Realism in Politics Worries People

7/29/2019 Realism in Politics Worries People

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"Realism in politics worries people."An interview with Czech philosopher Vclav Blohradsk

Vclav Blohradsk (b 1944) is one of the leading figures of Czech intellectual life. A graduate in philosophyand Czech from Charles University, Prague, he has lived in Italy since 1970, where he is currently Professorof Political Sociology at the University of Trieste. Cited as an intellectual influence by Vclav Havel in themid-1980s, he was later one of the first Central European thinkers to examine the consequences of the"post-modern turn" for the region. After 1989, he was supportive of then Prime Minister Vclav Klaus and hiscentre-right Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and often critical of the views of the new Czech President, VclavHavel. More recently, he has taken critical stances on globalisation, NATO, intervention in Kosovo and therole of the USA in the post-Cold War world.

To jump to individual thematic sections of interest in the interview, click on the correspondingsubject heading:

CzechsCentral EuropePost-modernism

LiberalismThe Left

Czechs

Central Europe Review: When we suggested talking to you, some Czech contributors to Central EuropeReviewwere scandalised. They protested that you were personally responsible for the "absolute relativisationof values" in the Czech Republic. Why do you think so many Czech intellectuals find you and your views socontroversial and unacceptable?

Vclav Blohradsk: The Czech discourse on "values, culture and morality" - what the novelist KarelPolek rather untranslatably used to term avnnm - compensates for the political failure of the Czech

nation. Here, I don't mean only the individual failures in the particular historical circumstances in 1938, 1939,1945, 1948, 1956 or 1968, or the break-up of Czechoslovakia after the 1992 election, or the whole secondhalf of the 1990s, when instead of building a democratic state, an arrogant new political andeconomicnomenklatura started to form in the Czech Republic, seizing immoral privileges for itself (take, forexample, the multi-million crown salaries of the heads of Komern banka, a badly managed, state-subsidised dinosaur).

What I have in mind is the failure of the Czech nation in its relationship with politics generally, with politics asthe constitutive dimension of Modernity. In their modern (and also their more ancient) history the Czechs didnot succeed in becoming a political nation, and it is already too late now for them to do so. In our nationalhistory, politics was always "a matter for those foreigners in Vienna" (or Berlin, or Moscow). Czechs replacedit with [President of the First Czechoslovak Republic Tom Garrigue] Masaryk's gradualistic conception ofemancipation through "cultivation of the mind of nation" based on "small-scale work," with Sokol gymnastic

displays, poems, "moral truth" and "true values." Jaroslav Haek, the celebrated author ofThe Good Soldiervejk, described the enthusiasm of the Sokol movement in Prague thus:

on the first day we were selling portions of roast pork for 1 crown 40, but when Wenceslas Square had beenbrightened up by huge, diverse crowds, we sold portions of pork for 3 crowns.

A well-deserved demystifying look at Czech political culture.

In the first days of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, in March 1939, instead of encouraging thenation to resist the invasion in some way, radio stations called on Czechs to "impress the Germans with theircivilised character as an ancient and cultured European nation," what is referred to in German as a"Kulturnation." This substitution of culture andavnnabout the values of a cultured nation for politics,

typical of the period of the Czech National Revival, caused the political culture in Czechoslovakia to beincurably intoxicated with moralising hypocrisy, kitschness, narcissism and sectarianism, something mainlycharacteristic of
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the professional intellectual and literary milieu. Instead of a defence ofCzechoslovakia's democratic state in 1938, there were kitsch poems with lines suchas "Tonight Wenceslas's steed stirred and the prince weighed up his lance." Insteadof the defence of democracy after the Second World War, there was thenationalisation of film studios and the expulsion of the Germans, the moral failure ofwriters in the 1950s - a vast failure with irreversible consequences. And after 1968,

there was the massively successful process of "normalisation" based upon theradical depoliticisation of national life.

What made Czechoslovak Communism so repulsive, in my view, was that it was saturated with the special,abstract extremism of literary and intellectual sects. Think of the surrealists and their mania for expellingeach other, for example. When practically on his deathbed, the Communist poet Stanislav Kosta Neumann,who was a moral authority for all Czech Communist intellectuals, horrified the poet Jaroslav Seifert by askingif they had managed to hang Ferdinand Peroutka, the founder of the liberal-democratic review Ptomnost,who had spent the whole of the Second World War as a prisoner of the Gestapo in the Buchenwaldconcentration camp.

CER: Such historical examples of the strong romantic, anti-political vein in Czech political thinking - even, orperhaps particularly, within Czechoslovak Communism - are very interesting. But how do they relate to the

rather rough reception you received in the Czech lands after 1989 as a "relativiser of values"?

Blohradsk: When set against the background of the political history of the Czech nation, to say that"values have been absolutely relativised" in the Czech lands after 1989 - the term absolute relativisation isan interesting paradox, by the way - is monstrously cynical. You just have to read Jiri vejda'snovel Moloch from the mid-1980s, which describes the ruthless and disrespectful greed of people during the"normalisation" period to rid yourself of any illusions about "pre-1989 values." I think this false consciousnessis a product of films sucha as Vesniko m stediskov. The film celebrates "values standing above politics,"valid in any era, and even includes some allusions to ecology (!).

Naturally however, this standing above politics is a fraud. In reality, public life is being depoliticised and afalse notion is spread that what really matters in our life is placed "above" politics. However, "the use of

chemicals in agriculture," against which the maverick country doctor played in the film by Rudolf Hrunsk isprotesting, is a political matter. It is my firm conviction that the first step towards democracy in the CzechRepublic should be the absolute relativisation of "values standing above politics," which merely serve tomask the failure of the Czechs in relation to politics as such.

One of the leaders of the revolt of the 1960s in Italy, Mario Capanna, has summarised the message of thatperiod thus: "everything is politics, nothing is politically neutral." Well, I hate summarising, but this onesummary I agree with. The far-reaching message of the post-modern condition is, I believe, this pervasivepoliticisation of all aspects of human/non-human life: there are at present global and local politics of Truth, ofbody, of mind, a politics of moral consciousness, a politics of the Genome and of the Environment, and evena politics of "fair Motherhood" - I am referring here to issues raised by the impact of the new "technology ofheterological conception (conception outside a traditional family)" recently discussed in the ItalianParliament.

CER: What alternative view of politics were you trying to promote?

