Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Man's Inhumanity to Man
Robert Burns (1759–1796). Poems and Songs.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.
Man was made to Mourn: A Dirge
WHEN chill November’s surly blast
Made fields and forests bare,
One ev’ning, as I wander’d forth
Along the banks of Ayr,
I spied a man, whose aged step
Seem’d weary, worn with care;
His face furrow’d o’er with years,
And hoary was his hair.
“Young stranger, whither wand’rest thou?”
Began the rev’rend sage;
“Does thirst of wealth thy step constrain,
Or youthful pleasure’s rage?
Or haply, prest with cares and woes,
Too soon thou hast began
To wander forth, with me to mourn
The miseries of man.
“The sun that overhangs yon moors,
Out-spreading far and wide,
Where hundreds labour to support
A haughty lordling’s pride;—
I’ve seen yon weary winter-sun
Twice forty times return;
And ev’ry time has added proofs,
That man was made to mourn.
“O man! while in thy early years,
How prodigal of time!
is-spending all thy precious hours—
Thy glorious, youthful prime!
Alternate follies take the sway;
Licentious passions burn;
Which tenfold force gives Nature’s law.
That man was made to mourn.
“Look not alone on youthful prime,
Or manhood’s active might;
Man then is useful to his kind,
Supported in his right:
But see him on the edge of life,
With cares and sorrows worn;
Then Age and Want—oh! ill-match’d pair—
Shew man was made to mourn.
“A few seem favourites of fate,
But oh! what crowds in ev’ry land,
All wretched and forlorn,
Thro’ weary life this lesson learn,
That man was made to mourn.
“Many and sharp the num’rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves,
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heav’n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn,—
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
“See yonder poor, o’erlabour’d wight,
So abject, mean, and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
To give him leave to toil;
And see his lordly fellow-worm
The poor petition spurn,
Unmindful, tho’ a weeping wife
And helpless offspring mourn.
“If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave, By Nature’s law design’d,
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?
If not, why am I subject to
His cruelty, or scorn?
Or why has man the will and pow’r
To make his fellow mourn?
“Yet, let not this too much, my son,
Disturb thy youthful breast:
This partial view of human-kind
Is surely not the last!
The poor, oppressed, honest man
Had never, sure, been born,
Had there not been some recompense
To comfort those that mourn!
“O Death! the poor man’s dearest friend,
The kindest and the best!
Welcome the hour my aged limbs
Are laid with thee at rest!
The great, the wealthy fear thy blow
From pomp and pleasure torn;
But, oh! a blest relief for those
That weary-laden mourn!”
[The origin of this fine poem is alluded to by Burns in one of his letters to Mrs. Dunlop: "I had an old grand-uncle with whom my mother lived in her girlish years: the good old man was long blind ere he died, during which time his highest enjoyment was to sit and cry, while my mother would sing the simple old song of 'The Life and Age of Man.'" From that truly venerable woman, long after the death of her distinguished son, Cromek, in collecting the Reliques, obtained a copy by recitation of the older strain. Though the tone and sentiment coincide closely with "Man was made to Mourn," I agree with Lockhart, that Burns wrote it in obedience to his own habitual feelings.]
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.
Man was made to Mourn: A Dirge
WHEN chill November’s surly blast
Made fields and forests bare,
One ev’ning, as I wander’d forth
Along the banks of Ayr,
I spied a man, whose aged step
Seem’d weary, worn with care;
His face furrow’d o’er with years,
And hoary was his hair.
“Young stranger, whither wand’rest thou?”
Began the rev’rend sage;
“Does thirst of wealth thy step constrain,
Or youthful pleasure’s rage?
Or haply, prest with cares and woes,
Too soon thou hast began
To wander forth, with me to mourn
The miseries of man.
“The sun that overhangs yon moors,
Out-spreading far and wide,
Where hundreds labour to support
A haughty lordling’s pride;—
I’ve seen yon weary winter-sun
Twice forty times return;
And ev’ry time has added proofs,
That man was made to mourn.
“O man! while in thy early years,
How prodigal of time!
is-spending all thy precious hours—
Thy glorious, youthful prime!
Alternate follies take the sway;
Licentious passions burn;
Which tenfold force gives Nature’s law.
That man was made to mourn.
“Look not alone on youthful prime,
Or manhood’s active might;
Man then is useful to his kind,
Supported in his right:
But see him on the edge of life,
With cares and sorrows worn;
Then Age and Want—oh! ill-match’d pair—
Shew man was made to mourn.
“A few seem favourites of fate,
But oh! what crowds in ev’ry land,
All wretched and forlorn,
Thro’ weary life this lesson learn,
That man was made to mourn.
“Many and sharp the num’rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves,
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heav’n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn,—
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
“See yonder poor, o’erlabour’d wight,
So abject, mean, and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
To give him leave to toil;
And see his lordly fellow-worm
The poor petition spurn,
Unmindful, tho’ a weeping wife
And helpless offspring mourn.
“If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave, By Nature’s law design’d,
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?
If not, why am I subject to
His cruelty, or scorn?
Or why has man the will and pow’r
To make his fellow mourn?
“Yet, let not this too much, my son,
Disturb thy youthful breast:
This partial view of human-kind
Is surely not the last!
The poor, oppressed, honest man
Had never, sure, been born,
Had there not been some recompense
To comfort those that mourn!
“O Death! the poor man’s dearest friend,
The kindest and the best!
Welcome the hour my aged limbs
Are laid with thee at rest!
The great, the wealthy fear thy blow
From pomp and pleasure torn;
But, oh! a blest relief for those
That weary-laden mourn!”
[The origin of this fine poem is alluded to by Burns in one of his letters to Mrs. Dunlop: "I had an old grand-uncle with whom my mother lived in her girlish years: the good old man was long blind ere he died, during which time his highest enjoyment was to sit and cry, while my mother would sing the simple old song of 'The Life and Age of Man.'" From that truly venerable woman, long after the death of her distinguished son, Cromek, in collecting the Reliques, obtained a copy by recitation of the older strain. Though the tone and sentiment coincide closely with "Man was made to Mourn," I agree with Lockhart, that Burns wrote it in obedience to his own habitual feelings.]
Sunday, October 24, 2010
From Salon
http://www.salon.eu.sk/article.php?article=1102-inhumanity-is-part-of-human-nature
Inhumanity is part of human nature
Zygmunt Bauman
“Motherland means safety” - says Jean Améry. Writing these words in his 1966 book “At the Mind’s Limits”, in the chapter entitled “How Much Motherland Does a Man Need?” the Frenchman Jean Améry, born Franz Meyer in Austria in 1912, knew what he was talking about. He had lost his homeland and it took him 27 years to fully grasp what that loss - by then irreversible and irretrievable - entailed: he realized that “by returning to a space one never regains the time lost”.
Safety means certainty; and in turn, „we can feel safe wherever we do not expect anything unexpected, where we do not have to fear anything completely and utterly strange” - that is, completely and utterly incomprehensible and thus, as Wittgenstein would say, anything that not only does not come with instructions but not even with a hint of how to deal with it. Améry realized he had lost his motherland when he found himself surrounded by signs that to him were “as illegible as the Etruscan script”: “Faces, gestures, clothes, houses and words”, while continuing as sensory perceptions, no longer signified anything. And if motherland is the headquarters of order, predictability and self-confidence, a strange country is the domain of disorder, surprise and confusion. Returning to one’s motherland after a prolonged absence one can discover or at least guess at, the order of meanings in the chaos of experience; but “an émigré, who has ended up in a foreign country as an adult, won’t be able to recognize these signs instinctively; rather it will be an intellectual act requiring a certain mental effort.”
As we acquire our mother tongue we would not even notice it has a grammar, were in not for our teachers pointing it out to us, at first to our surprise, later also to our irritation. Grammar is the Cerberus blocking the entrance to all languages - with the exception of the mother tongue (it is precisely the lack of a Cerberus at the gates that makes it our mother tongue). Grammar in our mother tongue is a reliable, yet unobtrusive guide, a thoughtful, yet invisible guardian angel; in all other languages it is a demon lurking in the darkness at the top of Jacob’s ladder. As Günther Anders, quoted by Améry, said: “No-one can spend years moving about exclusively within the limits of languages he is not fluent in, languages which he can at best merely try to imitate incompetently, without falling victim to the poverty of his speech.” For in these circumstances the mother tongue also starts crumbling away “bit by bit, and mostly in such inconspicuous and gradual ways that we do not notice its loss.” Until the moment of revelation that comes some 27 or more years later, when we realize that the irretrievable loss of our motherland is as irreversible as the loss of safety. This is the moment when we realize that “La table will never be the same as the table, and that at best it can be a place where we can eat our fill.”
Exile robs the émigré of his identity, and thereby of his confidence. By the same token, it robs him of the belief that what he considers to be true really is true. And since this belief is the shield protecting him from knowing what is true and what is not, sooner and later exile will also strip the émigré of his knowledge. (…) The unshakeability of the globe relies on the strong shoulders of Atlas’ identity. And its “foundations crumble” when those shoulders begin to tremble. And exile will make sure they will tremble.
Truth is what we all know to be true because we believe in its truthfulness - we believe we know that which is obvious to all of us. Obviousness is an alloy of knowledge and belief. Obviousness cannot be acquired, procured or concocted. Something is either obvious or not obvious - tertium non datur. Something is obvious only and exclusively if it appears as such to “everyone” who believes in its obviousness and if nobody can question my right to embrace “everyone” within the personal pronoun “we”. If these conditions are met, I have an identity. If not, all I have is a hint of identity or an idea of an identity; a kind of application for an identity that might be accepted or rejected in a court authorized to adjudicate in this matter, if such a court existed and if it undertook to examine our case. But no such court exists - and the foundations of the globe begin to crumble. And once they do, they can never be stopped.
In my case these conditions were not met. I was lucky to be offered a choice, which is wonderful. Except that my choice, as a private matter, is not binding on anyone but me. And that may be wonderful, but not quite.
Henryk Grynberg, who managed to smelt a noble chunk of literature out of the motley ore of Polish exile, said (in a book entitled…. “Émigré”, what else): “Suicides are also émigrés, maybe even more so.” Exactly.
