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From the Devil to Frighteningly Normal and Sane People
Leonidas Donskis After the twentieth century, we, especially Eastern Europeans like me, are inclined to demonize the manifestations of evil. In Western Europe and North America, humanists and social scientists are inclined to analyse the anxiety of influence, whereas Eastern Europeans are preoccupied with the anxiety of destruction. 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.1 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 itself – one that is rational, subjugating all to itself, anonymous, depersonalized, safely splitting man’s responsibility and rationality into separate spheres, fragmenting 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 and Robert Musil.
Yet during a public lecture on the natural history of evil you gave in September 2010 at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, you shed new light on the ‘demons and fiends’ of evil: you recalled the case of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem aptly described by Hannah Arendt in her provocative book.2 Everybody expected to see a senseless and pathological monster, yet they had to be discouraged and bitterly disappointed by psychiatrists hired by the court who reassured them that Eichmann was perfectly normal – the man might have made a good neighbour, a sweet and loyal husband, and a model family and community member. I believe that the hint you dropped there was extremely timely and relevant, keeping in mind our widespread propensity to explain away our traumatizing experiences by clinicalizing and demonizing anybody involved in a large-scale crime. In a way, it stands close to the point Milan Kundera makes in his Une Rencontre, writing about the protagonist of Anatole France’s novel Les Dieux ont soif: the young painter Gamelin becomes a fanatic of the French Revolution, yet he is far from a monster in situations and exchanges that are distant from the Revolution and from their founding father Jacobins. And whereas Kundera elegantly links this quality of Gamelin’s soul to le désert du sérieux or le désert sans humour (the desert of seriousness, the humourless desert), contrasting him to his neighbour Brotteaux, l’homme qui refuse de croire (a man who refuses to believe), whom Gamelin sends to the guillotine, the idea is quite clear: a decent man can harbour a monster inside him. What happens to that monster in peaceful times, and whether we can always contain him inside us, is another question.
What happens to this monster inside us during our liquid times, or dark times when we more often refuse to grant existence to the Other or to see and hear him or her, instead of offering a cannibal ideology? We tend to replace an eye-to-eye and face-to-face existential situation with an all-embracing classificatory system which consumes human lives and personalities as empirical data and evidence or statistics.
Zygmunt Bauman I wouldn’t have ascribed the phenomenon of the ‘demonization of evil’ to the peculiarities of being ‘Eastern European’ – condemned to live for a few recent centuries at the ‘limen’ separating and attaching a ‘civilizing centre’, formed by the west of Europe with the ‘modern breakthrough’, from and to a vast hinterland, viewed and experienced by juxtaposition as ‘uncivilized’ and ‘in need of civilizing’ (undeveloped, backward, lagging behind). Evil needs to be demonized as long as the origins of goodness (grace, redemption, salvation) continue to be deified, as they were in all monotheistic faiths: the figure of the ‘Devil’ stands for the irreconcilability of the presence of evil in the world as it is lived in and through, with the figure of a loving God: a benevolent and merciful father and guardian of humanity, the fount of all that is good – the fundamental premise of all monotheism. The perennial question unde malum, of where evil comes from, complete with the temptation to pinpoint, disclose and depict a source of malevolence code-named ‘Devil’, has tormented the minds of theologians, philosophers and a large part of their clientele, yearning for a meaningful and veridical Weltanschauung, for more than two millennia.
Casting all-too-visible ‘modernity’ (an eminently human product and acknowledged as a human choice, as well as a mode of thinking and acting selected and practised by humans) in the role hitherto reserved for Satan – invisible to most and seen only by a selected few – was just one of the numerous aspects and consequences or side-effects of the ‘modern project’: to take the management of world affairs under human management. Given the strictly monotheistic stance of the ‘modernity project’, inherited lock, stock and barrel from centuries of church rule, the shift boiled down to a substitution of new (profane) entities with different names for the old (sacred) entities – inside an otherwise unchanged age-old matrix. From now on, the query unde malum led to this-worldly, earthly addresses. One of them was the not yet fully civilized (purified, reformed, converted) plebeian ‘mass’ of commoners – residues of a premodern upbringing by ‘priests, old women and proverbs’ (as the Enlightenment philosophers dubbed religious instruction, family lore and communal tradition); and at the other resided the ancient tyrants, now reincarnated in the shape of modern dictators, despots deploying coercion and violence to promote peace and freedom (at least according to what they said and – possibly – to what they thought). Residents at both addresses, whether caught in action or supposed to be there yet sought in vain, were thoroughly examined, turned over, X-rayed, psychoanalyzed and medically tested, and all sorts of deformities suspected of gestating and incubating evil inclinations have been recorded. Nothing much followed, however, in a pragmatic sense. Therapies prescribed and put into operation might have removed or mitigated this or that suspect deformity, yet the question unde malum went on being asked since none of the recommended cures proved definitive and obviously there were more sources of evil than met the eye, many of them, perhaps the majority, staying stubbornly undisclosed. They were, moreover, shifting; each successive status quo seemed to possess its own specific sources of evil – and every focus on diverting and/or trying to plug and stop the sources already known, or believed to be known, brought forth a new state of affairs better insured against the notorious evils of the past but unprotected from the toxic effluvia of sources hitherto underestimated and disregarded or believed to be insignificant.
In the post-demonic chapter of the long (and still far from finished) story of the unde malum query, much attention was also devoted – aside from the ‘where from’ question but still in tune with the modern spirit – to the question of ‘how’: to the technology of evildoing. Answers suggested to that question fell roughly under two rubrics: coercion and seduction. Arguably the most extreme expression was found for the first in George Orwell’s 1984; for the second, in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Both types of answer were articulated in the West; in Orwell’s vision, however, painted as it was in direct response to the Russian communist experiment, an intimate kinship can easily be traced with Eastern European discourse, going back to Fyodor Dostoevsky and beyond – to the three centuries of schism between the Christian Church in the West and the Eastern Orthodox. It was there, after all, that distrust of and resistance to the principle of personal freedoms and individual autonomy – two of the defining attributes of ‘Western civilization’ – were at their strongest. Orwell’s vision could be seen as inspired by the Eastern rather than the Western historic experience; that vision was, after all, an anticipation of the shape of the West after it was flooded, conquered, subdued and enslaved by Eastern-type despotism; its core image was that of a soldier’s jackboot trampling a human face into the ground. Huxley’s vision, by contrast, was a pre-emptive response to the impending arrival of a consumerist society, an eminently Western creation; its major theme was also the serfdom of disempowered humans, but in this case a ‘voluntary servitude’ (a term coined three centuries earlier by, if we believe Michel de Montaigne, Étienne de la Boétie), that is using more carrot than stick and deploying temptation and seduction as its major way of proceeding, instead of violence, overt command and brutal coercion. It has to be remembered, however, that both these utopias were preceded by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, in which a blending and simultaneous as well as complementary deployment of both ‘methodologies of enslavement’, later to be elaborated separately by Orwell and Huxley, had already been envisaged.
