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do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone
back to part two of my reading of Raizard Lagutco's
The Demon in Democracy. We are up to section five
of part one and we are just going to jump
right back in. A third narrative remains regarding the transition
to the new system, the one about mankind's reaching and
developing its full creative potential. Although one strongly emphasized, this
eventually lost its importance and virtually disappeared. Regardless of the
fact that some socialist visionaries tried to revive it from
time to time, it had no place in communist reality.
The new regime fell into the trap of gigantic practical problems.
Who and for what purpose would consider humanities achieving self
knowledge at a time when the people were desperately grappling
with chronic scarcity and their leaders were courageously struggling with
the new problems they themselves had created. It is paradoxical
that socialism, which began with a great humanistic message, not
only quickly lowered its aspirations, but made them indistinguishable from
the objectives that had already been realized with much more
success by its main competitor, capitalism. The young Mark still
used the language of Hegel to describe mankind's road to
full flourishing, but the mature Marks chose to write about
surplus value, which clearly referred to economic exploitation and the
way to overcome it. It is therefore hardly surprising that
from the very beginning the communistic the communist country focused
on the problem of labor, which liberated from exploitation and
the burden of surplus value, would bring an unprecedented increase
in productivity. These countries and their governments fought a never ending,
by unfortunately persistently unsuccessful battle to produce enough goods for
their citizens, and the more they failed, the more they
aspired to superiority over capitalist economies. That's one of the
problems that you have with the state when the state
is there to solve problems for you and not protect
you and protect your culture and protect what you're If
they're stepping in, well, if something fails, if their solution fails,
they're not going to give it back to you so
that you can figure it out. They're just going to
try and keep correcting it and finding a solution themselves.
And if there's no one there who knows how to
do it or is willing to do it, or if
they deliberately understand that the more problems that you have,
the more problems a society has, the more you need
them well eu up the creek. No matter how much
they mobilized, mass production called for extra effort, designed ever
more ambitious five year plans, the shortages of goods persisted,
and the distance between the standard of living under capitalism
and socialism steadily increased. No major economic problem was ever solved.
All the riots and revolutions that broke out in communist
countries had economic roots. This was not the only reason
they occurred, but was nevertheless very important. The communists also
sought to provide citizens with adequate servings of pleasure, to
be enjoyed privately, but also, and more importantly, with their
satisfaction showing for the world to see. At the beginning,
the latter was confined to simple signs, usually by working
men and women, who, after a day's hard work, danced
and sang in the streets to the tune of propagandistic songs.
Over time, with progressive stabilization, the communists discovered that pleasure
and entertainment were an extremely serious political matter. They realized
that if a communist society was to resist a capitalist sentation,
it should secure a comparable level of consumer goods for
its citizens. A model communist man was thus defined by
three elements ideology, work, and leisure. Once these three objectives
were fulfilled, it was to be expected that the communist
citizen would internalize his deep commitment to the system, work
efficiently and abandoned for good the idea of the revolt,
because after work he would have sufficient access to enjoyable activities.
When compared to the full pathos of the declarations of
the classics of Marxism promising man's spectacular flourishing under the
communist system, it is hard, indeed, not to marvel. It
is hard, indeed, not to marvel about a dramatic reduction
in expectation. Liberal and democratic thought has been from the
very beginning, with few exceptions, minimalist when it comes to
its image of the human being. The triumph of liberalism
and democracy was supposed to be emancipatory, also in the
sense that man was to become free from excessive demands
imposed on him by unrealistic metaphysics invented by an aristocratic
culture in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In other words,
an important part of the message of modernity was to
legitimize a lowering of human aspirations. Aspiring to great goals
was not ruled out in particular cases, but greatness was
no longer inscribed in the essence of humanity. The main
principle behind the minimalist perspective was equality. From the point
of view of a liberal order, one cannot prioritize human objectives.
Only the means can be prioritized in terms of efficiency,
provided this does not jeopardize the rules of peaceful cooperation.
In parenthesis, it is neither less nor more rational to
desire the wealth of Croesus than the poverty of a
Buddhist monk, wrote the liberal economist Ludwig von Mises. There were,
as I have said, exceptions to this view, few but
worth noting. Among the eighteenth century authors, Kant, who defended
liberalism set up high standards for humanity. In the nineteenth century,
John Stuart Mill and T. H. Green had similar intentions.