Totalitarianism as a computer game
Slavoj Žižek (a character lifted straight out the age of dada and épater les bourgeois into an age when there is nobody left to be “épatéd” because everyone has already been “épatéd” up to their eyeballs and driven completely mad by “épatation” of every kind) said recently that two German films that show the everyday life of the Ossis at a time before the nickname for the East Germans was coined, do not capture the essence of communist totalitarianism; moreover, that they falsify its reality. If you want to know and tell others what life under communism was like, he declares, you should make films based on Varlam Shalamov’s “Tales from Kolyma” … And, by implication: the truth of communism was concealed in the barracks of Magadan rather than permeating the streets of Tambov or Yaroslavl. And the truth of Nazism must have been located in Dachauand Auschwitz, rather than breeding in the village whose story is told in such excruciating detail in the TV series “Heimat”.
I would ask Žižek, if it was worth it (which it is not), why is it that those fortunate enough to have been born too late to personally experience totalitarianism should want to exert their brains in order to grasp the nature of totalitarianism, a history that is, for them, long dead. Their need for stomach- churning atrocities is fully satisfied by “Reservoir Dogs”, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, or “Friday the Thirteenth”, as well as by daily helpings of television horror and hundreds of variations on computer games involving the wholesale murder of weirdos. … Surely, compared with the refined artistry of cinema, television, Nintendo or Play Station, the everyday life in the barracks of the concentration camps or the communist bloc must seem like some abortive creations produced by provincial amateurs and manufacturers of cheap kitsch. These lucky beasts have known almost from the day they were born that monstrous things are the creation of monsters and sordid things are created by scoundrels, and that monsters and scoundrels therefore have to be exterminated before they get a chance to exterminate us, and that, since those who are being exterminated are the spawn of the devil it must follow that those who subdue them are nothing but angels? So as they sit at their computers with their faces ablush, trying to defeat the electronic monsters at their own wicked game, to respond to their trickery with their own, even more refined, tricks and mow them down in their multitudes before they start mowing down ours, it does not in the least offend their own high opinion of themselves. After all, these electronic monsters ambushed them out of pure cruelty whereas they, on their part, were only trying to save themselves and while they were at it, the rest of the world, from the brutes. Humanity is divided into executioners and their victims, and once the latter finally exterminate the last of the former, we can safely store brutality in one of the deposits of memory (or forgetting) and slam the door behind it. If brutality is the creation of brutes we are without blemish – quod erat demonstrandum.
Oh, how I wish that things were that simple… If only totalitarianism could be reduced to releasing from their cages a couple of beasts who in “normal, i.e. decent times” are kept under lock and key… If only suffering were indeed ennobling, if it afforded safe conduct to innocence and moral virtue… If only the perpetrators lack of virtue would not leak staining the victims and witnesses of their crimes, if only the victims marched to the executioner’s block pure and immaculate… If only the world could be neatly and tidily divided, as they did in both kinds of barracks (or at least made a fervent effort trying to, and if they did not succeed then certainly not for lack of zeal!) into those who are omnipotent and those who succumb to their omnipotence, into those who act and those who submit to their action. Then the Communist and the Nazi totalitarianisms would be just another two of those bloody episodes in which the history of mankind abounds. An episode in which some beat and others are beaten. An episode that has to be (and can be) ended by whipping those who had done the beating and decorating those who were beaten. And after ending them, we could lock their yellowing and withered relics in archives, knowing they will never again trouble those of us who have locked them away.
Unfortunately, despite Žižek’s advice, the horrors of totalitarianism cannot be grasped by contemplating Kolyma or Dachau, the laboratories for testing the boundaries of human enslavement, to quote Hannah Arendt. To fully grasp this horror, to see it where it is at its most poisonous and sinister, and where it shows no signs of expiring, we have to get beyond the confines of barbed wire.
Survivor syndrome
Suffering is always painful but rarely ennobling. It is obvious that causing suffering morally taints the perpetrator. But the victims do not get away safe and untainted either by the destruction of moral impulses and inhibitions… Do they wait for their chance to pay back the executioners in their own coin? Yes, but first they learn the secrets of life in which this coin is currency. Right after the war, American psychiatrists who treated people who had survived the horrors of the Holocaust described the ailment tormenting their patients as guilt syndrome: “Why am I alive when so many others died in front of my eyes?!” However, they changed their view very quickly. “Guilt syndrome” vanished from psychiatric vocabulary to be replaced by “survivor syndrome”. “They are out to get me, to finish me off, and they are sure to succeed if I don’t get there first, if I don’t strike the first blow…”
„Survivor syndrome” is hereditary: successive generations pass on the poisoned fruit of a martyrology that is disappearing into the past. Descendants of victims cultivate only the communal categorical myth and hereditary martyrdom without having experienced the events that generated these messages; this circumstance makes “survivor” scholarship, spun from the experience of martyrdom, impervious to practical tests. The vision of a world conspiracy, freed from factual tests, pervades and dominates the “survivor” milieu. It enables individual “survivors”, speaking with Alain Finkielkraut, to participate in the glorification of their martyred ancestors and, on this basis, to demand compensation and licence to act ruthlessly - without paying the price their ancestors had to pay for their descendants’ memory.
Both victims and silent witnesses of atrocities, who were forced, in Jan Błoński’s words, to „participate in the bloody spectacle” now know only too well that there are ways -- inhuman perhaps? maybe so, but certainly effective - of getting rid of human problems, be they real or imagined. And that inhumanity is part of human nature. And that means that someone, somewhere, sometime, might resort to those ways again. And therefore one might also have to resort to them if the fear becomes unbearable…. The price of survival is the killing of those who can and want to kill you and therefore have to kill you…
“Survival syndrome” suggests that the point of life is survival - with the proviso that, whoever is the first to strike a blow will survive the one or the ones who did not manage to do so. If the blow is struck in good time, hitting the target and knocking it out, there is no need to fear revenge or punishment. The post-Holocaust world has promoted “preventative” wars. As the experience of Iraqdemonstrates, the world is willing to unleash genocidal passions in the name of preventing presumed genocide. And as the experience of Abu Ghraib orGuantanamo shows, our world has no scruples when it comes to those who (who knows?) would not have hesitated to strike a blow if treated with scruples. Both sides have found the lessons of the Holocaust useful.
Why Schindler beats Korczak
In “Schindler’s List” Steven Spielberg tells it like it is: at the time of furnaces and contempt what mattered was to survive. Thus it must have also mattered that some people survived instead of others. To the sounds of critical applause Spielberg enlists the same sinister instrument of modern genocide in the service of “the art of survival” which Raoul Hilberg considered to be the first step to extermination of European Jewry (their fate was sealed, he writes, the moment the first German local officials drew up the first lists of the Jewish inhabitants of their cities). Schindler, the film’s hero, hailed as a “redeemer of humanity” (in a reference to the Talmud), refuses to swap his Jewesses - i.e. the ones on his list - for “other Jewesses”. And audiences applaud as Schindler drags a man off a train leaving for Treblinka, a man who was on his list and, unlike the remaining passengers, was rammed into the cattle truck by mistake and through oversight. As Janina [David]recalls, future victims in the Warsaw ghetto who wore numbers rebelled against future victims without numbers who were trying to squeeze into their marching column. “Innocent people will die because of you!” they shouted -in the language of perpetrators. God, leading people to their extermination, mixes up their languages…
After Janina’s Brussels talk on the various ways of interpreting the lessons of the Holocaust in cinema, a Belgian film maker asked her why the film „Korczak”, a key work by Andrzej Wajda, was not shown in American cinemas and why it was ignored by American critics. That’s simple, Janina replied. Wajda’s (and Korczak’s) message stands in glaring contrast to the dominant version of Holocaust scholarship. Korczak did not save a single life - not even his own! All Korczak did was save human dignity of two hundred children from being abused and polluted. So why respect him and why honour his memory?
Elias Canetti was perhaps the first to warn of the poisoned legacy of the Holocaust. “The most elementary and obvious form of success is survival.” This criterion of success has bred the cult of “survivors” and elevated the “attitude of survivors” onto a pedestal. By accepting this attitude - Canetti lets alarm bells ring - “they want to survive their contemporaries”, and if things come to the worst, they are willing “to kill in order to survive others”. “They want to survive in order not to be survived by others.”
That nice neighbour is a beast
Summing up the lessons she derived from the years of contempt, furnaces and extermination, the wise Janina wrote that the executioners used to dehumanize their victims before putting them to death and that one of the hardest challenges of her life was to stay human in inhuman conditions. Albert Camus wrote that genocide is nothing new in the history of mankind; what is new is genocide carried out in the name of human happiness, historic justice or other equally noble goals. And, as demonstrated by genocide carried out on behalf of racial purity, just like genocide carried out in the name of class purity, what is new is also the ease with which “decent people”, exemplary fathers of families, faithful husbands, kind neighbours, can be convinced that the lofty goal of purifying the world makes zealous participation in the purge a virtue and obligation for “decent people”. Perhaps the most shocking information found in Hannah Arendt’s report of Adolf Eichmann’s trial was the opinions of distinguished psychiatrists who were asked to examine the defendant’s soundness of mind. They all agreed that Eichmann was not only “normal” by all common standards of “normalcy” but that he could be considered a model virtuous citizen - and in fact was regarded as such by his neighbours.
One shudders at the thought of what kind of activity this neat and nice neighbour, whom I only know from exchanging daily pleasant greetings and smiles, might be involved in his “office hours”... Totalitarian times leave behind a sediment of suspiciousness. But suspiciousness towards oneself (“If things had come to the worst, I might have joined in too….”) - no matter how thoroughly suppressed and pushed into the darkest recesses of our minds - only fans the flames of suspicion against our neighbour. In order to get rid of the fear and repulsion of one’s own meanness, which has lain dormant until now but might awaken at any time, we have to turn meanness into something inborn, something that only the neighbour owns. Christopher Browning’s conscience was shaken by the discovery that, if “ordinary people” recruited into the 101st Auxiliary Battalion were capable of such atrocities, then all of us, ordinary people, were capable of such bestial behaviour. To protect his own conscience and that of his readers, Daniel Goldhagen revised Browning’s sentence: if “ordinary Germans” from the 101stBattalion were capable of such atrocities, all of them, all Germans, were ready to commit such crimes. And not because the beast slumbers within each man and can be harnessed to perform any task, no matter how wicked, as long as we find the right stick and harness; but because the Germans, possessed by their hatred of the Jews, were happy to carry out the most wicked acts against the Jews.