You are so right when you draw into the forefront another motif in the seemingly everlasting and unfinishable debate of unde malum, conducted in our modern post-Devil era with the same, and growing, vigour as in the times of a scheming Devil, exorcisms, witch-hunting and pyres. It concerns the motives of evildoing, the ‘evildoer’s personality’, and most crucially in my view the mystery of monstrous deeds without monsters, and of evil deeds committed in the name of noble purposes (Albert Camus suggested that the most atrocious of human crimes were perpetrated in the name of the greater good … ). Particularly apt and timely is the way you recall, invoking Kundera, Anatole France’s genuinely prophetic vision, which can be construed retrospectively as the original matrix for all the subsequent permutations, turns and twists of explanations advanced in subsequent social-scientific debates.
It is highly unlikely that readers in the twenty-first century of Anatole France’s novel Les Dieux ont soif, originally published in 1912,3 won’t be simultaneously bewildered and enraptured. In all likelihood, they will be overwhelmed, as I have been, with admiration for an author who, as Milan Kundera would say, not only managed to ‘tear through the curtain of preinterpretations’, the ‘curtain hanging in front of the world’, in order to free ‘the great human conflicts from naïve interpretation as a struggle between good and evil, understanding them in the light of tragedy’,4 which in Kundera’s opinion is the novelist’s calling and the vocation of all novel-writing – but in addition to design and test, for the benefit of readers as yet unborn, the tools to be used to cut and tear curtains not yet woven, but ones that were bound to start being eagerly woven and hung ‘in front of the world’ well after his novel was finished, and particularly eagerly well after his death …
At the moment when Anatole France put aside his pen and took one last look at the finished novel, words like ‘bolshevism’, ‘fascism’, or indeed ‘totalitarianism’ were not listed in dictionaries, French ones or any others; and names like Stalin or Hitler did not appear in any of the history books. Anatole France’s sight was focused, as you say, on Évariste Gamelin, a juvenile beginner in the world of the fine arts, a youngster of great talent and promise, and a still greater ability to disgust Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard and other dictators of popular taste – whose ‘bad taste, bad drawings, bad designs’, ‘complete absence of clear style and clear line’, ‘complete unawareness of nature and truth’, and fondness for ‘masks, dolls, fripperies, childish nonsense’ he explained by their readiness to ‘work for tyrants and slaves’. Gamelin was sure that ‘a hundred years hence all Watteau’s paintings will have rotted away in attics’ and predicted that ‘by 1893 art students will be covering the canvases of Boucher with their own rough sketches’. The French Republic, still a tender, unsound and frail child of the Revolution, would grow to cut off, one after another, the many heads of the hydra of tyranny and slavery, including this one. There was no mercy for the conspirators against the Republic, as there was neither liberty for the enemies of liberty, nor tolerance for the enemies of tolerance. To the doubts voiced by his incredulous mother, Gamelin would respond without hesitation: ‘We must put our trust in Robespierre; he is incorruptible. Above all, we must trust in Marat. He is the one who really loves the people, who realizes their true interests and serves them. He was always the first to unmask the traitors and frustrate plots.’ In one of his authorial interventions, few and far between, France explains and brands the thoughts and deeds of his hero and his hero’s likes as the ‘serene fanaticism’ of the ‘little men, who had demolished the throne itself and turned upside down the old order of things’. In his recording of his own path from the youth of a Romanian fascist to the adulthood of a French philosopher, Émile Cioran summed up the lot of youngsters in the era of Robespierre and Marat, and Stalin and Hitler alike: ‘Bad luck is their lot. It is they who voice the doctrine of intolerance and it is they who put that doctrine into practice. It is they who are thirsty – for blood, tumult, barbarity.’5 Well, all the youngsters? And only the youngsters? And only in the eras of Robespierre or Stalin? All three suppositions sound obviously wrong.
How safe and comfortable, cosy and friendly the world would feel if it were monsters and only monsters who perpetrated monstrous deeds. Against monsters we are fairly well protected, and so we can rest assured that we are insured against the evil deeds that monsters are capable of and threaten to perpetrate. We have psychologists to spot psychopaths and sociopaths, we have sociologists to tell us where they are likely to propagate and congregate, we have judges to condemn them to confinement and isolation, and police or psychiatrists to make sure they stay there. Alas, good, ordinary, likeable American lads and lasses were neither monsters nor perverts. Had they not been assigned to lord over the inmates of Abu Ghraib, we would never have known (or as much as surmised, guessed, imagined, fantasized) about the horrifying things they were capable of contriving. It wouldn’t have occurred to any of us that the smiling girl at the counter, once on an overseas assignment, might excel at devising ever more clever and fanciful, as well as wicked and perverse tricks – to harass, molest, torture and humiliate her wards. In their hometowns, their neighbours refuse to believe to this very day that those charming lads and lasses they have known since their childhood are the same folks as the monsters in the snapshots of the Abu Ghraib torture chambers. But they are.
In the conclusion of his psychological study of Chip Frederick, the suspected leader and guide of the torturers’ pack, Philip Zimbardo had to say that
there is absolutely nothing in his record that I was able to uncover that would predict that Chip Frederick would engage in any form of abusive, sadistic behaviour. On the contrary, there is much in his record to suggest that had he not been forced to work and live in such an abnormal situation, he might have been the military’s All-American poster soldier on its recruitment ads.
Sharply and uncompromisingly opposing the reduction of social phenomena to the level of the individual psyche, Hannah Arendt observed that the true genius among the Nazi seducers was Himmler, who – neither descending from the bohème as Goebbels did, nor being a sexual pervert like Streicher, an adventurer like Goering, a fanatic like Hitler or a madman like Alfred Rosenberg – ‘organized the masses into a system of total domination’, thanks to his (correct!) assumption that in their decisive majority men are not vampires or sadists, but job holders and family providers.6 Reading The Kindly Ones, published by Jonathan Littell in 2009, one can unpack a covert critique of the common interpretation, endorsed by Arendt herself, of the ‘banality of evil’ thesis: namely, the supposition that the evildoer Eichmann was an ‘unthinking man’. From Littell’s portrait, Eichmann emerges as anything but an unthinking follower of orders or a slave to his own base passions. ‘He was certainly not the enemy of mankind described in Nuremberg’, ‘nor was he an incarnation of banal evil’; he was, on the contrary, ‘a very talented bureaucrat, extremely competent at his functions, with a certain stature and a considerable sense of personal initiative’.7 As a manager, Eichmann would most certainly be the pride of any reputable European firm (one could add, including the companies with Jewish owners or top executives). Littell’s narrator, Dr Aue, insists that in the many personal encounters he had with Eichmann he never noticed any trace of a personal prejudice, let alone a passionate hatred of the Jews, whom he saw as no more, though no less either, than the objects his office demanded to be duly processed. Whether at home or in his job, Eichmann was consistently the same person. The kind of person he was, for instance, when together with his SS mates he performed two Brahms quartets: ‘Eichmann played calmly, methodically, his eyes riveted to the score; he didn’t make any mistakes.’8
LD From William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe onwards, that is to say, from these two brilliant men of letters who depicted Niccolò Machiavelli as an embodiment of evil, the Devil in politics has assumed a number of interpretations some of which are surprisingly close to what we take as important traits of modernity. For example, a total abolition of privacy leading to manipulation of people’s secrets and abuses of their intimacy, which appears as a nightmarish vision of the future in such dystopias as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and George Orwell’s 1984, was foreseen, anticipated and wittily depicted in early modern European literature.