Blohradsk: From the early 1990s, in radical opposition to the traditional "anti-political" Czech discoursefounded on a dichotomy between "decent people" and "politicians," or "civil society" and "parties," I sought topromote "political realism." This expression does not mean that the end justifies the means in politics, as it iscommonly interpreted, or that interests of state - the baroque "Ragione di Stato" - stand outside good andevil. Political realism means first and foremost an "existential" acceptance of one tragic dimension ofmodernity: the irreducible pluralism of values. Modern individualism is a struggle for emancipation from thesacred authorities of the past; people are becoming more and more different from each another but, at thesame time, ever more dependent on each another. This is a consequence of the division of labour andglobalisation, which has since the onset of the Industrial Revolution been the pivotal civilizational process

conceptualised by the founders of modern sociological discourse, such as Marx, Smith, Durkheim, Weber,Simmel or Toennies.

the Czechs didnot succeed in

becoming apolitical nation,and it is too late

now for them todo so


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Every individual has a right to his or her values, but there are more and more values, and they contradict oneanother; and yet, despite that, each of them seeks to be the supreme value, to exercise a monopoly. Liberaldemocracy has found a solution to this tragic "human condition" - this solution is institutionalised "freedom ofopinion." Doxa, opinio, opinion is one of liberalism's great words. People voluntarily reduce their convictionsto mere "opinio," mere opinion, and no longer have to kill in the name of their convictions. Hobbes's famous(and for Christian tradition scandalous) formulation of what we call "political realism" -Auctoritas non veritas

facit legem - means simply that in the conditions of irriducible (religious) plurality political power must befounded not on the possession of Truth but on a "consensus about the general utility of the State."

The holder of an opinion is always more valuable and interesting than the opinion itself - this is a foundingprinciple of liberal democracy, the core of "sympathy" as the basis of ethics of which Hume and Smith wrote.Even the Catholic Church has - albeit hesitantly and incompletely - finally accepted the reduction of religiousfaith to mere "opinio" in exchange for its being accepted into the democratic community.

CER: This does seem a radical break with the a major aspect of the Czech intellectual tradition, which hasusually stressed notions such as "truth will prevail" or, more recently "living in truth"...

Blohradsk: "Truth" as a category assumes that there exists some state of knowledge in which otherpeople are superfluous: anyone who knows the truth doesn't need other people, as the quality of his choiceis already "metaphysically" guaranteed. Democracy, by contrast, is based on the conviction that there existsno state in the system in which the opinion of other people is superfluous. Politicians always makesdecisions on the basis of mere opinions, but often they must decide absolutely, as was the case withPresident Bene in 1938 or President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.The situation of modern people is a tragic one, because both the pluralism ofopinion and the political necessity of choosing between alternatives with

irreversible consequences are increasing rapidly. And, it must be remembered, theplurality of values is itself a great and generally shared value.

Take the issue of whether to complete the Temeln nuclear power plant, forexample. We chose to have nuclear power plants and there is no way back. It will

never be possible to turn them off, and their consequences will remain with us forthousands of years. Or to put it another way, in a democratic society we have to make decisions about anever greater number of things, to choose between ever more complicated alternatives, but we never haveunequivocal, unquestionable reasons for our decisions.

A dialogue between values never ends. Works of art, with their special truth, never fade away. Religiousbelievers look at the world from the standpoint of eternity; but a politician has to decide today. Politicalrealism means having a sense of the finite time of decision-making. The Pope says "think of the needs of thesick" and allows his hands to be kissed, but politicians must make decisions about how hospitals arefinanced in the here and now. Politicians have to make decisions despite not knowing today which method offinancing is the most correct one, because they have only inadequate information and experience. However,they cannot postpone their decision until they have all the information gathered, until such time as they are"in possession of the truth," and the views of other people are superfluous. In a democracy such a time willnever come.

CER: How does a fixation with values and truth relate to the problem of the "political nation" and the Czechs'failure to become one? After all, in Czechoslovakia in 1918, Czechs did create a national state and nationalpolitical institutions. Czech politicians have made momentous decisions. You mention President Bene'sdecision in 1938 to accept the Munich Agreement, for example...

Blohradsk: A political nation emerges at the moment when the tension between the realistic political time- the time within which we have to make decisions - and the unrealistic, infinite time of art, values, faith ormorality is legitimately resolved. It is unrealistic, and hence immoral, to delegitimise politics by constantlymaking reference to an unending dialogue between values, a dialogue in which one person will in the futurebe in possession of the truth and everybody else will be redundant; this is something a politician must reject

as an unrealistic concept of "historical time."

Realism in politics worries people, and they seek refuge from it in an infinite (and thus irresponsible)discourse about eternal values. The final stop on this escape route is totalitarianism, which elevates the

religiousbelievers look at

the world from thestandpoint ofeternity; but a

politician has todecide today


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single truth of the victor above the inconsistent, and thus contradictory, condition of pluralism - the new era ofCommunism, the Thousand Year Reich and so on. People want to be liberated from the dramatic time ofdecision-making and are thus often willing to hand all power to someone such as Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin,or to scientists and experts, who, they cravenly believe, has the truth; that way at least they can shirk theresponsibility of making a choice between contradictory alternatives.

Public space in the Czech Republic is governed by a hypocritical moralism against which I have tried tospeak out. For example, I consider hypocritical the behaviour of charitable foundations working for the "goodof others" - by, say, raising funds to help disabled people - who act as if what they are doing is the one andonly correct policy. They should involve themselves without looking down censoriously at politicians,because politics cannot be replaced by raising funds to buy wheelchairs for the disabled. The values of thesefoundations would quickly dissolve into conflicts between representatives of various legitimate interestsbetween which politics has to seek a reasonable compromise. Solidarity with vulnerable people shouldalways be a "civic" activity which does not seek to substitute itself for politics.

Czech rhetoric, compensating for its lack of political realism with a lyrical exaltation that "we have the truthand the values we profess are not relative," is an instrument of the rule of kitsch, which Kundera soimmortally described in his most universal (and hence most Czech) novel Life is Elsewhere. The book wasoriginally to have been called The Age of Lyricism. And indeed it seems the age of lyricism is something the

Czech nation has never grown out of.

To sum up, in the Czech context talking about "values and truth" compensates for what is today an alreadyirretrievable failure of our nation: an inability to integrate the relative and contradictory nature of values intoour national life as the key dimension of modernity, and thus an inability to become a political nation. What Ihave always hated most in this country is the wide-eyed expressions of those who excused theircollaboration

with oppressive political authorities with the words "I believed in it." The reduction offaith to mere relative opinion - for sake of which you have no right to discriminateagainst or oppress your fellow citizens - is a prerequisite of modern ethics.Czechoslovak Communism was the culmination of the substitution of lyrical

moralism for political realism: in the eyes of Czechoslovak Communist intellectuals, their political opponentswere not "representatives of different legitimate interests" but moral and cultural monsters, whom it wasmorally right to hang.

CER: Do you really see a politics based on moral values as inherently dangerous? I understand, of course,that there are gradations to your argument, but I think many of our readers will be surprised, perhaps even alittle shocked, that you can place 19th century liberal nationalism, Stalinist lyric poetry and charitablefoundations in today's Czech Republic on a continuum simply because they share a belief in some form oftranscendent values.

