The Crowbar of Events

“One might expect that a minimal level of rationality would require artists seeking a ‘meaningful’ alternative society to judge it by the same standards by which they judge their own. But this, alas, is one of their most consistent failings. They judge our society by the flaws and inadequacies they see all about them. But they tend to judge alternative societies, of which they often retain a peculiarly stubborn ignorance, by these societies’ officially announced ideals, a practice Jean-Paul Sartre once defended as necessary to ‘preserve hope.’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has reflected on such people. They have illusions, he says, which can only be destroyed by the ‘pitiless crowbar of events.’” [Richard Grenier, Capturing The Culture (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1991), pp. xxxviii-ix].