Suffice it to recall Luis Vélez de Guevara’s El Diablo cojuelo, a seventeenth-century text where the Devil has the power to reveal the insides of the houses, or a variation of this theme in Alain-René Le Sage’s novel Le Diable boiteux. What early modern writers took as a devilish force aimed at depriving human beings of their privacy and secrets has now become inseparable from the reality shows and other actions of wilful and joyful self-exposure in our self-revealing age. The interplay of religion, politics and literary imagination, this notion of the Devil is manifest behind modern European art: for instance, recall Asmodea from The Book of Tobias, a female version of the Devil, depicted in Francisco de Goya’s painting Asmodea.
In your Liquid Modernity you analyse the loss of privacy in our liquid times. In Liquid Surveillance, written together with David Lyon, you clearly distinguish between the early anticipations of mass surveillance and the reality on the ground in our liquid surveillance epoch. All in all, it seems to me that you proclaimed that privacy is dead. Echoing Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, we can assume that what happened from the Panopticon project to the colonization of privacy was the defeat inflicted by our epoch on the idea of the autonomous individual. If so, political liberty is on the way to disappearance. And we seem far from beating the drums at the threat. Instead, we celebrate it as our newly acquired security and a chance in the manner of a reality show to remind the world about our existence.
Is this our new form of praise of the Devil? A liquid praise of the Devil?
ZB A new form indeed, but not of ‘praise of’ the Devil, not of a languid and self-indulgent wallowing in raptures still only promised to come once the Faustian pact has been duly signed and sealed – but a luxuriating in the Devil’s gifts which have already been received, appropriated and consumed, interiorized and digested by us (while being appropriated, swallowed, consumed and digested by him, something akin to the ‘Alien’ from the film series under that title). And this is not the old, familiar Goethe’s Mephisto, either in its orthodox shape or in Istvan Szabo’s updated reincarnation, but a DIY (‘do it yourself’) Devil – diffused and scattered, deregulated and impersonal from being ground and pulverized and sprinkled all over the human swarm, spawning myriads of ‘local agents’ subsequently privatized and ‘subsidiarized’ to us, individual men and women. This is no longer a devil with an address, headquarters and executing arm like the devils of Zamyatin, Bulgakov or Orwell – or, for that matter, with a temple to summon and gather the congregation for a common prayer; we all carry prayer rugs wherever we go, and any high street will do for a prayer spot. We pray in public, even if (or because) the liturgy and the prayer books are self-referential …
You quote my original exchange with David Lyon – it has since grown into an ongoing conversation, from which permit me to quote one of my suggestions:
As for the ‘death of anonymity’ courtesy of the internet … we submit our rights to privacy to the slaughter of our own will. Or perhaps we just consent to the loss of privacy as a reasonable price for the wonders offered in exchange. Or the pressure to deliver our personal autonomy to the slaughterhouse is so overwhelming, so close to the condition of a flock of sheep, that only few exceptionally rebellious, bold, pugnacious and resolute wills will earnestly attempt to withstand it. One way or the other, we are however offered, at least nominally, a choice, as well as a semblance at least of a two-way contract, and at least a formal right to protest and sue in case of its breach: something that in the case of mechanical drones that spy on us without asking our permission is never given.
All the same: once we are in, we stay hostages to fate. The collective intelligence of the internet’s 2 billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on websites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. It took Rich Lam, a freelance photographer taking pictures of street riots in Vancouver, just one day to trace and identify a couple caught (by accident) passionately kissing in one of his photos. Everything private is now done, potentially, in public – and is potentially available for public consumption; and remains available for the duration, ’till the end of time, as the internet ‘can’t be made to forget’ anything once recorded on any of its innumerable servers. ‘This erosion of anonymity is a product of pervasive social media services, cheap cellphone cameras, free photo and video web hosts, and perhaps most important of all, a change in people’s views about what ought to be public and what ought to be private’ [to quote Brian Stelter]. All those technical gadgets being, we are told, ‘user-friendly’ – though that favourite phrase of commercial copy means, under closer scrutiny, a product incomplete without the user’s labour, after the pattern of IKEA furniture. And let me add: with users’ enthusiastic devotion and deafening applause. A contemporary Étienne de la Boétie would be probably tempted to speak not of a voluntary, but DIY servitude …
Privacy, intimacy, anonymity, the right to secrets are all to be left outside the premises of the Society of Consumers or are routinely confiscated by the security officers at the entrance. In the society of consumers, we are all consumers of commodities, and commodities meant for consumption; since we are all commodities, we are obliged to create demand for ourselves. The internet, with its Facebooks and blogs, those poor people’s high-street market versions of VIPs’ boutique salons, is bound to follow the standards set by the factories of public celebrities; promoters are bound to be acutely aware that the more intimate, saucy and scandalous the content of commercials, the more appealing and successful the promotion and the higher the ratings (of TV, glossy magazines, celebrity-hacking tabloids, etc.). The overall result is a ‘confessional society’, with microphones fixed inside confessionals and megaphones on public squares. Membership of the confessional society is invitingly open to all, but there is a heavy penalty attached to staying outside. Those reluctant to join are taught (usually the hard way) that the updated version of Descartes’s Cogito is ‘I am seen, therefore I am’ – and that the more people who see me, the more I am …
Keeping oneself to oneself and opting out of the game of publicity is made near to impossible by simultaneous assaults on two fronts. One frontline has a long history, inherited from an era whose fears and terrors were recorded by the likes of George Orwell, with TV monitors and cameras rolled into one and watching made available solely in a package deal with being watched. A long history it might have, but in the latest chapter of that history, written in our security obsessed and addicted society, it has deployed brand new weapons of an unheard-of and until recently unimaginable ubiquity and power of penetration: self-propelled spying ‘drones’ the size of a hummingbird or an insect are currently cutting-edge technology, but they will soon be made out-of-date by the arrival of nanodrones. The second frontline, the DIY one described above, has, however, a very short past: it also uses technological gadgets that progress fast and are ever easier to obtain, but its deployment is home-grown, like a cottage industry, and presented as, as well as believed to be, voluntary.
