Choose your own utopia
Slavoj Žižek has published a short essay in LBR a couple of weeks ago commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. It contains several familiar riffs for those who have been following his writings recently (like a reference to The Eighteenth Brumaire or his speculation on whether China could be a successful example of a capitalist society that doesn’t need to provide its members democratic freedoms in order to thrive) but the main theme of the article is the fate of anti-communism in the Central and Eastern Europe over the last 20 years. And in this Žižek makes an interesting observation, noting how the problems and challenges of the new era are seen in terms of old struggles – although most of the former Eastern block countries have been democratic for almost two decades now, any failures are seen as remnants of the old system that still haven’t been completely purged.
Žižek asks:
How and why are these ghosts being raised in countries where many young people don’t even remember Communism? Anti-Communists ask a simple question – ‘If capitalism is really so much better than socialism, why are our lives still miserable?’ – and offer an equally straightforward answer: it is because we don’t yet have capitalism, we don’t yet have true democracy. Ex-Communists are still in power, disguised as owners and managers. We need another purge, the revolution must be repeated.
And in this way, Žižek argues, the Central and Eastern Europe has been largely living for a capitalist utopia, believing that soon the true democracy and prosperity will arrive (now embarrassing populist election slogan of Estonia’s rightist Reform Party that set the target for Estonia to become one of the five most prosperous EU nations in 15 years was a perfect example of this kind of utopianism) – quite without realising that this is capitalism that they are living in, about as good as it gets. Electorates have been buying the stories of how the rising tide lifts all the boats and seeing in the practice the social inequality creeping up constantly – only to dismiss it as “a transition problem”, something that will eventually pass once everyone becomes laborious and savvy like those at the top.
On this note there is another interesting, if lengthy, article-cum-book-review from LBR by David Runciman that discusses the relationship between social inequality and quality of life – and makes some very profound points, the main one being that “among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine” and that “per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population ”. And, as the book under review – The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better - makes clear, in most of the cases this is not because of those at the bottom bringing down the average metrics of quality of life – on many accounts, those at the top in unequal societies fare worse than those at the top in egalitarian ones (although they may be much better off in absolute money terms), and in some accounts they may well actually fare worse than those at the bottom in more egalitarian societies. It is a lengthy and complex argument, as the review makes it apparent, and not everything is as clear-cut and simple as the title of the book makes it look like, but there is a lot that would deserve a very close attention by those who want to argue over the respective merits and shortcomings of capitalism vs. socialism.
From A to B
It is the beginning of the worst season of the year to be in Estonia – which will run from mid-November to about mid-March. The weather is mostly either bad or miserable and the daylight is trickling down to a couple of hours around mid-day, succeeded by grey and pale twilight that succumbs to a complete darkness before most of the people get out of their offices. There will be a few days of nice winter, as there always have been, but overall it has long appeared to me that the price of having to endure all the rest of those 4 months for those brief sunny spots is way too stiff.
Anyhow, I am glad to report that this year I won’t be paying it. On Friday I changed our car back to summer tires and on Saturday morning we packed it to its limit and left Tallinn with Helelyn, Miikael, Chiba and me. Two days of driving has taken us to Brno, CZ and if we put in another 13-hour day of driving we could reach Dubrovnik (which is our final destination) already tomorrow.
However, I have heard nice things about both Bratislava and Zagreb, so it is likely that we will take it easy tomorrow and just try to reach the Croatian coast – which would leave us with another easy day to get to Dubrovnik on Tuesday.
Dead End of History
Here is an online interview with Francis Fukuyama 20 years after the publishing the book that brought him into the limelight – The End of History. While I have many bad things to say about the original account, I really even don’t need to bother – for two reasons: 1) Fukuyama’s Hegelian view of the ultimate and irreversible victory of the liberal democracy has not only been challenged by a huge number of people, smart and otherwise, all around the world but has proven wrong also empirically, and 2) he seems to have learned next to nothing over the last two decades. So let’s take a look at some of the arguments that Fukuyama brings forth in his interview.
The basic point — that liberal democracy is the final form of government — is still basically right. Obviously there are alternatives out there, like the Islamic Republic of Iran or Chinese authoritarianism. But I don’t think that all that many people are persuaded these are higher forms of civilization than what exists in Europe, the United States, Japan or other developed democracies; societies that provide their citizens with a higher level of prosperity and personal freedom.
