How to Make a Carnival

Kenneth MischelAssociate Professor, Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, CUNY

Correspondence: kenneth_mischel@baruch.cuny.edu

May 2003

utopian \ yü-`tō-pē-ən/ [Utopia, imaginary and ideal country in Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More, fr. Gk. ou not, no + topos place] 1: of or pertaining to a desirable but impractical perfection in political or social life, or characterizing one who imagines or proposes such a perfection

carnival \ kär-nə-vəl/ [It carnevale, alter. of earlier carnelevare, lit., removal of meat, fr. carne flesh (fr. L carn-, caroē) + levare to remove, fr. from L, to raise] 1: a season or festival of merrymaking

This past fall in San Francisco, two peace activists lost their lives in a most

unusual way. Heading to a demonstration in a Volkswagen van welded to the top of a

school bus, the pair sang “Give Peace a Chance,” while sticking their heads out of the

van’s sunroof. So caught up were they in the abstract desire to preserve life that they

failed to notice that their bus was entering a concrete tunnel.

Ours is a season of tragicomedy. Protestors assemble in London (of all places)

under the historic banner “Peace in Our Time.” Berlin passers-by mistake the body of a

woman who has committed suicide for a piece of performance art. Delegates at a United

Nations’ conference on racism and xenophobia receive pamphlets bearing Hitler’s picture

and with the caption: “What if I had won? There would be NO Israel!” As these bizarre

events collect, I can’t help but be reminded of Lionel Trilling’s warning that we need to

be aware of the dangers that lie behind our most generous wishes. For these wishes, by a

paradox of human nature, frequently find a way to travel from generosity to coercion.1

1 See Lionel Trilling’s “Manners, Morals and the Novel,” in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Giroux & Strauss, 2000).

Efforts aimed at restoring a Golden Age have in the past more often culminated instead in

a bitter carnival2 of malicious buffoonery, violence and rage followed by a spate of

totalitarian rule.

In the aftermath of the tragedy of September 11th, biting attacks on religious

visions of the apocalypse have abounded. As an unintended consequence of all this

condemnation, the dangers of secular utopianism, which parallel those of apocalyptic

thinking, have been largely ignored and even inadvertently promoted. To make matters

worse, the recent criticism aimed at secular utopianism has tended to focus on its external

danger, namely, that those caught up in utopian patterns of thought can turn themselves

into pawns serving (for example) the latest Middle Eastern tyrant’s or terror-master’s

cause. A cursory glance of the headlines, opinion pieces and letters to the editor over the

past few years reveals the clarity and presence of this threat. But the greater threat, by

far, is a threat that is all but ignored: that secular utopianism has the potential on its own

to generate a carnival in its most malignant form. So, as certain European ministers and

visionaries tingle with excitement at being on the cusp of banishing the Hobbesian state

of nature from their neighborhood; as the UN Secretary General celebrates the “renewed

consciousness of the right of every individual to control his or her own destiny;” as tens

of thousands gather in Brazil at a World Social Forum under the rallying cry, “A New

World is Possible,” I find their towering aspirations hard to share. The quest to transform

human society—and human nature—once and for all may well and in the not so distance

future unleash the worst that mankind has to offer. It is my hypothesis that the

2 This phrase was coined by Michael Andre Bernstein in his important book Bitter Carnival (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

contemporary utopians may be on the verge of opening the door just wide enough for a

bitter carnival to sneak through and grab hold of us all.

The Essential Characteristic of Contemporary Utopianism

Utopianism is an ineradicable feature of the domain of human thought. No

empirical failure, no historical disaster, has had or ever will have the power to

permanently discredit utopian thinking. None can because utopian thinking is so

intimately bound up with the basic need we seem to have of making sense of the passing

of time by experiencing it as the unfolding of a story. Doing so requires an underlying

narrative structure. The “story begins,” the philosopher William Gass once wrote,

“when we set up along side this continuum of activity a metronome to mark the stages.”

By marking off a stage as a stage we invariably anticipate its end. There could be no

concept of “today,” if there were none of “tomorrow.” Naming requires a sense of

boundaries.