LD We learn from Eastern European writers that a fatal forgetting and oblivion is a curse of Eastern and Central Europe. 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 1928–41, and published in a heavily censored version in 1966–7), Mikhail Bulgakov confers on the Devil an additional and, perhaps, pivotal aspect of his power.
The Devil can strip a human being, doomed to be confined to non-person 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 human beings 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 (the Russian for Homeless), who also ends up in a mental asylum as a punishment for his childishly naive 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. That his last name means Homeless clearly signifies 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 Kołakowski, who had long intended to undertake a major work on the Devil in history and politics.
Grigory Kanovich, an Israeli-Lithuanian writer, describes loss of memory and sensitivity as an unavoidable aspect of how the Devil affects humanity during social upheavals, disasters, wars and calamities. In his novel The Devil’s Spell (2009), he depicts, with epic brushwork, the wilful 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 who 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.
Yet this has another side. Memory and memory politics have become an obvious aspect of foreign policies over the past years. We are witnessing a sinister tendency increasingly getting stronger in the United States and in Europe. Politicians increasingly find themselves preoccupied with two domains that serve as a new source of inspiration – 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 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. It is enough 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 she or he is on the way into the world, or dying, or consummating a 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.
Nothing new under the sky, though. Modernity always was, and continues to be, obsessed with how to get as much control over the 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 Orwell’s 1984, history solely depends on those who control the archives and records. Since human individuals have no other form of existence than that which is granted them 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.
History can never be left solely to politicians, whether they are 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 the moral choices we make every day. Like human privacy, our right to study and critically question history is a cornerstone of freedom. At the same time, it makes perfect sense to reiterate the words of Michel Dumoulin, a history professor from the Catholic University of Louvain, who commented on the willingness of politicians to adopt the roles and functions of both historians and jurists: ‘Qu’on laisse les historiens faire leur boulot (Let the historians do their job).’9
What is the way out of this predicament of liquid modernity? Too much memory can kill us, not to mention our sense of humour, yet we are unable to abandon our memory.
ZB Again, in my reckoning, devils come in all sorts, and the ‘works of the Devil’ usually tend to be ambiguous and ambivalent: an act of exchange, a trade-off, a quid pro quo, tit for tat, you gain something while losing something else. .. The Devil’s power resides in his mastery of the counterfeit art.
The figure of the Devil is a trickster, a swindler, a charlatan, all in all a confidence artist projected at the scale of an IMAX screen, which is on average an overwhelming 22 × 16.1 metres (about 72 × 53 feet in size), but can be made – and surely will be – even larger. Stretched to such a terrifying size, the Devil embodies the inexorability, nay indomitability, of something that is not what it seems to be, neither what it pretends to be nor what you take it for: the horror of a changeling, showing its true nature only at the point of no return – or after it has been passed …
In one of his Talmudic studies, Emmanuel Levinas suggests that the genuinely irresistible pulling power of temptation derives from the sheer state of ‘being tempted’, rather than from the attractiveness of the states that are promised, believed and expected to be ushered in by surrender to that temptation. What temptation offers is bound to mix the desire for bliss with fear of the unknown. So long as a state is still only imagined and not yet experienced, it is admittedly a risky, perhaps even downright treacherous task to draw a line between good and evil. In the state of being tempted (and up to the very moment of surrender), fear of the unknown, of drawing the line wrongly, is subdued by the joy of still having the drawing pencil in one’s hand – of being in control. Levinas calls that state ‘temptation of temptation’: a state of being attracted, in the last account, by the ‘under-determination’, ‘inconclusiveness’, ‘incompleteness’ of the moment – that elusive, harrowingly brief moment of freedom, when you have already become free to choose (having emerged – a creature drawn out by temptation – from the dungeon of the routine, the humdrum, the monotonous and the immovable) but have not yet chosen, keeping your freedom intact and unscathed. One could say it is a divine state, a glimpse of that infinite potency that is an attribute of God denied to us mortals. That is why temptation tends to be associated with the Devil and his works. The state of temptation is blasphemous, in as far as imagining oneself all-powerful is sacrilege. Allowing oneself to be tempted is the sacrilegious act for which surrender to the temptation is the statutory punishment. Being free to decide means having reached the vestibule of evil pandemonium. Dazzled by its splendours, it is all too easy to overlook the steep and slippery descent just on the other side of the threshold …
Now to one of the major instruments for immunizing temptation against the danger that its attractiveness will be eroded by the accumulating evidence of a fall … Yes, indeed, memory (by definition, memory of the past) can be manipulated (and it is, on the initiative of all sorts of people with devilish, counterfeiting intentions and ambitions, but not without the help and hard work of swarms of their hired hands – keen, lukewarm or reluctant, but always obedient – or their voluntary though sometimes inadvertent accomplices; this is what Winston Smith was employed for by the Ministry of Truth), but not annihilated. Memory stripped of event X is not a blank spot, it is still historical memory, only it becomes memory of a different history – a history that did not contain the event X. (By the way, Leonid Shestov, the great philosopher from Eastern Europe then France, considered this feat of ‘acting backwards’ ‘remaking what had already been made’, ‘undoing what had already been done’, and therefore ‘changing the past’, a crucial and monopolistic capacity of God when he insisted that God could change the past as much as he could change the future: for instance, he could make the outrage of poisoning Socrates by his fellow Athenians non-existent. If so, the Devil’s toying with the past is just one of his endless arrogant and desperate attempts to represent himself as ‘God’s alternative’ and to beat God at God’s own, his own by right, game. It is no wonder therefore, that Bezdomny could not deny the Devil without denying God – and it was precisely that unavoidable ‘doubleness’ of his denial that cast him into the lunatic asylum.) And so what happens is not the appearance of a ‘non-person’, but something akin to body-snatching: a surreptitious person-replacement (after all, we are increasingly, and ever deeper, immersed in a society of spare parts and progressive ‘cyborgization,’ as well as being recommended and eager to recompose our identities, including the biographies that composed them in the first place – aren’t we?) A different person appears, one who still owns a memory of a past, albeit a different past, and just like his former incarnation he uses his memory to perceive and comprehend his present and to project his future.
