Creating a "nuance" where no nuance exists

From Little Green Footballs, an excellent essay by David Warren about the protests in Ottowa. I love the beginning:

"I am a sick man. ... I am a wicked man." This is how Dostoevsky's nameless anti-hero begins his Notes from Underground, the prelude to a series of five extraordinary novels on the fate of modern man.

Through the last decade, excellent new translations of the major works of Dostoevsky and Gogol have been coming from the (married) team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. They have been making clear what other translators, from whatever motive, had been making opaque.

Previous translators of, for example, the quote above, avoided the word "wicked", and usually put the word "spiteful" in its place. A moral assertion was thus replaced with a psychological one. But Dostoevsky is a moral, not a psychological writer, and the word he used in the original Russian, "zloy", does not mean "spiteful". It is the root of that word, and it means "bad, evil, wicked". The word for "spiteful" is instead "zlobnyi" -- and Dostoevsky, who had some idea what he was doing in the Russian language, did not use it.

There you have our post-modernity in a nutshell: an unthinking elision of the moral into the psychological, creating a "nuance" where no nuance exists. And by so doing, the previous translators externalized the evil that Dostoevsky's character had discovered in himself. The old Christian thing was to do good, in the knowledge that we are capable of terrible evil. But the "new man" believes that he is good in theory, and thus does not recognize the evil in his deeds. We make a desolation and call it peace. (emphasis mine)

Elision. I love it. Later, Warren points out the major problem with including the kind of people who protest the war in Iraq and Bush in the decision-making process: they're incapable of logical discourse and would be an even larger and more egregious drag on the world than they are already.

It is hard to imagine what President Bush or anyone could say that would please the many people in this county (or any other, for that matter) who truly abhor him -- but can't explain why without using parrot-like slogans, and referring knowingly to non-existent "facts". Who, moreover, would not even dream of formulating a coherent alternative to what the Bush administration is doing in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, or Dubuque.

Not that no coherent alternative could exist. There were intelligent, if finally rejected arguments made against each of Mr. Bush's decisions in turn; there is room for informed disagreement over every question of public policy, from persons of goodwill. But the world is constructed in a curious way: so that goodwill and coherence tend to leave simultaneously. The people on the streets in Ottawa yesterday, looking desperately for a way to harm the object of their hatred, were beyond mere argument, their conclusions having long preceded their premises.

I suppose the last thing I wrote before that quote is unkind and not entirely true, but I have nothing but contempt for people who can't find the line between part of the problem and part of the solution. They're mostly beyond help and the sooner we enrage them and get them to run off in search of art supplies and a place to gather, the sooner the adults can get to problem-solving. Or, in the words of a certain hateful lefty blogger, screw them.