Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 4: Two Grandiose Paradigms: Marxist and Lockean
Try to imagine the early Twentieth Century astronomers Hubble and Eddington sitting on a discussion panel with Aristotle and Ptolemy. This is a challenge to the imagination. Agreement between all of them can be visualized only if one accepts the oversimplified and probably false idea that Aristotle and Ptolemy - as "reasonable men" - could be induced to accept Newtonian dynamics (a paradigm of physical force different from theirs) due to some sort of inherently superior and apparent reasonableness of the Newtonian system. Such a fascinating encounter can never be witnessed, of course, but something like it has been seen over and over again through the centuries. Some of the more contemporary encounters of this type - rarely witnessed anymore - have been between Marxist intellectuals, like the biologist J. B. S. Haldane or the physicist and crystallographer J. D. Bernal, vs. non-Marxist scientists, historians, and economists. Agreement between them never reached fundamentals, such as how the price of a commodity is determined. This is not because one or both sides were in error, as may well have been the case, but rather because both sides viewed the world through the prisms of completely different paradigms. It can be said that one side viewed the world from the point of view of Marx, while the other saw it through the eyes of John Locke. The "civilized" world is still divided between followers of Marx and those of Locke, though the latter do not as readily admit that they are following anyone as the Marxists do.
Adherents of Lockean paradigms in the West have vaingloriously insisted that they are "objective" and that truth - especially scientific truth - is not "culturally relative." David Joravsky is one such author who has written extensively on Lysenko. There are many fallacies in this idea, such as the dubious notions that enculturation is the only significant determinant of thinking, and that the concepts of "objective science" are in some way like the "real things" they represent - not just metaphors of thought into which paradigms congeal and attain verbal representation. The Marxists, on the other hand, say these "bourgeois" thinkers are in the grip of what it calls "ideologies" and so lack a disinterested awareness of historical necessity. Marxist thinkers make the powerful claim that by following principles enunciated by Marx, they are stationed at an absolute moment in history which is outside all cultural, historical, and ideological subjectivity, so that their truth is not relative either. By 1905, Lenin was misusing Marx’s concept of ideology by referring to Marxism and dialectical materialism as if they were ideologies too, as if they stood opposed to ideologies produced in capitalist societies. Lenin may have purposely made this "error" to sharpen war with capitalism, but philosophically it undermines one of Marxism’s most powerful claims, albeit one of its most intriguing and difficult ideas.
In the Lysenko controversy, a duel was joined between representatives of two broad paradigms of history and philosophy - that of Marx vs. that of Locke - as much as between the representatives of two narrower paradigms of heredity - that of Lysenko vs. that of Mendel, Weismann, and Morgan. Many Western observers of the "Lysenko affair" were offended that this acrimonious debate embroiled social philosophers and political thinkers, such as Communist Party functionary Mark Mitin and Marxist theoretician Isaac Prezent, in the same forums with specialists in plant breeding and genetics. The right and ability of these "philosophers" to contribute to - or even decide - this dispute received both ideological and institutional support in the USSR, and, as previously noted, was solicited and thereby endorsed by Soviet geneticists themselves. Stalin’s involvement in the debate was viewed in the West as just "more evidence" that he wished to dictate new, revolutionary "proletarian sciences" based on Marxist philosophy - sciences like the new "agrobiology" espoused by Lysenko - to overthrow the "bourgeois sciences" that had been imported for centuries by Tsarist Russia from Western capitalist societies, as if Stalin had deluded himself into thinking that he too knew something about plant respiration and epithelial cells. Stalin himself finally, lately, and reluctantly entered the fray, editing and even writing parts of a speech for Lysenko delivered at the close of an important academic conference held in 1948, the type of conference and debate that the geneticists had conspired to avoid in 1939. When doing so, Stalin made humble admissions of his lack of erudition in the sciences, but emphatically asserted his knowledge and expertise in dialectical materialism (the grandiose Marxist paradigm).
All of this was a consequence of the suspicion that some individual, incident, theory, or newly discovered fact threatened to throw a reigning or upcoming paradigm into a crisis. It shall be seen in Part II of this essay that Lysenko’s humble discovery of the vernalization of flowering plants threatened to do this, but not until the implications of his discovery were perceived as real, and not merely marginal, threats to the new Mendelian paradigm for heredity. The threat was not clear until it was thought that the theoretical pre-suppositions and implications of vernalization - newly presented to the Western world - were the product of a vigorous new "materialist science" that capitalist ideologies had supposedly theretofore inhibited. Lysenko’s discovery of vernalization set off a remarkable flurry of research into this obscure botanical phenomenon by biologists, geneticists, and other scientists East and West, forcing them to expand a narrow, idealized, and highly oversimplified paradigm of heredity based on Gregor Mendel’s diffident research into only seven traits in a single species (the culinary pea). Mendel had formulated therefrom a theory involving "factors" of heredity that was implausible and lacked a known material basis or mechanism at that time.
What should be noted in this and many other perennially unresolved disputes are all the terms which are rough-and-ready stand-ins for "paradigm," as if this notion is always operating and at least unconsciously taken into account. Examples of such terms range from words readers barely notice, such as "through the eyes of" and "perspectives" (as in the title of a book discussed in what follows: Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives); to conspicuous, fancy, impressive-sounding terms like Weltanschauung (German for "view of the world") and "root metaphor"; on to poetic words that evoke profound interest or acerbic skepticism, like "prisms of consciousness"; all the way to terms that sound - and are often intended to be - invidiously negative, such as "limited awareness," "schemes," "ideologies," "-isms," "spaghetti-thin reality tunnel," etc. An alien paradigm is usually seen from the "outside" by one who does not share it as a theoretical schematic to be applied to various facts (narrow paradigms) or to the world in general (broad paradigms) and thereby tested. The Twentieth Century philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, famous for his unrelenting logical analysis of traditional philosophical ideas and systems, said that the "right attitude" (sic) in studying a philosopher is to maintain a kind of "hypothetical sympathy," he called it, "until it is possible to know what it feels like [my emphasis] to believe his theories." This effort or "exercise of historical and psychological imagination," he said, "at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind." (Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1945, p. 39.) Once again, "scope of our thinking" and "temper of mind" could be two loose stand-ins for "paradigm."
Confining discussion to what Kuhn has called paradigms allows one to avoid plunging into the realm of discussing more nebulous, complex, and obscure entities of the kind materialists and realists would rather avoid, entities such as "states of consciousness," "levels of awareness," "analytical vs. dialectical thinking," etc. Agreement and progress rarely come when such ideal concepts are invoked. But paradigm consideration nonetheless easily spills over into discussions in which such terms dominate, at which point sweeping characterizations of very broad paradigms may arise, such as "Anglo-Saxon business-as-usual," "matter-of fact unimaginativeness," "Latin hysterics," "Nordic Romanticism," "Oriental mysticism," etc. An example of this occurs in Arthur Koestler’s The Yogi and the Commissar, in which the author states that in ancient Athens, in the early Renaissance, and during the first years of the Russian (Bolshevik) Revolution, intellectuals were "mentally integrated and awake, having a ‘cosmic awareness’ in which individual awareness and social reality were linked." Koestler appeared to be groping to explain the historical and social settings in which new grandiose paradigms arise, and how salutary and even exhilarating it feels to live through and be part of such a paradigm transition.
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