Blohradsk: What I call the "Czech style of political discourse" is deeply rooted in our national history. Thearchaeologist Petr Charvat, for example, maintains that archaeological research shows that, on the onehand, "feeble and frail social stratification," and, on the another hand, "ideological conflictuality" were alreadykey characteristics of the Czech state in the 9th century. Naturally, power which is not legitimated by strongsocial stratification must be legitimated ideologically. A moral discourse compensates for "frail socialstratification." To sum up, these two characteristics, conflated in various ways, have generated the modernCzech anti-political or politically unrealistic discourse. This discourse is a sort of curse of all CentralEuropean (and German) political culture, but we don't have time to analyse the historical context of the Cultof Antipolitics, in, for example, the Austrian empire in greater detail.

But let's talk about values a little more. A value does not describe what is but dictates what should be. Howstrong can this diktatbe? What can everything be in order that a value should be or can apply? How muchviolence against other people, to put things realistically, can a value demand? Violence is legitimate insofaras it is dictated by some great value, but how great? Max Weber distinguishesbetween an ethics of responsibility

and an ethics of conviction. Every person decides between their conviction thatcertain values are superior to others and their responsibilities to other people forthe costs of implementing those values. Are there values so great that we may

realism in politicsworries people

there exist no

truthfulboundaries; theyhave all been

decided on thebasis of 'opinionsof relative validity'


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promote their validity at any cost - at, say, the cost of nuclear war? There is no escape from this dilemma,and the greatness of a politician is that he does not seek such an escape but takes responsibility for his orher decisions. He does not say "orders are orders" or "laws must be obeyed" but "these are my orders."

The utopia of the West is to deduce "what should be" from "what is," that is, to found ethics on knowledge.What is dictated by a certain historical group, the rich industrial nations, is supposed to be the dictate of

reason - something against which no one has the right to protest. The idea of NATO as an instrument for theuniversal imposition of "human rights" and hence of "ethical wars" shows how this utopia works in reality.

In one of Karel apek's famousApocryphal Tales, Pilate compares truth to a landscape which we might findunfamiliar but which cannot be incorrect. Understanding that every truth belongs to a landscape in which it isuseful - it might overshadow something, unify it, bridge it or act as a short cut - is the first prerequisite ofdemocracy. The Italian philosopher Vattimo speaks of "hermeneutics" or the "art of interpretation" asthe koin of democracy: to interpret means to plant our utterances in a verbal landscape in which they fit in.Politics has its own unforgiving imperative: truths shift their ground, bulldoze the landscapes from which theyemerged, the boundaries between landscapes have to be redefined, their proximity and hierarchies have tobe decided upon. And there exist no truthful boundaries; they have all been decided by us merely on thebasis of "opinions of relative validity."

Central Europe

CER: If we could turn to a slightly different theme. The term "Central Europe" is widely used today, but until1989 it was employed very little outside the region itself. The British historian Timothy Garton Ash even wrotean essay called "Does Central Europe exist?". You have written a number of essays and articles on theexperience of Central Europe. How would you answer this question - does Central Europe exist?

Blohradsk: The concept of "Central Europe" gained world-wide recognition thanks to Milan Kundera. He

used it to fight against the arrogance and lazy narrow-mindedness of Western readers who placed Kundera'sworks in "Eastern Europe" and read them "politically" as an account of life "behind the Iron Curtain underCommunism." Eastern Europe is merely a military concept and has no historical legitimacy, Kundera toldthese lazy Western readers. Russia exists with its demons and its great literature, and Central Europe existsalso with its officialdom and its multi-national culture, a culture only a philistine could break from its historicalcontext and reduce to a mere "testimony of life under Communism."

Kundera was thus struggling against the conceited and arbitrary way in which powerful Western publisherscut down any text "from over there" to fit the mental horizons of the limited Western reader. The first Spanishedition of

the novelLife is Elsewhere, for example, was rewritten in a flowery style by someveteran poet, because the publisher said to himself - it's about a poet, so it has to be

flowery. In the first English edition ofThe Joke, too, the order of the chapters wasmodified so that all the characters were together; Western readers weren't interestedin the complexity of Kundera's composition. Even the first French edition ofTheJoke was arbitrarily rewritten in a redundant baroque style considered "more proper"by the translator. After all, it wasn't literature but a record of life "over there."

In one of his lectures on the literature of exile, Petr Blek analysed the workings ofthe process by which the unfamiliar context of a work of literature is mediated forWestern literary consumers; the American publisher of Ludvik Vaculk's The GuineaPigs supplied the book with a quite false sleeve note, stating that the author had

been sacked from the newspaper where he worked on 21st August 1968, for example. The egocentricconceit of the West was (and still is) offensive, and Milan Kundera successfully fought it with the concept of"Central Europe." The undoubted persuasiveness of the concept did force Western readers to redefine intheir own minds the context of a whole number of works from the imaginary "Eastern Europe" to thehistorically real Central Europe of Kafka, Freud, Wittgenstein, Broch, Musil and Haek.

the egocentric

conceit of theWest was

offensive, andMilan Kunderasuccessfully

fought it with theconcept of

"Central Europe"


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Kundera's inventive piece of counter-mystification was successful for three reasons. Firstly, it struck a chordwith a prevailing mood in the Europe of the late 1970s and the 1980s, when Europeans sensed that thecutting of cities such as Prague and Budapest out of the context of European unification was a scandal forEuropean historical consciousness, a scandal which was threatening their moral credibility. Secondly,Central European, mainly Viennese, modernism exercised a powerful fascination, because, unlike the avant-garde, it anticipated the great themes of the post-modern turn: the fragmentation of traditions, the turn

towards language, the turning away from the cult of history. And thirdly, interest in Austria-Hungary, as themodel of a supra-national state whose demise was highly instructive, played a great role.

CER:Do you think this historic Hapsburg legacy in Central Europe is still politically relevant today?

Blohradsk: As a political concept, Central Europe is an opportunity missed forever, mainly because ofGerman-speaking Austrians who, as Josef Roth put it in his novel The Capuchin Crypt, sang "Wacht amRhein" instead of the Austrian anthem "O Lord Preserve Our Emperor." They wanted to be part of a powerfulGerman Empire, rather than citizens of a supra-national Austria, that Danubian monarchy which was only anunstable collection of European peripheries. This can be seen from the street names of Sudeten Germantowns at the end of the last century as well as from the ill-fated results of all the attempts to democratise andfederalise Austria and grant the languages of its nations equal rights.

The idea of the Austrian state as a "close union of small Danubian nations" that the 19th-century Czechstatesman Frantiek Palack wrote of could never be politically realised, because of the will to power of theGermans and Hungarians; although, I would immediately add, the Czechs also bear a great deal of theblame. They did not fight determinedly or consistently for their political independence but instead wrotepoems, "were in possession of the truth" and organised balls. The non-political character of the Czechs, theirinadequate sense of the state, was a direct cause of Austro-Hungarian dualism, that is, of the imbalancebetween the nations of Austria and thus of the final end of any hope of federalising Austria.

CER: What about Central Europe as metaphor? You used the word "instructive." What is philosophical orhistorically instructive about the demise of the old Mitteleuropa?