The last two aptly perceived the danger of mediocrity that
the democratic role was inconspicuously imposing on modern societies. They
both believed differences, notwithstanding that some form of liberalism, or
rather a philosophy of liberty, was a possible remedy to
the creeping disease of mediocrity. Mill remained under the partial,
albeit indirect influence of German romanticism, and thus attributed a
particular role to great creative individuals whose exceptionality or even
eccentricity could, in a free environment pull men out of
a democratic slumber. But these ideas did. But these ideas
did not find followers, and liberal democratic thought and practice
increasingly fell into the logic of minimalism. Lowering the requirements
is a process that has no end. Once people became
become used to disqualifying certain standards as too high, impractical,
or unnecessary, is only a matter of time before inertia
takes its course and even the new lowered standards are
deemed unacceptable. One can look at the history of liberal
democracy as a gradual sliding down from the high to
the low, from the refined to the course. Quite often
a step down has been welcomed as refreshing, natural, and healthy,
and indeed it sometimes was. But whatever the merits of
this process of simplify, it too often brought vulgarity to language, behavior, education,
and moral rules. The growing vulgarity of form was particularly striking,
especially in the last decades, moving away from sophistication and decorum.
A liberal democratic man refused to learn these artificial and
awkward arrangements, the usefulness of which seemed to him a
first doubtful and soon null. He felt he had no
time for them, apparently believing that their absence would make
life easier and more enjoyable. In their place, he established
new criteria ease, practicality, usefulness, pleasure, convenience, and immediate gratification,
the combination of which turned out to be a deadly
weapon against the old social forms. The old customs crumbled,
and so did rules of propriety, a sense of decorum,
a respect for hierarchy. So does what it is intended
to do to destroy hierarchy, to destroy the past, to
seek to put mankind on a new path, and a
path that is permanent. So there's no stability, there's no order,
it's constant change. These changes were often attributed to the
deplorable influence of the bourgeoisie, the class that was said
to embody the disappearance of forms and the vulgarity of
the modern eraror. There was an immense output of creative
works depicting the shallowness of the mercantile civilization. The antidotes
of commerce was as evidenced by Thomas Mann's Budden Brooks
and John Galsworthy's The Fourth Site Saga art as a
disinterested expression of imagination in pursuit of the beautiful and
the sublime. But over time it became clear that commerce
and capitalism had been blamed somewhat hastily, and that the
cause is laid deeper. More perspective thinkers soon realized that
the very successive technology, productivity, and industry, that great achievement
of the genius of modern man, was conducive, as Jose
Ortega Gassett persuasively argued to the sterility of imagination and
the triumph of self satisfied pettiness. There was and still
is something paradoxical in the fact that the historically unprecedented
explosion of technology and industry, which brought wealth and security
to millions of people, and which would not have been
possible without a high degree of creativity, was a major
factor in reducing people's aspirations and astonishingly giving mediocrity a
touch of respectability. Man, feeling secure and enjoying the increasingly
abundant benefits of a modern civilization, was slowly releasing himself
from the compelling pressure of strict and demanding rules derived
from religion and classical ethics. Have to leave those things,
those antiquated things behind. Can have progress if you have
those right. He was no longer in the mood to
embark on a painful and uncertain journey to higher goals,
on which John Stuart Mill elaborated with such hope, and
his hopes were high. In a famous passage of his utilitarianism,
he said that although man aspires to satisfy his drive
for pleasure, he will always prefer to be unsatisfied Socrates
rather than a satisfied pig. Why the argument was the
following man is cognizant of both states, the Socratic and
the Swinish, and there is no way that reason and
conscious will allow him to opt for being a pig.
The argument thus assumes, in an unequivocable way, that some
ways of life are objectively better than others, that the
Socratic model is clearly superior to that of common man,
and that there is nothing in human nature that can
make people oblivious to this fact. This last assumption, however,
has been challenged since the very beginning of modern times.
In liberal democracy, especially in recent decades, A generally acknowledge
moral directive for bids looking down on people's moral priorities,
because in the present society equality is the norm, not
the hierarchy. But equality as always has its limitations. Mediocrity
has been generally though tacitly acknowledged as a non controversial,
if not preferred model, whereas the Socratic model, though nominally
viewed as equal among others, has lost its appeal and
so report from the democratic mainstream as too aristocratic and elitist.
In theory, the Socratic way is as good as any other.
In practice, that is hopelessly at odds with modern preferences.