As yet, no one has managed to strip humans of critical capacity, though there have been many who have successfully managed to redirect that capacity to alternative effects. What worries me most, however, about the plight of ‘memory of the past’ in our present-day mode of life is not the prospect of collective amnesia (this is not really on the cards) and so universal homelessness, but rather the ongoing transformation of the past into a container full of colourful or colourless, appetizing or insipid bits, all floating (to take a notion from Georg Simmel) with the same specific gravity; a container amenable to, and perpetually submitted, to chance dipping – allowing for endless permutations but devoid of any logic of its own, and its own hierarchy of importance. The work of the Devil? In order to overshadow or replace the occurrence of Jewish pogroms in Lithuania with the memory of Lithuanian Jews cooperating with Soviet occupants, candles could be lit to God or to the Devil in equal measure and with equal effect …
Besides, on that north-western peninsula of the Asiatic continent dubbed ‘Europe’, every and any identity, including national or ethnic identity, is less and less a principal frontline along which coercion and freedom, imposition and choice, inclusion and exclusion confront each other in a war of attrition; it is turning more and more into a play of temptations and a game of avoiding traps, a recent, updated version of snakes and ladders. For all practical intents and purposes, ‘identity’ is fast turning (at least in our part of the world) into ‘identainment’: it is moving from the theatre of war of physical and spiritual survival on to the stage of entertaining recreational play, turning into a concern and one of the favourite pastimes of homo ludens rather than homo politicus. It has been also largely privatized, shifted away and exiled from the area of ‘Politics’ (with a capital ‘P’) and cast into the poorly defined, loosely structured and incurably vulnerable and volatile realm of individually run ‘life politics’ – a space in large measure abandoned by policy-makers, or contracted out by design or default to the markets. Like most functions that have moved or have been moved into that space, it is currently undergoing a fast yet thorough process of commercialization. The play titled ‘identity search’ or ‘identity-building’ is being variously staged by competing producers, spanning the whole spectrum of theatrical genres from epic drama to farce or grotesque, though tragedy-style productions have become fewer and farther between than in the relatively recent past.
To go on: historical memory is always a mixed blessing, and all too often it is a curse in a veneer-thin yet dazzlingly tempting and seductive disguise of a blessing. Memories can serve evil as keenly and effectively as we would like them to serve the cause of improvement and learning from mistakes. They can camouflage the ambushes of treacherous temptations as much as they can serve as portable warning signs. Victimization, as it were, degrades the victimizers, who dearly wish to forget a shameful and sorely inconvenient episode – but it does not ennoble the victimized, who dearly wish to keep their suffering vivid in their memory, mostly motivated by hope of obtaining compensation in the same currency. In a recent interview, my interviewer Artur Domosławski commented that assuming the right attitude would make it impossible to pass over in silence war crimes committed by the Israeli army and the persecution of Palestinians – and this was so precisely because of the cruel fate of European Jews: suffering discrimination, pogroms, ghettoization, and in the end an attempt at their ultimate destruction. I found myself in complete agreement with Domosławski’s suggestion. I believe that the mission of Holocaust survivors is to assist in the salvation of our jointly inhabited world from another catastrophe of a potentially similar character and magnitude. To this end, they need to bear witness to the gruesome and murderous tendencies – hidden, yet very much alive and resilient – built into the very foundations of our mode of coexistence. This is how Raul Hilberg, the greatest among the historians of the Holocaust, understood that mission when he repeated again and again that the Nazi machine of genocide did not differ in its structure from the ‘normal’ organization of German society: it was that self-same society playing one of its ‘normal’, everyday roles. Richard Rubenstein, a theologian, kept reminding whoever was willing to listen that – in just the same way as bodily hygiene, subtle philosophical ideas, exquisite works of art and wondrous music – serfdom, war, exploitation and concentration camps were also mundane attributes of modern civilization. Shoah, he concluded, ‘was not evidence of fall, but of the progress of civilization’.
Alas, this was not the only lesson that happened to have been drawn from the Holocaust. There was another: the one who strikes first comes out on top, and as long as he stays on top, he also stays unpunished. It is true that the rulers of Israel are not the only ones who seem to have learnt that sinister lesson, and they are not the only ones to blame for having offered Hitler – whether intentionally or inadvertently – such a posthumous victory of sorts. If this happens in Israel, however, a country seeing itself as the lawful heir to the Jewish fate, it carries a more profound shock than other cases possibly would: after all, it destroys another myth, one we all embrace and cherish – that suffering ennobles, and that the victims of the infliction of pain emerge from their trials luminously clean and morally elevated. In stark opposition to what we would dearly wish to be true, we suddenly realize that victims of cruelty wait for the occasion to repay their oppressors in their own currency – and if vengeance on their oppressors of yesterday, or their offspring, is unfeasible or inconvenient for one reason or another, they hurry at least to efface the ignominy and disgrace of their past weakness, to demonstrate their equality to the task and chase away the spectre of inherited and continuing inferiority. Anyone within reach may be picked on for the demonstration – a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.
The sad truth, and a truly tremendous shot in the Devil’s arm, is that while the act of inflicting pain on others no doubt degrades and debases the perpetrators, the sufferers of the pain do not emerge from their trials morally unscathed either. The real consequence of brutality and persecution is that it sets into operation another ‘schismogenetic chain’ (to deploy the term coined by Gregory Bateson to denote a succession of actions and reactions that deepen the doggedness and pugnacity of both sides at each stage and widen the abyss that divides them) – and it takes a lot of good will and hard effort to opt out from stretching the chain indefinitely. Of the two evils, I would rather be a victim of nationalism than its carrier and practitioner. General Moczar, the man behind the anti-Semitic campaign in Poland, caused Janina and me a lot of pain, but he did not manage to soil our consciences. If anything, he stained his own – if he had one, that is.
You say: ‘Too much memory can kill us, not to mention our sense of humour, yet we are unable to abandon our memory.’ Beautifully put, with the sharpness and precision of a surgical scalpel; indeed it is difficult to conceive of a better summary of our predicament. But let’s remember as well that whereas one can live happily without memories (as all animals do), it’s well-nigh impossible to go on living without forgetting … No wonder that quite a few of the most brilliant and perceptive minds have advocated the manifold blessings of forgetting – managing to convince some (alas, very few) resourceful historical actors to follow suit. Two days after the murder of Julius Caesar, Cicero appealed to the Roman Senate to condemn the memory of ‘murderous quarrels’ to eternal oblivion for the sake of laying the foundation of peace. Louis XVIII, restored to the throne in 1814, decreed the forgetting of atrocities, including the regicide, committed during the French Revolution. He wrote into the new French constitution that ‘all inquiry into opinions and votes preceding the restoration are prohibited. Both the courts and the citizens are obliged in equal measure to forget them.’ And recall the exemplarily smooth and humane exit of South Africa, due largely to Nelson Mandela’s inspiration, from the long dark years of injustice, hatred and blood-letting. Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote that ‘forgetting is not only an absence and lack, but, as shown by Nietzsche, an elementary condition of mental life. Only thanks to forgetting does the mind have a chance of full renewal.’10
All things taken into account, is it better to remember harms and injustices suffered, or to forget them? Opinions continue to be – unpromisingly, discouragingly – divided and the courts are far from reaching a verdict. I suspect the jury will stay out for a very long time to come …
LD Evil lurks in what we tend to take as normality and even as the triviality and banality of mundane life, rather than in abnormal cases, pathologies, aberrations and the like. Whereas we in Eastern Europe still continue to be more preoccupied with the tragic in human history, you are inclined to shed more light on the banal and mundane. Therefore, it would be hardly possible to understand the phenomenon of loss of sensitivity without the concept of the adiaphorization of human behaviour. 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 you give it, an adiaphoron is a temporary withdrawal from one’s own sensitivity zone; an ability not to react, or to react as if something were happening not to people but to natural physical objects, to things, or to non-humans. 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.