Two versions of totalitarianism
The lasting (how lasting?!) legacy of both totalitarian regimes is moral devastation. Manichean moods, to which Stanisław Ossowski refers in his concern about the future of a nation exposed to a test that is beyond its powers of endurance, have always been an instinctive reflex; they are not the kind of mood we succumb to today, get rid of tomorrow and forget the following day, but rather features of the „normal“, usual way of perceiving the world, reinforced by sound reason and sanctified by the calendar of public rituals, of one’s own place in the world and a recipe for one’s own survival.
In this respect the legacy of the two totalitarian regimes [Nazism and communism] would appear at first sight to be identical. However, there are profound differences between these two legacies. The German totalitarian system affected the Germans in a different way than it did the Poles. And the totalitarian system imported from the Soviets, which tried to take root in Poland, promising the Poles a share of future benefits and forcing them to participate in procedures aimed at speeding up and easing the arrival of those benefits, had an impact on the Poles quite different from that of the other, brutally alien, Hitlerite totalitarianism which situated the Poles from the very beginning and openly, without reservation, on the other side of the wall, among its victims.
And this is where the analogy breaks down and there is simply no point in discussing, in the same breath, the five years of Hitler’s occupation and the half century of the Polish People’s Republic, as if their essence were exhausted by belonging to the same chapter in the nation’s martyrology. And it certainly does not make it any easier to come to terms with the legacy of either totalitarian period.
Translation: Julia Sherwood
This article was originally published in Polish in the Gazeta Wyborcza on 18 May 2009.
www.salon.eu.sk i
Inhumanity is part of human nature
Zygmunt Bauman
“Motherland means safety” - says Jean Améry. Writing these words in his 1966 book “At the Mind’s Limits”, in the chapter entitled “How Much Motherland Does a Man Need?” the Frenchman Jean Améry, born Franz Meyer in Austria in 1912, knew what he was talking about. He had lost his homeland and it took him 27 years to fully grasp what that loss - by then irreversible and irretrievable - entailed: he realized that “by returning to a space one never regains the time lost”.
Safety means certainty; and in turn, „we can feel safe wherever we do not expect anything unexpected, where we do not have to fear anything completely and utterly strange” - that is, completely and utterly incomprehensible and thus, as Wittgenstein would say, anything that not only does not come with instructions but not even with a hint of how to deal with it. Améry realized he had lost his motherland when he found himself surrounded by signs that to him were “as illegible as the Etruscan script”: “Faces, gestures, clothes, houses and words”, while continuing as sensory perceptions, no longer signified anything. And if motherland is the headquarters of order, predictability and self-confidence, a strange country is the domain of disorder, surprise and confusion. Returning to one’s motherland after a prolonged absence one can discover or at least guess at, the order of meanings in the chaos of experience; but “an émigré, who has ended up in a foreign country as an adult, won’t be able to recognize these signs instinctively; rather it will be an intellectual act requiring a certain mental effort.”
As we acquire our mother tongue we would not even notice it has a grammar, were in not for our teachers pointing it out to us, at first to our surprise, later also to our irritation. Grammar is the Cerberus blocking the entrance to all languages - with the exception of the mother tongue (it is precisely the lack of a Cerberus at the gates that makes it our mother tongue). Grammar in our mother tongue is a reliable, yet unobtrusive guide, a thoughtful, yet invisible guardian angel; in all other languages it is a demon lurking in the darkness at the top of Jacob’s ladder. As Günther Anders, quoted by Améry, said: “No-one can spend years moving about exclusively within the limits of languages he is not fluent in, languages which he can at best merely try to imitate incompetently, without falling victim to the poverty of his speech.” For in these circumstances the mother tongue also starts crumbling away “bit by bit, and mostly in such inconspicuous and gradual ways that we do not notice its loss.” Until the moment of revelation that comes some 27 or more years later, when we realize that the irretrievable loss of our motherland is as irreversible as the loss of safety. This is the moment when we realize that “La table will never be the same as the table, and that at best it can be a place where we can eat our fill.”
Exile robs the émigré of his identity, and thereby of his confidence. By the same token, it robs him of the belief that what he considers to be true really is true. And since this belief is the shield protecting him from knowing what is true and what is not, sooner and later exile will also strip the émigré of his knowledge. (…) The unshakeability of the globe relies on the strong shoulders of Atlas’ identity. And its “foundations crumble” when those shoulders begin to tremble. And exile will make sure they will tremble.
Truth is what we all know to be true because we believe in its truthfulness - we believe we know that which is obvious to all of us. Obviousness is an alloy of knowledge and belief. Obviousness cannot be acquired, procured or concocted. Something is either obvious or not obvious - tertium non datur. Something is obvious only and exclusively if it appears as such to “everyone” who believes in its obviousness and if nobody can question my right to embrace “everyone” within the personal pronoun “we”. If these conditions are met, I have an identity. If not, all I have is a hint of identity or an idea of an identity; a kind of application for an identity that might be accepted or rejected in a court authorized to adjudicate in this matter, if such a court existed and if it undertook to examine our case. But no such court exists - and the foundations of the globe begin to crumble. And once they do, they can never be stopped.
In my case these conditions were not met. I was lucky to be offered a choice, which is wonderful. Except that my choice, as a private matter, is not binding on anyone but me. And that may be wonderful, but not quite.
Henryk Grynberg, who managed to smelt a noble chunk of literature out of the motley ore of Polish exile, said (in a book entitled…. “Émigré”, what else): “Suicides are also émigrés, maybe even more so.” Exactly.
Totalitarianism as a computer game
Slavoj Žižek (a character lifted straight out the age of dada and épater les bourgeois into an age when there is nobody left to be “épatéd” because everyone has already been “épatéd” up to their eyeballs and driven completely mad by “épatation” of every kind) said recently that two German films that show the everyday life of the Ossis at a time before the nickname for the East Germans was coined, do not capture the essence of communist totalitarianism; moreover, that they falsify its reality. If you want to know and tell others what life under communism was like, he declares, you should make films based on Varlam Shalamov’s “Tales from Kolyma” … And, by implication: the truth of communism was concealed in the barracks of Magadan rather than permeating the streets of Tambov or Yaroslavl. And the truth of Nazism must have been located in Dachauand Auschwitz, rather than breeding in the village whose story is told in such excruciating detail in the TV series “Heimat”.
I would ask Žižek, if it was worth it (which it is not), why is it that those fortunate enough to have been born too late to personally experience totalitarianism should want to exert their brains in order to grasp the nature of totalitarianism, a history that is, for them, long dead. Their need for stomach- churning atrocities is fully satisfied by “Reservoir Dogs”, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, or “Friday the Thirteenth”, as well as by daily helpings of television horror and hundreds of variations on computer games involving the wholesale murder of weirdos. … Surely, compared with the refined artistry of cinema, television, Nintendo or Play Station, the everyday life in the barracks of the concentration camps or the communist bloc must seem like some abortive creations produced by provincial amateurs and manufacturers of cheap kitsch. These lucky beasts have known almost from the day they were born that monstrous things are the creation of monsters and sordid things are created by scoundrels, and that monsters and scoundrels therefore have to be exterminated before they get a chance to exterminate us, and that, since those who are being exterminated are the spawn of the devil it must follow that those who subdue them are nothing but angels? So as they sit at their computers with their faces ablush, trying to defeat the electronic monsters at their own wicked game, to respond to their trickery with their own, even more refined, tricks and mow them down in their multitudes before they start mowing down ours, it does not in the least offend their own high opinion of themselves. After all, these electronic monsters ambushed them out of pure cruelty whereas they, on their part, were only trying to save themselves and while they were at it, the rest of the world, from the brutes. Humanity is divided into executioners and their victims, and once the latter finally exterminate the last of the former, we can safely store brutality in one of the deposits of memory (or forgetting) and slam the door behind it. If brutality is the creation of brutes we are without blemish – quod erat demonstrandum.
Oh, how I wish that things were that simple… If only totalitarianism could be reduced to releasing from their cages a couple of beasts who in “normal, i.e. decent times” are kept under lock and key… If only suffering were indeed ennobling, if it afforded safe conduct to innocence and moral virtue… If only the perpetrators lack of virtue would not leak staining the victims and witnesses of their crimes, if only the victims marched to the executioner’s block pure and immaculate… If only the world could be neatly and tidily divided, as they did in both kinds of barracks (or at least made a fervent effort trying to, and if they did not succeed then certainly not for lack of zeal!) into those who are omnipotent and those who succumb to their omnipotence, into those who act and those who submit to their action. Then the Communist and the Nazi totalitarianisms would be just another two of those bloody episodes in which the history of mankind abounds. An episode in which some beat and others are beaten. An episode that has to be (and can be) ended by whipping those who had done the beating and decorating those who were beaten. And after ending them, we could lock their yellowing and withered relics in archives, knowing they will never again trouble those of us who have locked them away.
Unfortunately, despite Žižek’s advice, the horrors of totalitarianism cannot be grasped by contemplating Kolyma or Dachau, the laboratories for testing the boundaries of human enslavement, to quote Hannah Arendt. To fully grasp this horror, to see it where it is at its most poisonous and sinister, and where it shows no signs of expiring, we have to get beyond the confines of barbed wire.
Survivor syndrome
Suffering is always painful but rarely ennobling. It is obvious that causing suffering morally taints the perpetrator. But the victims do not get away safe and untainted either by the destruction of moral impulses and inhibitions… Do they wait for their chance to pay back the executioners in their own coin? Yes, but first they learn the secrets of life in which this coin is currency. Right after the war, American psychiatrists who treated people who had survived the horrors of the Holocaust described the ailment tormenting their patients as guilt syndrome: “Why am I alive when so many others died in front of my eyes?!” However, they changed their view very quickly. “Guilt syndrome” vanished from psychiatric vocabulary to be replaced by “survivor syndrome”. “They are out to get me, to finish me off, and they are sure to succeed if I don’t get there first, if I don’t strike the first blow…”
„Survivor syndrome” is hereditary: successive generations pass on the poisoned fruit of a martyrology that is disappearing into the past. Descendants of victims cultivate only the communal categorical myth and hereditary martyrdom without having experienced the events that generated these messages; this circumstance makes “survivor” scholarship, spun from the experience of martyrdom, impervious to practical tests. The vision of a world conspiracy, freed from factual tests, pervades and dominates the “survivor” milieu. It enables individual “survivors”, speaking with Alain Finkielkraut, to participate in the glorification of their martyred ancestors and, on this basis, to demand compensation and licence to act ruthlessly - without paying the price their ancestors had to pay for their descendants’ memory.