From a new perspective, the pig would seem, on reflection,
a stronger competitor. If you're following you see this path,
where this path has brought us the gradual process in
which to higher aspirations were being replaced by the lower
tell us no doubt something about human nature, namely that
unless met with strong resistance or an attractive inspiration, it
shows a powerful tendency to be lured by the common
and the mediocre. Common indeed has ceased to be a
word of disapproval in a liberal democratic rhetoric, or rather
has ceased to be used at all, When so much
is common, nothing really is. This change is but a
small signal of a corruption of basic categories by which,
for centuries people described and evaluated their conduct. Especially striking
is a change in the meaning of the word dignity,
which since antiquity has been used as a term of
obligation obliege. If one was presumed to have dignity, one
was expected to behave in a proper way, as required
by his elevated status. Dignity was something to be earned, deserved,
and confirmed by acting in accordance with the higher standards
imposed by a community or religion, for instance, by empowering
a certain person with higher responsibilities, or by claiming that
man was created in God's image. Dignity was an attribute
that ennobled those who acquired it as no bless obliege.
Dignity was an obligation to seek some form of self improvement,
however vaguely understood, but certainly closer to the Socratic way
and further away from its opposite. The attribute was not
bestowed forever. One could always lose it when acting in
an undignified way. At some point, the concept of dignity
was given a different meaning contrary to the original. This
happened mainly through the intercession of the language of human rights,
especially after the nineteen forty eight Universal Declaration. The idea
of human beings having inalienable rights is counterintuitive and extremely
difficult to justify. It may make some philosophical sense if
derived from a strong theory of human nature, such as
one finds in classical metaphysics. However, when we accept the
weak theory, attributing to human beings only elementary qualities and
deliberately disregarding strong metaphysical assumptions, then the idea of rights loss.
Then the idea of rights loses its plausibility. It may
of course be sanctioned as a mere product of legislation
through a parliament entry or court ruling which entitles people
to make various claims called rights, but these claims will
be no more than arbitrary decisions by particular groups of
politicians or judges who choose to do this, rather than
due to circumstances, ideology, or individual predilections, or under pressure
from interest groups. In other words, they're not It's not
going to happen organically. It will be imposed from top down,
and the way it should be when you properly understand
top down is the top is to protect you and
your beliefs and your predilections and your ideology and what
you stand for. It would indeed be silly to call
such claims inalienable, because inalienability, by definition, cannot be legislated. Thus,
in order to strengthen the unjustified end within the accepted
concept victual framework unjustifiable notion of human rights, the concept
of dignity was invoked, but in a peculiar way so
as to make it seem to imply more than it
actually did. The concept created an illusion of a strong
view of human nature and of endowing this nature with
qualities nowhere explicitly specified, by implying something noble being in
an immortal soul and innate desire for good, etc. But,
on the other hand, in using this concept unaccompanied by
other qualifications, the framers of the human rights documents apparently
felt exempted from any need to present an explicit and
serious philosophical interpretation of human nature and to explain the
grounds and the conditions on which one could conceive of
its dignity. This operation, and more precisely, sleight of hand
and not very fair to boot led to a sudden
revival of the concept of human dignity, but with a
radically different meaning, one that politicians and especially in the
democratic framework, could now enforce, giving them increasing their power,
increasing their importance. Since the issue of universal declaration, dignity
has no longer been about obligation but about claims and entitlements.
The new dignity did not oblige people to strive for
any moral merits or desert or deserts. It allowed them
to submit whatever claims they wished, and to justify these
claims by referring to a dignity that they possessed by
the mere fact of being born, without any moral achievement
or effort. In other words, they could just make shit
up and say I deserve this, can't You can't criticize
me because I was born with a penis and I'm
want to cut it off or I'm going to keep
it and you have to call me a woman, or
I'm gonna cut it off and you have to call
me a woman. Just to use an example from the Zeitghost,
a person who desired to achieve the satisfaction of a
pig was thus equally entitled to appeal to dignity to
justify his goals, as another who tried to follow the
path of Socrates, and each time for a pig, and
for Socrates, this was the same dignity. A right to
be a pig and a right to be a Socrates
weren't in fact equal and stem from the same moral
or rather non moral as a new dignity practically broke
off with morality source. Having armed himself with rights, modern
man found himself in a most comfortable situation. With no precedent.
