David Breeden is speaking all week about writing from prison.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and Wisdom.This week we’re looking at epistles, letters, and prison documents in general–things that people write when they have the time to kick back in prison. Not always happily, of course, but let’s look at some things.First off, I do want to do a little defining here. An epistle is a letter designed as a literary work rather than as a communication to an individual. But that term, epistle, is not much used nowadays. You know, it sounds like, well, something that Saint Paul would do. And so I suppose people think: I don’t want to try to live up to that. So I’ll just call it a letter today.I want to look at Antonio Gramsci. There is a book called Letters from Prison, but he’s mostly known for something else that I’ll get to He was a founding member and leader of the Italian Communist Party, and he was, as you might imagine, imprisoned by Mussolini. He wrote a lot of notebooks during the time that he was incarcerated, more than 30 notebooks. They are numbered according to dates. So he wrote 30 notebooks, three thousand pages of history and analysis during his imprisonment period. Gramschi wrote: “History teaches, but it has no pupils.” He was in prison from 1926-1937, when he died in prison.He never was a healthy person and prison life just was not what was good for him. But he was quite a prolific writer. Noam Chomsky wrote: “In the case of Antonio Gramsci, the fascist government agreed that he was a model intellectual in Edward Said sense, and for that reason determined in their words that we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” So they had to put him away in prison. Gramsci said: “I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partizan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent.”So get on our side, says Antonio Gramsci. His ideas are still around. You can see him in various posters on the streets even today. A saying that appeared in New York City recently: “Qualities should be attributed to human beings and not to things.” From prison. Notebook Number One. This is a central idea of Gramsci. It does go back to Marxist thought. Quality should be attributed to human beings, not to things. He had this to say about the way he wanted to go about theorizing: “The philosophy of praxis does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing conditions in his history and society, but is the very theory of these contradictions. It is not the instrument of government of the dominant groups in order to gain the consent and exercise hegemony over this subculture and classes. It is the expression of subculture and classes who want to educate themselves and the art of government and who have an interest in knowing all true of this, even the unpleasant ones, and in avoiding the impossible deceptions of the upper class and even more, their own.”A couple of catch phrases within this: praxis, of course, the philosophy of praxis. You’re going to do something that will have some effect on society. And we’ll get to the word “hegemony.” Gramsci formulated the term “cultural hegemony,” and he had this to say: “Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the folklore of philosophy. And like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental character is that it is a conception which,