Both victims and silent witnesses of atrocities, who were forced, in Jan Błoński’s words, to „participate in the bloody spectacle” now know only too well that there are ways -- inhuman perhaps? maybe so, but certainly effective - of getting rid of human problems, be they real or imagined. And that inhumanity is part of human nature. And that means that someone, somewhere, sometime, might resort to those ways again. And therefore one might also have to resort to them if the fear becomes unbearable…. The price of survival is the killing of those who can and want to kill you and therefore have to kill you…
“Survival syndrome” suggests that the point of life is survival - with the proviso that, whoever is the first to strike a blow will survive the one or the ones who did not manage to do so. If the blow is struck in good time, hitting the target and knocking it out, there is no need to fear revenge or punishment. The post-Holocaust world has promoted “preventative” wars. As the experience of Iraqdemonstrates, the world is willing to unleash genocidal passions in the name of preventing presumed genocide. And as the experience of Abu Ghraib orGuantanamo shows, our world has no scruples when it comes to those who (who knows?) would not have hesitated to strike a blow if treated with scruples. Both sides have found the lessons of the Holocaust useful.
Why Schindler beats Korczak
In “Schindler’s List” Steven Spielberg tells it like it is: at the time of furnaces and contempt what mattered was to survive. Thus it must have also mattered that some people survived instead of others. To the sounds of critical applause Spielberg enlists the same sinister instrument of modern genocide in the service of “the art of survival” which Raoul Hilberg considered to be the first step to extermination of European Jewry (their fate was sealed, he writes, the moment the first German local officials drew up the first lists of the Jewish inhabitants of their cities). Schindler, the film’s hero, hailed as a “redeemer of humanity” (in a reference to the Talmud), refuses to swap his Jewesses - i.e. the ones on his list - for “other Jewesses”. And audiences applaud as Schindler drags a man off a train leaving for Treblinka, a man who was on his list and, unlike the remaining passengers, was rammed into the cattle truck by mistake and through oversight. As Janina [David]recalls, future victims in the Warsaw ghetto who wore numbers rebelled against future victims without numbers who were trying to squeeze into their marching column. “Innocent people will die because of you!” they shouted -in the language of perpetrators. God, leading people to their extermination, mixes up their languages…
After Janina’s Brussels talk on the various ways of interpreting the lessons of the Holocaust in cinema, a Belgian film maker asked her why the film „Korczak”, a key work by Andrzej Wajda, was not shown in American cinemas and why it was ignored by American critics. That’s simple, Janina replied. Wajda’s (and Korczak’s) message stands in glaring contrast to the dominant version of Holocaust scholarship. Korczak did not save a single life - not even his own! All Korczak did was save human dignity of two hundred children from being abused and polluted. So why respect him and why honour his memory?
Elias Canetti was perhaps the first to warn of the poisoned legacy of the Holocaust. “The most elementary and obvious form of success is survival.” This criterion of success has bred the cult of “survivors” and elevated the “attitude of survivors” onto a pedestal. By accepting this attitude - Canetti lets alarm bells ring - “they want to survive their contemporaries”, and if things come to the worst, they are willing “to kill in order to survive others”. “They want to survive in order not to be survived by others.”
That nice neighbour is a beast
Summing up the lessons she derived from the years of contempt, furnaces and extermination, the wise Janina wrote that the executioners used to dehumanize their victims before putting them to death and that one of the hardest challenges of her life was to stay human in inhuman conditions. Albert Camus wrote that genocide is nothing new in the history of mankind; what is new is genocide carried out in the name of human happiness, historic justice or other equally noble goals. And, as demonstrated by genocide carried out on behalf of racial purity, just like genocide carried out in the name of class purity, what is new is also the ease with which “decent people”, exemplary fathers of families, faithful husbands, kind neighbours, can be convinced that the lofty goal of purifying the world makes zealous participation in the purge a virtue and obligation for “decent people”. Perhaps the most shocking information found in Hannah Arendt’s report of Adolf Eichmann’s trial was the opinions of distinguished psychiatrists who were asked to examine the defendant’s soundness of mind. They all agreed that Eichmann was not only “normal” by all common standards of “normalcy” but that he could be considered a model virtuous citizen - and in fact was regarded as such by his neighbours.
One shudders at the thought of what kind of activity this neat and nice neighbour, whom I only know from exchanging daily pleasant greetings and smiles, might be involved in his “office hours”... Totalitarian times leave behind a sediment of suspiciousness. But suspiciousness towards oneself (“If things had come to the worst, I might have joined in too….”) - no matter how thoroughly suppressed and pushed into the darkest recesses of our minds - only fans the flames of suspicion against our neighbour. In order to get rid of the fear and repulsion of one’s own meanness, which has lain dormant until now but might awaken at any time, we have to turn meanness into something inborn, something that only the neighbour owns. Christopher Browning’s conscience was shaken by the discovery that, if “ordinary people” recruited into the 101st Auxiliary Battalion were capable of such atrocities, then all of us, ordinary people, were capable of such bestial behaviour. To protect his own conscience and that of his readers, Daniel Goldhagen revised Browning’s sentence: if “ordinary Germans” from the 101stBattalion were capable of such atrocities, all of them, all Germans, were ready to commit such crimes. And not because the beast slumbers within each man and can be harnessed to perform any task, no matter how wicked, as long as we find the right stick and harness; but because the Germans, possessed by their hatred of the Jews, were happy to carry out the most wicked acts against the Jews.
Two versions of totalitarianism
The lasting (how lasting?!) legacy of both totalitarian regimes is moral devastation. Manichean moods, to which Stanisław Ossowski refers in his concern about the future of a nation exposed to a test that is beyond its powers of endurance, have always been an instinctive reflex; they are not the kind of mood we succumb to today, get rid of tomorrow and forget the following day, but rather features of the „normal“, usual way of perceiving the world, reinforced by sound reason and sanctified by the calendar of public rituals, of one’s own place in the world and a recipe for one’s own survival.
In this respect the legacy of the two totalitarian regimes [Nazism and communism] would appear at first sight to be identical. However, there are profound differences between these two legacies. The German totalitarian system affected the Germans in a different way than it did the Poles. And the totalitarian system imported from the Soviets, which tried to take root in Poland, promising the Poles a share of future benefits and forcing them to participate in procedures aimed at speeding up and easing the arrival of those benefits, had an impact on the Poles quite different from that of the other, brutally alien, Hitlerite totalitarianism which situated the Poles from the very beginning and openly, without reservation, on the other side of the wall, among its victims.
And this is where the analogy breaks down and there is simply no point in discussing, in the same breath, the five years of Hitler’s occupation and the half century of the Polish People’s Republic, as if their essence were exhausted by belonging to the same chapter in the nation’s martyrology. And it certainly does not make it any easier to come to terms with the legacy of either totalitarian period.
Inhumanity
Zygmunt Bauman | Gazeta Wyborcza
Jean-Paul Sartre once shocked the reading public by making the paradoxical claim that the French had never been as free as during the German occupation. It was, he claimed, only a seeming paradox since one gets trapped by free choice that disguises necessity - and for the French were deprived of the temptation of this trap by the German occupiers who left them no choice. And if the French were left with no choice, the same applies to the Poles a hundred times more so! After all, some of the German satraps tried to woo the French, promising them a place at the feast when, thanks to their collaboration, the New Order finally triumphed. The Poles, on the other hand, were told right at the start, in no uncertain terms, that the only role the New Order envisaged for them was that of workhorses, and that they had only one use for Poland, that of Lebensraum for the Thousand Year Reich. Thus there was no escape from fighting the invader; the only thing that was debatable was how soon to begin the fight and what weapons to deploy. The instinct for self-preservation, moral obligation and patriotism all spoke the same language. In unison, they said: don’t give in, resist, fight…
The “Soviet occupation”, if I may use a term that defies customary usage, was very different. The Polish People’s Republic meant rule by winners, not losers, who promised to lead the country, haunted by war and pre-war poverty, into a land overflowing with previously unknown blessings. Land for the peasants, work for the workers, education for children, healthcare for all, freedom from the fear of unemployment and poverty… And moreover, human dignity for all, respect for every kind of work, cultural treasures for everyone, an end to the nation’s division into the high and mighty on the one hand and the poor commoners kowtowing to them on the other; an end to people’s ill-treatment and humiliation, the coming of a people finally elevated by the leverage of solidarity (sic!) onto the highest plane of community. In short, social justice firmly resting on the enlightened tripod of freedom, equality and fraternity. All this would appear to appeal to the instinct for self-preservation, ethical impulse and patriotism to speak again in unison, only this time carrying the opposite message to the one it carried earlier. All that was required was to believe in those promises. Or, in spite of a few doubts about the sincerity or power of those making the promises, to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Mass-Produced Hypocrisy
Once Poland was plotted onto the map of the German Lebensraum, German totalitarianism brutally rejected even those few who sympathized with its world view in spite of its provenience. The slogans of Soviet totalitarianism, on the other hand, tempted and attracted even many of those who were not, to put it mildly, convinced of the virtues of its country of origin...
People aggrieved by the hereditary misery and civilizational backwardness tormenting their fellow countrymen found it difficult to resist the charm of communist slogans. The slogans appealed equally to their sense of social justice and, simply, to their love of the homeland.
What kind of patriot (a person who places the good of the nation above the interests of caste) would not wish his fellow countrymen to be able to partake of the blessings promised by these slogans?
The problem was that it quickly became obvious that the slogans were one thing and practice another. Instead of narrowing, the gap between Poland and the rest of Europe continued to widen. The promised prosperity was nowhere to be seen. Apart from being less ostentatious, the new divisions were just as great as the old ones. And above all this floated the spectre of a brutal and ruthless power that tolerated no opposition and was allergic not merely to ideas that deviated from its beliefs, but to all ideas that that it did not itself inspire, order or bestow. Just as the privileges of the new elite came to be symbolized by yellow curtains, the phraseology of social emancipation and people’s power symbolized the callousness of the rulers and their lack of scruples.