He no longer had to justify his claims and actions
as long as he qualified them as rights, regardless of
what demands he would make on the basis of those
rights and for what purpose he would use them, He
did not end, in fact, could not lose his dignity,
which he had acquired for life simply by being born human,
in some cases barely. And since having this dignity carried
no obligation to do anything particularly good or worthy, he could,
while constantly invoking it, make claims that were increasingly more
absurd in demand justification, forever more questionable activities, sinking more
and more into arrogant vulgarity. He could argue that the
vulgarity not only did not contradict his inborn dignity, but
it could, even by a stretch of the imagination, be
treated as some sort of an achievement. After all, can
a dignity that is inborn and constitutes the essence of
humanness generate anything that would be essentially undignified or non human.
The dignity based notion of human rights was thus both
a powerful factor to legitimize a minimalist concept of human
nature and its legitimate child. Moreover, it equipped modern anthropological
minimalism with the instruments of self perpetuation, the most efficient
instruments of this kind ever devised in the history of
the Western societies. Six work in entertainment plus, as we
shall see later, ideology that shaped the human existence in
communism and gave basic content to people's lives more or
less reflected but also caricatured what was happening to modern
man in the capitalist civilization. In modern times, work became
something more than earning means for survival and material security.
It was a vocation which gave human life, discipline, meaning,
and order. If we are to believe Max Weber, the
first stirrings of this epoch, making change had a religious character.
His argument was the following. The initiating factor was an
acute and unbearable awareness typical of early Protestantism, of the
sinfulness of human nature. Turned this turned men's minds to work,
which they began to treat as an expression of piety,
imposing on human sinfulness some form of discipline. But because
the fruits of work could not be enjoyed, such enjoyment
would be sinful, one could not consume them. And because
they could not be consumed, then, and this is where
the actual civilizational revolution happened, they had to be invested.
This was a fundamental change. What it meant was that,
for the first time on such a scale in their history,
people abandoned a deeply embedded desire to seek wealthy, to
seek wealth simply as a means to indulge in expensive
and extravagant whims. Work still produced wealth, as it was
always hoped it would, but was no longer valued primarily
as a means to consumption discipline. Work became its own
proper reward, devoid of dreams about future joys and satisfied temptations,
being completely rationalized and subordinated to a long term plan
of action. In Weber's view, this new approach to consumption
as being separated from pleasure and postponed to an indefinite
future was at the root of an unprecedented economic growth
that was brought about by capitalism. Faber's analysis give us
a Abor's analyzes gives us a good insight into why
and how modern thinking justified the lowering of aspirations. A
minimalist view of human nature, initially apparent first and foremost
in Protestantism, but later on expanding to other areas of
the Western world, had a specific nature. The basic cause
of the change was purely religious. A new doctrine of predestination,
as well as as fundamental weight attributed to the original sin,
precluded any form of moral and spiritual perfectibility. Big plans
for man were no longer feasible. But at the same time,
the low level to which human aspirations were reduced acquired
a noble, sometimes even heroic trait, which, let us add
completely disappeared together with the liberalization of the Protestant doctrine.
It is true that man acknowledged his powerlessness vi visavi
the great plans, those plans that in the past were
said to lead him into vanity, but he put all
his energy and will into doing as best he could
in the lower realm, the only one accessible to him
because of his corrupted nature, and this realm was work.
You see this in politics nowadays, with the we lose
down here form of Christianity. Who's like, oh, no, we're
we're not supposed to be involved in politics. You know,
we have original sin and no God. You know, Jesus
told us to love our enemies. He didn't tell you
to love his enemies. I swear some people, some I
have to assume. Some look at the Spanish Civil War
and the nationalist side, which was you know, probably what
ninety percent Catholic, and just assumed that those people were
complete sinners, that they were wrong, that they should have
let their country be handed over to communists and anarchists,
and that you know, their plans to kill half the
country so that they could institute their new communist order,
their new socialist order, that they should have just allowed
that to happen, because you know who cares this para
this paradoxical view of human nature, sure brought about by
the Protestant revolution. Man belittled his status while at the
same time drastically increasing his requirements within the lower realm
could not for too long retain its viability. The natural
downward pull of minimalism turned out to be stronger, as
the initial discipline had to become less and less compelling.
At some point, the old capitalism, which had rejected consumerism
and owned and owed its success precisely to this rejection,
was transformed into a system in which consumption not only
came to be accepted, but in fact took control of
the entire economic mechanism and gradually marginized most human incentives,
eventually to become the single most powerful source of motivation.
