Modernity in Crisis: A Dialogue on the Culture of Belonging

Modernity in Crisis

Modernity in Crisis A Dialogue on the Culture of Belonging Leonidas Donskis with an Introduction by Sigurd Skirbekk

modernity in crisis © Leonidas Donskis, 2011 All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—­a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Donskis, Leonidas. Modernity in crisis : a dialogue on the culture of belonging / Leonidas Donskis. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-230-10879-0 (alk. paper) 1. Group identity—Europe, Eastern. 2. Group identity—Europe, Central. 3. Political culture—Europe, Eastern. 4. Political culture—Europe, Central. 5. Europe, Eastern—Politics and government—1989– 6. Europe, Central—Politics and government—1989– 7. Europe, Eastern—Social conditions—1989– 8. Europe, Central—Social conditions—1989– 9. Europe—Civilization—1945– I. Title. JN96.A58D66 2011 306.20943—dc22 2011005480I Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: August 2011 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 Printed in the United States of America.

To Zygmunt Bauman—­ with all my gratitude, affection, and love

They are like people anywhere. They love money, but that has always been true  .  .  . People love money, no matter what it is made of, leather, paper, bronze, or gold. And they are thoughtless  .  .  . but, then again, sometimes mercy enters their hearts . . . they are ordinary people . . . On the whole, they remind me of their predecessors . . . only the housing shortage has had a bad effect on them . . . You were always an avid proponent of the theory that after his head is cut off, a man’s life comes to an end, he turns to dust, and departs into non-­ being. I have the pleasure of informing you in the presence of my guests—­ although they actually serve as proof of a different theory altogether—­that your theory is both incisive and sound. However, one theory is as good as another. There is even a theory that says that to each man it will be given according to his beliefs. May it be so! You are departing into non-­being, and, from the goblet into which you are being transformed, I will have the pleasure of drinking a toast to being. —­Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita Chi son’io tu non saprai. (Who I am, you shall not discover.) —­Lorenzo Da Ponte/Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart We miss community because we miss security, a quality crucial to a happy life, but one which the world we inhabit is ever less able to offer and ever more reluctant to promise  .  .  . Insecurity affects us all, immersed as we all are in a fluid and unpredictable world of deregulation, flexibility, competitiveness and endemic uncertainty, but each one of us suffers anxiety on our own, as a private problem, an outcome of personal failings and a challenge to our private savoir-­faire and agility. We are called, as Ulrich Beck acidly observed, to seek biographical solutions to systemic contradictions; we look for individual salvation from shared troubles. That strategy is unlike to bring the results we are after, since it leaves the roots of insecurity intact; moreover, it is precisely this falling back on our individual wits and resources that injects the world with the insecurity we wish to escape. —­Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction by Sigurd Skirbekk

1

1

Troubled Identity, or the European Canon and the Dilemmas of Memory

7

2

Secrets, Mysteries, Conspiracies, and Art

43

3

Eastern Europe after Communism: Identity and Morality in a Boundary Region

81

4 5

The Crisis of Modernity and the Age of Anesthesia, or Life According to Zygmunt Bauman

133

In the Name of Civilization, or the New Forms of Angst and Longing

167

Works Cited

195

Index

201

Acknowledgments

For encouragement, power of judgment, and my sense of projet de la vie, I am immensely grateful to my dear friend Zygmunt Bauman, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, the United Kingdom, one of the greatest thinkers of our times. He became my major inspiration and source of my confidence in myself, my work, and my sense of raison d’être. More than that, he anticipated and identified the emerging trajectories of my thought. I would not have done it myself. For encouragement, sensible anticipation of the new forms of my professional life and work, and invaluable lessons in the art of academic writing, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my dear friend Robert Ginsberg, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He gave me a second academic life by allowing me to enter the English language academic world of writing and editing. For a long-­standing professional dialogue, valuable advice, and critique, I am indebted to my colleague Sigurd Skirbekk, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Oslo, Norway. My warmest thanks are owed to Lena Pasternak, Director of the Baltic Center for Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden, for graciously allowing me to spend my happy time at the Center, putting the finishing touches on my book. Parts of Chapter One previously appeared in Leonidas Donskis, “The European Cultural Canon and the Predicaments of Memory Politics,” in Ineke van Hamersveld and Arthur Sonnen, eds. (2009) Identifying with Europe: Reflections on a Historical and Cultural Canon for Europe; Amsterdam: Boekmanstudies, EUNIC and SICA: 103–­126 (ISBN: 978-­90-­6650-­097-­6). I thank Ineke van Hamersveld, Arthur Sonnen, and the Boekman Foundation for their kind permission to incorporate parts of this material. Parts of Chapter Two previously appeared in Leonidas Donskis, “Secrets, Mysteries, and Art,” in Timo Airaksinen and Manfred J. Holler, eds. (2009) Homo Oeconomicus 26 (1) Munich: ACCEDO-­Verlag: 97–­121 (ISBN: 978-­3-­89265-­070-­6). I thank my colleagues Timo Airaksinen, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Manfred J.

x      Acknowledgments

Holler, Professor of Economics in the Institute of SocioEconomics at the University of Hamburg, Germany (executive editor of ACCEDO Verlag), guest editors of the special issue of Homo Oeconomicus, for their gracious permission to incorporate parts of this material. In addition, my warm thanks are given to Professor Airaksinen and Professor Holler for their valuable advice, from which I greatly benefitted working on the book. I am indebted to my dear colleague Olli Loukola, Docent of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, for his critique and inspiring suggestions. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Mykolas Drunga, a Lithuanian philosopher, translator, and journalist, for translating my unpublished essay on Zygmunt Bauman from Lithuanian into English. This essay laid the foundations for Chapter Four. I thank Albina Strunga and Darius J. Ross for translating parts of Chapter Three from Lithuanian into English. I thank all the good people at Palgrave Macmillan with whom I have had the pleasure and privilege of working on my book. Finally, with all my affection and love, I wish to thank my wife Jolanta for her unfading love and support, which were vital for me to accomplish this book.

Introduction

I

n 1992, shortly after the breakdown of the Soviet empire, Francis Fukuyama published a book titled The End of History and the Last Man, where he predicted a future free of previous ideological battles. The ideals of the West—­liberal democracy, free markets, and human rights—­had apparently won worldwide acceptance, at least as standards for modern society. During the following two decades this optimistic picture of a bright future has been challenged by several events. We have recently experienced an economic crisis, demonstrating that prosperity and wealth for all is not an automatic result of a free market economy. We have experienced a gradual shift in political power from an American superpower to new powers in Asia and elsewhere, and not all of them support Western ideals of democracy. We have witnessed examples of popular distrust and protest, not least in several European countries, against supranational bureaucracies who, in the name of universal human rights principles, will overrule decisions made by local democracies. And, above all, we have witnessed scientifically based predictions of a future in a worldwide ecological unbalance, which are not adequately corrected by any contemporary political ideologies. In addition, we have witnessed a wide range of symptoms of a culture in crisis, not the least in the midst of countries supposed to be leaders of modern democracy. These symptoms can vary from outspoken protests to manifestations in art and a dystopian literature to examples of human identity crises and statistics of self-­destruction. According to the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, suicide rates in a population can be the result of a dysfunctional anomic culture. In later years Lithuania has had the highest recorded suicide rates in Europe. Leonidas Donskis is a Lithuanian. He is a philosopher, a political theorist, an historian of ideas, a social analyst, and a political commentator. He is also a member of the European Parliament. I first met him as a member of a Nordic delegation of researchers who were given the task of evaluating academic papers written by Baltic scholars during the first ten years after 1989. My job was to read and evaluate everything sociologists in Lithuania had written in English or German during these years. It then struck me that Lithuanian sociologists had much to tell that did not fit well into the

2      Modernity in Crisis

bright picture of a liberated country. At the same time, I found a widespread shortage of adequate theoretical tools to analyze and to transform their experiences into frames that could have made their data interesting for social scientists in other parts of the world. I have had other contacts with professor Donskis. Like me, he is a member of the International Society for Comparative Study of Civilizations, and he has demonstrated an intense interest in the contemporary state of European civilization. He is well aware of the sociological perspective on individual identity confusion—­that the extent of such characteristics must be seen in relation to supraindividual cultural condition. Donskis does not only refer to political and economical data when he tries to describe a civilization of modernity in crisis. He makes allusions to art and to texts of literature over a wide range. Several perspectives are presented. Usually it is scholars from the bigger nations of Europe—­England, France, Germany—­who get the role of being spokesmen for Europe as a civilization. Small nations are often regarded as provincial. However, this is not always the case. Small nations can never rely solely on their own national traditions when big issues are at stake. The wide range, in time and space, of authors mentioned in Donskis’s exposé is an example of this. Besides being a Lithuanian, Donskis also sees himself as a spokesman for Central Europe. In this text he says, “Western Europe and North American intellectuals can hardly hope for a fruitful dialogue with their Central European counterparts when it comes to peace movements or the idea of socialism. What looks to West Europe and North America like an alternative and humane project of modernity, for central Europeans is merely an historic wound, a thoroughly examined and failed possibility, and a false promise of modernity with a human face.” He further talks about Central Europe as the Europe of Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, Vienna, Ljubljana, Warsaw, Krakow, Lvov, and Vilnius. People from this part of Europe are not as English-­oriented as people from countries bordering the North Sea. For my own part, I must admit to being astonished when last year I took the Gustav Mahler Express from Vienna to Prague and noticed that instructions onboard the train were printed in five different European languages, and none of them were English. People of the Baltic countries have experiences of foreign occupation not known to most people of Western Europe. This background might have given them too high expectations of what the liberation from Soviet supremacy and entraining the European Union (EU) could lead to. It is nevertheless worth noticing that according to polls conducted by Rait in 2004, 34.2 percent of Lithuanian respondents characterized the 1990–­2004 period as the most unfortunate period in the history of their country. Only

Introduction      3

29.7 percent, at that time, would give that character to the Soviet period and only 22.7 percent to the previous Tsarist period. According to other sociological polls, people in this part of Europe often express a strong sense of helplessness, fatalism, and failure, accompanied by a growing hostility to liberal democracy and democratic institutions. Quite a few Lithuanians would prefer an authoritarian leader instead of a parliamentary democracy. These reactions lead to the question of whether the EU has given its new members what they hoped for. A growing emigration has deprived Lithuania of many young and highly qualified people; nearly five hundred thousand have left the country over the past twenty years, settling in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, and Western Europe. Consequently the country has lost much of its potential, and the countryside has been deprived of some prospects for a more rapid economic and social development. Failed economic-­political dispositions cannot give a comprehensive picture of what lies behind a widespread feeling of crisis. The European community may also have missed in offering new members a culture of meaning and belonging. To transmit the culture of European civilization in such a way that it can give this kind of identity is certainly not an easy task. To give culture a political priority in public debate is a big challenge. To present a coherent image of European civilization may be an even greater challenge. Donskis asks, “Are we Europeans losing our shared historical and civilizational identity? Is Europe at the peril of losing its core values—­such as the legacy and presence of classical antiquity, Christianity, and the challenge of the Enlightenment, all being entangled yet complementary and necessary in the constellation of what we call Europe—­and cultural identity? Are we in the process of devaluing ancient Greek philosophy, Roman law and political institutions, medieval university traditions along with unique cathedral cities, and political, moral and aesthetical individualism as unifying principles of modern Europe?” European civilization is in some way at war with itself. What we call antiquity, middle age, and the new age can appear as different rooms with different walls and windows, showing contradictory world views. Still, there are doors between the rooms, even if they may be hidden. Max Weber is a central sociological scholar pointing at preconditions in medieval theology and philosophy to explain why European civilization could foster an experimental science, not to be found in any other civilization. Intellectual connections can be found in a line from Aristotle to Nicolas Oresme to Isaac Newton. Also in the history of mentality, even it its most bizarre forms, can tell something of such connections. Donskis mentions a trial in the city of Basel

4      Modernity in Crisis

in 1474 against a chicken, accused of not being normal, as an example of this. Such animal trials were certainly not based on science. But they demonstrated a mentality of its prosecutors with a strong motivation for separating, through experimental testing, whether the suspect creatures and natural phenomena in general corresponded with what was supposed to be their true, or lawful, nature. From such a mentality lines can be drawn both back to antiquity and forward to the foundation of experimental sciences. In Donskis’s words, “criminal and scientific investigations seem to have grown from the same roots. Unlawful nature had to be uncovered, scientifically and legally qualified, and punished or dealt with in accordance with the predominant paradigm of order. The world had to be disenchanted, as Max Weber would have had it, and its secrets had to be explained.” This program for disenchantment leads to the question of how much scientific rationality can revile, and whether a civilization without myths, ideologies, and religion is possible. My own answer to the last question would be no, after having used some fifty years of my life to read several hundred books related to the subject. Donskis presents many examples of popular explanations, pretending to be scientific, rational, and unveiling, but in an analytical perspective belonging more to a mythical and ideological sphere. Theories of conspiracies and historic determinism may belong to these categories. In order to separate pretended science from a more genuine experimentally based science we need analytical tools. The same can be necessary for separating myths from ideologies and separating both from religion or institutionalized belief systems. Intellectual analysis of this kind will be of importance in a modern civilization, not for the purpose of trying to eliminate everything that is not derived from a universal science, but for an appropriate classification, and for necessary control and corrections of misuse. If we accept that there are structural reasons for expecting to find myths, ideologies, and belief systems in every civilization, the goal for a critical approach would be to say something about functions and dysfunctions of different cultural forms facing various challenges. We can expect to find new ideologies taking the place of older ideologies that have been dismissed as totalitarian or inhuman. We can expect new myths, for example about an inevitable development leading to the benefit of all, when old utopias have lost their creditability. And we can expect to find new belief systems, claiming to be above dispute, if older religious traditions are being privatized. In my book Dysfunctional Culture: The Inadequacy of Cultural Liberalism as a Guide to Major Challenges of the 21st Century, which Donskis refers to in Chapter 5, I present some arguments for letting neither the

Introduction      5

UN version of human rights from 1948 nor the newer European version capture the status of indisputable belief systems. In spite of all moral measures for good politics that has been derived from these declarations, they were formulated by people with certain outlooks, typical for a period when war prospects and totalitarian regimes were seen as the main challenge for mankind. That period was not confronted with embarrassing problems related to ecological unbalance, social atomization, inadequate reproduction, and lack of motivating meaning. Today we are living in another era. We certainly need references to moral codes on a level above any singular civilization. I have argued for the European philosophical tradition of natural rights to be more adequate in this respect than the politically America-­inspired UN declaration from 1948 and its later derivates. But on the whole we must accept that human adjustment is based on variation and selection. Cultures in different parts of the world rely on partly different civilizations. This implies a certain respect for the ways people in other parts of the world try to uphold a moral order. It also implies the rights of Europeans to uphold our culture, even when it is not universally accepted. An example of moral variation on the level of civilizations will be the difference between an ethic of individual conscience and guilt and an ethic based on collective honor and social shame. The individualistic ethic of the West is not universal. Neither is it just a matter of choice for the individual. Culturally it hangs together both with a Christian concept of man and with a certain rationality. This must bravely be made clear when the issue at stake is the transmission of European identity to new generations. At first glance, it might appear as a tolerant approach to say that all cultures should be regarded as equal and that the UN Declaration of universal human rights will unite us. In political practice such an orientation may lead to devastating decisions. Conflicts in the Middle East between groups with an occidental and an oriental orientation, not able to understand the point of view of the other part, could be illustrative examples. To regard the Western culture as universal is false, immoral, and dangerous, said Samuel Huntington in his book The Clash of Civilizations. This statement can represent an important correction for people thinking their own orientation is free from premises. But even this position could need qualifications. It is not obvious that we create a better world by proclaiming equality between all cultures. Even if I might differ from Leonidas Donskis in some of his views, this has more to do with differences between perspectives in the social sciences and those to be found in literature and political philosophy than with differences in opinion. On the whole I think Donskis’s many references to contemporary and older literature complement sociological theories

6      Modernity in Crisis

rather than contradict them. On this basis I will regard his book to be a strong personal contribution to an important ongoing debate. Sigurd Skirbekk Dr. Philos. Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Oslo, Norway

1

Troubled Identity, or the European Canon and the Dilemmas of Memory

J’ai ainsi contrasté le Français: “Je suis homme par nature et français par accident,” et l’Allemand: “Je suis essentiellement un Allemand, et je suis un homme grâce à ma qualité d’Allemand . . .” [I contrasted somewhere the French: “I am a human being by nature and a Frenchman by accident” and the German: “I am essentially a German, and I am a human being through my German nature . . .”] —­Louis Dumont, Homo Aequalis, II: L’idéologie allemande, France-­Allemagne et retour I once said, perhaps rightly: The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes. —­Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen)

Are Our Lives as Shaky as the Fiddler on the Roof ’s?

D

uality, as major modern philosophers and sociologists have observed, permeates our human nature, since one part of it is beyond our reach and control, and another part is made up by us. Being determined by our existential and moral choices, this mobile part of our identity becomes another facet of our nature, manifesting itself as a set of accomplishments and achievements. Up to the nineteenth century we could safely assume that theorists were inclined to see that unchangeable part of human nature as essential. A paradigm shift in social philosophy and sociology signified an identity shift toward the mobile or changeable part of human nature.

8      Modernity in Crisis

The Duality of Identity According to Kant and Durkheim In his political treatise Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784), the German philosopher Immanuel Kant observed that human nature is contradictory and split—­that discrepancy exists between different faculties of the human soul, which creates mutual antagonism in society, and that the best name for this antagonism would be “unsocial sociability.” We are longing for creative solitude and individual self-­ fulfillment, which is always limited and restricted by our social milieu and society at large; yet another part of ourselves is inseparable from society, its norms, social recognition, and the sense of fellowship. Of this antagonism, Kant writes, The means which nature employs to bring about the development of all the capacities implanted in men is their mutual antagonism in society, but only so far as this antagonism becomes at length the cause of an order among them that is regulated by law . . . By this antagonism I mean the unsocial sociability of men; that is, their tendency to enter into society, conjoined, however, with an accompanying resistance which continually threatens to dissolve this society. The disposition for this manifestly lies in human nature. Man has an inclination to socialize himself by associating with others, because in such a state he feels himself more than a natural man, in the development of his natural capacities. He has, moreover, a great tendency to individualize himself by isolation from others, because he likewise finds in himself the unsocial disposition of wishing to direct everything merely according to his own mind; and hence he expects resistance everywhere, just as he knows with regard to himself that he is inclined on his part to resist others. Now it is this resistance or mutual antagonism that awakens all the powers of men, that drives him to overcome all his propensity to indolence, and that impels him, through the desire of honor or power or wealth, to strive after rank among his fellow men—­whom he can neither bear to interfere with himself, nor yet let alone. Then the first real steps are taken from the rudeness of barbarism to the culture of civilization, which particularly lies in the social worth of man. (cited in Gardiner, 1959, 25–­26, emphasis mine)

Whereas one part of our identity motivates us to keep away from society according to Kant, another part calls for us to go there to be identified, recognized, appreciated, and befriended (or envied, despised, and hated, which is also a path to relationships and social existence). We are able to hold two mutually exclusive attitudes to society, exclusive and inclusive, individualistic and holistic, each of them granting us a way of existence. It is difficult to define identity better and more precisely than Kant did without using the term. Having an identity allows us to be identified as a

Troubled Identity      9

unique individual, a family member, a human being with his or her unique existential experience and validity, a social-­class member, and a member or representative of the nation. Émile Durkheim, the French founding father of sociology, stressed the duality of identity as well. Partly echoing Kant, Durkheim asserts that every modern individual is homo duplex due to the dual character of the need for identity. This duality springs from our wanting to be accepted into a community and its culture through concepts that our minds communicate. By no means does the assuming of collective identity or participating in social ritual prevent us from having an individual and uniquely valid identity. As Durkheim notes, Because they are held in common, concepts are the supreme instrument of all intellectual exchange. By means of them minds communicate. Doubtless, when one thinks through the concepts that he receives from the community, he individualizes them and marks them with his personal imprint, but there is nothing personal that is not susceptible to this type of individualization . . . These two aspects of our psychic life are . . . opposed to each other as are the personal and the impersonal . . . The old formula homo duplex is therefore verified by the facts. Far from being simple, our inner life has something that is like a double center of gravity. On the one hand is our individuality—­and, more particularly, our body in which it is based . . . on the other is everything in us that expresses something other than ourselves. (Durkheim, 1973, 152)

The ambivalence of identity lies in the fact that we never know what leads people to celebrate their identity, nor when. On the one hand, it could be a dream of being identified as a member of a nation internationally credited for its economic success or its fight for independence; on the other hand, identity could be used with much success to underline the uniqueness of a particular individual who wishes not to be associated with or attached to anything. Therefore, identity can serve equally well as the transmission belt or as the emergency exit. Identity as a Crisis of Tradition The phrase “identity crisis” sounds like a pleonasm, since no identity exists that would not be in crisis. An intense search for an identity is a symptom of crisis. The need for identity itself is a crisis of tradition. A frantic search for identity, rather than an attempt at self-­comprehension, self-­articulation, or self-­reflection, signifies no more and no less than the crisis of a particular individual and his or her personality, or of a social group, or of a society at

10      Modernity in Crisis

large. Our search for identity, as well as our propensity to engage in identity shifting is a sign of uncertainty, unsafety, and insecurity. The search for identity is the end of a life cycle, a sign of exhaustion, the kiss of death for tradition, and a symptom of our inability to accept the world as it is. In addition, identity in modern, multicultural society manifests itself as a moral responsibility. The question arises here: who is going to celebrate European military and political victories, history, or mourn the victims of war crimes? Identity is also a memory regime, for people have a highly selective approach to history, prizing what others despise. When we politicize and otherwise mobilize our intimacy and sensitivity, identity may even become much of a political duty for those who try their utmost to make up a biography that would excite and deeply move a progressive and multicultural society. Obviously, identity can be made into a theory of social intimacy and distance, or an interpretive framework for a gradual and continuous discovery of ourselves and social reality around us. Last but not least, identity can serve as a tool for social suicide or at least for les liaisons dangereuses and improvisations with our wish to live more than one life and to cast ourselves for more than one social role. Moreover, identity becomes almost everything for a postmodern person who is an identity builder and an identity shifter par excellence. It is the raison d’être, a mode of discourse, self-­discovery, self-­interpretation, grasp of the world, and a perfect chance to reshape ourselves as the other in our own country. Identity protects and hurts. Through an identity-­building and identity-­shifting process, we can move from political majority to cultural minority, or the other way around. In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Passenger (1975), the main character, David Locke (Jack Nicholson), is a journalist working in Africa. An American citizen, Locke is said to have an English background, which allows some of his colleagues to explain his remarkable sense of detachment when dealing with hot political issues both at home and abroad. Desperately trying to find the way out of his professional and personal life, which he finds unbearably boring, dull, and predictable, David Locke decides to assume the identity of the deceased English businessman David Robertson (Charles Mulvehill) whose body he suddenly finds at a desert hotel in the middle of nowhere. The late businessman, with whom the journalist had spent an evening drinking and chatting, turns out to have been selling guns to a terrorist regime in Africa. Having switched identities with the late gunrunner, having found himself in another man’s shoes and having spent another man’s days in Munich and Barcelona, the journalist does not find new hope and inspiration. On the contrary, he is entangled and trapped in his former temporary companion’s dangerous liaisons, as he is bound to live the life of an adventure

Troubled Identity      11

seeker or of a concealed political radical without being able to build his own second life and biography. His project of the second life and identity fails because he is taken for another person and, having become a hostage of his unfortunate choice of identity, has to fight on behalf of and for someone else who no longer exists. In one of the most memorable scenes from this film, the journalist’s newly met girlfriend (Maria Schneider) asks him why he left his home, family, profession, and all of his previous life, assuming a false identity and living a ghostlike life of a deceased person. Because they are on the road, he, instead of answering the question, suggests she looks back over her shoulder. What she observes is a long and beautiful avenue with nearly identical trees. A stunningly beautiful but unbearably orderly and predictable road becomes a metaphor for a safe and secure, yet meaningless and wasted life. People would be happy to assume another person’s identity for the sake of riches, like the poor Tom Canty, a Prince Edward look-­alike from Mark Twain’s novel The Prince and the Pauper (1881), set in England, 1547, which tells an incredible story of identity shifting. Having exchanged his clothes with Prince Edward, Henry VIII’s son Tom, for fun, unexpectedly becomes Edward VI. Other people would gladly assume another identity because of their desire for more power and prestige. We can easily imagine people who would attempt to build another identity to become safer and more secure. Antonioni’s magnificent film shows us something radically different: a safe and secure individual, a well-­established and highly regarded professional decides to end his life by disappearing and living the life of another person out of his sincere want of unsafety and insecurity. Yet, the tragedy is that assuming another man’s identity and committing a social suicide does not help much. The journalist fails to find independence and freedom because he becomes dependent on someone else’s biography, felonies, and misdemeanors. He cannot get away with another person’s life, for no empty and insignificant life exists. Another person’s life reckons with him, chases after him, and his identity confines the main character of the film to the worst-­case scenario—­the former journalist is bound to spend the rest of his time hiding and desperately trying to prolong his life, as if a mere and pointless continuation of his life were his dream. An unlived life becomes a burden and a fiction. If someone has good reason to dislike mainstream politics or major political parties of a given country, nothing can prevent her or him from retreating into a cultural-­minority group or any other community of historical memory. Identity serves as an invitation both to the past and to the future. In addition, identity is a more or less safe retreat from present culture wars and partisan politics. For instance, if someone happens to be a foreigner or a legal alien in a country where he or she works, that

12      Modernity in Crisis

person does not belong there and therefore cannot assume responsibility for the encounters of local competing memories or ideological clashes. Being unable to make up one’s mind about which side to be on, this person always has a way of concealing part of the personality, switching to identity games. Religion, no matter whether it is moderate or militant, offers and lends itself to those who find themselves unable to cope with the challenges of secular public morality and the burden of individual responsibility. Ingmar Bergman’s film, Persona (1966), which reveals the mystery of identity through the effect of the doubling of personality, is one of the greatest masterpieces of cinematography in the twentieth century. This work of genius, like Bergman’s name itself, cannot be separated from the small island of Fårö,  a province of Gotland Island in Sweden, on which he spent his free time for many years and where he lived the last years of life after finally putting his creative activities to rest. This little island is well-­known in the movie world for its special light, which has long been noticed and appreciated by cameramen. The rocks, sun, and water create a shining and a mood that are quickly picked up even by those who do not hold a camera in their hands. Fårö is where Sven Nykvist and other famous Swedish cinematographers filmed. It is where Bergman filmed his immortal Persona. In one of the episodes of this film, the nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) and the actress Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann) look at the mirror feeling that each of them became an extension of one another, and that even their love and sex lives intertwined lending their fragments and dialogues to one another, and, finally, rolling into one. No matter if we go further revealing the metaphysical and psychoanalytical planes of the great and multifaceted film, the point is that the essence of identity lies in the effect of the mirror, one or another person serving as one for us and allowing a glimpse of sudden changes, disenchantments, passions, and desires that are only possible insofar as we communicate or grasp them through that mirror. Identity is an attempt at recovering or recollecting ourselves through the bonds that have been broken in our milieu or among us, people who act trying to establish themselves through the mirror, rather than through the bonds. Therefore, identity becomes the mission of carrying the mirror for ourselves or for someone else with whom we experience and identify—­that is, reestablish, affirm, and confirm ourselves. It is incomparably more than a totality of words or images that we confer for ourselves or that others offer to explain us or to explain away our presence. Like in the fairy tale Bluebeard popularized by Charles Perrault (1697), it is where the secrets have to be kept, and the limits are not to be crossed. Some limits and boundaries are not meant to be crossed, like some areas of our identity that are not allowed to be trespassed. Identity shifting and

Troubled Identity      13

seeking is an adventure, yet the violation of something that is not meant to be ever exposed may end in tragedy. We should not wish to know everything about another person. The hell lurks in our wish to know and, consequently, to possess and control someone else’s secret life and personality. This is how the ambivalent identity comes to unite and divide, invite and chase away, whisper and cry. More than that, identity seems increasingly to become a personal secret, a family or background legend, and a license to engage in political radicalism. In fact, the term “troubled identity,” if taken not as a metaphor but as a strict term—­that is, without any interpretive context—­would sound a bit like a pleonasm, for no other form of identity exists in the modern world. The shifting identity is always troubled, and the troubled identity is always shifting. Assuming someone else’s identity could become a liability in early modernity. Recall the French film The Return of Martin Guerre (Le retour de Martin Guerre, 1982), directed by Daniel Vigne and based on historical events in France during the sixteenth century, as witnessed by the Arrest Memorable (Arrest memorable du parlement de Tolose), an account of the case written by the trial judge, Jean de Coras (Corasius, 1515–­1572), in 1560 and published in 1565. The film tells an incredible story about how the main character steals the seemingly deceased or vanished person’s identity only to unexpectedly find his happiness in that person’s family. The impostor happens to be a certain Arnaud du Tilh, nicknamed Pansette, a man from the nearby village (Gérard Depardieu). Whether Martin Guerre’s wife, Bertrande de Rols (Nathalie Baye), had mistaken Pansette for her lawful husband or whether she simply pretended to have done so only because she found an impostor a better person or a more passionate lover, we will never know. The fact remains clear that an identity theft, which, as we will analyze later, became commonplace nowadays, was perceived as a dangerous fraud and unpardonable felony in the sixteenth century. Nobody was allowed, in Renaissance Europe, to improvise an identity or to work out one with someone else’s family, even with the newly gained family’s silent consent. After a series of painstaking investigations and trials, the impostor was exposed by the real Martin Guerre (Bernard-­Pierre Donnadieu) who returned back home. Arnaud du Tilh was sentenced to death and executed. How ironic it is, then, that a radical identity change, rather than an identity fraud of theft, became the reason for the untimely death of the Huguenot jurist Jean de Coras himself (featuring Roger Planchon). What happened in reality, yet was left beyond the script of the film, was that Jean de Coras, having converted to Calvinism and then tried hard to open Toulouse to Calvinism and its influences, saved his life only through his

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relations with the royal family; yet the dangerous liaisons doomed him anyhow, and he was killed in 1572, immediately after St. Bartholomew Massacre Day. A secret life as a husband of someone else’s family was prosecuted by law and held a felony, yet the trial judge himself lived a secret life as an adherent to an outlawed religion and to a foreign religious doctrine. Two secret lives and two concealed identities made a sad plot on the fundamental difference between the early modern identity as ascription and the late modern identity as choice. Failing to establish ourselves successfully at home, we try to do it elsewhere. Finding no understanding or consolation in our home town, we move to another town establishing our new legend or story of how we cherish the spirit and tradition of that newly found town. The search for identity is an internal migration process, which culminates in the individual’s departure from modern life. This usually happens by choosing a militant religion, an antimodern ideology, or a hate group. At the same time, the question of identity can be linked to the crisis, if not the collapse, of those institutions and forms of life that, as Georg Simmel and then Zygmunt Bauman would have it, constituted for centuries the premises upon which modern society was built. It also signifies the growth of the sense of uncertainty, unsafety, and insecurity. As Benedetto Vecchi insightfully notes, “The question of identity is associated too with the breakdown of the welfare state and the subsequent growth in a sense of insecurity, with the ‘corrosion of character’ that insecurity and flexibility in the workplace have produced in society. The conditions are created for a hollowing out of democratic institutions and a privatization of the public sphere, which increasingly resembles a talk show where everyone shouts out their own justifications without ever managing to affect the injustice and lack of freedom existing in the modern world” (cited in Bauman, 2004, 5). Today, we are accustomed to beating the drums of supposed danger as a warning about what appears to be the unavoidable outcome of globalization. Are we Europeans losing our shared historical and civilizational identity? Is Europe at the peril of losing its core values—­such as the legacy and presence of classical antiquity, Christianity, and the challenge of the Enlightenment, all being entangled yet complementary and necessary in the constellation of what we call Europe—­and cultural identity? Are we in the process of devaluing ancient Greek philosophy; Roman law and political institutions; medieval university traditions along with unique cathedral cities; and political, moral, and aesthetical individualism as a unifying principle of modern Europe? Does a modern, liberal-­democratic, and multicultural society have the ability to uphold its cohesion without succumbing to atomization and

Troubled Identity      15

fragmentation? Does a blueprint for an open society go hand in hand with an ability to sustain a set of historically formed ideas, culturally shaped values, and collective sentiments that we take as identity? Did Europe abandon itself by adopting a blueprint for a social and moral order that does not support its core values anymore? Are we facing the breakdown of the world that we once knew as Europe? Being European Is Part of the Political Agenda Some of these questions have their theoretical rationale; yet others appear as a political fantasy fuelled by our troubled identity. In fact, our identity needs an assurance and confirmation. There was a time when being a European was as easily shared and understood as playing a concerto grosso composed by an Italian and performed by a Viennese chamber orchestra conducted by a German, or a German or Flemish master portraying an English aristocrat. Those times are long gone. Now being a European is part of the political agenda. Being a European increasingly tends to become a political manifesto, a matter of politically mobilized identity, and an expression of what I would describe as the politicized moral sentiment or the politically tuned and exposed sphere of human intimacy. We have to spell out and cry out who we are, as if it were a matter of utmost moral loyalty or high treason. We are not at peace with our sense of belonging, which is placed in jeopardy. We are being constantly questioned about our loyalty and even pushed to the limit where we have to endorse an elusive set of attitudes and views just to assume certainty, safety, and security. Being unable to get away, in this troubled world, with our sense of shared memory and sentiment as an inhabitant of a city, town, or region, we successfully pass an examination to qualify for becoming a European, a Westerner, or a civilized person. Having failed to endorse that set, we may slide into a resistance identity that allows us to raise our voice against modernity and its unbearable burden of ambivalence and uncertainty. What Is the Cultural Canon? In the modern world, identity increasingly tends to become a password to real or imagined solidarity, a political and moral examination, a mask that we wear to conceal our uncertainties and worries, and an achievement that we celebrate as an almost mystical unity of the individual and their community. Thus a well-­publicized interracial marriage or the adoption of a child of different race becomes a political statement rather than an act of love, compassion, and human intimacy.

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The same applies to the fierce defenders of identities based on the blood-­ and-­soil type of symbolic logic and moral culture. They speak up in favor of the distribution of power and prestige on the grounds of ethnicity or the Heideggerian “mythopoeic substance” rather than human fellowship and solidarity. Last but not least, this is the world that incites and invites a new type of religiosity, something like politicized religion in which wearing religious symbols is no longer an innocent detail of private life and silent devotion; instead, it becomes a war cry or a military uniform. Some political scientists, like the late Samuel P. Huntington (1927–­2008), would perhaps gladly use the adjective “civilizational,” which is tantamount to “militant” or “military” nowadays. The Function of and Need for Tradition Are we losing our tradition, this haven of certainty, safety, and security? Does it slip away, robbing us of our sense of pride and belonging? Does it vanish in the air without a trace? If we are not to conflate identity and tradition, we have to admit that identity relates to tradition as civilization relates to culture in Oswald Spengler’s gloomy prophecy, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West, 1918 and 1920). Spengler notes that the epoch of culture is able to create masterpieces of art and great treatises of philosophy without engaging in the analysis of every single episode from social life or without asking questions about the meaning of art and culture, whereas the epoch of civilization is devoid of any authentic form of art or philosophy; yet it has the striking powers of analysis and interpretation. Much in tune with Spengler, we could assert that tradition is what is taken for granted, what makes the world, and what allows us to paint, to compose, to write, and to pray without asking the cursed questions, such as “Who am I?” and “Why am I here, and not there?” Tradition is creative, and identity interpretive. Our reliance on tradition without being able to explain what it is makes us sound like Tevye the milkman from Sholom Aleichem’s collection of short stories Tevye and His Daughters (1883), later the main character in the famous stage musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964) and its film adaptation (1971). Tevye is certain that only tradition can keep the Jews going in this world without being able to explain why, how, and for how long this would happen. Ultimately, he finds himself unable to put this into words and explain what the tradition is. He just feels it. Without tradition, Tevye assumes, our lives would be as shaky as that of the fiddler on the roof himself.

Troubled Identity      17

The irony is that Jewish tradition, as we learn from Tevye’s life, already has become the fiddler on the roof. What is left of it is just common destiny of being a target of irrational hatred. Tevye’s daughters marry three men who represent three trajectories of the fate of the Jews in the modern world. One daughter marries a deeply traditional Jew, a poor and hard-­working tailor who desperately tries to make ends meet; the second daughter marries a revolutionary, secularist, and modernist; and the third one marries a gentile. It is no less ironic that the great Ukrainian-­Jewish writer Solomon Rabinovitch wrote under the pseudonym Sholom Aleichem, since at that time, Yiddish was considered déclassé, and Rabinovitch wanted to keep his identity a secret. Do we need the tradition now as strongly as we did earlier? Moreover, do we need the cultural canon in our age of encounter and discovery of multiple traditions and identities? Or are our lives without them as shaky as that of the fiddler on the roof? In a way, this is true of the infatuation with the cultural canon, if we take it as a protective amour of our troubled identity, instead of perceiving it as a bridge between tradition and modernity or between classical and modern sensibilities. We try to restore or rediscover the cultural canon in the hope that it would protect us from the uncertainties and ambiguities of “liquid modernity,” to use Zygmunt Bauman’s term. The Cultural Canon: An Intensive Debate Yet the question arises: what is the canon? The cultural canon hardly is a recent invention. We could recall the debate that took place in the sixteenth century known as the debate between the Ancients and the Moderns. The Renaissance saw a rediscovery and revaluation of classical Greek and Roman art and culture and in all contemporary art an attempt to meet the standards that were formulated and practiced by the Ancients. In the debate, the adepts of the Ancients never reached for anything beyond their Greek or Roman examples. They stuck to the virtues and standard of education they considered to be superior to the virtues and education of their own time. The Moderns argued that despite an appreciation and fascination with classical antiquity, the modern sciences, such as mathematics, physics, and modern referential knowledge, easily surpassed it in their ability to transform reality beyond recognition. Desiderius Erasmus touched on these very issues in his satire Ciceronianus (1528) in which he raised questions concerning identity, and reality versus fiction.

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Some scholars, such as the Florentine political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy (Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, written between 1513 and 1517) or the English philosopher, scientist, and statesman Sir Francis Bacon, actually provided many interesting insights concerning this tension between classical antiquity, for which they had much admiration, and modernity. Bacon firmly believed that the intellectual powers of his time were no greater than those of the Ancients, but that they had the advantage of the additional experience that had accumulated since classical antiquity. They held what can be considered the first debate concerning the nature of the canon, which gives food for the thought that a canon originates when there is friction between tradition and modernity. This debate stayed topical for centuries to come. In the seventeenth century, for instance, Charles Perrault, a French philosopher better known as an anthologist of fairy tales, wrote his Parallels between the Ancient and the Moderns (Parallèles des anciens et des modernes) between 1688 and 1697. These Parallels were rehabilitating the latter and putting the idea of its misery vis-­à-­vis the classical antiquity into question. However, in the eighteenth century the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume still argued in his Natural History of Religion (1757) that the pagan religions were more tolerant than the monotheist ethos, which characterized Christianity (see Hume, 1956; Hume, 1985). Classical antiquity in the sense of the pagan world, which was quite tolerant and quite inclusive, was again contrasted with the modern era, Christianity, and its great achievements in science and culture. To describe the canon as a sort of “ever-­presence” or as a collection of rules or standards is the last thing I would do, nor would I define it as a collection of texts that have to be reinterpreted time after time, or each time we include them in our curricula. Instead, I would describe the canon as a dramatic debate and a crossroads where tradition meets modernity, where modern interpretation can rediscover or reinterpret some important texts, some core texts. Instead of being a matter of ascription, the canon is a discovery of a form of life and creativity. What is behind the canon is a unifying language of art and style, which permeates culture and historical epochs. In addition, the cultural canon fosters a mode of aesthetic sensitivity that bridges societies, their traditions, and ways in which they grasp reality. Therefore, the canon is likely to serve as an interpretive framework within which we identify ourselves and the world rather than as a ready-­ made mode of the assurance and confirmation of our identity. Having said this, we have to add that this does not prevent us from understanding the canon as the discovery of universalistic systems of thought and action; it can be easily thought of as a paradigm in the arts and sciences, as well as in philology. When we think about Europe’s cultural

Troubled Identity      19

canon, all we need to do is remind ourselves of the European canon that has grown, up to this very day, rather than measuring swords about its composition. Finally, I cannot imagine the canon without studia humanitatis by the Florentine humanists, which allowed people to share their knowledge of Europe and the Middle East, as well as of the great non-­European cultures. The same applies to the great inventions, such as the mechanical watch, book printing, or the technique of perspective in Renaissance painting. The epoch of the Renaissance to me is the embodiment and core of European intellectual interplay between people like Erasmus and Thomas More, one a Dutchman, the other an Englishman. What brought them together in Paris was an admiration for Lucian of Samosata, an Assyrian rhetorician who wrote in the Greek language and whom they translated into Latin. That was how their friendship started. They began sharing important insights; we know that Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (Encomium Moriae, or Lof der Zotheid, 1509) was nothing but a play on words—­moria as folly but also as a reference to More, a subtle dedication. This friendship led to the emergence of talented people like the German Hans Holbein the Younger, whom Erasmus “discovered” and then introduced to Thomas More. This led Hans Holbein the Younger to make his fortune and reputation in England as a painter at the Royal Court. Who cared that one of them was Dutch and the other English and that they shared an admiration for the great painter Hans Holbein the Younger? That was how it went and this tells us something about how humanism and universalism are absolutely indispensable prerequisites for the European canon, because the canon needs to be understood as a dialogue. How Does the Cultural Canon Work? The canon originates in the discovery of what was an anticipation of a modern language. French art critics in the nineteenth century rediscovered Johannes Vermeer, precisely because they understood that his was an incredibly modern and innovative artistic language. They reevaluated other Dutch seventeenth-­century painters, including Frans Hals, his great disciples, such as Judith Leyster, and other painters of the Golden Age, although the choice of subject and style of the painters of the Dutch School were already renowned in Western Europe by the end of the eighteenth century. By that time, the classical norms had met with fierce opposition, even though the model of the Renaissance, in the sense of rediscovery of forgotten styles and its canonization as an ideal for contemporary art, stayed intact.

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The French critics, like Théophile Thoré, and artists alike lauded Dutch seventeenth-­century painting for its naturalism and appeal to human virtues. Life itself was their subject, instead of a pantheon of gods, mythological images, or those of the Madonna with the Child. They understood that Hals and his school invented loose brushwork as well as a good part of the modern language of visual arts, an aesthetic language that was to become accepted and widespread in the nineteenth century. They anticipated what was to become a modern aesthetic language or idiom in the nineteenth century. That was the reason Claude Monet and other great French impressionists held that their masters were the great Dutch masters. It is difficult to describe the European canon in any other way than European, in the deepest sense of this word. Can we imagine Rembrandt van Rijn or Bartholomeus van der Helst without the Dutch movement of the Caravaggisti? Their treatment of chiaroscuro, the painting technique revealing the light di sotto in su (up from under), can be traced back to Italian predecessors, especially Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio). Or can we imagine the greatest of the Spanish Baroque painters, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, without the major influence of Titian (Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio)? Or, say, Rembrandt without Titian? Like many of the Dutch painters from the Golden Age or their Spanish contemporaries, they were influenced and inspired by Italian examples. Copies of Italian masterpieces, which they studied, circulated throughout Europe, suggesting certain schemes for composition. The same logic of the interplay of cultures holds for early Renaissance Italy, itself a recipient in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the expressive qualities of northern, especially Dutch, “portraits and devotional images that attracted the Florentines” (Aikema, 2007, 105). Sir Anthony van Dyck (Antoon Van Dyck) is another example. Without Van Dyck, we could not imagine Europe—­namely, people who belong at least to several cultures. Van Dyck spoke Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and English and spent much of his time in England with Charles I, becoming the royal household’s finest painter. Moreover, there is no question that Van Dyck laid the foundations for English portrait painting—­even Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough in the eighteenth century regarded themselves as his disciples. Obviously, he belongs to several plains of creative work. The same could be said about George Frideric Handel in music. Handel in Italy and England, yet Georg Friedrich Händel in Germany—­ each plane of his artistic and political existence would allow us to talk about him as a great influence. Another example that underlines how the cultural canon works is William Shakespeare, a classical story. There were rumors about Shakespeare

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that no one believed an actor was able to compose or to write such fine tragedies. Many versions of these rumors supported speculations that Sir Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe was Shakespeare’s ghostwriter. Few took Shakespeare seriously. Even in nineteenth-­century Victorian England, people were still tempted to doubt whether a man not affiliated with Oxford or Cambridge would have been able to compose such masterpieces. Who made Shakespeare a great standard-­bearer then? It was not the French who were skeptical or ambiguous about Shakespeare. Voltaire had some admiration for Shakespeare, but then again he developed an antagonism to the playwright. He was skeptical about form, about Shakespeare’s supposed inability to distinguish between comedy and tragedy. The same was true of Molière. It was the Germans who familiarized the continent with the writings of Shakespeare, against the background of a growing anti-­French and pro-­English lobby. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was the pioneer, who reconciled the unclassic art of Shakespeare with the classic strivings of the eighteenth century. The actor, producer, and Shakespeare-­ adaptor Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1744–­1816), the director of the Hamburg theatre for many years, also played an important role. But somehow it was with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller of the Storm and Stress (Sturm und Drang) movement that Shakespeare became Europe’s and literature’s great standard-­bearer. Therefore, a European project exists within Shakespeare. He became the greatest writer because of this creative interplay of cultures. A genius reveals himself or herself as a symbolic design within which contemporaries or the generations to come search for the frame of meaning rather than a mysterious individual beyond the reach of the mortals. Or a genius may come as an early anticipation of a modern and, therefore, universalistic artistic language, or as a cutting-­edge means of artistic expression. No wonder, then, that Felix Mendelssohn discovers Johann Sebastian Bach as the founding father of modern music rather than merely the embodiment of the grandeur of Baroque music. Or consider the painter of modern life par excellence Édouard Manet, who discovers the genius of his predecessor Diego Velázquez, and thanks to whom the royal court painter crosses the boundaries of Spanish culture becoming the jewel in the crown of Europe’s art. As the art historian Williband Sauerländer reminds us, “C’est le peintre des peintres.” Such was Édouard Manet’s homage after seeing Diego Velázquez’s work in the Prado in 1865. It was the era of France’s craze for all things Spanish, but Romantic enthusiasm for the Spain of opera and passionate adventure was not that interested the painter of Olympia. The murkiness of Jusepe de Ribera and the melodrama of Bartolomé Esteban

22      Modernity in Crisis Murillo were foreign to Manet’s nature. But in Velázquez he discovered an artist who refrained from all sentimentality—­from all empathy, in fact—­an artist who was neither garrulous nor allegorical, who did nothing but depict. It was one of the most productive paradoxes in the history of painting: Manet, the painter of modern life, who recorded the fashions and mute dramas of liberal, urban society recognizes an older brother in the court painter of Hapsburg Spain. Returning to Paris, he modeled a portrait of the actor Rouvière as Hamlet on one of Velázquez’s portraits of jesters. Velázquez, whose work had been largely unknown outside of Spain until then, joined the pantheon of European painters. (Sauerländer, 2010, 18)

An eminent film director, Sergei Parajanov (1924–­1990), who lived in the former Soviet Union, is another great example of the canon as a continuing rediscovery of self in the world of multiple identities and as a shared space of cultural identity. He was born into an Armenian family in Tbilisi, now Georgia, and spent much time in Ukraine and Georgia, finally settling in Armenia. All of these countries considered him to be one of their own. He spoke several languages. Incidentally, that was a time when it was possible to play the ethnocultural identity card, precisely because the Soviets started allowing such minor identity games. Parajanov went to Ukraine to make the magnificent film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), which is regarded as a classic in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians acknowledged the film as a significant part of their national rebirth movement. It is full of religious and folkloric themes and did not fit the social-­realism criteria of Soviet cinema at the time. That was how a person made himself up while acting in several cultures, all of which were involved in a dialogue that was intertwined, constant, and that had multiple strands. Parajanov achieved international fame and professional credit after the triumph of his film The Color of the Pomegranates. The film was a biography of Sayat Nova (1712–­1795), the “King of Song,” a great poet of Armenian origin who lived in Georgia, and who wrote in Armenian, Georgian, Persian, and Azerbaijani Turkish. The greatest folk singer-­songwriter that ever lived in the Caucasus, Sayat Nova would be unthinkable without the context of several languages and cultures. It is impossible to squeeze the cultural canon as it stands today into a single culture. The ability to place something exclusively in one culture means that we have merely a political invention or a political project masquerading as culture. One more point should be made concerning the way in which the canon could be “seeded”—­that is, by placing to one side those things that are absolutely obvious and that we take as a great continuation of European spiritual and intellectual process. We know that some things are politically planted.