The Nazi occupation left many wounds on the nation’s body and soul but hypocrisy was not one of them. By contrast, this was the method of inflicting wounds that Stalin’s totalitarian system preferred and that the authoritarian regime which followed perfected. The mass production of hypocrisy was an essential (even if not an intentional, and hence not called by its proper name) feature of Soviet communism and of the regimes it was willing to tolerate in its sphere of influence. People were expected to form a congregation that showed unthinking obedience and discipline, though not necessarily faith. Apart from a brief Sturm und Drang period, only a few people, including the ruling elites, believed in the slogans they spouted, but everyone was obliged to repeat them at every public occasion. In time, faith actually became an inconvenience to the government, since belief in the infallibility of the principles inevitably revealed the fallibility of their interpreters.
According to an unwritten concordat regulating mutual relations between the rulers and the people, the rulers were supposed to behave as if it they were completely devoted to the implementation of the programme of social prosperity and justice that they proclaimed, while the people were supposed to speak in public as if they believed them. It may not have applied to everything, but Vaihinger’s als ob [as if] principle certainly applied fully to the everyday contact between the government and the Polish people. And the point is that it was not an appendix to the system but a necessary condition of its existence.
In his years of exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn suggested that his fellow countrymen should hold a “day without lies”, implying that one such day would be enough to bring about the collapse of the Soviet system. We will never know if he was right but his assumption did not seem much more absurd than the system to which it related.
However, geo-political factors cast doubt over the realism of Solzhenitsyn’s idea. In Yalta the so-called West washed its hands of the affairs of the peoples populating the areas east of the River Elbe, subsequently providing plenty of evidence, through actions rather than evasive words, that apart from repeating its own set of slogans that were distinct from those proclaimed beyond the Elbe, it had no intention of getting its hands dirty again by meddling in their affairs. The Poles, even the most fanatically anti-communist and most radically rebellious among them, could not count on succour or help from the outside, and it was only madmen and incorrigible romantics who could dream of taking on their eastern neighbour’s might in a lone duel that could have ended just as tragically for the country as all previous uprisings, starting with the November Uprising [of 1830, against the Russian Empire] and ending with the Warsaw Rising of 1944. And therefore the idea that the Soviet empire might implode and self-destruct had not occurred either to the domestic intelligentsia with its factual and sober reasoning nor to any of the highly respected and authoritative “sovietological” institutes around the world, flush with funding and brains of the highest calibre; such a thought was not mooted even many years later, when the colossus’s feet of clay began to visibly waste away. In these circumstances living a lie became a condition of survival more for those who lived the lie than for the regime that demanded their hypocrisy. As for the regime, it did appreciate the consent of its subordinates but it could just as easily have managed without their pretended, sincerely insincere consent.
Either way, the lie was lived and for many years there was no indication that the cup of the people’s patience might run over. As Witold Wirpsza’s melancholy poem „A letter about conscience” says:
They say: we are building socialism.
And they are right, even though they are lying…
They have taught
Their thoughts and imagination
To crawl; and creeping along the crevice
That their bellies had hollowed in the emptiness,
They will learn any catechism
By heart!
Is the individual really nothing, a zero?
Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) the heirs, spokesmen and most zealous practitioners of hypocrisy in present-day Poland are the ruling elites. In this respect things have somewhat returned to the norm from which the Communist regime had deviated. The people (or at least that part of the people that does not speak on behalf of ruling parties; and even they only when there are no nosey journalists around) seem no longer to take words seriously while the rulers do not take seriously what the people are saying (at least in the breaks between elections - which are actually getting longer as a result of a shrinking of public memory in general, and the memory of pre-election promises in particular…).
In one of his Flying University lectures Adam Michnik explained how the intellectuals succumbed to the rulers who were at odds with the people, by believing that historical rights were implacable, that the direction of events had been predetermined, and that resisting history could only increase the number of sacrifices that would have to be made on the way to the goal without ever changing the course of history. Resisting history would amount only to the proverbial attempt to stop a speeding train by placing a stick in the spokes of its wheels - an attempt that was doomed to failure. Therefore, Michnik said, even though they were fully aware that “violence has triumphed and that the will of the majority of society is being raped”, the intellectuals thought it had to be that way, that it could not be any other way, since the result had been predetermined, since history has condemned mankind to progress; and thus everything that attempted to resist its course could only be (“objectively speaking…”) mean and foolish plotting by reactionaries… Perhaps what we have here is one of theketmans that Miłosz had observed and catalogued?
Or, in the words of Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom Joseph Stalin considered the greatest poet of the Country of Soviets, “an individual is nothing, an individual is zero - on his own he can’t lift a five-stone log”. Yes, if there is still something about these words that arouses our indignation today, in a completely different world, it is probably their sincerity - the fact that they so loudly express sentiments that we ourselves hesitate to express for the sake of our own peace of mind and out of respect to our interlocutors…
For we “intellectuals”, the heirs of Auschwitz and people civilized through and through in a contemporary fashion, have a tendency to ritual worship at the altar of the free and thus fundamentally omnipotent individual, but in the privacy of our soul we don’t really believe in the individual’s (and thereby also our) omnipotence. It is a paradox, or perhaps, when we really think about it, it’s not really a paradox, that the authority of the individual has never sunk so low as in this day of the cult of the individuals and their “human rights”. Statistics dutifully registering the majority support for this or that party or this or that washing powder, lists of bestselling books, most popular films or spectacles attracting the greatest crowds, have deprived the individual of the authority which the pioneers of modernity promised it would be endowed with. All that the individual has left is a shovel; and as folk wisdom warns, it’s useless to try reaching for the sun with a shovel. Or reaching for mass culture, if we apply folk wisdom to the social sciences…
As Günther Anders noted in 1956 - without an iota of enthusiasm, in contrast to Mayakovsky, who had departed this world at his own request a quarter of a century earlier) - „The game goes on whatever we do; regardless of whether we participate in it or not, it goes on and we are its participants”, adding in final desperation: “And nothing will change if we refuse to participate.” So is an individual really nothing, a zero? Some fifty years since the passing of Stalin’s favourite a Frenchman, Pierre Bourdieu, and some Germans - Claus Offe and Ulrich Beck - seem to have no doubt with regard to this question. Though using different words, they all sound the same warning: the freer the individual, the less his moves can influence the course of the game. The greater the tolerance (or indifference?) the world shows to an individual’s acts, the less is the influence we exert on the game we play and that is played with us. The world takes the form of a solid block which we cannot shift from its place and which, to cap it all, is opaque and windowless so that we cannot look inside to discover what has made it so heavy. And the officials sitting at their desks in Warsaw confirm our conviction that this burden is not an illusion but the sacred truth, by constantly repeating that whatever they do, “they do it because they have to”, because “there is no other way”, because otherwise it would be the end, since to do anything else would lead the country and the people to unimaginable disaster. They repeat this mantra in unison with those from other capitals who claim that There Is No Alternative (TINA), as Jacek Żakowski put it in his devastating critique "Anti-TINA".
Hope, courage and perseverance
The more numerous the chorus and the more sonorous its song, the slimmer the chances of discovering the truth of its refrain. Or, as Florian Znanecki’s collaborator William Isaac Thomas, suggests: if people believe that a certain view is true, it becomes true as a result of their actions. In other words: the more the individual believes in his lack of power, the harder he will find it to discover his own power and to bring himself to use it. TINA is a brilliant way of clearing one’s conscience. And also an excellent prophylactic: if applied conscientiously, the conscience will not get a chance to discover that it has been soiled.
It so happened that a couple of years ago, within a short space of time, I attended birthday celebrations of two individuals: Václav Havel and Jacek Kuroń. These were great opportunities to stop and think again about everything I have said so far about the role of the “individual”.
Let’s be honest about it, Havel and Kuroń were mere individuals, they lacked that which is supposedly essential for an individual in order to free himself from his allegedly natural powerlessness. They had no aircraft carriers or missiles, no police or prisons, they lacked riches or fame, TV studios or crowds of sycophantic troubadours and zealous yes-men. They did not appear on TV surrounded by throngs of admirers, they were not featured on the front pages of newspapers. Yet, in spite of all this, both of them, in their own way, changed the rules of the game for their fellow countrymen. They succeeded thanks to three very basic weapons known to mankind at least since the stone ages: hope, courage and perseverance - except that they used them more often than I, and probably most of us, would.
Havel has said of hope that it definitely is not a prognosis. It does not bow religiously to statistical trends, and it certainly does not throw in the towel when these happen to be unfavourable. Speaking of Havel, Richard Rorty recalled Kenneth Burke’s words: “We discover the future by finding out what people are allowed to sing about”, linking it with Havel’s motto that it is impossible to tell in any one year what song will be on people’s lips a year from no. Bearing this in mind, one has to muster the courage to keep up hope, something that Maria Janion once described as “obstinate idealism”. Havel did muster that courage, as did Lipski and Jacek Kuroń...
Bishop Jan Chrapek would repeat obstinately: „Live in a way that will leave a trace in this world”. Havel, Lipski or Kuroń would probably have specified the kind of traces that mattered, advising people to live in such a way that they left the world a better place than they had found it. And acting on their own advice, they have made the world a better place, even though only a tiny little bit - and even though none of them believed that all their hopes would come true and despite the fact that one might have (as indeed they had themselves) quite a few objections as to the fruit their efforts have borne.
Nevertheless, they have made the world a better place at least to the extent that the price that we have to pay today for hope, courage and perseverance is smaller than it used to be, making it a little easier to live according to the guidance they provided and that they themselves followed. The world has come a few steps closer to fulfilling Jacek Kuroń’s maxim: “The truth (actually a number of varying, often contradictory truths) is the property of free citizens”. Thus, towards the end of his life, Kuroń was able to say with a clear conscience: „It is enough to have the will, the idea and a bit of perseverance to achieve something really significant in our Poland again.” And to remind us: “It means it is worth having the will. And it’s worth trying. In spite of everything.”
So perhaps the melancholy predictions of Günther Anders and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s enthusiastic proclamations worthy of quite a different cause, are not necessarily true? They are not, if one is a Havel, a Kuroń or a Lipski. And they do not have to be true, if we insist on following in their tracks and if we have the courage to accept the consequences. Of course, not many people have it in them. I don’t think I have it in me. But I suspect I might have made a more energetic effort if I had not told myself that I could not...