Blohradsk: In the late 1970s in Italy, and in the 1980s at Kundera's seminars in Paris, I interpreted

Central Europe as a place where people underwent an existential experience of great historical importancefor modern Europe, an experience whose fateful meaning Central European literature and philosophysensed with exceptional perspicacity. The whole of

Central European literature and philosophy analyses the absurdity that theimpersonal language of legality and legal clauses injects into people's lives - theabstract necessity contained in official procedure and the unrelenting strictness ofthe bureaucrat which the Austrian state elevated into a sort of new secular religion.In doing so, it was seeking to preserve its unity in an era dominated by the demonsof nationalism.

Everyday life in Austria was suffused by the impersonal language of the law and by a bureaucratic ethos like

that of no other country in Europe. The reduction of legitimacy to legality was seen as a categorical civicimperative. In the thin, abstract ether of the Law, as Doderer wrote, the ambiguity of the life world was putinto uniform and subordinated to the relentless coherency of official procedure and the absolute command ofthe Office.

Kafka summed up this hegemony of bureaucratic necessity in Joseph K's dialogue with the doormanguarding the entrance to the Law: "You don't have to consider everything to be true but to be necessary,"says the doorman. "The Lie is thus becoming ruler of the world," replies Joseph K.

Indeed, any impersonal necessity is a lie tearing us away from our real life chances, whether it be thenecessity of economic growth, globalisation, the expansion of NATO or scientific progress. These chanceswill never return. They were historical and thus only appeared once on the horizons of our life worlds. Truthis always an experience about alternatives, about other possibilities. Asking questions only has meaning

when, within ourselves, we allow for the possibility of different answers. Are we really allowing for thepossibility of different answers when we ask if globalisation is necessary today?

all that remains ofCentral Europe

today is merely apowerful

intellectual aurafrom old Vienna


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The Central European critique of the flight to necessity is still very much alive. It anticipates the post-modernrejection of the neutrality of science and law: nothing is neutral, all measurement serves some form ofPower, every law denies something, separates someone from someone, or something from something,orders someone to do something, or gives something to someone.

CER: In 1991, in a column you wrote for the Mlad fronta Dnes newspaper, you asked an interesting

rhetorical question: would it be possible for the post-Communist democracies of Central Europe to make a"Leninist leap" over the era of consumerism that Western Europe experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. Howwould you answer this question today?

Blohradsk: The contemporary Czech poet and philosopher Ji Grua, who spent many years in exile,once wrote that human experience in Communist countries was one of the anti-entropic centres of our age.In these countries people tasted modernity in its decisive and most pervasive form. Despite all its violence,Communism contained great emancipatory force. It brought social equality, the mass expansion of educationand a reduction of

the intensity of the struggle for survival. Its main goals were the same as those ofcapitalism - prosperity and the scientific management of society.

One of the founders of Charter 77, the philosopher Jan Patoka pointed out to memany times - as part of a polemic with my liberalism - that despite all the absurdity ofthe Communist present, we should not forget that it was a system that had emergedfrom the spirit of Western philosophy. Lenin was right when he defined classicalGerman philosophy, Scottish economics and French utopian socialism as the "threesources and components of Marxism." The crisis of Communism is to a great extentthe crisis of modernity generally. Havel wrote in the Power of the Powerless thatCommunism was only a "convex mirror of the inner direction of Western modernity";and this, I should add, was a sentence my students adored.

CER: Yes, I remember reading those lines myself as a student in England in the 1980s and being astonishedand fascinated by them....

Blohradsk: Communism offered us the opportunity to leap over a certain phase of Western capitalism,but it was an opportunity which we did not manage to take. [first post-1989 Prime Minister] Vclav Klaus, forexample, dreamt that we would be able to leap over European corporatism - the power of professionalorganisations posing a threat to democracy and a skein of abstract, initiative-stifling legal regulationsadministered by a rapidly self-enriching lobby of lawyers - but we did not manage this. In the article you referto, I also say that without experiencing the ephemeral and chaotic character of the consumer society, we willbe unable to redefine democracy "post-modernistically." The affluent society or post-industrial consumerismhas its historical role - it dissolves the metaphysical foundation of the society and to this extent is anemancipating force.

In the Czech lands today a "winners of the Cold War" discourse prevails according to which Communism

was a criminal system over which NATO, under the heroic leadership of big chief Ronald Reagan, emergedvictorious. This is a shameful lie. The bi-polar world was based on a pact which was mutually beneficial toboth sides. Post-Communist Czech journalism has taken up this "winners of the Cold War" discourse and indoing so has reduced our experience of Communism to mere "moral devastation," as our CzechMcCarthyists put it. The discourse that has been taken up by most of the nation, as can be seen from themassive success of the recently released Czech film Pelky(Cosy Dens), which is an arrant mystification ofthe past. We have definitively stopped being an "anti-entropic centre," to the detriment of everybody I'd say.

Post-modernism

CER: In the columns you wrote forMlad fronta Dnes in the 1990s you introduced notions of post-modernityvery directly into a Czech context. People from Western Europe and North America often see Central Europeas relatively backward in comparison with their own post-modern, fragmented, multi-cultural societies. Do

post-CommunistCzech journalism

reduced ourexperience of

Communism tomere "moral

devastation," asour Czech

McCarthyists putit


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you really think ideas of post-modernity are relevant to the region? In what sense are Czechs or otherCentral Europeans "post-modern"?

Blohradsk: Let's recall first of all that the prefix "post" had been closely linked with Communism since thelate 1950s, when Daniel Bell invented the idea of "post-industrial society." Post-industrial society was apolitical myth which significantly redefined the post-war world: it persuasively introduced the idea that there

was a discontinuity between industrial society and post-industrial society. Consequently, post-industrialsociety could not be interpreted using ideological categories such as the proletariat, the capitalists, thestruggle between capital and labour, that is, using the vocabulary of Marxism. The basic productive forces ofpost-industrial society were science and education and thus the most productive investment was investmentin people and their specific qualities - qualities such as inventiveness, independence and creativity.

Communism was supposed to "humanise" itself, because oppression did not pay economically, and only freepeople could make a contribution to the development of the system. The 1960s were suffused from top tobottom by this myth of discontinuity, which was the ideological justification of the "convergence of all politicalsystems around a new and increasingly more human form of modernity" spoken of in the Kennedy andKhrushchev era. There is undoubtedly a hidden connection between the adjectives "post-modern" and "post-industrial": the common idea of discontinuity in the history of industrial society.

CER: There are many competing definitions of post-modernity and the post-modern. Could you perhaps justclarify how you understand the term?

Blohradsk: The German sceptical thinker Odo Marquard introduced theexpression Kompenzationsprinzip into contemporary philosophy, an expression he used to denote a keyneed felt by modern people: the need somehow to compensate for the consequences of progress, innovationand a growing mobility and communication, which are devaluing the standpoints of the past into merehistorical prejudices at breakneck speed. Modernity is faith in the coming of a new, more rational world, butone in which past experience is just an obstacle, dead because present is radically different from past andtime is not cyclical but linear.