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If we speak of a European canon, we cannot treat it as something distant from us; nor does it make sense to define it as something that has to be celebrated and mobilized. In fact, the European interplay of epics, cultures, and languages is exactly what Europe is and has always been about. The canon can be seen as a momentum of memories, playing an active role in daily society, the arts, and literature. But how do these memories function? And is it important not to forget? Literature, even more than theories, offers a clear insight into the answer to these questions. Memory Politics: Remembering versus Forgetting In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978) Milan Kundera describes his protagonist Gustav Husak as the President of Forgetting, who needs the forms of aesthetic and political kitsch and mass culture as potent instruments of organized forgetting. After 1968, Husak refuses to take seriously a mass emigration of Czech and Slovakian writers, composers, film directors, scholars, and medical doctors, yet he immediately reacts to the emigration of a pop star, Klaus. Husak writes a warm, friendly letter to the pop singer, asking him to return to Czechoslovakia and promising him heaven on earth. Never mind that an exodus of the intelligentsia deprived the country of its intellectual and artistic potential; but the emigration of a music idiot is a tragedy, for Husak understands that they can work closely together to rob Czechoslovakia efficiently of its memory and history. They need each other. The President of Forgetting and the Music Idiot work for the same cause. In the winter of 1948 the Czech Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald and his comrade Vladimír Clementis were standing waiting for a solemn speech in a historic building, without being aware that this was the German gymnasium where Franz Kafka studied. They would never suspect that Kafka’s father had a store on the ground floor of the building where a jackdaw was depicted on the wall. “Kavka” is the Czech for jackdaw. In four years, Clementis, who kindly offers his hat to Gottwald to protect a comrade from freezing, will be hanged for the alleged coup, and his image will be eliminated from all photographs. All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald’s head. The same applies to Clementis’s place in political memory manufactured by the regime. He is merely a miserable traitor whose face is unworthy of being remembered, and whose name must sink into oblivion. Kundera ascribes the fatal forgetting to the city of Prague. Prague appears in Franz Kafka’s The Trial (Der Prozess, 1925) as a city devoid of memory and self-­comprehension. The real Prague is entangled in the same

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frame of mind. It constantly changes the names of its streets, forging the city’s life as a never-­ending present and obliterating every trace of the past. In doing so, the city turns into a memory-­free ghost, a creature of anonymous mass society, and a nonentity. The Counter-­Reformation did this by changing the names of Prague’s streets and creating the illusion that real history will start anon. In the twentieth century, Prague was forced to believe that up until now its history was a fraud, and that History with a capital H now creates new names and narratives. That the fatal forgetting and oblivion is a curse of Eastern and Central Europe, we learn from Eastern European writers. In one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, a work of genius and of warning, and also a Faustian tale about a woman’s deal with the Devil to save the love of her life, a tormented novelist confined to a mental asylum, The Master and Margarita (written in 1928–­1941, and published heavily censored in 1966–­ 1967), Mikhail Bulgakov confers to the Devil an additional and, perhaps, pivotal aspect of his power. The Devil can strip human beings doomed to be confined to nonperson and nonentity of their memory. By losing their memory, people become incapable of any critical questioning of themselves and the world around them. By losing the powers of individuality and association, they lose their basic moral and political sensibilities. Ultimately, they lose their sensitivity to another human being. The Devil, who safely lurks in the most destructive forms of modernity, deprives humanity of the sense of their place, home, memory, and belonging. It is not accidental that the character of this great novel, the poet Ivan Bezdomny, who also ends up in a mental asylum as a punishment for his childishly naïve denial of history and universal humanity through the denial of the existence of both the Devil and God, or, as we will see, Dark and Light, is homeless in the ontological sense. His last name means Homeless, thus clearly signifying that Bulgakov took placelessness, homelessness, and forgetting as devilish aspects of the radical, or totalitarian, version of modernity. Bezdomny loses the very foundations of his personality by becoming totally divided, devoid of memory, and unable to decipher the unifying principles of life and history. His mental illness diagnosed as schizophrenia is part of the Devil’s punishment, like the loss of memory and sensitivity. The Devil in history and politics is a characteristically Eastern and Central European theme, from Mikhail Bulgakov to Leszek Kolakowski, who had long intended to undertake a major work on the Devil in history and politics. Grigory Kanovich, an Israeli-­Lithuanian writer, describes the loss of memory and sensitivity as unavoidable aspects of how Satan affects humanity during social upheavals, disasters, wars, and calamities. In his

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novel The Spell of Satan (2009), he depicts, with an epic brushwork, the willful forgetting of crimes committed during the Holocaust in Lithuania as an aspect of the Devil’s work. The emptiness of conscience, oblivion, and the will to forget as the final blow dealt to the victims that are blamed themselves for the crimes committed against them—­here we have the devilish act of the deprivation of human memory and sensitivity. Ultimately, undistorted historical memory remains the only reliable and promised fatherland for European Jews after the Shoah. However, to lightly equate remembering with authentic existence, and forgetting with the obliteration of self or the denial of the world, is the last thing a serious writer would do. Too much memory can destroy human life, as Kundera convincingly shows by depicting the novel’s heroine Tamina, a young and beautiful widow who cannot build a second life in France. Tamina is unable to establish any lasting emotional and social intimacy with a small French town’s milieu. She does not belong there. Mentally, Tamina continues living elsewhere. She is incapable of restoring her powers of association and ability to forget, two indispensable conditions of the will to live. Tamina is separated from her intimacy and memory, since all of her letters are left in Prague. There is little chance that her love letters and diaries would remain unread by her relatives or, worse, unscrutinized by the regime. In a desperate attempt to keep in touch with her family and to recover her letters, Tamina engages in an empty and meaningless affair with a young Frenchman, merely to be able to make expensive long-­distance telephone calls to Prague from his apartment. The divorce of the present and the past does not offer any way out of this predicament. Tamina is doomed to failure. Too much memory becomes an unbearable burden, depriving her of the meaning of existence and forcing her to take her own life. In Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), the heroine Teresa becomes vulnerable and fragile because of her failure to forget the traumatizing experience with her mother. It is hardly accidental that, in addition to Kafka and Kundera, another major Central-­European writer, Robert Musil, depicts a man without qualities in his novel with a similar title, The Man without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 1930–­ 1942). The anonymity, facelessness, angst, anguish, solitude, isolation, and despair of the cornered individual come out in Musil’s novel as the unavoidable signs and manifestations of the destructive powers of modernity with all of its obsessive fixations on the liberation of individuals from their legacy, past, and inherited parts of identity. The destructive powers of modernity would be unthinkable without forgetting the past, a crucial aspect of modernity’s obsessive belief in the future: that dying individuals lose their past rather than the present and

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we learn the future from the unbearably light and ironic Kundera, but not from the deadly serious prophets of modernity. Yet the politics of remembering is not the way out of the uncertainties and painful dilemmas of modernity. It works well as a remedy for the malaise of forgetting, oblivion, and insensitivity, as long as it serves as a framework for a dissenting stance and thought. The politics of remembering begins in a prescriptive mode of self-­comprehension. However, it can turn into a dangerous fixation on a selected series of events and historical personalities that would result in the total denial of those individuals and groups that remember in a different fashion. Politics of Remembering The politics of remembering is only sound and good insofar as we maintain the legitimacy of two or more opposed modes of memory and narrative. The legitimacy of two opposed interpretations of the same phenomenon, including political experience, is what modernity with a human face is all about. A happy, unforced equilibrium of remembering and forgetting appears to be the natural condition of our lives. The politics of remembering, if forced and practiced with no alternative to it, will unavoidably be at the peril of becoming an oppressive instrument of arbitrary, selective memory. Such a memory can serve as the denial of others and their right to experience and remember the world in the way they want. Competing memories and opposed narratives are characteristic of warring nationalisms, especially when they clash in multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural cities. In fact, the politics of remembering reveals the past as a critical aspect of our experience, as something without which we could never sustain our political and moral sensibilities. Yet when it becomes the axis of political life, we can slide into the tyranny of a frozen time that divides the world into “us” and “them.” In doing so, we are at the risk of adopting the Manichaean moral logic that does not allow us to grasp social reality as consisting of flesh-­and-­blood human beings able to change their views, convictions, and stances. The tyranny of the past would never allow us to reconcile ourselves with the world, especially when peace with the former political foe and oppressor is at issue. Forgetting and Forgiving Nothing is simple and obvious here, for the dialectic of forgetting and forgiving is one of the most complex of all human experiences. To regard

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all Germans as crypto-­Nazis and antisemites, or at least as covert sympathizers of National Socialism, would be barbarous, as would be taking all Russians to be born totalitarians and imperialists. We have to suspend the details of our martyrdom and to overcome the temptations of comparative martyrology not to contaminate present forms of life with hatred. This effort implies a methodical forgetting, which is reminiscent of suspending or putting aside that which does not help to deal with present social and political reality. Such an effort does not signify the repression of our memory or the arrival of a mental self-­censorship. Contrary to widespread opinion, the politics of forgetting does not necessarily imply the destructiveness of modern life with its totalitarian regimes, devaluation of life, insensitivity, and social constructivism. Sometimes, forgetting lends itself to forgiveness, liberating us from the burden of worn-­out concepts and arguments. Like remembering, forgetting is at its best when it comes as an existential and moral choice. Forgetting cannot be an imposed action, which surfaces, leaving unresolved tensions, animosities, and hatred underneath. This is to say that remembering and forgetting have to encompass each other as two complementary forms of grasping life and as two intertwined ways of looking at the world around us. According to Kundera, if human beings were able to remember everything they would become totally self-­contained and self-­sufficient and, in effect, would end up with dramatically diminished powers of association. Modernity is obsessed with controlling memory and rewriting history in accordance with power distribution or disposition. I am in control of societal existence and culture; therefore, I am able to provide a legitimizing narrative. Memory is an aspect of power. What and how to remember and what and how to forget depends on who writes an account of an epoch’s history and political deeds. At the Limits of Modernity To memorize and keep everything for the generations to come, prolonging the existence of, and giving a second life to those who deserve it? I remember, therefore, I am? Or to forget what is irrational and does not qualify for the realm of collective memory? These two are opposed, if not mutually exclusive, promises of modernity. We know that three of the greatest authors of twentieth-­century dystopias, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell, prophesied the arrival of a social and political catastrophe resulting from the logic of modernity pushed to the limit. This is to say that they depicted a radical version of modernity running up against its ultimate barrier. Using literary techniques and devices, Zamyatin’s We

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(1920), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Orwell’s 1984 (1948) seek what such twentieth-­century thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Lewis Mumford, Isaiah Berlin, and Leszek Kolakowski sought in their social and political philosophy. In its much earlier anticipation of totalitarianism, literature overtook theory. Literature offers a deeper presentiment of modernity’s dangers. Zamyatin’s novel We markedly influenced Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. We portrayed transparent glass houses in which the inhabitants of the Only State were required to live and be constantly seen. This novel, a half century before Michel Foucault’s panopticon theory appeared in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison, 1975), revealed modernity to be the incarnation of the obsession with unlimited power and unrestricted control. Zamyatin describes this obsession as the observation without a response and as a perfectly developed discourse of power. The asymmetry of power lies in the elusive authorities’ ability to deprive us of our privacy and to make us act as if we were under surveillance all the time. To cut a convoluted and long story short, Zamyatin preceded and anticipated what the French poststructuralist, historian of consciousness, and political theorist Michel Foucault was to achieve through his complex and multidimensional theory. Doubts may arise about chastising authors, especially Zamyatin and Orwell, for having been allied with the conservative imagination. These writers were openly leftist in their political views and attacked modernity more as a basic foundational structure of economic, social, and political existence. The essential institutional manifestation and at the same time the sociological hypostasis of modernity is capitalism. Yet the criticism of modernity of these authors, when we set aside their political views and biographies and then analyze the texts themselves, is notably conservative and proffers forms of the recognition and interpretation of reality that would be held by just about any conservative writer or thinker. Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell portray the death of the institution of the family. Orwell reveals its degradation, while Zamyatin and Huxley its utter disappearance. However, they object to the annihilation of love. The love story of Winston Smith and Julia in 1984 is a final desperate human and social attempt to stave off the depersonalizing and dehumanizing machine of totalitarian control. This effort fails, just as the love between the narrator D-­503 and the dissident I-­330 in Zamyatin’s We fails. The narrator’s love, sociability, and powers of association are cut from under him by the regime. We and Brave New World reveal a reality in which love and the family cease to exist. Only sex, unrestrained by the state, remains. In Orwell’s

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novel, even sex starts to be degraded because the Party is powerless to destroy the orgasm, over which it has no control. As we learn from Winston and Julia’s dialogues, sex in Oceania is reduced to mere multiplication, although this does not apply to the Inner Party with whose members Julia has had secret affairs. The three dystopias describe the elimination of privacy, which means a veritable triumph of the state organs of control. This obvious threat posed by present-­day modernity, which was to be flagged in studies by Jürgen Habermas (1929) and Zygmunt Bauman, was foreseen by writers of dystopias. The Importance of the Reference System and Language Modernity seeks to control our memory and language in their entirety. Winston Smith in 1984 attempts to recall a cherished boyhood song, which is taken over and finished by the character O’Brian, an alleged friend and brother-­in-­arms of Winston in the holy cause of resistance to the regime, who turns out to be a high-­ranking official in the Inner Party. Oceania, in which Orwell’s book creates a new language, the New Speak, is supposed to become a place where human perception and understanding of space and time would be totally transformed. With this language, nobody would be able to understand Shakespeare. This means that the reality represented in the classical literary imagination would become unrecognizable. Radically changing everyone’s field of reference and system of concepts would make it easy to take away the dimension of the past. By controlling their field of reference and system of concepts, humanity’s history can be firmly taken over in the manner required by the collective solipsism professed by Big Brother and the Party. We speaks to the death of the classical and the death of the past. In the Only State’s education system, classical studies no longer exist, and the humanities in general disappear. Regarding the death of humanism and the prohibition of the study of history and classics in the education of the world of the future, the French writer Louis-­Sébastien Mercier had in 1770 first written about and given form to the extremes of the ideology of never-­ ending progress in his work of political fantasy, The Year 2440 (L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais; see Bury, 1987, 192–­201). In Zamyatin’s dystopia, the past is associated with barbarians whose primitive works, threatening rationality and progress, cannot be studied, while the worst illness in the Only State is what the ancient Greeks referred to as the soul. Therefore, in the context of the dystopias of Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell, the compound phrase “technocratic totalitarianism” would be a pleonasm, since no other form of totalitarianism seemed possible to them.

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The disappearance of other important spheres discussed by these dystopias is private space, private property, which is torn out by its roots, and our favorite belongings. Winston reminisces constantly about his favorite possessions, which are a part of his world and his human identity. Michael Walzer points out that it is for Winston’s lower middle-­class sentimentality and attachment to things, and not for his ideas, that Raymond Williams and other intellectuals of Britain’s left mercilessly criticized Orwell. Such intellectuals were unable to forgive Orwell for bestowing Churchill’s first name on his novel’s protagonist (see Walzer, 1988). We can reject any residual doubts about Orwell’s conservative sentiments, which were never incorporated into the realm of his political views and evaluations. Unlike the majority of English socialists, Orwell held patriotism to be a value and would have agreed with Simone Weil’s reality of rootedness, as developed in her work The Need for Roots (L’enracinement, 1949). Like Weil, Orwell was convinced that our rootedness in this worldly reality of community life, locality, and attachment to the past is a crucial fact of life and an existential need. That we lose the past rather than the future when we die was sensed by Orwell long before Milan Kundera made this insight the thread of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Curiously, Kundera strongly disliked Orwell’s 1984, describing it as a bad novel that, according to Kundera, “misrepresented human existence, dangerously reducing it to politics” (see Kundera, 1995, 225). Organized Memory versus the Role of Power What kind of imagination constructs utopias and dystopias? To come up with an overarching answer is difficult. This is a form of imagination where plots dictated liberal, conservative, and socialist thought and sensibility. Yet utopias and dystopias would never have been born without the conservative trajectory of this form of imagination, and without the conservative sensibility that lurks in the modern moral imagination. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World depict a memory-­free world deprived of public historical archives and the humanities in general, just like Mercier’s The Year 2440 presents the world of the future where no room exists for history. The study and teaching of history is abandoned in twenty-­fifth-­century France, since to study a series of human follies and irrational actions is a disgrace. How on earth can a rational human being study a past deeply permeated by superstition and backwardness? In the philosophical implications of Kundera’s literature, history appears as a meaningful and silent moral alternative to the brutality of geopolitics

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and power politics carried out by the powerful. Memory becomes a tool of the small and weak, while forgetting serves the interests of the big and mighty best. In this way, memory manifests itself as an alternative moral imagination in opposition to the logic of power. Memory of the powerful is nothing more than a celebration of successful practice, in the sense of Niccolò Machiavelli’s concept of verità effettuale. Memory is a practice, instead of an elusive human ability or potential. Yet, this thread of Kundera’s thought does not exhaust his understanding of how memory works in the modern world. What Kundera implies is that memory uncovers its essence as a conscious effort to continue or prolong the existence of what deserves to exist. Therefore, the cultural canon is a mode of the existence of organized memory. Within the framework of organized memory, Shakespeare, Van Dyck, Hals, Vermeer, or Rembrandt, depicting, portraying, or otherwise individualizing their contemporaries, become part of the process of a conscious continuation of someone else’s existence. Le Devoir de Mémoire We must remember to remain open to our multiple identities and to a gradual (re)discovery of the world around us. Without le devoir de mémoire, or the duty to remember, we would substantially decrease our powers of association, not to mention our powers to empathize with someone else’s pain. Without our powers of memory, the world would turn into the dark abyss of modern barbarity with its temptations of willful forgetting of one’s moral choices. The concept of collective memory was developed by the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, a Durkheimian who rested his theoretical premises of the nature of collective memory on social facts and human connection. According to him, collective memory is not a given but, instead, a socially constructed notion. As Halbwachs put it himself, “No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections” (Halbwachs, 1992, 43). This is to say that it is a set of social frameworks within which a coherent body of societal bonds makes it possible for individuals and groups to remember. Yet no mysticism is involved here. In spite of the profoundly social nature of memory, only flesh-­and-­blood human beings can remember. Needless to say, Halbwachs’s theory has its proponents and passionate adherents, yet it has more than enough skeptics and critics. Although Halbwachs made a deep impact on sociology as well as social anthropology and historical anthropology, some of his claims became accepted as the

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epistemological foundations of the social sciences; as such, they have to be questioned and revisited from time to time. Commenting on a similar view on the social nature of memory and remembering, adopted by Bronislaw Malinowski and other major figures in the social sciences, and Halbwachs’s role in this symbolic congregation of the students of memory, Maurice Bloch writes, The problems with such arguments, especially as they relate to the topic of memory, become clear when we look more closely at Halbwachs’ position, since he is much more explicit about collective memory and much more aware of the problems than many others. He maintained uncontroversially that the evocation of the past in the discourse of one person when speaking to others is a social act and is therefore governed, not merely by what one has stored in the brain, but also by the micro political intentions and relative power of the participants as well as by their concepts of what is “appropriate” for the particular context in which these discourses occur. That these non-­ psychological factors are significant for the act of recall in uncontroversial. However, he then went further by claiming that even private recollections are similarly affected by the social since, according to him, the individual, even when alone, is as though addressing an imaginary audience of people. For Halbwachs, therefore, it does not matter whether we are thinking by ourselves or addressing others, the contextual constraints on what is evoked apply equally and so the social moulding of the context of memory occurs. Finally, Halbwachs assumes that because we are still in a social context even when thinking in private we can only remember what the social context would allow us to recall. In other words for him recall and remembering are equivalent. (Bloch, 2010, 131–­132; italics mine)

Yet the cognitive essence of memory includes the indispensable and unavoidable mechanism of forgetting as well. By keeping our individual and collective memories intact as long as we can or by refusing to inventory, renew, update, challenge, or abandon at least some of them, we are at risk of losing our ability to accept and understand new facts and forms of life. More than that, we are at risk of becoming hostages of cognitive dissonances, traumatized memory, and any other troubled elements of experience in general that prevent our reconciliation with the hitherto unrevealed forms of life (for more on this issue, see Donskis and Dabasinskiene, 2010). As the Hungarian writer György Konrád summed up the dilemmas, trials, and tribulations of Eastern and Central European intellectuals, “Today only the dissidents conserve the sentiment of continuity. The others must eliminate remembrances; they cannot permit themselves to keep the memory  .  .  . Most people have an interest in losing memory” (cited in Coser, 1992, 22).

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To be or to flee? To regret or to forget? These are the questions that enable us to talk about the duty to remember. If we decide that we have nothing to do with what our ancestors or predecessors did we destroy the world of belonging. Memory is about connectedness and belonging, whereas forgetting is a treacherous denial of the world of belonging, offering, instead, merely the moral void accompanied by the moral fragmentation of the individual and the soulless segmentation of society. Ultimately, forgetting is a silent betrayal of that primary ethical impulse, which is even prior to the theoretical and metaphysical grasp of reality and which enables us to assume responsibility for the Other, as the greatest ethicist of the twentieth century Emmanuel Lévinas would have it. We assume—­intuitively and without giving much theoretical consideration—­ responsibility for the world in the face of another human being. Memory is a mode of facing humanity, its wounds and injuries. By remembering, we face humanity refracted through ourselves. Memory appears as an irresistible force when we find ourselves at a crossroads of history and politics. Memory is a cognitive response to the ethical challenges, without which we would abandon humanity in ourselves. As Kundera depicts the painful dilemmas of Tomas and Teresa, the main characters of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, they can be summed up by referring to their inability not to accept their destructive fate. Both escape from a Prague full of Soviets tanks and troops in 1968, both find themselves seemingly serene and happy in tranquil and quiet Switzerland only to reveal that the destruction of Prague and its velvet revolution with the hope to create socialism with a human face is old news. Teresa’s photographs with the views and scenes of the brutality of the Soviet military and the dash and fearless behavior of young people in Prague turn out to be out of date in terms of what a Swiss female magazine can sell well. Having realized the meaninglessness of her situation, she chooses to return to Prague, even though she knows that she does it at the expense of what all people would take as safety, security, and happiness. This choice is more about the inability to resist her memory and her duty to remember than Tomas’s adulteries with his mistress Sabina and other, more temporary infatuations. Tomas, a gifted surgeon, able to stay in a well-­established and prestigious Swiss hospital, all of sudden remembers the words left by Ludwig van Beethoven himself. The String Quartet No. 16 in F major, op. 135, by Ludwig van Beethoven was written in October 1826 and, as we all know, was the last substantial work that he finished. In the last movement of the manuscript, Beethoven wrote the question, Muss es sein? (Must it be?), to which he responds, with the faster main theme of the movement, Es muss

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sein! (It must be!). And the whole movement is headed Der schwer gefasste Entschluss (The Difficult Resolution). Hamlet’s dilemma “To be or not to be?” becomes here rather a Central European existential dilemma “To be or to flee?” This is a predicament of memory connected to the sense of belonging. To flee somewhere where you will be safe and well, yet disconnected and constantly misunderstood and misinterpreted (this is at best, as the worst-­case scenario is to become a professional who sells his services and is appreciated as a colleague, yet who ceases being a member of society—­which is a typical lot of the vast majority Eastern and Central European émigrés)? Or to be exhausting every hour, minute, and second of your life, yet feeling that you chose a dramatic and brief existence? To speak up in favor of the pursuit of happiness at the expense of memory and belonging or to choose a slow self-­immolation rejecting happiness, yet preferring a love-­hate relationship, intensity, and love or friendship? A cursed question of an Eastern or Central European. To live your life as if it never happened to you, experiencing it as a dream from a Pedro Calderón de la Barca play? Or to put more weight and importance to it as if to say that a lifetime to a human being is incomparably more than an unlived epoch? How to examine an unlived life? And how to live out an unexamined life? Whatever the case, as Tomas has it, Einmal ist keinmal. One time equals nothing. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all. The fatal moment comes when during the conversation with his colleague Tomas makes a subtle allusion to this predicament by mentioning the aforementioned string quartet by Beethoven. The colleague playfully and intelligently gets the hint, and reciprocates with an equally nuanced question, Muss es sein? Tomas confirms echoing Beethoven: Es muss sein! The fate has been chosen, and the kiss of death was promised to Tomas the very same moment when he decided to get back to Prague. Much the same, though in a different way, happens to Tomas’s mistress Sabina, a Czech artist in exile with whom he had long had an affair. She stays in Switzerland to lose Tomas and then to start an affair with Frantz, a philosophy professor at a Swiss university. Franz is a typical leftist for whom 1968 signifies no less than the arrival of the new epoch and the Grand March of History, as Kundera wittily terms this sort of political infatuation. Franz celebrates the events of 1968 in the Latin Quarter of Paris as if they were a promise of deliverance and happiness of humanity. Youths marching across Paris with the banners of Frantz Fanon, Mao, and Stalin, as fully endorsed by Franz, appear to Sabina as a folly and a senseless betrayal of her country combined with a striking insensitivity to its tragedy. They still celebrate in Western Europe, Sabina thinks for herself,

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the ideas and their architects in whose name half of Europe was destroyed and deleted from the political map of the world. They are inclined to take as a grand theory what became sinister and murderous practice in Eastern and Central Europe. They are a theory; nay, they are the children of a grand idea, whereas we make up empirical evidence that can be safely relegated to the margins as a kind of collateral damage. They carry the banners with the faces of Mao and Stalin in whose name millions of people were slaughtered in China and in Eastern and Central Europe, as if to say that if reality contradicted a grand ideology and a future doctrine, that was worse only for that unfortunate, dislocated, and misplaced reality. Therefore, le devoir de mémoire becomes a moral imperative of Eastern and Central Europe. Here we reach a crossroads where two memory regimes shall never meet. A Western European idea becomes a gravedigger of Eastern and Central Europe, thus reminding that such was a project of les philosophes of the Enlightenment. Socialism and a promise of freedom as a theory in the West proved a horrible practice in the East in that same year, 1968. Curiously, Milan Kundera’s and Milos Forman’s paths diverged at this point. Therefore, we can legitimately assume that there was no single and unified Central European perspective on 1968 as a defining date in recent history of the West. Instead, the Central European perspective, if it existed at all, was as divided on this as a more general perception of world politics and international relations in the Cold War era. Whereas Kundera, with his fidelity to early modernity of Europe and its classical canon, saw in 1968 little more than a relapse into barbarity, Forman took inspiration from the year 1968 for his masterpieces of cinematography, such as Taking Off, Hair, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Only a Central European after 1968 in Prague could draw a parallel between an American mental hospital, no matter how somberly and pessimistically depicted in Ken Kesey’s novel, and totalitarian suppression of the human being turning her or him into nonperson. Or suffice it to remember Václav Havel’s infatuation with 1968, youth culture, rock music, and the rebellious spirit of the time. Contrary to the cultural conservative Kundera, Havel could be best described as a curious amalgam of right-­and left-­wing sensitivities, ranging from his praise of the Middle Ages, the spirit of Martin Heidegger’s Heimat, André Glucksmann’s spirit of 1968 in Paris coupled with his hostility to the brutality and imperialism of the Soviet Union, power politics, and Realpolitik in general, and Frank Zappa whose album Bongo Fury was among Havel’s most favorite music albums (see Berman, 1997).

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The combination of Heidegger, medievalism, critique of modern anthropocentrism, left-­wing nonconformism, and the caustic spirit of Havel’s plays that merited him the title of a postmodern playwright—­at this point, Havel appears as a paradigmatic case of the eclectic secular humanism of Eastern and Central European intellectuals. Kafka, Kundera, Gottwald, Havel, and Zappa. How did their paths cross in Prague? During his noisy visit to Prague in 1990, Zappa “checked in at the Hotel Intercontinental and set out to receive his keenest fans in the wine cellar of the Union of Socialist Youth, around the corner from the historic balcony where General Secretary Klement Gottwald had long ago announced Communism’s original seizure of power” (ibid., 201). Rock music, as we all know, was mercilessly and caustically dismissed by Kundera in The Book of Laugher and Forgetting as a gravedigger of Bach and of the entire classical legacy of Europe, and as an instrument of forgetting. Or we could recall Kundera’s irony toward the character Franz in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, who contrives to reconcile in his soul both classical music and rock music, a move nothing short of naïve, barbarous, and self-­indulgent in the eyes of the great Czech-­French esthete. In his eyes, the affinity between the kitsch of pop/rock music and the political kitsch lay both in forgetting and in seeking universal approval and acceptance. You cannot avoid the kitsch, once you willy-­nilly seek popularity. Yet the young Havel, as mentioned, celebrated rock music and its global message of the grand refusal and disobedience, instead of what Kundera saw as the kiss of death given by pop culture and rock music to the classical and humanist legacy of Europe. As the sliding into barbarity in the West, 1968 was a reference point and a wider perception of the state of affairs strongly shared and fully endorsed by Leszek Kolakowski at Berkeley (“There are of course ignorant young people at all times and in all places. But in Berkeley their ignorance was elevated to the level of the highest wisdom”—­Kolakowski, 2005, 83), Theodor Adorno in Frankfurt, and Eastern European dissenting intellectuals in the West, such as Tzvetan Todorov in Paris and Vladimir Bukovsky at Berkeley. What was a temporary infatuation of Western European and North American leftists proved to be a murderous totalitarian practice wearing the mask of the Left. The year 1968 marks the time when the West changed, adopting new political sensibilities. Yet it also marks the time when the velvet revolution of Prague was killed, and such dissenting thinkers as Leszek Kolakowski and Zygmunt Bauman exiled. Memory politics, as well as opposing memory regimes, still divides Europe. Qu’est ce qui nous arrive? What is happening to us?

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Eastern Europe: The Land of Ambiguity and Confusion An American, a Brit, or a German, does not need to say a word about his or her identity, as it speaks itself with a voice of economic and political power of a given country. Yet an Eastern or Eastern/Central European, having introduced himself or herself or having been identified as one, necessarily has to switch to a historical-­cultural or, more frequently, a post-­Cold War narrative telling a moving story of his or her country’s belonging, albeit disrupted and arrested, to the West. Therefore, Eastern Europeans often do not have any other option than to submit their life stories and personal details to a political or cultural history lesson about their respective country that is offered to Western Europeans. This is why they usually do not introduce themselves as flesh-­and-­ blood human beings; instead, they tell a story about their country and its heroic efforts to become present in, and part of, the West. In doing so, they are bound to become part of their country’s historical narrative or to criticize that country in harsh terms just to be able to examine their own self-­worth and to present their person. Ambiguity of their country easily allows them to improvise an identity that allegedly is deeply rooted in history and linguistic-­cultural paraphernalia, as if a storyteller would have no other faculty of his or her soul than exotic otherness or ambivalent and unpredictable belonging to the Western world or, more symptomatically, Western civilization. The ambivalence, ambiguity, uneasiness, volatility, versatility, and unpredictability of their belonging mean they have ready-­made identity stories and documented narratives at work. The less known and the more ambiguous your country, the longer your historical-­cultural narrative becomes. You are supposed to have a strong, distinct, resilient, yet curious and exotic identity precisely because you do not belong here. The need for a strong and versatile identity springs from loosening or abandoning the sense of belonging. We allow and even encourage others to be as distant as possible when we deny them access to our ideas and politics, and we want them to serve as facts or empirical evidence that would support our theories and blueprints for social and moral order. This is to say that for a more sophisticated milieu in the West, Eastern Europeans become Communist or post-­Communist storytellers; in less fortunate circumstances, they serve merely as living proof of the increase of the purchasing power or social mobility of Eastern Europeans. This forced production of self-­introductory and self-­justificatory narrative, not to mention colonization of memory and self-­comprehension, is what happened to Eastern Europe on the mental map of the West in the era of

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liquid modernity. Things were quite different in the era of solid modernity, though. As Larry Wolf plausibly argues, Eastern Europe emerged on the mental map of Enlightenment philosophers as a vast and largely imagined territory of chaos, ambiguity, ambivalence, backwardness, and barbarity as opposed to harmony, rationality, lucidity, and civilization emanated by Paris, France, and Europe in general (see Wolf, 1994). This sort of mental map and a curious, yet hardly accidental, trajectory of Enlightenment consciousness led Voltaire to depict Russian, Polish, or Bulgarian aristocrats in his philosophical tales and plays (in Candide, ou l’optimisme, written in 1759, Voltaire disguises Prussians as Bulgarians), although he never visited Russia or Poland. The philosophes imagined Russia and its provinces as a perfect experimental territory to try out their political ideas and projects. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau attempted to draft a constitution for Poland without ever visiting the country. Denis Diderot served the Russian Empress Katherine the Great as her chief librarian and mentor of philosophy. Voltaire confined his service of this kind to mentoring the Prussian Emperor Frederic the Great. Much time has elapsed and much ink has been spilled since then. As regards our time, cold, albeit carefully disguised, indifference rather than contempt or intense loathing is characteristic of Western Europe’s attitude to present Eastern and Central Europe. Central Europe as an Early Warning System of the Crisis of Modernity In 1984, Kundera wrote his groundbreaking and provocative essay, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” where he argued that the tragedy of the region could not be easily confined to the loss of independence and liberty. In fact, as Kundera pointed out, the most painful aspect of the tragedy of Central Europe lay in Western Europe and its inability to see in Central Europe anything more than just another term for Eastern Europe isolated by the Iron Curtain from the West. Due to the loss of its own cultural identity, insisted Kundera, Western Europe was unable to recognize, in Central Europe, yet another voice of itself. In this context, quite controversial was Kundera’s exclusion of Russia from the symbolic space of Europe, a move not endorsed and even strongly criticized by such Eastern and Central European peers of Kundera as Joseph Brodsky, György Konrád, and Czeslaw Milosz. Whereas Central Europe was described by Kundera as the embodiment of diversity in a small territory, Eastern Europe was depicted here as just another name for

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uniformity in a vast territory, which can hardly be mistaken for anything other than Russia. Much ink has been spilled arguing whether Central Europe fulfilled its promise to return to the path of liberty fully emancipating the anguished, cornered, isolated individual, and opposing the most degrading and dehumanizing tendencies of modernity. The question arises here as to whether we can witness the triumph or the failure of this project—­that is, a more humane and sensible version of modernity. Did the voices of Central European dissenting intellectuals allow the region to move faster to intellectual and political pluralism? Did they enhance liberty in Central Europe? Did civil society get its chances to come into existence fostering individual conscience and powers of association? Does Central Europe remain merely a geographical term after 1984? Or does it assert itself as a trajectory of consciousness shared by Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, Vienna, Ljubljana, Warsaw, Krakow, Lvov, Vilnius, and other cosmopolitan and multicultural cities of this part of Europe? Where does Central Europe stand after 1984? Is it, in fact, as Kundera insists, an uncertain zone of small nations squeezed somewhere between Germany and Russia? Or is Central Europe, if broadly understood, inclusive of Germany herself and also of Italy with such profoundly Central European phenomena as Trieste and the political and cultural legacy of the Republic of Venice in what is now Slovenia and Croatia? George Schöpflin’s ideas about Central Europe as an early warning system of the West, and Milan Kundera’s insights into Central Europe as an area of conservative, nearly anachronistic revolutions (the paradigmatic revolution of the “return to Europe,” for instance) trying to slow down the passage of time or to arrest incessant change, have become especially relevant in view of another aspect of the entire world increasingly becoming a single, global Central Europe. This is the loss of the sense of certainty, safety, and security that had long characterized the Kafkaesque world of Central Europe. The world is increasingly becoming a Single Central Europe with its Kafkaesque anonymity, Musilesque human-­traits-­free individuality, or the divided individual without individuality and indivisibility, Orwellesque Newspeak and total control, if not manufacturing, of history. What Zamyatin once described in his We as the One State or the Single State tends to become a Single and Global Central Europe with its sense of being confined to the confrontation with imposed, uninternalized, and globally produced problems that no separate individual can solve, as Zygmunt Bauman and Ulrich Beck would have it. Like in the Hungarian-­born British novelist Arthur Koestler’s dystopian novel Darkness at Noon (1940), we are questioned for no reason. Without

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a shadow of a doubt, a prison cell, once powerful in modern literature as a symbol of craving for freedom, goes to the margins of literary history, as life itself assumes the form of interrogation for no reason. And the untold albeit publicly felt secret is that all this is not for the sake of exercise of power or humiliation for its own sake; in fact, this is how a disciplinary society establishes obligatory reciprocity between the individual and society/power structure. We cannot be lightly left to our own devices. We cannot remain private and unavailable anymore. Once a net of social connections and social control has been established through the incredible acceleration of technology, especially IT, our refusal to participate or respond is tantamount to marginalization, if not self-­abolishing, self-­abandoning, and suicidal escape from the public that itself is a totality of disciplined individuals occasionally granted attention, the most prized property of social existence nowadays. The promise of individual self-­fulfillment, the pressure put on the individual to assume full responsibility for the state of affairs, and the resulting sense of the hopelessness and meaninglessness of these assignments and qualifications imposed by anonymous forces on the cornered and anguished individual—­here is a Single and Global Central Europe with its new sense of permanent uncertainty, unsafety, and insecurity, this unholy trinity of the second, or liquid, modernity. Somebody else decides for us. We live in an alien world that was imposed on us as a piece of literature that we never read, yet that piece has a role conferred to us. We participate in someone else’s drama without being able to do anything about it, yet that drama makes a reference to us as a character, who is there playing his seemingly serious role. Once Central Europe felt that its modernizations were coming from without and were alien, no matter if they were from Western Europe or totalitarian Russia. Now we, having become a Single Central Europe, feel that we are urged to tackle the problems or to change the setup of all present social and political circumstances within which we have to make our choices or make up our mind without being able to understand where they all came from. We did not produce them. We did not want them. They just came out and claimed our lives or imposed on us the logic of social and political choices that we otherwise, under other circumstances, would have been happy to avoid or ignore. We live an unexamined life and we examine an unlived life—­this is what Central Europe is all about now. Once Western Europe, or the West, was an area of centralized, homogenous, and powerful state. It appeared to Central Europe as a Single France with its political and cultural extensions signifying the ability to tackle all uncertainties of life and to challenge all temporary inefficiencies of societal

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existence. Western Europe was permeated by belief in science and rationality, whereas Central Europe was not. Western Europe, no matter whether in war or in a relatively safe epoch, always had a forward-­looking blueprint for a social and moral order full of self-­reliance. At that time, Central Europe was trapped in the chain of ups and downs, all of them coming from without and determining the trajectories of life. Now uncertainty, unsafety, and insecurity are no longer Eastern or Central European; instead they are universal, endemic, and global. Yet the paradox is that the uniquely rich historical and cultural legacy of Baroque, rather than modern politics, remains the core of the civilizational identity of Central Europe. At the same time, the striking fact is that all major civilization-­shaping movements of Western Europe, such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Counter-­Reformation, came to Central Europe as external forces. The divorce of culture and politics, or a historic struggle between politics and poetry, is a fate of Germany and Russia, albeit in substantially different proportions and intensity; yet it is also characteristic of Central Europe. According to George Schöpflin, For Central Europe, both the Reformation and the Counter-­Reformation came from outside . . . the area had been absorbed into Western Christianity, but it was peripheral to both Rome and the centres of Protestant reform, the German lands and Geneva . . . Central Europe was affected, not in any way necessarily unwillingly, by the Reformation and then subsequently, rather less voluntarily by the reconversion to Catholicism launched in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The key factor here was that the region was not directly involved in the formulation of the innovations and the new thought-­worlds and thought-­styles were the work of outsiders, just as feudalism had been . . . Neither variant of Western Christianity fully suppressed the other and the two lived on as competing plausibility structures  .  .  . the contest sometimes being bloody, as during the Thirty Years War. They infused politics with added dimensions of defined reality that claimed sole representation of the truth and access to the ultimate sacred postulate; in the pre-­Enlightenment period with pre-­political populations religion commanded considerable authority and stamped its forms on elites and societies alike. (Schöpflin, 2010, 254–­55)

The identity of Central Europe has always been, and continues to be, cultural rather than political—­hence its major difference from France, the political, historical, and symbolic center of Western Europe. This may shed more light on why and how all Central European waves of revolutionary transformation of reality are backward-­looking, conservative, and longing for the past, which would be incomprehensible for Western Europeans.

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Culture, instead of politics, remains a unifying principle of the civilizational identity of Central Europe. As Kundera wrote in 1984, referring to a silent failure, if not the disappearance, of the European culture of belonging, But if to live means to exist in the eyes of those we love, then Central Europe no longer exists. More precisely: in the eyes of its beloved Europe, Central Europe is just a part of the Soviet empire and nothing more, nothing more. And why should this surprise us? By virtue of its political system, Central Europe is the East; by virtue of its cultural history, it is the West. But since Europe itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity, it perceives in Central Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it sees in Central Europe only Eastern Europe. Central Europe, therefore, should fight not only against its big oppressive neighbor but also against the subtle, relentless pressure of time, which is leaving the era of culture in its wake. That’s why in Central European revolts there is something conservative, nearly anachronistic: they are desperately trying to restore the past, the past of culture, the past of the modern era. It is only in that period, only in a world that maintains a cultural dimension, that Central Europe can still defend its identity, still be seen for what it is. (Kundera, 1984, 38)

In an epoch when culture bows out and loses its significance, politics becomes incapable of pursuing universalistic ideals and values—­this is the message of Kundera. It is little wonder, then, that West European and North American intellectuals can hardly hope for a fruitful dialogue with their Central European counterparts when it comes to the peace movement or the idea of socialism. What looks to West Europeans and North Americans like an alternative and humane project of modernity, for Central Europeans is merely a historic wound, a thoroughly examined and failed possibility, and a false promise of modernity with a human face.

2

Secrets, Mysteries, Conspiracies, and Art

Relation is reciprocity. My You acts on me as I act on it. Our students teach us, our works form us. The “wicked” become a revelation when they are touched by the sacred basic word. How are we educated by children, by animals! Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity. You speak of love as if it were the only relationship between men; but are you even justified in choosing it as an example, seeing that there is also hatred? As long as love is “blind”—­that is, as long as it does not see a whole being—­it does not yet truly stand under the basic word of relation. Hatred remains blind by its very nature; one can hate only part of a being. Whoever sees a whole being and must reject it, is no longer in the domination of hatred but in the human limitation of the capacity to say You. Yet whoever hates directly is closer to a relation than those who are without love and hate. —­Martin Buber, I and Thou (Ich und Du)

W

hy do secrets have to be kept strictly confidential as a covert aspect of an important person’s life, without becoming part of the overt side of the person’s politics or social existence? It is because the secret distinguishes an important figure from the second-­rank ones. Nobody is interested in the secrets of those who do not have access to financial, ideological, and political power. The secret is about power in both the most inclusive and exclusive sense. The secret always reveals itself as a critical aspect of power. Power calls for a secret or for at least some covert and unavailable aspects of its emergence in the world. Following the logic of democracy, to deprive people of their secrets means to disempower them. This chapter focuses on the concept and practice of art as a cognitive bridge between the principle of imagination and the principle of reality.

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Secrets and Mysteries: Defining the Terms The mystery in our secular-­minded age is what lacks proper phrasing, more sensitive language, or our participation in the symbolic construction of reality. The secret, for its part, refers to a missing link between the private and the public. If we take politics, in the broad sense, as the dialectical relation between the private and the public, then a secret is what makes up an important aspect of a personal life, biography, or identity of a politician or a public figure without becoming available to the public. Yet this aspect, if exposed and widespread, may have crucial political implications for a person and his or her milieu. As a fact of personal life concealed from the public and available to a tiny group of adherents, family members, or no one, the secret remains a highly ambivalent phenomenon: it always functions behind the scenes, yet it can shed light on societal life. Those people in charge of the covert life of a secret and its holder would never allow anybody else to expose it, yet some hints or insignificant parts of information extracted from the context and intentionally dropped to the public can make a secret even more significant and powerful. This is how rumors come into existence. They may well be a popular response to the public perceptions of a person closely related to the existing power structure whose private life is beyond the reach of common people; yet these rumors may be manufactured and released deliberately by the powerful to divert political attention from the real stratagems of significant political actors. It suffices to recall antisemitic rumors and conspiracy theories forged in Tsarist Russia after 1905 to divert the political attention of working class people from real politics and to channel their suffering and anguish into bigotry and antisemitic hatred (see Cohn, 1975; 1981). Why do secrets have to be kept strictly confidential as a covert aspect of an important person’s life, without becoming part of the overt side of the person’s politics or social existence? It is because the secret distinguishes an important figure from the second-­rank ones. Nobody is interested in the secrets of those who do not have access to financial, ideological, and political power. To deprive people of their secrets means to disempower them, as exemplified in the work of twentieth-­century dystopian writers. The secret is about power in both the most inclusive and exclusive sense. The secret always reveals itself as a critical aspect of power. Power calls for a secret or for at least some covert and unavailable aspects of its emergence in the world. As we learn from Bruno Bettelheim’s interpretation of the fairy tale Bluebeard, the pain of death for the revealing or exposing of a secret is exactly how power can be exercised and how it manifests itself (see Bettelheim, 1991).

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Yet the ability of a modern individual to have secrets or an institutionalized practice based on holding secrets, from exam questions at a university to banking details in a personal account, is about the empowering of an individual and his or her self-­fulfillment. At the same time, the secret may well be related to our vulnerability, which is yet another aspect of power. Confidentiality is related exactly to this relationship between the covert and overt sides of an individual’s life. Marital unfaithfulness, ideological or political infidelity, covert aspects of a sex life, disloyalty, betrayal, or high treason—­all these reasons may be found behind a human being’s fierce resistance to exposing some of the details of his or her biography or activity. The ambivalence of secrets lies in the fact that they never completely belong to the private or to the public. Whereas a mystery at least holds out the promise of being solved (unless it is a religious mystery), the secret is always on the frontier or the edge of privacy, yet never becoming 100 percent public property. The tension between the private and the public is exactly what creates the secret of a secret and the mystery of a mystery. Secrets and mysteries are semiprivate and semipublic by their social and political nature. Yet the mystery is more available to the public than the secret. In a subtle psychoanalytical interpretation of classical fairy tales, Bruno Bettelheim suggests that a secret chamber—­that is, the forbidden room in a husband-­beast’s house—­appears as a test case of feminine fidelity and of respect for her husband’s privacy, his right to have secrets and a secret chamber unattended. As Bettelheim reminds us, “as a test of trustworthiness, the female must not inquire into the secrets of the male” (ibid., 300). Mysteries can be revealed, at least in the long run, yet secrets have to be kept. This is to say that mysteries are an open possibility to become part of overt reality, while secrets are supposed to be kept as far as the power and symbolic authority structure behind them is concerned. Superstitions and Serendipities It happens through our reflections on mysteries and secrets that literature does not become philosophy, and vice versa. They are the best indicators that we have yet to create a theoretical language or an interpretive framework to deal with our fragmented modern existence. In its ambition to bridge theory and literature or philosophy and art, my interpretation stands close to Umberto Eco’s analysis of what he takes as serendipities. In a way, secrets and mysteries are inseparable from serendipities; that is, our failures in discovering what was expected and, instead, surprisingly benefiting from them. Serendipities result from failures of our reasoning, epistemological effort, or cognitive and scientific fallacies that prove unable

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to explain the world around us, and yet otherwise prove useful (see Eco, 2000). They are so unless they become widely accepted as established facts or hypotheses and, therefore, stop functioning as secrets and mysteries. Of the discovery of America as nearly a perfect example of serendipity, Jean Baudrillard writes, “Serendipity—­a spectral term which denotes finding something one was not looking for, coming upon something unexpectedly. It is a name Christopher Columbus could have given to his caravel. But in fact, that discovery of America was not really a chance event. The Whites merely fulfilled the Indian prophecy which predicted the destruction of the race by beings from elsewhere. The Whites were merely the instrument of that prophecy by which the Indians met their end” (Baudrillard, 1997, 101). This is especially obvious in the case of such enduring and long-­lasting superstitions as the myth of the omnipotence of secret societies whose part is the conspiracy theory of society. At the end of the day, some superstitions can be useful for scientific and referential knowledge. The existence of the Rosicrucians (Rosencreutzen), like that of the Higher Unknowns or Bavarian Illuminati or modern Templars, is serendipity. What do we learn from studying the reputed stories of secret societies? Nothing that might prove them to have existed; yet we learn a great deal about the political realities of the age in question, not to mention the ways in which both collective and individual historical and political imaginations operate. A personal secret may lie in a conscious choice to conceal something that jeopardizes our reputation, image, or public perception, whereas being mysterious is about the incompleteness, whether intentional or accidental, of our social appearance. By remaining secretive or by creating secrets, we try to preserve our privacy and resist public pressures. Yet being mysterious is about that part of our experience that is lost in translation, perception, or identification. The secret is about our refusal to apply a language or method that would and could reveal its essence or at least shed light on it; yet the mystery springs from lacking such a language or method. Paradoxically, a fallacy in science and rational discourse in general may become a prophecy in literature and art. As we learn from the history of the Middle Ages, the so-­called lusus naturae was no joke in those days. The rooster trials in Switzerland are a trace of the same Christian animism and demonology that produced medieval ecclesiastical attempts at exorcising the Devil in all his manifestations: the egg-­laying roosters and other abnormalities contradicting the laws of nature, religious heresies, the beginnings of heterodoxy, witchcraft, black magic, and the like. To unmask and disclose the Devil, European Christians were obliged to carry out experiments.

