--the work is central to understanding not only the intellectual seductiveness of the "rule of philosophy" but, more importantly and generally, the dangers of intellectual conformity. Milosz's dissection of intellectuals' attraction to leftist social systems becomes a defense of open society in both the intellectual and general communities. We come to understand most fundamentally the concept of intellectual freedom, and how the elimination of it becomes the ultimate goal of authoritarian leftist politics... despite claims otherwise.

Many intellectuals believe that their interests are best served by socialism or communism. Milosz explains why they are frequently fooled into believing this, and why many of the very components of socialism and communism that intellectuals most covet--freedom from vulgar market forces and important roles in the administration of society--are the very forces that strip them of their liberty. He illustrates this process with four character examples.

Though written in the throes of the Cold War, this work could not be more timely. And though it is written as an attack on Communism (with a big "C") and is rife with often knee-jerk anti-Russian rhetoric, it's arguements can be easily applied to all forms of totalitarianism, both left and right. Mostly, Milosz is attempting to defend the chaotic human condition from idealogical molding and, considering contemporary encroachments of politics, government, and religion into the lives of human beings, this book is as valid and important today as it was in 1953. Not to be missed.

"It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abtruse books of philosophy". That's how this book begins, and it captures Milosz's major theme: the vast difference between "abtruse books of philosophy" and real human beings. In a series of connected essays, he studies that difference, and the ways in which people respond when they're forced to deny it. Most of the essays tell the stories of writers that Milosz knew in Warsaw before the war, and the different routes they took to becoming instruments of communist propaganda. Of the other essays, the one most powerful to an American reader is "Looking to the West", which starts with Milosz being asked whether Americans are really stupid. The writing is beautiful and vivid. I highly recommend this book to anybody who dislikes the oversimplifications of ideology. I recommend it even more highly to anybody who doesn't.

This short volume of essays is one of the finest books I have ever read. It is not for nothing that Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The discussions of the Baltics and Poland under communism are horrifying, profound, and stimulate the deepest thought and emotions. Essential reading for those interested in man's freedom, and in the contrasts between true religion and the false diety of historical "necessity".

I often wonder as I read about the horrors committed by the worst regimes in history, how the people that perpetrate crimes against humanity can live with themselves. What is the motive and reasoning of those who praise the slaughter of innocents?

The Captive Mind sheds a little bit of light into these darkest corners of the human psyche. It describes the path that leads righeous people on the road to immorality, written by a man who, along with his friends and comerads, traveled that road but took another path before he came to his final destination.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote from the Soviet Union, Vaclav Havel from Czechoslovakia, and Czeslaw Milosz from Poland, but they all lived under the shadow of Communism, and thus they wrote about the same things. Czeslaw Milosz (who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980) defected from Poland in 1951, and his book "The Captive Mind" attempts to justify and to explain his defection.

"The Captive Mind" is a description and analysis and critique of Communism's mind-workers, its writers. Milosz starts with an interesting question: given the totalitarian aspects of Communism, why did not all the writers defect to a land when they can write whatever they want? The answer is that Communism, more than the West, respects the word as a power for propaganda, and treats writers very well. In fact, there's hardly any resistance, and it's truly striking how the whole intellectual class was ready and willing to prostitute itself to the demands and directives of the Center in Moscow. Some of this can be blamed on fatigue and disillusionment resulting from World War II, some to opportunism, most to apathy. (Also, the natural human instinct to just get along, rather than to cause friction.) Milosz makes it clear that as a writer his conscience cannot permit him to live in such a state of affairs, and thus he chooses exile.

Towards the end of the book, Milosz criticizes Pablo Neruda. As a former Polish translator of Neruda's poetry, Milosz believes that the great poet ought to write what he knows: in other words, he should continue to criticize the oppression of his native land, but shouldn't because of that be too ready and willing to praise the Soviet Union.

While Milosz does not overtly praise America, there is always that bias in his writings. Alexis de Tocqueville discusses the difference between America and European dictatorships in his book "Democracy in America." The great Frenchman claimed that while European dictatorships may demand your body America demands your soul. Intellectuals living under dictators know all too clearly what's wrong with the system, all engaged in double-think (thinking one way and behaving another), and are guilty of cynicism and opportunism, but not stupidity and ignorance. But what can we say about a culture that happily watches "Entertainment Tonight" and "Family Guy," and believes their civilization to be the height of humanity?

The Communist threat to humanity has come and gone, but what's left is a much more nefarious menace.