Oh really? Not all that many people out there who don’t agree with Western liberal democracy being the “highest form of civilization”, you say? Apparently Fukuyama hasn’t been watching news much. But this is even not really the crux of the point. The real question would be this – as Žižek has asked: what if Chinese authoritarian form of state capitalism ends up providing its citizens with a higher level or prosperity (if not personal freedoms – but the value of those vs. some personal prosperity might vary in different places and at different times)? What then? Does is then become a highest form of civilization? And if not, why should the western liberal democracy be it now?
The real question is whether any other system of governance has emerged in the last 20 years that challenges this. The answer remains no.
China, anyone?
Clearly, that big surge toward democracy went as far as it could. Now there is a backlash against it in some places. But that doesn’t mean the larger trend is not still toward democracy.
However, this also doesn’t mean that the larger trend IS toward democracy. I mean, it’s not that I loathe liberal democracy and think that it is bad for the people and should be just forgotten – quite to the contrary. But to see the events of last 20 years as a temporary setback, or – to quote the Black Knight of Monthy Python – “nothing but a flesh wound”, would be a prime example of wishful thinking.
At the same time, I don’t believe the existence, or even prevalence of cultural attributes, including religion, are so overwhelming anywhere that you will not see a universal convergence toward rule of law and accountability.
What if accountability could be framed not only within the framework of periodic elections but, for instance, precisely in terms of religion? And, one could argue that sharia is the ultimate rule of law – a law that permeates the whole society.
In the end, though, that is not enough. You cannot solve the problem of the “bad emperor” through moral suasion. And China has had some pretty bad emperors over the centuries. Without procedural accountability, you can never establish real accountability.
This didn’t prevent George W. Bush running two consecutive terms as the emperor of not only America but, de facto, of the whole world. Any accountability, should such be forthcoming, is purely post factum – kind of Nürnberg-accountability at best. Of course, it is better than none at all, and the statutory limit of two terms of office means that no matter how bad the president, his damage is temporally limited to eight years. But as George W. Bush demonstrated, one can do a lot in eight years, and unfortunately liberal democracy is no safeguard against disasters such as this. In fact, I’d venture a guess that it will be a lore more difficult to make democratically elected leaders of Israel, for example, accountable for shelling schools and bombing civilian targets than will be to convict Karadzic.
It is certainly possible that Fukuyama is right and I am dead wrong. It is possible that we’re simply living through some dark times right now, that soon China’s success will cave in and that America and EU will claim their rightful places as beacons of civilization once again, beyond any challenge or doubt. This all is possible, although not very likely in my opinion. But this is not the point – it is all right to have different opinions. As Blaise Pascal pointed out long ago – what we should do in a situation where we have different options and opinions under the conditions of uncertainty is to look at their respective outcomes. Not only say that “I believe eventually it will be all right”, but also consider what happens if it won’t, what happens if things go otherwise. What if liberal democracy is not the final form of the government and society, what if it is not the end but instead a dead end of history? The fact that we would like it to be doesn’t make it so. And this is where Fukuyama fails most miserably by my standards.
Übermensch of the early 21st century
What Kind of a Person
“What kind of a person are you,” I heard them say to me.
I’m a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,
Sophisticated instruments of feeling and a system
Of controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,
But with an old body from ancient times
And with a God even older than my body.
I’m a person for the surface of the earth.
Low places, caves and wells
Frighten me. Mountain peaks
And tall buildings scare me.
I’m not like an inserted fork,
Not a cutting knife, not a stuck spoon.
I’m not flat and sly
Like a spatula creeping up from below.
At most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle
Mashing good and bad together
For a little taste
And a little fragrance.
Arrows do not direct me. I conduct
My business carefully and quietly
Like a long will that began to be written
The moment I was born.
Now I stand at the side of the street
Weary, leaning on a parking meter.
I can stand here for nothing, free.
I’m not a car, I’m a person,
A man-god, a god-man
Whose days are numbered. Hallelujah.
– Yehuda Amichai
Scary other people
About a week ago, a friend posted a clip on “muslim demographics” on his Facebook-feed which, quite predictably, really got me going. It is 7 minutes of ominous-looking illustrative computer graphics with even more ominous-sounding voiceover that aims to demonstrate how Europe in particular and the Western world in general is facing a muslim onslaught and is about to be engulfed by the tidal wave of hostile culture within next couple of decades, lest we, the people of the free and enlightened world, start reproducing like rabbits and preaching gospel to infidels.