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There are many reasons to believe that animal trials in medieval Europe were directly related to and even caused the emergence of experimental science and referential knowledge. If we are to believe Max Weber and Joseph Needham, experimental science and the disenchantment of nature could only emerge in the West, for Chinese demonology, for instance, lacked a principle of radical evil. Virtually, the same might be said of all non-­ Western civilizations: “In 1474, a chicken passing for a rooster laid an egg, and was prosecuted by law in the city of Basel. The animal was sentenced in a solemn judicial proceeding and condemned to be burned alive ‘for the heinous and unnatural crime of laying an egg.’ The execution took place ‘with as great solemnity as would have been observed in consigning a heretic to the flames, and was witnessed by an immense crowd of townsmen and peasants.’ The same kind of prosecution took place in Switzerland again as late as 1730” (Walter, 1985, 51). Hence the animal trials in Western Europe (see Evans, 1906). The trial coincided with a scientific experiment testing whether the suspect creatures and natural phenomena in general corresponded with what was supposed to be their true or lawful nature. At the same time, it is obvious that experimental science, accompanied by the principle of empirical evidence, was developed as a significant part of Western legalistic consciousness. The principle and practice of investigatio covered both territories, epistemic and legal. Therefore, criminal and scientific investigations seem to have grown from the same roots. Unlawful nature had to be uncovered, scientifically and legally qualified, and punished or dealt with in accordance with the predominant paradigm of order. The world had to be disenchanted, as Max Weber would have had it, and secrets had to be explained. Whereas an unlawful secret is assumed and qualified as a crime, a lawful one tends to become a mystery safely avoiding the touch of criminal investigation or scientific inquiry. Since we have to qualify for (or to be eligible to qualify) secrets as an aspect of power and social prestige, this sort of eligibility to having secrets becomes a watershed between being on the right or wrong side of the paradigm of order. The will to secret and the right to secret are merely two sides of that same coin. Once we aim to overthrow the predominant model of world order, our secrets threaten that order and violate the laws it generates for self-­preservation; yet we have every right to keep our secrets if we uphold that order and derive them from the symbolic codes of authority. As an inalienable aspect of power, secret, or to be more precise, the right to have and practice it freely, comes to legitimize the controlling principle of a political regime or civilization. This is exactly what may well be termed the overt secret. To the contrary of it, the covert secret appears as a subversive force that hides an alternative to the existing

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or predominant model of order or regime. A similar distinction could be made between secret or covert mysteries and overt ones. Interestingly enough, Vytautas Kavolis’s concept of the “lawful nature” involves the dichotomizing of cultural and moral categories into polar opposites: righteousness and transgression, purity and pollution, sanity and madness, true consciousness and illusion (Kavolis, 1995, 62–­63). Kavolis uses this approach to shed new light on the medieval practices of exorcism and witch hunts, and on the nature of the medieval carnivals, feasts of fools, and other antistructural phenomena. And he extends this analysis to examine the concepts and patterns of chaos and order within Hinduism, Chinese religion and social thought, Judeo-­Christian cosmology and theology, and Marxist theory. Such a dichotomizing of categories, as well as a quest for demons and fiends, was a feature of Christian demonology, because, according to Max Weber, Confucianism and Taoism, the major forms of religious expression in China, “lacked even traces of a satanic force of evil against which the pious Chinese, whether orthodox or heterodox, might have struggled for his salvation” (Weber, 1951, 153, 206, 228; Needham, 1969). As Eugene Victor Walter notes, In contrast, the Occidental demonology segregated the invisible world into realms of good and evil spirits. Christian dualistic animism imposed certain obligations on religious communities. One of these obligations was to stand guard in the realm of nature, ready to place natural phenomena on trial, testing them for good and evil. From the middle of the 14th century until the 18th century, Europeans tried to control the demonic forces in nature by trials for witchcraft . . . For religious reasons, then, European Christians were obliged to carry out experiments. They could not leave nature alone. These experiments . . . were carried out not in laboratories, but in the courts. Christian dualistic animism inspired a conspiratorial view of the universe, leaving men confronted with the terrors of a vast spiritual underworld bent on ruining them for eternity. The church assumed the responsibility of exorcising the Devil in all his manifestations. It was the province of the courts to cooperate in this spiritual police action against maleficia, or evil magical actions, against diabolic agencies, malicious spirits, watchful fiends, and crowds of demons. (Walter, 1985, 57, emphasis mine)

The witches, sorcerers, unnatural creatures, heretics, and Jews were all ascribed to diabolic agencies and malicious spirits, and subsequently lay in the same idiom of evil and its embodiments. They were imagined or even constructed through a conspiratorial view of the universe since they failed to be properly placed within the frame of what might be termed the Unseen Order. Having failed to be ascribed to the principle of good,

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order, or nature, they could only have been placed in the realm of evil and disorder. This is how the concept of radical evil relates to the excited conspiratorial imagination. That the conspiratorial view of the world originates in the concept of maleficium, or evil magical action, and that it is inseparable from the stereotype of the witch and from the fantasy of occult magical actions supposedly performed by clandestine evil groups, is best demonstrated in Norman Cohn’s superb inquiry into the origins of the great European witch hunt. It was a sad irony of history that the early Christians, before they turned the concept of maleficium against the Jews, witches, and other forces of darkness, first fell victim to this sinister fantasy that can be traced back to the Greco-­Roman world. Combined with historical circumstances, those seeds of hatred fell to quite fertile soil when the conspiracy theory, which dealt with Jews as deliberately poisoning wells, was forged in fourteenth-­century France, thereby justifying the slaughter of Jews in one of her provinces. This theory was supposed to be a sufficient explanation for the epidemic of the plague from which medieval Europe was suffering. Another sphere where the beginnings of the conspiratorial view of the universe may be traced is that of European travel discourse. In Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Stephen Greenblatt examines this mode of discourse in terms of the travelogue, concepts of order, and the historical imagination. His interpretation revolves around Mandeville’s Travels, a book by the reputed fourteenth-­century traveler Sir John Mandeville (compiled by several authors) that captured the minds and souls of his contemporaries in spreading the ideas of a peaceful coexistence of religions and of cross-­cultural tolerance. As for the latter, Greenblatt quite correctly identifies it as having been false and misleading. Greenblatt writes, But should we call Mandeville’s attitude tolerance? . . . Tolerance, we could argue, is only genuinely possible with those with whom one has to live; the customs of those at a vast distance in space or time or of imaginary beings may be admired or despised, but such responses are independent of tolerance. They are, in effect, the attitudinal equivalent of the act of categorizing: one may decide that other peoples scarcely merit the name of human beings or that they are models of virtue. In neither case do significant life choices, entailing political decisions with historical consequences, have to be made. A metaphoric embrace of the other is no doubt wonderful, but what is its exigency in the real world? What is to keep it from vanishing into thin air? From this perspective, Mandeville’s open and lively interest in the customs of exotic peoples, his refusal to invoke demonic causality for unfamiliar or even repellent practices, and his willingness to impute internal coherence to superficially irrational

50      Modernity in Crisis behavior is not tolerance but rather an early instance of what Hans Blumenberg calls “theoretical curiosity.” (Greenblatt, 1992, 45–­46, emphasis mine)

Yet Mandeville’s book appears to have evoked real martyrdom and the struggle for religious tolerance. “When in the sixteenth century the inquisition demanded that the heretic Menocchio—­who rejected the sacraments as human inventions and called for tolerance of all forms of religious belief—­reveal his accomplices, Menocchio replied, ‘Sir, I am not aware that I ever taught anyone, nor has anyone shared my opinions; and what I have said came from the book of Mandeville that I read.’ Menocchio was burned at the stake in 1599” (Greenblatt, 1992, 46). Surprisingly, Mandeville’s tolerance does not count for the Jews. His local sensibility and generous accounts of orthodox Muslim believers, Brahmin mystics, Tibetan cannibals, and Chinese idolaters (who were, according to Greenblatt, completely fantastic for a fourteenth-­century European audience) are suddenly tinged with Mandeville’s disgust for the Jews, a people who lived in the midst of Europeans. Was it more difficult for Mandeville’s travelogue and the European historical-­cultural imagination in general to discover European Jews in their ghettos than several exotic and unseen peoples overseas? A clue to this puzzle lies somewhere else. A metaphoric embrace of the Other allows no room for the Jews. To employ terms of literary scholarship, the only poetic figure of language reserved for the Jews is metonymy. Even of Jerusalem—­the center of the realm of the sacred and supposedly the quintessence of the metaphoric embrace of the Other—­Mandeville thinks and speaks as if it had never had anything to do with the Jews. Greenblatt points out that The Jews of [Mandeville’s] own time scarcely figure in his account of the Holy Land—­it is as if they had vanished, leaving only the ancient textual traces attached to the landscape . . . But when Mandeville turns away from the Dome of the Rock to the sphere beyond, the Jews make several peculiar and highly charged appearances. He claims that a Jew had personally confessed to him that with a deadly poison that grows in Borneo his people had plotted to kill all of Christendom. This charge, in the context of fourteenth-­century Europe with its waves of anti-­Semitic persecutions centered (especially after 1321 and 1348) on the charge of poisoning wells, is particularly horrible and dangerous. Moreover, Mandeville writes that in a land beyond Cathay the Ten Lost Tribes are shut up within steep hills. The narrow exit from the hills is guarded by the Queen of the Amazons, and “if it happen that any of them pass out, they can speak no language but Hebrew, ne they not speak with other men when they come among them . . .” But it is prophesied, Mandeville writes, that in the time of the Antichrist these Jews—­known as Gog and Magog—­will sally forth from the hills and, aided by Hebrew-­speaking Jews

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dispersed elsewhere in the world, will bring Christendom under their sway, just “as they have been under Christian men.” (Greenblatt, 1992, 50)

This passage sheds new light on from where the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (the notorious literary forgery, which, as we will see, first appeared in prerevolutionary Russia and then was translated into other European languages) drew their inspiration. Nothing other than Christian demonology provided a general framework within which popular beliefs in diabolic agencies and sinister forces on earth, and secular forms of the demonization of the Other in general came into being. Therefore, the conspiracy theory is much more likely to have originated as a phenomenon reflecting and referring to a deviation or exclusion from the Unseen Order than as merely the secularization of religious superstitions. Such an implication might also be found in Greenblatt’s interpretation of the paradigms of order. He suggests that the mode of European travel discourse, represented by Mandeville, results from the intersection of the medieval or traditional Christian demonology and the Renaissance discovery of the world and of the human being. This mode of discourse implies two models of culture and paradigms of order, one of them being superior and prior to the other. The paradigm of the sacred order is Jerusalem-­ centered and rests on the principle of hierarchy (Jerusalem being the symbolic center of the world, and the rest representing its periphery), whereas the paradigm of the secular order is based on the principle of equality. The problem of the Jews was that neither of the two paradigms could accommodate and represent them; nor could the paradigms properly contextualize and explain them, since the Jews were conceived of as a grand deviation from the two. The Church Father Origen’s thesis of the deicide, for which the Jews were supposed to assume the collective responsibility, left no room for them in the superior realm of the sacred order. At the same time, the Jews could in no way be placed at the inferior level of the secular order, since that would have implied making them subject to segmentation, and, subsequently, to treating them as equal to others. Equally subversive to, and inconceivable for, both Western models of culture, the Jews remained between the realms of the secular and the sacred (see Greenblatt, 1992, 50–­51). This is to say that the conspiracy theory evidently refers to the failure of a given society or culture to accept and contextualize one (or several) of its segments. At the same time, the conspiracy theory, as a response to such a failure, may well be employed by those who are perceived (by political or cultural majority) to be an alien and inimical segment of a given society or culture—­some marginalized or victimized groups (although this

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phenomenon, as a rule, may also be found in large social bodies, such as societies and their cultures). In brief, the conspiracy theory, by virtue of being a para-­theory and thus functioning at the margins of the theories of society par excellence, can never be locked solely within the frame of theoretical constructs. To show how the conspiratorial view of the universe enters the nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century world, it is necessary to enter the realm of literary fiction. Moreover, to be able to trace the ideological and moral implications of the conspiracy theory for modern consciousness, politics, and culture, we have to focus on a less attractive source of information—­a subterranean world of pathological collective hatred, the world inseparable from political intrigues and manipulations, and also from literary fakes and forgeries. Stendhal and the Footprints of Machiavelli’s Thought The book that reveals much of the footprints of Niccolò Machiavelli’s thought in modern Europe is Stendhal’s Les Chroniques Italiennes (1839; see Stendhal, 1991). In one of his short novellas, “The Cenci,” Stendhal expressed the idea that Don Juan is a bona fide Christian phenomenon if only because passion and pleasure are unable to go unmarked by sin and evil in Christian Europe. How many young and wealthy rakes, such as Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan and, later, Molière’s Don Juan, went completely unnoticed in ancient Athens and Rome? But in those societies, religion was a feast that encouraged people to enjoy life, which, as we know, was something to which Europe was later unable to reconcile itself. Another novella by Stendhal, which addresses Machiavelli even more, is “Vanina Vanini.” It is the story of a nineteenth-­century Italian woman aristocrat, who falls in love with the 19-­year old Carbonaro, Pietro Missirilli, who has escaped from prison, injured, and who has been given refuge in Vanina’s father’s home. Even though the story is set in 1832, allusions occur to the pre-­Shakespearean early Renaissance novella about the beginnings of Romeo and Juliet’s love. In Luigi da Porto’s version of it, Juliet falls in love with Romeo dressed in women’s clothing, or, at least, she cannot take her eyes off him. As we know, Shakespeare based his tragedy not on the version by Luigi da Porto, but the later one by Matteo Bandello. In Stendhal’s work, Vanina falls in love with the wounded pretty girl Clementina or is besotted with her beauty. She is revealed soon after as the wounded escaped Carbonaro Pietro. His innocent 19-­year-­old face, angelic eyes, and long hair allow him to disguise himself as a girl. A passionate romance ensues that sees the madly smitten Vanina reaching the painful

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realization that for her beloved the venta (a unit of the Carbonari) and the fight for Italian independence are more important than she. It suffices to recall that the Carbonari were widely believed, in the nineteenth century, to have formed a secret political body closely allied with Freemasons. Here we encounter a covert secret rather than an overt one. Quite a few right-­wing hacks and reactionaries justified the struggle against the Carbonari and the state’s efforts to crush the movement as a right cause that was meant to prevent Europe from falling prey to the world conspiracy of the Carbonari and Freemasons. The conspiracy theory of society would be unthinkable without an intriguing literary plot. Eco demonstrates how the idea of the Jesuit plot, invented by the novelist Eugène Sue and plausibly dealt with in his last novel, Les Mystères du peuple, echoed a firm conviction of the nineteenth-­ century liberal nationalists—­from Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet to Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi—­that the Jesuits did nothing but conspire against the welfare of humanity. The anxiety was mutual, however. Trying to defame the Jesuits, the anticlerical inspirers of the Risorgimento merely reciprocated a strong suspicion of the Jesuits, who, for their part, felt—­and not without reason—­that their opponents were affiliated with the Freemasonry. It was especially true of the Carbonari and Young Italy movements. Yet none of liberal nationalists succeeded more in denouncing the “Jesuit plot” than Sue, of whom Eco writes, “In his Juif errant, the wicked Monsieur Rodin, the quintessence of Jesuitical conspiracy, clearly appears as a replica of the Higher Unknowns of both masonic and clerical memory. Monsieur Rodin returns in Sue’s last novel, Les Mystères du peuple, in which the evil Jesuit plot is revealed down to the least detail. Rodolphe de Gerolstein, who has migrated into this novel from Les Mystères de Paris, denounces the Jesuits’ plan, revealing ‘with what shrewdness this infernal plot was organized, what frightful disasters, what horrendous enslavement, what future despotism it would mean for Europe’” (Eco, 2000, 19–­20). Returning to Stendhal’s beautiful novella, after a period of abetting the Carbonari and using her wealth to obtain better ordnance, Vanina learns that Pietro and his unit are preparing an especially risky but clever conspiracy against the government. She betrays his comrades without naming Pietro Missirilli. All are arrested; Pietro comes under suspicion and, unable to bear the terrible sorrow and horror of having remained free, turns himself in to the authorities. In an attempt to rescue Pietro, Vanina goes to exceptional lengths. She agrees to marry a wealthy Roman aristocrat who is her devoted admirer and who has influential political ties. Vanina manages to visit Pietro, but in prison he becomes an even more fervent patriot, while his love for Italy is accompanied by a strengthened

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religious sentiment with interludes of fatalism. After telling Pietro that their love has no future and that he is first and foremost an Italian patriot whose life belongs to the homeland, Vanina admits that she has committed a terrible crime by betraying his unit. And because one of Pietro’s cohorts kills himself as he is being escorted to prison, she ends up with the weight of terrible crime on her conscience. The prison guard has to protect Vanina from Pietro, who attempts to kill his disloyal lover with his chains. The story concludes with Missirilli still in jail, though Vanina manages to save his life, while Vanina marries the Duke Livio Savelli. During one of his most passionate avowals of love, Missirilli cries out that he loves Vanina even more than life itself—­that he would gladly go to America with her and be happy except for the woeful fact that Italy has yet to be liberated from the barbarian yoke. In another place, he vows to devote all of his energies to freeing Italy from the barbarians (see Stendhal, 1991, 178). Quoting from the original, the punchline reads as follows: “Dès qu’il fut seul, il résolut de ne plus songer à la jeune Romaine qui l’avait oublié, et de consacrer toutes ses pensées au devoir de délivrer l’Italie des barbares” (Stendhal, 1973, 323). Pietro, when referring to the barbarian yoke, repeats Petrarch’s words about the liberation of Italy from barbarians (liberar l’Italia de’ barbari) uttered in 1350. Machiavelli was to repeat them at the end of The Prince (Il Principe, 1513, published in 1532), where he exhorted Lorenzo de’Medici to resolutely unite Italy and liberate it from the barbarian yoke (the French). These words were also repeated by Pope Julius II and eventually, long before George Gordon, Lord Byron, by the eighteenth-­century Italian poet and dramatist Count Vittorio Alfieri, who deplored tyranny even more than Lord Byron. Count Alfieri called Machiavelli the “divine Machiavelli,” divino Machiavelli. Remarkably, Stendhal, a French writer, develops this theme and allows us to retrace Machiavelli’s thought and sentiment back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This may strike you as incredible, until you have read Stendhal’s novella, “The Duchess of Palliano,” in which the prologue discusses the loss of Italian passion, its disappearance in the eighteenth century when, to their great loss, the Italian aristocracy imitated the cold and wholly indifferent upper classes of France and England. France’s calamitous influence consisted of its demonstration of indifference toward everything and everyone and its studied masking of emotions, while England’s disastrous influence was a stilted and all-­effacing politeness to which one could add the affected boredom of its dandyism and the perfunctory stance toward everyone and anything. Stendhal, in this superb study of mentalities and the history of customs, demonstrates the manner by which passion vanishes through the imitation

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of alien modes of aristocratic behavior. It was precisely his desire to discover Italian passion that encouraged Stendhal to study and recount the chronicles of Renaissance Italy. Should we be surprised by this? Italian history, after all, rife as it was with passion, betrayal, and suffering, provided Shakespeare with much inspiration. Secrets, Political Persecution, and the Art of Writing In Political Persecution and the Art of Writing, Leo Strauss had aptly described the relationship between political persecution and the art of writing showing how theorists and interpreters in oppressive regimes play the hidden ideological games with their censors, checking their vigilance and grasp of the Aesopian language and writing between the lines (see Strauss, 1988, 22–­37). Coercion and style feed and stimulate each other, as persecution and the art of writing do with regard to one another. Does literature benefit from political persecution and censorship? In a way, it does. Political censorship made Voltaire a hero in France, and something similar happened to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the former Soviet Union. If overt dissent has no chance to survive under duress of severe censorship and oppression, then the genre becomes the winner. Utopianism emerged as the first culturally legitimized and conventionally accepted form of social criticism. The most appropriate way for utopian writers to live safely and avoid serious misunderstandings was to employ a fictional trick (among other utopian literary devices they were using). It amounted to a fundamental change in the historical imagination, introducing the apparently naïve or simple-­minded narrator who finds almost everything under the heavens surprising, wonderful, and amazing. In Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), for example, the storyteller is called Raphael Hythlodae (or Hythloday), “dispenser of nonsense”; in Christianopolis (1619), Johann Valentin Andreae himself is required by three magistrates to take an entrance examination, after which he is allowed to enter the city, not because of his excellent performance on the test, but as a result of his cleansing ordeal by shipwreck. In Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (written in 1624, published in 1626), we find a description of Bensalem supposedly discovered by Bacon and his friends after they had been lost at sea. Similarly, Swift’s shipwrecked Gulliver finds a confusing incongruence between the mysteries and realities of the world he has just discovered on the one hand, and his own modest, unsophisticated knowledge and experience on the other.

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The modesty and naïveté of the storyteller was by no means accidental. From Amaurote, Austrinopolis, Bensalem, and Christianopolis, the utopian storyteller, or upholder of the historical imagination, brought a comparative perspective to the Old World. This had far-­reaching consequences. First, it enriched the historical imagination of Renaissance discourse by offering an alternative vision of the Old World, challenging whether it was indeed the only true civilization, or the best world. It is equally true of the historical and moral imaginations of the Enlightenment: consider, for instance, Voltaire’s philosophical tale Candide, ou l’optimisme, which depicts Candide and his mentor Pangloss, who, having returned from the utopian kingdom of Eldorado to the Old/Historical World, constantly argue whether the latter is indeed the best of all possible worlds. Second, a utopian or comparative perspective offered a new, subversive, but nevertheless culturally legitimized form of social criticism. The phenomenon of the voyage is such an effective allegorical reference to the liberation of consciousness, individual or collective. It is little wonder, then, that European travelogue has become an inescapable part of, if not just another word for, utopianism and utopian literature. Allegory, fable, political fantasy, or social satire—­they all benefit from the socially restrictive and politically oppressive conditions, no matter how merciless this may sound. Metaphor often flourishes at the expense of freedom. This logic of a secret war between politics and literature permeated nineteenth-­century and twentieth-­century Russian culture. Although in a different manner, modern German intellectual culture, especially in philosophy and literature, is tinged with this hostility between politics and culture too. Through the art of writing, secrets become literary devices allowing us to hide away from political persecution: this is how the concealed identities function. Renaissance literature would be incomprehensible, if it were deprived of its context of concealed philosophical issues. Only one other era of sensibility was to follow in which philosophy would so intricately flow together with literature. That was the French Enlightenment, with Voltaire’s philosophical tales, such as Candide, or Optimism and L’Ingénu (1767), Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (Lettres persanes, 1721), and Diderot’s novels. The Renaissance discovered a veritable carnival of language. It took over from the Middle Ages the genres of the parody of grammar, which had gained popularity in ancient Greece, and the parody of the liturgy and of the lives of the saints, while developing the ancient genres of philosophical dialogue and diatribe. For example, in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (from ca. 1532 to ca. 1564), Friar Jean creates his utopian vision of the perfect monastery, which bears witness that Rabelais was well acquainted with More’s Utopia.

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A detail that betrays the intertextuality of Rabelais and More’s works: Pantagruel’s mother is introduced as the Princess of Amaurote, and Amaurote is the capital of More’s Utopia. In ancient Greek, άμαυρός means “unclear.” We could add Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, which, like Rabelais’s work, can be considered a discursive map of Renaissance literature and an encyclopedic compendium of the figures of Renaissance poetic language and plots. The masters of Renaissance literature discovered the skillfully camouflaged technique of criticizing the modern world. The synonymy of the Greek and Latin languages, the wordplay in the two languages that was accessible only to the most highly qualified specialists of philology, its acrostics and anagrams—­all this interweaves criticism with political fantasy, artistic fiction, wordplay for a linguistically and politically sensitive ear, and symbolic codes intended for a handful of likeminded Europeans. Or the codes were meant for generations to follow, the interpreters of texts and social commentators who sought to preserve tradition and the canon, while questioning these critically. The commentators rendered the codes stronger. This was what More was doing with his beloved Plato’s Republic (ca. 380 BC), which More tested against the light of Utopia. The symbolic codes, techniques of storytelling, and other literary devices created by More, Rabelais, and Erasmus reached the works of European travel literature. The best example is Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a book astounding for its intertextuality and symbolic codes. The interpretive field is enriched if we line up for an intertextual analysis of Gulliver’s Travels, More’s Utopia, and Voltaire’s Candide. Swift masks his merciless criticism of England with a virtuoso use of language, including allusion, wordplay, and anagram. Following are several examples of Swift’s masterfully crafted anagrams. Gulliver describes several strange countries, remarking upon their odd customs and political practices that defy understanding by a healthy mind. One of these lands is called Langden, an anagram for England, the other is Tribnia, an anagram for Britain. Laputa, a floating island, in the context of the coded, secret, esoteric, and occult language of Renaissance humanists can be interpreted as “the whore.” (In seventeenth-­century French, the word pute was a variant of the modern word putain, which means whore; see Ovason, 1998, 525–­526). The coded and esoteric language, a mishmash of Greek, Latin, and modern languages, was called the Green language. The term was derived from the Langue verte, which in French signifies green and a secret and closed language different from the Langue ouverte, the open vernacular of ordinary people. If this interpretation is correct, then the grotesque portrayal of all the other islands, first of all the oppressive England, disguised

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as Laputa in Swift’s book, yet including Ireland, which Swift tried so passionately to defend against England’s imperialism, has no analogy in literary history. Some things can be easily retraced from the simplest allusions. That the Kingdom of the Lilliputians and its perennial foe Blefuscu with its homunculi of the same stature are obviously England and France. Lilliput’s two main political parties, the High-­Heels and the Low-­Heels,  for whom all ideological differences result in discord, such as from which end to begin eating a boiled egg, and on which end to crack it open, the pointed or the blunt one, are England’s Tories and Whigs. Having been a member of both parties and having become equally disillusioned by both, Swift mocks them, mercilessly using forms well developed in Renaissance literature, such as hyperbole and grotesque. Similarly, Swift ridicules England’s Academy of Sciences, and the experiments it encouraged, in his grotesque portrayal of the Lagado Academy, where the belief in the power of science and technology to transform reality and rationalize the world of human beings takes on absurd proportions, from the building of useless contraptions to the creation of an artificial language. We can naturally make the claim that the Lagado Academy surfaces as a model of the modern project. The promises of science and technology to rationalize the world resonate as the modern form of madness directed against humanity, soundness of mind, and life itself. The project reaches its culmination with the experiments of a member of the Lagado Academy who studies excrement, the color and consistency of which is used to determine and predict conspiracies against the State and the Crown. Therefore, allegory, the grotesque, hyperbole, litotes, and the anagram become powerful weapons in exposing modern forms of madness and barbarity. In addition, they serve as the instruments used by the conservative moral imagination to construct a symbolic alternative reality. Abolishing Privacy, or Welcome to the Secret-­Free World! We know that all three of the greatest authors of twentieth-­century dystopias, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell, prophesied the arrival of a social and political catastrophe resulting from the logic of modernity pushed to the limit. This is to say that they depicted the radical version of modernity running up against its ultimate barrier. Using literary techniques and devices, Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s 1984 seek what such twentieth-­century thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Lewis Mumford, Isaiah Berlin, and Leszek Kolakowski sought in their social and political philosophy. In its much

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earlier anticipation of totalitarianism, literature overtakes theory. Literature offers a deeper presentiment of modernity’s dangers. Zamyatin, whose novel We (1924) markedly influenced Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s 1984 (1949), portrayed transparent glass houses in which the inhabitants of the Only State were required to live and be constantly seen. This novel, a half century before Michel Foucault’s “panopticon” theory appeared in Surveiller et punir (1975), revealed modernity to be the incarnation of the obsession with unlimited power and unrestricted control. Zamyatin describes this obsession as the observation without a response and as a perfectly developed discourse of power. The asymmetry of power lies in the elusive authorities’ ability to deprive us of our privacy and to make us act as if we were under surveillance all the time. To cut a convoluted and long story short, Zamyatin preceded and anticipated what the French poststructuralist, historian of consciousness, and political theorist Michel Foucault was to achieve through his complex and multidimensional theory. All three of those authors of great dystopias portray the death of the institution of family. Orwell reveals its degradation, while Zamyatin and Huxley its utter disappearance. But they object to the annihilation of love. The love story of Winston Smith and Julia in 1984 is a final desperate human and social attempt to stave off the depersonalizing and dehumanizing machine of totalitarian control. This effort fails, just as the love between the narrator D-­503 and the dissident I-­330 in Zamyatin’s We fails. The narrator’s love, sociability, and powers of association are cut from under him by the regime. We and Brave New World reveal a reality in which love and the family cease to exist. Only sex, unrestrained by the state, remains. In Orwell’s novel, even sex starts to degrade because the Party is powerless to destroy the orgasm, over which it has no control. As we learn from Winston and Julia’s dialogues, sex in Oceania is reduced to mere multiplication, although this does not apply to the Inner Party with whose members Julia has had secret affairs. The three dystopias describe the elimination of privacy, which means a veritable triumph of the state organs of control. This obvious threat posed by present-­day modernity, which was to be flagged in studies by Jürgen Habermas and Zygmunt Bauman, was foreseen by writers of dystopias. Modernity seeks to control our memory and language in their entirety. Winston Smith attempts to recall a cherished boyhood song, which is taken over and finished by the character O’Brien, an alleged friend and brother-­in-­arms of Winston in the holy cause of resistance to the regime, who turns out to be a high-­ranking official in the Inner Party. Oceania, in which Orwell’s book creates a new language, the Newspeak, is supposed to

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become a place where human perception and understanding of space and time would be transformed. With this language, nobody would be able to understand Shakespeare. This means that the reality represented in the classical literary imagination would become unrecognizable. Radically changing everyone’s field of reference and system of concepts will make it easy to take away from them the dimension of the past. And by taking over their field of reference and system of concepts, humanity’s history can be firmly taken over in the manner required by the collective solipsism professed by Big Brother and the Party. We speaks to the death of the classical and the death of the past. In the Only State’s education system, classical studies no longer exist, and the humanities in general disappear. In Zamyatin’s dystopia, the past is associated with barbarians whose primitive works, threatening rationality and progress, cannot be studied, while the worst illness in the Only State is what the ancient Greeks referred to as the soul. Therefore, in the context of the dystopias of Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell, the compound phrase “technocratic totalitarianism” would be a pleonasm, since no other form of totalitarianism seemed possible to them. The disappearance of other important spheres discussed by these dystopias include private space, private property, which is torn out by its root, and our favorite belongings. In a world of glass houses and transparent walls, secrets and mysteries are deprived of any touch of privacy. The forced and disfigured public domain colonizes human privacy, and, in effect, abolishes it. The all-­powerful State monopolizes the private and the public. Therefore, the human individual remains naked, powerless, devoid of any privacy or autonomy. By losing their right to have personal secrets and to freely experience mysteries, human beings lose their moral substance. All three major dystopias anticipate and suggest unlimited control and surveillance becoming the “norm” of the totalitarian future. Ketman, or a World of Secrecy and Mental Acrobatics In spite of it all, we have good reason to believe that privacy and secrecy can survive even in totalitarian regimes. Czeslaw Milosz’s subtle interpretation of what he terms Ketman opens up an elusive and complex phenomenon, a world of concealed identity, acting, pretending, and mental acrobatics. Ketman is a time-­honored principle of Islam, although it dates back to ancient Persian culture, and the term has its roots in the Persian language. According to Ketman, Muslims are entitled to conceal their true faith and temporarily adopt a false one in the face of grave danger to their dignity and life.

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In his thoughtful and subtle analysis of the totalitarian system of brainwashing and manipulative exchanges, Milosz offers a new interpretation of Ketman, which, in his able hands, is transformed into a transideological and transcivilizational idiom that operates equally well within religious and secular ideocracies. Milosz’s provocative and thought-­stimulating interpretation of Ketman enabled him to reveal different literary devices and interpretive techniques concealing the true political, moral, aesthetic, and religious views of oppressed people. These devices and techniques were invented or perfected by Central and Eastern European intellectuals desperately trying to survive and act decently in a world of cynical lies and severe censorship. In The Captive Mind (1953), Czeslaw Milosz analyzes the following varieties of modern ideological Ketman: National Ketman; the Ketman of Revolutionary Purity; Aesthetic Ketman; Professional Ketman; Skeptical Ketman; Metaphysical Ketman; and Ethical Ketman. Oddly enough, the phenomenon of Ketman was discovered and described by the founding father of racist anthropology, Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, a perceptive yet dangerous writer whose book Religions et philosophie dans l’Asie Centrale (1865) made this European social determinism and racism available to a nineteenth-­century readership. Having described the cases of Hadzhi-­Sheikh-­Ahmed, the founder of a sect in Persia, and Sadra, the disciple of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Gobineau recalled his revealing conversation with a Persian who admitted that not a single true Muslim could be found in Persia. This led Gobineau to assert that Ketman was a widespread phenomenon and was practiced almost universally in Persia. Describing this mysterious phenomenon, Gobineau emphasized the enormous pleasure and intellectual satisfaction of those who were intelligent, daring, and cunning enough to liberate themselves from the chains of ideocratic community and to cheat the deeply oppressive system of thought and action, secretly practicing their faith or philosophy. Gobineau devotes much of his attention to the ability of those who practice Ketman to keep on their guard in the darkness of illusion and ignorance. But Ketman is a mortally dangerous mental and intellectual acrobatics. Just a minor diversion or logical mistake, and you are exposed. Then nothing would save you from death. As a technique of misleading your opponent or enemy, Ketman takes much time, energy, and vigilance. Sadra, for instance, had to fake his piety, deep religiosity, and his absolute obedience to the mullahs, until the mullahs exempted or softened their control, having no doubts about his dedication. Only then, according to Gobineau, was Sadra able to figure out, through a painstaking study of faces, spontaneous reactions, and the comments of those who attended the meetings, who

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was prepared for the truth. Having examined his audience carefully, having established an elusive contact with it, and having achieved silent reciprocity, elusive solidarity, and empathic relationship, Sadra decided to unmask and show himself the logician and metaphysician that he was. Ketman is by no means an exclusively Islamic phenomenon. An intercivilizational idiom of, and a symbolic reference to, the surrender to an alien dogma while practicing secretly your religion or culture, one or another form of Ketman accompanies nearly every clash of ideas, doctrines, and ideologies throughout history. Thus consider the Nicodemites in the Roman Empire who were concealed Christians. Seneca was thought by some Renaissance humanists to have been a Nicodemite. Another example would be the Marranos in fifteenth-­century Spain. Those crypto-­ Jews converted to Christianity yet practiced Judaism secretly. Ketman must have always existed, in myriad ways, wherever philosophy was regarded as a blasphemy, diversion, and crime, and wherever heterodoxy was not tolerated. In a way, Ketman was a preheretical and preheterodox form of dissent, which survived into the twentieth century as a form of covert political dissent. An abortive form of dissent, Ketman proved capable of entering any civilization and adjusting to secular ideocracies too. The Ketman of Philosophy Countless logical and metaphysical games of medieval philosophy, invented with the sole purpose of appeasing the oppressive and all-­embracing system of thought and action to make the existence of autonomous thought possible, fall into that same category. Monotheism, in its rise and in its most furious phases, hardly allows room for philosophy as a truly independent intellectual activity. Instead, the premodern forms of monotheist religions allow a narrow framework for answering logical and theological questions, and reducing philosophy to a secondary intellectual enterprise. This is true of every monotheist religion unless it is reconciled with modern life and thought. In an oppressive and self-­contained value-­and-­ idea system where apostasy, heterodoxy, and dissent are not tolerated, philosophy survives either as a Ketman or as a half-­concealed esoteric practice. The same might be said about premodern monotheistic civilizations. As the acceptance of an alien dogma while you practice your religion secretly or keep fidelity to your values, Ketman probably originated as a transcivilizational phenomenon, instead of something reducible to Islam or the Stalinist phase of Communism. By and large, the history of philosophy is a history of Ketman, as far as the premodern civilizational forms of monotheism are concerned.

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Whether we like it or not, the truth is that epochs, centuries, and phases of civilizations in world history were blank pages in the history of philosophy. Only the ancients, or, to paraphrase David Hume, the tolerant idolaters and the moderns were able to practice philosophy with no risk to their lives. Neither Islam nor Judaism allowed room for autonomous philosophy. Philosophy could survive there only through esoteric and mystical tradition, itself a refined and sublime form of Ketman. Early and medieval Christianity was not a haven for autonomous theoretical thought either. Therefore, a study of the fate of philosophy in Western and non-­Western civilizations is especially instructive when dealing with such issues as tolerance, ideocracy, and Ketman. For Christian civilization of the West to develop what we now call the theoretical and moral foundations of tolerance and pluralism took centuries. Czeslaw Milosz’s conception of Ketman practiced in East-­Central Europe as the last resort of human dignity and safety rests on his assumption that people in the Soviet Union and in the people’s democracies were able to survive and give some meaning to their lives only through acting. Through acting and simulating fidelity or faking loyalty, many people survived the regime, especially in its most furious phases, such as the Stalinist purges. Many people realized instantly that the only rescue was to fabricate their personality and then fake their emotions and reactions. The only way to survive was to fake your mental life. According to Milosz, It is hard to define the type of relationship that prevails between people in the East otherwise than as acting, with the exception that one does not perform on a theater stage but in the street, office, factory, meeting hall, or even the room one lives in. Such acting is a highly developed craft that places a premium upon mental alertness. Before it leaves the lips, every word must be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be can occasion dangerous suspicions and accusations. Even one’s gestures, tone of voice, or preference for certain kinds of neckties are interpreted as signs of one’s political tendencies. (Milosz, 1990, 54)

Such a world of permanent acting and danger creates the atmosphere of alertness. It sharpens the intellect and troubles the moral imagination. To eliminate the slightest possibility of being open to the charge of treason, you have to forge a new vocabulary of morals, politics, and culture. If you can imagine the collapse of the Center and the dissolution of the New Faith, you must have a strong argument at hand to justify your former involvement in the System, in order not to be exposed as a fool or cynical opportunist.

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Behind the Scenes of Silent Art’s Life: Concealed Identities and Untold Stories That human reality is always incomplete and insufficient in terms of being in the word we learn from the metaphysics and aesthetics of ruins, as shown by Robert Ginsberg in his The Aesthetics of Ruins. Ruins reveal the unfinished and nonfinite essence of the world. They contain the mysteries of the past. At the same time, they serve as a potent reminder of the unfinished nature of human existence. Our identity secrets and their concealment games are nothing other than part of our effort to fulfill ourselves in the world. Modernity increasingly allows us to employ and practice our secrets as an inescapable part of our esthetic and existential self-­fulfillment. We tend to be moved and excited by a hint dropped by a painter or writer much more than we would be by his or her talking prose or fully exposing his or her personality. Too much reality does not allow us to complement or correct that reality and to participate in its symbolic construction. Of the nonfinished in artworks, Ginsberg writes, We must distinguish unfinished works of art from the nonfinished in artworks. In Michelangelo and Paul Cézanne, the nonfinito (Ital.) is the inclusion within the work of a contributory inconclusiveness. The uncut stone, white canvas, or abandoned subplot in an artwork provokes heightened awareness of the artistic process. The presence of the unworked material amid what has been worked-­over makes us participate in the making of the work. A gain, not a loss. The work’s unity incorporates the undone in this sophisticated kind of artistic doing. The nonfinito shares with the ruin enjoyment in the discovery of material, contiguity of the formed and the unformed, and springing forth of form. (Ginsberg, 2004, 296)

Yet a deliberately unfinished work of art also has its metaphysics and aesthetics, as does an unfinished and open-­ended thought. What becomes obvious here is that the ruins are a powerful means of moralization—­ suffice it to mention the vanitatum vanitas kind of still-­life paintings in Flanders and in the Netherlands of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which a skull beside food, a glass of wine, and flowers reminded us of human temporality and mortality. Reproaching and severely criticizing humanity for their vanity and wickedness, the painters of the Golden Age of Dutch art acted as secular preachers and social critics. The skull, the most powerful idiom and reminder of the ruins of the human body, allowed them to dismiss such human weaknesses as the inclination to luxury and self-­deception. Much the same applies to

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the memento mori paintings where the flower, the sand clock, and the skull are most telling details of human fragility, vulnerability, and brief presence in this world. The initials and inscriptions of great artists and scholars left in their canvases and books appear as an extension and a symbolic equivalent of the skull. They remain quite ambivalent as they cast a shadow of doubt about whether this or that great master left an inscription or initials. An identity-­concealment-­and-­revelation game, a sophisticated variety of hide-­and-­seek, this phenomenon comes into existence together with the emergence of individualism. Italian, Flemish, Dutch, and German Renaissance masters start signing their canvases, thus signifying the arrival of the Era of the Individual; yet they play identity games that become part of the picturesque carnival of the language and artistic expression. Instead of signing their given and family names, they drop a hint or leave a mark as if to say that the identification of the master is an inescapable part of the interpretation of the work of art itself. An identity concealment leaving part of the clue to that identity is a metaphor of the modern identity game that calls for affirmation of existence: I exist insofar as you identify me as a person; say my name, and bow to me as a Unique Individual on the Face of the Earth. I begin existing as an individual only when you identify me and my artwork, which is my silent autobiography. The deeply symbolic and allegoric nature of Renaissance and Baroque art invites and incites a viewer, an eyewitness of being, to experience a joy of revelation, deciphering hidden meanings and allusions. Like an allusion or allegory, our identity is just a mask covering the face of being. Like a search for an original and unique means of expression or an authentic artistic language, which always remains an effort, our moral choices bring us closer or, on the contrary, distance us from others. Grasp of life and understanding of the other is a continuous path to our own moral substance. If we put it aside, our self becomes merely a mask, a game, and a joke for the sake of amusement of merry ladies and gentlemen. Als ich kan (as well as I can) is a recurring motto by, and a clue to identification of, the author that appears on paintings by Jan van Eyck. The portrait of the Arnolfini couple, a powerful proof of the miracle of the face of the individual, contains this motto, which allows us to identify Van Eyck’s existential and aesthetic traces there. We hasten to read two letters, RF (Rembrandt fecit, the Latin abbreviation for “Rembrandt executed this work of art”) just to make sure that we stand before Rembrandt himself, and not his pupils Ferdinand Bol, Aert de Gelder, or Carel Fabritius. Of Rembrandt’s De Nachtwacht (The Night Watch) Oswald Spengler, in Der Untergang des Abendlandes, wrote as frozen history. Therefore, a great work of art, in addition to its ability to remind us of the mystery of being and

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the individuality of every human face, body, object of reality, thing, or any other trace of being, allows us a point of entry into history. That art can reveal not only concealed identities and frozen history but also untold stories we learn from Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Leo X (1518–­ 1519). We know that Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1483–­1520) executed this magnificent work just a year before his death. More than that, one of the two Cardinals standing behind the Pope, both relatives and cardinal-­ nephews of Leo X, Luigi de’ Rossi (ca. 1471/1474–­1519) died shortly after this work saw the light of the day. Another Cardinal, a member of the Medici family just like the Pope himself, Giulio de’ Medici (1478–­1534), later succeeds Leo X as Pope Clement VII. Scholars suggest that the scene represents Leo X and his cousin Giulio de’ Medici listening to the sentence of July 4, 1517, that condemned the Sienese Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci (ca. 1490–­1517) to death for plotting to kill the Pope. The accusation of Petrucci for his conspiracy and high treason, as well as his execution, appears to have been not a big consolation before the fate of their all, though. Pope Leo X, born Giovanni de’ Medici (1475–­1521), passed away two years after Raphael immortalized him in a group portrait with two Cardinals. Last but not least, in spite of the Pope’s power and prestige, it was the beginning of the time of trouble for the Papacy and the Church, as Martin Luther dealt a blow to their standing and international reputation. In addition, Clement VII broke with Henry VIII and England because of his unsanctioned and illegitimate divorce from Katherine of Aragon. What do we have here? A prophetic vision of a great artist? Or a blend of secret, conspiracy, and mystery uniquely concentrated in a group of influential individuals portrayed by Raphael? Raphael did not need his great mastery and creative genius to make an intrigue here. We will always remain indebted to a great master for the mystery of the individuality of a human face—­especially when this mystery is sharpened by our knowledge that we observe the face of a dying or otherwise passing individual. The secret behind the scenes is sufficient to strengthen the mystery of the power of Raphael’s masterpiece’s appeal. A blend of secret and mystery, Alfonso Petrucci’s alleged conspiracy creates the initial disposition of power exercised by the Pope and two Cardinals in great solemnity. Conspiracies, Power Games, and Modern Individualism Like any other power game and part of covert narrative, conspiracy is tailor-­made for a work of art. It contains a mystery while offering a secret: something promised to be revealed, yet another segment of covert

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narrative structure to be kept unexposed. Conspiracy fuels our historical and political imaginations. They had long been, and will continue to be, part of art. Even putting aside the conspiracy theory of society both as a cognitive phenomenon and as an aspect of power structure and its interpretation, it remains obvious that it is always linked to secrets and mysteries as covert aspects of social reality. This makes the conspiracy theory serve as an unmistakable source of success for any kind of sensationalist literature and journalism. It is an indispensable element of what is supposed to be an exciting literary plot that offers secrets or mysteries as semipublic and semiprivate properties of modern individuals and societies. As such, it is likely to survive into the centuries to come. Yet the conspiracy theory would not have become one of the major plots and traits of the modern moral imagination had it been not developed as a mode of discourse within the framework of political thought. Curiously enough, this mode of discourse coincides and even overlaps with something far more fundamental in modern Europe—­namely, the genesis of the self-­asserting, self-­sufficient, reflective, and brave individual capable of bridging thought and action. Like in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (ca. 1599–­1601), this emergence of the individual can signify the marriage of thought and action. La mente audace—­that is, the brave mind—­this ideal put forward by Renaissance humanists is obvious in Hamlet’s ability to outsmart and get rid of his treacherous friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Yet the arrival of the modern individual may signify the reverse tendency, the divorce of thought and action, which is the case with Hamlet and which becomes the reason of his defeat—­albeit political rather than moral—­and death. No thinker has ever embodied and represented these, we would think, mutually exclusive facets of modern individualism as Niccolò Machiavelli. In a way, the modern conspiracy theory of society received its impetus from Machiavelli, who deprived his political theory of all indispensable emphases on religious and moral aspects of politics, and who was least concerned with the ought to be as superior and prior to the is. Whereas classical political theory rested on, and was derived from, moral theory, Machiavelli emancipated political theory from moral theory. This is not to say that Machiavelli was not a humanist, though. I would argue that he was one and that his applied and practical political philosophy merely reflected the real politics of his time. Yet the fact is that Machiavelli provided a new and viable framework for the conspiracy theory of society, and hence, a profound immorality intrinsic in all modern conspiracy theories as a frame of reference and as a point of departure. As Frederick Copleston points out,

68      Modernity in Crisis [Machiavelli] . . . over-­estimated the part played in historical development by politics in a narrow sense; and he failed to discern the importance of other factors, religious and social . . . Machiavelli was clever and brilliant; but he can scarcely be called a profound political philosopher . . . He was thus immediately concerned with political mechanics; but his outlook implied a certain philosophy of history. It implied, for example, that there is repetition in history and that history is of such a nature that it affords a basis for induction. Machiavelli’s method was not . . . altogether new. Aristotle . . . certainly based his political ideas on an examination of actual institutions and he considered not only the ways in which States are destroyed but also the virtues which the ruler should pretend to have if he is to be successful . . . But Aristotle was much more concerned than Machiavelli with abstract theory. He was also primarily interested in political organizations as the setting for moral and intellectual education, whereas Machiavelli was much more interested in the actual nature and course of concrete political life. (Copleston, 1963, 134)

Machiavelli’s principle of verità effettuale deeply penetrates modern political thought, not to mention mundane political reasoning and practice-­ and-­achievement-­oriented discourse of political efficiency. He, who outlives his foes and adversaries, exists from the political point of view. Truth coincides with successful practice, which means that adopted and institutionalized practices are real and true. The crime becomes a necessary measure or even a painful sacrifice insofar as the major political ends are achieved; for instance, if the state is successfully centralized. Yet those who fail to centralize the state are severely judged by the generations to come as cruel and senseless rulers. In Machiavelli’s border-­value perspective, a blunder or a mistake is therefore worse than a crime. Small wonder, then, that the words allegedly said either by Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, deputy from Meurthe in the Corps législatif, or by Napoleon’s chief of police, Joseph Fouché, on the execution of Louis Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien, sound as if they were straight from Machiavelli: “C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute” (“It is worse than a crime; it is a blunder”). This statement is sometimes attributed to the French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-­ Périgord, the quote being given as “It is worse than a crime; it is a mistake.” Therefore, a crime ceases to be a crime insofar as it serves a proper program or agenda or insofar as it brings the outcome that may become a blueprint for a viable social and moral order. A crime can be translated into virtue or at least a heroic deed, but a mistake cannot. The difference between the national hero and the criminal is much in tune with this kind of reasoning: a successful and victorious criminal has every chance to pass for a hero, whereas a failed hero is portrayed by the

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winning power and the vocabulary it forges as a criminal. The dividing line remains quite thin, as if to say that it is all about who outlives whom, and who imposes on whom their practices, criteria, historical-­political narrative, and moral vocabulary. Power is respected, while failures are despised. Whether we like it or not, this logic is deeply embedded in modern political thought. Even at the beginning of the twenty-­first century, we are likely to live in the world where successful exercise of power, be it plausible violence or good economic performance, increasingly becomes a license to abandon individual freedom, civil liberties, and human rights. The Culture of Determinism and Conspiracy Theories By no means is the conspiracy theory nurtured only by the conservative imagination, or by right-­wing hacks. However tempting it is to attach utopia to the Left and the conspiracy theory to the Right, such a watershed would be simplistic and misleading. By no means always dwelling with the angels, political imagination of the Left has produced conspiracy theories of its own. The left-­wing variant of the conspiracy theory ranges from the ideological myth of the capitalist world conspiracy against the working class and its faithful ally, the toiling and progressive intelligentsia—­the myth so aptly described by Popper—­to the theory of the American-­Israeli/ Zionist world conspiracy. The latter, as this pearl of wisdom goes, embodies the sole purpose of the “reactionary forces”—­to dominate the countries that are not yet completely lost for the spread and acceptance of progressive ideas or for the civilizing and enlightening mission, which is to be accomplished by “progressive countries.” The left-­wing variant of the conspiracy theory is usually accompanied by what might be termed left-­wing antisemitism disguised as anti-­Zionism or as an anti-­Israeli stance. Far from being exclusively the offspring of Soviet Communism, left-­wing antisemitism is a time-­honored phenomenon that dates back to such towering political theorists of the Left as Pierre-­Joseph Proudhon, Eugen Karl Dühring, and, above all, Karl Marx himself. Yet the modern version of the conspiracy theory should not be lightly reduced to antisemitism, for it rests on the assumption of inexorable laws in societal life and human existence, and on that of infinite manipulation with human consciousness; hence, what might be called natural innocence and victimization. According to this attitude, people cannot in principle control biological or social forces—­on the contrary, particular individuals and even entire societies are shaped and moved by those forces.

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Since the world is controlled and dominated by powerful groups, clandestine international organizations, or secret agencies and their elusive experts, individuals cannot assume moral responsibility for their actions; nor can they influence or change the state of affairs. Such an attitude is characteristic of marginalized and victimized groups. It is in part characteristic of what had been called by Oscar Lewis the culture of poverty (see Lewis, 1996), but it is equally characteristic of the kind of consciousness shaped by antiliberal and antidemocratic regimes. For victimized consciousness, the “Jews” usually have nothing to do with flesh-­and-­blood human beings. They serve as the most familiar and recognizable idiom of the malevolent forces of the universe. The “Jews” represent what may well be called a group target, an indispensable constituent part of the conspiratorial view of the universe. Such an idiom of evil enters the underground of modern consciousness through the popular version of Christian demonology, which is deeply grounded in peasant cultures, backward societies, or largely marginalized groups and which may be easily assimilated to modern forms of demonology. It surfaces repeatedly in professional circles and even in public discourse, in the form of political speculations and working hypotheses or in the shape of plain demagoguery or deliberate manipulations with mass consciousness. In the age of ideologies, a phenomenon emerges that might be termed the domestication or localization of the conspiracy theory. A new conspiratorial view of the universe comes to adjust itself to the scientific and “rational” worldview. This is to say that the idea of some small-­scale conspiracies, within the framework of a new conspiratorial view of the world, tends to replace that of a global conspiracy. The conspiracy, in the age of ideologies, is seen as a scientific or technological project, which may be carried out in the name of evil. (We can recall here, for instance, a “theory” of the spread of AIDS, which explained this apocalyptic disease as a consequence of Jewish physicians’ subversive activities—­this was exactly what the Chicago commentator Steve Cokely held, describing Jewish doctors as injecting the AIDS virus into black babies.) Conspiracy is by no means accidental, since ideology as such comes to identify the truth with a conscious transformation of reality. In the deeper sense, ideology is always “scientific.” If medieval science had to carry out experiments to disclose the disguised forces of evil, the modern scientific and technological culture can only qualify evil as something that resists being conceived of and rationally explained, as obstacles on the way to progress and the maximization of human happiness. The conspiracy theory, disguised as a scientific theory or “rational” project, tends to reappear in many ways. For instance, it makes its appearance masquerading as the global management theory. Evidently, this is

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just another term for what Eco, in Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), qualifies as “synarchy,” a kind of symphonic unity of world history achieved through a series of interrelated political plots perpetuated by secret societies. These, deeply grounded in esoteric theories and mystical speculations, seek to control the course of history and, ultimately, establish a world-­republic free of monarchy and papacy. The global management theory, like its counterpart described by Eco as “synarchy,” cannot in principle be practiced otherwise than as a scientific and technological project, whatever its guise and frame of reference. Hence this results in a new image or representation, in modern consciousness, of evil forces, the latter being embodied in human agencies of evil that misuse scientific knowledge and technology. No wonder that technocratic consciousness quickly associates the spread of illnesses, infections, viruses, earthquakes, and disasters with deliberate plots initiated and perpetuated by hidden expert groups, malevolent and omnipotent agencies, secret political organizations (such as the KGB or the CIA), or by dangerous maniacs and mean-­spirited scientists who possess enormous powers of expertise. Here we are in the Kafkaesque world of anguish, fear, loneliness, and isolation, the world of the cornered, scared, and suffering human individual who finds himself or herself totally alienated from the mechanistic and dehumanized world. Usually associated with ignorance, backwardness, and bigotry, the conspiracy theory, though, has a sort of highbrow cultural setting that is deeply grounded in underground consciousness. The highbrow setting of the conspiratorial view of the world consists of noncommercial literature and films, or even sociological theories of negative technological determinism, full of antirationalist, antitechnological, antibureaucratic, and antiscientific resentment. Its more popular version finds a home in the “prose of everyday life,” suspense, fantasy, metafiction, postmodern, and entertainment literature. Having mentioned that, we have to stress technological determinism—­ in particular, its negative version—­and technocratic consciousness as a major source of inspiration: both are likely to nourish the conspiratorial view of the world in the future, as they did so far. In technocratic visions of societal existence, society appears as a kind of complex mechanism or machine, which cannot operate other than under the guidance of supreme experts and their elusive masters. These are concealed in secret institutes and laboratories. Since the ultimate end of supreme experts and their patrons is to brainwash and manipulate society, they control education and mass media. Independent and critical thought has to be abolished in the long run.