Utopianism, at its core, involves a confusion of boundaries. It is at the interface

where the unfolding stage and the anticipation of its end meet that the author and the

contemporary utopian part ways. For the author holds (what Russian literary theorist

Mikhail Bakhtin once called) an essential surplus over the structural elements and

“contingencies” of his story that the utopian lacks. If the writer wants a character in his

story to be hit by a milk truck in chapter ten, or to fight with his wife in chapter two, he

can make these events occur. If he is under contract with a magazine to deliver a

detective story, he can pretty much insure that he delivers one. It is not like this for the

utopian. As protagonist in his story rather than its author, the utopian lacks the author’s

essential surplus over the full range of the unfolding story’s structural elements and

possible trajectories. The behavior of others, the weight of habits and traditions, the

vagaries of chance, the hand of God, these forces are beyond the utopian’s full control.

But the utopian refuses to give them their full due. Lacking an appreciation of the limits

of his power to shape the unfolding story, he loses sight of the fact that he is in the story

rather than over and above it. The essential characteristic of the utopian is his inability

to distinguish the difference between protagonist and author.

Lacking an understanding of this distinction, the utopian persistently exposes

himself and those around him to the force of unintended consequence in an exquisitely

heightened way. “Utopia” literally means “nowhere.” If utopia is to be brought to a real

town, the (as Trilling put it) wildly conceiving, madly fantasying mind envisioning it

must triumph in a battle for reality over the world of ordinary practicality. In a crisis

moment in the battle, the utopian may make choices—by no means out of malice—that

widely miss the mark. (“Making peace is, in some ways, like making love,” Israeli

minister Shimon Peres asserted twelve days before the wide outbreak of hostilities in the

Middle East in September 2000. “First you have to close your eyes a little but—if you

open them completely, you cannot be totally romantic.” The possibility of war, Peres

assured, was at any rate “out of the question.”3) 3 Shimon Peres, speech before the Weinberg Founders Conference, September 16, 2000, www.washingtoninstitute.org/pubs/speakers/peres_2.htm. For a brilliant exploration of the utopianism inherent in the Israeli government’s enthusiastic involvement in the Oslo process, see Charles Krauthammer’s “He Tarries: Jewish Messianism and the Oslo Peace,” June 10, 2002,

Though the consequences of possibly missing-the-mark can be disastrous, this

possibility does not unduly disturb the utopian. As the enthusiasm of a significant

fraction of world Jewry for the “road map” attests, many remain fully committed to

keeping their eyes closed. The New York Times spoke for many in its recent Christmas

Day editorial: “Have humans ever been able to bring this entire globe to peace at once?

The answer is almost certainly not. But that answer is no deterrent to trying to do so, no

obstacle to the hope that renews itself with particular freshness at this time of year.” Are

we then to believe that no past blood spilled in the name of a hope can ever be sufficient

to qualify as an obstacle to that hope in the future?

The utopian might respond to his end’s past failures with the assertion that this

end could be achieved if only people were made to see the regressive thinking patterns

that have impeded it up to now. If only people were made to see. Totalitarian means are

thus uniquely seducing to the high-minded. “Authority must now step in, patriarchal

authority, the authority of a father for his children,” the French modernist architect Le

Corbusier once demanded.4 We might say of the contemporary utopian that he possesses

an underdeveloped sense of tragedy.

The same cannot be said of Sir Thomas More, whose book introduced the word

“utopia” into the English language. In that book, Sir Thomas simultaneously expresses

both hope and concern about what that hope, if it were acted upon, might entail. Many of

www.biu.ac.il/Spokesman/Krauthammer.html .4 Cited in Colin Rowe, The Architecture of Good Intentions: Towards a Possible Retrospect (London: Academy Editions, 1995), p. 152.

the Utopians’ ideas he finds appealing, but practically unrealizable. And he worries

about their unintended consequences if in fact they were realized. Sir Thomas thus

names the character from whom he learns about Utopia “Hythloday”, meaning “expert in

nonsense.” And he closes Utopia’s second book on the ambivalent note that, while he

does not agree with everything Hythloday says, he finds in Utopia certain features that he

likes but does not expect to ever actually see.

