Yet the consumer capitalist society has also become compromised through its vulgarity and illiteracy; its self-centered ignorance; its ever more mediocre political leaders; its political debates; its TV shows with the same rules of entertainment and mass approval as a rap diva or a skating competition. Nothing seems perceptible in this cacophony unless it’s scandalous and the scandals are soon forgotten.
In 1989, at the end of World War II and its heir, the Cold War, new hopeful and utopian predictions were filling the public arena: the end of history, the end of ideologies. Many people bought into these hollow thoughts.
Soon after the start of our new century and millennium, the religious terrorists of September 11, 2001 proved, with their murderous spectacle of fanaticism, that we are still far from a serene earthly paradise beyond history and ideologies. The human story and mankind’s history go on, as before, through ideas and conflicts, through new — old projects of happiness, and through cruel unhappiness and disasters in daily reality.
The blinded pilots of sacred barbarism of September 11 were fulfilling, paradoxically, the prediction that the twenty-first century would be religious or it would not be at all. But such a prophesy went only so far. It forgot to tell us what would happen if our century did, indeed, become religious. The loudest answer to this question seems to come from the new chevaliers de la mort, crying “God is great!” Not the God of all people, of course, only their God who is fighting all other gods and all the followers of other gods and all the godless sinners of the world as well. Paradoxically, this God becomes the supreme counter-argument against the most important commandment of all religions: thou shall not kill!
Frightened, repelled by so nightmarish an Apocalypse in the name of happiness, should we perhaps give up forever on our need for transcendence? Should we resign ourselves to the narrow pragmatism of our domestic, limited, and trivial happiness and unhappiness, to our modest, ephemeral struggle to just go on, from one day to the next? All historical periods have faced similar unsolvable questions, paying the heavy price of hope without hope.
Modernity has accelerated, more than any other human epoch, history’s centrifugal dynamics. Yet, even modernity, perhaps more than the traditional past, left the individual alone, robbed of any other center than his own self. This clouded, convoluted, and pulsating SELF has proved to be insufficient and frustrating for too many people.
Does anyone seriously believe that mankind is prepared to renounce the great enterprise of crime and killing? A deep skepticism, if not bitterness and despair, seems unavoidable.
Some ten years ago I proposed something very much non-utopian, and I would like to revisit that proposal today. It was in an intervention I made in the famous Walser Debate of 1998 in Germany (see above, pp. 193–201). As some of you may recall, the esteemed German writer Martin Walser, in his acceptance speech on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association at the Frankfurt Book Fair warned against the “permanent representation” and the “monumentalizing of German shame.”
My response was to suggest that every country — and I emphasize again every country and every people—should complement its monuments of heroism with monuments of shame. This would mean recalling a nation’s wrongdoings towards other countries, other people and also to its own people. To love our neighbors as ourselves may imply scrutinizing ourselves with the same objectivity as our neighbor; and not doing to others what we don’t like to suffer ourselves. It is probably good therapy to look at ourselves with the same exigency as we look at others, to put ourselves in the shoes of others in order to understand their otherness. Aren’t modesty and humility and self-questioning a desirable and sound exercise for being truly human?
But if we really want to return to a more hopeful perspective, we need to return to the individual, the frail, sinful, and heroic conqueror of nature and sometimes of his own nature, to his rich and resourceful imperfection, to his struggle to be more than he succeeded to be, to find a meaning in his often meaningless environment, to be a creator who adds to what is already spread around him.
Despite the great scientific and technical achievements of modernity, despite prosperity and the visible improvement in human rights, the loneliness and estrangement of the individual has not disappeared. Indeed, the opposite is true. The multi-colored and noisy void around us has not made life more meaningful. The modern world is a centrifugal world, and few people can live without a center, whatever that center may be. The lonely wanderer encompasses all of us, he remains our lonely, fraternal companion, torn between solitude and solidarity, a lucid, compassionate, independent, and selfless fellow who deserves our confidence. A lot of people have today a kind of mystical belief in identity—as a magical potion for curing any illness. Identity is what connects us to others: gender, language, wealth, habits, convictions, and aspirations, even physical or psychological features. Identity has, undoubtedly, its place and its importance in social and private life. But the core of humanness is, in the end, the individual entity: what remains when we are alone in an empty room before or after we connect to a collective identity. Without such a lucid, soulful, conscientious entity, identity remains an empty association of empty terms.
Montaigne says in a kind of avalanche of aphorisms: “A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself. Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.” And he never forgets to warn us: “Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own ass.” Something we should not forget when we stand up, ready to meet our peers.
Part III. EPHEMERIDAE
The Silence of the Eastern Bloc
In the sound and fury unleashed worldwide by the Rushdie affair, we might take note of a significant silence from the Socialist East. I do not refer only to the authorities’ “tactical” silence, to those always in search of advantage in the game of power, I refer also to the silence of the organized groups of artists, writers, and intellectuals, and, above all, to the absent voices of individuals, for whom it is impossible to speak out.
I am saddened but not surprised by this silence. I know the complexities of the process of regeneration and social normalization now under way there and I know, too, the attitudes that not only writers but ordinary citizens have to an event with so many implications for their own historical predicament.
I myself still remember vividly the agitation and dark premonitions I felt when Khrushchev stipulated that Pasternak could travel to Stockholm for his Nobel Prize only if he did not return, or when Brezhnev exiled Solzhenitsyn. At such moments, one feels acutely the danger to one’s position as a citizen and, more simply, as a human being. I have endured more than once, in my turbulent past, the violent impact of this kind of danger: as a child in a Nazi concentration camp, as an adolescent in the Stalinist regime of postwar Romania, as a writer in the bankrupt, ambiguous socialism of recent decades.