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The logical conclusion of such a theory is that the contemporary science, ultimately, is a conspiracy against humanity. By implication, every single experiment carried out in secret laboratories, virtually, is a small-­ scale conspiracy. Yet this is not a sufficient explanation of what provides, in the modern world, an interpretive framework for a new conspiratorial view of the universe. The fact that this view implies a new version of maleficia (almost the same diabolic agencies, demons, fiends, and other paraphernalia of the Christian demonology) may suggest that we are witnessing the emergence of the technocratic demonology. This is the culture and consciousness of destiny, as opposed to those of freedom and choice. Nobody is responsible for anything, since the world is being shaped and moved by inexorable biological or social forces. Human helplessness and forsakenness, in the face of the malevolent forces of the world, can only be reduced by those who are in power or by those who possess technology and (secret) information. To simplify this phenomenon by describing it in terms of the absence of the rule of law or of the traditions of liberal democracy in a given society is the last thing I would do. The conspiracy theory, victimization, and technocratic demonology are almost equally widespread in liberal-­democratic and illiberal parts of the world. What is radically different between them is the conspiratorial worldview’s sociocultural and political implications. The contemporary forms of technocratic and victimized consciousness are much more likely to be favored by what Vytautas Kavolis once termed “an encounter of political modernization with a deficiency of cultural modernity in the deeper sense” (Kavolis, 1986, 138). Thus the conspiracy theory becomes deeply characteristic of, and linked with, victimized social groups whose members may sincerely believe that it is they whom evil forces chose as a target. Surprisingly, it sheds new light on victimized consciousness as an inversion of political messianism. Political messianism upholds the belief in the possibility to newly shape and move world history through a single collective actor chosen for such a mission. Victimized consciousness is moved by the belief in malevolent and sinister forces of the universe—­allegedly manifesting themselves through secret and elusive human agencies—­that come to manipulate and dominate the world through their subversive activities immediately targeted at a single actor, the most vulnerable and fragile one. The principle of evil is permanently ascribed to the big and powerful, while reserving the principle of good exclusively for the small, vulnerable, and fragile. By implication, I cannot err or sin because I happen to belong to a small, vulnerable, and fragile group, or vice versa—­I can never be on the right side if I, by birth and upbringing, belong to a privileged or powerful one. This means that my human value and merit are predetermined and,

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subsequently, can be lightly judged by my race, gender, nationality, or class. This sort of modern barbarity, which takes all human beings as irreversibly shaped and moved by biological or social forces with no moral or intellectual choice involved, powerfully stands behind the conspiracy theory. Regrettably, modern barbarity, which deprives humanity of the sense of human fellowship and tends to replace it with the concepts of natural animosity and everlasting struggle between irreconcilable groups or forces, tends to surface and extend its influence beyond underground consciousness. Far from being qualified as social pathology, it assumes its status as what is supposed to be normal and even progressive. What results from modern barbarity is the practice of the splitting of human beings, ranging from ideological division of humanity into “us” and “them” to modern racism and blood-­and-­soil nationalism. The most militant forms of feminism and some exaggerated practices of what is called preferential treatment are also tinged with this propensity and are at risk of becoming the mere inversion of the object of their resentment. The conspiracy theory allows no room for critical self-­reflexivity and critical self-­discovery. At this point, it is a mortal enemy of moral philosophy. Whereas modern political philosophy, if properly understood, is an extension of moral philosophy, the conspiracy theory’s point of departure is the radical denial of theoretical reflection, critical judgment, and moral accountability. Instead, the conspiracy theory’s assumption is that the agencies of good and evil are established once and for all—­that the only distinction between good and evil is that good is powerless and condemned to suffer endlessly, while evil is all-­powerful and solely motivated by the hunger for power. Infinite manipulation and unlimited power are the ultimate ends that motivate evil forces. The world is too naïve, vulnerable, and fragile to unmask the real masters and their dirty manipulations with which they keep that world in the darkness of ignorance, stupidity, and self-­deception—­this is the revealing message the conspiracy theory conveys to its adherents. In his book Moralizing Cultures, Kavolis suggests that this phenomenon is deeply rooted in a modern system of moralization, which he termed the culture of determinism. Kavolis puts it thus: A modern amoral culture, in the sense that it tends to eliminate the notion of individual moral responsibility without taking collective responsibility seriously, is the culture of determinism. In this culture it is assumed that individuals are shaped and moved by biological or social forces in all essentials beyond the control, or even the possibility of major choices, of individuals affected by them. The four major intellectual foci of this culture are the theory that “biology (or racial inheritance) is destiny;” the belief that the

74      Modernity in Crisis human being is and should be nothing but a utility-­calculating, pleasure-­ maximizing machine; the conviction that the individual is, in currently existing societies, only a victim of the “oppressive,” “impoverished,” “devitalizing,” or “traditionally constricted” social conditions of his or her existence (without the ability to become an agent of his fate and assume responsibility for her actions); and the notion that he can be helped out of such conditions solely by the “guidance of experts” who have a “rational social policy” at their disposal, in the determination of which those who are to be helped participate merely as instruments of the experts. (Kavolis, 1993d, 48)

Kavolis’s concept of a modern amoral culture sheds new light on why victimized groups or societies relate to the ruling elites as patients to diagnosing and curing specialists. At the same time, it allows us a point of entry into the crucial focus: we can understand why and how victimized culture manifests itself as the culture of destiny and determinism—­in contrast to the culture of freedom and choice. This concept reveals the links between all kinds of deterministic theories, especially in the social sciences. Kavolis starts by quoting Sigmund Freud’s dictum, “Biology is destiny,” and then goes on showing other modes of discourse that speak out in favor of inexorable laws of racial inheritance, history, milieu, societal life, social organization, and so forth. A modern amoral culture denying individual responsibility and moral choice, or the culture of determinism in Kavolis’s parlance, is a system of moralization disseminated in the modern moral imagination. It is characteristic of antimodernist reactions, including racism, technocracy, and other forms of deterministic consciousness. It also includes a belief in inexorable historical laws, a phenomenon that Karl R. Popper described as historicism. It is too obvious to need emphasis that the culture and the spirit of determinism are a driving force behind totalitarian regimes; totalitarianism without deterministic consciousness would be merely a contradiction in terms. At the same time, the culture of determinism penetrates all “minor” forms of organized hatred. It appears wherever the quest for enemies is in demand. The culture of determinism is not only a perfect home for conspiracy theories of all shades; it is just another term for what I call modern barbarity. It might be suggested that totalitarianism and the spirit of technology are both the offspring of modern barbarity (see Kolakowski, 1990, 14–­31). Deterministic consciousness passionately denies free will and moral choice. In so doing, it rejects individual reason, conscience, responsibility, and ultimately, freedom itself. In a way, deterministic consciousness shaped the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was nothing other than deterministic consciousness that brought about such phenomena of

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cognitive imagination as geographical determinism and theoretical racism as an early phase of anthropology. Theoretical racism became possible when the concept of species was transformed into the concept of race and then applied to some social science and humanities disciplines. It was deterministic consciousness, too, that led quite a few scholars to assume that human beings could be classified like insects—­like bees or ants that, once they have been scientifically identified and attributed to their species, had to be locked in their communities once and for all. At the same time, deterministic consciousness brought about a phenomenon known as scientism: the idea that strict methods of scientific analysis, research strategies, or classifying practices, all borrowed from the natural sciences, could be applied successfully to the humanities and social sciences. In addition, the culture of determinism seems deeply embedded in what might be termed resistance knowledge, which relies on the analysis of hidden intentions and elusive political agendas, ill will, or the world’s obsessions with power and manipulations. A secular and negative version of the doctrine of predestination, this sort of social and critical theory insists on the hidden language of power that manifests itself through the way we talk, think, socialize, or describe the world around us. The initial disposition of power becomes our destiny—­this is the message of such a social theory. It is not us but a mode of power discourse or power structure that talks through us without our awareness that we are merely an instrument of something that continues for centuries. Something more substantial and enduring than us is the reason of the order of things and of the logic of events. The power structure talks through us constantly, it betrays and testifies what we are unable to describe properly, yet what puts us into the category and contextualizes within the history of power and its practices, inclusion, exclusion, and marginalization. What lies between Foucault’s poststructuralist way of theorizing and the conspiracy theory of society as common grounds is their equal obsession with power and hidden plans and political agendas. Both rest on a metaphysics of suspicion that employs and sets in motion the anonymous or personified, albeit metaphorical and detached from flesh and blood, social and political forces beyond our reach and control. At this point, an obvious theoretical kinship exists between Karl Marx and Michel Foucault, for they both are nearly a perfect embodiment of a metaphysics of suspicion and of a sociology of hidden power structure. Conspiracy theories are mere caricatures of resistance knowledge. They are a travesty of a metaphysics of suspicion, and a popular version of a sociology of hidden power, whereas Marxism and poststructuralism are their highbrow versions.

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The idea that we must write and interpret history as a constant interplay of historical laws, and that we have to deprive the concept of history of any sort of naïve references to free will, self-­determination, and freedom was the birth-­cry of modern historical and cultural determinism. History without human presence, history where the inexorable laws and social forces manipulate and determine the lives of classes, nations, and individuals—­ this is the essence of deterministic consciousness, which masquerades as revolutionary political doctrines, modern secular humanism, progressive social theories, and resistance knowledge and scholarship. As regards to this, we can only agree with Popper that the conspiracy theory gives rise to what he calls historicism. Had the latter been renamed by him as historical-­cultural determinism and related to deterministic consciousness, Popper’s theory of history and also his critique of the theoretical foundations of totalitarianism would have benefited considerably (see Popper, 1959; 1979). The philosophical and scientific implications of determinism have obviously led to more than one fallacy in epistemology and cognitive science, not to mention the distortions they have brought to the humanities and social sciences. The political and moral implications of the deterministic stance are no better. In denying any kind of individual accountability, responsibility, and moral reflexivity, determinism leads to something beyond good and evil—­a moral logic, which blames the victims for the crimes or wrongs committed against them. This moral logic always goes hand in hand with the conspiratorial view of the world. Moral determinism is not dissimilar to medieval Christian demonology, though. In the Middle Ages, a man who seduced a woman could easily escape the charge of adultery by blaming everything on the demonic and irresistible powers of seduction inherent in the sinful female body. The charge of the deceived woman with witchcraft and maleficium (i.e., occult evil action) was still at hand and guaranteed a safe retreat for any male involved in such an affair. The propensity to blame the victim of rape or of any other crime appears as a modern echo of this age-­old moral logic, instead of something describable in clinical terms. In the twentieth century, some antisemites led by the moral logic of determinism blame the Jews for the Holocaust or deny the Holocaust, denouncing it as a forgery of international and Jewish organizations and those Jewish writers who survived the Holocaust. This is to say that even a study of the Holocaust is perceived by antisemites as a sort of industry, as part of the intentional malevolent action of the Jews against other countries, or as a Jewish world conspiracy. That same profoundly amoral type of reasoning inherent in the culture of determinism led some people in the Middle East to assert that the September 11, 2001, tragedy in the United States was the outcome of a Jewish world conspiracy. Yet it did not

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prevent some other paranoiacs, even in the United States, from insisting that the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York was planned and orchestrated by the CIA. Kavolis’s concept of the culture of determinism provides a new explanatory framework for the reinterpretation of technocratic consciousness. Such a framework is of great importance for social philosophy and sociology, since the conspiracy theory, in the current social sciences, is a missing link in, though an obvious corollary of, a set of the phenomena of victimization, technocracy, deterministic worldview, and antiliberal stances in politics and culture. The starting point in theoretically reconstructing and morally evaluating the conspiratorial view of the world and its implications would be the analysis of the liberal moral culture as radically opposed to the culture of determinism. The former rests on the principles of morally committed individualism, individual reason and conscience (as prior and superior to anonymous decisions), individual moral responsibility, and tolerance; whereas the latter fundamentally denies the Other as the dimension of human existence and consciousness, let alone any kind of self-­reflexivity and critical self-­discovery. Technocracy and the Age of Indifference Yet the culture of determinism may have another side, which allows it to close ranks with technocracy; that is, the idea that the entire societal life is moved by those who possess special competences or power and to whom ordinary citizens relate much in the same fashion as clients to experts or patients to physicians. This requires our unconditional trust in the elite or specialists who would gladly assure us that “it could not happen here.” Whatever happens elsewhere, including economic recessions, acts of terrorism, or power plant accidents, is explained away as the outcome of the lack of competence that could never be the case here. A sort of scientific and technocratic hubris, and also a blend of arrogance, self-­reliance and optimism, the “it could not happen here” phenomenon appears as an offshoot of the conspiracy theory of society. Since we are more conscientious and efficient than others, nothing can go wrong here. The Leibnizian philosophical optimism, caricatured by Voltaire in his philosophical tale Candide ou l’optimisme in the character Pangloss, Candide’s mentor of philosophy, who is deeply convinced that whatever happens is for our own good and that we live in the best of all possible worlds, is therefore transformed into a sense of superiority and a sincere belief that results from it, namely, that we have a better social and moral order

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or a better elite or a higher moral code than other societies. If so, any sort of technical deficiency or failure to prove that can only occur as a consequence of conspiratorial action originated elsewhere. Interestingly, our disbelief that our society can err or that our elite can fail to comply with the rules of the game may come from a different source. If the “it could not happen here” mindset is reminiscent of a naïve technocratic and rationalistic belief in a “happy iron cage” where individual initiative or lonely voice does not matter due to the unquestionable efficiency and rationality of a blueprint for a social and moral order, the opposite pole that puts into question our every failure springs from self-­victimization (see Donskis, 2003). According to this moral logic, we are small, neglected, forgotten, or otherwise abused by the big and powerful. The “it could not happen here” mentality reflects a sense of superiority. A naïve technocratic dream of perfect social control and enormous powers of expertise, it nurtures a feeling of the infallibility of a rational world order. Yet this attitude may well be related to the belief that we are victims of history or of the predominant world order. If so, we cannot assume any moral and political responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity, since these facts can be easily turned against our country, itself a victim of history. Those who try to put moral and political pressure on us to force us to admit the Holocaust in our respective country or any similar facts of moral insensitivity and betrayal of humanity, intend to compromise us or to tarnish our image and international reputation. As this wisdom of self-­ victimization goes, we are a target of powerful and influential international Jewish groups. This attitude may be easily identified in Lithuania as a trace of traumatic historical experience, although it can never become an excuse for our failure to come to terms with our history. “It could not happen here” is a voice of the culture of determinism heard anywhere there is a strong need for historical revisionism. It is a voice of the Holocaust denial in European countries, or of the concealed attempt to rehabilitate Stalinism and its crimes against humanity, which is the case in present Russia. Far from an innocent thing, this attitude manifestly exposes a profound disbelief in our spontaneous will, independent moral choices and actions, unpredictability, and ultimately, freedom. “It could not happen here” can pave the way for our conscious abandonment of spontaneity and individual autonomy accompanied by relegation of all powers of judgment to rational practices and technocratic elites. At the same time, it can signify the arrival of a moral logic that denies guilt and responsibility offering, instead, historical accounts of our injuries, political wounds, and martyrology. In both cases, freedom and moral responsibility are at the peril of becoming an empty sound.

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Yet one more pivotal aspect of the conspiracy theory of society exists. This aspect has been aptly described by the British author and journalist David Aaronovitch. According to Aaronovitch, conspiracy theories reflect our unbearable fear of indifference of the surrounding world toward us (see Aaronovitch, 2009). Aptly describing the paradoxically comforting effect of the conspiracy theory, which in his view protects us from, to use the term coined by the London-­based American psychoanalyst Dr. Stephen Grosz, “the catastrophe of indifference,” Aaronovitch reminds us, Everyone knows Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Fewer will have heard Susan Sontag’s clever development of it: “I envy paranoids. They actually feel people are paying attention to them.” If conspiracism is a projection of paranoia, it may exist in order to reassure us that we are not the totally unconsidered objects of a blind process. If Marilyn was murdered, then she did not die, as we most fear and as we most often observe, alone and ingloriously. A catastrophe occurred, but not the greater catastrophe that awaits all of us. (ibid., 308)

As the phrase “nobody cares about you” sounds like a cruel verdict tantamount to proof that we are a nonperson or nonentity, we have only one tool at hand to actualize and fulfill ourselves as those who matter in this world—­namely, to convince the world around us that we deserve to be a target group or that we qualify for an object of conspiracy or desire to be destroyed. In a world of desperate attention seeking, indifference becomes a failure, if not a liability. In a way, the conspiracy theory of society bears family resemblance to such phenomena of the age of indifference as exaggerated, politically exploited victimhood, martyrdom, sensationalism of all shades in public life and politics, and scandalized grasp of reality. To crack the armor of the indifferent world trying to get at least the minimal amount of its temporary attention, we need an outbreak of collective hysteria, a sex or corruption scandal, or a plausible conspiracy theory on how the world hates trying to subvert or eliminate us from within and from without. Therefore, much like TV celebrities or successful victims, the masterminds of conspiracies and conspiracy theories win exactly where people of long-­term commitment and moderate way of speaking and thinking tend to lose—­they break the ice of silence getting the attention of the world. The winner takes it all. The conspiracy theory of society appears as a crie du cœur against the wall of liquid-­modern forms of social alienation, moral indifference, political disengagement, and silence. Like self-­inflicted political martyrdom and a sense of self-­cultivated victimhood, the conspiracy theory is a desperate

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attempt to win the hearts and minds of a world of mechanical rhetoric and polite indifference. This is the world where nobody responds to our letters or email messages and where nobody reciprocates our efforts unless we come up with a political sensation or a plausible account of our suffering, or unless we ourselves become good empirical evidence that may support someone else’s social theory or political doctrine. Postscript As the recently deceased intellectual historian and public intellectual Tony Judt (1948–­2010) subtly noted reviewing Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind and commenting on the phenomenon of Ketman, “writing for the desk drawer becomes a sign of inner liberty” (Judt, 2010, 8), which is a sad lot of an Eastern European intellectual bound to choose between his country and his conscience. Here comes the pivotal part of his perceptive review when Judt reveals fear of the indifference as a primary moving force behind mental acrobatics and immoral maneuvering described by Milosz as Ketman. Judt quotes from The Captive Mind, “Fear of the indifference with which the economic system of the West treats its artists and scholars is widespread among Eastern intellectuals. They say it is better to deal with an intelligent devil than with a good-­natured idiot” (cited in ibid.). And here we encounter another crucial aspect of the fear of indifference. Sometimes hatred and destructive forces scare the intellectual or any other anguished and cornered individual less than indifference, which relegates them to the margins of history and existence. As Martin Buber has it, “Yet whoever hates directly is closer to a relation than those who are without love and hate” (Buber, 1970, 68). This is why and how small secrets not only hide mysteries but also reveal the insatiable lust for life, human relationship, and the sense of belonging.

3

Eastern Europe after Communism Identity and Morality in a Boundary Region

It may be said that, thanks to the “clerks,” humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world. Now, at the end of the nineteenth century a fundamental change occurred: the “clerks” began to play the game of political passions. The men who had acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as its stimulators. Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity. —­Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs)

Annus Mirabilis

T

he year 2009 marked the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even on a short look backward, 1989 appears to have been the year that was nothing short of a miracle. World War II, with its sinister and seemingly insurmountable divisions within Europe, was over nearly overnight, leaving no trace of the disbelief, despair, and hopelessness that devastated Eastern and Central Europe for more than forty years. Instead, Europe was filled with joy and the sense of solidarity. As Adam Michnik, a hero of the Solidarity movement and a towering figure among public intellectuals and dissenters of Central Europe, recently noticed, it is quite tempting nowadays to assume the role of having

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been the then leading force and the major inspiration behind the historic fall of totalitarianism in Europe. Therefore, it was with sound reason that Michnik called the year 1989 the annus mirabilis, the miraculous year that marked the second birth of Modern Europe. If a unique combination of forces and inspirations from both within and without the Soviet Union had not been possible, 1989 would never have become the decisive year that changed history beyond recognition. Yet one human factor exists that seems to have been overlooked in Eastern and Central Europe. No matter how much passion and controversy this factor and its mention would arouse, I have to spell out its first and last names. This is Mikhail Gorbachev. Needless to say, Gorbachev was bound to become a sharp dividing line between Eastern and Western Europe, probably nearly to the same extent as the assessment of 1968. What looked to a Western European intellectual like the Grand March of History stretching from the Latin Quarter of Paris to the rest of the globe, as the character Franz from Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being has it, was a tragedy and the jackboot trampling on the face of the human being in the way another character of the novel, Franz’s mistress Sabina, a Czech artist in exile, describes it. Socialism and a promise of freedom as a theory in the West proved a horrible practice in the East in that same year 1968. As mentioned, memory politics, as well as opposing memory regimes, still divides Europe. The same applies to Mikhail Gorbachev. A regrettable liar, coward, and hypocrite in the eyes of Lithuanians who suffered most from the bestiality and brutality of Soviet troops in January 1991, Gorbachev is highly esteemed and cherished in the unified Germany nearly as a saintly figure. On a closer look, however, he is more of a tragic figure straight out of a Shakespeare play. Equally vilified in the Baltic countries and in Russia itself—­the latter with its increasing nostalgia for the power and international prestige of the former USSR that is far beyond present Russia—­ Gorbachev is blamed for the collapse of the empire—­he became a litmus test case of historical memory and political sensibilities. Yet the fact is that Gorbachev, no matter if a man of half-­truth and of an inexorably doomed attempt to humanize totalitarianism, as the Lithuanian poet and literary scholar Tomas Venclova has labeled him, proved far less driven by irrational impulses of power and blood thirst than we could expect from the cornered head of the most dangerous and unpredictable state in the world. True, he misinterpreted nationalism of the occupied nations and misrepresented the real state of affairs of the USSR. More than that, he found himself totally confused and lost at a crossroads of the state whose very existence violated justice and all modern sensibilities.

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Gorbachev willy-­nilly allowed himself to be seen globally as a weak and confused individual, which would have been unthinkable with his predecessors and successors. If anyone doubts that, let him or her try to imagine Yuri Andropov or Vladimir Putin in Gorbachev’s shoes, let alone other ghosts of the Kremlin. Not finding a better word for this phenomenon, I would call the reason behind Gorbachev’s unwillingness to respond to his failure in the Baltics with massacre if not decency and humanism, than at least human weakness and moral intuition that may have suggested to him that his story was over. Another epoch had begun, the epoch where he did not belong. If one is able to step out from powerful position and office without causing bloodshed and casualties in retaliation, it is a sign of decency and dignity. Sometimes it is worth celebrating not only the courage and resolve of those on our side but the human weakness and confusion of our adversaries as well. Unnoticed Fascism Norman Cohn (1915–­2007), a recently deceased British historian, argued in his book Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-­Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that the Nazis and the Holocaust they committed somehow overshadowed some earlier genocidal events and atrocities in Europe that unquestionably were of smaller scale, yet they were nearly as sinister and cruel on the ground as those initiated by the Third Reich. Cohn described the earlier politics and practices of hatred as unnoticed fascism. He meant a series of horrible antisemitic pogroms orchestrated by the Okhrana (or Okhranka, as it was called in the masses), the secret political police of the Russian Empire. These pogroms stretched from the infamous Kishinev pogrom in 1903 through the massacre of the Jews by the Whites during the Civil War in Russia, claiming the lives of several hundred thousands of Jews. Had a sinister and murderous antisemitic ideology that fuelled the massacre remained the unparalleled phenomenon of this sort in the twentieth century, it would have doubtlessly merited the name of fascism, especially referring to the Union of the Russian People (Soyuz Russkogo Naroda), commonly known as Black Hundreds, a fanatical terrorist hate group skillfully manipulated by the Okhrana. Small wonder that National Socialism made humanity forget its predecessors with all their imperfections and inconsistencies. Whatever the case, we know for sure who manufactured the two major antisemitic forgeries that were used to fuel bigotry of the masses and to boost the morale of

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soldiers before the pogroms, including the Kishinev pogrom—­namely, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (fabricated around 1897–­1898, published in 1903) and The Grand Rabbi Speech (fabricated around 1881). The former was crafted by Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, the sinister head of the foreign branch of the Okhrana in Paris, whereas the latter was nothing more than a Russian journalistic adaptation of the Rabbi speech to the 12 tribes of Israel, an excerpt from Hermann Goedsche’s sensationalist novel Biarritz, based on a nineteenth-­century conspiracy theory (see Cohn, 1981; Donskis, 2003). Yet a déjà vu feeling arises when watching Andrei Nekrasov’s and Olga Konskaya’s (1964–­2009) film Russian Lessons (2009). After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West was convinced that the epic struggle between liberal democracy and totalitarianism, no matter whether the latter was disguised as a rival civilization to the West or as a legitimate heir to, or another version of, the Enlightenment, was over. That was not to be. When the war in the Balkans broke out and the West revealed the shocking barbarity and hatred deeply embedded in the former Yugoslavia, the country that once was thought of as the most civilized part of the Communist system seemingly based on a peaceful federation, Slobodan Milosevic firmly monopolized and embodied the evil of post-­Communism. More than that, he and the Balkans in general became a reference point when dealing with the unholy trinity of the post-­Communist condition, namely uncertainty, unsafety, and insecurity, resulting in attempts to rewrite history, to redraw the boundaries, and to establish a single historical memory regime. The horror of Srebrenica, where Serbian militants exterminated, in two days, around eight thousand innocent civilians in the eyes of the shocked and demoralized Dutch military, and where the most awful war crimes since the end of the World War II were committed, in the middle of Europe, overshadowed the horror of both Russian-­Chechen wars, not to mention ethnic cleansing, looting, and organized violence in Abkhazia. The slaughter of civilians in Chechnya was put into the category of the internal affair of the Russian Federation. After the 9/11 attack, the extermination of Chechens, like the smashing of this tiny and long-­suffering country from the face of the earth, received the new and firm legitimacy. This time it was a “noble” cause rather than just a war over oil or gas pipeline—­ namely, the fight against terrorism. And now we watch Andrei Nekrasov’s Russian Lessons, codirected by Olga Konskaya, who passed away shortly after the film was finished. The images are disturbing. As Nekrasov showed, providing the undisputable evidence, the alleged Georgian planes that bombed Tskhinvali were, in fact, Russian planes bombing the city of Gori in Georgia. Yet these images were

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used in Germany and other European Union (EU) countries as an official coverage of the Russian-­Georgian war. Vladimir Putin talking as a mentor and lecturing a noted German journalist reveals the full scale of cynicism of Russia, and self-­inflicted blindness and cowardice of the West. “They know that we lie, and we understand that they know that we lie”—­this is the Russian dissident and human rights defender Stanislav Dmitrievsky’s formula for the Kremlin’s attitude to the EU concerning the condition of human rights in Russia. Two years ago, Andrei Nekrasov made his earlier film Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case (2007) for the Cannes festival. The film sent a powerful message to the world that the Kremlin can poison with impunity its critics and adversaries in a foreign country whose citizens they happen to be. The Russian state that wages war against its best people since the times of Pyotr Chaadaev now is targeting and assassinating dissenting journalists and human rights activists and defenders—­from Yuri Shchekochikhin and Anna Politkovskaya to Natalya Estemirova. All in all, the new Russian fascism went unnoticed. Do we need one more wake-­up call? Didn’t we have enough of it? Reason or Treason? Raison ou trahison? Reason or treason? What happened to France? Did we witness, in 2010, one more time the art of maneuvering of the Gaullist France that will never confine herself to the role of a midwife of American foreign policy and power politics in general? Or was it merely a regrettable instance of what political commentators take as a rapid “Shröderization” of the European political class; that is, a sheer act of economic pragmatism tinged with corruption, albeit wrapped in the colorful paper of sugary lip service about international cooperation and solidarity? Needless to say, when France has recently decided to sell to Russia the warship Mistral, a powerful strategic weapon of a potential full-­scale attack from the Baltic Sea, the Baltic countries could barely welcome such a move from a NATO ally and an EU friend. Quite a few politicians in the Baltics made themselves clear that this was nothing less than a treacherous act of a supposed friend and ally. Others suggested not to jump to the conclusions and to await more information. The easiest way to explain the whole affair would be to rely on the economic logic behind this controversy. France badly needs Russian markets, to say nothing about its gas and oil. Germany is far ahead of France at this point, which sheds more light on why the aforementioned stratagem may have been regarded as a turning point in the two countries’ economic

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cooperation. With regard to the political aspect of this story, we all know the beautiful, albeit empty, phrasing trying to apply such pearls of conventional political wisdom as “cooperation prior to isolation,” and so on. Of course, we can easily credit the French Prime Minister François Fillon and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Bernard Kouchner for reminding Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States that France has its historically formed political sensibilities and priorities. Russia is a difficult partner rather than a foe. C’est vrai. Vous avez raison. That is true. Yet when it comes to the credibility of France among her smaller partners and friends in Eastern Europe, the Mistral deal dealt a hardly ever repairable blow to the reputation of France as a moral and political leader of the EU. After Jacques Chirac’s (in)famous reminder that Poland and the Baltic States missed a good opportunity to remain silent on the Iraq War affair, the Mistral deal is the second overt and public act of showing contempt for the insecure Eastern European nations. Whatever kind of political vocabulary or perspective we apply, this is so. We can take it one way or another, the outcome remains the same. Nobody benefited from this except Russia. In fact, nobody ever will as far as the future of the EU is concerned. The political credibility of the major forces of the EU as a security-­generating entity will be undermined for a long time. And the reason of it lies not in the faults of French policy makers’ political reasoning but in their lack of political imagination and historical sensitivity. Eastern European historians of political ideas remember quite well how the French philosopher Alain Besançon described the source of the strength of the Soviet regime. According to Besançon, the “failure to understand the Soviet regime is the principal cause of its successes” (cited in Shtromas, 2003, 75; for more on this issue, see Besançon, 1978). Curiously enough, Besançon’s disciple Françoise Thom, a history professor at Sorbonne, added that never before has misunderstanding of Russia in Western Europe been as great as it is now (see http://www.diploweb. com/english/russia/thom1.htm). A sort of self-inflicted blindness fuelled by sweet lies and charms of self-deception, it results in shutting the eyes before the fact that Russia provoked, in 2008, the war against the sovereign state of Georgia to occupy and annex parts of Georgia’s territory. No matter how strongly we agree on Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili as hardly a raw model democrat, the fact remains that the West has swallowed this déjà vu episode that was straight from the geopolitical repertoire of the twentieth century. We believe that Russia is on the way to reforming its economic and political systems. Yet we tend to forget, as Thom points out, that all the waves of modernization of Russia came out as a reaction to its defeats and losses. Peter the Great undertook his reforms after the defeat of Russia

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by Sweden near Narva, Alexander II after the painful loss of the Crimean War, Nicholas II after the disastrous defeat of Russia by Japan. Let me add Mikhail Gorbachev to this chain: he had good reason to make a desperate attempt to modernize the military and economic potential of the Soviet Union after its disgraceful failure in Afghanistan. Why don’t we then have a closer look at what motivates Russia concerning her modernizing efforts now? Is it a sincere wish to make the country a trustworthy partner and a reliable neighbor, instead of a constant existential threat and foe of the Baltic States and other neighboring countries? A clear conclusion that Russia, in the face of the dangerous growth of China’s power and prestige, has no other historical option than to take on the path leading to the strategic partnership with the United States and the EU? Or bitterness and anger about the greatest geopolitical catastrophe, as Vladimir Putin named the collapse of the Soviet Union? It is high time to answer these questions. Last but not least, it is pivotal for the EU to start speaking with one voice regarding the safety and security of every European nation. Otherwise, the major powers of Europe will fail, the European project eventually sliding into the sinister logic of the twentieth century. And one more question: does this all mean that Vladimir Lenin’s famous metaphor of the rope, which the greedy and stupid bourgeoisie of the West, according to him, will unavoidably craft for Soviet Russia only to be hanged by the Bolsheviks in due course, was a prophetic one? Trapped by Half-­Truth Are the Baltic countries and Ukraine really praising up to the skies their World War Two collaborators of the Nazis or else celebrating their disgraceful pages of the past? This is the question that arises upon hearing present Russia’s never-­ending insinuations on the Baltic States as failing to adopt the truly European standard in assessing the Second World War. In fact, Russia itself detests and furiously condemns any attempt to hold it accountable for the crimes against humanity it committed in the twentieth century. Small wonder that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has recently accused Ukraine and the Baltic States of historical revisionism and also of praise they allegedly gave to their collaborators of the Nazis. The rage can easily be explained by pointing to Russia’s fear of losing the remnants of its political and moral authority and, perhaps, even legitimacy if not as a superpower, then at least as a global player. Sweet lies to its own citizens and self-­deception seems all Russia has to offer to its older and younger generation hard-­line state supporters now. Being hesitant to

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admit its crimes and fallacies, Russia objects not only any equation of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany but also any stronger and symmetry-­of-­ crime-­based opinion on the Ribbentrop-­Molotov Pact in 1939. This does not mean, however, that there are no threats resulting from the equation of Nazism and Communism or from the idea of equivalency of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in terms of their crimes against humanity. However tempting it may be, the idea of the moral and political equivalency of National Socialism and Communism has its dark side. It concerns an unavoidable relativization, trivialization, and obfuscation of the Holocaust. Moreover, this idea can be grossly and dangerously misleading in nuances and details, although it can make sense from the point of view of conventional wisdom. In a way, both major totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century can be viewed as one another’s negative double. In fact, they have obviously closed ranks in their brutal practices, violent politics, political rituals, and social engineering undertakings. Small wonder that the Russian film director Mikhail Romm’s documentary Ordinary Fascism (1965), a masterpiece of Soviet cinema, mesmerized the audience precisely because it offered a proper, albeit carefully concealed, artistic language to expose, with the stroke of genius, a striking family resemblance of Nazism and Soviet Communism. Yet on a closer look it appears that we would unpardonably simplify things by holding these regimes to have been identical. Not because one was better or more humane than another, though. It is rather due to the fact that the paths of the West in treating them diverged irreversibly. The West was an ally to the Soviet Union. Even more importantly, the Soviet regime had gradually transformed itself into a sort of authoritarian dictatorship that, under Leonid Brezhnev, bore more family resemblance to cleptocratic and criminal regimes of Africa and South America than to Nazi Germany or even Stalinist Russia. The fact is that the West has worked out a modus vivendi with the Soviet regime, which lasted not 12 years like Nazism but more than seventy years. Whatever the case, we cannot succumb to temptation to adopt black-­ and-­white theories that rest on half-­truth. Russia’s fierce resistance to a wide international condemnation of the Ribbentrop-­Molotov Pact as the first move and one of the most real causes of the Second World War has nothing to do with European clashes of historical memory. Present Russia’s historical revisionism is not about history at all. It is about the present and the future. In fact, it is as much about history as the occupation of Ossetia and Abkhazia was about the defense of Russian citizens’ human rights. Let us call a spade a spade. Russia still tries hard to repaint and relegitimize its criminal policies in Chechnya and the lands of Georgia parroting Western

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political vocabulary and telling the world a blend of fantasy and joke about its struggle against international terrorism. Much in that same fashion, Russia, by denying the fact of the occupation and annexation of the Baltic States in 1940 and by justifying the Ribbentrop-­Molotov Pact, is paving the way to a new division of Europe and, presumably, to Finlandization of the Baltic countries. What happened to Georgia a couple of years ago may have been Russia’s attempt to set up a pattern for a similar scenario in Ukraine or the Baltics. Ironically, Mikhail Gorbachev appears to have been a dove of peace, and the USSR under him was a new and promising, albeit flawed, democracy compared with Putin-­ Medvedev’s Russia, which does not bother to embrace the ugly legacy of its totalitarian past as a source of national pride. True, the Russians, like many other nations, heroically fought the Nazis. The civilized world will never forget that. Yet heroism in the Second World War cannot become the license to rehabilitate Stalinism or, even worse, to justify and thus symbolically repeat the crimes of the past, recasting them as part of an internationally acceptable pattern of Realpolitik. A Lonely Voice of Despair During my recent visit to Washington, DC, my attention was caught by the letter of a Russian journalist published in The Wall Street Journal (Friday, November 12, 2010). The letter in question was a moving appeal to the politicians in the West, and also was an account of the lost friends written by Elena Milashina, an investigative journalist for Novaya Gazeta and a recipient of Human Rights Watch’s 2010 Alison Des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism. Novaya Gazeta covered nearly all politically charged, complicated, and controversial stories ranging from the sinking of the Kursk submarine in the Barents Sea in the year 2000 to the Beslan school siege in the fall of 2004. Whereas in the first case government officials tried to cover up the fact that 23 sailors aboard the submarine survived for many hours after a deadly explosion in the torpedo unit, in the second case the government reported 354 hostages, but Ms. Milashina herself reported over 1,000. More than that, Ms. Milashina and her fellow journalists from Novaya Gazeta destroyed the official version of the event, which suggested that the initial explosions in the school building were triggered by the hostage takers. The fearless Russian journalists proved the opposite: although it remains unclear whether or not the whole thing was staged, the undisputed fact is that the secret services fired first.

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In her note from Moscow, “The High Price of Journalism in Putin’s Russia,” Ms. Milashina reminds us of what is happening in the battlefield. While she describes the independence of Novaya Gazeta, some grim and telling facts come to us as a wake-­up call. As she notes, “Yet we have paid a heavy price for our independence. Over the past 10 years, five of Novaya Gazeta’s journalists have been murdered. One of the victims was our star correspondent and my mentor, Anna Politkovskaya, who was assassinated in 2006 after tirelessly exposing brutal human-­rights violations in Chechnya” (Milashina, 2010, A19). What can I say hearing such a testimony? I had met the incomparable Anna Politkovskaya in 2003. During a conference in Graz, Austria, she overtly spoke on the hell in Chechnya with all its war atrocities and severe, awful, routinized human-­rights violations. She went so far as to paint black on white all the war crimes committed by Russia in Chechnya. Some of my Russian and Belarusian colleagues left the conference room, most probably out of fear to be reported as her accomplices. I found myself enchanted with a fearless person whom I thanked for returning me the feeling of gratitude to, and love for, the Russia of Pyotr Chaadaev and Alexander Herzen. We had an unforgettable conversation after which I planned many times to invite her to my country. I planned to do so until the terrible news struck me in 2006. She was assassinated like many other best people of Russia against whom the regime waged war, this time after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A lonely voice of despair, Ms. Milashina’s letter led me to a comparison of Russia and the Baltic States in terms of freedom of expression and quality journalism. I have to say that each time I try to give it a thought, I find myself slightly confused. True, a deep gulf exists between Russia and us in terms of censorship or rather its absence, not to mention the political persecution of journalists and the silencing of dissenting voices. Yet our paths diverged not only from this point of view. Whereas such independent Russian publications as Novaya Gazeta, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, or www.grani.ru defend liberal and democratic values, their counterparts in Lithuania chose to rely on political scandals, cheep sensationalism, chilling statistics of Lithuania regarding its highest suicide rate in the world, unmatched degree of the bullying in high schools, and heartbreaking stories from the lives of local pop stars. I do not imply that all this does not exist in Russia. It certainly does. But they worked out a powerful antidote, which we have yet to develop in Lithuania. It is difficult to resist the temptation to sum it up as a typical twenty-­ first-­century failure to value political liberty and freedom of expression, while Russian journalists still pay the twentieth-­century price for freedom.

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And the name of that price is no more and no less than someone’s life taken suddenly, brutally, and unexpectedly. Truth stopped on the run. Life for truth-­telling, death for the privilege to remain a free and independent person in a country whose power structure denies the value of human life, worth, and dignity—­this is the lot of a Russian human rights activist or of a conscious journalist. The gate to success and to the world of entertainment is wide open, yet it closes each time the moral heirs of Chaadaev and Herzen attempt to remind authorities that Russia is not their property and that patriotism can be critical and demanding, instead of a sort of sugary aggression and contempt for disobedient neighbors combined with the whitewash of history. There is only one way for us to help Russia get rid of its imperial past and troubled political present. This is our sympathetic understanding of Russian democrats struggling for the democratic future of Russia. Each time the EU or its major members try to make it up to Putin and his ruling clique in the Kremlin instead of working with democratic politicians and dissenters, it comes as a silent betrayal of Anna Politkovskaya, Natalya Estemirova, and their noble cause. Why Do Russian Dissidents Hate the European Union? There has been an increase in references to the former great Soviet dissidents’ thoughts about today’s Western world in our press of late, and more often, about the state of the EU and European policies and consciousness. Likewise, the number of translated works on this topic that have been published in our press has also grown. This is a welcome and interesting development, as is anything else that broadens our field of critical thought and world view. At the same time, it is rather ambivalent. The point is that this interest in Russian dissidents’ and human rights defenders’ thoughts on the EU is not likely to be unambiguous in Lithuania. It is not hard to understand why our euroskeptics and radical nationalists often gladly base their arguments on the proclamations of the former great Soviet dissidents—­specific fragments are conveniently selected from their thoughts that give substance to a preconceived position or can be safely transferred to a completely different, albeit externally similarly sounding context. Politicians and commentators on many an occasion have cited harsh and polemical articles and comments by the legendary dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, otherwise worthy of much respect, where he states that political correctness is worse than Leninism, and practically derives the EU from the former Soviet Union, particularly from its last phase (see Bukovsky’s

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lecture at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia: http://1gatta-felice .livejournal.com/127043.html). Yes, this is the same fearless and ever-­humorous dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, brother-­in-­arms of Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, who was not afraid of Soviet psychiatrists who had him locked up in a psychiatric hospital (along with Ukrainian dissident Major General Pyotr Grigorenko) and pronounced insane. It was here that Bukovsky and the imprisoned psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman coauthored, around 1972, their famous, A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents. Bukovsky defended writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who were persecuted by the Soviet system and imprisoned. He defended Alexander Ginzburg, a friend of Lithuanian dissenters Aleksandras Shtromas and Tomas Venclova (see Donskis, 2002), along with many other dissidents. It was this nonconformist of unbreakable will that the Soviets, under pressure from the West, primarily the United States, exchanged for the then imprisoned leader of Chile’s Communist party, Luis Corvalán. In this way, Bukovsky ended up in Switzerland on December 18, 1976, and later found himself in England. It is no surprise that immediately after this event a real pearl in Soviet dissident poetry was born—­a Russian two-­liner about the desire to get rid of the serving Soviet Communist party leader Leonid Brezhnev: Obmeniali khuligana na Luisa Korvalana. Gde naiti takuyu bliad’, chtob na Lioniu obmeniat’? (They exchanged the hooligan for Luis Corvalán. Where can such a whore be found, to exchange for Lionya now?)

But is Bukovsky correct on all fronts in his recent lectures and publications, not to say massive attacks, on the EU, political correctness, Western European and North American leftists’ myopic and incurably naïve views regarding the former Soviet Union and present Russia? Yes and no. He has the right to make such claims because he confronted real totalitarianism in all its glory. That is why confronting the softer, gentler forms of today’s Western totalitarianism (termed so by the insightful and talented Russian journalist Yulia Latynina) understandably arouses something of an allergy and a sense of déjà vu in the dissident. It was these soft forms of totalitarianism in the West—­successfully, if not de jure, then de facto sanctioned violence against the democratic order and tolerance of real barbarism, the unpunished propagation of terror and violent policies, calling it a fight for identity and social justice, as well as open forms of censure, which Bukovsky described in his resonant article.

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A renowned American publishing house has refused to publish Bukovsky’s unique book (translated into many other languages and already released in several countries in the West), based on an analysis of secret Kremlin documents, unless he rewrites it from a leftist liberal position. It is not hard to imagine Bukovsky’s reaction and where he told the honorable editor to go—­in his mind, of course. This in itself is shameful—­it is censorship in its purest form. Readers could argue until they were blue in the face whether Bukovsky and Latynina were absolutely justified in calling the West’s left (some of whom are undoubtedly from an intellectual and moral perspective inadequate, twisted Stalinists and admirers of the policy of violence and cult ideologies) a form of soft totalitarianism, against which, much like other variants of soft totalitarianism, the West has already lost. But it is no use arguing when they speak out about new forms of censorship in the United States and Western Europe. In this case, they are most certainly correct. Just like Bukovsky—­a biologist who has worked in American and English universities—­is correct in pointing out the widespread conformity in Western universities. But Bukovsky’s and Latynina’s position is, in essence, not indefectible or absolutely correct—­there has not been a hint of ideological socialism in the West for a long time, where a much greater threat to the West itself, and to us, is the transformation of our world into a total market and universal field of consumerism, followed by merely simulated concessions to the left and a partial legitimization of its rhetoric—­the origins of the political correctness phenomenon. The best evidence of this is the history of the term “politically correct.” It is taken from a book of quotes and thoughts by Mao Zedong, “the great leader” of the Chinese nation and the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China, which was very popular among California University’s Berkeley professors and students from 1968, and was called the “little red book.” In it, the great leader Mao used this term, denoting that which was politically correct from a people’s and party approach, and that which was not. Incidentally, an analogous party idiom was used by Soviet functionaries as well. It is this new, inconceivable Western combination of the far right and the far left, the purest political schizophrenia—­their existence not as parallel worlds, almost independent of one another, as was the case earlier, but their complete unison that Bukovsky tries to explain. However, it is unfortunate that he does this inaccurately, and makes some sweeping generalizations. There is much truth in his words, but there are also significantly doubtful claims.

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In his immortal essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” as noted, Milan Kundera wrote about Western Europe’s Manichaeism of the right and the left, which appeared to him to be colossally stupid and insurmountable. In one respect, he was right—­Manichaeism certainly existed and it truly appeared grotesque after 1968 when students in Paris carried transparencies with the names and faces of people in whose name the peaceful Prague revolution was killed and the life of half of Europe was destroyed. In another respect, he was wrong—­after all, he could not have envisaged that he was on the cusp of the nearing and eventual convergence of the mentioned parallel Western worlds. 1968 was the last frontier when it was still possible to differentiate between the right and the left in Europe and in the United States. The secret that everyone today actually knows, but is too afraid or unwilling to discuss, is that now they are no different from one another. They are the two faces of Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings, or of Hegel and Marx, who were, God forbid, prognostically correct—­the most portent unison of opposites. Finally we have reached the era of true dialectics. Incidentally, it is worth remembering that Czeslaw Milosz in The Captive Mind consciously identified the Soviet version of the Hegel-­Marx dialectic, and George Orwell’s Newspeak featured in 1984 as logically related expressions. Only that Orwell would have said this somewhat differently—­it is doublethink, or the act of simultaneously accepting as correct two mutually contradictory beliefs. It is not cynicism, but the genuine belief that two contradictory things really do exist. It all depends on who asks, where, and when. We are all for capitalism and the market when we win from its financial opportunities, but we stand up against it when we need social solidarity or at least minimal popularity in society. It is a situational truth, or a mobile truth, as noted by Erich Fromm commenting on the phenomenon described in American writer Alan Harrington’s novel Life in the Crystal Palace (1959)—­a freely convertible and continually changing belief in that which makes us feel safer for at least the slightest moment. It is particularly typical among job seekers. You advertise a company’s product or a college program and honestly believe that it is the best in the world. But as soon as you are fired or transfer to a competing firm, with that same ambition and burning belief in your eyes you start to spread the truth to the world about its product. As Erich Fromm observes, An American writer, Alan Harrington, who in Life in the Crystal Palace gives a subtle and penetrating picture of life in a big American corporation, has coined an excellent expression for the contemporary concept of truth: “mobile truth.” If I work for a big corporation which claims that its product

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is better than that of all competitors, the question whether this claim is justified or not in terms of ascertainable reality becomes irrelevant. What matters is that as long as I serve this particular corporation, this claim becomes “my” truth, and I decline to examine whether it is an objectively valid truth. In fact, if I change my job and move over to the corporation which was until now “my” competitor, I shall accept the new truth, that its product is the best, and subjectively speaking, this new truth will be as true as the old one. It is one of the most characteristic and destructive developments of our own society that man, becoming more and more of an instrument, transforms reality more and more into something relative to his own interests and functions. Truth is proven by the consensus of millions; to the slogan “how can millions be wrong” is added “and how can a minority of one be right.” (Fromm, 1961, 263–­264)

It is in fact a combination of the structure of capitalism and the energy of socialism—­the intertwining of the right and the left as if in a Bach fugue (for more on this issue, see Andersson, 2010). Leftist millionaires—­like, for example, George Soros or Hollywood actors—­are an excellent illustration of this phenomenon. You make your millions from the same structure that leads countless countries into bankruptcy, and that forces two and a half billion people on our planet to live on two US dollars a day, as Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, but then you rush to denounce it and convert to critical rhetoric and charitable practices as soon as you decide to help those who live on those two US dollars a day in the same structure that is supported and strengthened from your own business or speculative stock market activities. The encounter of the ideological and political extremes of the right and the left constitutes the real drama of our liquid modernity. A double-­faced Janus, one of its faces interchanging with the other, or, in terms of the infinity of the Faustian soul as Oswald Spengler would have it, one musical phrase lending its elements to another one and thus melting in an indistinguishable totality of complex power (or law and order, or harmony, if you will) structure in a Bach fugue or choral prelude. Of the fusion of the values of the right and the left vis-­à-­vis capitalism in the Third Way, and a rapid process of the capitalization of noneconomic fields of human activity, Jenny Andersson writes, There seem to be virtually no values, to contemporary social democracy, that are not also economic values . . . This reflects what I have described as a process of capitalization: The Third Way turns notions of good that historically were noneconomic goods, such as creativity and curiosity, into new commodities and indeed new forms of capital. This could be put more bluntly: In the Third Way, social democracy’s critique of capitalism has been replaced

96      Modernity in Crisis by a theory of capital, by a theory how to create value in the knowledge economy. In so doing it elevates principles of prosperity and efficiency into hegemonic notions of value and worth and makes alternative definitions of value seem frivolous. In this process—­in the process of constantly defining everything in terms of its potential use value in the new economy—­social democracy is an active agent in the constitution of an economy that might make us prosperous in some ways and infinitely poorer in others. (ibid., 157)

Instead of revealing the real division of Western politics into two parallel realities and the betrayals of conscience and freedom of thought that came from this divide, Bukovsky unfortunately deals out cheap and easy trump cards into the hands of Eastern Europe’s nationalists and extreme right wingers (or left wingers—­it is after all a matter of political modality and situational shift)—­who, alas, shout louder than they think. Our political and ideological prudes do not even fully understand what this political correctness means, despite regularly accusing their ever-­ proper and polite opponents of it, the loyal users of a civilized vocabulary. Everything here is deemed as political correctness that does not hint at disrespect for our fellow man, a scandalized comprehension of reality, seeing society only in black and white, or loud speeches about a world that is seething with enemies. Is Yulia Latynina correct (see http://demset.org/f/showthread.php?t =1233) in stating that Western and EU human rights defenders do not defend those who live in a zone of methodical and constant violence— that they do not fight against criminal regimes, for example, against the very same Taliban whose fanatics shot at the heads of women kneeling in a stadium? According to her, they are primarily concerned with the state of prisons in their own countries and the shortcomings of democratic politics. Yes and no. All professional human rights defenders that are concerned over war crimes or the state of prisons in democratic countries simply must do this. Human rights must be defended everywhere. It is regretful if nongovernment organizations or especially journalists interested in human rights are afraid or do not want to cover cases where sadists and fanatics decapitate their colleague, American journalist Daniel Pearl, only because he was a Jew. It is a sad fact that there is less interest in such macabre events than in Guantanamo prison itself (where, incidentally, in 2007 terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed admitted to decapitating Pearl). But it does not follow that this prison and the violations of human rights that take place there must be ignored. Ideological selectivity in general in the field of human rights, whereby some people are considered more worthy of compassion and sympathy

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than others, distorts the defense of human rights no less than EU politicians’ manipulation of Andrei Sakharov’s name—­knowing full well that today those same politicians would not dare to repeat that which was said by Andrei Sakharov. This was convincingly covered by his wife and comrade-­in-­arms Elena Bonner (for more on this issue, see http://grani .ru/Politics/World/Mideast/m.151256.html). It is not difficult to solve this riddle: Soviet and Russian dissidents risked their lives for the opportunity to tell the truth. They could have been killed, and might still be killed, at any moment. This threat is significantly minimal, or perhaps it does not exist at all in the EU or the United States, where moralizing is done from a safe distance and politically convenient, safe targets are usually chosen—­democratic countries that will not seek revenge or respond with violence. In their view, their real respect and trust cannot be won by those who, according to Vladimir Sorokin, have never felt the taste of Russia—­a mix of vodka, snow, and blood, who speak the dead, soulless, and wooden language of bureaucrats, yet sit with a glass of fine French wine in their hands in their political groups and decide on which Russian or Chinese dissident is worthy of a prize named after a man who denounced the whole Realpolitik and called it a self-­comprehending lie, contrasting it to the idea of human rights not as an aspect of Realpolitik, but as its alternative and a policy of truth. For example, the open EU opposition toward Israel—­undoubtedly an imperfect and fallible, but democratic state—­yet at the same time calling it its friend and ally for naming dissidents and critics of the regime who methodically destroy Putin’s Russia, where there is not a hint of democracy, would be seen by Sakharov as an expression of fear and feebleness, and a lie. This is certainly not something to be argued about with Elena Bonner. And if such ideas are not acceptable, then it is no use trying to symbolically appropriate Andrei Sakharov’s name. Mistrust of the West’s Realpolitik is also a regular topic of Andrei Sakharov’s comrade Sergei Kovalev. I have the honor of knowing this wonderful person, and remember how he once openly admitted to me inside the chambers of the European Parliament that the naivety of West Europeans regarding Russia was merely a mask and convenient screen that relieved their conscience and sense of responsibility. Did they not understand then, in 1937, what was happening when Lion Feuchtwanger described Russia as a wonderful and advanced country, and Stalin as a great antifascist? Naivety is indeed a mask. They understood everything then, just as they understand everything now, according to Kovalev. They simply learned how to live with foreign fascism, and

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only have no tolerance for fascism of their own kind: this is the root of antifascist Feuchtwanger’s acceptance of Stalin the “antifascist.” As mentioned, this line of thought was similarly formulated by another esteemed Russian defender of human rights—­Stanislav Dmitrievsky. This was how he described Westerners’ position: “I know that they (i.e., Russia) are lying and they know that I understand that they are lying.” But it would be considered impolite to ruin the ball by rising at the table and saying, gentlemen, I am afraid that you are lying . . . But the point is that we idealized the West for so many years. So did the dissidents. During the Cold War the West itself believed in its moral superiority above the Soviet Union and all the other antidemocratic regimes. Today, that trust in the absolute moral superiority of democracy against antidemocratic regimes has been lost. Unfortunately, that is a fact. Therefore, the criticism of Russian dissidents often comes across as the voice of a disenchanted lover, as disillusionment in that which seemed as the only just and free space. Alas, while you are in prison, the reality beyond the prison walls will always appear more beautiful than it really is. We cannot fall for the illusion that in our world, the truth lies in only one territory and that it can be monopolized by someone. After all, not everything is as it should be in the West, just as not everything is so miserable in Russia, where besides Putinism there is also a brilliant intelligentsia and a great culture. It is no wonder that someone from the Russian dissidents who had lived in the West exclaimed that unfortunately, Soviet propaganda spoke a lot of truth about capitalism and the West. The problem, according to him, was that it wrote complete nonsense about socialism and the Soviet Union itself. Whatever the case may be, it would be absurd to place an equal sign between the EU and the Soviet Union, or between the West’s liberal democracy and the Chinese model—­capitalism without political freedom, or tyranny with a free market. The defense of human rights in the EU and journalists’ freedom to examine and write as they please, while journalists in Russia who become the Kremlin’s critics are simply exterminated. In China not only nonconformists are imprisoned but also the attorneys who defend them in court. Can any equality or equivalency be seen here? And besides, do we have another alternative? Create an EU ourselves and then freely criticize it? Or cast everything aside and go back to the future or forward into the past?