This kind of ambivalence is no longer in vogue. When the Franco-Swiss

philosopher and playwright Denis de Rougemont, who founded the European Cultural

Center in Geneva in 1950, added luster to Victor Hugo’s 1849 prediction that the idea of

Europe was on the threshold of becoming reality by suggesting that “Alas, Hugo was a

hundred years ahead of history,” it was clear that More’s caution and keen sense of

tragedy were nowhere to be found. Utopianism between More and de Rougemont had

profoundly changed.

Where might contemporary utopianism be heading? Perhaps we can get a sense

of a possible trajectory from de Rougemont’s spiritual heirs. In the 1990’s, the Council

of Europe briefly circulated a poster promoting the European Union. Based on

Brueghel’s 16th century painting, the “Tower of Babel,” the poster superimposed modern

cranes and workers on the unfinished tower. In the skies above the tower floated the stars

of the EU. The poster’s caption read: “Europe: Many tongues, one voice.”5

5 The poster was reprinted in International Currency Review, 23(4), 1996, p. 46.

Why the Tower Doesn’t Get Completely Built

The recurrent “edifice of Europe” (as Helmut Kohl once called it) has its foundation

in fear. Living in the shadow of two World Wars, the edifice’s architects hoped that the

centrifugal forces of nationalisms that had ripped their continent apart might be

countervailed by the centripetal force of a massive joint construction project. That is why

the European Union’s main decision-making organ needs to devote almost two hundred

pages to a document specifying permissible placement of seats and doors on a European

bus,6 and why Brussels-leaning Europeans continue to insist that the political importance

of their edifice dwarfs whatever substantial economic benefits that edifice brings.

In building its magnificent edifice on a foundation of fear, contemporary Europe

owes a debt to Biblical Mesopotamia Living in the shadow of the great flood, the Tower

of Babel’s architects had also once hoped that their massive joint project might stave off

the forces of dispersion. There is a rabbinical exegetic tradition on these biblical verses

that culminates in Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin’s (1817-1893) commentary to the

effect that God was not so much aroused by anything the Tower’s visionaries may have

said as by the fact that their speech was “one.” Their plans, unimportant in themselves,

required a unity for implementation impossible to achieve in an environment of scattered

peoples, cultures and ideas. The Tower was thus both a building project and a means of

potentially totalitarian social control.7

6 See Bret Stephens, “Good Europeans,” Jerusalem Post, May 31, 2002. 7 See Rabbi Ezra Bick, “Parashat Noach,” The Israel Koschitzky Virtual Beit Midash, Yeshivat Har Etzion, http://www.vbm-torah.org/parsha.59.02noach.htm.

It still is. In July 2001 then EU President Louis Michel warned Austria against

putting the Nice Treaty, expanding the EU, to a referendum: “I personally, think it’s very

dangerous to organize referendums when you’re not sure you’re going to win them. If

you lose it, that’s a big problem for Europe.” Michel continued with a rhetorical

question. “Has a country the right to prevent the progress of Europe? I am not giving

you an answer. But I am asking the question.”8 Similarly, a number of Eastern European

nations aspiring inclusion in the EU were warned by the French President, Jacques

Chirac, over their support for the U.S. position towards war with Iraq. These

governments had “missed an opportunity to shut up,” he declared. (So much for “unity in

diversity.”)

Few understood the totalitarian impulse behind the Tower and its potential

consequences better than George Orwell. His essay, “The Prevention of Literature,”

explores the ways in which lying is an inherent feature of totalitarian outlooks and the

ways in which such lying erodes creativity. Has literature, much less reportage, ever

widely flourished in totalitarian settings or among those in the thrall of a totalitarian

regime? Orwell invites his reader to consider the case of a British communist during the

Second World War. Prior to Hitler’s pact with Stalin, the communist was expected to

stew about the horrors of Nazism. For the year-and-a-half that the pact was in force, he

was expected to believe Germany was more sinned against by the Allies than sinning

against them. Finally, after Hitler abrogated the pact the communist once again had to

8 “EU head warns Austria against a ‘dangerous’ referendum,” July 11, 2001, http://www.eubusiness.com/news/stories/525/52403.html.

view Nazism as the greatest force for evil the world had ever known. This twisting and

turning of sentiment at just the right moment comes at a terrible cost. The communist

must either lie about his feelings or repress them. Either way he stalls his creative

engine: “not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem

to stiffen under his touch.” Orwell has discovered God’s clever trick of causing post-

Babel tower builders to reenact for Him His own response to the Tower.