Ketmans, the tricks of the mind
Ketmans were introduced by Miłosz in his book “The Captive Mind”. The book’s hero was the mind, and all those who used it but allowed it to become captive. What he had in mind was not the ordinary mind, not the one that we all possess (under the name of “reason”) albeit not to the same degree. He wrote about the mind as a privilege, about the mind that serves only the select, and by definition, the few who write and those they write about. The mind that, unlike reason, (sound reason, of course) does not tell us what to do but what one is supposed to and forced to do. In order to do its job properly, reason has to be “captive”: one has to stick to the predetermined path, not deviating from it and not allowing those one leads to deviate from it. The more faithfully reason follows the orders that have to be followed and the more obediently it serves the powers that be and those who issue orders, the better reason does its job.
If Paul, following the example of Paul, “is peaceful, not bothering anyone”, then the mind, as Saul, “invents the wildest frolics”. That is its vocation, that is itsraison d’être. The mind needs freedom - the mind breathes freedom. The captive mind is a contradiction in terms (or, as the English would have it, an oxymoron). What could it be? Could it be the mind masquerading as reason? The mind that has stooped to the level of reason (sound reason, I repeat….)? In the name of what? Of tricking the powers that be? (There was a popular joke in the Warsawstudent theatre Stodoła in the sixties: „We are governed by half-intelligent people.... But I’m saying it from the point of view of quarter-intelligent people!” And the satirist Vladimir Voinovich defined socialist realism, the artistic equivalent of the captive mind, as praising the powers that be in terms they can understand.) Power is based on the fact that you can’t cheat it without cheating yourself. Because reason is the sleeping pill of the mind. If we use it in small daily doses it becomes a drug. If we use it in large doses, it turns into poison. But to ask what the mind is up to when it is busy taming and shackling its natural freedom until it can no longer exercise it, would be as futile as asking what the wind does when it is not blowing or what a river does when it is not flowing. The mind is truly itself only when it is in uncharted territory: the kind of territory of which reason warns us: hic sunt leones. And that is its only use. Nothing more, but also nothing less. And I am convinced that this is not little, far from it.
I repeat: ketmans are a trick of the mind. It is the mind that, like Peter (before he became a saint) denies its vocation, that needs ketmans. In his ketman typology Miłosz clarified the different ways people armed with a mind tried to (were able to?) trick themselves into believing that they were not tricking themselves. For hundreds of years people “armed with a mind” have been referred to as “intellectuals”. Ketmans are the professional tool of intellectuals. Or rather, an indispensable ingredient of their first aid kit. And these first aid kits, as Derrida warned, are full of drugs: medicine if taken in small doses and poison if the dose is exceeded…
For the rest of us, i.e. the overwhelming majority of us, ketmans are not indispensable. To people armed with a mind the world is not a subject of creative transformation, which is why they do not have to justify to others or to themselves if they renounce or give up the process of transformation; even more so if they never even thought of it and attempted it. Those who feel confined in Plato’s cave and who cannot forget the brightness “out there” and cannot recall it without a painful pang of sadness, mock the platonic “troglodytes”, dismissing the cave dwellers’ daily cave-bound routine as stupefying and dehumanizing. Yet a routine, particularly if it lasts long enough to turn into a habit, provides protection to the self from being torn asunder, a fate that befalls anyone who dares to cross the threshold of Plato’s cave. As Richard Sennett discovered during the forty years he devoted to the intense observation of New York bakers, by making the world uniform and monotonous, routine makes it a place that is safe, predictable and generally free of surprises at the same time; and by this token routine tears true professional pride apart but allows us to pull our lives together.
Translation: Julia Sherwood
Part I of this essay appeared in Gazeta Wyborcza on 18 May and is available online here, english here.
This article was originally published in Polish in the Gazeta Wyborcza on 25 May 2009.
© 2010 Projekt Fórum | http://www.salon.eu.sk | posledná aktualizácia 24.10.2010 | stránky vytvoril exe | admin
Inhumanity Is Part of Human Nature / Part II.
Jean-Paul Sartre once shocked the reading public by making the paradoxical claim that the French had never been as free as during the German occupation. It was, he claimed, only a seeming paradox since one gets trapped by free choice that disguises necessity - and for the French were deprived of the temptation of this trap by the German occupiers who left them no choice. And if the French were left with no choice, the same applies to the Poles a hundred times more so! After all, some of the German satraps tried to woo the French, promising them a place at the feast when, thanks to their collaboration, the New Order finally triumphed. The Poles, on the other hand, were told right at the start, in no uncertain terms, that the only role the New Order envisaged for them was that of workhorses, and that they had only one use for Poland, that of Lebensraum for the Thousand Year Reich. Thus there was no escape from fighting the invader; the only thing that was debatable was how soon to begin the fight and what weapons to deploy. The instinct for self-preservation, moral obligation and patriotism all spoke the same language. In unison, they said: don’t give in, resist, fight…
The “Soviet occupation”, if I may use a term that defies customary usage, was very different. The Polish People’s Republic meant rule by winners, not losers, who promised to lead the country, haunted by war and pre-war poverty, into a land overflowing with previously unknown blessings. Land for the peasants, work for the workers, education for children, healthcare for all, freedom from the fear of unemployment and poverty… And moreover, human dignity for all, respect for every kind of work, cultural treasures for everyone, an end to the nation’s division into the high and mighty on the one hand and the poor commoners kowtowing to them on the other; an end to people’s ill-treatment and humiliation, the coming of a people finally elevated by the leverage of solidarity (sic!) onto the highest plane of community. In short, social justice firmly resting on the enlightened tripod of freedom, equality and fraternity. All this would appear to appeal to the instinct for self-preservation, ethical impulse and patriotism to speak again in unison, only this time carrying the opposite message to the one it carried earlier. All that was required was to believe in those promises. Or, in spite of a few doubts about the sincerity or power of those making the promises, to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Mass-Produced Hypocrisy
Once Poland was plotted onto the map of the German Lebensraum, German totalitarianism brutally rejected even those few who sympathized with its world view in spite of its provenience. The slogans of Soviet totalitarianism, on the other hand, tempted and attracted even many of those who were not, to put it mildly, convinced of the virtues of its country of origin...
People aggrieved by the hereditary misery and civilizational backwardness tormenting their fellow countrymen found it difficult to resist the charm of communist slogans. The slogans appealed equally to their sense of social justice and, simply, to their love of the homeland.
What kind of patriot (a person who places the good of the nation above the interests of caste) would not wish his fellow countrymen to be able to partake of the blessings promised by these slogans?
The problem was that it quickly became obvious that the slogans were one thing and practice another. Instead of narrowing, the gap between Poland and the rest of Europe continued to widen. The promised prosperity was nowhere to be seen. Apart from being less ostentatious, the new divisions were just as great as the old ones. And above all this floated the spectre of a brutal and ruthless power that tolerated no opposition and was allergic not merely to ideas that deviated from its beliefs, but to all ideas that that it did not itself inspire, order or bestow. Just as the privileges of the new elite came to be symbolized by yellow curtains, the phraseology of social emancipation and people’s power symbolized the callousness of the rulers and their lack of scruples.
The Nazi occupation left many wounds on the nation’s body and soul but hypocrisy was not one of them. By contrast, this was the method of inflicting wounds that Stalin’s totalitarian system preferred and that the authoritarian regime which followed perfected. The mass production of hypocrisy was an essential (even if not an intentional, and hence not called by its proper name) feature of Soviet communism and of the regimes it was willing to tolerate in its sphere of influence. People were expected to form a congregation that showed unthinking obedience and discipline, though not necessarily faith. Apart from a brief Sturm und Drang period, only a few people, including the ruling elites, believed in the slogans they spouted, but everyone was obliged to repeat them at every public occasion. In time, faith actually became an inconvenience to the government, since belief in the infallibility of the principles inevitably revealed the fallibility of their interpreters.
According to an unwritten concordat regulating mutual relations between the rulers and the people, the rulers were supposed to behave as if it they were completely devoted to the implementation of the programme of social prosperity and justice that they proclaimed, while the people were supposed to speak in public as if they believed them. It may not have applied to everything, but Vaihinger’s als ob [as if] principle certainly applied fully to the everyday contact between the government and the Polish people. And the point is that it was not an appendix to the system but a necessary condition of its existence.
In his years of exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn suggested that his fellow countrymen should hold a “day without lies”, implying that one such day would be enough to bring about the collapse of the Soviet system. We will never know if he was right but his assumption did not seem much more absurd than the system to which it related.
However, geo-political factors cast doubt over the realism of Solzhenitsyn’s idea. In Yalta the so-called West washed its hands of the affairs of the peoples populating the areas east of the River Elbe, subsequently providing plenty of evidence, through actions rather than evasive words, that apart from repeating its own set of slogans that were distinct from those proclaimed beyond the Elbe, it had no intention of getting its hands dirty again by meddling in their affairs. The Poles, even the most fanatically anti-communist and most radically rebellious among them, could not count on succour or help from the outside, and it was only madmen and incorrigible romantics who could dream of taking on their eastern neighbour’s might in a lone duel that could have ended just as tragically for the country as all previous uprisings, starting with the November Uprising [of 1830, against the Russian Empire] and ending with the Warsaw Rising of 1944. And therefore the idea that the Soviet empire might implode and self-destruct had not occurred either to the domestic intelligentsia with its factual and sober reasoning nor to any of the highly respected and authoritative “sovietological” institutes around the world, flush with funding and brains of the highest calibre; such a thought was not mooted even many years later, when the colossus’s feet of clay began to visibly waste away. In these circumstances living a lie became a condition of survival more for those who lived the lie than for the regime that demanded their hypocrisy. As for the regime, it did appreciate the consent of its subordinates but it could just as easily have managed without their pretended, sincerely insincere consent.
Either way, the lie was lived and for many years there was no indication that the cup of the people’s patience might run over. As Witold Wirpsza’s melancholy poem „A letter about conscience” says:
They say: we are building socialism.
And they are right, even though they are lying…
They have taught
Their thoughts and imagination
To crawl; and creeping along the crevice
That their bellies had hollowed in the emptiness,
They will learn any catechism
By heart!
Is the individual really nothing, a zero?
Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) the heirs, spokesmen and most zealous practitioners of hypocrisy in present-day Poland are the ruling elites. In this respect things have somewhat returned to the norm from which the Communist regime had deviated. The people (or at least that part of the people that does not speak on behalf of ruling parties; and even they only when there are no nosey journalists around) seem no longer to take words seriously while the rulers do not take seriously what the people are saying (at least in the breaks between elections - which are actually getting longer as a result of a shrinking of public memory in general, and the memory of pre-election promises in particular…).
In one of his Flying University lectures Adam Michnik explained how the intellectuals succumbed to the rulers who were at odds with the people, by believing that historical rights were implacable, that the direction of events had been predetermined, and that resisting history could only increase the number of sacrifices that would have to be made on the way to the goal without ever changing the course of history. Resisting history would amount only to the proverbial attempt to stop a speeding train by placing a stick in the spokes of its wheels - an attempt that was doomed to failure. Therefore, Michnik said, even though they were fully aware that “violence has triumphed and that the will of the majority of society is being raped”, the intellectuals thought it had to be that way, that it could not be any other way, since the result had been predetermined, since history has condemned mankind to progress; and thus everything that attempted to resist its course could only be (“objectively speaking…”) mean and foolish plotting by reactionaries… Perhaps what we have here is one of theketmans that Miłosz had observed and catalogued?
Or, in the words of Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom Joseph Stalin considered the greatest poet of the Country of Soviets, “an individual is nothing, an individual is zero - on his own he can’t lift a five-stone log”. Yes, if there is still something about these words that arouses our indignation today, in a completely different world, it is probably their sincerity - the fact that they so loudly express sentiments that we ourselves hesitate to express for the sake of our own peace of mind and out of respect to our interlocutors…
For we “intellectuals”, the heirs of Auschwitz and people civilized through and through in a contemporary fashion, have a tendency to ritual worship at the altar of the free and thus fundamentally omnipotent individual, but in the privacy of our soul we don’t really believe in the individual’s (and thereby also our) omnipotence. It is a paradox, or perhaps, when we really think about it, it’s not really a paradox, that the authority of the individual has never sunk so low as in this day of the cult of the individuals and their “human rights”. Statistics dutifully registering the majority support for this or that party or this or that washing powder, lists of bestselling books, most popular films or spectacles attracting the greatest crowds, have deprived the individual of the authority which the pioneers of modernity promised it would be endowed with. All that the individual has left is a shovel; and as folk wisdom warns, it’s useless to try reaching for the sun with a shovel. Or reaching for mass culture, if we apply folk wisdom to the social sciences…
As Günther Anders noted in 1956 - without an iota of enthusiasm, in contrast to Mayakovsky, who had departed this world at his own request a quarter of a century earlier) - „The game goes on whatever we do; regardless of whether we participate in it or not, it goes on and we are its participants”, adding in final desperation: “And nothing will change if we refuse to participate.” So is an individual really nothing, a zero? Some fifty years since the passing of Stalin’s favourite a Frenchman, Pierre Bourdieu, and some Germans - Claus Offe and Ulrich Beck - seem to have no doubt with regard to this question. Though using different words, they all sound the same warning: the freer the individual, the less his moves can influence the course of the game. The greater the tolerance (or indifference?) the world shows to an individual’s acts, the less is the influence we exert on the game we play and that is played with us. The world takes the form of a solid block which we cannot shift from its place and which, to cap it all, is opaque and windowless so that we cannot look inside to discover what has made it so heavy. And the officials sitting at their desks in Warsaw confirm our conviction that this burden is not an illusion but the sacred truth, by constantly repeating that whatever they do, “they do it because they have to”, because “there is no other way”, because otherwise it would be the end, since to do anything else would lead the country and the people to unimaginable disaster. They repeat this mantra in unison with those from other capitals who claim that There Is No Alternative (TINA), as Jacek Żakowski put it in his devastating critique "Anti-TINA".
Hope, courage and perseverance
The more numerous the chorus and the more sonorous its song, the slimmer the chances of discovering the truth of its refrain. Or, as Florian Znanecki’s collaborator William Isaac Thomas, suggests: if people believe that a certain view is true, it becomes true as a result of their actions. In other words: the more the individual believes in his lack of power, the harder he will find it to discover his own power and to bring himself to use it. TINA is a brilliant way of clearing one’s conscience. And also an excellent prophylactic: if applied conscientiously, the conscience will not get a chance to discover that it has been soiled.
It so happened that a couple of years ago, within a short space of time, I attended birthday celebrations of two individuals: Václav Havel and Jacek Kuroń. These were great opportunities to stop and think again about everything I have said so far about the role of the “individual”.
Let’s be honest about it, Havel and Kuroń were mere individuals, they lacked that which is supposedly essential for an individual in order to free himself from his allegedly natural powerlessness. They had no aircraft carriers or missiles, no police or prisons, they lacked riches or fame, TV studios or crowds of sycophantic troubadours and zealous yes-men. They did not appear on TV surrounded by throngs of admirers, they were not featured on the front pages of newspapers. Yet, in spite of all this, both of them, in their own way, changed the rules of the game for their fellow countrymen. They succeeded thanks to three very basic weapons known to mankind at least since the stone ages: hope, courage and perseverance - except that they used them more often than I, and probably most of us, would.
Havel has said of hope that it definitely is not a prognosis. It does not bow religiously to statistical trends, and it certainly does not throw in the towel when these happen to be unfavourable. Speaking of Havel, Richard Rorty recalled Kenneth Burke’s words: “We discover the future by finding out what people are allowed to sing about”, linking it with Havel’s motto that it is impossible to tell in any one year what song will be on people’s lips a year from no. Bearing this in mind, one has to muster the courage to keep up hope, something that Maria Janion once described as “obstinate idealism”. Havel did muster that courage, as did Lipski and Jacek Kuroń...
Bishop Jan Chrapek would repeat obstinately: „Live in a way that will leave a trace in this world”. Havel, Lipski or Kuroń would probably have specified the kind of traces that mattered, advising people to live in such a way that they left the world a better place than they had found it. And acting on their own advice, they have made the world a better place, even though only a tiny little bit - and even though none of them believed that all their hopes would come true and despite the fact that one might have (as indeed they had themselves) quite a few objections as to the fruit their efforts have borne.
Nevertheless, they have made the world a better place at least to the extent that the price that we have to pay today for hope, courage and perseverance is smaller than it used to be, making it a little easier to live according to the guidance they provided and that they themselves followed. The world has come a few steps closer to fulfilling Jacek Kuroń’s maxim: “The truth (actually a number of varying, often contradictory truths) is the property of free citizens”. Thus, towards the end of his life, Kuroń was able to say with a clear conscience: „It is enough to have the will, the idea and a bit of perseverance to achieve something really significant in our Poland again.” And to remind us: “It means it is worth having the will. And it’s worth trying. In spite of everything.”
So perhaps the melancholy predictions of Günther Anders and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s enthusiastic proclamations worthy of quite a different cause, are not necessarily true? They are not, if one is a Havel, a Kuroń or a Lipski. And they do not have to be true, if we insist on following in their tracks and if we have the courage to accept the consequences. Of course, not many people have it in them. I don’t think I have it in me. But I suspect I might have made a more energetic effort if I had not told myself that I could not...
Ketmans, the tricks of the mind
Ketmans were introduced by Miłosz in his book “The Captive Mind”. The book’s hero was the mind, and all those who used it but allowed it to become captive. What he had in mind was not the ordinary mind, not the one that we all possess (under the name of “reason”) albeit not to the same degree. He wrote about the mind as a privilege, about the mind that serves only the select, and by definition, the few who write and those they write about. The mind that, unlike reason, (sound reason, of course) does not tell us what to do but what one is supposed to and forced to do. In order to do its job properly, reason has to be “captive”: one has to stick to the predetermined path, not deviating from it and not allowing those one leads to deviate from it. The more faithfully reason follows the orders that have to be followed and the more obediently it serves the powers that be and those who issue orders, the better reason does its job.
If Paul, following the example of Paul, “is peaceful, not bothering anyone”, then the mind, as Saul, “invents the wildest frolics”. That is its vocation, that is itsraison d’être. The mind needs freedom - the mind breathes freedom. The captive mind is a contradiction in terms (or, as the English would have it, an oxymoron). What could it be? Could it be the mind masquerading as reason? The mind that has stooped to the level of reason (sound reason, I repeat….)? In the name of what? Of tricking the powers that be? (There was a popular joke in the Warsawstudent theatre Stodoła in the sixties: „We are governed by half-intelligent people.... But I’m saying it from the point of view of quarter-intelligent people!” And the satirist Vladimir Voinovich defined socialist realism, the artistic equivalent of the captive mind, as praising the powers that be in terms they can understand.) Power is based on the fact that you can’t cheat it without cheating yourself. Because reason is the sleeping pill of the mind. If we use it in small daily doses it becomes a drug. If we use it in large doses, it turns into poison. But to ask what the mind is up to when it is busy taming and shackling its natural freedom until it can no longer exercise it, would be as futile as asking what the wind does when it is not blowing or what a river does when it is not flowing. The mind is truly itself only when it is in uncharted territory: the kind of territory of which reason warns us: hic sunt leones. And that is its only use. Nothing more, but also nothing less. And I am convinced that this is not little, far from it.
I repeat: ketmans are a trick of the mind. It is the mind that, like Peter (before he became a saint) denies its vocation, that needs ketmans. In his ketman typology Miłosz clarified the different ways people armed with a mind tried to (were able to?) trick themselves into believing that they were not tricking themselves. For hundreds of years people “armed with a mind” have been referred to as “intellectuals”. Ketmans are the professional tool of intellectuals. Or rather, an indispensable ingredient of their first aid kit. And these first aid kits, as Derrida warned, are full of drugs: medicine if taken in small doses and poison if the dose is exceeded…
For the rest of us, i.e. the overwhelming majority of us, ketmans are not indispensable. To people armed with a mind the world is not a subject of creative transformation, which is why they do not have to justify to others or to themselves if they renounce or give up the process of transformation; even more so if they never even thought of it and attempted it. Those who feel confined in Plato’s cave and who cannot forget the brightness “out there” and cannot recall it without a painful pang of sadness, mock the platonic “troglodytes”, dismissing the cave dwellers’ daily cave-bound routine as stupefying and dehumanizing. Yet a routine, particularly if it lasts long enough to turn into a habit, provides protection to the self from being torn asunder, a fate that befalls anyone who dares to cross the threshold of Plato’s cave. As Richard Sennett discovered during the forty years he devoted to the intense observation of New York bakers, by making the world uniform and monotonous, routine makes it a place that is safe, predictable and generally free of surprises at the same time; and by this token routine tears true professional pride apart but allows us to pull our lives together.