Not surprisingly, the source of this “call to action” is religious itself. One of the underlying assumptions of the grand and dark picture that emerges from the clip is that – while christians seem to be giving birth to people who are endowed with reason and capacity of free choice, and who can subsequently become not only christians but also citizens of the state they live in, doctors, drivers, writers, athletes, and yes, sometimes even muslims – muslims are begetting only muslims, always and over many generations. So if christianity (or belonging into Western culture) is a, supposedly enlightened, state of mind, being a muslim is akin to dominant gene. Many claims that are being made in the clip do not of course stand any closer scrutiny (here is an excellent recent article from FT that deals with most of this stuff), but that’s the thing – most of the people watching it and then forwarding it to others apparently do not feel that there’s a need for any closer scrutiny to something that is already evidently clear. After all, isn’t that what Spengler and Huntington said? Who cares of details such as muslim birth rates in Europe plummeting way faster than average western ones? Isn’t it a lot easier to talk of “muslim crime” than deal with the cultural and racial discrimination of immigrant population in European countries?
This, however, led me to reflect back upon something that we ended up discussing with students in a seminar a couple of weeks ago – and namely, why is it that we feel threatened by people who are somehow markedly different from us? Of course, we may perceive them as a threat to our way of life, we may feel that if church bells tolling are being taken over by prayer calls from mosques then our worlds will be changed too. But in many cases, this doesn’t go very far to explain our fears. Why, for instance, do many heterosexual people feel threatened by homosexuality? After all, their fertility rates should lead us to believe that the threat of homosexuals taking over the world is non-existant and indeed, that the mere fact of their survival thus far is nothing short of miraculous. Why can’t we, free people, tolerate someone’s choice to wear ḥijāb? Why is the only way to make sense out of such choice that the person so choosing must be deluded in that being her own free will – and should be subsequently forcibly liberated from such tradition?
But maybe it is because the existence and presence of someone markedly different simply undermines the notion of our world being the best or even the only possible one? This is what Judith Butler has argued with gender and sexuality – as long as gender is defined through the discourse of heterosexual practices (such as woman being defined as an object of heterosexual male desire, or marriage being a union between man and a woman), a homosexual person stands as a challenge to the clear and unambiguous notion of gender of everyone so defined. Similarly with muslims – the presence of people in our midst who do not necessarily adhere to our deeply held notions of what it means to be free or what constitutes a life worth living, but appear, against all odds, still be able to lead fulfilling lives, is a threat to our way of life in a way that runs much deeper than we would like to acknowledge.
Why so few?
A couple of days ago I happened to stumble upon a lecture by Nick Bostrom, the director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and probably the world’s foremost transhumanist. If you don’t know who he is, or haven’t heard of transhumanism before, I suppose it’s an interesting viewing – kind of TED stuff that so many people seem to really like (and sure enough, Bostrom has several lectures available there as well).
In the lecture, Bostrom explains in about 20 minutes his well-known view of existential risk for humanity and outlines a “possibility space” for human species, along with his threefold model of future of human development (extinction/stagnation/posthuman). I have in fact all sorts of different problems with Bostrom’s approach, but now I suddenly realised that they don’t even matter. Bostrom argues that what defines us as human, compared against animals for instance, is our superior mental, cognitive or whatever other capabilities, and argues quite persuasively that there is no reason to believe that the limits we currently face in those terms should be considered as somehow final and unsurpassable. Therefore it follows that if we were to increase those capabilities (for instance, by increasing our brain volume) we would likely become able to think thoughts that are currently impossible, and indeed, unimaginable for us. And I don’t really even disagree with that.
Where I do disagree though (and, as I said earlier, this is quite apart from all kinds of different ethical objections) is that I honestly don’t believe that things such as brain volume or our current cognitive capacities (such as ability to hear only within certain frequency range or see within certain spectral range, and so on) could honestly be considered serious limitations for “most of the people, most of the time”. I would maintain that for vast, vast majority of us those limits are never came nowhere near of. Apart from very select few we all live our lives well below what we would actually be capable of, by virtue of being humans. And this sentiment is, for me, perfectly captured in this small episode in a wonderful movie “Waking Life”:
Happy now?