Western philosophy has a special concept for this gulf between past and present: "actuality." It uses the term

to describe any force whose actions separate present time from past time and give it new meaning: science,technology, the market, the Marxist discovery of the final meaning of human history. Kant created a model ofphilosophy of actuality in his article "What is the Enlightenment?". In the article he defined actuality asovercoming the dependency we have caused ourselves, as "man becoming master over himself." KarlLwith has shown that faith in "actuality" is nothing more than the secularisation of Christian hope. However,Christian hope was addressed not to the history of this world; it located the meaning of life "beyond" it, in thehistory of salvation or the "other world."

Modernity, by contrast, projects the eschaton, the happy ending, final meaning or salvation into the history ofthis world. It is from this source that the idea of socialism drew its epoch-making energy and pathos. Thisidea was the great religion of modernity, as we can still sense in the writings of Masaryk. It was the history ofthis world which would bring the righting of all wrongs and within which a "New Man" would be formed; thishope is the source of the modern "effervescence," the sweeping enthusiasm that Durkheim speaks of in hissociology of religion.

For Marquard, for example, the "human sciences" are compensation for lost traditions: the radical-Marxistrevolts of the 1960s in Germany are sons' compensation for their parents' obedience and failure to rise upagainst Nazism in the 1930s; Habermas's "discursive ethics" is compensation for the disintegration ofhierarchies in post-industrial society and society's lack of transparency. In this Marquardian spirit, I conceiveof the whole of the human subjectivity originating with Descartes as compensation for heliocentrism: theEarth was no longer the centre of the cosmos, man was lost in infinity, but the maxim "I think therefore I am"rescued everything. Once again, it was necessary to start from man, from his thought and perceptions of theworld. Man might be a reed in the cosmos but he was a "thinking reed," as Pascal's most famous reflectionhas it.

Man's supreme form of compensation for having to live in a world defined by science, a world in which hewas a mere reed, was Communism. Human labour, taken as "practical proof" that Man-the-Thinker waschanging the world, was venerated; the real history of humanity began with Marxism, the end of alienation,history as a sweeping narrative of human subjectivity, of "the


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active side," of a new world in which Man created himself through his own labour.Communism pulled nature deep into human history and elevated human labourinto a force for salvation. I well remember the repercussions of this in the rituals ofCzechoslovakia in the 1950s. In his Building of a State, Masaryk rightly sensed the"titanism" of German philosophy, its enormous compensatory function.Totalitarianism is only an extreme form of this titanism, of the need to compensate

for Man's being lost in the cosmos.

The question which still haunts me is this: are consumerism, globalisation and other religions of Growth onlya functional substitute for Communism and thus necessarily developing into a totalitarian forms of Power? Istotalitarianism not already present in this need for compensation? My answer is yes.

CER: This notion of Big Ideas of the modern world as a rather worthless form of compensation is fascinating,but I'm not sure it amounts to a definition of post-modernity...

Post-modernity is a phenomenon which is not easily definable. In an article entitled "Post modernity andPost-Communism" (European Review, January 1998), Segedy-Maszk defines post-modern culture asintertextuality, the notion of a work of art as a network of references to other artefacts, and of the artist'sposition as writing "for society," as opposed to the modern artist writing "against society." These are certainlyconstitutive elements of the post-modern style, but nevertheless, I prefer to define post-modernity morephilosophically: it is an era in which people are freeing themselves from the need to be compensated forhaving to live lost in the infinite cosmos constituted by science; they free themselves from the need to "be thesubject," a select being in whose history - a history conceived as a process of self-discovery - somethingabsolutely different is happening from what occurs in the lives of all other living beings on Earth. A post-modern person releases nature from his history and accepts his status as one living being on Earth,becoming a patriot of planet Gaia as a whole.

In this sense, post-modernity is the culmination of the process of secularisation. I am indeed a reed in thecosmos, but I share this position with all living beings in the cosmos, feel a sense of solidarity with theirmortal existence and am not trying to escape from it into an eternal world of ideas. You must know theconclusion of Foucault's Les mots et les choses: Man is a recent discovery and became the main problem of

philosophy in the last three centuries, because of a certain organisation of knowledge and the working ofcertain methodologies and apparatuses; when these methodologies and apparatuses are replaced, Mandisappears from philosophy like "waves washing away a face drawn on the seashore." I think that the Manwho compensated for his cosmic insignificance by defining himself as the "subject" is starting to disappear;the waves of a new ecological sensibility, a new solidarity among the living beings on Earth, is slowly erasingthe cruel, selfish, grimacing face forced upon us "in the interests of humanity" by the apparatuses promotingthe growth of Growth.

CER: A theme that concerns many writers on post-modernity is the fragmentation of social identities. Sincethe mid-1990s, you yourself have written of the breaking down of shared identities into a large number of "in-between worlds" (mezisvty). What are the consequences of this for a region such as Central Europe?

Blohradsk: As I've said, what was strong in Central European culture has been transfused into post-modern culture: Wittgenstein, Freud, Gdel, Musil, Broch, Haek or the Prague Linguistic Circle. All thatremains of Central Europe today is merely a powerful intellectual aura from old Vienna, but no sense of livingconnection or a common fate among nations. Czechs know very little about Hungary, we are starting toignore the Slovaks, and who amongst us knows anything about contemporary Polish philosophy?

However, I'd like to say a few words about the expression "intermundia" or in-between worlds, which I useoften. This was the expression the Latin poets used to denote the spaces between worlds where cold windsblew and where only gods dwelt. I use the word to mean the worlds, which produce the democratic publicspace of the West. In these worlds a

fundamental role is played by "literature," eccentric descriptions of the world, amixture of different genres whose overall effect is to subvert objective and official

versions of the world.

Public space is governed by a "polylogy," a multiplicity of vocabularies, canons andlanguages which are not hierarchically arranged from top to bottom, none of them

Are consumerism,globalisation andother religions of

Growth only afunctional

substitute forCommunism?

feudal orcommunist public

space wasmetaphysical,

magnificent andmonumental;

democratic publicspace is farcical,anti-monumental


10/17

exercises any hegemony; they are in a state of constant competition and tension. For every version of theworld there exists a counter-version, for every universe there exists a "diverse." I like Bakhtin's thesis,according to which this polylogy is a Roman heritage: this sense of "diversum" has been imposed on us bythe power of Latin culture.

Consequently, democracy is based not only on the Roman notion of "ratio" and of "lex," but also on that of

"risus," on "laughter," the most proper product of the different "diversa," or counter-versions of the universe.Feudal or Communist public space was metaphysical, magnificent and monumental, its product was a"hinter-world," for example, a Communist paradise visible on the horizon. Democratic public space is farcical,anti-monumental, it forces us to see the landscapes of our utterances and thrusts us into a windswept "in-between world," where meaning is not guaranteed or assured by anything beforehand.