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Seeking Safety and Security in an Unsafe and Insecure World Curiously enough, the independence of Lithuania, proclaimed and regained on March 11, 1990, was inseparable from the country’s long fight for the right to close down the Ignalina nuclear power plant. After the Chernobyl tragedy, there was little if any trust in the ability of the then collapsing Soviet Union to meet Western European standards of technological credibility, not to mention the resulting human safety and energy security. Hence there was a fierce opposition in the late 1980s to the idea of prolonging the functioning of the Ignalina nuclear plant, which was widely perceived then as a time bomb able to undermine the future existence of Lithuania. To cut a convoluted story short, it was a high point in the history of the Lithuanian Green Movement, which coincided with the fear that the emerging independence of Lithuania would be fatally undermined by the legacy of Soviet-­style technology and lack of transparency. Whatever the case, we were to become, in the long run, a society of fears and risks, like any other modern, liberal, and free-­market-­economy-­based society in Europe. What appeared in the 1980s as the worst-­case scenario of Lithuania with its dark promises of the new Chernobyl, turned out to be a corner stone of Lithuania’s economic potential, not to say its independence in the 1990s. In fact, we learned how to capitalize on our former sources of fear, unsafety, insecurity, and uncertainty, thus turning our anxieties and seemingly weak points into our advantages. The funny thing was that the nuclear power plant, whose abandonment had long symbolized the triumph of Lithuania’s independence and dignity, became the essence of the new independence discourse in the next decade, this time describing the plant as indispensable and instrumental in keeping Lithuania economically alive and well. Small wonder, then, that the requirement of the EU to close the Ignalina nuclear plant as a condition sine qua non, without which Lithuania would have been unable to join the EU, became the new tool in the hands of both more or less serious politicians and populists. Whereas the former insisted that the closing of the Ignalina plant jeopardized the economic independence and even the political future of Lithuania, our populists quickly learned how to come up with dramatic, albeit senseless, questions about our energy well-­being offered to the European Commission, as if to say that they all woke up and started caring about the “abandoned” country. Yet Eastern European countries seem locked mentally somewhere between the discovery of the intrinsic logic of capitalism characteristic of the nineteenth century and post-­Weimar Republic period—­an incredibly fast economic growth and a passionate advocacy of the values of free

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enterprise and capitalism, accompanied by a good deal of anomie, fission of the body social, stark social contrasts, shocking degree of corruption, culture of poverty (to recall Oscar Lewis’s term, which refers to low trust, self-­victimization, disbelief in social ties and networks, contempt for institutions, etc.), and cynicism. Our postmodern and posttotalitarian era, in the Baltic region, proved capable of squeezing two centuries of uninterrupted European history within one decade of the “transition” of the Baltic States and other East-­ Central European countries from the planned economy of Communism to free-­market economy and global capitalism. In a way, Eastern Europe appears to have become a kind of laboratory where the speed of social change and cultural transformation could be measured and tested. In fact, the Baltic countries and their societies are far ahead of what we know as the grand historical narrative, or, plainly, predictable and moralizing history; nay, these societies are faster than history. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, identity and morality became, in the Baltic States, core issues of political existence. It was tempting to apply to the Baltic countries that description by which Kundera attempted, in his “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” to identify Central European countries—­a huge variety of culture and thought in a small area. Yet the question immediately raised was whether the tie that binds us to our neighbors, Latvia and Estonia, will be just a remembrance of common enslavement and a sense of insecurity. Will we be able to create a new Baltic regional identity—­one that is both global and open and in which we can map our past and our present according to altogether different criteria? Up to now modernity in Western Europe was supplying a theory to explain the world around us; the point is that Eastern Europe has changed the world, becoming more than a theory-­emanating entity. Eastern Europe is a laboratory of change and a vast area of side effects and damage inflicted by modernity on the world. As such, it still supplies empirical evidence to the West to judge the “second modernity” (according to Ulrich Beck), or “liquid modernity” (as Zygmunt Bauman would have it), squeezed and condensed here in less than two decades. As Vytautas Kavolis described the Baltic region, it appears as a laboratory of change deeply embedded in Eastern Europe, itself a boundary region of Europe—­the laboratory where the great challenges and tensions of modernity can be tested, and where the scenarios for European life in the not-­too-­distant future take shape.

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Does the Baltic Region Exist after 1990? What is the relationship between Lithuania and the other two Baltic nations? It differs from Latvia and Estonia in more than one way. No matter how rich in historically formed religious communities and minorities it is, Catholic Lithuania, due to its historic liaisons with Poland and other Central and Eastern European nations, is much more of an East-­Central European nation than Lutheran Latvia and Estonia. Therefore, it would be quite misleading to assume seemingly identical paths by the Baltic States to their role and place in modern history. Lithuania’s history and its understanding would be unthinkable without taking into account such Eastern and Central European countries as Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. Latvia is inseparable from major German and Swedish influences, and Estonia from Swedish and Danish, not to mention its close cultural ties with Finland. Lithuania is an old polity with a strong presence in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Latvia and Estonia emerged as new political actors in the twentieth century. It was with sound reason, then, that after 1990, when Lithuania and the other two Baltic nations became independent, politicians and the media started making jokes about the unity of the three Baltic sisters, which was achieved by them through their common experience of having once been three inmates in the same prison cell. Small wonder, then, that this led Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a former foreign minister (now president) of Estonia, to describe Estonia as a Nordic country rather than a Baltic nation. In fact, once they had come into existence, the Baltic States underwent considerable political changes in the twentieth century. It is worth recalling that Finland, before the Second World War, was considered a Baltic State too. That is to say that four Baltic States existed in interwar Europe. The fact that only three entered the twenty-­first century is a grimace of recent history. Yet some similarities and affinities between the Baltic States are too obvious to need emphasis. All three nations stood at the same historic crossroads after the First World War. All were linked to the fate of Russia in terms of (in)dependence and emancipation. All three existed as independent states from 1918 to 1940. At that time, all three introduced liberal minority policies, granting a sort of personal, nonterritorial cultural autonomy to their large minorities, Lithuania to its Jewish, Latvia to German, and Estonia to German and Russian minorities. All three sought strength and inspiration in their ancient languages and cultures. All have a strong Romantic element in their historical memory and self-­perception. Last but not least, all benefited from émigrés and their role in politics and culture. It suffices to mention that the presidents of all three Baltic States

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have been, or continue to be, émigrés, who spent much of their lives abroad and who returned to their respective countries when they restored independence after 1990: Valdas Adamkus in Lithuania, Vaira Vyke-­Freiberga in Latvia, and Toomas Hendrik Ilves in Estonia. Most importantly, the trajectories of the Lithuanian and Baltic identity allow us to understand the history of the twentieth century better than anything else. Yet the questions arise: What will the Baltic Region be like in the twenty-­ first century? What will be the common denominator between Klaipeda, Riga, Tallinn, Kaliningrad, and St. Petersburg in the new epoch? Will the Baltic States come closer to the Nordic states, or will they remain a border region in which contrasting Eastern and Western European conceptions of politics and public life continue to fight it out among themselves? Will we able to apply to the Baltic countries that description by which Milan Kundera attempted to identify Central European countries—­a huge variety of culture and thought in a small area? Will the tie that binds us to our neighbors be just a remembrance of common enslavement and a sense of insecurity, or will we create a new Baltic regional identity, one that is both global and open and in which we can map our past and our present according to altogether different criteria? These are some of the questions the Baltic Region raises: formulating them is no less useful and meaningful than answering them. Possibly here is where some vital experiences are tried out, experiences that larger, more influential countries have not yet had but that await them in the future. It may be that the Baltics were and still remain a laboratory where the great challenges and tensions of modernity can be tested and the scenarios for European life in the not-­too-­distant future take shape. Faster Than History Interestingly enough, the “faster than history” idiom acquires a special meaning when dealing with social change in Central and Eastern Europe. The speed of time in what Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, each in his own way, described as “yet another Europe” is beyond the historical, cultural, and political imaginations of Western Europeans and North Americans. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, post-­Soviet and post-­ Communist countries underwent considerable social and cultural change. To paraphrase the title of Kundera’s novel that became one more admirable idiom to express the East-­Central European sense of history and grasp of life, all this leads to the experience of the unbearable lightness of change. What happened in Western Europe was that the greatest events and civilization-­shaping movements of centuries acquired a form—­in Central

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and Eastern Europe—­of mandatory and rapid economic and political programs that had to be implemented by successor states of the Soviet Union. This is to say that the new democracies had to catch up with Western European history to qualify for the exclusive and honorary club of Europe. Moreover, “yet another Europe” had to become even faster than history, transforming itself into a more or less recognizable collective actor of the global economy and politics. Capitalism, which had long been presented in Soviet high school textbooks as the major menace to humankind, now seems more aggressive and dynamic in post-­Soviet societies than in far more moderate, timid, egalitarian, social-­democratic, welfare-­state-­orientated, and postcapitalist Western European countries. Sweden, Finland, and the rest of the Nordic countries, for instance, can only marvel at what they perceive as a sort of old-­fashioned, historically recycled, and ruthless capitalism of the Baltics, or to put in more conventional terms, the libertarian economy of Estonia and other Baltic countries. The countries that used to symbolize to Soviet citizens the embodiment of “wild capitalism” with its overt glorification of the winners and contempt for the losers now appear to them as astonishingly communitarian, warm, and humane. Indeed, they are pure and innocent compared with the “first come, first served” or “grab the stolen” or “catch it all” type of mentality that paradoxically, albeit logically, blends with a sort of Marxism turned upside down—­ this extremely vulgar variety of economic determinism and materialism in Lithuania and other East-­Central European countries barely surprises those who know quite well that the last thing we could expect to be named among priorities there is culture. Although quite a few pay lip service to it without giving much consideration as to how to foster intellectual dialogue among countries, somehow almost everybody agrees there that the West has to pay for “the culture, uniqueness, and spirituality” of posttotalitarian countries—­generous grants in exchange for suffering and unique experience. If we want to imagine a blend of nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century phenomena of consciousness, politics, and culture, then we can safely assume that our postmodern and posttotalitarian era proved capable of squeezing two centuries of uninterrupted European history into one decade of the “transition” of Lithuania from the planned economy of Communism to a free-­market economy and global capitalism. In a way, Lithuania appears to have become a kind of laboratory where the speed of social change and cultural transformation could be measured and tested. Indeed, Lithuania is far ahead of what we know as the grand

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historical narrative, or, plainly, predictable and moralizing history; nay, these societies are faster than history. They are faster than history, yet slower than a lifetime. People often complain here that their lives and careers have been ruined by this rapid social change and grand transformation. They take it as a tragedy arguing (and not without reason) that their lives, energies, and works have been wasted, if not completely spoiled. A lifetime of a human being proves insufficient to witness a thrilling and sweeping transformation of society. Vytautas Kavolis worked out a theory of postmodernism as an attempt to reconcile what has been separated by modernity. At the same time, the idea of postmodernism served, for Kavolis, as an interpretative framework for the split between the modernist and the antimodernist. He accorded the concept of the postmodern to the process of desovietization, too: “If desovietization, in its diversity of forms, continues relatively unhindered and does not become complacent with its own rhetoric, it has the potentiality of becoming a first-­rate (that is, ‘enriching’) civilizational movement. If the concept of the ‘postmodern’ can still be retrieved from the cultists who have made it a monopoly of their own exuberance, desovietization could even be considered, in some of its cultural emphases, as ‘postmodern.’ (I conceive of the ‘postmodern’ not as antimodernist, but as the building of bridges between the ‘modernist’ and the ‘antimodernist.’)” (Kavolis, 1995, 166). Artists and humanists in Lithuania might fill many gaps and bridge some parts of human sensibility divided between disciplines and scattered across the universe of our global culture. They are ahead of many social and political processes that are on their way to Lithuania. They predict and passionately deny these processes, laugh at them, make fun of them, anticipate and critically question them. The contemporary art has become a sort of social and cultural critique in our postmodern world—­yet this applies to Central and Eastern European societies better than to anybody else. At the same time, contemporary art and culture may prevent the spread of one more disease of our time—­unlimited manipulations of public opinion shamelessly performed in the name of freedom and democracy. It can do this by calling into question everything that fails to do justice to humanity or respect human dignity. In doing so, contemporary artists and scholars would be able to find their raison d’être in our age of the divorce of words and meanings, power and politics, politeness and sensitivity—­ along with their efforts to help restore the damaged sociability and power of association crucial for their societies. In the twentieth century, modern artists hated the crowd intensely and spoke up in favor of the individual. Postmodern art, if properly understood, could advocate community, thus attempting reconciliation of the individual and community or society.

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Whatever the speed of life and the intensity of change, our epoch can be faster than history—­especially if measured like it was measured a century ago. Yet it will always be slower than a lifetime of a particular human individual. The efforts within contemporary culture to reconcile the individual with him or herself, with community, society, and history would therefore come as a perfect tribute to what always remains beyond or ahead of history—­values, humanity, and the miracle of human dialogue. The Culture of Poverty In fact, the culture of determinism is also characteristic of what Oscar Lewis described as the culture of poverty (see Lewis, 1996). The culture of poverty is not identical to real poverty, according to Lewis, who for many years had studied the trajectories of the identities of people living in the shanties of Puerto Rico and Mexico, their value orientations and evaluations of the world. There are cases, when groups living in poverty have their social networks, conspicuous cooperation and social forms (for instance, Eastern Europe’s Jews during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century or craftsmen from India). The culture of poverty manifests itself first of all in an absolute distrust of institutions and the state, unwillingness to participate in the state’s life, and the conviction that everything in the world is predetermined—­social roles, distribution of power, wealth, and poverty. Let us say that the culture of poverty was not characteristic of Fidel Castro’s postrevolution Cuba, since the society (even the poorest layers of it) acquired its value and a sense of the meaning of life, as Lewis had noticed, in the revolution. A strong sense of fatalism, a low level of social trust, a matriarchal family, a man’s distancing of himself from the most important family problems—­these are all characteristic of the culture of poverty. In other words, this whole anthropological complex of the culture of poverty clearly points to the fact that it is a variant of determinism. Incidentally, Lewis has discovered that the main characteristics of the culture of poverty—­isolation, disbelief in the possibility of social linkage, fatalism, distrust of everything—­have been encountered even in wealthy people’s thinking and worldviews. At this point, it is worth remembering that Kavolis, as early as 1996, once asked rhetorically whether the culture of poverty exists in Lithuania. In fact, ample evidence shows the solid foundations that the culture of poverty has in Lithuania. As recent sociological polls suggest, a strong sense of helplessness, fatalism, and failure is accompanied by a growing hostility to liberal democracy and democratic institutions—­quite a few Lithuanians would prefer the authoritarian leader

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instead of parliamentary democracy and would favor the strong man’s rule rather than the rule of law, representation, and the division of powers. Powers of association have deteriorated considerably. Social atomization and the fragmentation of society have gone so far as to allow us to talk about new forms of cultural colonization, isolation and marginalization. The Soviet regime seems to have transformed Lithuania into a kind of low-­trust nation where disbelief in authorities and institutions threatens the fragile foundations of civil society, yet where people—­oddly enough—­ place an enormous amount of trust in the media and TV in particular. This sort of explosive and destructive potential was revealed and successfully exploited by Lithuanian populists during the presidential election in 2002 and afterward. People of the older generation often feel that their lives have been spoiled, if not totally wasted. Many of them have lost their jobs and savings. Their children have left the country and settled in Ireland or Spain, whereas they have to live on a miserable pension. It is hardly possible to convince these people that Lithuania has a vibrant economy or that it is “a Baltic tiger” (as Poland’s Leszek Balcerowicz once described it). Although this is actually the case, quite a large segment of Lithuanian society lives beyond the EU reality. In fact, Lithuania has the highest suicide rate in the world—­quite a sad and scary fact that might shed new light on the degree of social depression, alienation, and despair in Lithuanian society. Moreover, growing emigration has deprived the country of many young and highly qualified people—­nearly five hundred thousand have left Lithuania over the past twenty years settling in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, and Western Europe. Consequently the country has lost much of its potential, and the countryside has been deprived of some prospects for more rapid economic and social development. The fragmentation and segmentation of Lithuanian society has reached dangerous limits and can become a threat to democracy, not to mention social cohesion and civic solidarity. During the Paksas scandal, which ended in 2004 with the impeachment of Lithuanian President Rolandas Paksas, some political commentators and politicians coined the phrase “two Lithuanias,” thus dividing Lithuanian society into the “sugar beets”—­ the term runkeliai in Lithuanian is a far from innocent word, and in this context appears as a derogatory term—­and the “élite.” At this point, great uncertainty hangs over Lithuania’s future. As the presidential scandal has shown, there are still all too many temptations to talk of two Lithuanias. On the one hand, there is the westward-­looking and dynamic Lithuania, celebrating its dynamism and rejoicing over the accession of Lithuania to the EU and NATO. On the other, there is the

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élite-­abandoned, long-­suffering, divided, and depressed Lithuania, longing for something like the equality-­in-­misery it knew in the Soviet Union. Each time it comes to an election, a certain segment of society perceives the vote as an opportunity for revenge against the much-­hated and semimythical élite. Usually these voters of despair and revenge are described as the aforementioned sugar beets, although it would be naïve to reduce this problem to the depressed countryside. Not a few Lithuanian public figures overtly supported former functionaries, not to mention the nouveaux riches. Even so, it does not explain the roots of the culture of poverty in Lithuania—­bearing in mind Lewis’s idea that the culture of poverty does not necessarily coincide with actual poverty. At this point, most telling is the fact that 34.2 percent of Lithuanians—­according to the results of sociological poll conducted by the market analysis and research group Rait on December 2–­5, 2004—­think that the period of 1990–­2004 (i.e., the period of the newly gained independence of Lithuania) was the most unfortunate period in the country’s entire history. Only 29.7 percent of respondents reserved this honor for the Soviet period, and even fewer—­22.7 percent—­ for the period under Tsarist Russia (1795–­1915; for more on this, see http://www.rait.lt/). Small wonder, then, that many commentators shocked by this outcome jumped to conclusions diagnosing a new social disease and suggesting that Lithuania is suffering from an identity crisis, amnesia, political illiteracy, the loss of the sense of history, and ultimately, the disappearance of national pride. The culture of complaints coupled with the culture of poverty goes so far as to depict Lithuania as an unfortunate, corrupt, cynical, predatory, amoral country devoid of justice, benevolence, fairness, and respect for human dignity, the country that does not have a future among civilized countries of the EU, and so forth. Yet on a closer inspection, it appears that the main characteristics of the culture of poverty—­isolation, disbelief in a possibility of social link, fatalism, distrust of everything—­are stronger in Lithuania than ever. Most probably it is the high price Lithuania has to pay for an incredibly fast and drastic sociocultural change. This became especially obvious from 2009 on, as Lithuania—­and Latvia as well—­suffered a dramatic slowdown of their economies accompanied by a backlash of far-­right, xenophobic, homophobic, and antisemitic attitudes (see Donskis, 2009). Lithuania went so far as to challenge core European values, such as human rights and civil liberties, and to question the moral validity of the EU.

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The Encounter of Two Europes: The Old and the New July 14, 2009, was a historic date that marked 220 years from the beginning of the French Revolution. We would have expected a celebration of the date trying to embrace the new reality of Europe—­first and foremost, its unique and historically unprecedented solidarity. We would have thought that the day marked the reconciliation of Europe, the Old and the New—­to use Donald Rumsfeld’s parlance—­especially in light of the election of the Polish MEP Jerzy Buzek, the former prime minister of Poland and one of the heroes of the Solidarity movement, President of the European Parliament. A unique chance opened up to put many things behind us, including the frequent clashes of the moral and political sensibilities of the “two Europes,” meaning the Old Europe’s liberal and tolerant attitudes toward human diversity, and the New Europe’s old-­fashioned infatuations and reactive conservatism. Yet this was not to be. It would have been too good to be true. How ironic that on that same day when the newly elected European Parliament opened its plenary session, the Seimas (Lithuania’s parliament) adopted the law that turned down, almost overnight, everything that today’s Europe stands for and is all about. The new Lithuanian Law on the Protection of Minors from the Detrimental Effects of Public Information adopted on July 14, 2009, struck human rights defenders and media people, both in Lithuania herself and in the EU, as overtly homophobic and profoundly undemocratic. This law was vetoed twice by the former President of Lithuania Valdas Adamkus, yet he was overruled by the Seimas. In addition, the law was severely criticized by the current President of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaite. More than that, the law in question has been assessed in vigorous terms by the Lithuanian media, political commentators, and several civil liberties and human rights defenders who have stressed its homophobic substance along with its dangerous political implications, such as censorship and self-­ censorship. Needless to say, this law had little if anything to do with the protection of children. Instead, it was against gay and lesbian citizens of the country. Whatever the case, the equation of homosexuality to physical violence and necrophilia is morally repugnant and deeply disgraceful. Still, it was difficult to believe that the adoption of such a law was possible in an EU country at the beginning of the twenty-­first century. We can take this law as an unfortunate move or as a profound misunderstanding, to say the very least. Changes to articles 310 in the penal code, and 214 in the administrative code were debated in the Seimas that would criminalize—­ with the threat of a fine, community work, or imprisonment—­anyone involved in the “promotion” of homosexuality in “any public space.” If this

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is not the slide to state-­sponsored homophobia and the criminalization of public self-­expression by Lithuania’s gay and lesbian citizens, what is it? Is it not a sad reminder of the cycle of abuse in a country that suffered isolation and humiliation for more than five decades? This law was a disgrace, but even more so would be an attempt to obfuscate, trivialize, and in effect, justify it. This is why a sort of déjà vu appeared on hearing how some conservative politicians in the European Parliament (EP) tried to depict the EP Resolution on this law as a blow allegedly dealt by the EP to the national parliament of a sovereign country. In their understanding, the idea to ask for the Human Rights Agency’s expert opinion on whether this law contradicts fundamental rights would jeopardize the independence and sovereignty of Lithuania. If we apply double standards refusing to react to the violations of human rights within the EU, yet simultaneously engaging in verbose assaults on Russia, China, or Iran, are we not in peril of closing ranks with those profoundly undemocratic countries? What would be the dividing line between the EU and Russia if we had adopted the principle of noninterference with national parliaments on such matters as human rights? This would signify the end of Europe the way it is now. If so much sound and fury comes defending the “holy” rights of the national parliament to criminalize diversity, are we not at risk of transforming the EU into merely an amoral trading bloc? All in all, European values, norms, and solidarity prevailed, and the EP sent a powerful message reasserting the simple truth that civil liberties and human rights can never be confined to domestic affairs. They are not the property of the state, no matter how just and democratic that state might be. And they never will be so as far as the EU is concerned. What happened to us? Did we decide to use the package of democracy in a nonchalant and selective way, appropriating some parts that suit us while discarding what we dislike? Had it become the enthusiastic “yes” to the simplistic notion of democracy as a 50 + 1 methodology, yet the strong “no” to minorities? “Yes” to the right to practice our mainstream Lithuanian culture, national identity, and Roman Catholic faith, yet the resolute “no” to gay and lesbian rights? If so, not a single chance exists that such a selective and arbitrary concept of democracy will be ever accepted in the EU—­and rightly so. It turned out to be difficult to be independent and responsible for the social and moral order that allows every citizen to experience their sense of pride and dignity. It is hard to extend our modern political and moral sensibilities to the extent of every human being, regardless of his or her creed, faith, or gender. The simplest things, as we thought of them in the

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1990s, turned out to be the most challenging ones. We have had a valuable lesson of democracy. Lithuanian Intellectuals: Roles and Identities What is the role of intellectuals in the nation-­ or community-­building process? Some scholars of nationalism suggest that intellectuals invent traditions, work out interpretive frameworks for collective identity and self-­ comprehension, establish collective identities, forge political and moral vocabularies, and even shape their respective nations. At the same time, dissenting intellectuals may challenge their nations by offering an alternative vision or critique of their societies and cultures. In the early 1990s, some Lithuanian intellectuals were quite optimistic about their social roles in society. For instance, Ricardas Gavelis (1950–­ 2002), a recently deceased Lithuanian writer, who might well be described as a caustic public intellectual and libertarian-­minded critic of society and culture, responding in 1993 to the questionnaire by a cultural journal of Lithuanian émigrés in the United States, wrote about the role of what he termed the free intellectual in the following way: I nevertheless have some hope. It is precisely thanks to the fact that Lithuania dropped out of the general development [of Western culture] that we have managed to preserve a now almost extinct species—­the free intellectual. Such creatures are virtually extinct in Europe, and even more so in America. There the intellectual is almost always part of some kind of academic circle. And that means that he unavoidably becomes a member of the state hierarchy, even if he teaches at a private university. Whether they like it or not, they must accommodate the rules of the academic career, of the narrow world of academia, of a narrow context of specialized reference. The era of the free intellectual—­of the kind that Russell and Sartre were—­has long passed in the world . . . In Lithuania, for now, the true intellectual is free whether he wants it or not, because there is basically no influential academic world. For that reason, individual intellectuals have a greater influence on overall cultural development than anywhere else . . . I would consider this to be a positive thing. In times of change and confusion free intellectuals are more useful than inflexible academic structures. Individuals are more flexible, more inclined to take risks, are not afraid to lose their academic positions or authority. It is my hope that free intellectuals will be the ones to launch the process of synchronizing Lithuanian and world culture. (cited in Donskis, 2005, 7)

Yet quite different positions were expressed regarding the social role of the intellectual in society. Donatas Sauka, a conservative literary scholar, wrote,

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as early as 1995, that Lithuanian intellectuals had forgotten their mission to preserve cultural traditions and to defend the nation, offering the exhausted paradigm of the building and defense of the nation against those who tarnished its image and international reputation. Small wonder, then, that Sauka, in doing so, also warned that “the liberals of the younger generation and their older colleagues among émigrés” threatened the injured nation. Sauka put it thus: Who, then, defends society’s conservative opinions—­who speaks in the name of the injured nation, who expresses its historical insults, who mythologizes its rural moral reputation? Who, really? What is the point of trying out the sharpness of one’s arrows when attacking a monster created by one’s own imagination; but please give us a true picture of its traits, give us its first and last names! The liberals of the younger generation and their older colleagues among émigrés, who often hold condemnatory trials, do not have a concrete target which could embody the essence of such an ideology. And the target of their polemic is not too fresh—­but faded ideas and moral directives, statements by the current leaders of the nation that were expressed during the euphoria of the Rebirth period. (cited in Donskis, 2002, 37)

Here we have two opposing concepts of the intellectuals—­whereas Gavelis suggests the concept that depicts the intellectuals as critics of the establishment, society, and culture, Sauka takes them as defenders of the nation’s pride and prejudice. What lurks behind the critique of society and culture offered by intellectuals—­loyalty or dissent? Fidelity or betrayal? Last but not least, what is the real raison d’être of modern intellectuals? Personification of conscience? Dedication to the nation and its historical injuries and moral traumas? Advocacy of individual reason and conscience? Social and cultural criticism? The politics of loyalty or the politics of dissent? The work for the sake of sustainable society? Preservation of historical memory? The defense of the nation from the attacks of liberals? The struggle against cosmopolitanism? The essence of the populist struggle against cosmopolitanism is perfectly expressed by Romualdas Ozolas, the former MP and the signatory of the Independence Act: “I am a nationalist. Nationalism is the sole source of my strength. Each, according to the level of his stupidity, is free to decide what that means.” The following maxim is a unique pearl of nationalist wisdom: “The cosmopolitan cannot be moral. The cosmopolitan is a-­subjective; for that reason, he is incapable of imperative self-­questioning” (ibid., 36). The nature of this kind of ghost chasing is very well expressed in an introductory passage of an issue of the journal of cultural resistance I laisve (To Freedom): “A spiritual gap is growing between the sincere Lithuanian

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intellectual, for whom Lithuanian-­ness, Lithuanian culture and the nation’s interests are of the first order, and that new creature—­probably a product of the Soviet period—­the super-­cultural-­activist-­intellectual, who, supposedly in the name of Western culture, offers obscene trash to television programs, books and theatre festivals of a questionable nature. Unfortunately, together with these self-­named intellectuals comes another threat to the Lithuanian nation—­cosmopolitanism” (ibid.). Interestingly enough, one thing that has long been taken for granted in Lithuania—­the idea that the real intellectual is a dedicated educator, builder, and shaper of the nation rather than a public thinker or social and cultural critic—­underwent considerable change and was put into question over the past ten years. If very few have critically questioned the idea that the intellectual is or at least ought to be instrumental in the nation-­ building process, things started changing around 1995. The mainstream Lithuanian nationalism was challenged by a new approach, which brought about the concept of civil society instead of the people or the nation. This is to say that some Lithuanian intellectuals began increasingly associating themselves with civil society, the community-­building process, and the public domain—­this tendency was extremely timely and important, bearing in mind the deterioration of social links and networks, anomie, and the atomization of Lithuanian society. The Lithuanian philosopher Arvydas Sliogeris anticipated and aptly described this shift, calling into question Gavelis’s enthusiasm for individual intellectuals, and placing more emphasis on the community-­building process instead of personal emancipation. Despite some undertones of Kulturpessimismus—­that is, a sort of extremely harsh and exaggerated critique of Lithuanian public life—­Sliogeris’s standpoint sheds new light on the critical importance of public debate for society in transition. As Sliogeris wrote in 1995, Several years of independence have proven our inability to order our present rationally, our lack of common sense, and even any sense. What can that pitiful handful of active and thinking people—­still capable of seeing the world clearly, simply, with a sober and cold eye—­accomplish? Some such individuals exist, but they are powerless, because the parade is being led by the mobile vulgus and its idols. Is there any hope? Yes, there is, but that hope is hazy and cannot be transformed into a technical project, because in its deepest essence it is non-­technical, anti-­technical. My hope is all tied to the spontaneous emergence of small communities in which organic future forms of communal existence can begin to grow. However, these new forms of community can only develop somewhere beyond the boundaries of existing “organized” forms of (political, religious, economic, educational) life. The instigators of these communities must say a determined No to all, absolutely all, currently dominating structures of public and private life, because those structures

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are in fact dead and continue to exist only from habit. Democracy, freedom, prosperity, spirituality, truth, conscience, Christianity, culture, tradition—­ all of this has turned into ideological chatter and self-­deception. If “values” and forms of existence remain as they are, it is no longer possible to breathe life back into these things. Why do I speak about the creation of new types of communities? For, after all, here remains the danger that such a newly created community will be nothing but a herd of slaves and schizophrenics ruled by paranoid and cynical Rasputins. There are already more than enough such sects in today’s world. The formation of authentic communities involves enormous risk. But there is no other option, because individuals are ultimately helpless. (cited in Donskis, 2005, 9)

It is widely and rightly assumed that loyalty and betrayal are among the key concepts of the ethic of nationalism. The marriage of state and culture, which seems the essence of the congruence between political power structure and collective identity, usually offers a simple explanation of loyalty and dissent. Within such an interpretative framework of nationalism, loyalty is seen as a kind of once-­and-­for-­all commitment of the individual to his or her nation and its historical-­cultural substance, whereas betrayal is identified as a failure to commit himself or herself to a common cause or as a diversion from the object of political loyalty and cultural or linguistic fidelity. However, yawning gaps exist between different patterns of nationalism. For conservative or radical nationalists, even a social and cultural critique of a people and state can be regarded as nothing more and nothing less than treason, while for their liberal counterparts it is precisely what constitutes political awareness, civic virtue, and a conscious dedication to the people, culture, and state. Upon closer look, it appears that the concepts of loyalty, dissent, and betrayal can be instrumental in mapping the liberal and democratic facet of nationalism. Loyalty, dissent, and betrayal are political and moral categories. It is impossible to analyze them without touching upon crucial issues of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, such as political culture, liberal democracy, poverty, hatred, populism, manipulative exchanges and deliberate political manipulations, social criticism, and political commitment. The analysis of the aforementioned phenomena may reveal what it means to live in a changing society where all these things increasingly tend to become the nexus of social and political existence. History, sociocultural dynamics, and the dialectic of identities can be properly understood only where the acceleration of the speed of change reaches its climax, and where social change becomes faster than history.

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Yet the major threat to Lithuanian and Eastern/Central European intellectuals, in terms of their marginalization or sociopolitical and sociocultural miscast, comes from their own countries where the traditional roles of intellectuals as the personification of the conscience and as the principal driving force behind the nation-­building process disappeared over the past twenty years, as if those roles vanished in the air leaving no trace. Being unable to enjoy their lives and work in the truly prestigious academic institutions, as none exist or are identified and celebrated as such in the countries of incessant change and direction-­free transformation, Eastern and Central European academics and intellectuals are bound to choose between shifting their roles toward the field of political power and prestige—­becoming Realpolitik experts and advisers, or specialists in public relations and entertainment at home (trying to escape marginalization and poverty)—­and temporary or permanent migration in North American or Western European academic towns and universities. The Treason of Intellectuals or an Identity Crisis? Tomas Venclova is regarded as one of the most accomplished and noted Lithuanian humanists in the world, and rightly so. An eminent Lithuanian poet, literary scholar, and translator, Venclova had long acted as a conscious and dedicated dissident opposed to the entire project of the former Soviet Union with its crimes against humanity, severe human rights violations, brutal suppression of all fundamental rights and civil liberties, and violent politics (see Donskis, 2002). Having spent a good part of his life in Lithuania, Venclova was exiled to the West in 1977 where he built his academic career, eventually becoming Professor of Slavic Literatures at Yale University. Far from a conservative nationalist, Venclova has always spoken out in favor of liberal values. This could be a clue to his deeply moving and sensitive essay on the tragedy of Lithuania, the Holocaust that claimed the lives of more than 220,000 Lithuanian Jews. The essay in question, “The Jews and the Lithuanians,” written in the 1970s, revealed Tomas Venclova as the first Lithuanian writer who showed the real scope of the tragedy admitting the guilt and responsibility of those Lithuanians who collaborated with the Nazis and actively participated in the massacre of Lithuanian Jews. Deeply embedded in the best intellectual traditions of Eastern and Central Europe, his collection of essays Forms of Hope reads like a moral map of a great European public intellectual and political thinker (see Venclova, 1999).

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Venclova recently made a strong and effective comeback to the public domain of Lithuania publishing, in July 2010, an elegantly written and caustic essay, “It Suffocates Me Here.” Wittily referring to the clash of the character Strepsiades, a staunch defender of the ancient Greek tradition, and its challenger Socrates, both depicted in Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds (the original in 423 BC, and the revised version in ca. 419–­416 BC), Venclova described some of the ongoing political and moral debates in Lithuania as a backlash of parochialism and moral provincialism, and as a fear of modernity, applying harsh words and judging his country from a critical perspective. Without the shadow of a doubt, the essay became a landmark in the area of public debate. Small wonder that a dozen angry and noisy reactions to Venclova’s essay appeared over the past two months, as this piece of polemical writing dealt a blow to conservative and nationalistic writers of the country. The bitter response would not be long, though. Adding insult to injury, Venclova’s critics came to describe him as an arrogant and rootless cosmopolitan, whereas the opposing camp, the supporters of the aforementioned essay, implied that Venclova came up with a timely and principled call upon his country to take a close look at itself at the beginning of the twenty-­first century to be able to rethink its past and present. Moreover, much in the spirit of Julien Benda’s manifesto on the intellectual’s responsibility, La trahison des clercs (The Treason of Intellectuals, 1927; see Benda, 1969), Venclova’s essay became an attack against those who regard the nation-­state as the end in itself, and who see the paramount mission of the intellectual in the defense of that nation-­state at any price against the supposed evils of modernity and globalization. A déjà vu feeling invoked by recent political developments and public debates in the media tells us how striking is the affinity of the challenge posed by the epoch of Durkheim and Benda in France at the end of the nineteenth century, and that in post-­Soviet and post-­Communist countries. The unstoppable and unbearable acceleration of social change combined with anomie, political apathy, disenchantment in democratic politics, and the dramatic decrease of trust—­all these factors put together richly contribute what I would term the unbearable lightness of change. Much to his credit, Venclova was correct in raising this issue, as the Lithuanian media was peppered over the past months with a number of skeptical comments on the loss of Lithuanian identity and even independence after the country’s accession to the EU. More than that, some of the former political activists and heroes of Lithuania who fought for its independence in the national liberation movement Sajudis in the late 1980s had gone so far as to suggest that the EU is hardly any different from the Soviet

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Union, and that both of these political formations were, and continue to be, the gravediggers of the European peoples and of their independence and liberty. What can be said in this regard? No matter how critical or skeptical we could be of European bureaucracy or the new managerial class that ignore local sensibilities and cultural differences, such a comparison does not merit serious attention. Yet this new sort of rhetoric sent a clear message that part of the former political and intellectual elite of Lithuania found themselves deeply alienated from the new political reality of Europe. In ancient Athens, writes Venclova, Socrates died for his freedom of thought, doubt, and the right to question everything around. As we learn from Socrates, uncertainty is not the enemy of a wise man, and an unexamined life is not worth living—­these pieces of perennial wisdom became an inescapable part of critical European thought. For Strepsiades and his modern followers, everything has to be certain and easily predictable. Therefore, each little garden becomes more important than universal humanity. Whatever the case, says Venclova, it is Strepsiades, rather than the greatest cultural hero of Western Europe, Socrates, who is alive and well in present Lithuania. According to him, to defend the pattern of identity and statehood of the nineteenth century instead of modern moral and political sensibilities is nothing other than a betrayal of the mission that intellectuals must carry. The question remains quite timely and serious: what is the pattern of identity that Lithuania and two other Baltic States could maintain as a bridge between their precious cultural legacy and the world? In fact, an identity crisis is part of the search for identity. The Baltic States that surfaced to the world restoring their existence and securing their place in the political, mental, and intellectual maps of the world, know it better than any other country or region on the globe. Memory Wars We are witnessing how a sinister tendency is increasingly getting stronger in the United States and in Europe. Politicians find themselves preoccupied with two domains that serve as a new source of inspiration—­namely, privacy and history. Birth, death, and sex constitute the new frontiers on the political battlefields. Since politics is dying out nowadays as a translation of our moral and existential concerns into rational and legitimate action for the benefit of society and humanity, and instead is becoming a set of managerial practices

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and skilful manipulations with public opinion, it is not unwise to assume that a swift politicization of privacy and history promises the way out of the present political and ideological vacuum. Suffice it to remember the hottest debates over abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage over the past twenty or so years to conclude that the poor human individual, no matter whether he or she is on the way to the world, or is dying, or consummating her or his marriage, continues to be regarded either as a property of the state and its institutions or, at best, as a mere instrument and hostage of a political doctrine. There is nothing new under the sky, though. If we are to believe such incisive dystopian writers as Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell, or such groundbreaking social theorists as Michel Foucault and Zygmunt Bauman, modernity always was, and continues to be, obsessed with how to get as much control over human body and soul as possible without physically exterminating people. The same is true with regard to society’s memory and collective sentiment. As we learn from George Orwell’s 1984, history depends on who controls those archives and records. Since human individuals have no other form of existence than that which is granted by the Party, individual memory has no power to create or restore history. But if memory is controlled or manufactured and updated every day, history degenerates into a justificatory and legitimizing design of power and control. Logically enough, this leads the Inner Party to assert that who controls the past controls the future and who controls the present controls the past. If you think that it does not make sense to refer to the Orwellian world any longer, please think about the memory wars in present Europe. That Russia has already become a revisionist power is obvious. Moreover, it attempts to rewrite the history of the twentieth century by rehabilitating Stalin and depicting him as merely a wise, albeit sometimes cruel, modernizer of Russia. As we can see, Stalin appears here to have been just another version of the Great Modernizer of the State like Peter the Great. Needless to say, an attempt to outlaw what is regarded in Russia as historical revisionism—­that is, the criminalization of any effort to put into question whether the Soviet Union with its labor camps, overtly totalitarian, not to say fascist, practices, and antisemitism (for those who have doubts about this, please do recall the Holodomor in Ukraine or the methodical extermination of Russian Jews and Jewish culture under Stalin) was any better than Nazi Germany, has its logic. By no means is all this about the past. As early as under Mikhail Gorbachev, a plethora of decent and courageous Russian historians exposed the Soviet Union as being a criminal state. Stalin was explicitly regarded as a criminal and paranoiac dictator who committed the most horrible

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crimes against humanity. The fact that Vladimir Putin’s Russia changed the interpretation of the past nearly overnight shows that everything is about the present rather than the past. Although the denial of the Holocaust is too complex a phenomenon to be confined to legal practices and administrative measures, Germany outlawed the denial of the Holocaust out of its firm commitment never to repeat its past. Russia cynically denies its occupation and annexation of the Baltic States, as well as its numerous crimes against European nations, because it is sending a message to us that it would gladly repeat recent history restoring the past and rehabilitating political doctrine that Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s Russia regarded as overtly criminal and hostile to Russia itself. Hence we have seen an attempt by the Baltic States and the Eastern-­ Central European nations to work out a viable antidote to Russia’s revisionism. However understandable and logical this attempt, the idea of the political and moral equivalency of Communism and National Socialism is not the most convincing way to do it—­for Western Europe and the United States will always take a deep exception to the claim that the Holocaust and Soviet crimes were of the same nature. Therefore, something has to be done to untie this Gordian knot of history. Lithuanian and Baltic politicians and public figures have to stop romanticizing the political forces of 1941 that tried to save the independence of the Baltic States collaborating with the Nazis. The tragedy was that our countries were “liberated” from the Nazis by the Soviets, instead of Great Britain or the United States. All in all, only our political courage and moral integrity, rather than selective interpretation of history, can end our memory wars with Russia or with the far Left of Western Europe. We cannot allow Russia to distort history spreading ugly lies about the Baltic States as crypto-­fascist countries, yet we have to be fair and sympathetic to the Holocaust survivors, who fear, and rightly so, that a simplistic and relativistic approach to the Shoah as, supposedly, one of many Holocausts in Europe becomes a sort of obfuscation and trivialization of the tragedy. History can never be left solely to politicians, no matter whether democratic or authoritarian. It is not a property of a political doctrine or of a regime it serves. History, if properly understood, is the symbolic design of our existence and moral choices we make every day. Like human privacy, our right to study and critically question history is a corner stone of freedom.

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The Inflation of Genocide We are living in an era of not only monetary inflation but also the inflation—­hence devaluation—­of concepts and values. Sworn oaths are being debased before our very eyes. It used to be that by breaking an oath a person lost the right to participate in the public square and to be a spokesman for truth and values. He would be stripped of everything except his personal and private life, and would be unable to speak on behalf of his group, his people, or his society. Pledges have also suffered a devaluation. Once upon a time, if you went back on your word you were divested of even the tiniest measure of trust. Concepts are also being devalued; they are no longer reserved for the explicit task of describing precise instances of human experience. Everything is becoming uniformly important and unimportant. My very existence places me at the center of the world. In my experience, the pinnacle of concept inflation was reached ten years ago, when I came across articles in the American press describing the “holocaust” of turkeys in the run-­up to the Thanksgiving holiday. This was probably not a simple case of a word being used unthinkingly or irresponsibly. Disrespect for concepts and language only temporarily masks disrespect for others; and this disrespect eventually bubbles to the surface. In recent decades, the concept of genocide has undergone a perilous devaluation. Here, I would like to stress that the devaluation of this concept has not been underpinned by a concern for humanity as a whole or for the condition of contemporary humaneness; just the opposite—­it is a symptom of the history of the revaluation of the self as the world’s navel and, concurrently, of an insensitivity toward humanity. Moreover, the immoderate use of this word threatens to stifle dialogue. Genocide is a term used in philosophy, political science, and sociology but also in law; it is clearly defined in UN legal documents, and a precise definition of genocide exists in international law. After the mass slaughter of national and ethnic groups by the Nazis, the term began to be used to designate the doctrine of deliberate extermination of national, religious, or ethnic groups, and to designate the execution of this doctrine. The term genocide was coined by Raphael (Rafal) Lemkin, a Polish international lawyer of Jewish background, in 1943. As Timothy Snyder, who himself prefers mass killing to genocide, and quite understandably so, notes, Lemkin managed to encode the term in international law “through a miracle of energy and persistence” (Snyder, 2010, 412). Snyder mentions a number of controversies arising from nebulous use and political application of the term or at least resulting from adoption of law in a certain political setting and at a certain time.

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This is more than true with regard to the aforementioned term, as the victorious side after the Second World War had to make sure that the term and its legal implications bypass them. Thus, for instance, the Soviets made sure that the term genocide, contrary to Lemkin’s intentions, excluded social classes, political strata, and economic groups. Otherwise, the Holodomor in Ukraine would have been qualified as a genocide, which would have dealt a mortal blow to the reputation of the Soviet Union. No wonder, then, that what resulted from this embarrassing situation was a deliberate political modification of the definition of genocide. No matter how much distaste the allies and the West in general had for the nightmares of Stalinist purges and repressions, the victorious Soviet Union, both as an ally and as a supposed heir, albeit treacherous and homicidal, to the legacy of the Enlightenment and to the ideals of the French Revolution, rejoiced in its unquestionable superiority over defeated Nazi Germany. Charges against the Soviet Union for its genocidal actions and practices would have made the Soviets close ranks with the Nazis in the eyes of the world. Lemkin himself regarded the Ukrainian famine as genocide. In his groundbreaking monograph Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, a real tour de force in the research of the political horrors and crimes of the twentieth century, Timothy Snyder lists several major problems related to the politically charged application of the term, especially in those cases where historical memory has not been reconciled with facts and political reality clearly presented by the past. According to Snyder, The term genocide gives rise to inevitable and intractable controversies. It relies upon the intention of the perpetrator in two places: “intent to destroy” a certain group “as such.” It can be argued that policies of mass killing were not genocide, because rulers had some other “intent,” or because they intended to kill someone, but not a specified group “as such.” Though the term genocide in fact has wide application, it is often thought to refer only to the Holocaust. People who associate themselves with victims will wish to define past crimes as genocide, thinking that this will lead to recognition of the kind awarded to the Holocaust. Meanwhile, people associated with states that perpetrated a genocide resist the term with great energy, because they believe that its acceptance would be tantamount to acceptance of a role in the Holocaust. Thus, for example, Turkish government resist the classification as genocide of the mass killing of a million or more Armenians during the First World War. (ibid., 413)

As we know, by the terms of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, genocide includes “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,

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as such.” Five ways in which genocide can be committed are as follows: by “killing members of the group”; “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”; “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”; “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”; and “forcibly transferring children of this group to another group” (cited in ibid., 412–­413). Most importantly, Snyder adds a critical qualification here pointing out that “as a guide to historical and moral interpretation, however, the term genocide has limitations” (ibid., 413). I could not agree more on this. Yet having no better option than to resist a growing infatuation of politicians with this term, and clearly seeing the political implications of the new propensity to use this term as a warrant to blame the victims of the Holocaust and to justify perpetrators as victims of yet another genocide, I have to challenge not only the inflation of the term genocide but also some aspects of the way in which Lemkin defined this concept. Unfortunately, Lemkin opened up the dangerous Pandora’s box, which is highly unlikely to be ever elegantly confined to moderate political debates and courtly college discussions. In fact, this Pandora’s box will open up for a chain reaction of countless efforts of national parliaments to modify the definition of genocide, thus pursuing an effort to present any nation as a nation of martyrs and victims. Therefore, my effort to challenge Lemkin’s initial definition of the concept of genocide is critical to be able to confront the new inclination, if not the growing obsession, to call occupations, repressions, deportations, and war crimes genocides—­though some of these war crimes and crimes against humanity were no less horrible than those committed in genocides, yet they were not genocides. Period. A genocide is the annihilation en bloc of a people or of a race, or at least a theory or ideology ready to do so, irrespective of class divisions, dominant ideology, and internal social and cultural differences. Genocide does not denote a battle against an enemy that, under conditions of war or revolution, is something clearly defined by classical military, ideological, or political-­doctrinal criteria. If this were the case, any revolution, and the systematic annihilation of those opposing it, would need to be labeled genocide. Genocide is annihilation without preselection, where the victims are utterly unable to save themselves—­in theory or in practice—­by an ideological change of heart, by religious apostasy, or ultimately, by betraying the group and going over to the other side. On this view, let us then agree that the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris and the bloody killings of Huguenots throughout France; the terror unleashed during the Middle Ages by the Inquisition, which led to the murders of masses of women, witches, soothsayers, Jews, and

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homosexuals; and the wiping out of entire village populations in the Vendée by French revolutionaries in 1789 to 1794—­regardless of how harrowing all of this carnage was—­did not amount to genocide. Those people met with a barbarous end, but almost all could have saved themselves by going over to the side of their enemies or persecutors. Was the French Revolution genocidal then? And why don’t we qualify all major revolutions to have been nothing other than a series of genocides? And if so, how about the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation? With sound reason, Blair Worden describes the cruelties of the epoch of the Renaissance, as well as those of the age Reformation, as paradoxically related to the virtues and high points of those same epochs. Were they genocidal in the sense of this modern phenomenon? According to Blair Worden, Few episodes pose in such acute form the challenge that awaits all scholars who seek . . . to recreate a world with values inimical to our own. How can we describe the burnings without feeling revulsion? And yet who are we to visit condemnation on the ages we study, or to look down on them? The intolerance of the age of Reformation emerged from the same society, and often from within the same minds, as the intellectual and artistic achievements of the Renaissance. The burnings were instigated not for cruelty’s sake (though there were executioners and spectators who may have derived cruel pleasure from them), but in the service of an ideal of religious uniformity that commanded the devotion of highly intelligent and cultivated people, in whom we can recognize warm humanity on other matters. To call their policy “persecution,” as we instinctively do, is to tilt the scales of judgment. (Worden, 2010, 48)

Genocide is both a theory and a praxis (although it is a praxis first and foremost) that leaves its intended victims without any hope of escape—­ even if they choose to go over to their enemy’s side. You are guilty at birth, and this fatal error of having been born—­this original sin—­can be corrected only by your extermination. Such is the metaphysics of genocide and absolute hatred. The only way of resolving the “problem” is by the complete and utter annihilation of bodies, lives, blood, and skin pigment. In his Nobel address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn compared nations to thoughts of God; it was the murder of this single God—­which goes beyond good and evil and which promotes the destruction of the entire world—­ that is the true genocide. It is a symbolic murder of humanity, because the annihilation of one form of human existence relegates the existence of other peoples to the margins of mere future practicalities. Killing one person makes it that much easier to go out and kill others.