What is left of the project as its builders’ creative energies begin to stall? In his

parable about the tower, the “City Coat of Arms,” Franz Kafka imagined that the city

workers’ thoughts turn from the tower to their more immediate housing. Each wants the

finest quarters for himself.

Consider, for example, the honor of hosting the European Parliament. The

Parliament’s recently constructed home in Strasbourg, France is a sight to behold. An

enormous steel and glass structure, its tower is replete with a fiber optical lighting system

designed to blink, like the stars, as the sound of parliamentary debate rises. At a cost of

$400m, no expense was spared.9 Not to be outdone, Belgium has also had a no-expenses-

barred home built in Brussels for the European Parliament’s extra sessions. Caprice des

Dieux—“mood of the gods”—the locals call it, playing on the name of a popular kind of

cheese. When the added costs to the European Parliament of locating itself in three

homes (the General Secretariat remains based in Luxembourg) were estimated by the

9 “Europe: New EU Building Spares No Expense,” BBC, July 20, 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/399112.stm.

Parliament itself to amount to about 15% of its budget,10 Kafka would not have been in

the least bit surprised.

Consider, as well, the honor of winning a soccer tournament. A South Korean player

under contract with the Italian soccer club, Peruggia, scored the goal that eliminated the

Italian national soccer team from the 2002 World Cup Tournament. (During the World

Cup, players return to their native homelands to play for their national teams). When

Peruggia’s owner fired his South Korean player on the spot—“I am a nationalist and I

regard such behavior not only as an affront to Italian pride but also an offence to a

country which two years ago opened its doors to him”—Kafka would again have

understood. The “City Coat of Arms” ends on the note that the songs and legends born of

the workers’ city are filled with the longing for the day when the city will be destroyed

by the great blows of a gigantic fist.

Two Paths Towards A Bitter Carnival

How does the city workers’ longing for the giant fist bring down the fist’s blows

upon them? The city workers hasten the fist either for the sake of Heaven (so to speak)

or for the moments of rapture they feel as the fist’s blows crash down. Each hastening

involves opening the door to a bitter carnival.

10 Lord Moynihan before the British House of Lords, May 21, 1998, http://www.parliament.the-stationary-office.co.uk/pa/ld199798/ldhansard/vo980521/text/80521-12.htm.

Carnivals and utopianism are essentially connected. The impatient utopian

protagonist who is frustrated that the unfolding story isn’t turning out in the way he

anticipates may well try to clear a path for his anticipated end by inverting hierarchies,

thereby turning the recalcitrant current realities topsy-turvy. The fifth chapter of the book

of Isaiah contains these two contiguous warnings: “[Woe to] Those who say, ‘Let Him

hurry, let Him hasten His Action, so that we may see it; let the plan of the Holy One of

Israel Approach and take place, so that we may know it.’ Woe to those who speak of evil

as good and of good as evil; who make darkness into light and light into darkness; they

make bitter into sweet and sweet into bitter.” The genius of the contiguity of these

warnings is that they together convey the single message that carnivals are the by-product

of frustrated utopianism.

Consider, for example, the behavior of Shabbatei Tzvi’s followers. After their hoped-

for messiah converted to Islam in the 1660’s, those Jews who continued to hold out hope

for Tzvi reasoned that his conversion was evidence that the world could not be redeemed

until it had debased itself even further. Amongst themselves they playfully changed the

wording of a phrase in the Standing Prayer referring to God as One who frees the bound,

“Mateer Asoorim,” to “Mateer Eesoorim,” meaning One who permits the impermissible.

Consider, as well, the example of Seeker preacher William Erbery, who pursued a proto-

secular millennium in England at about the same time by insisting that the “people of

God turn wicked men, that wicked men may turn to be the people of God.” As a means

of hastening this end, Erbery charged his flock with the task of being “sober to God but

stark raving mad” with the English Church.

