Subversion
Professor Ritchie Robertson recently wrote about Willa and Edwin Muir: ‘The religion with which the Muirs were most familiar was Scottish Calvinism, and they roundly rejected it. Edwin tells in his autobiography of seeing, in a Glasgow slum street, a young man repeatedly hitting another for no apparent reason. To remonstrances, the aggressor replied, “I ken he hasna hurt me, but I’m gaun tae hurt him!”. In retrospect at least, Muir found this an image of Calvin’s predestination: God has decided before the beginning of the world who will be saved and who damned, and mercilessly inflicts a punishment which its victims have done nothing to deserve. Muir explored Calvinism further in his hostile biography of John Knox (1929) and in a remarkable essay, “Bolshevism and Calvinism” (1934). The Calvinist and Bolshevist elect, he argues, both consider themselves saved and anticipate with satisfaction the damnation or extinction of sinners and bourgeois.’ The aptitude human beings have for institutionalising, then rationalising their subversion of high ideals is fascinating and redoubtable.