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By and large, I would agree with Zygmunt Bauman that world history is full of mass killings of genocidal proportions, yet the modern genocide of the twentieth century became an instrument to exterminate by putting into the category, defining, turning down, and then proceeding in the name of the Grand Design of History or the New Order (see Bauman, 2010, 99–­ 107). Yet I would add here that a bona fide genocide occurs when we are not allowed to accept that New Order or to embrace the Grand Design; nor are we allowed to take sides at all. We are the remnants meant to be chipped away from a large piece of stone on which a work of art emerges. Something profoundly modern and totalitarian exists in the metaphysics of modern genocide. At this point, Bauman is perfectly right. Yet I would distinguish between the manifestations of human cruelty in mass killings and the industrial killing coupled with modern education and the resulting powers of the planning and rationalization of mass murder. Whatever the case, the genocide comes here as a reference point when dealing with horrible proportions of killing, instead of the modern character of extermination without allowing a chance of assimilation, becoming something or someone else, or changing the object of loyalty and even betraying one’s country. Therefore, the Shakespearean world of political cruelty can never apply to the logic of a modern genocide. The metaphysics of betrayal, changing allegiances, conflicting loyalties, and high treason so manifest in Shakespeare is replaced here by the metaphysics of the inevitability of destruction for no reason, which brings us to the world of Kafka, Bulgakov, and Zamyatin. Total irrationality in the sense of a failure to explain itself as something finite and temporal behind a seemingly rational project whose rationality lies in the ability to handle the masses and human beings as numbers—­as Zamyatin insightfully describes it in We, this is the rationality and power of the finger pressing the button of a missile. What if we apply this logic to the supreme political will that would enact the masses by pressing them like the finger that presses the button of a missile? The infinite joy of obedience is a result of a perfect operation. What appears as logical and rational here is not the ability to shed more light, but instead, the ability to set in motion or to chip away rude and resistant material—­exactly like Michelangelo would chip away a piece of stone, marble, or bronze, allowing the form to triumph over the matter. In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, the main character Rubashov describes the masses as the mud of history, and the Party as the molding power that shapes history. Again, the form vis-­à-­vis the matter, like in Aristotle. As Bauman points out, “What set the story of modern totalitarian regimes apart from other gory manifestations of human cruelty to humans

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was the Grand Design: killing and construction of a new order, and an order meant to last a thousand years, or for eternity. Killing as a way to force social reality to match the elegance of a Grand Design. Something like the statement imputed to Michelangelo in reply to the question as to how he went about producing such beautiful sculptures: simple, I just get a block of marble and cut away all the un-­necessary bits” (ibid., 101). The only thing I would add to Bauman’s idea is that modern mass killing or genocide is difficult to imagine other than through the justificatory doctrine, more or less consolidated public opinion in the country that initiates the bloody social engineering, and mobilized perfectly normal people—­ rather than natural-­born killers, sociopathic perpetrators, and the like. In addition, I would add one more qualification, namely, the pivotal importance of the unchangeable initial disposition in the anthropological sense. The fact of your background puts you into the category and determines your fate without any possibility of ideological conversion or proselytizing. The genocide is not about anger or revenge. It is about elimination of what cannot choose your side and what is doomed by definition. To put it in a simple way, the logic of modern genocide does not recognize high treason or moral betrayal. During a genocide, you cannot be a traitor; you are unable to become one, as this is simply irrelevant. The Holocaust as a pivotal and unprecedented event in world history that set precedent for further similar actions would have been unthinkable if the entire culture and education system of a modern and highly civilized nation had not provided a framework within which the whole criminal project was disguised and recast as a just struggle and as a noble cause put forward in the name of advancement of civilization and the future of humanity. Without the intellectual and cultural potential of the modern state, which recast the Holocaust as a European cause in the fight against Bolshevism, the Holocaust would never have acquired its political and intellectual foundations in Europe. The Holocaust was something that enabled a new political-­historical narrative. Therefore, it is a long way to go from cruel massacres and killings to the modern industrial extermination of people in the name of creating an alternative version of modernity or appropriating some of its elements it in the name of subversion of its logic. Whatever the case, there is no point in devaluing the concept of genocide through ratiocinations about the so-­ called genocide of cultures and languages. Such phenomena, quite simply, do not exist—­nor have they ever existed. Until the twentieth century, larger and more powerful states not only defeated but also assimilated smaller countries and nations, as much as we are loath to admit this. Doubtless, the forced assimilation of individuals and nations is a repellent part of imperialism and of imperial politics as a spiritual principle; but it is not a crime

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against humanity once it becomes a routine and voluntary practice undertaken by the elites of smaller nations who later go on to rise to influence in the adopted metropolis. After all, we cannot regard the history of all our civilizations as one ongoing crime and one endless genocide of some group or other. Whitewashing a concept benefits no one. Whether we like it or not, the Holocaust was the one and only bona fide genocide in human history. It was unique not only because of its scale, its praxis, and its industrial methods of annihilation but because of its determination never to call a halt to the Final Solution as long as a single Jew remained alive. Ultimately, it was not a garden-­variety mass killing; it was a policy decision taken by an industrial and civilized state; one into which the country’s entire economic and industrial machinery was plugged in, bolstered by military might and a political propaganda apparatus. Which is why other genocides of the twentieth century need to be discussed with provisos, although this does not in any way diminish the scale of these other tragedies, nor does it diminish the culpability of the perpetrators in the eyes of God and humanity. Although they were more sporadic and involved less forward thinking, the other twentieth-­century mass killings of nations that exhibited genocidal features, beyond any shadow of a doubt, were no less sickening. The massacre of Armenians during the First World War; the slaughter of Roma during the Second World War; Stalin’s Holodomor, which unleashed mass starvation on the Ukrainian populace; the killing spree that saw millions of Tutsis cut down in Rwanda; and, lastly, the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks and Albanians in the former Yugoslavia—­all of these macabre twentieth century events can be considered genocides or at least mass killings with genocidal traits. Compared with the Holocaust, these mass murders were smaller in scale, were not as global, and were somewhat less international in their ideological reach and practical scope, but they were nonetheless horrific and were certainly crimes against humanity of a genocidal type. Their aim was not to destroy isolated groups or social strata among the enemy, but to liquidate as many members of an ethnic group as possible. Did Lithuania experience genocide? No, it did not. No matter how cruel the Soviet terror that was visited upon the Baltic States, a large segment of Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian society, by going over to the other side, by becoming collaborators, was able not only to save itself but also to secure for itself successful careers in the administration of the occupying regime. This group was able to wreak havoc on and settle scores with its own people, doing so with impunity.

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There was never any project for a complete annihilation of the Baltic peoples—­had this been the case, it is very unlikely that we would still be around. In writing this, I am in no way downplaying the scale of the atrocities committed in the name of Soviet Communism. I will always deplore any attempt to exculpate or to diminish the scale of the crimes committed by that bloody and essentially criminal regime. Nonetheless, let us be honest and honorable by acknowledging that we did not experience a true genocide. It was not for nothing that philosopher and Soviet dissident Grigory Pomerantz suggested referring to the Soviet terror not as genocide, but as stratocide—­the annihilation of certain strata and classes within a nation. He explained that it was not an entire nation that had been wiped out, as a racial or ethnic whole, but its most educated, most cultured, and most conscious strata. Russians do not refer to the physical annihilation of their intelligentsia and bourgeoisie—­numbering in the millions of lives lost—­as genocide, just as the purges during China’s Cultural Revolution, which carried off the lives of tens of millions of Chinese, was never proclaimed a genocide of the Chinese people. Genocide is not a mass slaughter motivated by an internal ideological or political struggle—­if that were the case, civil wars would end up falling into the category of genocide. Again, it does not mean that mass slaughter is any better than genocide. Without a shadow of a doubt, they are always an unspeakable calamity. Yet an act of barbarity and cruelty cannot be labeled as genocide, if we do not wish to completely relativize and kill the concept. In the case of genocide, one nation engages in the premeditated annihilation of another; the aggressors do not seek to subjugate the victims, nor to bring them to heel and foist upon them an alien doctrine, religion, or ideology. So let us be precise. Let us call a spade a spade. The end result of a totalitarian revolution, and of the institutionalized social engineering that seeks to level a society’s composition by liquidating a particular class, is no better than genocide—­but it is not genocide. This is why the excessive use of this word is not benign at all. If you want to downgrade the Holocaust or shove it into the margins of history, well then, all you need to do is come up with another genocide that took place in that same country, even if it is one that does not quite fit the legal criteria for and definition of genocide. If the Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania in Vilnius is not investigating the Holocaust, then a question surfaces: what is it investigating? And what is its definition of genocide? A new law currently being drafted for debate by Lithuania’s legislature would make it a crime to deny that a genocide against the Lithuanian people was ever conducted by the Soviets. It follows from this that whenever

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historians, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and law professors discuss the concept of genocide, or discuss historical cases of genocide, they end up running the risk of landing in jail if they express any doubts about a genocide of Lithuanians by the Soviets—­as if this genocide could be somehow identical to the one conducted by the Nazis against Jews. In my view, attempts to criminalize discussion are totally out of place in any democratic state. Such attempts pose a grave threat to the freedoms of thought and of conscience, which could easily end up being stifled in the name of a threat to national dignity or security. Forgive me, but this sounds like a melody from the repertoire of some authoritarian regime. If the reply to this charge is that Holocaust denial is forbidden and punishable as a crime in Germany and Austria, I will readily admit that I am in no way enamored of that practice. The criminalization of Holocaust denial causes a slackening of conscience, safely removing the Holocaust from the sphere of ethics and morality and tucking it into the neatly arranged sphere of law. Furthermore, a halo appears above the heads of Holocaust deniers and revisionists—­and it is the dangerous ideas of these people that must be defeated through forthright discussion, not by shutting away the proponents of such ideas in a windowless cell. You can put someone in the dock for denying the past tragedies of a country or nation—­you can even put such a person behind bars—­but this will not hinder him or her from demonstrating contempt and insensitivity toward that nation or state in the present. Leftist politicians in countries that prohibit Holocaust denial, who shun lengthier discussions of the topic, and who, at the same time, merrily fulminate against Israel, labeling it a fascist state and referring to the suffering of the Palestinian Arabs as genocide, leave me wondering if the criminalization of Holocaust denial in Western Europe is not a phenomenon marching in step with a new form of antisemitism that has begun growing shoots—­a politically correct, left-­leaning, antiglobalist antisemitism (one strain of which is ideological anti-­Americanism) that employs criticism of Israel as a disguise. It was with sounds reason that Pascal Bruckner described this new mask of antisemitism as an attempt to Hitlerize history presenting Nazism not as a criminal regime that came into existence in 1933 and was destroyed in 1945, but as the matrix of European history (see Bruckner, 2010, 117–­127). Elsewhere Bruckner passionately exclaims against brutal distortions of history and the use of false and flawed political analogies: Instant reversibility: if the Jews oppress, they necessarily do so in the manner of the Blond Beast, as faithful reproducers of the abominations they formerly suffered in Germany and Poland. The simple fact of having been hounded

128      Modernity in Crisis and exterminated by the Nazis transforms them into potential Nazis. The war in Lebanon is assimilated to the German policy of Lebensraum, vital space. The Gaza Strip is Auschwitz . . . and so is Jenin, and Zionism is the twin brother of Nazism  .  .  . Resistance a posteriori to National Socialism makes it easier to deprive the Jew who does not repent the existence of Israel. This synonymy, with the power to harm that it implies, proceeds from a lamentable theoretical leap made by intellectuals who are supposed to be experts at making distinctions. To Nazify the Israelis is to delegitimize the state of Israel, and it is also to Judaize the Arabs, shifting the ancient battle against ignominy to the banks of the Jordan. Ultimately, it is to justify in advance the possible disappearance of Israel, that “usurping entity.” (ibid., 70–­71)

It is obvious that focus on, and obsession with, every non-­Holocaust genocide, trying to label the occupation of the country and the repressions or deportations of its population as a genocide, is a relatively new trend in politics and public debates. It has already become a new stick to beat the Jews or a new tool to minimize, relativize, and trivialize the Holocaust, especially in the countries where local Jewish communities were exterminated with the help of local population. Therefore, it would be naïve to relate this tendency to a stronger sense of compassion and attention to the victims of mass killings and war crimes, as its real motive lies in intent to rewrite history, so the niche and the status of a victim on the long waiting list of political victimhood and martyrology could be safely reserved for one’s country. This trouble with imprecise terms and the hidden political agenda behind them to impose a certain vocabulary on the globe and, consequently, to recast world history and global politics was aptly described by Alain Besançon as early as 1976. In The Soviet Syndrome, Besançon wrote, The United Nations resolution of November 1975, denouncing Zionism as a form of racism, therefore seems to me to have been instigated by the U.S.S.R. Indeed, racism is not part of the vocabulary of the Arab world. It belongs to the vocabulary of Nazism and anti-­Nazism. Until this U.N. resolution, the word had a relatively specific meaning, since it was applied to races that really existed, although in a totally different manner from the pseudo biology of racism. Applying the word to Zionism, which is based upon the notion of a people and categorically repudiates the notion of race, makes the concept of racism part of radical untruth. Henceforth, “racism,” like “imperialism” and “fascism,” belongs to that group of imprecise notions that can be applied to anyone and anything, according to the immediate interest of ideological power, in which respect Bolshevism has always been superior to Nazi ideology. The remnants of détente will be used to make international society accept this vocabulary. (Besançon, 1976, 83–­84)

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Yet the aforementioned phenomenon seems a global tendency rather than merely a sort of characteristically Eastern and Central European political maneuvering that reflects the cognitive dissonance and traumatized memory of posttotalitarian countries. As Bruckner puts it in his rhetorical questions, “Wounded memories compete for the title of most affronted. Today, who does not fight to claim this capitalized label, ‘Genocide,’ whose semantic radioactivity is intact? What government, what country does not seek to seize this qualification in order to take its place on the grandstand where only the most privileged sit?” (ibid., 116–­117). Antisemitism, it would seem, has been thrust out the front door only to be allowed to climb back in through the window. Therefore, when addressing the painful episodes of human history we should ponder the dangers of our contemporary amoral and relativist culture. By quashing open and rational discussion, we will never restore to our concepts and values their original content. And there are no laws that can help us here either. Martyrdom for Attention, or Who Is Suffering the Most? Yet it is a far wider problem, so we should not succumb to a pars pro toto fallacy taking part for the whole. Since a martyrdom-­seeking politics has become, in our world overwhelmed with total indifference, an efficient tool of attention seeking, if not a passport to the heaven of recognition, the Holocaust is perceived as a successful pattern of the politics of memory. Cynically speaking, it is treated as a success story in our world of comparative martyrology. Therefore, the pie is expected to be sliced and shared equally among all victimized actors of history—­Jews, Palestinian Arabs, Afro-­Americans, Native Americans, Latin Americans, Muslims, and Eastern Europeans alike. This is to say that a convincing martyrology, or a plausible account of suffering, becomes a password through the gates of power and recognition. We have to become a celebrity or a victim in our liquid modern times to get more attention and, therefore, to be granted visibility, which is the same as social and political existence nowadays, as Zygmunt Bauman would have it. The more convincing victim we are, the more attention and publicity we get. The more we try to think the unthinkable and to speak the unspeakable, the more likely we become to qualify for a niche in a power structure, whether local or global. Hence the idea of double genocide widespread in Lithuania and beyond, which is based on the assumption of the symmetry in suffering of Eastern European Jews as victims of the Holocaust, and their non-­Jewish compatriots and neighbors as victims of Stalinism and Communism—­as if to say

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that the Holocaust was only about the Jews, whereas Stalinism was exclusively hostile only to the Balts and other non-­Jews, as the Jews have enormously contributed to Communist causes. Needless to say, the distortion of history is too obvious here to need emphasis, yet it throws more light on why and how the wave of the obfuscation and trivialization of the Holocaust became possible in Lithuania where an attempt was made to equalize the Holocaust as a major crime against humanity and the crimes of Communism, as if to say that we have experienced not one, but two Holocausts, two parallel realities of horror and hatred, a Holocaust of the Jews and a Holocaust of Gentiles, the former orchestrated by the Nazis, and the latter by the Communists. Let me put aside all considerations about the moral and political aspect of this campaign or sinister tendency of memory politics. We have to understand how this mechanism works, as it is in the process of becoming a pattern of the rewriting of history, hijacking someone else’s narrative, inflating the concepts, and then deliberately conflating the victims and the perpetrators within the framework of a symmetry theory or of a comparative martyrology perspective. In a way, it is an identity theft, yet this sort of theft is fundamentally different from the way in which Arnaud du Tilh, or Pansette, stole the identity of Martin Guerre. For Pansette sought food, shelter, and household, which became possible only through the fraud, while the marginalized and crushed by globalization steal someone else’s collective identity and hijack a foreign narrative to get more attention, safety, and security, all these being unthinkable without plausible and realistic martyrdom. It is too obvious to need emphasis that identity, memory, and victimhood tend to become deeply intertwined each time when it comes to a search for a plausible historical-­political narrative within the framework of political self-­legitimation, which is itself a pivotal aspect of the process of political legitimation. Contrasting a success-­centered history to a suffering-­centered history, and tracing their political implications in terms of open-­ended or self-­contained modes of historical-­political discourse, George Schöpflin suggests that A history that places success at its centre and legitimates a claim to power thereby is evidently future orientated, because it implicitly argues a linearity of success projected into the future because glory is repeatable and it is desirable that it should be repeated. Victimhood, by contrast, creates its polarity overwhelmingly around a non-­repeatable event (it is really rather unlikely that a group would construct a historical narrative that actually seeks the experience of victimhood in the future). In this sense, glory creates open structures; victimhood closes them. Victimhood locks the identity in

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question into a discourse that focuses on past suffering, on a unique suffering, but offers a clarity of identity by delimiting it very emphatically from others in the same political or territorial space, by attempting to transcend both. (Schöpflin, 2010, 102)

Schöpflin might have added that victimhood, as a mode of discourse and as a frame of meaning within a historical narrative, does not necessarily become a path to our sympathetic understanding of others, human compassion, and a sense of belonging. Instead, it strengthens our feeling of having been singled out by those representing power structure. If so, the world owes us something. And that something is a passport to power. As mentioned, successful victimhood is a prospective call to share power, to slice the cake of global attention, and to grant access to Realpolitik and established political vocabulary. As the politics of memory is just another term for, or a twin brother to, the politics of identity, it exposes itself each time when, to employ some technical vocabulary of political science, social and political actors do not have access to any real and enduring power structure, save their local petty power games. Or, to paraphrase Benedetto Vecchi’s subtle point in his introduction to a series of his conversations with Zygmunt Bauman, the politics of memory “speaks the language of those who have been marginalized by globalization.” Out of our fear to vanish in the air leaving no trace, or to disappear from the media, we have to reinvent and reactivate our identity discourse on a daily basis. As Benedetto Vecchi points out, The politics of identity therefore speaks the language of those who have been marginalized by globalization. Yet many of those involved in postcolonial studies emphasize that that recourse to identity should be considered an ongoing process of redefining oneself and of the invention and reinvention of one’s own history. This is where we find the ambivalence of identity: nostalgia for the past together with complete accordance with “liquid modernity.” It is this that creates the possibility of overturning the planetary effects of globalization and using them in a positive manner. Those who would define this operation as “optimism of thought and pessimism of the will” would not in fact be mistaken. Through the breakdown in the social bonds of “solid modernity” it is possible to glimpse a scenario leading towards social liberation. (cited in Bauman, 2004, 7)

To cut a long story short, we keep talking about identity all the time because of, as Vecchi reminds us echoing Georg Simmel, the collapse of those institutions that “constituted for many years the premises upon which modern society was built” (ibid., 6). Elsewhere he incisively adds that “the various

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religious fundamentalisms are nothing more than the transposition of identity on to politics by cynical apprentice magicians” (ibid., 8). So too, I add, are present attempts to hijack someone else’s historical-­ political narrative, to strip the concepts of their logical and moral content by putting them in the profoundly relativistic and immoral context of comparative martyrology. Once the politics of identity is little more than the transposition of identity on to politics, a historical-­political identity theft or any similar attempt to hijack a foreign narrative of political self-­ legitimization is the indispensable part of the politics of identity. Once Pandora’s box has been opened, there is no way back. All are victims and martyrs, who do not have their share in the distribution of power and prestige on the global stage of politics and international relations. Everything starts in the innocent search for identity and then ends in the revisionism of the existing social and moral order, including history textbooks that increasingly tend to become part of the politics of identity and the politics of memory rather than a painstaking search for the truth and understanding of the world around us.

4

The Crisis of Modernity and the Age of Anesthesia, or Life According to Zygmunt Bauman

Lying is the most contemporary and actual form of evil. The phenomenology of lying. The special variety and sophistication of its forms. The reasons for its special actualization. The philosophy of lying. The rhetorical lie. The lie in art. The lie in forms of seriousness (conjoined with fear, threats, and violence). There still is no form of force (power, government) without the inevitable ingredient of lying. Blindness with respect to meaningful ideal being (whether or not anyone is acquainted with the latter or not). He who is deceived is turned into a thing. This is one of the ways of doing violence to, and objectifying, man. —­Mikhail Bakhtin (from his 1943 Diary)

The Disappearing Sense of Life’s Value and Meaning, or Why We Are All Artists and Creators of Our Own Lives

W

e live in times of a universal rush and a universal inflation. What is most characteristic of our epoch? What else if not this rushing about; this having no time to live and take joy in everyday things; this pursuit of multiple tasks all at once; this constant busyness and lack of time for ourselves, for our favorite books, for our friends, and for those we feel closest to? We do everything in a hurry. Fast things have little value—­fast food, for example. It’s not for nothing that one of the most interesting antiglobalist cultural movements now in Europe is Giacomo Moioli’s Slow Food International. With the creation of fast food comes the fast and easy

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consumption of it. There’s also the fast and easy consumption of art works. Let’s not forget fast reading, fast writing, and fast talking: speaking slowly while thinking about what you’re saying can quickly becoming boring for a TV audience that has no time. Finally, there is fast communication even among friends and partners of the heart. It is no less a time for inflation. Even as we look everything is quickly and incessantly losing in value. Banknotes, concepts, words, vows, and letters of recommendation—­there were times when such letters were written exceedingly rarely because we knew the value of our words and of our reputations: now they are put out like hotcakes. There are a growing number of poorly written scholarly articles and books because ever less attention is being paid to the value of their contents. Everything is just counted up and marked off rather than being read. And the value of architecture and works of art is increasingly determined by the most vulgar money talk and naked financial power. In the universities of the Western world, scholarly works are treated as items of mass production—­a global tendency. There was a time in Europe when an article or two in a good scholarly journal sufficed for its author to obtain an academic position at a good university. Today everything is weighed in terms of number of papers published and the total quantity of characters therein rather than in terms of their contents, the ideas in them, and their international resonance. In the first half of the twentieth century, such thinkers as Otto Weininger and Ludwig Wittgenstein could write just one book and radically change European intellectual life, or at least seriously challenge it. Today they would probably not land an academic job either in the West or in the East on account of being nonproductive—­they simply wrote too slowly and too little. We take pride in the fact that we have reached the finish line and successfully conquered the distance. But we do not realize that we thereby, at that instant, reduce our lives to the conquering of distance in the sincere belief that the whole meaning and value of life lies in the excitement of the start and the rush of the finish. But perhaps everything is just the opposite? Maybe the most valuable things are those we do not see and notice while running—­the moments and episodes, the glances and faces we do not register? And why don’t we ever stop to ask, what’s the point of running at all? This sense of meaninglessness and spiritual emptiness imposed by modern civilization was brilliantly evoked by the film director and actor Sydney Pollack in his 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? What is going on here? A globalization-­induced loss of the sense of universal value and meaning, a loss that ties value and meaning to nothing but power, success, visibility, intensity, and fast recognition? An extreme form of capitalism with its characteristic brutality and a general modern

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barbarity that reduces all art and culture to the market? The mythologized consciousness of post-­Communist society with its inverted Marxism that takes nothing seriously unless it is linked to the market and financial power? Aren’t we being exploited by our own deliriously adopted way of life, which we fatalistically hold to be something both impossible to oppose and inescapably expressive of the spirit of the times? It is absolutely necessary that we get back to the slow reading of good books; to repeated reacquaintance with the great texts; to the watching of favorite plays and films; to leisurely conversations with friends and family; and to the frequent enjoyment of beloved landscapes and museums. Most important of all, let us restore value to concepts, words, vows, works, moral reputation, and forms of life. So far we have lived in a world of universal inflation. Why not try a little deflation instead? This, of course, would require returning value and meaning to human souls. Why celebrate a life in which everything is devalued and bereft of meaning? Perhaps it would be better to live a bit differently. Then we would not have to regard our lives as sacrifices on the altar of globalization or as tools of some other kind of mythologized progress. Nor would we have to rack our brains on whether there exists a secret project of the “globalization architects” seeking to conquer our souls, as the best conspiracy theories proclaim. It would be impossible to draw a map of Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts and ideas without inquiring about what happened to us in this second, late, or in his words, “liquid” modernity with its liquid feelings, the ephemerality and transitoriness of it all, its pervasive unclarity and insecurity, and the lack of any trustworthy ethics. But such a discursive Bauman map would also be impossible without asking, what happened to one’s life as a project? Does it still exist? What are we in relation to our own lives? Jean-­Paul Sartre believed in the existence of le projet de la vie, a life project even though that life no longer contained any straightforward signs of such a project. Bauman claims that we are all condemned to be the artists of our own lives since in our individualism-­saturated society and culture—­ whether we know it or not and whether it is the result of our own wish or of society’s decisions—­life becomes something we create. All of us (whether we love it or not, consciously or unconsciously) become our lives’ creators, performers, and artists, even if we lack the materials and a studio to create this work of art (see Bauman, 2008a). We are obligated to give our lives a purpose and a meaning because for a very long time already no creed, no philosophical theory, no system of thought and action or ideology has been able to supply us with a sense of meaning and purpose. But then we are being judged on what we have accomplished and what we have lost. A crucial question arises: were or are we happy? Happiness is our life’s purpose and meaning; hence its

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achievement becomes the main criterion of evaluation even if it remains unclear what happiness is—­a state, a disposition of power, a relation to ourselves and our family, friends, and intellectual allies, or simply a set of images palatable to our environment and society. From Stendhal to Bauman: Sin, Passion, Don Juan, Don Quixote, and Modernity As noted, in Stendhal’s Italian Chronicles there is a short novel entitled “The Cenci” in which Stendhal expresses the thought that Don Juan is an authentic Christian phenomenon because passion and pleasure for him bear the mark of sin and evil—­the content that Christian Europe put into the medieval Don Juan legend and the modernized vagabond tale. How many young and rich playboys, asks Stendhal, such as Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan or the later Don Juan of Molière remained unnoticed in ancient Athens and Rome? In those societies religion was a feast that induced people to enjoy life, something that a later Christian Europe could not come to terms with (see Stendhal, 1973, 48–­52). In other words, Christian ethics turns Don Juan into a rebel. Instead of just remaining a playboy, like Callimaco in Niccolò Machiavelli’s comedy Mandragola, or The Mandrake, written in 1518 and published in 1524, Don Juan becomes one who breaks the rules and throws the gauntlet down to society. In accordance with the same moral logic, the Marquis de Sade turns from a simple libertine into a herald of the liberal spirit, a champion of republican ideals. That which in the ancient world could and even should have remained at the margins or, at best, stayed in the precincts of ordinary comedy, in modern times transformed itself into a drama and even a tragedy of freedom. What happened? The adventures of pagan love that in the Mandragola caused just laughter later took on an ever more dramatic tinge in the works of Molière and George Gordon Byron. In the eyes of Christianity, is every challenge to normality and the canon to be considered a remnant, in our consciousness and conduct, of paganism? An example, now deeply embedded in European mentality, of breaking a rule and disobeying a prohibition in the style of Don Juan is provided by the following wonderful passage from Stendhal’s “The Cenci”: “It was in Italy and in the seventeenth century that a Princess said, as she sipped an ice with keen enjoyment on the evening of a hot day: ‘What a pity, this is not a sin!’” (Stendhal, 1991, 7). This is the cultural code of Don Juanism pervasive in European high society: “Quel dommage que ce ne soit pas un péché!” (Stendhal, 1973, 52).

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According to Stendhal, who is philosophically deep, sociologically subtle, and supremely attentive to psychological detail, passion is regarded as fatal and pleasure as sinful only in those circles that oppose them to religious sentiment. No wonder, then, that the European Renaissance, especially its Italian version, sought to reconcile passion, pleasure, and religiosity, those mutually opposed sentiments. If it were possible to identify philosophical, historical, and sociological schools, disciplines, and methodological tenets in literary fiction (and this does seem possible: a sort of parallel or alternative philosophy anchored in European literature really exists), Stendhal might indeed be held to have founded a parallel, or perhaps an early history of mentality, an early sociology of feelings. If we recall Giambattista Vico’s La Scienza Nuova (1725), which in the context of a Cartesian conception of knowledge and science we should undoubtedly hold to be a work of belles lettres rather than of science or philosophy, the philosophical implications of Stendhal’s insights is a valid subject matter. One of the philosophically and sociologically deepest insights of Stendhal take us back to the dispute that raged in the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods between the Ancients and the Moderns with respect to the issue of whose heritage was the more important in Europe’s cultural and mental universe: that of ancient Greek philosophy and literature as well as ancient Roman statecraft and law, or that of Christianity and modern science and progress. This dispute from Niccolò Machiavelli and the Renaissance humanists up to Charles Perrault, Jonathan Swift, and David Hume created a whole area of history and political philosophy that became a watershed in the divisions between conservatives and liberals. Strangely enough, the clear importance of Stendhal has not been sufficiently recognized in these debates about the canon and modernity. Stendhal notices our frequent insistence that Christianity softened traditions and human feelings. That may be so, but it raises the question, would not the ancient world have achieved the same had it existed for a longer time? According to Stendhal, Virgil’s Aeneid (ca. 29–­19 BC) is much tenderer in spirit than Homer’s Iliad (ca. 800 BC). Stendhal’s insight about the civilizing process and the softening of manners harmonizes with the ideas of Giambattista Vico. In this way fictional literature dovetails with a philosophical problematic. At the same time a deep connection between politics and literature opens up, enabling conceptual or reflective prose to become a parallel political philosophy or political theory without method. Of course, it is paradoxical to speak such words about a writer who compared politics in literature to a gunshot in an opera performance. If the ideas Stendhal expressed in his Italian Chronicles had been formulated earlier and discussed by Machiavelli, Vico, or Hume, they would not have shamed these latter thinkers. Similar ideas or at least problems

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were indeed suggested by philosophers and historians who were Stendhal’s contemporaries. The French historian Numa-­Denis Fustel de Coulanges, in his study The Ancient City (La cité antique, 1864), broached the idea that modern liberty was much less closely associated with the ancient polis than with individualism, modern forms of political and moral sensitivity, and the separation of church and state; but what is important here is not that this historian interpreted the same phenomenon in a different way than Stendhal but that this problem cropped up at roughly the same time and extended the historical despite between the Ancients and the Moderns. In short, Stendhal may be tied to the debates begun by Niccolò Machiavelli and William Shakespeare and continued in the Elizabethan era by Sir Francis Bacon—­debates about the advantages modern Europe had over antiquity. Was Europe getting successfully and farther away from the great classical epoch and its ideals, or was it nevertheless influenced by them? By the way, this is one of the fundamental historical issues giving rise to the theoretical and ethical tensions that helped form the identity of Europe. It is in such a context that Stendhal draws his interpretive map of the change of feelings and passions in modern life. This sounds far-­fetched until we read Stendhal’s novella, “The Duchess of Palliano.” In its prologue the author discusses the disappearance of Italian passion in the eighteenth century when, in his view, the Italian aristocrats unfortunately began imitating the cold and indifferent French and English upper classes and their conduct. The disastrous influence of France on the Italians asserted itself mainly in the demonstration of indifference to everything and everybody while carefully and masterfully masking their emotions; whereas the English influence on the Italians was above all an unnatural, pompous, and bombastic civility obliterating all human differences and nuances, to which might be added an affected boredom born of dandyism and a couldn’t-­care-­less attitude toward everything. In this outstanding study of the history of mentalities and customs Stendhal discloses the way passions disappear in the imitation of alien and artificial manners of aristocratic comportment. It was just this desire to understand and reveal Italian passions that induced Stendhal to study and relate in detail these chronicles of Renaissance Italy. We should hardly find this amazing. After all, Italian history so filled with passion, suffering, and treachery inspired no less a figure than Shakespeare. In his “The Duchess of Palliano” Stendhal writes that fifteenth-­century Paris, when compared to Italian cities of that time, was a town of lovely barbarians. In France the women of that period admired only warriors, who usually were coarse and eventually forgotten. But a Renaissance man in Italy, if only he knew ancient Greek, could hope to gain admiration as much as any warrior. Such a thing used to be possible in Italy

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thanks to its characteristic passions rather than the gallantry smothering it (see Stendhal, 2010, 144–­147). However that may be, in Bauman’s sociology Don Juan becomes something else again—­first of all, a hero and embodiment of modernity. Following José Ortega y Gasset, Michel Serres, and the Polish philosopher of culture Beata Frydryczak, Bauman analyzed Don Juan as a hero of modernity, a protagonist of a life spectacle taking place “here and now,” rather than a soulless collector of broken hearts and beautiful women. For Don Juan, a man devoted to experiencing the intensity of the fleeting moment, collector’s items were strong sensations, states of elation and excitement rather than portraits or other valuable objects the acquiring of which meant forgetting one’s goals and the double or even triple intensification of the means to reach them, an intensification so necessary for an active and important part in the vanity fair: “And sensations are by their nature as frail and short-­lived, as volatile as the situations that triggered them. The strategy of carpe diem is a response to a world emptied of values pretending to be lasting” (Bauman, 2004, 53). From the perspective of Vytautas Kavolis, Don Juan, with his thirst for intensity and mobile identity, possible only through renewals of highest intensity and altered meaning, would undoubtedly be assigned to the category of an ambiguous human being. According to Kavolis, Where the striving for intensity prevails, the authoritarian style in both thinking and decision-­making predominates quite often, even when the conscious contents of the thought are libertarian: let us take, for example, Marcuse or the Living Theater. The intensity seekers quite naturally tend to think in polarities contrasting “truth” with “error,” or “virtue” with “meanness,” instead of searching for some missing links and nuances. Those nuances represent nothing other than the psychic ambiguity in their character, which they consider unbearable and try to repress with arbitrary, though “real,” moments of intensity. This is why they, even in demanding the freedom of choice, expect others to choose their way to be free or even their way to conceive freedom. (Kavolis, 1993b, 126; translation of this passage from Lithuanian into English is mine)

For Vytautas Kavolis, as we will soon see, Don Juan would be the embodiment of an ambiguous man, both creating and created by ambivalence and intensity. For Bauman Don Juan is something more—­the architect and protagonist of a modern strategy of life. About this champion of a modern life strategy with all its evasions of direct answers to hard and inconvenient questions, its flexibility and multifacetedness, its inconstancy and unpredictability, Bauman writes, “Don Juan (as portrayed by Molière, Mozart, or

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Kierkegaard) may be named as an inventor and pioneer of that strategy. By Molière’s Don Juan’s own admission, the delight of love consists in incessant change. The secret of Mozart’s Don Giovanni’s conquests, in Kierkegaard’s opinion, was his knack for finishing quickly and starting from a new beginning; Don Giovanni was in a state of perpetual self-­creation” (Bauman, 2004, 52). Don Juan appears as a hero, or an antihero, of Western modernity and civilization whose name can be shared by, and engraved on, distinct historical visions and trajectories of consciousness. In fact, the name of Don Juan can be inscribed on hardly reconcilable, if not mutually exclusive, forms of modern moral and political sensibilities. Far from Tirso de Molina, Molière, Byron, and even more so from Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), Peter Handke’s Don Juan is a different sort of the (anti-­) hero of modern life. He represents and reveals the symbolic logic of modern existence whose content and meaning have to be provided by an individual himself or herself. In Handke’s novel Don Juan: His Own Version (2004), Don Juan comes as a victim of modern life with its alienation, fragmentation, social atomization, and solitude. An orphaned soul, Don Juan is moved and motivated by sorrow rather than lust. His power lurks in his look; having established an eye contact with Don Juan or after his long and intense gaze, all women realize how lonely and forsaken they had been. Therefore, he has the power to unleash the woman’s desire (see Handke, 2010). Handke’s Don Juan does not count women. Far from counting his supposed victories and broken hearts (whose number, if we are to believe Da Ponte’s libretto for Mozart’s Don Giovanni, approximates two thousand— ­a sad, albeit unconscious, anticipation of modern barbarity wherein a human being becomes a number, no matter if viewed from the standpoint of the pleasure principle or from the reality principle, as Freud would have it), he suffers from a counting compulsion, but it has nothing to do with the counting of women who, in the aforementioned classical versions of Don Juan, have been conquered by his irresistible charms and powers of persuasion that every beautiful woman is unique, or, the other way around, that every unique woman is beautiful. In fact, Handke’s anti-­Don Juan is very much of an establisher of a dialogue, and also a provider of the sense of belonging. He understands perfectly well that he narrates his story into the fabric of life, sending a message that nobody controls his time and that he is solely responsible not only for his time but for the sense of fellowship and belonging as well. His logic is “I narrate, therefore, I am,” yet this fragile foundation of life could be reversed as “I gaze, therefore, I am.” As Joel Agee subtly notes, “‘Woman time’ and ‘counting time’ are the antipodes of his existence. Time, then, not

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sex, is his obsession. His chief endeavor is to be ‘master of his own time.’ . . . Surely his ‘own time’ is narrative time, the time of self-­telling. He takes his time with it, going nowhere slowly . . . His women are phantasms; he himself is a figure of his own dream” (Agee, 2010, 18). In opposition to Don Juan with his constant preoccupation with self-­ creation, incessant change, and intensity, another hero of modernity (no doubt antithetical to him), Don Quixote, seeks to arrest social and cultural change so that he might at least briefly freeze life’s beautiful moments, as if saying “Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!” (What Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ascribes to Faust during a spell of human weakness, is in fact Don Quixote’s supreme impulse: to return to the past and take a hold of it, to arrest the images and words that create us, because he understands that endless change is fundamentally diabolical and catastrophic insofar as it destroys human memory, the faculty of judgment, and criteria of valuation.) If Don Juan, taking to an extreme his unwillingness to answer existential questions, his inconstancy, volatility, and unpredictability, chooses a relationship with an unclear, ambiguous, mercurial, changeable reality, like a good player deciding to beat his rival on his own turf and even with his own weapons, then his antipode Don Quixote strives to resuscitate man’s dignity and self-­value—­and with it the value of the world, as an indivisible unity. Thus while Don Juan acts as a perfect being of modernity, Don Quixote reveals himself as a tragic conservative par excellence. “Don Quixote is a transition-­age figure, in whom the values and ideas of the preceding age are no longer operative; but the new ones, in whom people could place their trust, have not yet had time to coalesce. No wonder, then, that Don Quixote fails to grasp his environment” (Donskis, 2008, 46). Don Juan foreshadows such live challenges of social reality as the Marquis de Sade’s, who celebrates freedom by consciously breaking taboos, defying conventions, and choosing life practices rather than abstract objectives or theoretical goals. But Don Juan’s personality, or rather the civilizational trajectory he personifies, also harbors the possibility of the fanatic, who can zealously defend change as the sole source of meaning and as fatally opposed to the canon and to recognizable reality. This is a modernizing, secularizing fanaticism whose representatives would gladly erase the past from the surface of the earth. Intensity and ambiguity allow dogmatism to flourish, a dogmatism defending ascetic and revolutionary ideals and at the very least evincing hatred toward any kind of religious symbols and faith-­related instruments of power—­something definitely to be found in the Marquis de Sade’s writings. On the other hand, Don Quixote, too, pushed to the limits of his internal logic, would disclose a totally different aspect of fanaticism. He would

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renounce the present day in favor of one that was past, just as he would most likely renounce reason and the senses in favor of faith and imagination. It is not surprising, therefore, that Don Quixote permits such a variety of different interpretations—­he is the prototype of the knight of faith, the saint, the revolutionary, the hermit taken for a lunatic, and finally, especially in Eastern Europe, the dissident. Harold Bloom reveals the openness of Don Quixote, just like Hamlet, to a multitude of mutually conflicting interpretations (see Bloom, 2004, 79–­99). Nevertheless, the fanaticism of denying the canon—­just like its negative doppelgänger, that of affirming the canon, a fanaticism incompatible with modern ideological secularism and relativism—­is Janus-­faced: both the fanaticism of change and that of a higher order and justice need each other like the two sides of the same coin. Don Juan embodies freedom and becomes the protagonist of a liberal imagination, while Don Quixote, knight of the conservative imagination, represents a distant and noble epoch that is incomparably closer to him than his own age. But in one respect they are ethically incompatible and radically negate each other. If Don Juan is an embodiment of the fragility of human relations, of short-­livedness, and of the separation of emotional and physical proximity, then Don Quixote rises up as a powerful symbol of commonality, even if these powers of association are morally errant and serve a questionable purpose. At the same time Don Quixote is the symbol of a loyal friend supremely faithful to his code of honor and his pledge. Friendship as a common commitment, a community of souls (Seelengemeinschaft) lays the foundation, in Don Quixote’s case, for the Romantic conception of friendship. Such a friendship leaves us with the hope that is possible to create an antidote to treating humans as instruments, to the reign of manipulative relations, this most unfortunate aspect of modernity. Everything depends on what trajectory of human consciousness we wish to pursue, what aspect of the human soul we wish to push forward to its self-­disclosure and fulfillment. Ambiguous Man and the Two-­Sidedness of the Modern World An analysis of modernity’s two-­sidedness, self-­rejection, and self-­ destruction allows us to trace not only the contours but also the sources of a phenomenon that Vytautas Kavolis, in his analysis of ambiguity and other social pathologies, has called ambiguous man. This is a type of consciousness characterized by the murkiness, vagueness, unclarity of one’s self-­identity, and the consequent thirst for intensity. Such a psychical mechanism of intermixed vagueness and intensity allows glorifying

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spontaneous, nonstate-­organized force; romanticizing brutality; and fostering the aggression of politically weak groups suffering from a victim syndrome. Ambiguous people tend to romanticize what their societies hold to be perversions; they strive to experience intensively whatever their culture considers to be beyond the borders of rationality and clarity. (Here, by the way, is the source of astrology’s and occultism’s success in the “rational” Western societies of today.) It is no wonder that none other than the Marquis de Sade has come to be a symbol, in our modern imagination and culture, of negating “normality”—­that is, the world as constrained by norms and conventions—­and of intently seeking to experience that world’s antitheses and perversions. Kavolis writes as follows about the way ambiguous people conceive the world only in terms of black-­and-­white dichotomies and dramatic antinomies while abjuring all nuances and brooking no doubts about their rightness: Where an intense desire reigns, there an authoritarian style of thinking and judging often gains the upper hand even when the conscious content of the thought is libertarian  .  .  . Seekers after intensity are naturally inclined to polarize “truth” and “error,” “virtue” and “wickedness,” instead of recognizing any intermediate grades. It is these intermediates that would stand in for the psychological ambiguity in their own character, which they consider intolerable and repress with arbitrary but “real” moments of intensity. Therefore, even if they demand freedom of choice, they expect that other choose their way of being free and even their way of understanding freedom. Dogmatic demands to the world arise from an ambiguity in the inner self. Tough language is a safeguard against inner dissolution. (Psychoanalysts found this mechanism in the earlier, still rather Romantic Russian revolutionaries.) Dogmatism is a mechanical stabilization of the ambiguous man, not arising from his inner personality . . . The final threat to the ambiguous man is not death, but boredom . . . (Kavolis, 1993b, 126–­127)

As an ambiguous compensation in the ambiguous man’s world, there is not only boredom, which to him is worse than anything else and which the English writer Malcolm Muggeridge has accurately dubbed the technological man’s fate but also a fatal sense of emptiness, which can be conquered only by consciously and actively cultivated extremisms, such as an ideologically hard language, marked by fanaticism and hate, or a drastic, prurient language shocking people of a Victorian taste and Puritan morality (i.e., curses, naturalistic scenes, and everything else that Susan Sontag has called the pornographic imagination). Boredom and emptiness are dispersed not

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by disciplined thought, demanding form, or strict discourse but by body language, strong expression, and powerful physical sensations. In the words of Kavolis, Ambiguous man, as we know him in the West, is a “consumer” of ideas, friendships, even his own feelings, but no “producer” (he doesn’t accumulate, he comments). He isn’t even a “regular consumer” with a certain felt commitment to a certain “producer” but rather an occasional “taster.” When he “produces” he doesn’t feel “free.” His freedom, in extreme cases, is to be an emptiness with respect to all things, to be filled with their incidentality. Only when you are filled with them, can you feel yourself. The more of “them” there are in you, the more there is of “yourself.” Thus, instead of creating a list of your inner requirements, you just wait for some external accident to hurt you—­you look for fragments of barbarism, for brutal corners of reality. There are two possibilities: injurious details or language bereft of significance. (The pathology here is this, that in “avant-­garde culture” there seem to be no other possibilities.)” (ibid., 128–­129)

The phenomenon of the ambiguous man is directly related to the idea of the death of literature, art, and the entire higher culture. The contemporary US writer Don DeLillo has interestingly handled this problem in his novel Mao II, published in 1992. It foresaw the threat of a global terrorism that breaks out of the shackles of political and military control. The novel’s main character is a charismatic writer who is both a mysterious loner and a cultic figure of world literature. Suddenly he experiences a profound creative crisis and comes to the conclusion that his exhaustion is symptomatic and symbolic: with him dies the whole of creative fiction. He is hounded by the conviction that literary narratives have altogether ceased exciting people in an era of global terrorism. According to him, people who every day on their television screens watch civilians being killed, airplanes crashing, and buildings exploding, can no longer be moved by literature. Terrorism has become the big political and cultural narrative. Literature is no longer capable of competing with a reality that has overcome and far surpassed imagination. The theory of the death of literature is based on the assumption that literary imagination hopelessly loses out to reality—­to terrorism, to violence, to the permanent fear of traveling and of going out to public places. At the same time we recall Bauman’s trenchant observation that to a humanity tormented by our epoch’s unholy trinity—­uncertainty, unsafety, and insecurity—­the classical ways of moralizing and conventional artistic wisdom seem things desperately outdated.

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Forms of manipulating mass consciousness are wildly competing against each other. A young woman, having served in Moon’s Unification Church and having been exploited to such an extent that she loses the ability to identify reality, no longer knows what controls her consciousness more—­the works of the writer she adores, television, terrorism, the stories of people terrified to fly, or images from the lives of drug addicts. DeLillo’s novel draws an impressive parallel between a throng of American football fans and the thousands of couples from all the world virtually wed in a gigantic football stadium by Sun Myung Moon, who is being watched by them on a giant screen. They all seek to be submerged in a will greater and higher than theirs, a will that controls and creates an image, a television screen miracle—­the will of the Leader, Protector, Savior, and Image Provider. These people thirst after being manipulated. The structure and phenomenon of an authoritarian personality, unable to live and identify itself in the absence of a powerful leader and guide, an all-­powerful and sole, true party, was first grasped and theoretically articulated by the Frankfurt School—­above all, Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm. The latter, in addition, insightfully analyzed the flight from, and the almost passionate renunciation of, freedom. But the Frankfurt School and Don DeLillo have somewhat different conceptions of the structure of personality. Adorno and Fromm revealed the structure of the modern man who has lost his sense of the world’s clear meaning (in other words, the ambiguous man) and is desperately intent on regaining it—­that is, they revealed the personality and identity structure of the political or religious sect follower, ideological true believer, revolutionary, ascetic, radical, or fanatic. This is a man who could happily greet the Nazis marching in the streets of Berlin after feeling the shock of the world’s stability and sense disappearing in the wake of the Weimar Republic’s crash. The authoritarian personality, discovered and so perspicuously analyzed by Adorno and Fromm, needed, like it needed oxygen, a felicitous compound of ideas and practice that would become a reference sign and allow it to experience the world’s cognitive transparency and clarity of meaning. DeLillo, on the other hand, presents the view of a sharply segmented postmodern and postideological personality that no longer yearns for integrating ideas; instead of ideas, it needs a protective and comforting image with which it can stay forever. This is a person incapable of confronting reality; he takes refuge in its underground, which itself can take various shapes: a crowd of football fans creating an illusion of sociability and vanishing after the game, a hate group, terrorists calling themselves resistance fighters and yearning to die, a closed professional life in which one refuses

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to evaluate facts of reality and to hold political views but places one’s trust only in persuasive pictures and images, or a principled eschewal of participation in political life on the grounds of an unshakable conviction that the world is ruled by powerful, closed groups and their conspiracies. The symbolic structure of authority changes fundamentally, too. In the modern world it was still possible to be a fanatic dying for a specific idea or person. In the postmodern world authority is diffuse; it cannot be collected into one person, ideology, or theory; therefore, you want to die when there is still hope that together with you there will disappear at least a small part of the reality you hate and do not understand. Postmodernism deromanticizes everything; it turns it into a routine, an everyday thing, even fanaticism and hatred. The modern world—­fanatics used to terrify it; whereas the postmodern world is not terrified by fanatics, but by a confrontation with reality, reality as it is and not as represented by the images hiding it, advertising clips, or cartoons. Nobody wants to see hunger, death, women degraded and stoned—­it is much more convenient to construct a doctrine that everything we take to be hunger, violence, and hate-­filled speech about the modern world really are unique alternative ways of conceiving collective identity and the world. Thus a hatred of reality and the desire to destroy, or at least safely hide, really does not surprise the people of the postmodern world. The symbolic ending of DeLillo’s novel has the author voluntarily going to Beirut in order to satisfy the terrorist group’s demand to agree to become a hostage so that another hostage can be freed. But did he do this because of a moral impulse and a suddenly authentically felt inner need to save an innocent human being’s life? Or did he do this because he wanted to experience something truly intense and in this way reboot and inspire himself to create a new work of literature? DeLillo’s novel leaves this question unanswered (see DeLillo, 1992). An ambiguous man’s existential and psychological openness to violence and terror as a source of inspiration and as a stimulus for experiencing the meaning of being in the world brings out what Kavolis has defined as pathologies of ambiguity. Reality exists to the extent that intensity, stimulation, vehement experiences, vivid body language, artificial self-­stimulation, and routinized everyday shocks exist. The routinization of shock, fear, and other affects, and making them a part of popular culture, are also distinctive of the ambiguous man’s psychology and sociology. (In this context it is not so difficult to explain the tremendous demand for terror and fear that motion pictures satisfy in our popular culture.) The flight from routine leads to a routinization of intensity and affects, but it also bears witness to the changes taking place in modern man’s consciousness. The speed of modernization reaches its apex—­what changes is

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not only the structure of the way we conceive the world, the way we talk and express our thoughts (taken over by an aggressive fast-­talking reminiscent of a TV report or commercial and a highly simplified language reminiscent of newspaper headlines), but also the entire morphology of our culture and our relationship to reality. We are no longer satisfied with the languidly moving camera—­ deliberately slow Eastern European movies can appeal only to the cinema aesthete or people of an extremely sophisticated taste. Whenever possible we exchange a printed text for an image. Images themselves become faster and place new demands on the written and printed text—­the latter must be concentrated, separated into easily and quickly read paragraphs that are not too long and themselves grouped into sections moving easily one after the other. It remains for sociologists to find out whether the constant acceleration of a modernization directed upon, and obsessed with, itself pushes us toward the margins and into the underground of a sociocultural system that is already exploiting us and that we ourselves have created. The negation of modernity and the quest to consign it to the margins of contemporary processes is part and parcel of the ambiguous man’s response to an incomprehensible and ungraspable reality. This in turn intensifies the negative and destructive potential inherent in the imagination and life practice of contemporary people. Our desire to announce the end of modernity and of history, on the one hand, and the arrival of postmodernity (in practically all cases) on the other, are what Bauman had in mind when he wrote, “What prompts so many commentators to speak of the “end of history,” of postmodernity, “second modernity” and ‘surmodernity,’ or otherwise to articulate the intuition of a radical change in the arrangement of human cohabitation and in social conditions under which life politics is nowadays conducted, is the fact that the long effort to accelerate the speed of modernity has presently reached its ‘natural limit’” (Bauman, 2008b, 10–­11). It is not in vain that Bauman warns it would be naive to think that an extreme acceleration of modernization processes means that modernity is over or has died and that something fundamentally different has taken its place. For the people of our epoch, many of the moral and political choices are determined not only by the intensity of social change, the velocity of processes, and the changed social perception but also by the symbolic structure in which we articulate our social experience and interpret ourselves and the surrounding world, and also by the forms of anxiety and fear.