Laughter is amongst the most powerful tools for regenerative leveling (clearing the

way for a new order by tearing down the old one currently in its place). Fools, freaks and

buffoons enjoyed privileged places in royal courts because their laughing view of the

world allowed them to deliver a message of subversion and consolation far too

threatening if launched from more dignified quarters. That which seems so solid today

may be gone tomorrow, their mockery seems to say; that which was in the past may yet

be again. Postmodernism is not modern. The Romans set aside seven days each year for

Saturnalia, during which they temporarily and playfully inverted hierarchies, master

becoming slave and slave becoming master. The word satire comes from “satura,”

meaning mixture.

While it may be true that today one has to travel at certain times of the year to New

Orleans or Rio de Janeiro to observe modern-day carnivals labeled as such, this in no way

means that the carnival’s leveling impulse has become a diminished force. On the

contrary, the impulse has managed to escape its traditional temporal and spatial shackles.

We observe it in the post-modern attack on the notion of culture as a hierarchical

repository of our noblest spiritual and intellectual aspirations, on the idea that a text may

have meaning apart from the meanings that the interpretive community of the moment

wishes it to have. We observe it at the Jewish Museum’s recent exhibition, Mirroring

Evil, which inverted by thoroughly mixing together the categories of victim and

victimizer. What is the significance of Libya’s ascent to the pinnacle of the UN Human

Rights Commission? Only the realization it should provoke in us that there is nothing

new under the sun.

What makes the carnival impulse, unshackled as it has become, potentially

menacing is the violence that perpetually looms in its shadow. In the Golden Bough, Sir

James George Frazer writes of the history of a prologue to Saturnalia practiced in certain

regions of the Roman Empire. One month before the festival, soldiers drew lots. The

selected soldier was dressed in regal garb reminiscent of Saturn and allowed to publicly

indulge his passions, whatever they might be. At the end of the month he was expected

to slit his throat on the altar of the god he was personating.

Last year I was shown an excerpt from a Qatari television program, whose plot

involved an Israeli joint venture with Count Dracula to bottle Palestinian blood under the

label “Dracola.” When the Count became infuriated with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel

Sharon, he bit him on the neck only to die of blood poisoning. At numerous points

watching this I simply could not overcome the urge to laugh, so over the top was the

whole thing. So powerful was the show’s carnival impulse that I found it impossible to

get a sense of just who was the primary object of its mocking derision: Israel, the show’s

absurd looking actors, or its viewers. Yet behind the buffoonery lurked rage. As with the

lucky and then unlucky Roman soldier, what we have here is a spectacle with the specter

of bloodshed lurking on the horizon.

***

Those seeking a more durable clarity than the latest pundit can offer about our current

flirtations with bitter carnival would do well to turn to Dostoevsky’s political novel, The

Devils. They may be surprised to learn that we are not the first to have anticipated a

widely liberal “End of History” or to have engaged in a global struggle against terror. In

the early 1860’s, Tsar Alexander II of Russia freed one-third of Russia’s population from

serfdom with the stroke of a pen, relaxed censorship of the Russian press and instituted

limited self-government. The unanticipated result was a global wave of bombings and

assassinations aimed at people sitting in cafes, theaters and office buildings.

Russian revolutionaries and anarchists of the 1860’s were at the forefront of that

wave. Among these was Sergei Nechaev, whose Catechism of a Revolutionary was a

kind of training manual for would-be bombers the world over. In 1869, Nechaev was

convicted in a sensational trial of murdering a young student and disposing of his body in

a pond. In 1873, Dostoevsky sent a copy of The Devils to Alexander III, the heir to the

Russian throne, along with a letter explaining his reasons for writing it. The novel

amounted to “almost a historical study,” exploring how the Nechaev debacle could take

place in Russia. Dostoevsky placed the ultimate blame for the ensuing carnival on the

country’s liberal visionaries. Though they may have been unaware of it, these visionaries

were the spiritual fathers of Nechaev and his gang. The Devils sketches out the

transmission from father to son.

Stepan Tromfimovich Verkhovensky is the father of the bitter carnival that overtakes

his previously undistinguished little town. A once prominent liberal, Stepan is a man

who in his prominence spoke frequently about “humanity in general.” When accused of

atheism, he defends himself on the grounds that he believes in God, but as a being that is

conscious of Himself only through him. One of Stepan’s early poems culminates in an

image of the Tower of Babel.