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. One doesn’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 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 likes to pull legs, 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 the result of the media. Stimulation becomes a method and a way of self-realization. Things turned into a routine do not turn anybody on – one needs to become a star or a victim to gain any sort of attention from one’s society. As you have observed, 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 stardom 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 degradations. 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 your 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, that is, his becoming the victim, re-establishes the lost dignity: the perfect mixture of hero and victim is achieved by the cult of the shahids, or martyrs, in the consciousness of terrorists and those who believe in them.
You consider the adiaphorization of behaviour to be one of the most sensitive problems of our epoch. Its causes are manifold: instrumental rationality; mass society and mass culture, that is, 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 those things that we ourselves do not connect with our lives become of no importance to us; their existence is dissociated from our being in the world; and they 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.
When you constantly see 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 ceases to provoke amazement, or disgust. It, as it were, 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 oneself. A brutal type of discourse cutting down others and oneself, 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 a way of making comments about oneself that would not occur even to a real enemy of that person or their country.
Isn’t this sufficient to imply that we are in peril of losing calm and balanced discussion as we knew it for decades? What if this is all distorted into a mental or IT technique to provoke the mass reactions we need? And how can democracy and the public domain exist without informed opinions and political deliberations, rather than all those political scandals and reality shows that we call politics nowadays? And aren’t we in peril of losing our ability to follow what is happening in the world and to empathize with people who suffer? Isn’t this intensification of virtual life with its side-effects, such as the sadistic language and mental cannibalism lurking in anonymous online chats and deeply offensive comments that are meant to hurt and discourage those who are visible and who expose themselves, a direct way to a loss of human compassion and sensitivity?
ZB Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked that the suffering of however many people, of all of humankind even, can never be greater – more acute, profound and cruel – than the suffering of one member of the human race. This is one pole of the moral–immoral axis. At the second pole is the idea that care for the health of the social body calls for drastic surgery: diseased (or disease-prone) parts of the body need to be amputated. The rest of moral discourse moves between those poles.
But by ‘adiaphorization’ I mean stratagems of placing, intentionally or by default, certain acts and/or omitted acts regarding certain categories of humans outside the moral–immoral axis – that is, outside the ‘universe of moral obligations’ and outside the realm of phenomena subject to moral evaluation; stratagems to declare such acts or inaction, explicitly or implicitly, ‘morally neutral’ and prevent the choices between them from being subject to ethical judgement – which means pre-empting moral opprobrium (a contrived return, one could say, to the paradisal state of naivety preceding the first bite of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil … ). In popular wisdom, that set of stratagems tends to be collected under the rubric of the ‘ends justify the means’; or ‘evil as the act might be, yet it was necessary to defend or promote a greater good’. In classic ‘solid’ modernity, bureaucracy was the principal workshop in which morally loaded acts were remoulded as adiaphoric. Today, I suspect, it is the markets that have taken over most of that role.
To me the term ‘adiaphoric’ does not mean ‘unimportant’, but ‘irrelevant’, or better still ‘indifferent’ or ‘equanimous’ – following the intentions and suggestions of church councils ruminating on the concordance or contradiction of specific beliefs with the canons of Christian faith: beliefs proclaimed by the Council to be ‘adiaphoric’ could be held by members of the church without falling into sin. In my somewhat secularized use, ‘adiaphoric’ acts are those exempted by social consent (universal or local) from ethical evaluation, and therefore free from carrying the threat of pangs of conscience and moral stigma. Courtesy of social (read, majority) consent, the self-esteem and self-righteousness of the actors are a priori protected from moral condemnation; moral conscience is thereby disarmed and made irrelevant as a constraining and limiting factor in the choice of actions.
Even if they are proclaimed ‘adiaphoric’ by people, authorized to deliver the verdict (an authority derived from their numbers or the offices they hold), acts and inaction all too often remain objects of passionate controversy; their moral innocence is hotly contested. A very common instance of this contention is the classification of the use of force as either defence of law and order (that is, legitimate violence), or acts of violence (that is, illegitimate coercion). It is easy to see that the difference between these two denominations rests ultimately on who is entitled by law to draw the line dividing the ‘legitimate’ from the ‘illegitimate’. The right to draw that line and the means to render it binding and obligatory is a principal stake in all power struggles.
Your worry as to whether we are ‘in peril of losing our ability to follow what is happening in the world and to empathize with people who suffer’ is fully justified. This peril exists in a life whose rhythm is dictated by the ratings wars and box-office returns of the media, in a speed-space (to borrow Paul Virilio’s term) in which IT-managed information ages well before settling down, striking roots and maturing into an informed debate – a ‘hurried life’ in which we all smart under the ‘tyranny of the moment’ that not so much forces or encourages us to forget what we had or could learn, as offers us little chance to memorize it and retain it in our memory. The great Italian sociologist Alberto Melucci used to say that ‘we are plagued by the fragility of the presentness which calls for a firm foundation where none exists’. And so, ‘when contemplating change, we are always torn between desire and fear, between anticipation and uncertainty.’11 Uncertainty means risk: inseparable companion of all action and a sinister spectre haunting the compulsive decision-makers and choosers by necessity that we have been since, as Melucci pithily put it, ‘choice became a destiny’. What separates the present-day agony of choice from the discomforts that tormented the homo eligens, the ‘man choosing’, at all times is the discovery or suspicion that there are no preordained rules and universally approved objectives that can be followed to thereby absolve the choosers from the adverse consequences of their choices. Reference points and guidelines that seem trustworthy today are likely to be debunked tomorrow as misleading or corrupt. Allegedly rock-solid companies are unmasked as figments of the accountants’ imagination. Whatever is ‘good for you’ today may be reclassified tomorrow as your poison. Apparently firm commitments and solemnly signed agreements may be overturned overnight. And promises, or most of them, seem to be made solely to be betrayed and broken. There seems to be no stable, secure island among the tides. To quote Melucci once more, ‘we no longer possess a home; we are repeatedly called upon to build and then rebuild one, like the three little pigs of the fairy tale, or we have to carry it along with us on our backs like snails.’