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Modern Forms of Anxiety and Fear Investigators of Eastern European literature have noticed how greatly forms of modern anxiety and tension differ in Western and Eastern Europe. In the twentieth century Western Europeans and Americans most often experienced an anxiety of influence because of the way they were manipulated and their moral character was being deformed, whereas Eastern Europeans experienced an anxiety of (physical) destruction (see Proffer, 1996, 361–­369). Today these forms of anxiety have converged—­after September 11, 2001, Westerners increasingly talk about the possibility that they, their environment, and even the whole world might suffer wholesale destruction. Eastern Europeans in their new democracies or, more precisely, oligarchies with elements of procedural democracy, emphasize the dangers of manipulation and the involvement of even highly respected public officials in unexpected games of power and influence. After twentieth-­century talk about a possible East–­West convergence—­ during the Cold War this theory was a halfway tolerated form of freethinking and intellectual dissent that even Andrei Sakharov subscribed to—­we see that if there was any convergence between the Marxist East and the capitalist West, it happened only in the arena of fear, anxiety, and tension. West and East exchanged forms of fear, anxiety, tension, and hatred. Thus the world became more alike not in sharing freedom, individualism, consumption, public policy, or social relations (it is just here that the chasms are deep not just between continents but even between the states of the United States or the member states of the European Union) but in sharing forms of anxiety, fear, and hatred. It is evident that the current political and sociocultural situation in Europe is more reminiscent of the decentralized, multicultural states of Central Europe during the Baroque period than of what then was the centralized and monocultural heart of Western Europe, France, the architect of the current European Union (EU). I would even risk the metaphor that the current EU is the forgotten history of Central Europe transformed into the political present, about which in the most paradoxical way a Central Europe pushed into the defensive medium of small states harbors doubts—­in opposing contemporary Europe, we are opposing a condition that we historically experienced earlier than did the West. In Baroque Europe, monolingual England or France with a rather uncomplicated formula of identity (or monarchically dictated class membership) and political centralization (especially France) was much more redolent of that nationalism that today seems so inseparable from Central Europe. But we at that time were precisely that which contemporary

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Western Europe is now—­the decentralized political home of many languages, cultures, and religions. We exchanged places, only no one noticed. We forgot and don’t want to remember our past because for us it is associated with the insecurity and existential threats we have experienced: we believe that it is not parliament or a statute but the formula “one language, one culture, one religion, one state” that guarantees our political survival and trustworthy identity. Except that our strength in Central Europe used to coincide with the heterogeneous and culturally multidimensional identity of parliament and freedom, whereas the strength of Western Europe lay in its homogeneous structure of power and identity. Today everything is topsy-­turvy. Our homogeneity nowadays symbolizes our defensive nationalism, whereas Western Europe’s heterogeneity symbolizes its strength. Today we are like the West of Baroque-­period Europe minus the power, whereas contemporary Western Europe is like the Baroque Central Europe plus economic and political power. Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita purveys precisely such a form of Eastern European existential anxiety. In the novel’s constructed reality no one doubts that people almost fatalistically fall into the categories of sinners and saints, cowards and braves; therefore, the main question is how much chance nobility has in a world in which the worst thing is not even candidly self-­identifying evil (personified in the novel by Satan, calling himself Woland) but our own forms of life standing under its influence, the most dangerous of which are moral relativism, faithlessness, and the nihilistic rejection of everything not associated with power or the possibility to survive physically here and now. As Ellendea Proffer notes, “In Anglo-­American literary studies we refer to ‘the anxiety of influence’; in totalitarian Russia the appropriate phrase would have been ‘the anxiety of destruction.’ All of Bulgakov’s literary energy and creative will were concentrated on proving something that his environment contradicted: that manuscripts don’t burn, that art outlasts the tyrants, that entropy doesn’t triumph over the creative spirit. In the view of some of his friends this was touching naiveté, not unlike Yeshua’s, or perhaps it was a kind of cosmic whistling in the dark” (ibid., 369). The conception of modernity—­horrible, frightening, capable of turning a man who does not succumb to organized evil and hatred into a clinical case and mental patient—­is, in Bulgakov’s brilliant novel, essentially Eastern European. It is openly Manichaean, just as Bulgakov’s interpretation of Christianity is, although the latter has Ernest-­Joseph Renan’s interpretation of Jesus Christ’s life mixed in. Of the Manichaean myth, David J. Levy writes,

150      Modernity in Crisis But there is more to the Manichaean myth than the sum of the influences—­ Zoroastrian, Christian and Mesopotamian—­that we can detect within it. There is a unity to the whole that gives it a grandeur and pathos all its own and allows us to speak, with Eliade, of the “tragic pessimism” of the system. The source of this unity lies not in the diversity of historical origins to which the content of the myth bears witness. Rather, the myth illuminates, in a powerful way, the experience of the worldly evil and the aspiration to perfection of an imperfect form of life which is coeval with mankind. It is this, the existential rather than the historical root of the Manichaean world-­view, which gives the myth its unity and even a certain outrageous plausibility. (Levy, 2005, 335–­336)

A common thread from this novel to the semiotics of Yuri Lotman is the idea that nowhere in the modern world were a bipolar conception of the world, a black-­and-­white social optics, a political and moral Manichaeism, and the abyss separating good and evil (in a word, the modern version of Manichaeism proclaiming that good and evil are parallel realities) so deeply rooted and ingrown as in Russia and partially in other Eastern European countries. In the words of Tim McDaniel, Yuri Lotman, a recently deceased semiotician and cultural historian, developed, together with colleagues, a particularly powerful perspective on the causes of Russian historical breakdowns. In his various books, including his last work, Kultura i vzryv [Culture and explosion], he argues that Russian culture, unlike the culture of the West, embodies an underlying binary logic of opposition. Without necessarily being aware of these patterns, individuals and groups conceptualize social life in terms of sets of absolute alternatives that admit of no compromise. There is no neutral ground: either one or the other must be chosen, and in this choice either one or the other must be absolutely victorious. In terms of human values, Lotman gives the following sets of polar oppositions: charity versus justice; love versus the law; personal morality versus state law; holiness versus politics. As we know from ancient literatures, particularly Greek, the Russians were not the first to perceive the tensions among these qualities. But in Russia, argues Lotman, the tendency is to present the opposition starkly: either one or the other. (McDaniel, 1996, 17)

Central Europe’s conception of modernity is akin to the Eastern European apocalyptical vision of modernity only in sharing the same anxiety of (physical) destruction. But if in Eastern Europe the dark side of modernity asserts itself as an absolutely irrational force, annihilating the fragile cover of rationality and civilization, in twentieth century Western European literature a totally different type of modernity manifests

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itself—­one that is rational, subjugating all to itself, anonymous, depersonalized, safely splitting man’s responsibility and rationality into separate spheres, fragmentizing society into atoms, and through its hyperrationality making itself incomprehensible to any ordinary person. In short, if the apocalyptic prophet of modernity in Eastern Europe is Mikhail Bulgakov, then the latter’s equivalent in Central Europe would undoubtedly be Franz Kafka. Like Winston Smith perceived by George Orwell as the last European (as we know, the preliminary version of the title of 1984 was The Last European), Mikhail Bulgakov appears to have been the last classical writer and the last classical European in revolutionary Russia. With sound reason, then, Proffer points out that Like the writers literary history has come to label modernists, Bulgakov is writing in the post-­Einsteinean universe, and in many ways he fits the general profile of Anglo-­American modernism. Because he is usually discussed as a Soviet writer, albeit an aberrant one, he is rarely place in this context. Like the modernists, Bulgakov was inclined to parody the forms of the earlier masters, and in this novel [The Master and Margarita] he certainly uses myth to impose order of sort—­only then to explode the myth itself. Like T. S. Elliot, Bulgakov had no desire to subvert traditional humanism—­to the contrary, he longed to reestablish it in a country where it was held in contempt. But his art actually reveals the typical concerns of modernism, so it is not surprising that irony and ambiguity of motivation are central to The Master and Margarita. To some degree these approaches are present in earlier Russian writers, especially Dostoyevsky and Gogol, but Bulgakov adds truly modern anxiety: the knowledge that there is no stable society against which to rebel, there is only entropy, visible everywhere. (Proffer, 1996, 361)

You are disciplined and punished not because you committed a transgression, and you are put on trial not because you broke the law. The reality rather is that there appears in the world a power constellation of actions, a “system” (Max Weber metaphorically called it an iron cage and didn’t doubt its rationality) that establishes itself only by turning people into passive objects and controlling them. That is the way it operates. A modernity that had nothing to do with individuals and groups turned into items to be rationalized, controlled, observed, and disciplined would simply stop functioning. A local, self-­limiting modernity is an oxymoron; “there ain’t no such animal.” Modernity takes away a person’s features because they constitute a human being’s vulnerability—­they pose a problem for an anonymously controlled whole. We become either goods (though we ourselves don’t know this; we think that goods are what we consume, though we ourselves

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are consumed) or statements, or live illustrations of political programs, or instruments of defending or implementing a policy. Our worth is measured by criteria in no way associated with our own life purposes. If Franz Kafka’s The Trial became a prophetic depiction of universal control in an anonymous system, then one more chef-­d’oeuvre of Central European literature, Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, so beloved by Bauman, became the great document of a modernity intent on erasing individuality and personal features. And recalling the interpretation that Milan Kundera provided of Central Europe’s tragic, anonymous, and memory-­erasing modernization in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting, we may assert that Central European modernity is an organized process of forgetting; a phantom city alienated from its own history and obsessed by a desire to begin that history anew or to reject its real history and in its place exhibit a souvenir history; and its ghostly inhabitants, people without a history or a memory. (Interestingly enough, such a destructive version of modernity is purveyed in Ricardas Gavelis’s novels Vilnius Poker, 1989, and Vilnius Jazz, 1993.) Zygmunt Bauman’s Theoretical Project: Themes, Concepts, and Metaphors Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology is not confined to the boundaries of sociology as a project of describing the modern individual’s social experience. It is a philosophy of life that analytically absorbs not only forms of life but forms of modern social, political, and moral sensitivity and discourse as well: it is through these forms that experience and life are interpreted. To understand a phenomenon in its context and to describe it in its own language—­this is a hermeneutics requiring not just immense experience, sensitivity, and mastery. It also requires great powers of empathy, tying together conceptual explication, high-­level theorizing, social analysis, interpreting the concrete experience of people here and now, and moving from theoretical language to advertising talk and to the sometimes playful jargon of newspapers, the Internet, the social media, technocratic politics, and public administration. Above all, Zygmunt Bauman in his language and thinking joins together experiences of private and public life and their theoretical and existential implications. Thus in his books you can find all of the following: sophisticated constructs of sociological thought; his own clinically exact terms, which come epistemologically and cognitively alive only in the author’s hands and which transferred to another context and to another theoretician’s text

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would turn into either phrases without content or graceful metaphors; philosophical passages; excerpts from diaries or literary works; advertising copy; mantras of business gurus and fashionable motivation specialists; political rhetoric, clichés, and mass incantations; newspaper ads; commercial infos; government decision fragments; and political document collages. Pointillism as a dimension of time and a form of life becomes an embodiment of modernity in Bauman’s marvelous study Consuming Life. In French pointillist painting configurations of dots become contours of life, constantly changing form in a Protean way in which we ourselves participate while trying to understand the signs of reality that themselves do not completely explain anything to us at all. Pointillist time, according to Bauman, can be accompanied by constant breakdowns and breakouts (of feelings, fears, crises, catastrophic premonitions, apocalyptic signs), risings and mass ecstasies as well as intervals and regular separations of temporal parts (Bauman, 2007b, 32). After all, Bauman endorses Michael Lövy’s reinterpretation of Walter Benjamin’s modern vision of the historical process: this interpretation has it that “time of necessity” has been supplanted by the “time of possibilities,” an allusion to an accidental time, open to the invasion of novelty at any moment. This conception of time, gaining ascendancy in late modernity, reveals a field of possibilities and happenstances, after which no predetermined time remains. We no longer know anything, so guesses become valueless. Every fragment of history harbors the possibility of a seismic shift and a revolutionary potential (ibid., 33). In Consuming Life Bauman reveals the mechanism of turning people into commodities through the decision of British politicians to select immigrants mainly on the basis of the needs of the economy; that is, organized consumption, a mechanism connected with the cult of beauty, youth, and good health that, according to Bauman, flowered during the Great Depression in the United States. It was then that the transition from the producers’ to the consumers’ society took place (see Baumann, 2007b, 5–­7). Women began to treat their physical beauty as a harbinger of success. Being liked by others becomes a key to success. In general people begin to look at themselves as commodities, although most often they fail to realize this. According to Bauman, we think we are only consumers, though in reality (and this is a big secret the system diligently guards) we are the ones being consumed. Through the consumption of a commodity we model ourselves after that commodity and become one, too. Our human value and potential is no longer measured by our creative or productive achievements but by our purchasing power and consuming potential as well as by

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our flexibility—­consumption turns us into material for another’s use and into potential objects. In this way Bauman in his existential social hermeneutics uniquely combines sociology, philosophy, essayistic science, and other interpretational models that allow him to act both as a nomothetic, theory-­forming sociologist and as an idiographic describer of unique historical and cultural configurations—­such an interpretation erases the boundaries between, on the one hand, the disclosure, so characteristic of the arts and humanities, of individual behavior, and attitudes toward the world, and on the other, the type of societal analysis that is closer to the social sciences. There is no aspect of modern existence that Zygmunt Bauman hasn’t put on the map of his interpretations: from modernity’s instrumentalist rationality, the breakdown of civilized thinking, and his analysis of human sensitivity-­undermining adiaphorization, in Bauman’s great study devoted to modernity and the Holocaust (see Bauman, 2000), to his writings discussing the liquidity of love and the fragility and ephemerality of human ties in late modernity (see Bauman, 2003), the liquidity of modernity (see Bauman, 2008b), ambivalence (see Bauman, 2007d), fear (see Bauman, 2007c), and (im)mortality (see Bauman, 1992)—­it is all there. It is a reconciling, unknown to other sociologists, of methodological individualism and holism, possible only because Bauman operates as a philosopher, a sociologist, and an essayist recording changes in social reality through his own experiences and his own relationship to those changes. Bauman’s prose is unique: we might call it a philosophy of everyday life. In it life is not some abstract vital principle or rationally excogitated theoretical possibility. Bauman records what is going on with me and you: this becomes evident in the discourses about power and fear and is contextualized in a social theory that interprets our individual states and experiences in the field of power, moral and political imagination, symbolic authority, ideology, and interests. In the words of Vytautas Kavolis, what we have here is an analysis of social structure combined with an interpretation of energy (see Kavolis, 1979). It is no wonder that Georg Simmel, who had a great theoretical influence on Bauman, in his own thought coherently joined together both the philosophical interpretation of Geist or l’esprit and the sociological analysis of structures—­he was, after all, a philosopher of culture formed by the German Lebensphilosophie and also a sharp-­witted sociologist who laid the foundations for conflict theory. In order to understand the forms of Bauman’s existential, moral, and political sensitivity, we should also have to add here the Central European experience of modernity; the end of the modern world as it happened during the twentieth century; and a deep knowledge, from the inside, of

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modernity’s national versions, as betokened in Polish, Jewish, Russian, and British cultures. Lastly, the fundamental theoretical and aesthetic influences on Baumann included those of Emmanuel Lévinas, Polish sociological thought, French poststructuralism, modern Jewish religious philosophy and Russian literature, all of which correspond to the field of existential thinking and critical theory, so powerfully synthesized by Bauman’s own thought. In his ability to comprehend the fundamental forms of contemporary life while simultaneously maintaining an analytical and a historical perspective, Bauman reminds us of the new French philosophers, especially André Glucksmann, who likens philosophy to the subtitles of a cinema film whose language we don’t understand. Philosophy is neither life itself nor its construction; however, it is a sequence of subtitles that help us to interpret life, to join together its dispersed fragments, and to find our orientation not just in the life we observe but in ourselves as well, living as we do our lives and excogitating them into a common picture of life. It is such interpretative subtitles that Bauman provides, perfecting our cognitive tools and extending their possibilities up to a conjoining of conceptual content and personal experience—­something of a mission impossible for the theoretician. Yet Bauman accomplishes it: he builds a bridge from the history of ideas and concepts; that is, our overwhelmingly bookish and academic experience, to that real world of thought and action in which we live as real people. To put it otherwise, reading Bauman makes us both observers of the world and participants in it. We cannot observe without participating, but at the same time it is impossible to participate without stepping back. The uniting of theory and practice into an existential philosophy, even one that wears the mask of social theory, brings to light Bauman’s magical touch: thought turns into action, and action turns into thought. That which goes on with us cries out for words and concepts, but the latter wither and die if they are not faced with the actual goings-­on. A good example would be Bauman’s insight of the community as a narrative and discourse that as it were participates in the explanation of all our history but whose real significance becomes evident only when you confront what you don’t understand and don’t know but stubbornly hold on to as the only possibility of survival, clarity, and safety. People scared by life atomized and fragmented come to regard the community as a promise of safety and of anxiety overcome. But, according to Bauman, without a painful experience, fear, ambiguity, insecurity, and anxiety, the concept of community would lose any connection with the real content of a contemporary individual’s suffering and aspirations. Were it not for the crisis of modernity and the dream of a safe place with which we wish to identify, the community as a theoretical subject matter and dream would be impossible.

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Identity and the search for it become the center of our self-­conception and self-­interpretation only when we lose a clear sense of where our real place is and how we are perceived by those around us. Identity, according to Bauman, is born of an identity crisis, of a weakening of our bond to the surrounding world; this is why it positively demands its reinterpretation. It is the fear of neglect and separation that compels us to find ourselves anew and, in addition, to think up a persuasive story that would convince those in whose eyes we just have to be the people we want to be (see Bauman, 2004). Perhaps all main theories of modernity grew out of greater or smaller crises that it caused by splitting that structure of personality and its self-­conception that had existed for centuries; and all postmodern theories inevitably arose from that very crisis of modernity. Here is what Bauman says on this topic in his Consuming Life: To cut a long story short, community might be as old as humanity, but the idea of “community” as a condition sine qua non of humanity could be born only together with the experience of its crisis. That idea was patched out of the fears emanating from the disintegration of the earlier self-­reproducing social settings—­called subsequently, and retrospectively, the ancien régime, and recorded in the social-­scientific vocabulary under the name of the “traditional society.” The modern “civilizing process” (the only process calling itself by that name) was triggered by the state of uncertainty, for which the falling apart and impotence of “community” was one of the suggested explanations . . . The “nation,” that eminently modern innovation, was visualized in the likeness of “community”: it was to be a new and bigger community, community writ large, community projected on the large screen of a newly imagined “totality”—­and a community-­by-­design, a community made to the measure of the newly extended network of human interdependencies and exchanges. (Bauman, 2007b, 72–­73)

In Consuming Life Bauman emphasizes that “consumerism,” just like “society of consumers” or “consumer culture,” are not descriptions of reality itself but rather tools for analyzing it. They are what Max Weber called “ideal types.” In Bauman’s view, the great majority if not all the concepts actively used in the social sciences have the status of ideal types. This is true of “capitalism,” “feudalism,” “free market,” democracy, even society, community, organization, and family (see Baumann, 2007b, 27).

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Adiaphorization: Quitting the Sphere of Sensitivity and Things of Little Import Adiaphoron in Greek means an unimportant thing (pl. adiaphora). This term was used by the Greek Stoics; later it was adopted by Martin Luther’s fellow religious reformer Philipp Melanchthon, who called the liturgical differences between Catholics and Protestants adiaphora—­that is, things to which no heed should be paid. But in the sense given to it by Bauman an adiophoron is a temporary withdrawal from our own sensitivity zone; an ability not to react, or to react in such a way as if something were happening not to people but to natural physical objects, to things, or to nonhumans. The things occurring are unimportant; they do not happen to us or with us. This helps explain the once popular public executions, which were attended and observed as pleasing spectacles by women with their babies, children, commoners, and aristocrats (the latter watching from a distance). Individual personhood diffused and dissolved in the throng as well as publicly performed cruelties all destroyed any real relation to the person being tortured and killed. All these people watching an execution would have been horrified if such a spectacle had threatened them or their loved ones personally. But since these cruelties were inflicted not on “real people,” but on criminals and “enemies of the people” (during the French Revolution, say, when to the great delight of the masses, the royal family, the aristocrats, the Vendée activists, the conservative provincial royalists, and other enemies of the revolution were guillotined), the human power to feel sympathy and empathy was suppressed. In his Les chroniques italiennes Stendhal describes a strange and horrifying amalgamation of an Italian crowd’s sensibility, theatricality, and fascination with gory details: even sympathy for the innocent Lucrezia condemned to die in “The Cenci” harmonizes weirdly with a desire to see all the details of the head-­chopping mandaia (an Italian death machine resembling the guillotine) no less than the mazzolato used on her brother. By the way, murder by the mazzolato (cudgel blows topped off by an executioner’s knife) was carefully described by Alexandre Dumas in his Le Comte de Monte-­Cristo (1845–­1846). It turns out that a “healthy and normal person” can for a time turn into as much of a moral idiot as a sadistic sociopath slowly killing another human being or one showing no sympathy for a tortured human being’s suffering. We don’t even need clinical terms—­moral insanity can befall even the healthy. The routinization of violence and killing during war leads to a condition in which people stop responding to war’s horrors. On the other hand, constant stimuli force people to cease reacting to them, and

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they pay attention only to some more powerful social or informational stimulus. Ancient wisdom reminds us that by misusing a high social intonation or by sowing moral panic you sooner or later will lose quick and sufficient responses from others when you really do need their help. Let us just recall the fairy tale about the young shepherd who fakes wolf attacks and then receives no assistance when his herd is really attacked by wolves. Incessant political scandals similarly diminish or entirely take away people’s social and political sensitivity. For something to agitate society, it must really be unexpected or downright brutal. Thus inevitably mass society and mass culture adiaphorize us. Not just politicians but insensitive individuals whose social nature and attention are awakened only by sensational and destructive stimuli are in large part media constructions. Stimulation becomes a method and a way of self-­realization. Things turned into a routine do not turn anybody on—­we need to become a star or a victim to gain any sort of attention from society. As Bauman observes, only a celebrity and a famous victim can expect to be noticed by a society overstuffed with sensational, valueless information, especially in an environment that recognizes only force and violence. Celebrity and starhood means success that leaves the masses with the illusion that they are not too far from it and can reach it. A star is a hero to those who have succeeded or who still believe that success will enter their lives. But a victim is a hero to those who have been united by failures and degradings. The traditional mythic hero is a projection of power generalized into the belief that the present can always repeat the past—­this, after all, is no more than what the historical hero means in the present-­ day world. The worst possible combination today, in Bauman’s view, lies in the conflation of victim and hero, which resuscitates the dignity of the degraded but exacts the price of the hero’s death and the glorification of destruction. The physical annihilation of the enemy or his embodiment, necessarily accompanied by the self-­annihilation of the hero (i.e., his becoming the victim), reestablishes the dignity lost: the perfect mixture of hero and victim is effected by the cult of the shahids, or martyrs, in the consciousness of terrorists and those who believe in them. As Czeslaw Milosz observed in his Captive Mind, what is normal or usual is not necessarily what is good and noble (see Milosz, 1990). Normal things for people are those with which they grew up and which they internalized as their own social reality. Later the shocking discovery might be made that these “normal” things bring humiliation and pain to another person. But such discoveries and sudden enlightening insights are infrequent. Most often they do not take place at all: people hold to be true whatever does not surprise them and to which they never reacted because it seems to them to be a self-­evident thing.

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Bauman considers the adiaphorization of behavior to be one of the most sensitive problems of our epoch. Its causes are manifold: instrumental rationality; mass society and mass culture (i.e., being in a crowd each and every moment—­just think of television and the Internet); having the crowd in one’s soul; and a conception of the world such that it seems you are always enveloped by an anonymous power thanks to which no one will recognize, identify, or shame you. Thus of no importance to us are those things that we ourselves do not connect with our lives, whose existence is dissociated from our being in the world and that do not belong to the sphere of our identity and self-­ conception. Something happens to others, but not to us. It cannot happen to us—­this is a familiar feeling, provoked by our understanding of the technological and virtual human world. Constantly seeing crashing planes in the movies, you start looking at them as fictions that can never happen to you in real life. Violence shown every day takes away amazement at, and disgust with it; as it were, it grows on you. At the same time it stays unreal—­it still seems it cannot happen to us. It did not happen to us. It happened to someone else. It happened to others. These “others” are fictions created by artists, analysts, scholars, or journalists. Real is only what happens to me. What happens to me physically and directly. What can be proven. Often we fail to tie together two connected and even mutually conditioning things: the excess of verbally and pictorially depicted violence and brutality in our media, and the undoubtedly sadistic and masochistic practice of political commentary seeking to belittle others and ourselves. A brutal type of discourse cutting down others and ourselves; that is, social and political commentary as a slow process of self-­negation and self-­destruction has truly nothing in common with a critical attitude. For real and good criticism is a constructing of alternatives, an essaying of a thought or an action from the position of logic or another way of knowing or thinking. Verbal and mental cannibalism or mutual moral annihilation means just one thing—­the disavowal of free discussion and its smothering before it has even started. Sadistic language usually aims to control, torture, and thereby subjugate its object, while masochistic language is characterized by such a way of making comments about yourself as would not occur even to a real enemy of yours or your country. As Erich Fromm has written, only those unacquainted with the subject might think that sadism and masochism are mutually opposing tendencies of character and personality structure. In reality, they are closely connected and often intertwine themselves into a sadomasochistic knot precisely because they spring from the same source—­loneliness, a feeling of being thrown out of the world, and a fear of isolation (Fromm, 1994, 281).

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Since freedom is usually conceived by weaker persons as standing there naked and helpless in the face of an inhospitable world, they seek to save themselves by injuring another’s or their own personality. Celebrity, Victimhood, Suffering, and Success, or the End of Privacy and the Public Sphere In the apt observation of Daniel J. Boorstin, our epoch shows that great personalities are no longer needed—­unless they are turned into celebrities. In contrast to a great personality, which creates not only itself and others but also codes of behavior, standards of decision, and criteria of evaluation and which, in addition, corrects or rejects traditional viewpoints, mere celebrities are created by the media and the pseudoevents the latter construct (see Boorstin, 1964). Bauman extends Boorstin by claiming that nowadays it is only celebrities and victims that have an impact on the world and themselves become significant (see Bauman, 2006). According to Bauman, intellectuals who once acted like interpreters, supplying people with the structure and possibility of meaning and helping lawmakers to create social and moral order, today hide in, and retreat to, multiculturalism or the ideology of the end of ideology (see Bauman, 2007a, 125). As Bauman explains, “To stand up against the status quo always takes courage . . . and courage is a quality which intellectuals once famous for their . . . radicalism have lost on the way to their new roles and ‘niches’ as experts, academic boffins or media celebrities. One is tempted to take this slightly updated version of la trahison des clercs for the explanation of the puzzle of the learned classes’ resignation and indifference” (ibid). Why have intellectuals today almost ceased to exist as a class capable of (or at least having long been capable of) joining together the world of ideas and the sphere of public affairs? Why and how have they devolved into entertainers and an irresponsible chattering class who have lost their former power to raise standards of political and moral decision making in the public sphere or to strengthen the significance of public morality and political ethics? And what has happened to the public domain? How and why did the hero, the personification of conscience and the devil’s advocate become a chancellery expert, a detached commentator, or, much worse, a celebrity? That a martyr becomes a hero and a hero a martyr is deeply anchored in the transition that takes us from premodern societies into solid, early modernity, and later from solid modernity into its liquid form. The martyr is a protagonist of the premodern system of values and ideas, as well as its symbol. By contrast, the hero is a thoroughly modern social character and

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role player. In Bauman’s view, society under liquid modernity has no more need of either the martyr or the hero. Their places are taken by two new main social characters: the victim and the celebrity. As Bauman clearly and cogently argues, By contrast with the case of martyrs or heroes, whose fame was derived from their deeds and whose flame was kept alive in order to commemorate those deeds and so to restate and reaffirm their lasting importance, the reasons which brought celebrities into the limelight are the least important causes of their “knownness.” The decisive factor here is notoriety, the abundance of their images and the frequency with which their names are mentioned in public broadcasts and the private conversations that follow them. Celebrities are on everybody’s tongue; they are every household’s household names. Like martyrs and heroes, they provide a sort of glue that brings and holds together otherwise diffuse and scattered aggregates of people; one would be tempted to say that nowadays they are the principal factors generating communities were not the communities in question not only imagined, as in the society of the solid modern era, but also imaginary, apparition-­like; and above all loosely knit, frail, volatile, and recognized as ephemeral. It is mostly for that reason that celebrities are so comfortably at home in the liquid modern setting: liquid modernity is their natural ecological niche. (Bauman, 2006, 49–­50)

In such an adiaphorized reality, a successful, convincing experience of victimhood and a persuasive narrative of suffering become a road to success and recognition, not at all because in that world humanity and sensitivity triumph but because an agonistic element accompanies suffering, martyrdom, and victimhood—­just like it accompanies economic competition or power struggles (a successful victim, too, enters into the world of power and prestige). Victims and martyrs compete: who is more convincing and which side has more authenticity? Successful suffering and a story that sways the majority open the gates to the structure of symbolic authority, power, and recognition—­or at least to safe formulas and a phraseology behind which political influence and power lie. Simply put, victims are celebrities, and celebrities are victims. That is the story of success in liquid modernity. In a consuming world suffering is consumed, too, as are victims and stories—­in a word, everything that is intense, that can be poignantly experienced either at a safe distance or through a protective and “loving” power relation. Adiaphora are operative here, too—­for, after all, we are not talking about a sympathetic relation to humans but about an access dictated by a safe distance from pain or by a power and caregiver relationship.

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The new social networks, such as the Internet’s Facebook, serve to show off fragments of our privacy in the expectation that we, too, will receive attention in an era of indifferent consumption, routinized social action, and moral anesthesia. The enthusiastic demonstration of our privacy (accompanied by stories about work, success, and family with personal and family photos displayed to hundreds and thousands of virtual “friends”) becomes a substitute for the public sphere and simultaneously a new—­a liquid—­public sphere. It is in this sphere that we seek inspiration, recognition, attention, new topics, and character prototypes for nascent literary creations at the same time it becomes an arena in which a quasi-­global audience of admirers and world friends takes shape. It is, to recall Malcolm Muggeridge’s words, a cri du cœur of technological man desperately struggling with his sense of meaninglessness and seeking to overcome the apathy of his surroundings, the piercing cognitive silence, and the moral vacuity spreading out under the alarmist editorials and sensationalist headlines, the advertising slogans, the declarations of global conspiracies and of the end of the world. It is the lonely and desperate man’s search for a space of his own, one that would protect him if not physically, then at least virtually. In this respect the Facebook phenomenon represents a struggle against our nonexistence and nonpresence in the world. It is an unconscious and often sporadic protest of the virtual crowd and its supernumeraries against the fact that they are nonbeing, a fiction of importance and significance, even though it is as if in their name that everything in the world is done. The struggle against meaninglessness, against insensitivity, against a failure to react and to extend recognition gives rise to such compensatory forms of struggle as a wildly spreading belief in conspiracy theories (which at least confirm your hunch that someone is trying to rub you out—­in other words, there is somebody that does give a hoot about you) as well as an inflation of weighty words. Important terms referring to terrifying human experiences, such as Holocaust, genocide, crime against humanity, apartheid, are being used ever more freely and ever more irresponsibly when talking about God knows what. They are adapted like old furniture to a more modern interior design: a once-­vibrant form of life and culture is turned into a lifeless decoration. In this case another’s suffering and annihilation of humanity becomes at best a way of turning attention to ourselves and our own way of talking (or our own “truth”). The hysterical conflation of semantic fields and the resemantization of terms, undertaken for the purpose of calling attention to yourself or of fortifying your faith or political doctrine (which essentially neither interests nor excites anyone until you announce that you know it will atone for the world’s sins or at least show the true face of evil), have their roots here, too.

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As a result, there’s an explosive and unstoppable proliferation of “holocausts” and “genocides”: only if you have become a successful victim and overcome this anesthetized layer will you be admitted into the field of distributed power and attention. If you lack real power but are authentically and uniquely powerless, at least you have touched on real power and have a sense of its other, dark side. You weren’t empowered but unempowered. If so, you can still be a witness to power—­only from a different angle. You can, therefore you are. Thanks to your unempowerment others can—­once more you are, only in a different way. As Danniel J. Boorstin accurately and humorously put it, a celebrity is a person well-­known for his fame, and a bestseller is a sold-­out book because they were successful in selling it. But what is authority and what does it mean to have it in such a society and social situation? Authority is what increases the number of viewers or readers. As Bauman explains, “Authority expands the ranks of the followers, but in the world of uncertain and chronically undetermined ends it is the number of the followers that makes—­that is—­the authority” (Bauman, 2008b, 67). In other words, public opinion research, questionnaires, telephone polls, and obsessively counted ratings are what create authority and what themselves constitute an anonymous, diffused authority that the engineers of image and public opinion, the imagologists, as Milan Kundera called them, are quick to incarnate in the person of some current hero. How and out of what else might authority be fashioned in a society that has lost its goals, vision, direction of development, and criteria of evaluation? The power and social roles of imagologists are also reinforced by the ever more indistinct boundary between the private and the public. The public place, known in ancient Greece as agora, in the twentieth century became a euphemism for the toilet. Public discussions today are nothing but collections of private evaluations and experiences, easily recognizable and watched and commented upon by equally private persons. The latter are only for a moment turned into public figures by the imagologists or their technical and auxiliary personnel (including producers and impresarios who in the absence of imagologists would lose their existence and all social functions at once)—­such a simulation of the public sphere, built up and torn down in a jiffy, convinces the extras of this life that they, too, are seen, that they exist at last. Of course, they exist, but only for a short while and thanks to the imagologists only. Here we have a partial fulfillment of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s, Aldous Huxley’s, and George Orwell’s bleak dystopian prophecies—­a rapid disappearance of the private sphere, though not in a totalitarian system but in mass society and mass culture where all things (including people, their functions, and their artifacts) are mutually replaceable. What we observe in

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the most diverse reality shows and various mass public TV discussions, accompanied by “heart-­rending” sentimental stories and sado-­masochistic revelations (the speakers and participants not even suspecting they are being manipulated) is just about what Jürgen Habermas identified as the vanishing of the private sphere: in his view, publicity simply completed an invasion into the private sphere, conquered it, and colonized it. However that might be, at the same time, before our very eyes, the public space is also being pulled apart. These are two mutually conditioning processes. Zygmunt Bauman, replying together with Jürgen Habermas to Richard Sennet’s prophecy of the end of the public man (Sennet, 1978), talked about a parallelly evident tendency: the end of privacy and even its colonization in current public discourse and mass culture. Privacy has become one of the rarest commodities. It is not only joyously renounced in reality shows and profane television or political clown sessions in general; it has become a key to commercial success and mass popularity. Of course, this is a merging of both tendencies: if the content of our public life is firmly won over by the private life of celebrities (which in fact is becoming our public life), then this means nothing other than that the public person and the public sphere are beginning to come to an end. Sennet was altogether right. But, in any case, as Bauman acutely observed, the process is taking place in both directions: there is nothing left of privacy, either. Here we might also offer some reflections on the end (or at least the beginning of the end) of Politics with capital P in our contemporary world. As Bauman observes, classic politics was always associated with the power to turn private problems into public questions as well as the power to internalize public questions and turn them into private or even existential questions. Today this political mechanism is out of tune. What we in our postmodern politics treat as public questions most often are private problems of public figures (Bauman 2008b, 70). The consequences are dramatic. It is just not clear anymore what freedom is. Is it the remnants of our privacy and our resolve not to sacrifice them to the new Internet social networks, mass popularity, and deformed public space? Or, on the contrary, is it our participation in public space, which seemingly needs nothing more than our extreme and ecstatic experiences and those of the virtual crowd? Should we try to accept this new game without rules and support the public space with at least minimal alternatives? Or would it be better to quit looking for an effective public morality and political ethics, if everything gets immediately deformed in front of our eyes anyway? But what then is the future of politics? Can it be that what awaits us in the nearest future is merely an amoral, technocratic void? As Christian Caryl reminds us, “The technology has outpaced the

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ethics, and it seems justified to ask whether the ethics can ever catch up again” (Caryl, 2011, 27). And where then is our true place? In the social game whose rules we don’t know and that we try to figure out only after having started to play and participate in it (for no one knows them, including the organizers)? Or in the forms of the past that are rejected as fictional only because they do not make it into the sphere of statistics, mass consumption, and ratings, which in our culture without standards and criteria is perhaps the only sphere that should determine their value? But what is belonging to (and in) a world that has no clear and trustworthy criteria? In solid modernity, where the importance of an identifiable territory corresponded with an individual’s recognizable face in portraiture (these coincided with the supports of reality’s factuality and the criteria of trustworthy reality), such criteria existed. But in liquid modernity the consumption of the world and of ourselves creates another time and place: discontinuous pointillist time, just like pointillism in painting, makes the momentary impression or state into a more real thing than do long-­term projects, history, the classical canon, and the past. Zygmunt Bauman’s great questions reach out to us from the map of his thought. It is difficult for them to receive answers that are worthy of them. But perhaps answers aren’t even necessary. The philosophy of liquid modernity’s experience and life—­this is a space for questions, not answers.

5

In the Name of Civilization, or the New Forms of Angst and Longing

It might be said that civilization can only have its epic poets in advance. Just as a man cannot report his own death when it happens, but only foresee it and describe it as something lying in the future. So it might be said: If you want to see an epic description of a whole culture, you will have to look at the works of its greatest figures, hence at works composed when the end of this culture could only be foreseen, because later on there will be nobody left to describe it. So it’s not to be wondered at that it should only be written in the obscure language of prophecy, comprehensible to very few indeed. —­Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen) A writer should never abandon his mother tongue and its treasures of idioms. Literature must deal with the past instead of planning the future. It must describe events, not analyze ideas; its topic is the individual, not the masses. It must be an art, not pretend to be a science. Moreover, belief in God and His Providence is the very essence of literature. It tells us that causality is nothing but a mask on the face of destiny. —­Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Author’s Note” to The Image and Other Stories

Human Rights in the Epoch of Disengagement

T

he great Russian humanist, dissident, and human rights defender Andrei Sakharov (1921–­1989), in whose name the supreme European Parliament (EP) award in the sphere of the defense of human rights was initiated, when asked about what kind of universal ideology could be adopted by humanity in the future, described the universality of human rights and our commitment to defend them as the only set of values and ideas capable of bridging the gulfs and reconciling the opposites. Otherwise, according to

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the patron saint of Russian and Eastern European liberal dissent, we would be trapped in ideological fights and culture wars for years and decades to come. This sense of universal human fellowship and solidarity attainable only within the framework of the defense of human rights was shared by Sakharov’s friends and brothers in arms, from Elena Bonner and Sergei Kovalev to the noted Lithuanian émigré political scientist and former Soviet dissident Aleksandras Shtromas (1931–­1999). According to Shtromas, The great Russian dissident human rights’ campaigner, Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov, proclaimed himself and his associates and counterparts in the country and around the world “right defenders,” or partisans and advocates of what he defined as “the ideology of human rights,” which he sharply counter-­opposed to “ideologies based on dogmas and various metaphysical beliefs aimed at the reconstruction of the world” . . . “The ideology of human rights,” Sakharov explains, “is by nature pluralistic, it is the one and sole ideology allowing for the liberty in various forms of social associations and for the co-­existence of these various forms, which endows man with the maximum liberty of personal choice” . . . In Sakharov’s portrayal, this “ideology” is actually nonideological almost by definition. As he himself has put it, “the ideology of . . . human rights is perhaps the only one which has the potential to accommodate within itself such otherwise incompatible ideologies as the communist, the social-­democratic, the religious, the technocratic, the nationalistic; it can also serve as the foundation for [sociopolitical] positioning of those men who do not want to tie themselves to any theoretical finesses and dogma and who are sick and tired of the multitude of ideologies none of which has brought people any, even the most elementary human happiness.” (Shtromas, 2003, 176)

In fact, it was with sound reason that Sakharov and Shtromas pointed this out. All major religions of the world, no matter how profound their differences, agree on the unique value of human life and on the dignity of every human being. Even if our modern moral and political sensibilities are not always in tune with religion and conservative tradition, we firmly believe that no particular political ideology or civilization can provide a universally valid blueprint for a social and moral order within which we should be instructed as to how to be a better human being. Therefore, if a certain common denominator can be found for a framework within which we could talk about the universality of human rights, it can only be something manifestly nonideological—­that is, something that would never entail a possibility of proselytizing and ideological conversion as a means of unavoidable and necessary “rational” adjustment to a prioritized blueprint for a social and moral order.

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How ironic, then, that East and Central European countries, which once immensely benefited from the noble cause of the defense of human rights and human dignity, today tend to violate them themselves on the grounds of championing their ethnic and linguistic sensitivities or of fostering their revised and updated historical-­political narratives. Yet they are not alone in this. In fact, things are far from it. As we all know, the idea that democracies do not violate human rights and that it is a monopoly of undemocratic and oppressive regimes, sounds like a joke at the beginning of the twenty-­first century. All in all, human rights seem to have become the raison d’être of the European Union (EU). The EU conferred a special role for itself as a key global actor in the field of human rights. Once the EU is a community of values instead of an immoral trade bloc or a soulless technocratic political player, human rights become top priority, at least in theory. True, there is little disconnectedness or naïveté about this, since a better and more reliable criterion to check the political and practical reliability of the state in question than a close analysis of how our partners or adversaries observe human rights in their respective countries has yet to be offered. Tell me whether you respect the difference and dignity of humanity, and I will tell you what I can expect of you as a partner. On the other side, suffice it to subtract human rights from the package of liberal democracy, and we will immediately get authoritarian capitalism or technocracy masquerading as democracy. Therefore, human rights are not only about preservation of the legacy of natural law theory, European humanists, Enlightenment philosophers, or such luminaries as Andrei Sakharov. They are a deeply practical matter and also an efficient instrument of policy making. Bridging the gaps of memory and sensitivity, and also coming to grips with what we tend to deny as a political echo of the twentieth century, we lay the foundations for the twenty-­first-­century world that is expected to reconcile what has been separated by modernity—­the individual and community, rationality and religion, innovation and tradition, truth and value. Yet not everything is as beautiful and serene here as it may appear. On a closer look, we can notice the political dissonances in the EU, especially when conservative politicians blame the EP for some resolutions it adopts, implying that the EP deals a blow to the national parliaments and strips them of their dignity. What can I say on hearing this as an Eastern European myself? If we apply double standards, refusing to react to the violations of human rights within the EU, yet simultaneously engaging in verbose assaults on Russia, China, or Iran, are we not at the peril of closing ranks with those profoundly undemocratic countries?

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What would the dividing line between the EU and Russia be if we had adopted the principle of noninterference with national parliaments on such matters as human rights? This would signify the end of Europe the way it is now. If so much sound and fury comes defending the “holy” rights of the national parliament to criminalize diversity or freedom of expression, are we not at risk of transforming the EU into a value-­free political entity? Whatever the case, the EP keeps sending its powerful messages reminding us of a simple truth that civil liberties and human rights can never be confined to the nation-­state and its domestic affairs. They are not a property of the state, no matter how just and democratic that state might be. Hopefully, they never will be, as far as the EU is concerned. On the other side, human rights are often unscrupulously and easily sacrificed to successful international relations, trade, and foreign policies. Suffice it to recall the efforts of the EU to make it up to Russia and China every time when it comes to the supply of Russian gas and oil for the major European players or trade agreements and major projects with China. Yet the fact remains that both countries infringe human rights, not to mention the overt and methodical extermination of Russian dissenters, critics of the Kremlin, and human rights defenders in Russia, or the war waged by the People’s Republic of China on its civil society, opponents, dissenting intellectuals, and even lawyers already disbarred by the regime. To repeat and quote myself: Even at the beginning of the twenty-­first century, we are likely to live in the world where successful exercise of power, be it plausible violence or good economic performance, increasingly becomes a license to abandon individual freedom, civil liberties, and human rights. Russia and China may best exemplify this sinister tendency, the embodiment of the Chinese alternative to the West, whose essence lies in capitalism without liberty, or the free market without democracy. However, the question remains here as to whether human rights are a truly universalistic element of human existence. Are they a primary and pretheoretical, premetaphysical, albeit deeply ethical in the sense of Emmanuel Lévinas, move of our soul in the face of the Face of the Other for whose dignity we are responsible even without being able to explain it? Are they a genuinely shared concern of humanity? Or are they merely a well articulated, closely argued, and, ultimately, subtly imposed element of Western liberalism and liberal democracy on the rest of the world? Are human rights an imposition, albeit deeply modern and progressive in their spirit and political implications, of individualistic civilization of the West on non-­Western civilizations much more deeply rooted in their traditions and hierarchical grasp of the world? Leszek Kolakowski, who plausibly derives human rights from natural law theory and Hugo Grotius, stresses the fact if we believe in the validity of

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human rights, “it does not mean that those rights make up, or have always and everywhere made up, a part of all legal systems.” Kolakowski goes on by pointing out, “Such a statement would be false and in any case irrelevant to what most people believe to be true about human rights—­that these rights would be valid even if no positive law included them, explicitly or implicitly. Conversely, if all legal systems in the world guaranteed them, this by itself would not be sufficient grounds for accepting them. Their validity, then, does not depend positively or negatively on actual legislation, past or present” (Kolakowski, 1990, 204–­205). Having said this, we could remind ourselves of a curious detail: in present Western Europe and North America permeated with cultural and moral relativism, human rights remain the only island for the belief in the universality, rationality, and exchangeability of human nature—­quite a paradoxical remainder of European metaphysics in an epoch as hostile to metaphysical thought as ours, or a secret room for the otherwise relativized and neglected philosophical and metaphysical identity of Europe. A political belief of present Europe, an echo of the Enlightenment, and a secular version of Protestant Christianity, this human rights ideology seems to have become a unifying principle of Europe not because of its universal validity but due to a gradual rejection of all other components of European legacy. Not every school of philosophical thought embraced the distinction between natural law and divine positive law, though. This distinction made in the seventeenth century paved the way for the concept of the nature of things that could not be changed even by the Creator Himself. This is the great legacy of Grotius, Leibniz, and Puffendorf, including Puffendorf ’s assumption that the idea of homo included his inherent dignity (see ibid., 205). Some currents and schools of European thought remained out of touch with the historical and theoretical context of human rights, however. As Kolakowski argues, To the extent that the idea of human rights was logically dependent on the belief in natural law, it was clearly unacceptable to the adherents of empiricism and of all varieties of historicism, including Marxism. A distinction on this point is necessary, however. The human rights concept includes three characteristics, among others, that are important for this discussion: first, these rights are valid because of the inherent dignity of being human, and they make up part of the natural order, rather than being established by decree or by positive law; second, this order is immutably valid wherever human beings live together and interact with one another; third, these rights, however specified, are rights vested in all individuals and only in

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The Norwegian sociologist Sigurd Skirbekk has challenged some of our assumptions and premises, safely located in social and political theories as well as in the modes of political discourse. In his book Dysfunctional Culture: The Inadequacy of Cultural Liberalism as a Guide to Major Challenges of the 21st Century, Skirbekk makes it clear that the principle of the equality of cultures, if implemented in practice rather than in theory, would nullify all our talks about women’s rights, children’s rights, equality of sexes, and the like, since non-­Western modes of political discourse quite often are irreconcilable with these fundamentally modern Western assumptions. Therefore, as he argues, we have to make up our mind as to whether we silently agree on the moral superiority of European and Western principles and ideas as regards human rights, or whether we consistently apply the principle of the equality of cultures that would relativize all the aforementioned principles and ideas (see Skirbekk, 2005). Most importantly, we cannot conflate the technical aspects and practices of human rights as well as an attempt to apply them globally as an aspect of international relations and foreign policies with that profoundly idealistic concept of human rights that was developed by Eastern European dissenting intellectuals and Soviet dissidents, first and foremost by the fearless and heroic Russian and Ukrainian human rights defenders (for more on this issue, see Van Voren, 2009; 2010). The characteristically Eastern European concept of human rights has much more to do with the sense of belonging and human fellowship than a sort of carrot-­and-­stick political approach, which takes human rights violations as a mere stick to beat the regimes or governments that are otherwise welcome and praised in the West for their modernizing efforts of economic reforms yet which have to be contained from further aggressive steps in their foreign policies by applying the instrumentalist concept of human rights. As we saw, Andrei Sakharov’s concept of “the ideology of human rights” has nothing to do with political doctrines and beliefs aimed at the fundamental and radical reconstruction of the world. To appropriate Sakharov’s term and, even more importantly, to monopolize his name and symbolic capital of his own and his fellow Soviet and Russian dissidents, yet simultaneously stripping this concept of his original content and putting in a totally alien context of partisan politics and, as Kundera, would have it, of the insurmountable Manichaeism of the left and the right, would be the last thing a conscientious and decent politician should do.

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Unfortunately, this dubious tendency to appropriate Eastern European symbolic capital and moral vocabulary for the specifically Western European political and rhetorical fights or political obsessions is an unfortunate tendency obvious even in such an institution as the European Parliament. Though in a slightly different perspective than Skirbekk’s, I would agree with him that there is something profoundly amoral in such misuse of a noble-­spirited cause, which paradoxically asserts the sense of superiority of the West—­the sense, which thrown by the relativism of Western anthropology and also by the politically correct declarations on the equality of human beings and cultures, makes a victorious comeback in the form of the universal validity of the concept of human rights. As it is no longer possible to restore, in our liquid modern times, earlier forms of a metaphysical belief in the universal and unchangeable human nature, the concept of human rights comes to us as a Deus ex machina. Without a shadow of a doubt, the idea of the universality of the human nature has been thrust out the front door by modern historicism and cultural relativism only to be allowed to climb back in through the window redressed as that of the universally valid human rights. Trying to sum up the dramatic clashes of our time as regards human rights and other pivotal issues, we could safely assume that instead of la revanche de Dieu, as suggested by Gilles Kepel and Samuel P. Huntington, we are much more likely to encounter here with la revanche du siècle des Lumières. No wonder, then, as we are reaching the culmination of the encounter of modernity and antimodernity, or of two opposing and irreconcilable versions of modernity, the open-­ended and secular one vis-­à-­ vis the fundamentalist one that uses religion and tradition only to make a modern ideology, as S. N. Eisenstadt would have it, as we will see. Whereas Western European and North American human rights activists and politicians actively engaged in human rights defense do their utmost nowadays to mainstream human rights as a pivotal aspect of foreign policies—­that is, that same real and power politics whose instrumentalism, cynicism, and double standards kill any consistency and credibility of this new and essentially Western para-­ideology, the founding fathers of the Russian human rights movement Andrei Sakharov and Sergei Kovalev, as mentioned, denied Realpolitik from the bottom of their hearts and minds, trying to replace it with the alternative thought-­and-­action system, or value-­and-­idea system, which they described as a new universal ideology, or nonideological ideology—­that of human rights. A Western European thinker who may be legitimately described as a brother-­in-­arms to Sakharov and Kovalev in their consistent and powerful denial of Realpolitik as a sort of self-­comprehending and convenient lie is André Glucksmann.