I happened to leaf through the Financial Times today and came across this very interesting piece of news. Apparently there has been a bunch of people working, led by Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Armatya Sen, trying to figure out a more meaningful way to measure and assess economic progress than this reflected by the all-important GDP growth. Of course, in many ways the flaw is an obvious and glaring one, and has been pointed at many times already. Gross Domestic Product that GDP stands for is a general and aggregate metric that simply reflects the monetary value of goods produced and services rendered within the borders of a nation. And while in general it is certainly true that there exists a positive correlation between high GDP value and high standard of living, the relationship is not a trivial nor a direct one. For one thing, GDP measure completely neglects the dimension of distribution of wealth and value created in the society, and while it may be tempting to claim that “rising tide lifts all the boats”, in practice it is a fact of life that some boats get lifted more than others. Another well known fact is that in terms our personal happiness, the absolute amount of money (or goods, or whatever) we happen to possess is quite a bit less important than the relative wealth compared to that of our immediate social circle, or society in general. And so, what Sarkozy was suggesting is that measuring the success or failure of economic policies based on GDP growth leads us astray – and therefore that measure should be dropped and replaced with a more meaningful one(s), that would take into account things like availability and quality of health care, or time available for leisure, etc.
This all reminded me immediately of my trip to Bhutan last year. Bhutan has long been famous for pursuing GNH instead of GDP. GNH, a shorthand for Gross National Happiness, is a complex metric that is meticulously traced and aims to reflect a wide range of different aspects of society and thus provide an overall view of human happiness instead of narrowly focusing on the creation of financial wealth – which from the Buddhist point of view is, if anything, detrimental to the project of being happy. Bhutanese holistic approach to being happy consists of 72 different components and includes things that would probably seem rather esoteric for most westerners, such as “Frequency of prayer recitation”, “Ability to understand lozey”, “Zorig chusum skills”, “Knowledge of mask and other dances performed in tshechus” and “Purchase of second hand clothes”. But in general, this all further underlines the point that being happy is something that is inevitably grounded in local circumstances and is difficult to directly convert into dollars or ngultrums – although it clearly seems to be the case that while being rich is no guarantee towards being happy, it is easier not to be unhappy if you have more money rather than less.
It remains to be seen what comes out of this – and whether it is simply another knee-jerk reaction to the anniversary of the financial crisis (though it seems that Stiglitz’s workgroup got started already 18 months ago, therefore predating the onset of meltdown by about half a year). I for one remain skeptical to the demise of GDP as a measure of economic performance – we have had things like Human Development Index and so on for many years and while there is no serious doubt to their usefulness, they haven’t came to replace the hard and easy applicability of GDP. But I guess we’ll see, and I would be rather glad to be wrong on this account.
For humans only
A few months ago in Los Angeles I was rather baffled when driving from the airport to the center I noticed public benches along the road with big signs painted on them, saying “FOR HUMANS OLNY”. Tonight I went to see Neill Blomkamp’s movie District 9 and suddenly realised what this all was about.
Let me first get this off my chest : District 9 really is a good movie, easily one of the best I’ve seen this year – and I have seen a few pretty good ones. It excels in a number of different ways and is a very thought-provoking, relevant and deeply ironic piece. The camerawork is particularly good, and the way how different formats such as newscast, interview or hand-held camera have been used is nothing short of genius. Although the movie has a couple of sentimental slips they didn’t really distract from the overall experience – which is pretty bleak and disturbing.
But more about the way the movie works: while the mockumentary and mock-newscast formats have became kind of popular recently in Hollywood movies (see “Sweet and Lowdown” and “Syriana”, for example), D9 takes it to a new level. Not only does the movie itself play with formats we are used to acquire and digest information with, it also expands the same thing into areas such as outdoor media (such as park benches in LA that I mentioned), websites (see MNU and Non-Human Rights movement site, for example) and social networking sites (on Twitter and Facebook). In this way, D9 is critical towards both modes of engagement with the world – the purportedly objective gaze of CNN/BBC as well as their hundreds of smaller and local off-shoots, as well as Facebook- and twitter activism (which all too often boils down to statements such as “non-humans are humans too” – something that Ali G has already parodied earlier). It is precisely that kind of an “objective reporting” and armchair activism that allow us to distance ourselves, not only to objectivize what’s happening but also objectify those it is happening to. Because ultimately this is the only thing, the modus vivendi that allows us to see and realize everything that’s going on in places like Darfur, Palestine, Rwanda, and indeed, often in our own cities, and still go on seeing ourselves as moral subjects. It is only possible through dehumanizing the other in our minds, both collective and personal.
[*** MILD SPOILER ALERT ***] It is also interesting to note how the camerawork changes from detached newscast format into a hand-held camera akin to this used in Blair Witch Project once the protagonist moves into the D9 and becomes an alien (both literally and metaphorically) himself. Losing the professional editing and voiceover, what we see suddenly becomes a lot more subjective, and this inevitably changes also the way we see those it is happening to – they become human, in the deep sense of that word. Actually, even the mockumentary/newscast-format parts have a layer of this self-awareness, with a couple of scenes left in which are being referred to as something that will have to be edited out later. And then, before the movie returns to newscast format at the very end, we have a short patch of rather typical Hollywood-type view of heroic battle and self-sacrifice that appears to be the usual mode in which we conceptualize heroism.