Speech is a "medium," because it does not belong to anyone but is something between us. In thecompetition between vocabularies, genres and languages, the boundaries between our landscapes ofutterance collapse. We have to think up new connections for the landscapes in which we plant our truths. Weknow that Western universalism brought massacres and the Inquisition, because we made the interest ofone historical "us" into the "interests of humanity." I think, nevertheless, that "polylogy" and its historicalproduct - living in "in-between worlds" - is the genuinely universal feature of the West. Anyone who hasencountered it can no longer return to the innocence of monologue, to one single, immaculate version of the

world. He is incurably infected by the Latin tradition of "risus," of farce, of the laughter that such MagnificientMonologues provoke. But can free public space subvert the current hegemony of theglobalisation nomenklatura and its Magnificient Monologues?

Liberalism

CER: Politically you are a right-wing liberal. At the same time, however, you often warn against the dangersof globalisation and consumerism. How do you explain these apparent contradictions?

Blohradsk: I certainly am not a right-wing liberal. I should remind you of the 1960s, when the pastoralpower concentrated in the welfare state reached its peak. Freedom was draining away. Currency lawsallowed the English, whose free institutions liberals hold sacred, to exchange only 80 pounds a year andItalians to exchange about 800,000 lira, roughly 600 marks. I remember vainly trying to change pounds intofrancs in London, something foreigners were forbidden to do by one of more than 100 currency regulations. Ialso remember that the day after Mrs Thatcher came to power, these humiliating regulations disappeared.

CER: We obviously have very different experiences of Britain in the 1970s, which I remember as a time ofrelative security and prosperity. I do, however, recall having similar experiences in a bank in Czechoslovakiain the early 1990s. Such currency control regulations are irritating, of course, but are used by a variety ofgovernments in a variety of contexts. I don't necessarily see any close connection with the welfare state...

Blohradsk: Naturally, I do not claim any privileged value for my perception of Britain in the 1970s.Anyway, what emerged more and more clearly at that time, and also emerged at the level of massperception, as the sweeping electoral success of Mrs Thatcher confirmed, was that the welfare state was aparalysing structure of sectional and corporative interests: trade unions, bureaucrats, the pharmaceuticalindustry, politicians, hospitals and public sector employees. The state was starting to become like deTocqueville's shepherd, herding his flocks onto pre-designated pastures. I was instinctively opposed to this"caring" state and to the pastoral power concealed within it. It is certainly no coincidence that Michel Foucaultbegan his critique of "care" as the most dangerous (terminal) form of Western power after experience of theSwedish welfare state.

CER: To return to your earlier answer, if yours is not a right-wing liberalism, how would you define it?

Blohradsk: My liberalism has always been a critique of Foucaultian pastoral power and caring institutions.In his epoch-making reflections about the Subject, Foucault shows that the left-wing interpretation of modernhistory as Man-the-Subject fighting for his own authenticity against the state, capital and false consciousness


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is itself a form of false consciousness. In reality, our subjectivity, what we consider to be our authentic"selves," is the product of technologies of power incorporated in the modern state.

Real emancipation presupposes that we will be able to find the courage to reject not onlythe totalitarian tendencies of capital and the modern state but also the subjectivity in whosename we are fighting against them.

Our "selves," the way in which we see ourselves and wish to see ourselves, have been forced upon us bythe pastoral power which the modern state has developed from older Christian practices, such asconfession, the profession of the creed, listening to the voice of conscience, submitting to the authority of thefather and so forth. Today, when our interest in ourselves is clearly managed and manipulated by that mostaggressive form of pastoral power - advertising - and when the phrase "Know Yourself" is an advertisingslogan for underwear, Foucault's rejection of "authenticity" is extraordinarily actual.

To repeat the point: my liberalism has been above all an opposition to the opposition represented by the Leftin the 1970s: the Left was seeking to take up this pastoral power and to wield it in order to emancipatepeople. But pastoral power is the greatest danger for people's freedom regardless of who wields it.

In Italy, I become familar with a particularly insidious form of pastoral power, that theorised by AntonioGramsci. The historical role of what Gramsci rather sinisterly calls "intellettuale organico" is to implement atotalitarian politics whose two constitutive features are the following: firstly, to organise a new type of masspolitical party - the Communist Party - in such a way that members of this party would find within it allgratifications and experiences they previously found in a plurality of organisations; secondly, that theCommunist party should progressively encapsulate and integrate all other socio-cultural organisations andinstitutions in a system regulated by the single Party. It is significant that only two thinkers in this centuryused the term "totalitarianism" with a positive meaning: Gramsci and the official fascist philosopher Gentile.

Frankly, I was horrified by the pastoral power so cleverly managed by leftist Italian "organic intellectuals" inthe 1970s, and I sought to resist it with all the moral and intellectual commitment available to me. Secondly,my liberalism has been a defence of individualism in the sense of the following thesis of Hayek, a thesis Itook very seriously: "What individualism teaches us is that society is greater then the individual only so far as

it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which controlor direct it. If the presumption of the modern mind, which will not respect anything that is not consciouslycontrolled by individual reason, does not learn in time where to stop, we may, as Edmund Burke warned us,'be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk tothe dimension of our minds.'"

It seemed to me that the Left wanted to "shrink society to the dimensions of the minds of those governing it,"and I viewed this shrinking of society as a great threat to human freedom and dignity. I conceive of liberalismas a theoretical and a practical struggle to ensure that society always remain bigger than all the individualsand groups of individuals within it, however well-organised, massive and powerful they might be. Freedom isnothing more than a "society which is bigger than all its parts," because nobody can act in its name, only inhis or her own name. As a liberal, I consider myself more of a social democrat than the official Left.

To return to the start of our conversation, my liberalism is a set of philosophical and practical positionsinspired by the conviction that there is no end-state for the system, no state in which one person or onegroup of people are right and in possession of the truth and in which only one rational function remains forthe others,acting as mere functionaries in the execution of the orders of Truth. Only in liberalism do we findthis respect for society, which must always be "bigger than the minds of those governing it."

CER:It's interesting that you stress society and the "social," rather than simply the individual or individualfreedom. But how does this philosophical outlook relate to politics, say, to Czech politics and your support ofto Czech Prime Minister Vclav Klaus and his Civic Democratic Party (ODS)?

Blohradsk: I think that Vclav Klaus knows of these dangers and, in his own way, is also trying to preventthem, whilst Vclav Havel really is convinced that society should be governed by the most moral, most

educated and most altruistic individuals. However, a society governed by the best is also a dangerouslyshrunken society, and the fact that it is shrunken to the "dimensions of the minds" of its most moral,educated and altruistic leaders does not change this.
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CER: At one time you were politically very close to the ODS. I believe you even contributed to the party'sprogramme in 1992...

As far ODS is concerned, my relationship with the party was never an organic one. I didn't contribute to theODS programme in any specific way apart from working with the preparatory committee chaired by JosefZieleniec, an ODS deputy chairman who later became minister of foreign affairs in the 1992 ODS-led

government, where I often and actively took part in discussions. Of course, I welcomed the emergence of theODS: at last the party apek and Peroutka had waited for in vain had been formed, a party of the Czechliberal bourgeoisie. It is good for the Czech political system that such a party exists and I hope it will soonovercome the crisis it is currently in. What I value in Vclav Klaus personally is the following strategic thesisof his: we are changing the system, not the people. In a country where intellectuals had gone into politics inorder to change "people's thinking" and "transform their hearts," this sounded extremely liberating andinvigorating.