The roads to this stage was complex, and getting there
took a long time. But before this happened, the modern
bourgeois civilization had its long period of glory, when, by
having espoused the classic concept of human nature and releasing
all channels of human creativity through the capitalist revolution, it
managed to transform spectacularly our civilization into accomplished, extraordinary things
in all areas of life. The consumerist change was, of
course to be expected by some and welcomed by many.
Gradgrind of Dickens's hard times, a strict fanatically disciplined modern men,
mercilessly attempted to eradicate human weakness. Is a despicable figure,
and as such perfectly illustrates a negative perception of a
classical capitalist by the humanist critics of a modern society.
Mister gradgrind is deaf to temptations, unresponsive to warm emotions
and simple pleasures, motivated purely by new rationality and by
nothing else. His callousness seems almost inhuman. But capitalism finally
changed in the severity of the world's gradgrinds disappeared. The
religious back ground of the new economy, so persuasively described
by Weber, evaporated, and the capitalism itself, while continuing the
ethic of the discipline of work and pushing productivity to
new records of efficiency and inventiveness, liberated itself completely from
the Protestant gloom. The liberal democratic society abandoned the old
time rigor without regret. The discipline of work and high
requirements of productivity persisted in the new times, but in
other matters man refused to go back to his previous self.
Once having made a decision about having his aspirations reduced,
he unabashedly enjoyed this new situation and compensated the strict
work imperatives by his ever increasing indulgence in entertainment. But
this new predilection, so different from his previous somberness, had
consequences unanticipated and even unfathomed by Weber. Naturally, entertainment always
constituted a strong inclination of human being existence, but for
centuries it was regorsly separated from the serious component of
man's life. Lent and Carnival could not be confused, because
each of them responded to different needs and performed different functions.
But when the minimalist anthropology took hold, the barrier separating
one from the other weakened, and the temptations to give
entertainment more and more prominence became irresistible, particularly in societies
in which the fear of sin had lost its deterring power.
In today's world, entertainment is not just a pastime or
a style, but a substance that permeates everything schools and universities,
upbringing of children, intellectual life, art, morality, and religion. It
has become dear to the hearts of students, professors, entrepreneurs, journalists, engineers, scientists, writers,
even priests. Entertainment imposes itself psychologically, intellectually, socially, and also
so strange as it may sound, spiritually. A failure to
provide human endeavors even the most noble ones, with an
entertaining rapping is today unthinkable and borders on sin. It's
I mean, think about everything. It's like, well, how are
you gonna sell this? I mean, you're not going to
get anybody to go to your church unless it's a
freaking Coldplay concert, right, I mean everything is entertainment. Advertising
has the commerce, super Bowl commercials, it's all entertainment. People
make fun of people who play video games, make fun
of people who watch sports ball. The modern sense of
entertainment increasingly resembles what Pascal long ago called divertisement. That is,
an activitvity, as he wrote in his Thoughts, that separates
us from seriousness of existence and fills this existence with
false content. Divertissement is thus not only being entertained in
the ordinary sense of the word, but living and acting
within artificial rules that organize our lives, setting conventional and
mostly trivial goals which we pursue, getting involved in disputes
and competition, aspiring to honors, making careers, and doing everything
that would turn our thoughts away from fundamental existence matter
existential matters. By escaping the questions of the ultimate meaning
of our own lives or of human life in general,
our minds slowly get used used to that fictitious reality
which we take for the real one and our in
our lord by its attractions. The difference between Pascal's divertisement
and today's entertainment, or rather having fun, as it has
become customary to say say, is that the modern man,
no matter how much a desire to have fun has
captured his soul, knows very well that it is an
artificial construction, not the real thing. Whether some other more
objective reality exists is to him a matter of indifference,
and if told there is not, he would probably still
remain probably still remained unmoved. Having neutralized all musings about objectivity,
the modern man takes pride in his deep involvement and entertainment, which,
in the absence of other objective references, he considers natural.