If Stepan is the carnival’s instigating cause, his son Peter—at once a loose sketch of

Nachaev and a prescient prefiguring of Stalin—is its orchestrating force. Peter is no

visionary; he treats his revolutionaries with barely disguised disdain, particularly its

utopian dreamers. Rather, as a shrewd and ambitious politician, Peter understands that

the real engine of his carnival must be his “brother” Nikolai Stavrogin.

Stavrogin, Stepan’s former student, lives life as a carnival. Upon returning home to

Russia from a period abroad, he commences a series of what are widely perceived as

“insults on society.” Among these, he takes an elderly liberal who is in the habit of

proclaiming, “No, sir, I won’t be lead around by the nose!,” at his literal word, grabbing

the man by the nostrils and dragging him around the room. Invited in a reconciliatory

gesture by a prominent liberal to a birthday party for his wife, Stavrogin next makes a

public pass at the woman. When called to the provincial governor’s mansion to explain

his behavior, Stavrogin beckons the governor close only to bite down hard on the man’s

ear. (The contemporary reader of the novel may find society’s response to its insult

disturbingly reminiscent. It is decided that the root cause of Stavrogin’s behavior must

have been a brain fever, and the whole town expresses contrition towards him. “You

didn’t expect me to challenge you to a duel, did you?,” asks the man whose wife

Stavrogin made a pass at.)

Why does Stavrogin insult society so? As he later states in a “confession,” written

purely for the titillation of shocking its reader, the purpose of his misbehavior is the

ecstasy of residing in tortured awareness of how far he’s sunk. I can do no better here

than recite Stavrogin’s own words:

It was the same every time I stood at the barrier waiting for my adversary

to fire his shot in a duel; I’d experience the same despicable, savage

sensation…I confess I often sought it out, because I found it stronger than

anything else of that kind. When I got a slap in the face (I’ve had two in

my entire life), this feeling was also present in spite of my terrible anger.

But if one can restrain one’s anger at the time, the rapture exceeds

anything one could possibly imagine.

Here is the fully sketched out portrait of what Kafka hinted at in his parable. Behold the

city worker, the carnival reveling son of a utopian, who hastens the blows of the fist

entirely for their own sake.

While there are undeniably important differences between Dostoevsky’s Russia and

Western Civilization today, there are also some striking similarities. Like the 1860’s, the

1990’s were a time in which “something new was in the air” which no one could quite

get a handle on. General Ivan Ivanovich Drozdov, who was castigated in St. Petersburg

salons simply for being a general, might meet a similar reception in many a Western

European salon today. We too have our carnival revelers. A prominent Columbia

University Professor who uses a keynote address at an academic conference to deliver a

paean to suicide bombing as performance art. A major American novelist who tells a

French newspaper that New York City became interesting to him again after September

11, “because it was a town in crisis.” The effect of all this longing for the great blows of

the giant fist is to create a climate conducive for the fist to come down.

A Plea For Moral Realism

Some today are coming to the conclusion that events in and hatched out of the

Middle East owe a significant “debt” to the West, these events being the continuation of

the gruesome festivities that possessed Europe for a large part of the twentieth century.

While this conclusion seems increasingly credible, we should not infer from it that this

case of possession has ensconced itself in the Levant to the exclusion of the West for the

foreseeable future. Disturbing patterns of thought and behavior of the kind that

Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor would surely have recognized are reinvigorating

themselves in certain European capitals and in universities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Carnival—the flaying of flesh from the bone—has just knocked and many are answering.

We cannot now know whether this carnival-in-the-making has moved too far past

the doors to be pushed back out again. History will judge that on hindsight. If it has,

great energy and effort will be needed (especially in little Israel) to figure out how to

simply get by amidst the rage, malice and buffoonery.

If it has not, we will at the very least be facing a kind of international crisis of

manners. The fictions of “world community,” “human rights” and “international law”

around which people and governments organize their words, never really solid, are now

exposed in all their flimsiness for everyone to see. Out of necessity, ideas will step in to

fill the void. But it would be a tragedy if the door were closed on one bitter carnival only

to open it for another. Hence a plea for moral realism: recognition of the dangers in our

most generous wishes and the fantasying mind that unleashes them.