CER: In 1994, you also described yourself as a "pro-capitalist" philosopher. Is this a description you wouldstill use? Are you less "pro-capitalist" than five years ago?

Blohradsk: My pro-capitalism forms a special chapter in my intellectual biography. It is linked to my 20-year experience as an emigrant in an old mercantile, maritime republic, the city of Genoa. I studied a veryinstructive episode in the state archive there, the circumstances surrounding the very tolerant laws regulatingthe residency of Jews in the city, adopted by the republic's government in 1658 and confirmed in 1752. Thefree-thinking spirit of these laws was opposed by the Holy See, which steadfastly insisted on severediscrimination against Jews in the name of Christian values.

The Genoese patriarchs attempted to protect the Jews using commercialarguments. They said, for example, that to forbid Jews to buy houses which

they wished to purchase would go against free trade and that simple respect fortheir industriousness meant that they should be permitted to walk around the cityfreely even late at night, because they also worked at night, that the requirementthat they should wear yellow scarves as a warning sign would mark them out

within the community and might give the impression they could be robbed withimpunity. These mercantile arguments can be found in the letters the Genoesewrote to Father Centurione, the Vatican ambassador.

The Pope and his emissaries, by contrast, argued in metaphysical terms that theJews might infect Christians and that they were "outside the truth" and should therefore be isolated as"unclean." Now, tell me what guaranteed the freedom of the Jews of Genoa? Christian love for one'sneighbour and humanist values? No! Commercial respect for utility turned out to be a better guarantee ofhuman freedom and dignity than the whole of Christian love and ethics. The tolerant Genoese merchants,who were seafarers with a respect for difference in the world, resisted the concerted pressure of the Churchonly because to their mercantile way of reasoning it did not seem useful that the industrious Jews of Genoabe stripped of their freedom and dignity. The Genoese were fighting for the rights of the Jews in name of thecommercial virtues not "values" and love for one's neighbour.

CER: So this historical insight was an intellectually formative experience?

CER: This episode played a very big role in my intellectual history. I understood that in many respects MiltonFriedman was right. Values and the Good often serve as a justification for persecution and oppression, whilethe market and respect for commercial utility are liberating. The trade routes emanating from the Arab andJewish Middle East have since time immemorial linked the world up into a gigantic bazaar for the exchangeof information, objects and skills. The merchant's gaze gives an important outside view of our life worlds,because it tears us out of our provincial egoism and confronts us with the multi-faceted nature of the world.The struggle for democratic freedom owes much to this gaze. The oldest travelogues are merchants' diaries.In 966, the merchant Ibrahim Ben Jacob saw Prague on a journey transporting his goods to Poland andrecorded its name - in Arabic and in a merchant's script.

Today, this secularising and hence liberating spirit of capitalism is dead. The market has become anideology. The whole system works only because the vast majority of people are unable to defend their realinterests. I criticise globalisation because I see within it a development in the direction that so horrified

commercialrespect for utilityturned out to be abetter guarantee

of human freedomand dignity than

the whole ofChristian love and

ethics


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Hayek: the whole of human society will soon be shrunk to the dimensions of the minds of the globalisersgoverning us.

The Left

CER: It's very often argued that in today's post-modern world traditional notions of left and right havebecome obsolete. The British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for example, claims to have pioneered a "ThirdWay" between traditional Social Democracy and free market liberalism. Many sociologists and politicians inCentral Europe have found Blair's ideas an attractive model. What is your opinion of Tony Blair and "ThirdWay" politics?

Blohradsk: I see Blairism as the greatest danger facing the European Left, because it hypocriticallycamouflages absolute conformism to globalisation and American neo-imperialism as a "new Third Way." Justthink back to its unreserved support for the bombing of Iraq and Serbia or to the British role in the anti-European "Echelon Affair." Even in the chaos of globalisation, the Left should not abandon the issues that

have historically defined it.

These are firstly, how can the primacy of politics over economics be realised in a unipolar world? Here theword "unipolar" does not only mean America's planetary "technotronic" (Brzezinski) neo-imperialism but thefact that globalisation only privileges and enhances the value of the "mobile factors" in human life, that is, ofcapital, which can be rapidly transferred wherever it will bring profit. But is what is most mobile also mostfundamental to our lives?

Jan Patoka spoke of three movements of human life and defined the first of these as the movement ofrootedness in the lives of other people, being in

a community with them and sharing a natural language. It is easy to translate

information into English but not its historically constituted context, which issedimented in natural language and not very mobile at all - it can often takegenerations to change. Were we not talking at the start of this debate about thepersistency of the Czech "anti-political discourse"? And is the persistency of thisanti-political attitude not ultimately a subconscious defence of something

fundamental to our national existence in this corner of Europe, of something we are unaware of?

So your philosophical critique of today's "unipolar world" relates not only to the dangers of a "technotronic"world for democracy and "public space" but also to the threat posed to national identity and cultural diversity?

Blohradsk: Philosophically, "unipolarity" means the radical and unilateral privileging of mobile factors inpeople's lives, a devaluation of "Earthliness," of connection with the Earth. People are being pulled"unipolarly" in one direction towards enhancing the value of "mobile factors," which is destroying what isfundamental in human life, our rootedness in natural language communities and specific historicallandscapes.

CER: But to return to politics, I think we were talking about the Left...

Blohradsk: Secondly, the Left cannot talk of the end of the welfare state as superficially as Blair does.The welfare state is surely dead but not the welfare society, which we must implement in some way. Thewelfare state, after all, is a certain development of the national state. It

was within its cultural and political framework that institutions guaranteeing socialjustice and solidarity emerged. The national state is not just a leftover of theideological blindness of the last century, as the globalisers maintain. It is a

historical framework within which the economy was subordinated to politics, albeitinadequately. Simply put, the democratic Left today should be a robust defence ofthe non-mobile factors in human life. And, we should not forget, meaning is the

I see Blairism asthe greatest

danger facing theEuropean Left

things that can betranslated into

English easily arenot worth livingfor


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least mobile of all the factors that determine our lives. Things that can be translated into English easily arenot worth living for.

Thirdly, the Left must be critical of "efficiency" as the key value of the global economy. Efficiency assertsitself by abolishing everything that is superfluous and redundant. However, in a complex society governed byuncertainty it is dangerous to get rid of potential alternatives, replacement options and dual certainties.

"Efficiency" is a dangerous goal in a complex society, and the Left should promote its moral delegitimationnot support the "growth of efficiency" in society.

No, Blairism is not a source of hope. Rather, I believe that the Catholic Church will soon attempt to revolt insome way against the cynicism of the globalisers and will successfully draw upon its own contradictory,dangerous but authentic "Third Way." It should link itself firmly to democracy, something which in the pastthe Catholic Church was not able to do.