The tsunami of information, opinions, suggestions, recommendations, advice and insinuation that inevitably overwhelms us on our meandering itineraries of life results in the ‘blasé attitude’ towards ‘knowledge, work and lifestyle’ (indeed, towards life as such and everything it contains) already noted by Georg Simmel at the start of the last century as surfacing first among residents of the ‘metropolis’ – the big and crowded modern city:
The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination. This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, as is the case with the half-wit, but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and grey tone; no one object deserves preference over any other … 12
Joseph Roth pointed to one of the mechanisms of this desensitizing habituation:
When a catastrophe occurs, people at hand are shocked into helpfulness. Certainly, acute catastrophes have that effect. It seems that people expect catastrophes to be brief. But chronic catastrophes are so unpalatable to neighbours that they gradually become indifferent to them and their victims, if not downright impatient … Once the emergency becomes protracted, helping hands return to pockets, the fires of compassion cool down.13
And so we rush to help victims of catastrophe in a momentary suspension of the habitual daily routine, carnival-style, only to return to that routine once a cheque has been mailed. The very briefness of the call shook us out of balance and equanimity and prompted us into action (as brief as the call). Under the tyranny of the moment, though, ‘compassion fatigue’ will set in, waiting for another shock to break it, again for only a fleeting moment. And so the horror of the one-off earthquake or flood stands a much better chance of spurring us into action than slowly (one can say imperceptibly) yet relentlessly rising inequality of income and life chances; a one-off act of cruelty is more likely to draw a crowd of protesters into the streets than the monotonously served doses of humiliation and indignity to which the excluded, the homeless, the downgraded are exposed, day in, day out. One iniquitous act of murder, or a railway catastrophe, hits minds and hearts more strongly than the trickling yet continuous and unstoppable, indeed routine tribute paid by humanity in the currency of lost or wasted lives to the juggernaut of technology and the malfunctioning of a society which is increasingly blasé, insensitive, listless and unconcerned, since consumed by the virus of adiaphorization …
In other words, a protracted catastrophe blazes the trail of its own continuation by consigning the initial shock and outrage to oblivion and thus emaciating and enfeebling human solidarity with its victims – and so the possibility is sapped that forces will be joined for the sake of staving off future victimhood …
LD The Lithuanian writer Ricardas Gavelis (1950–2002) – ironic, caustic and brilliant, albeit little appreciated, not to say neglected, in his own country, who was especially active in the 1990s, once coined the term ‘the epoch of dilettantes’. Although he was far from engaging in a cult of ‘pure specialists’, Gavelis feared the domination of aggressive mediocrities with their ability to silence polite and calm men and women of letters who prefer to think twice before saying and undertaking something. His fear was not exaggerated. In fact, what happened in the post-Soviet political space was a revolution of dilettantes. People who were to become the ‘old new’ managerial and political classes, business community, jet set and the cultural elite were all recruited from the Communist Party or Communist Youth, which was a public secret in Eastern Europe. In fact, they had more social capital and networks than all other segments of post-Communist society put together.
‘Dilettante’ is not always a bad word, though. Just recall Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni, a great Venetian Baroque composer, who dared to call himself a Venetian dilettante. Yet Gavelis clearly meant something different. What is inexorably lost in translation here is the nuance of a silent independence and creativity of men and women of letters, a sort of slow food in societal life and culture, which facilitates and allows important things to happen, such as original books, civil society-oriented debates, and the birth of political ideas. Alas, we did not get any closer to such a slow food for thought; instead, having escaped the political kitsch and ideological tyranny of the Soviets, we found ourselves desperately trying to catch up with the academic junk food of Western Europe. We started remedying our malaise with the medicines which will only distance us from what Western liberal education used to be, instead of bringing us any closer to it.
What happened after 1990 in Eastern Europe was an extreme acceleration of unprecedented economic, social and political change without any chance left to slow down and think for a while. A laboratory of the most rapid change ever seen in modern history, Eastern Europe started losing the opportunity to think and react slowly. The need for immediate action or for a thunder-like reaction to the emergency calls and challenges of a radical transformation left no room for independent intellectuals, who had to choose between functioning as the new court rhetoricians and PR folk serving the political class or allowing themselves to be relegated to the margins of international academic life.
True, there was one more option left for an Eastern European intellectual as a poor cousin of his or her Western European counterpart, aptly described by Ernest Gellner in his posthumously published essay ‘The rest of history’: namely, a permanent or temporary migration across the globe without any chance of a final recognition of his merits and creative contributions or without even a remote possibility of certainty. ‘A wandering academic’, ‘a gypsy scholar’, or, to use an American euphemism for a jobless academic, ‘an independent scholar’ (or ‘unaffiliated scholar’, to recall one more Orwellesque pearl of the seemingly sensitive Newspeak of the senseless and insensitive world of today) – these are all masks for the face of the existential and intellectual homelessness of an Eastern or Central European intellectual. Unless the entire world is in the process of becoming a Central Europe, this time-honoured embodiment and symbol of uncertainty, unsafety and insecurity …
Like the majority of European Union countries, Lithuania is now confined to the new managerial experiments – officially labelled as a substantial structural reform – which are trying to transform the universities into semi-corporate bodies run like business companies, with a paramount mission of service and efficiency, rather than original, in-depth research and top-level teaching. These senseless experiments are far from innocent and harmless. We are at serious and real risk of bidding farewell to the university as a cornerstone of European culture and as an institution which has survived states and forms of government. Even in Italy, the new managerial class has stopped talking about the autonomy of universities. The commodification of universities and education is too obvious to need emphasis. Yet one thing is much worse that that – namely, a gradual disappearance of the political in the realm of the university, and also a sliding into technocracy disguised as democracy and free choice.
Incidentally, it was Zamyatin’s We that spoke 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. The death of humanism and the prohibition of the study of history and classics in the education of the world of the future was written about as early as 1770 by the French writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier in his work of political fantasy L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (The year 2440: a dream if ever there was one), giving form to the extremes of the ideology of never-ending progress. 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.
What, in your view, does a slow dying of classical and modern universities (modern in Humboldt’s sense) signify? Are we witnessing the death of the Humboldtian concept of education as a cultivation of humanity in ourselves and as an awakening in us of the potential to shape the world around us? How are we going to sustain and cultivate le devoir de mémoire culture – the duty of memory – and our modern sensibilities without them?
ZB We live in an era of sound-bites, not thoughts: ephemera calculated, as George Steiner famously observed, for maximum impact and instant obsolescence. As a French journalist wittily suggested, were Émile Zola put in front of TV cameras today to state his case about the Dreyfus scandal, he would be given just enough time to yell ‘J’accuse!’ The standard form of interhuman communication is an iPhone message of words reduced to consonants and any word that can’t survive such a reduction is disallowed and eliminated. The most popular communications, most widely echoed, yet, like an echo, reverberating for only the briefest of moments, are allowed no more than 140 characters. The span of human attention – that scarcest of commodities currently on the market – has been cut down to the size and duration of messages likely to be composed, sent and received. The first victim of a hurried life and the tyranny of the moment is language – emaciated, impoverished, vulgarized and squeezed out of the meanings it was presumed to carry. While ‘intellectuals’, the knights errant of meaningful words and their meanings, are their collateral casualties.