Oh, and as far as I’m concerned, Sharlto Copley’s performance as Wikus van de Merwe is absolutely amazing.
So if you haven’t, do yourself a favour and go see it.
Glimpse of a beautiful mind
A few months ago, in Harvard bookstore, I picked up a thin pocket-sized volume titled This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges. It waited in my bag for a proper moment since about two weeks ago and I finished it just today. For a book of mere 121 pages it certainly took me a long time to get through – and the reason was not it being tedious or difficult to read, quite to the contrary. The book is actually a transcript of six lectures that Borges delivered at Harvard in 1967, recordings of which were only recently discovered in an archive. In his talk, Borges masterfully strikes this elusive balance between simplicity and sophistication – in fact he shows convincingly that it is not at all necessary to compromise between the two.
However, there is one thing that makes those otherwise quite remarkable lectures on poetry (and literature in general) truly amazing. Borges had been gradually losing his eyesight and by 1960 he was almost completely blind. This means that those six lectures were delivered without notes, simply by walking up to the stage and starting to talk. And reading them one cannot but marvel at how Borges picks up a thread and then effortlessly follows it, without ever losing his bearings or repeating himself. While doing so, he often quotes lines poetry and entire passages by Shakespeare, Homer, Joyce, Milton, Tennyson, Rossetti, Frost, Cummings, Chesterton, Manrique, Omar Khayyám, Yeats, Coleridge, Whitman, Quevedo and countless others in English, Spanish, German, Arabic, German and Old English. The only comparable feat of erudition and command of the subject I can think of must be Auerbach’s tour de force and magnum opus “Mimesis” that was written in Istanbul, where the author was in exile without access to library – and thereby the veritable study of Western literature from Tacitus to Proust and Woolf was written similarly “blind” and out of memory, without taking a look at source texts or anything else that had been written on them. Giants such as Borges and Auerbach stand as towering monuments to the art of reading and imbuing, immersing oneself in literature with a seriousness and dedication that almost scares me.
Borges concludes his series with a deeply personal and intimate creed, by looking back to a long life lived with, in and by literature. He opens his last lecture by saying:
I think of myself as being essentially a reader. As you are aware, I have ventured into writing; but I think what I have read is far more important than what I have written. For one reads what one likes – yet one writes not what one would like to write, but what one is able to write.
He reminisces a scene from his childhood, when he first heard his father reading “Ode to a Nightingale”, a poem by Keats, and describes an effect that this experience had on him:
I have toyed with an idea – the idea that although a man’s life is compounded of thousands and thousands of moments and days, those many instants and many days may be reduced to a single one: the moment when a man knows who he is, when he sees himself face to face. I suppose when Judas kissed Jesus (if he indeed did so), he felt at that moment that he was a traitor, that to be a traitor was his destiny, and that he was being loyal to that evil destiny. /…/ When I heard those lines of Keats’s, I suddenly felt that that was a great experience. I have been feeling it ever since. And perhaps from that moment I thought myself as being “literary”.
I don’t think I’ve had a moment like this, and I probably never will. I suppose most of us never will. And maybe this is the thing that ultimately separates us mere mortals from those few that are truly great.
Full circle
This morning I boarded the plane at Tegel, switched flights in rainy Riga and landed in Helsinki around 2pm. Ferry schedules between Helsinki and Tallinn look a lot less busy nowadays than what they used to be, but I suppose I’ll find something around 6pm, and this would bring me back to Tallinn before the nightfall – precisely 8 months after I left on January 14th.
Given that I have long had somewhat irrational but nonetheless rather strong aversion towards most things German, Berlin was a whole lot more pleasant than I expected it to be. It is a very mellow place with friendly and easy-going people who keep their voices down and move around in an organised way. Berlin’s many parks were especially nice with people sitting on lawns, reading books, drinking beer from bottles (after half a year in the US I still need to get over of this not being an offense one can get detained for) and simply having a good time.
Being in Berlin reminded me of one beautiful short story by Nabokov, titled “A Letter That Never Reached Russia”. You can read it in its entirety here (highly recommended, never mind all the typoes), but it is the last melancholic and hauntingly beautiful paragraph that has lingered in my mind for many years now:
Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a streetlamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so gernerously surrounds human loneliness.
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