"There are occasions when silence no longer suffices, when it may pass as an avowal. Then one must not hesitate. Not only must one deny one's true opinion, but one is commanded to resort to all ruses to deceive one's adversary. One makes all the protestations of faith that can please him, one performs all the rites one recognizes to be the most vain, one falsifies one's own books, one exhausts all possible means of deceit." - Arthur Gobineau, from `Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia'

"The Captive Mind," written in the early 1950s immediately after Milosz was awarded political asylum in France, is one of the first attempts to articulate the appeal of Communism (or, more broadly, dialectical materialism) to the intellectuals all over Eastern Europe.

Central to the novel are four characters identified by Milosz only as Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Gamma (but who we know enough about to identify as the very real authors Jerzy Andrzejewski, Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Putrament, and Konstanty Ildefons Galczynski.) Each of the four has uniquely different relationships to writing, and thinks differently about the way dialectical materialism affects their writing. In Alpha's youth, his far-right politics calls him into writing with the force of "moral authority." He later eschews these politics and becomes a Catholic who speaks out against anti-Semitism. After World War II ends, Alpha's writing ideologically aligns itself with the puppet governments that set themselves up on Eastern Europe, and he is later seen only seen as a literary prostitute by his former friends. Beta, a poet who spent two years in Auschwitz and Dachau only to later be released by American soldiers, later swallows the pill of Murti-Bing and writes hard-line ideological defenses of Leninism and Stalinism. The experiences of Delta and Gamma are equally typical accounts of when the mind of an intellectual bumps into an intractable ideological system which inevitably evolves into "ketman," meaning an outward acceptance of an idea while still holding on to unspoken reservations. In fact, this word, originally from the Arabic, was imported into English by Arthur Gobineau himself (see the quotation above).

The first two chapters are incisive in evoking the spirit of the Communism-addled writer who struggles to balance his "priorities." But the middle chapters on the writers seem as untrue - not false in the strict sense, but lacking the clarity of the moral-political-aesthetic themes with which he was trying to deal - as the ideology with which they are struggling. While they are presented as individuated, personal characters, the reader gets the feeling that Milosz is to turn them into archetypes while at other times working deliberately against this, which has an odd way of turning them into alienating abstractions for the reader.

Perhaps most of all, this book serves as a tocsin. By now, an entire generation of Europeans has had the ability to write, think, and speak publicly about whatever they wish, the very fact of which possibly renders Milosz's book a peculiar curio from the doldrums of intellectual history. For many Americans, whose questions of freedom are restricted to whether or not one is allowed to burn their draft card or a Koran, or utter a prayer in school, reading "The Captive Mind" may very well have a stultifying effect. If that happens, the book runs the risk - we all run the risk - of it becoming still even more relevant than it is now.

An excellent, if short, book analyzing artisan associates of the author who make conversions, adaptions, and protestations to the Communist regime. Those who don't die by suicide or execution tend to become cynics, knowing they mouth hollow phrases for a corrupt regime and receive undeserved praise for crud they produce because they've either lost the ability to produce deserving work or such work would be reactionary.

Looking at modern day people of the left, I often notice that they have a vision of their ideologies, whether socialist, feminist, multiculturalist, etc. etc. etc., that is utopian in nature and almost impenetrable to negative feedback about the actual consequences of their policies. Exactly what is it in the human psyche that allows some ideologies to hook into someone's consciousness with such tenacity?

Czeslaw Milosz had the same questions in his day when communism was in the ascendancy on the world stage and appeared to have the winds of history at its back. He wrote THE CAPTIVE MIND in an attempt to address such issues by telling us the stories of several authors captured by the communist ideal. The result is a classic book still timely to the same issues today as we read of talented individuals willing to sell their talents, and alas their souls, over to an ideal of human perfection while justifying the trail of mass destruction and slaughter that came about instead.

In one major way, I am disappointed with the book. One of the more powerful statements that I read about totalitarian ideologies of the past was that there were numerous people outside of the ideological circle screaming their heads off about what was going on. Yet there was some mechanism or mechanisms within the ideology itself which prevented such negative feedback from entering the loop. My own experience with ideologues has demonstrated this time and again. It is just breathtaking to hear the unbelievable verbal gymnastics and mental contortions used to maintain a belief in one's sytem. I was hoping that THE CAPTIVE MIND would explore the pschological infrastructure of the totalitarian mentality far more than it does. Well, I cannot have everything, I suppose.

A reader should be aware that THE CAPTIVE MIND can be a tad difficult. Milosz often switches perspectives from his voice to others to hypotheticals and back again without clearly delineating the shifts. This can make a cursory reading ineffective and possibly even misleading. The book is not that hardgoing, so taking one's time is recommended.

An excellent read and justifiably a classic. It's certainly a dated piece, as political works usually are, and yet Milosz's insistance on confining his commentary to his own experience and epoch (i.e., Nazi and Soviet occupation) makes it a timeless work of intellectual history. Particularly salient are his observations about the function and psychology of the artist in society. Just read it.