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These two systems of thought and action can appear as interrelated or identical only at first glance, as in their essence they are out of touch with one another. Soviet dissidents fought for the inmost human right to live and enjoy self-­worth and dignity, instead of trying to adjust this right to Realpolitik, applying it selectively as its aspect, which is clearly the case with the Western world. They did their utmost to fight the dehumanizing and depersonalizing totalitarian megamachine heroically opposing the conquest of the sphere of privacy and legitimate human secrets by power discourses and brutal power politics. Therefore, we would be unpardonably naïve and inaccurate by taking present-­day European politicians or well-­paid and well-­established human rights activists in the West, who have never experienced the abyss of lawlessness and constant danger of being assassinated at any moment, and who have never been through the hell of total unsafety and insecurity, as brothers-­and sisters-­in-­arms to Soviet and Russian dissidents. Another problematic aspect of the normativity seeking for human rights is that a series of political events over the past two decades were frequently motivated and explained by referring to the necessity to internationalize and mainstream human rights. The internationalization of human rights, however, was not accompanied by any clear definition of the relationship between state sovereignty and uncontrolled international agencies. This process cannot avoid such offshoots and side effects as double standards applied to big and small states regarding political boycotts or war crimes. As George Schöpflin points out, the trend in question appears to be “unguided, undebated and not sanctioned by any formal processes of legitimation” (Schöpflin, 2010, 153). It is a striking and unprecedented process, as the aforementioned tendency can be perceived as the marginalization of state sovereignty unseen in the last two centuries. With sound reason, Schöpflin writes of the dangers of a selective, partisan, and arbitrary approach to human rights normativity that undermines the legitimacy and fairness of a noble cause: Let me add that this development of human rights normativity is not necessarily reprehensible or undesirable, but it does have unintended consequences. In the first place, the extension of the right (?) to intervene applies throughout Europe, which is a source of equity for the post-­communists, but in the name of consistency, interventions must also be extended to large states, otherwise it will lose much of its legitimacy. Second, the acceleration—­ though not the initiation—­of human rights normativity was a left-­wing discourse and was largely used to target human rights violations from the right. If this is not extended to cover abuses of power by the left, there will be serious problems with its application and with compliance. The most obvious

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case is Gorbachev, to whom the Pinochet precedent applies fairly clearly in political terms, with respect to his responsibility for the killings in Vilnius in January 1991 at a time when Lithuania was struggling to gain recognition of its independence from the Soviet Union. (ibid., 154)

Yet Skirbekk goes further than that. He implies, and with good reason, that no other civilization than the modern Western variant of European and North American civilizations “has developed fundamental premises for the distinctive brand of individualism that is taken for granted in the Declaration of Human Rights”; therefore, hence “the key role the individual occupies in this declaration, as the beneficiary of all kinds of rights” (Skirbekk, 2005, 72). He sums it up by saying that the Declaration of Human Rights, with all due respect to its highly emotional appeal and moral authority, could be regarded as “a testament for a secular religion” or as “a belief system.” If we try to assume more, we are at risk of developing “a dysfunctional guide for orientation” (idem). Of the profound internal contradiction within the framework of the liberal interpretation of human rights and their universal application, Skirbekk writes, This also means there are limits as to how far we can apply a declaration on human rights as a general rule of thumb in bringing about an acceptable culture. For that matter, liberal interpretation of these rights is fraught with self-­contradictions, including the declaration of equal rights for everyone, while all cultures are declared equal—­or at least only judged on their own terms. If all cultures were morally equal, then all human beings, as individuals, would not have the same rights, because some cultures grant some men with more rights than other men and women. If, on the other hand, all men and women were granted equal human rights, all cultures could not then be regarded as equal, since cultures that acknowledge the equality of men must then be regarded as superior to those that do not. (Skirbekk, 2005, 10)

A student of modern ideologies, Skirbekk has devoted much of his analytic attention and creative effort to the issue of whether—­and if so, to what extent—­contemporary forms of culture are adequate as a response to the structural and sociopolitical challenges of modernity. He takes cultural liberalism as a set of Western values and ideas that had much success in mainstreaming civil liberties, human rights. Whereas Vytautas Kavolis perceived cultural liberalism as a potential of every moral culture or moral ideology for critical assessment of its own trajectories of thought and action—­that is, as revisionism inherent in every mode of symbolic design within which we try to search for adequate concepts and frames of meaning to explain ourselves and the world around us in terms of good

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and evil (see Donskis, 2002, 50–­60)—­Skirbekk appends to this term a rather different connotation. It is precisely that focus on individual rights and individuals, mentioned by Kolakowski, without giving much consideration to groups, society, social bonds, cultural settings, and cohesion that makes Skirbekk skeptical about, and critical of, the liberal notion of culture. Hence the concept of cultural liberalism used by Skirbekk as a mainstream form, or current, of modern liberalism, which includes, among other things, a rather instrumentalist and reductionist notion of culture. As Skirbekk has it, When the relationship between the individual and society is seen as external, we must consider what the individual is, quite apart from how it is constituted by culture. The individual can be seen as being governed by its reason or its nature, its will or its needs, and by its right to exploit its inherent potential. By thinking in terms of individuality apart from specific cultures, one can even theorize that the essential characteristics of a social collectivity of individuals is not dependent on religion, culture, history and cultural setting . . . There is a clear link between the liberal notion of individualism and modern interpretations of universal human rights. This same perspective predisposes us to regard culture as a set of goods or benefits—­benefits that people from all four corners of the globe are entitled to experience and enjoy. (Skirbekk, 2005, 60)

A crucial aspect of human rights is secular humanism, which may be regarded as one of the key elements of the foundations of our modern political faith in the central place of human rights in the context of our moral and political sensibilities. This is revealed in one of Kavolis’s early essays, “Heresy and Humanism,” where Kavolis describes the psychological sources of modern secular humanism emphasizing the universality of humanism and human rights. “The psychological source of humanism—­in particular, in the twentieth century—­is one’s sensitivity to the other human being’s pain. An ideological trait of humanism is the recognition of every human being as significant for the rest of humanity. Many of the purposes of their lives may seem to others insignificant, and their values banal and unsophisticated. Yet every person may be experienced as significant when we come to empathize with his or her pain. Only when it becomes impossible to pass by the other’s pain, can the universality of humanism be conceived of ” (Kavolis, 1993c, 47; translation of this passage and of the following passages from Lithuanian into English is mine). In addition, Kavolis relates human rights to the liberal moral culture that he contrasts to the nationalist moral culture (for more on this, see Kavolis, 1993d). As Kavolis suggests,

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The danger of nationalist [moral] culture lies in its moral provincialism. Nationalism, as John Stuart Mill noted, makes people indifferent to the rights and interests of any part of humankind, except for that which is called the same name as they are, and speaks the same language they do. Not always, however, has nationalist culture been provincial. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Europe was full of liberal nationalists who believed that the struggle for the liberation of all peoples was a common cause: Therefore, a patriot of one people must help other peoples as well. Thus, later on, Basanavicius participated in the movement of Bulgarian democrats, and Georg Julius Justus Sauerwein [the nineteenth-­century German liberal nationalist, who was equally sympathetic to the Lithuanians and to the Sorbs] wrote “We Were Born Lithuanians” (and another version of the same song which was dedicated to the Sorbs). Yet nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century—­in part, because of the impact of social Darwinism—­moved away from the notion of universal brotherhood, enthusiastically shared by all nationalists, and reshaped itself within quite a narrow frame of the exclusive (“zoological”) defense of people’s interests by all means. This is to say that nationalism became “primitive.” (In many non-­ Western countries—­for instance, in India,—­the twentieth-­century nationalism has repeated this sequence; so we can ask if it might be taken as a natural part of the nationalist movement’s evolution, that is, as a consequence of the transformation of nationalism into a mass-­oriented phenomenon?) Exclusive nationalism is incompatible with liberal culture, which is, in principle, morally universalistic. (In the rationalist version of liberal morality: All are equal in their rights; in the Romantic version of liberal morality: All are equal in their pain which equally hurts everybody.) (Kavolis, 1993a, 184–­185)

Far from taking liberalism as a flawless philosophical perspective on modern human existence, Kavolis criticizes its deficiencies in terms of its failure to grasp the major forms of modern moral and political sensitivity. By stating the insufficiency and limitations of liberal moral culture in embracing the variety of the forms of modern consciousness and culture, Kavolis notes, “Liberal culture itself insufficiently embraces the totality of human essence and of the human being’s relationship with his/her milieu. The nineteenth-­century liberal culture took seriously neither nature, nor radical evil, nor the distinctiveness of national cultures, nor the subconscious sphere of human experiences and its demands. It failed somehow to identify the emotional reciprocities and emergent, though never verbalized, human solidarities—­Seelengemeinschaften” (ibid., 191). Yet, in spite of all shortcomings of present liberalism and our misgivings about them, its major alternatives do not come as an inspiration either. The defense of a liberal and humane practice, even if the doctrine behind it raises our suspicions and has many flaws, seems a far better option than our endorsement of plausible and coherent, albeit profoundly illiberal,

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theories behind which we could find only the void regarding human self-­ worth and dignity. Here we are in a huge field of tension stemming from globalization, where the will (and necessity) to use a foreign and cheap workforce on one hand clashes with the hope to not take on the culture of this workforce and remain within our own culture and identity zone on the other hand. How can a good life and use of a foreign workforce be combined with maintaining a familiar culture, language, and historical identity? How can this servitude of foreigners, inherited from ages of a hierarchical society, be legitimized in the face of the modern world’s promise of equality? The answer—­by trying to integrate, to assimilate, or to simply keep the other at a safe distance (isn’t that what is meant by the whole ideology and practice of multiculturalism?). Emigration, immigration, and all the apprehensions that go along with them are an expression of the tension between the enthusiasm of a global economy and the dreams of a local culture; that is, the dream to live simultaneously amid our own culture and surroundings. What else could be meant by Europeans’ skepticism of mass American culture and its worldwide success? Neither denies the advantages of a global economy model, which they gladly use themselves as soon as they find employment in the United States. But no one wants to lose their own cultural surroundings, since no one wants to adopt a new culture as part of the one global economy package. Skirbekk, therefore, is quite correct, summing up that “if culture is reduced to mere entertainment and symbols for identification, this will most certainly have consequences for our collective orientation. Political principles of individual freedom and philosophical doctrines of natural rights do not provide an adequate background for understanding our dependence on cultural structures and social functions” (Skirbekk, 2005, 61–­62). For ours is an epoch when culture bows out and loses any significance, as Kundera would have it. With good reason, Skirbekk titled his book Dysfunctional Culture, an ironic allusion to the situation of the game where culture is sent off. It does not play anymore save and except some functions of entertainment, codes for identification, and, most notably, an obvious commodification of education and intellectual exchanges. Like multiculturalism, which seems a perfect reference point when dealing with the epoch of disengagement, the concept of human rights tends to become an excuse for disengaged politicians and intellectuals. They find a niche where the correct term uttered at the right time in the right place becomes a password to enter the gate of power structure at no cost. An unmistakable move, such a password should not deceive us. For without action and engagement, multiculturalism, in spite of its explicit reference

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to culture, is not about respect for someone’s unique culture; instead, it is about our doing nothing to accommodate and manage human diversity in the time of anxiety and fear. We allow them go free with their uniqueness, because they have nowhere to go anyway. We know it perfectly well. Likewise, human rights call for participation, instead of critical observation enjoying a safe distance. The more we disregard and abuse human rights at home, the more fiercely we tend to fight for them elsewhere. A safe distance and a set of correct words—­this is what people of ideas and public affairs need the most in the epoch of disengagement. Civilization and Angst We live in the world that incites and invites a new type of religiosity, something like politicized religion in which wearing religious symbols is no longer an innocent detail of private life and silent devotion; instead, it becomes a war cry or a military uniform. The same applies to politicization of intimacy, sentiment, and cloths. Civilization, as Vytautas Kavolis had wisely suggested, emerges as a symbolic design, within which people search for the frames of meaning to explain themselves and the world around them (see Kavolis, 1995); yet at a more troubled time, this design provides the forms for challenge, dissent, and discontents. That tradition can be a tool in the struggle against the most unfavorable and detested forms of modern life is obvious. Yet the comforting scheme “modernity versus antimodernity” can be quite misleading here, as some civilizational, religious, or political movements, especially fundamentalist ones, seek to make a modern ideology out of tradition. By no means do they reject modernity; on the contrary, they endeavor very hard to appropriate it. As S. N. Eisenstadt pointed out in his seminal discussion on fundamentalism with Sadik al-­Azm and Bruce Lawrence, I also want to make a statement that may seem very curious and paradoxical: That modern fundamentalisms, contemporary fundamentalisms, although rooted in a very curious way in some of the religious traditions of the civilizations in which they grew up—­Islam, Judaism, Protestant Christianity, pre-­ Protestant Christianity—­can be compared with certain sectarian tendencies in these civilizations. They have been greatly transformed, and, basically, they are very modern phenomena. They are modern not only technically, in the sense that they use technology (this we all do); not only chronologically (that is by definition); not in terms only of their ideological, philosophical contents, which Sadik al-­Azm has explored; but in terms of their basic political dynamics. With their basic political and ideological dynamics,

180      Modernity in Crisis most of these movements are very modern. I say, they are no traditionalist movements. They are movements which make a modern ideology out of tradition. And I think this is something very different . . . They are antitraditionalist, antitraditional. They are against the living, ongoing tradition of their own societies . . . They are against the living, ongoing, developing traditions which existed in their civilizations. (Eisenstadt, 1996, 38–­39)

Civilization appears in the epoch of our troubled modernity as an explanatory framework for a rival ideology or as a symbolic conjunction between thought and action or as a tool to foster a dissenting value-­and-­idea system. It can come as a war cry or as a token of dissent or as an alternative value-­and-­idea system. Things were different after the First World War when civilization became just another word for the decline of the West or for the discontents with modern life. In fact, Sigmund Freud’s Unbehagen was as telling as Oswald Spengler’s Untergang. These two thinkers may be said to have reached the climax in the history of the concept of civilization. Yet since Freud came out as a modern prophet nearly unintentionally, and Spengler sought this role and performed it as best he could, we would benefit more from a glimpse of Spengler and his drama. Spengler provided ample material for a panoramic view of the decline and fall of the West. Having reached the civilization phase, Western culture becomes a travesty of what it was for centuries. Here we can hear the voices of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Spengler plausibly describes the death of philosophy in the era of civilization: the loss of the breadth of perspective, the mystification of the readership, and the domination of overspecialized inquiry and technical jargon ultimately kills what once was a majestic intellectual enterprise. Philosophy for philosophy professors, as Schopenhauer would have it. A far better philosopher lurks in a scientist or in an entrepreneur than in a philosophy professor—­such is Spengler’s verdict pronounced with all severity. Like painting in civilization, which is unable even to get closer to Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, and other Dutch masters in terms of the interplay of forms, philosophy in civilization is incapable of that noble simplicity and clarity of thought that shaped philosophy in the culture phase. Much the same happens to architecture, music, painting, and literature. The loss of the sense of form negatively marks the entire creative enterprise. Writers, composers, painters, and architects are desperately trying to wrestle with the indifference of mass society, where everything is interchangeable and where a piece of art inevitably loses its unique validity.

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Art is no longer preoccupied with the revelation of God and the human being or with the discovery of the marvelous individuality of human faces and hands conceived of as mysterious traces of being. Instead, art is focused on how to surprise art critics and amuse the masses by displaying virtuosity, artistic skill, or new techniques of delivery. As for the contents of philosophy or the form of art, nobody cares about it any more. Apparently, nobody pays attention to such old-­fashioned things as the ontological authenticity of a piece of art or of philosophical thought. Spengler perceived the morphology of culture as his major contribution to, and in his terms, Copernican discovery of, the comparative study of civilizations. His harsh critique of Eurocentric prejudices and superstitions, such as the predominant notion of history based on the concepts of Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modern Ages, paved the way for a new approach to the study of history, not to mention the rehabilitation of medieval Europe’s culture. Yet his true originality lies elsewhere. Although Spengler derived the method of morphological physiognomy from Goethe’s idea of a morphological description of natural phenomena as opposed to the scientific analysis of “body parts” of nature, his morphological perspective had far-­ reaching implications for the humanities and the social sciences. The morphology of culture allowed for a point of entry into the realm of interrelated phenomena of culture. As Spengler suggests, such thing as a general and linear history of art or architecture or philosophy does not exist, for every culture has its own mathematics, physics, architecture, painting, music, literature, and philosophy. Western philosophy is first and foremost related to Western religious experience, mathematics, architecture, physics, music, painting, and other forms of the Faustian soul, instead of Chinese or Indian philosophy. This statement might best be exemplified by recalling his interpretation of the idea of infinity—­the symbolic code and the unifying principle of Western culture. Spengler’s interpretation of the manifestations of infinity in Western culture is a high point of his theory. According to Spengler, the idea of infinity was absolutely alien to the Apollonian soul. Euclid’s geometry is devoid of the dimension of infinity. Exactly the same may be said about all other mathematical and philosophical theories or cosmological speculations in ancient Greece. Mathematicians and philosophers of Classical Antiquity would never have understood infinity as part of the cosmos. On the contrary, the cosmos for them was what was possible to experience empirically, if not physically, or to observe from the walls of the polis. Harmony, symmetry, and proportion were all ascribed to the orderly world, the cosmos. Infinity would have been ascribed to chaos, or the disorderly world. It would be impossible to find the beginnings of the idea of infinity

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in Egyptian mathematics as well. Small wonder, then, that infinity in mathematics comes along with modern Western philosophical theories, which only affirms the affinity of Christianity and the forms of modern Western cosmology inherent in Faustian philosophy, physics, and mathematics. A striking implication of Spengler’s interpretation of the idea of infinity in the Faustian soul would be that Western culture was born modern. Having said that, we have to add that Spengler’s admiration is obviously reserved for early modernity, whereas late modernity would fall into the civilization phase. In Western music, the idea of infinity becomes a potent form of culture along with the emergence of polyphony and counterpoint. The principle of counterpoint is especially manifest in Johann Sebastian Bach’s organ music where several recurring themes, which lend their segments to one another, could be developed ad infinitum if only the structure and logic of a musical piece allowed it. Yet the code of a piece comes to sum it up and to set the limits to the counterpoint, thus preventing it from leading us to the infinity of themes. Along with Bach’s toccatas, fugues, and chorale preludes comes the concerto grosso form developed by Antonio Vivaldi and his contemporaries, other composers of the Baroque, such as Arcangelo Corelli, Alessandro Marcello, Tomaso Albinoni, Johann Sebastian Bach, and George Frederic Handel. Each of the three movements of the concerto grosso culminates in a fermata (a long pause made by the string orchestra and harpsichord) or a tutti (the pause that paves the way for a closing part of each movement). This closing part allows for variations on the main theme performed by a solo instrument. These variations, for their part, could be developed ad infinitum too, but a strict form of concerto prevails over infinity. In brief, what we know as tema con variazioni, arguably a most valuable achievement of Baroque music, is the best proof of the existence of infinity as the substance of Western music. Of the morphological interplay of forms of music and mathematics, Spengler writes, From out of these forms of the early Baroque there proceeded . . . the sonata-­ like forms of suite, symphony and concerto grosso. The inner structure and the sequence of movements, the thematic working-­out and modulation became more and more firmly established. And thus was reached the great, immensely dynamic, form in which music—­now completely bodiless—­was raised by Corelli and Handel and Bach to be the ruling art of the West. When Newton and Leibniz, about 1670, discovered the Infinitesimal Calculus, the fugal style was fulfilled. And when, about 1740, Euler began the definitive formulation of functional Analysis, Stamitz and his generation were

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discovering the last and ripest form of musical ornamentation, the four-­part movement . . . as vehicle of pure and unlimited motion. For, at that time, there was still this one step to be taken. The theme of the fugue “is,” that of the new sonata-­movement “becomes,” and the issue of its working-­out is in the one case a picture, in the other a drama. Instead of a series of pictures we get a cyclic succession . . . and the real source of this tone-­language was in the possibilities, realized at last, of our deepest and most intimate kind of music—­the music of the strings. Certain it is that the violin is the noblest of all instruments that the Faustian soul has imagined and trained for the expression of its last secrets, and certain it is, too, that it is in string quartets and violin sonatas that it has experienced its most transcendent and most holy moments of full illumination. Here, in chamber-­music, Western art as a whole reaches its highest point. Here our prime symbol of endless space is expressed as completely as the Spearman of Polycletus expresses that of intense bodiliness. When one of those ineffably yearning violin-­melodies wanders through spaces expanded around it by the orchestration of Tartini or Nardini, Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven, we know ourselves in the presence of an art beside which that of the Acropolis is alone worthy to be set. (Spengler, 1996, 231)

In Western painting, the idea of infinity manifests itself through the principle of perspective and the chiaroscuro technique, both developed by the masters of the Renaissance. Giotto, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giorgione, and Titian—­they all initiate in painting what comes from the idea of the infinity of God. During the Golden Age of Holland, the Dutch masters transformed the chiaroscuro and perspective from purely artistic devices into a new vision of being. The shining faces and hands of people in Rembrandt’s portraits rise from the dark emphasizing the superiority of life over death. The unforgettable looks and smiles of Johannes Vermeer’s young women or Frans Hals’s officers never call for verbose explanations—­they remain silent yet most eloquent, as if to say that the indestructible individuality of a human face would always prevail over uniformity and other modern masks of death. Spengler argues that we would never understand the nature of the play of light, dark, and shade in Dutch painting without grasping the impact that astronomy, physics, mathematics, medical science, and the invention of the microscope made on the Dutch masters. To describe the forms of culture in the works of Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Jacob van Ruysdal, Meindert Hobbema, Judith Leyster, Adriaen Brouwer, or other great Flemish and Dutch painters, we have to study physical sciences of that time, instead of studying, say, ancient Greek or Chinese painting.

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Such a controlling and unifying principle of culture as the idea of infinity in Western culture proves the existence of style—­an all-­encompassing and all-­embracing character of the collective individual, which provides the coherence and inner logic of every culture. In contrast to organic culture, mechanical civilization has nothing of the kind. The morphology of culture is Spengler’s great accomplishment. It is difficult to imagine modern philosophy of history and philosophy of culture without The Decline of the West. In many ways, Spengler gave us a clue to the proper understanding of the modern configuration of values and ideas. The morphological method resulted in such new disciplines in the humanities as the morphology of art. At the same time, Kulturmorphologie became a pivotal part of Kulturkritik—­modern philosophical critique of culture, not to mention its prominent role and place in the contemporary philosophy of culture. Egon Friedell and Othmar Anderle in Austria, Anton Hilckman in Germany, Pitirim A. Sorokin and A. L. Kroeber in the United States, Lucian Blaga in Romania, to name just a few—­in one way or another, they all belong to this paradigm of the philosophies of culture and history (for more on this issue, see Sorokin, 1966). We have to confess that we tend to overdo nowadays in our endless search for the hidden political agenda behind philosophical and sociological theories exposing their political implications. Kulturphilosophie has become an easy prey for this modern obsession to regard a theory as merely another term of a political doctrine or a midwife of an ideology. Yet there is another danger: that of trivialization and vulgarization of a theory reducing it to a sheer ideological construct or confining to a set of clichés for immediate public use. Junk food for thought or junk philosophy. The sad fate of Oswald Spengler was far from becoming a tool in the hands of Nazis or their intellectual and political heirs. Instead, some of his deeply original insights and beautiful poetic metaphors were translated into regrettable and distorted fragments of conventional wisdom, if not the banalities on the lips of those who are quite prepared to do away with the question of the fate of Europe with the help of several ready-­made phrases. As for the deeply ambivalent political implications of the morphology of culture that have been widely discussed by theorists of history and culture, Pitirim A. Sorokin could be credited for the analysis of what he described as totalitarian macrosologies of civilizations and high cultures (see ibid., 177–­240). Yet Spengler’s infatuation with historical and cultural determinism, as well as his biological metaphors, cannot outweigh and cast a shadow on the substance of his theory—­the theory on the controlling and unifying principle of civilization combined with what he termed the morphological method.

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In fact, Sorokin is absolutely right exposing Nikolai Danilevsky’s, Arnold J. Toynbee’s, or the Polish historian Feliks Koneczny’s political bias or even sinister ideas. Toynbee’s ideological hostility to the Jews and especially his anti-­Israel bias is well known and has been widely discussed. Yet it is also worth recalling, for instance, Koneczny’s deterministic idea of the inevitable clash of civilizations as constant war of irreconcilable organic entities, instead of something like Samuel P. Huntington’s idea of the clash of civilizations as a mere variation of the topic of modernity versus antimodernity or the West and the Rest; or it suffices to remember Koneczny’s overt claim of Latin European civilization’s superiority over the rest of the world due to a historic role of the Roman Catholic Church there to get Sorokin’s point (see ibid., 212–­213). Whatever the case, we have to distinguish between political excesses and theoretical insights, or between philosophical indoctrination and theoretical fallacy. Such thinkers as Spengler or the poetic Romanian philosopher of culture Lucian Blaga or the uniquely talented Viennese actor, journalist, cabaret performer, and philosopher Egon Friedell can hardly be held responsible for the political nightmares of the twentieth century; this is especially true of Friedell, an Austrian Jew himself, a victim of the Nazis, who committed suicide when they came to arrest him. No matter how ambivalent and dangerous a thinker Spengler was, he had rejected the Nazis after they came to power (see Hughes, 1962, 120–­136). How ironic that the theoretically sublime discourse on the decline of the West, inseparable from Bildungsroman, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and their educational and cultural concerns about the fate of the humanistic legacy of Western civilization, has become over the past decades a mere part of Facebook philosophy full of celebrated banalities and worn-­ out clichés regarding the supposedly inexorable collapse of the West. The irony is that whereas Spengler, accused of fascist and totalitarian thinking, saw the Untergang as a silent rejection of the forms of culture and life that emanated from the Faustian Soul, the trivialized and vulgarized version of the morphology of history, that real travesty of his philosophy, is deeply permeated with racism and xenophobia. What Spengler perceived as yet unpronounced refusal of, and as yet undeclared parting with, a great unifying principle behind Masaccio, Leonardo, Raphael, Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, our Internet and Facebook Cassandras proclaim as the onslaught of the new Visigoths. What Egon Friedell saw as a profound crisis of the European soul, our new Cassandras assess merely in terms of the loss of power, domination, and prestige. Suffices it to mention an amateurish and, in effect, regrettable, albeit enormously popular, book, Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Germany Abolishes Itself: How We Are Putting Our

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Country at Risk), an attempt to beat the drums of threat to German and European identity undertaken by Thilo Sarrazin, a former German finance ministry official and finance senator of Berlin (see Ash, 2011, 22–­24). True, this also was part of Spengler’s overall political concern, which resulted in his gloomy prophecies. Yet a new cultural pessimist in our era of disengagement, anesthesia, and flirtation with the virtual crowd and anonymous sentiment, is devoid of the philosophy of culture. For theirs is a dream of how to combine the benefits of global economy with the charms of homogeneity. A dream doomed to failure. To repeat myself: Here we are in a huge field of tension stemming from globalization, where the will (and necessity) to use a foreign and cheap workforce on one hand, clashes with the hope to not take on the culture of this workforce and remain within one’s own culture and identity zone, on the other hand. How can a good life and use of a foreign workforce be combined with maintaining a familiar culture, language, and historical identity? Obviously, this is the hidden drama of present Europe, which Alain Finkielkraut insightfully termed an unprepared America. In fact, Europe is a failed America. This is nothing other than the question of power stripped of its metaphysical, educational, and religious foundations or just a sort of Spenglerism stripped of Kulturmorphologie and, subsequently, confined to the will to power or longing for it in the era when colonialism and “white man’s burden” are irreversibly rejected and hopelessly discredited. Or a painful drama of the loss of power and influence in the world that hardly accepts any other logic than that, if you will. Civilization is therefore a reference point and a metaphor behind which we find ourselves in a world of fear and angst. It is no longer a concept referring to cultural accomplishments; nor does it have anything to do with the German notion Zivilisation as something alien to the world of das rein Geistige, the pure spirituality that dwells in the realm of Kultur and Bildung (for more on this issue, see Elias, 1994, 3–­28). Civilization is no longer about the gain; instead, it is about the loss. It is hardly a reference to a set of accomplishments or to a world of modern solitude and alienation found in every big city; it is much more likely to appear as an interpretive framework for our hidden discontents, fear, hatred, anticipation of war, and anxiety of destruction. This Is Not My Time, and I Do Not Belong Here The conflict of the forms of culture and social change, or a clash of politics and culture, if you will, to put it in a more radical Eastern European fashion, is not a fantasy. Hence conservative reactions to the brutality of

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social and political change that shaped European philosophy of culture over the past two centuries. They were even more conservative and reactive in Eastern Europe, especially in Russia, the whole course of modernity was little more than a dramatic encounter, if not a tragic clash, of politics and culture. As Kundera noted in his perceptive essay, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” all revolutions in Central Europe (and I would add that even more so in Eastern Europe) were conservative, even anachronistic, as if to attempt to stop the passage of time, to arrest social change, and to return. Yet the question arises here: to return where? Where is my time? And where is my epoch? Where do I belong? It appears, again, that the entire modern world is becoming a global Central Europe: not only due to the loss of certainty, safety and security but also due to the passionate wish and to the desperate attempt to return somewhere, be that “somewhere” somewhere in that kind of classical Europe that does not exist anymore—­early modernity with such miracles and mysteries of culture as the Renaissance in Italy and Flanders or the Dutch Golden Age. Conservatism, especially cultural conservatism, is impossible without what I would call the tragic imagination. The liberal imagination is often described as the imagination of freedom and modernization, or the imagination of the rationalization of the world (see Trilling, 1957, 1967). The term “cultural conservatism” sounds like a pleonasm, because authentic conservatism is nothing other than a radical point of division between politics and culture, which would work to the detriment of political liberalism and reduce it to the simplest form of political reaction. The conservative imagination is tragic. It tends toward a cyclical interpretation of history. You could put forward the hypothesis that nineteenth­ and twentieth-­century theories of trinitarian evolutionary history were disseminated by the liberal imagination (see Gellner, 1990, 19), but we already hear the voice of conservatism’s tragic imagination in the cyclical theories of history that are its antithesis—­those of Oswald Spengler, Egon Friedell, Arnold J. Toynbee, Pitirim A. Sorokin, Feliks Koneczny, Lucian Blaga, Anton Hilckman, and Othmar Anderle. Recall Hermann Hesse’s novel Der Steppenwolf (Steppenwolf, 1927), in which the protagonist, the refined and well-­read loner Harry Haller, hates the twentieth century intensely. He refers to jazz as the music of perdition and of the end of the world, which must have been heard during the final days of the Roman Empire. The other characters in Hesse’s Bildungsroman are also close to the heroes of the moral imagination, who define themselves as longing for other eras to which they belong in spirit. The characters comprehend their appearance in this world of mass society, mass culture, and kitsch as a tragic mistake and a lamentable misunderstanding.

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A fan of Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791), a connoisseur of Baroque music, and a loyal investigator of the classical canon of art and literature, Haller has a code name for what he loves most in classical European culture—­ the golden footprint. The golden footprint represents the world of Bach, Mozart, Goethe, and Beethoven, which, in principle, cannot be reconciled with the world of kitsch, similar to the case of the fateful chasm between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa in another famous novel by Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game, 1943). As Haller remarks, the infamous cruelty and terror of the Middle Ages, which are so revolting to people in the modern era, were not as terrible in reality as they seem to us. The real tragedy, in his mind, is to live in an era that is absolutely foreign and even revolting to himself, to think the entire time about an earlier era and to pine for it. That era should have been his, but, unfortunately, it passed on from this world and has withdrawn to a past that can only be recalled and pondered. The real tragedy is to be unable to live in the era we love. This remark by Haller is what I would call the best example of the conservative and tragic moral imagination. Political conservatives understand their raison d’être as the halting of social change, or its attenuation, as if we could return to the imagined eternal yesterday. Cultural conservatives can only bemoan the fact that they were not born in their “rightful” era and do everything in their power to preserve, or else imitate, its style. Spengler had a great influence on Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. The philosophy of culture and the epochal style of their Bildungsroman and Spengler’s The Decline of the West are inextricably linked. Spengler’s book paved the way for that tragic imagination, which took on a virtually perfect historical and cultural form. Spengler provided the writers of their type a framework for creating a language of despair, which allowed them to abandon their time, identifying with other eras and cultures. This strange existence of people who consider themselves the hostages of an unacceptable and perhaps despicable period with its alien and incomprehensible cultural logic is far from being a fantasy. This type of consciousness is common to those who find themselves powerless to integrate into the modern Western society, and who feel themselves vanquished by modernity. This consciousness represents a much more universal form of alienation, the roots of which are to be found in a strong antimodernist sentiment. This alienation is largely a Romantic phenomenon. It can be encountered in the Romanticism of German conservatism and in the Romantic cult of the lonely and isolated genius that it espouses. The alienation is also a sentiment that has permeated nineteenth-­century Russian culture, especially the complex of ideas and moral stances known as the Russian

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idea. Hegel accurately called that distancing of persons from their era experienced by alienated individuals “the unhappy consciousness.” The brightest and the most telling example of this phenomenon that comes across my mind is the Finnish musicologist, music critic, and journalist Seppo Heikinheimo (1938–­1997), one of the most mysterious personalities in contemporary Finnish culture, the author of the tragic book The Memoirs of a Rotten Egg (Mätämunan muistelmat, 1997). Heikinheimo, a man of universal learning, knew many languages from which he translated books into Finnish; he had studied not only piano and musicology but also classical philology. He earned his doctorate in 1972 with a dissertation titled The Electronic Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen: Investigations of Aesthetic and Formal Problems during its first Phase. As the music editor and critic of the Helsinki newspapers Uusi Suomi (New Finland) and Helsingin Sanomat  (Helsinki News) he also managed to work simultaneously as a deputy manager of the Helsinki Philharmonic. The Memoirs of a Rotten Egg is the work  (the recollections, and confessions) of an aesthete, a friend of great Russian musicians and political dissidents  (e.g., Mstislav Rostropovich), one who interacted with Baltic musicologists as well. This book of raw nerves and drastic openness reveals the tragedy of a man who ended up in the wrong age, a tragedy impeccably described in Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605 and 1615). Heikinheimo’s book does recall Don Quixote’s situation when one doesn’t believe in one’s own age, people, and values, and is looking for inspiration in the texts and wisdom of the past. In this connection let us recall Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf and its main character, Harry Haller. Seppo Heikinheimo’s existential affinity with the condition of Harry Haller’s soul is no empty speculation but a tragic fact. Let us recall how in Steppenwolf Haller vows to kill himself when he turns fifty, not wanting to live any longer in a world of kitsch and the mass man. Having written in his book that he sees no sense living in a world where everything is degenerating before his very eyes and the great European cultural tradition no longer means anything, Seppo Heikinheimo committed suicide. The Gotland of Geniuses, or a Metaphor of Home in the Epoch of Longing In of the world’s places I love most, the island of Gotland, two geniuses of the cinema gave nature a different form of being. They made it part of the history of culture and their own biographies. A fragment of nature became a part of humankind’s cultural and esthetic memory.

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At the mere mention of Gotland it is not difficult to guess which geniuses of the movie screen we have in mind—­Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky, of course. The former’s name cannot be separated from the small island of Fårö (province of Gotland) on which he spent his free time for many years and where he lived the last years of life after finally putting his creative activities to rest. This little island is well-­known in the movie world for its special light, which has long been noticed and appreciated by cameramen. The rocks, sun, and water create a shining and a mood that are quickly picked up even by those who do not hold a camera in their hands. Fårö is where Sven Nykvist and other famous Swedish cinematographers filmed. As mentioned, it is where Bergman filmed his immortal Persona. The image was always important to Ingmar Bergman, but just as a masterly photograph or a portrait revealing the history of an individual’s consciousness. That’s why Bergman needed the faces of brilliant actors, for example, Liv Ullmann, Max Von Sydow, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Bergman, and Harriet Andersson. Bergman’s great strength lay in an all-­pervasive psychologizing, his ability to reveal the deeper layers of human relationships. At the same time he had such a grasp of nuances that psychoanalysts ought quietly to sing his praises. I would go so far as to say it is hard to understand the forms of modern sensitivity and human relations in the contemporary world without having seen Bergman’s films. I cannot imagine how you could teach a university course on conceptions of death and how they changed in Europe without analyzing his Wild Strawberries (1957), that masterpiece focusing on the secular world’s stubborn and paralyzing fear of annihilation and its desire to capture an entire life with a limited and fragmented memory. The mystery of death and of survival in its presence transfixes my favorite Bergman film, The Seventh Seal (1957), as well. How can you plumb the mystery of modern fanaticism and troubled identity if you miss the three Bergman film characters with one and the same last name: Vergérus? Recall the Nazi scientist Hans Vergérus who experiments with humans in The Serpent’s Egg (1977). Or the modern bureaucrat Dr. Vergérus, the minister of health, who believes neither in the mystery of the individual nor in the unconditional value of individuality itself but seeks to control and explain the whole world in The Magician (1958). Or the Lutheran bishop Edvard Vergérus who orders the child he viciously beats to kiss his hand in Fanny and Alexander (1982). How can you find your way in the abyss of a mother’s and daughter’s shattered relationship and by the same token grasp the fact that parents who neglect and do not love their children increase the number of

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unhappy and traumatized people in the world, if you have not seen Autumn Sonata (1978)? Ingmar Bergman is the Sigmund Freud of the cinema. Like no one else he unveiled the tormenting ambivalence of mutual human relations, an ambivalence persistently and quietly masked by the suffering of children or spouses and the surreptitious revenge wreaked on parents and partners for a life destroyed. As the cinematic poet of odi et amo, the tie of love and hatred, Bergman offered glimpses into such an everyday hell as only calm, civilized, modern, and outwardly very decent people are capable of inflicting on one another. For Bergman Fårö too was probably a projection of his soul, nature like a face, a unique individuality hiding its history. It is no accident that the rocks jutting out of the seashore there resemble human bodies and faces. They are creations of nature that can be studied all life long. At the same time Fårö is a site of quiet contemplation and confrontation with one’s own self, a place in which instantly all social masks fall away. Tarkovsky chose Gotland province for filming his last movie, The Sacrifice. It was not the island of Fårö, which probably seemed to him too famous and exploited by other movie makers. The Russian cinema artist needed a location without identifiable signs of time, history, and culture. He found this timeless space in the tiny island of Närsholmen, which means “close-­by or low island” in Swedish. Both cinema masters greatly admired each other. Tarkovsky loved Bergman’s films and held them to be the pinnacle of cinematography. Most likely he didn’t even suspect that the brilliant Swede harbored much the same feelings toward him. Bergman acknowledged and even wrote that he always viewed Tarkovsky as an artist who succeeded in creating a cinematic language that he himself aspired to and who expressed in his films things that Bergman always felt and wanted to expressed but for which he hadn’t found the right cinematic language and poetics. Did they meet and get together? Apparently not. It seems that Bergman was present at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival where Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983), created when the latter had already emigrated from the Soviet Union to Italy, got the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the FIPRESCI Prize. He wanted to approach Tarkovsky, but did not summon the courage to come up to the genius. The very same thing happened to Tarkovsky: he did not think he had the right to bother the great Swedish master. Are they similar artists? Yes and no. They’re similar in the way that Frans Hals and Rembrandt, Dante and Petrarch, Shakespeare and Cervantes are similar. Both are geniuses. Creators of a language of art, a form of culture, perhaps even a form of consciousness. But there are big differences between them.

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The films of Tarkovsky reveal an entirely different world. If Bergman depicts a silent and quotidian psychological hell whose existence no one suspects (in other words, if for Bergman hell is not the punishment waiting for us after death for our unbelief and our transgressions but a daily self-­destructive practice arising out of our insensitivity and inability to understand ourselves and others), then Tarkovsky unveils the cruelty and infernal sufferings that humans cause each other as the lot of unbelief and spiritual degradation. Only those who believe have hope. Bergman reveals to us the depths of an agnostic, or of a human being tormentedly searching for himself and for God; Tarkovsky looks deep inside a profoundly religious man confronted by the modern disbelief in everything and the attendant spiritual emptiness. Bergman’s image is that of a weak, disoriented, nervous, hysterical individual’s face and bodily movements; Tarkovsky creates his image like a great painter to whom human faces are things just like glasses, vases, candle holders, and books that move and fall off the table. After The Passion According to Andrei (in the Soviet Union this film long went under the name Andrei Rublev, 1966) I had no doubt that Tarkovsky’s genius joined the mystery of faith with the beauty of iconography, a beauty by no means inferior to that of Theophanus the Greek or Andrei Rublev himself. In The Mirror (1975), he easily glides from a reproduction of Leonardo to his own created image, just as in Nostalghia he creates a picture of the Madonna in Church worth the canvas of a Piero della Francesca. Much of the credit here belongs to the amazing Russian cinematographer Georgy Rerberg, who worked with Tarkovsky in creating The Mirror and Stalker (1979), in the same way that it would be hard to imagine Grigory Kozintsev’s masterful screen adaptations of Shakespeare without the genius of Jonas Gricius (see Donskis, 2009, 81–­86). Nevertheless, the essential mystery of Tarkovsky lies in his power to tie the Great Tradition of Europe with ordinary things and nature. After Solaris (1972) it is difficult to read Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote without commenting on Sancho Panza’s monologue about sleep with the professor who reads this monologue after his sleepless nights. That same professor later adds that a human being needs not to conquer space or penetrate the oceanic planet of Solaris; in fact, a human being needs another human being. Bach’s choral aria is of a piece with the fluttering of people and books and candlesticks in a state of weightlessness. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow, a powerful metaphor of home and belonging, rises up before my eyes just as soon as I start thinking about childhood and winter. For shooting his Sacrifice (1986) Tarkovsky sought a location that would not express anything and had no signs of history or culture. Paradoxically,

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Närsholmen now is associated not with its lighthouse and its sternly beautiful Gotland seashore but with Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, an excerpt from which is heard in the film. In Gotland Tarkovsky gave Bach’s sound and his waiting for a miracle a home. It is no accident that the tree symbolizing this waiting was man-­made and specially constructed for this film. Thanks to the traces left by Bergman’s and Tarkovsky’s presence Gotland becomes a part of our spiritual topography. A place in which we want to be alone—­in order to confront ourselves. A place where the spirit acquires the marks of history and by the same token unites time and individual experience. Most importantly, the esthetic relationship between ourselves and an object that signifies and reminds us of our belonging enables us to save the individuality and uniqueness of that object. In a way, the esthetic impulse can be prior and even superior to the ethical one when it comes to art and our map of existential experience. Trying to slowdown the passage of time or to arrest incessant change inherent in the second modernity, as Ulrich Beck would say, or liquid modernity, as Zygmunt Bauman would have it, we, like Bergman and Tarkovsky, go to Gotland, thus establishing our spiritual topography and relating ourselves with metaphors of home and belonging. We do so establishing the relationship with the films that marked our initiation in the world of the European canon and classical art, on the one side, and that into the world of modern, highly ambivalent experience, on the other. Tarkovsky and Bergman, no matter how different and similar they are in their worldview in cinematographic language, signify an existential tension between a sense of longing and a sense of belonging. And the truth is that we cannot exist without both. In Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, a mysterious and mortally dangerous area carefully guarded by the military from the human sight is called the zone. It turns out to be the area of an existential meeting with ourselves, as if to stand before the mirror of our wishes and dreams. The zone, where we can experience ourselves and our ultimate desires, passions, and dreams, becomes a powerful metaphor of understanding who you are and where you belong. The zone allows us to make a wish, and then it is believed that this wish may come true. The point, however, is that this modern version of the search for the Holy Grail is incomparably more than merely a parable of the pursuit of human happiness; in fact, a far more important question arises, whether being together and facing death at any moment can change our wishes and desires. Can a human fellowship, a joint dedication, or at least a sporadic community of the searchers change their initial disposition of happiness

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and the meaning of life? Can our being together alter what initially comes as a disconnected and personal wish? For the sense of belonging, ultimately, matters more than happiness. And a human being needs not to conquer space or penetrate the oceanic planet of Solaris; in fact, a human being needs another human being.

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Web References http://demset.org/f/showthread.php?t=1233 http://www.diploweb.com/english/russia/thom1.htm http://1gatta-felice.livejournal.com/127043.html http://grani.ru/Politics/World/Mideast/m.151256.html http://www.rait.lt

Index

Aaronovitch, David, 79 Adamkus, Valdas, 102, 108 Adorno, Theodor, 36, 145 Agee, Joel, 140–41 Aikema, Bernard, 20 Albinoni, Tomaso, 182 Aleichem, Sholom (Solomon Rabinovitch), 16–17 Alexander II, 87 Alfieri, Count Vittorio, 54 Alighieri, Dante, 191. Anderle, Othmar, 184, 187 Andersson, Bibi, 12 Andersson, Harriet, 95, 190 Andersson, Jenny, 12, 95, 190 Andropov, Yuri, 83 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 10 Arendt, Hannah, 28, 58 Aristophanes, 115 Al-Azm, Sadik, 179 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 21, 36, 95, 182, 185, 188, 192–93 Bacon, Sir Francis, 18, 21, 55, 138 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 133 Balcerowicz, Leszek, 106 Bandello, Matteo, 53 Baudrillard, Jean, 46 Bauman, Zygmunt, 144, 147, 152–61, 163–65, 193 Baye, Nathalie, 13 Beck, Ulrich, 39, 193 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 33–34, 183, 185, 188 Benda, Julien, 3, 115 Benjamin, Walter, 153

Bergman, Ingmar, 12, 190–93 Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 28, 58 Berman, Paul, 35 Besançon, Alain, 86, 128 Bettelheim, Bruno, 44–45 Blaga, Lucian, 184–85, 187 Bloch, Maurice, 32 Bloom, Harold, 142 Bol, Ferdinand, 65 Bonner, Elena, 92, 97, 168 Boorstin, Daniel J., 160, 163 Bourbon, Louis Antoine de, 68 Brezhnev, Leonid, 88, 92 Brodsky, Joseph, 38 Brouwer, Adriaen, 183 Bruckner, Pascal, 127, 129 Bruegel the Elder, Pieter, 192 Buber, Martin, 2, 80 Bukovsky, Vladimir, 36, 91–93, 96 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 24, 123, 149, 151 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 64, 124, 183 Bury, John B., 29 Buzek, Jerzy, 108 Byron, Lord, 54, 140 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 20 Caryl, Christian, 164 Castro, Fidel, 105 Cervantes y Saavedra, Don Miguel de, 189, 191 Cézanne, Paul, 64 Chaadaev, Pyotr (Peter), 85, 90 Chirac, Jaques, 86 Clement VII, Pope (Giulio de’ Medici), 66

202      Index Clementis, Vladimir, 23 Cohn, Norman, 44, 49, 83–84 Cokely, Steve, 70 Copleston, Frederick, 67–68 Coras, Jean de (Corasius, 1515–1572), 13 Corelli, Arcangelo, 182 Coser, Lewis A., 32 Daniel, Yuli, 92 Danilevsky, Nikolai, 185 Dante. See Alighieri, Dante Da Vinci, Leonardo, 183, 185, 192 DeLillo, Don, 144–46 Depardieu, Gérard, 13 Diderot, Denis, 38, 56 Dmitrievsky, Stanislav, 85, 98 Donnadieu, Bernard-Pierre, 13 Donskis, Leonidas, 1–5 Dühring, Eugene Karl, 69 Dumas, Alexandre, 157 Dumont, Louis, 7 Durkheim, Émile, 1, 8–9 Eco, Umberto, 45–46, 53, 71 Eisenstadt, S. N., 173, 179–80 Elias, Norbert, 186 Erasmus of Rotterdam, Desiderius, 17, 19, 57 Estemirova, Natalya, 85, 91 Evans, Edward P., 47 Eyck, Jan van, 65 Fabritius, Carel, 65 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 97–98 Finkielkraut, Alain, 186 Forman, Milos, 35 Foucault, Michel, 28, 59, 71, 75, 117 Fouché, Joseph, 68 Friedell, Egon, 184–85, 187 Fromm, Erich, 94–95, 145, 159 Frydryczak, Beata, 139 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa-Denis, 138 Gainsborough, Thomas, 20

Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 53 Gasset, José Ortega y, 139 Gavelis, Ricardas, 110–14, 152 Gelder, Aert de, 65 Gellner, Ernest, 187 Ginsberg, Robert, 64 Ginzburg, Alexander, 92 Giorgione (Giorgio da Castelfranco), 183 Giotto di Bondone, 183 Glucksmann, André, 35, 155, 173 Gluzman, Semyon, 92 Gobineau, Comte Joseph-Arthur de, 61 Goedsche, Hermann, 84 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 21, 141, 181, 188 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 82–83, 87, 89, 117–18, 175 Gordon, George, 54, 136 Gottwald, Klement, 23, 36 Greenblatt, Stephen, 49–51 Gricius, Jonas, 192 Grosz, Stephen, 79 Grotius, Hugo, 170–71 Grybauskaite, Dalia, 108 Habermas, Jürgen, 29, 59, 164 Halbwachs, Maurice, 31–32 Hals, Frans, 19–20, 31, 180, 183, 185, 191 Handel, George Frideric, 20, 182 Handke, Peter, 140 Havel, Václav, 35–36 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 94, 189 Heikinheimo, Seppo, 189 Helst, Bartholomeus van der, 20 Herzen, Alexander, 90–91 Hesse, Hermann, 185, 187–89 Hilckman, Anton, 184, 187 Hitler, Adolf, 120 Hobbema, Meindert, 183 Holbein the Younger, Hans, 19 Homer, 137

Index      203

Hughes, H. Stuart, 185 Hume, David, 18, 63, 137 Huntington, Samuel P., 5, 16, 173, 185 Huxley, Aldous, 27–30, 58–60, 117, 163 Ibn Sina (Avicenna), 61 Ilves, Toomas Hendrik, 101–2 Josephson, Erland, 190 Judt, Tony, 80 Kafka, Franz, 23, 25, 36, 123, 151–52 Kanovich, Grigory, 24 Kant, Immanuel, 8–9 Kavolis, Vytautas, 48, 72–74, 77, 100, 104–5, 139, 142–44, 146, 154, 175–77, 179 Kepel, Gilles, 173 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye, 140 Koestler, Arthur, 39, 123 Kolakowski, Leszek, 74, 170–71, 176 Koneczny, Feliks, 185, 187 Konrád, György, 32, 38 Konskaya, Olga, 84 Kovalev, Sergei, 97, 168, 173 Kozintsev, Grigory, 182 Kroeber, A. L., 184 Kundera, Milan, 23, 25–27, 30–31, 33–36, 38–39, 42, 82, 94, 100, 102, 152, 163, 172, 178, 187 Lawrence, Bruce, 179 Leibniz, Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von, 171 Lemkin, Raphael (Rafal), 119–21 Lenin, Vladimir, 87 Leo X, Pope (Giovanni de’ Medici), 66 Leonardo da Vinci. See Da Vinci, Leonardo Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 21 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 33, 155, 170 Levy, David J., 149–50 Lewis, Oscar, 70, 100, 105, 107 Leyster, Judith, 19, 183

Lotman, Yuri, 150 Lövy, Michael, 153 Lucian, 19 Luther, Martin, 66, 157 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 18, 31, 52, 54, 67–68, 136–38 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 32 Mandeville, Sir John, 49–51 Manet, Édouard, 21–22 Mann, Thomas, 185, 188 Marcello, Alessandro, 182 Marlowe, Christopher, 21 Marx, Karl, 69, 75, 94 Masaccio (Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone), 185 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 53 McDaniel, Tim, 150 Medici, Cardinal Giulio de’ (Pope Clement VII), 66 Medici, Giovanni de’ (Pope Leo X), 66 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 54 Medvedev, Dmitry, 87, 89 Melanchthon, Philipp, 157 Mendelssohn, Felix, 21 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 29–30 Meurthe, Antoine Boulay de la, 68 Michelangelo. See Buonarroti, Michelangelo Michelet, Jules, 53 Michnik, Adam, 81–82 Milashina, Elena, 89–90 Milosevic, Slobodan, 84 Milosz, Czeslaw, 38, 60–61, 63, 80, 94, 102, 158 Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh, 96 Moioli, Giacomo, 133 Molière, 21, 52, 136, 139–40 Molina, Tirso de, 52, 136, 140 Monet, Claude, 20 Monroe, Marilyn, 79 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de, 56 More, Sir Thomas, 19, 55–57

204      Index Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 139, 183, 185, 188, 140 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 143, 162 Mulvehill, Charles, 10 Mumford, Lewis, 28, 58 Murillo, Bartalomé Esteban, 22 Musil, Robert, 25, 152 Needham, Joseph, 47–48 Nekrasov, Andrei, 84–85 Nicholas II, 87 Nicholson, Jack, 10 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 180 Nova, Sayat, 22 Nykvist, Sven, 12, 190 Orwell, George, 27–30, 58–59, 94, 117, 151, 163 Ovason, David, 57 Ozolas, Romualdas, 111 Paksas, Rolandas, 106 Parajanov, Sergei, 22 Pearl, Daniel, 96 Perrault, Charles, 12, 18, 137 Peter the Great, 86, 117 Petrarch, Francesco, 54, 191 Petrucci, Sienese Cardinal Alfonso, 66 Planchon, Roger, 13 Politkovskaya, Anna, 85, 90–91 Pomerantz, Grigory, 126 Popper, Sir Karl R., 69, 74, 76 Porto, Luigi da, 52 Proffer, Ellendea, 148–49, 151 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 69 Puffendorf, Baron Samuel von, 171 Putin, Vladimir, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 97, 118 Quinet, Edgar, 53 Rabelais, François, 56–57 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 55, 66, 119, 183, 185

Rembrandt. See Rijn, Rembrandt Harmensz van Renan, Ernest-Joseph, 149 Rerberg, Georgy, 192 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 20 Ribera, Jusepe de, 21 Rijn, Rembrandt Harmensz van, 20, 31, 65, 180, 183, 185, 191 Romm, Mikhail, 88 Rossi, Cardinal Luigi de’, 66 Rubens, Peter Paul, 183 Rublev, Andrei, 192 Rumsfeld, Donald, 108 Ruysdal, Jacob van, 183 Saakashvili, Mikhail, 86 Sakharov, Andrei, 92, 97, 148, 167–69, 172–73 Sarrazin, Thilo, 186 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 110, 135 Sauerländer, Willibald, 21 Sauka, Donatas, 110–11 Schneider, Maria, 11 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 180 Schöpflin, George, 39, 41, 130–31, 174 Sennet, Richard, 164 Serres, Michel, 139 Shakespeare, William, 20–21, 29, 31, 52, 55, 60, 67, 82, 123, 138 Shchekochikhin, Yuri, 85 Shiller, Friedrich von, 21 Shröder, Friedrich Ludwig, 21 Shtromas, Aleksandras, 86, 92, 168 Simmel, Georg, 131, 154 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 167 Sinyavsky, Andrei, 92 Skirbekk, Sigurd, 6, 172–73, 175–76, 178 Sliogeris, Arvydas, 112 Snyder, Timothy, 119–21 Socrates, 115–16 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 55, 122 Sontag, Susan, 79, 143 Sorokin, Pitirim A., 184–85, 187 Sorokin, Vladimir, 97

Index      205

Soros, George, 95 Spengler, Oswald, 16, 65, 95, 180–88 Stalin, Joseph, 34–35, 97–98, 117, 125 Stendhal, 52–55, 136–39, 157 Strauss, Leo, 55 Sue, Eugène, 53 Swift, Jonathan, 55, 57–58, 137 Sydow, Max von, 190 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de, 68 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 190, 193 Thom, Françoise, 86 Thoré, Théophile, 20 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio), 20, 183 Todorov, Tzvetan, 36 Toynbee, Arnold J., 185, 187 Twain, Mark, 11 Ullman, Liv, 12, 190 Van Dyck, Sir Anthony, 20, 31, 183 Van Eyck, Jan, 65 Van Voren, Robert, 172 Vecchi, Benedetto, 14, 131 Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y, 20–22

Venclova, Tomas, 82, 92, 114–16 Vermeer, Johannes, 19, 31, 180, 183, 185 Vico, Giambattista, 137 Vigne, Daniel, 13 Virgil, 137 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 21, 38, 55–57, 77 Vyke-Freiberga, Vaira, 102 Walter, Eugene Victor, 47–48 Walzer, Michael, 30 Weber, Max, 3–4, 47–48, 151, 156 Weil, Simone, 28, 30, 58 Weininger, Otto, 134 Wilde, Oscar, 79 Williams, Raymond, 30 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 7, 134, 167 Wolf, Larry, 38 Worden, Blair, 122 Yeltsin, Boris, 118 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 27–30, 39, 58–60, 117, 123, 163 Zappa, Frank, 35–36 Zedong, Mao, 34–35, 93