This aspect of entertainment and disturbing consequences of its present
reign come under scrutiny. Scrutiny nearly a cent came under
scrutiny nearly a century ago. Since its absorbing presence and
its impact on human life have increased immeasurably. It is
interesting that both the conservatives defending the classical view of
human nature and some of the sociologists of the Frankfurt School,
while having fun ndamental disagreements, described this new phenomenon in
similar terms and were equally alarmed by the extent to
which the human mind was degraded and enslaved by what
was claimed to be an extremely pleasant, un unproblematic, but
somehow superior form of freedom. Both groups feared that the hedge,
money and the omnipresence of entertainment might effectively dilute a
sense of the seriousness of existence, as well as the
type of mindset that gives this seriousness a proper role
in thought and action. For the first time in the
entire history of mankind, in the entire history of mankind,
there appeared a type of human being who thought not
having been surrounded by entertainment from cradle to grave in
all areas of life was an anomaly. Of course, liberal
democracy should not be singled out as the only cause
of this mental revolution. There were other causes, capitalism, secularism, technology,
and other equally important factors. The fact is, however, that
for the important reasons, liberal democracy and entertainment found enthusiastic
allies in each other. Entertainment became the most obvious and
direct manifestation of freedom that liberalism offered humanity, and at
the same time the most tangible confirmation of the dominant
status of the democratic man and his tastes. To be sure,
his dominance was larger, deeper, and more consequential, and by
no means exhausted itself in an inner necessity to have fun.
And yet the omnipresence of entertainment was something by which
the democratic man became easily recognized. It was his trademark,
his coat of arms, his so to speak, symbolic identity
card maasically, want to break out my Florida Panthers jersey
or my New York Yankees hat? Are you getting it?
Once we assume anthropological minimalism is to be a key
to understanding today's liberal democracy, it becomes clear why the
liberal Democrats wholeheartedly embraced a belief in the inevitability of history.
This belief was, of course, a legitimate offspring of the
Enlightenment faith in progress, to which the liberal Democrats are
even more committed than the socialists themselves, also partly the
disciples of the Enlightenment dogmas. In view of the fact
that liberal democratic civilization brought a spectacular development of technology
and succeeded in providing millions of people with the benefits
of modernity, the belief in the inexorability of progress is
at least within the limits delineated by the liberal democratic mind,
not without rational foundations. The primary source of the belief
in unidirectional history is thus man himself. A remark correlation
exists between the regime and the man, one that had
never in history been achieved on a similar scale. The
communists attempted to mold the communist man to fit the
institution and logic of the communist system, but suffered defeat.
But where they failed, the liberal Democrats proved successful. If
ever any system existed that was perfectly tailored to the
aspirations of the people inhabiting it, it was liberal democracy.
And if ever any human model existed that was perfectly
tailored to opportunities offered by the political system and of
the aspirations enhanced by it it was a liberal democratic man.
Alternative political models have not been drawn or even seriously considered,
and the effectiveness of the regime is still impressively high. Therefore,
an expansion of liberal democracy will probably continue, and the
system will continue to confirm the set of beliefs that
the inhabitant of the regime not only claims to live by,
but also holds to be the only set of beliefs
that are worth living by. He feels privileged and lucky
not to be like those unfortunate fools or rascals who
have failed to accept the obvious. All these factors, taken together,
reinforce his belief that if the world is to survive
and develop, it must move on in one and only
one direction. His own. This view has become contagious, and
it quickly spread to the communist countries at the time
when they face fundamental future choices. After having parted with
the old regime, one would think the fall of an unpopular, coercive,
and evil regime would provide a unique opportunity for the
nation to develop its own institutions at every level of
social and political life, the institutions that would be responsive
to its own needs, bearing witness to its own historical
experience and reinforcing a sense of a newly gained freedom
and autonomy. This was the time when the creative potential
of the nation released from a long period of enslavement
should have manifested itself fully and most enthusiastically. But in
Eastern Europe this was not the case. As if charmed
by powerful but invisible political magicians, the East Europeans immediately
succumbed to what they considered to be the imperative of
the historical development of Western civilization. The required attitude of
a newly liberated nation was not that of creativity, but conformity.
The events that took place after nineteen eighty nine shattered
the illusions many people harbored, which in the recent past
had not seemed illusions at all, but had possessed some
degree of credibility. Poland may be a case in point.
Everything indicated that dramatic and painful historical experiences should make
the polls particularly suspicious of the new, grandiose political projects
aimed at restructuring the entire social substance. The riots that
erupted more or less once per decade since nineteen forty five,
when the Soviet Union imposed the Communist system on Polish
society were read as an expression of such suspicions. There
was no better illustration of the desire than the period
of the so called First Solidarity in nineteen eighty nineteen
eighty one. In July and August of nineteen eighty, workers
held massive strikes against lawlessness and economic chaos, which led
to the establishment of a powerful trade union in Poland,
the first such big independent organization in the Soviet Bloc.