Translation: Julia Sherwood
Part I of this essay appeared in Gazeta Wyborcza on 18 May and is available online here, english here.
This article was originally published in Polish in the Gazeta Wyborcza on 25 May 2009.
© 2010 Projekt Fórum | http://www.salon.eu.sk | posledná aktualizácia 24.10.2010 | stránky vytvoril exe | admin
Inhumanity is in human power - Part 3
Zygmunt Bauman
Liberation comes only when we decide to transform the fate of the appointment.
Time to think about what all this entails. And in particular, whether something is clear, from what we could, trying to compose our lives, to learn - for the benefit of us and for others ... Something like this should arise. Not least because it challenges that face us today, and what stood before those born generations, wyrosłymi or come to an old age in the Polish People's Republic, with all the glaring differences were also to each other strikingly similar. I went here and there, and goes a decent life. The freedom from humiliation. About making the world in which they live came out, or at least yourself in it, better than he was or is. That went well and goes to make his life so that all trace of him remained in the world. Marx used to say that people make their history, but in conditions created by them. This, however, made that notwithstanding the conditions of them independent, about the same thing, creating their own history, people care and are seeking ...
O children of men (and who of us is not a human child or does not he?) Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote: "Deprived of speech, inability to maintain upright posture in, uncertain as to what to focus, unable to calculating profits and losses the child is profoundly human, because of his embarrassment promises and promises the coming of what is possible.
Do Not Lose Dignity
Being a child is the same: everything is still in front, there, in this mysterious place, "future" called, which is known to be out there somewhere, but I do not know how it looks, anything can happen, if not now then later. O anything else is not the time to say that can not happen, and even do not yet irretrievably lost. The world of possibilities has no boundaries - and even if it had, it still would not know where to run and how to find them. Each has the desire to ziszczenia same chance, and among plenty of opportunity yet unproven benefits and costs of the settlement has little meaning. There is a children's dictionary of the separation of what is "realistic", the fantasy or "reasonable expectations" from idle fantasies (these distinctions are invented by adults .) Roads are cut down under the feet of countless multitude, and each of them waiting, attracts, persuades, tempted to try it out - like the places where the road is (perhaps) lead, and ways of walking toward them. Being a child is the same as not having "the past", which is known from this after all that implies, holds the neck, captivates with no hope of release, but instead to have boundless plenty of "future", which it promises to solve all the shackles and all chains break down ... Being a child does not have a permanent address check - but I have as a perpetual ticket, valid on all vehicles. The child, in other words, this infinite possibilities.
Ability to lead and bring you to reality, it must persuade (persuade, entice, compel), that is no longer what it was before, "only a possibility." This assistance (help? Violence?) Is called the training or education. Its purpose is to maturity : end of childhood. To become fully human, one must first cease to be a child. A man adult, the term "childish" an affront, and slander of childish behavior is an affront him, insult or condemnation verdict. "Adult" is already-not-child, the more the things being deprived of all opportunities outside of this one, which has developed into reality. The most precious opportunity that educators seek to transform into reality, is to leave the disturbingly broad views and confusing crossroads of only one , even and straight. this path, not swerving and not looking around, must be followed, watching this way and never exceeding the impenetrable (though insidious, because it distorted), the boundary between reality and fantasy, both supervisors expensive social order and philosophers, the guards order thinking.
In the course of maturation / education something to gain: the ability to distinguish between the comme il faut and comme il ne faut pas - between permitted and forbidden, that which is approved and what is condemned, the "you must do this 'or' that you will escape the dry "and" to be sure that "or" will do so at your own peril. " Gains in life in peace and tranquility in the soul - and even at the cost of incapacitation, subordination, obedience, humility and docility. Mature man knows his place and keeps it on the basis of the temptations of the nose or finger insertion, where it belongs. And in the first Republic, and second, and third, and fourth. I considered this a hole in history, the Polish People's Republic ...
In the course of maturation / education comes easily, it can be something to lose: czupurność and persistence, willingness and courage to say "no", the tendency to refuse to adopt things as they are, because they are as they are, and they maintain that the other can not be . Boldness sneezed carrot and stick prowess ignore ... The dignity of the opposition: not to be "set", and harshly treated contemptuously, bully, intimidate, ignore, negotiable. In short, you can destroy human dignity.
Freedom is a responsibility
"Do not leave the world as it is" - he wrote in his notebook, Janusz Korczak probably so that these commandment przewodziło his actions. Jozef Tischner wrote down another admonition: "Let's stop the world accountable, and let's start with ourselves accountable." Sounded like a retort ... But it really was a riposte? An expression of opposition? Perhaps contrary to appearances, however, was not.It is difficult to Korczak's admonition to resist the call, if we compare them with the observation by Tischner also recorded that "freedom is not a man crawls after reading the books, freedom comes after a meeting of the second free man." Tischner was a thinker as few consistently - even in the description and the vivisection of inconsistency, this widespread human vices, which many times in his writings came back with sorrow, but with the right of his contemplation of human destiny indulgence ...
When a record from the second set, will emerge as a consistent and clear message, and certainly consistent with an appeal Korczak: Reconciliation of himself, and not a world that does not often encounter on their way free people. We charge each other, because - as you can see - the people we met, after meeting us, freedom does not come. Therefore, we charge ourselves with the fact that we did not quite free. If we do that, the world is no longer the world as it is, there will be no world in which they rarely, too rarely, rarely painful, free people she meets. And so we should not settle the world, instead of clearing himself, but not to account for themselves, without accounting for the world.
Do not leave the world as it is, if you do not leave ourselves as we are. And let themselves "such as we" should not, because I suffer in this world - then again, few of our settlement with each other that resulted. The circle is closed. "Nobody can be completely free," says Tischner, when "the others around him are slaves." "An appropriate restriction of human freedom is not, as is sometimes said, the freedom of another human being, but his captivity." "The liberation of man begins from within. It could not begin, however, had not met the person next to each other and freedom if he had not choked her."
But what is this freedom, the Jozef Tischner also told that "he would have given it to first place from all the values that are in Poland?" Lots of answers uzbierałoby on this question, if thoroughly browse through the contents of libraries, but the closest to capturing the essence of freedom seems to Joseph Brodsky, poet, thinker and an experienced similar to our fate, when he says that a free man is one who "is not addictive when the bear failure ", which, in other words, takes responsibility for his actions and their consequences. Which of liability does not run away and do not try to protect it before it wider than your back, and the charge of desertion and cowardice is not a magic formula twists, "I was told," had "or" I could not get otherwise. " Who actively denies the same despicable suggestion that Fyodor Dostoyevsky put in the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor, that "the most tiring of human concern is to find someone who could give the gift of freedom."
And what is it again to "accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions? What other consequences referred to here? Of course on the impact that our actions or our failure to act will have on the fate of other people. Because whatever we do (and before doing anything to shrink), changes the circumstances under which the work falls to others around us: a set of objectives which may be a sensible place, and measures which can be used to achieve them.
This is true regardless of whether we thought about it and whether or not we are aware of the interrelatedness of our destinies, whether we realize that - like the deeds of other people make up our fate - our actions and our inaction are part of their fate. Have we aware of it or not, whether we like it or not, we bear responsibility for what happened to us happen to another. But as long as that fact does not count and as long as we behave as if he were not, and we, and others around us are, so to speak, "igraszkami fate." We are not free. Liberation comes only when we decide to transform the fate of the establishment, where, in other words, we assume responsibility for this responsibility, and so we assume, after all, and from which we can not escape, for which we can, at most, we can forget or ignore - not to let her memory guide our actions, and submitting the same slavery over freedom.
Assuming responsibility for this responsibility, which is always, willy-nilly, knowing or not knowing, we assume, for what would happen to others, we open the gates of freedom. But open them at the risk of error, for which we will henceforth only himself to blame and for which in his own chest to fight we will. Together with our consent to the risk of error, at risk, without which freedom can not come, we open a door conscience, it will be our judge now investigating and adjudicating at the same time, strict and incorruptible, from which judgments can no longer mock us, explaining that the what we have done, or to neglect his duty to make, forced us coercion or pushed someone else's own ignorance.
Zygmunt Bauman, Roman Kubicki, Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska, "Life in contexts. Talk about what is behind us and what is before us"
http://wyborcza.pl/1,76842,6666013,Nieludzkosc_jest_w_ludzkiej_mocy___cz_3.html
http://wyborcza.pl/1,76842,6666013,Nieludzkosc_jest_w_ludzkiej_mocy___cz_3.html
Publisher WAiP, 2009
Source: Gazeta Wyborcza
Source: Gazeta Wyborcza
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Bridging Heaven & Earth Show #132 w/ Chungliang Al Huang
Chungliang is the founder-president of the Living Tao Foundation. A philosopher, artist-calligrapher, bamboo flute player, and Tai Ji master-mentor, Al combines his multi-cultural dimensions of learning to inspire the TAO of life-long self-cultivation. He is the author of the classics, "Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain: The Essence of Tai Ji"; "Quantum Soup: Fortune Cookies in Crisis"; "Beginner's Tai Ji Book"; co-author with Alan Watts of "Tao: The Watercourse Way; and with Jerry Lynch of "Thinking Body, Dancing Mind"; "Working Out, Working Within", and most recently, "Ther Chinese Book of Animal Powers."
Bridging's website is: www.HeavenToEarth.com
Bridging's website is: www.HeavenToEarth.com
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (translation by Derek Lin)
Tao Te Ching
Tao and Virtue Classic
Tao and Virtue Classic
Tao Classic - Chapters 1 to 37
Te Ching Virtue Classic - Chapters 38 to 81
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Source:
Translation by Derek Lin
Permission is hereby granted to site visitors who wish to quote from this original work. Please credit as your source www.Taoism.net and Tao Te Ching: Annotated & Explained, published by SkyLight Paths in 2006.
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