Dilettantes, says Gavelis? I guess this is what people of thought and words have ceased to be, rather than have become … Originally, and more than a century before the term ‘intellectual’ was coined (reputedly by Georges Clemenceau, to denote the residue of ‘men of knowledge’ who retain their passion while most of their comrades-in-arms have opted out for well-paid jobs in academia, politics, journalism, etc.), all these human beings consumed with the passion to explore, examine and understand (the term ‘dilettante’ comes from Latin delectare, that is ‘to delight in’) were, so to speak, freelance and self-supported, or sustained by high and mighty patrons. Max Weber pointed out the difference between politicians who lived for politics and those who chose to live off politics … Perched on the elevated heights of their new locations, those politicians living off politics desperately sought ways to devalue the remaining passionate practitioners of the arts – and by the same token to stifle their own nostalgia for the delights of a passion they now sorely missed. They found satisfaction for both in branding the survivors of the relics of the ‘epoch of dilettantes’ as ‘mere amateurs’, as distinct from, and inferior to, their own professionalism. Clemenceau’s intellectuals – painfully aware of their responsibility for values transcending the limits of any profession in a world notorious for an ever stricter, more divisive, fragmenting and separating division of labour – vanished or underwent a mysterious conversion once they were inside the corporate buildings or out on the vast, rainy and windy expanses of the market. They were reincarnated as Michel Foucault’s ‘partial intellectuals’ (an oxymoron, to be sure): surgeons defending hospitals, stage actors demanding funds for theatres, academics concerned with the future of universities and research establishments – and, all in all, employees fighting to protect their jobs, sources of income, and whatever remained of their privileges.
Having refused to follow the herd of converts to the new Church of the Market and abandon their own mission, what could the ‘dilettante’ sharp-shooters of yore do under such circumstances? They could listen to Theodor Adorno:
For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity … The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant; the only advantage of the former is insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such … Above all, one should beware of seeking out the mighty, and ‘expecting something’ from them. The eye for possible advantages is the mortal enemy of all human relationships; from these solidarity and loyalty can ensue, but never from thoughts of practical ends.14
These words were been written from the hermitage of an émigré (‘the past life of émigrés is, as we all know, annulled’15) – but by the time they were written intellectuals of the ‘dilettante’ variety had been forced or had volunteered to emigrate from the brave new world of ‘partial intellectuals’ and had firmly fixed their eyes on the ‘possible advantages’ ‘from the mighty’ …
Quite a lot of water has flowed under the bridges since Adorno jotted down his sad and sombre words. With decades of intense globalization, deregulation and individualization slicing lives into fragments and the flow of time into an endless series of episodes, Michel Houellebecq penned Possibility of an Island, the first great, and thus far unrivalled dystopia for a liquid, deregulated, consumption-obsessed, individualized era: a treatise not on the fate of intellectuals, but on a world in which the very concept of intellectuals was going to become a contradiction in terms if the processes of the last several decades went on unabated and nothing was done to redirect or arrest them.
Commenting on an interview conducted with Houellebecq by Susannah Hunnewell, I noted a while ago in my diary:
The authors of the greatest dystopias of yore, like Zamyatin, Orwell or Aldous Huxley, penned their visions of the horrors haunting the denizens of the solid modern world: a world of closely regimented and order-obsessed producers and soldiers. They hoped that their visions would shock their fellow travellers into the unknown and force them out of the torpor of sheep meekly marching to the slaughterhouse: this is what your lot will be like, they said – unless you rebel. Zamyatin, Orwell, Huxley, just like Houellebecq, were children of their times. This is why, unlike Houellebecq, they were bespoke tailors by intention: they believed in commissioning the future to order, and dismissed as a gross incongruence an idea of a future that was self-made. What they were frightened of were wrong measurements, unshapely designs and/or sloppy, drunk or corrupt tailors; they had no fear, though, that the tailor’s shops would fall apart or be decommissioned or phased out – and they did not anticipate the advent of a tailor-free world.
Houellebecq, however, writes from the innards of just such a tailor-free world. The future, in such a world, is self-made: a DIY future, and none of the DIY addicts controls, wishes to control, or could control it. Once each is set on his or her own orbit, never criss-crossing, the contemporaries of Houellebecq have no need of dispatchers or conductors, any more than the planets and stars need road planners and traffic monitors. They are perfectly capable of finding the road to the slaughterhouse on their own. And they do – as the two principal protagonists of the story did, hoping (in vain alas, in vain … ) to meet each other on that road. The slaughterhouse in Houellebecq’s dystopia is also, as it were, DIY.16
Notes
1 If we accept the logic behind Milan Kundera’s reasoning in his famous essay ‘The tragedy of Central Europe’, much of what had long been dealt with as Eastern Europe in the political sense historically belongs to Central Europe. If we agree with the assumption that multicultural and cosmopolitan cities along with major Roman Catholic and especially Baroque influences comprise the cultural boundaries of the region, then we could include Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, Lithuania and the western part of the Ukraine in the symbolic space of Central Europe. Eastern Europe would include, first and foremost, Russia, Belarus, the eastern part of the Ukraine, Moldova, and to a lesser extent, Romania and Bulgaria. However arbitrary and debatable, these boundaries have their religious and historical-cultural divisions, especially after Russia’s political influence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For more on this, see Milan Kundera, ‘The tragedy of Central Europe’, New York Review of Books 32:7 (26 Apr. 1984), pp. 33–8, and Leonidas Donskis (ed.), Yet Another Europe after 1984: Rethinking Milan Kundera and the Idea of Central Europe (Rodopi, 2012).
2 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Books, 2006).
3 Here quoted from Anatole France, The Gods Will Have Blood, trans. Frederick Davies (Penguin, 1979).
4 Cf. Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, trans. Linda Asher (Faber & Faber, 2007), pp. 92, 123, 110.
5 Cf. Émile Cioran, Précis de decomposition (Gallimard, 1949).
6 See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Deutsch, 1986), p. 338.
7 Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones (Chatto & Windus, 2009), pp. 569–70.
8 Ibid., p. 565.
9 See ‘Les politiques peuvent-ils “dire l’histoire”?’ Le Soir, 25 Jan. 2012.
10 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Mohr, 1990), p. 21.
11 See Alberto Melucci, The Playing Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 43ff. This is an extended version of the Italian original, Il gioco dell’io (1991).
12 Georg Simmel, ‘The metropolis and mental life’, here quoted in Kurt Wolff’s 1950 translation, as reprinted in Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), p. 52.
13 Juden auf Wanderschaft, here quoted from Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hofmann (Granta, 2001), p. 125.
14 See Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. Jephcott (Verso, 1974), p. 26.
15 Ibid., p. 46.
16 Zygmunt Bauman, This is Not a Diary (Polity, 2012).