But the First Solidarity was not just a trade union,
and the demands it raised were not simply about the
distribution of wealth, increases in wages and benefits, and workers guarantees.
The union's program also included more general demands, far exceeding
those ordinary human aspirations that seemed all but natural in
a permanently inefficient economy with humiliatingly low wages and notorious
shortages of goodsready stood up in front in defense of
human dignity in its original and not the corrupted sense,
access to culture, respect for truth and science, and for
nobility and art, and a proper role given to Christian
heritage and Christian religion. It seemed that suddenly those great
ideas at the root of Western civilization, which this civilization
had slowly begun to forget, were again brought to life
and ignited like a fire in the minds of the
members of a trade union. This was probably one of
the reasons why Solidarity met with such widespread, though short
lived admiration. Suddenly, in this god forsaken place there emerged
a movement that not only challenged evil empire, but reminded
everyone of the spiritual dimension of human existence, of truth, god, heroism,
nobility of culture, the importance of historical and religious heritage,
and other high moral principles. During the period of the
Second Solidarity in nineteen eighty eight nineteen eighty nine, the
final chapter of the Communist rule in Poland, this mood
disappeared almost without a trace, and although the possibility of
political victory was nearer than ever, the big ideas and
ambitious plans lost their appeal. This change of attitude was
somewhat understandable, considering the pressure of circumstances and after the
Communists lost their monopoly, an urgent need to resolve vast
numbers of practical problems. But the fact remains that the
new Poland, like other countries in the region quickly discarded
the higher concerns expressed by the first Solidarity and almost
immediately adopted a minimalist perspective in order to conform to
the atmosphere and practice of Western liberal democracy. Once big
ideas were gone, working entertainment seized the imagination of the
people and turned them into copies of a standard liberal
democratic model. Poland shook off the communist yoke at a
time when the Western world had already reached a phase
of considerable homogeneity and standardization. Therefore, as soon as the
Poles liberated themselves and started aspiring to be to the
liberal democratic world, Poland lost his previous exotic charm as
a country in which workers, intellectuals and priests defied communism,
prayed to God, and risked their freedom in defense of truth,
good and beauty. The liberal democratic world did not want
such exoticism in their midst and would have been embarrassed
if the Poles had persisted in their initial ambitions. It
expected a different Poland, the one that was indistinguishable from
other nations following this or that pattern of liberal democratic order,
provided it covered all areas of social life. The Poles
grasped this quickly, and the majority of them adapted to
the expectations without protests and without regret. There was, of course,
an unpleasant side to it. The societies that liberated themselves
from the old rules adopted new ones, but were unaware
that new rules gave them less liberty and fewer opportunities
than they had naively hoped. Being blinded by the radiant
vision of the free world, many East Europeans were ready
to admit that although the world was not moving inexorbally
toward communism, as the communists had tried to convince them
for a long time and with relatively good results, it
still moved inevitably in another direction. Just as the Soviet
Union had been the vanguard of progress before, so now
it was the West, which often meant the United States
and sometimes the European Union. The East Europeans were supposed
to follow in their footsteps. The metaphors of catching up
and a race were often used to describe the situation
of the societies that joined the world in liberal democracy.
They were somewhere in front of us, rushing fast forward,
while we remained in the back, trying to make up
for lost time by doing all the things that they did,
but in a shorter period of time. The result was
that innovation and inventiveness, so much talked about, praised and
encouraged by all and sundry and paid homage to it
in words, could not be taken seriously as challenges and
never became a really respected attitude. The deeper wisdom was
to copy and to imitate. The more we copied and imitated,
the more we were glad of ourselves. Institutions, education, customs, law, media, language,
almost everything became all of a sudden imperfect copies of
the originals that were in the line of progress ahead
of us. All right, that's the end of chapter one.
I'm going to finish right there. I hope you're enjoying this.
This really explains a lot and really starts to get
down into the minutia of modernity and also you know,
tracing the ideas of modernity, but really laying out and
getting down into the weeds of dignity and what dignity
used to mean and what dignity means today, which is
one of the most important things that we've forgot. Chapter
two is called Utopia. We'll be back with that one
in a couple of days. Thank you.