CER: You are very critical of the United States, both for its role in the contemporary world generally and inrelation to the Kosovo crisis in particular. Why is this? Many liberals see the USA in a very positive way.

Blohradsk:My critical position towards the role of the USA in the unipolar world must be clearly defined.

Firstly, I am critical of a rhetoric which describes the end of Communism as a "victory of the West in the ColdWar." The attempt to reform socialism symbolised by Gorbachev was not just a "defeat in the Cold War" buthad a very instructive logic of its own, which has been drowned out by the rhetoric of the victors. Seenagainst the background of the appalling social problems of the USA, the poverty of the Third World and theecological crisis, this self-aggrandising rhetoric of victory is especially offensive. Capitalism has still not yetdared to attempt its own "perestroika."

Secondly, I am convinced that the Americans' new status as a single superpower has caused a certaindelirium in them. This is documented by the wave of self-glorifying films flooding the world; by the rhetoric ofmystification used in the dirty war against Serbia, which the USA dragged Europe into; by the arrogantedging out of the UN; and by a paranoid political vision of the world as a place where villains conspireagainst democracy, while America self-sacrificingly watches over a threatened world as the world'spoliceman, equipped with the illegal Echelon planetary eavesdropping system. Only they have the moral

right to decide about what is good and bad for humanity. Non-Americans make up an "insane society," whichhas no right to judge them.

CER: The notion that capitalism is waiting for a "Gorbachev" to lay bare its real problems is an arresting one,although rather pessimistic; Gorbachev, destroyed the system, he wished to reform. But even to me, assomeone with quite strong residual leftist anti-American sympathies, your characterisation of the UnitedStates sounds a little exaggerated. Surely all great powers have from an overblown sense of their ownimportance, especially in their mass culture. And great powers rise and fall. Is the "delirium" of the UnitedStates in today's world really so dangerous?

Blohradsk: It is a dangerous delirium. For example, in a speech in May to Italian pilots at the Gioia delColle NATO base, General Wesley Clark said: "The Serbs can't do anything to us, but we can take light from

them. In Belgrade people are saying that fighting NATO is like fighting God" (La Stampa, 12 May). Americaemerged from the spirit of a religious sect and General Clark is speaking as a sectarian. How widespread isthis delirium in the USA? How many people think that "fighting NATO is like fighting against God"? Theabsolute majority, I fear.

To give another example, Captain Richard Ashby, whose aircraft brought down a cable car with more than20 people on board in the Italian town of Cermiz, declared after having been found - what else? - not guiltyby an American court (Corriere della sera, 6 March 1999): "The truth has absolved me of blame. The Italiangovernment gave the National Imagery and Mapping Agency a copy of the maps containing the ill-fatedcable car installation. But the National Imagery Agency didn't take this into consideration and ignored it whencreating its own map... There was no cable car link marked on the maps of the National Imagery Agency."

Only taking your own maps into consideration is a delirium. It is dreadful to know that we exist only to the

extent that we are marked on American maps. And how do we probably appear on them, as coloureddashes? Whatever the case, we Europeans do not have a great deal of importance on them, as the verdictfreeing Captain Ashby shows. I think every person living on the planet has a


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moral duty to contribute in some way to help Americans recover from this delirium. In1998, American generals bombed a pharmaceutical plant somewhere in Sudan inretaliation for a terrorist attack on the embassy in Nairobi. In reality, it was a factoryproducing medicines, but on their maps it was circled as a threat to Americaninterests (!). In reply to the protests of the UN they answered: no one has the right tojudge us!

Another example of a map replacing rather than describing territory is modernAmerican "pan-legalism," an attempt to solve everything through the application of the law. The AmericanLeft, which has proved quite unable to promote social justice to even the slightest extent, today makes itsliving by struggling against discrimination against gays, sexism, ageism and smokers, while the life chancesof a quarter of the population of New York are lower than in Third World.

A stubborn memory for the difference between the map and the territory, that the map is only an image of theterritory not a substitute for it, this is European philosophy's most characteristic inheritance. I see the role ofEurope today as the dogged defence of the difference between map and territory, which the Americans, intheir post-Communist delirium, have forgotten.

CER: Reading your work and listening to your answers, I can't help feeling that there is a certain "left-wing"element in your thinking. The idea that consumerism and the market can act as a pyschologically oppressivestructure, for example, seems strongly to echo the "New Left" of the 1960s.

Blohradsk: As I said, for me, the Left in the form of pastoral power and a centrally financed welfare stateis dead. But I think that Albert Camus's The Rebelis still a magnificently relevant book. The revolutionary is ametaphysician; he or she believes that there exists some final phase, form or state of reality, which thevanguard of humanity will discover in history as the true content and basis of human identity and mediate tothe whole of humanity. Violence is legitimate insofar as it is carried out by this vanguard which projects"historical truth" into the institutions of the socialist state.

In the early 1980s, I published an essay entitled "A Critique of the Eschatology of Impersonality," which wasbased on the following idea: hope must not be linked with any final form of the world, with some final solution

whether it be socialism, globalised capitalism or the realisation of Christian virtues. I share Richard Rorty'sadmiration for American pragmatism in the original democratic version given to it by James and Dewey. Inhis introduction to pragmatism, William James compares two philosophical styles, the first of which he calls"tender-minded," the second "tough-minded." "Tender-minded" thinkers privilege the purity of abstractprinciples and guard their coherency, whilst "tough-minded" thinkers privilege the brutal factual reality thatmires these principles into the outrageous mud of experience and thus calls them into question.

He quotes the pamphlet "Human Submission" by the American anarchist Morrison I Swift, one of the so-called "muckrackers," the journalists and thinkers who realistically described the violence and corruption ofAmerican capitalism at the turn of the century. Swift describes the lives of the unemployed in Cleveland, whohave been driven out of their wretched homes and counts the number suicides committed out of desperation.He cites "the Professors of Philosophy," Royce and other idealists, who defend the notion that "the absoluteis always richer than the contradictions it contains" and compares their views with the living conditions of thepeople inhabiting the universe whose principles these professors are interpreting.

James sympathises with Swift's anarchist rage against pure principle, and so do I. I think that Western cantabout human rights quite shameless, when every three seconds someone on this Earth is dying of hunger.Shaking principles to their foundations is an old aspiration of art and philosophy, perhaps their originalaspiration. In depicting horror, a writer is trying to shake what Weinrich termed the Heiterkeit, or serenity, ofthose who speak in the name of rights and principles.

CER: So, you are saying that it is the Left's historically critical stance towards the status quo - or at least thecritical and "tough-minded" attitude of some on the Left towards the status quo - that attracts you?

Blohradsk: For me, the Left today can only mean a repeated daily attack on the serenity of defenders of

values, principles and morality. The revolutionary left was only the historicisation of the old metaphysics; therevolutionary believes in History in the same way that the Christian believes in the Christian God. Seattleconvinced me that the old metaphysical Left can now no longer return; an era of local, unpredictable revoltsagainst the cynicism of the globalisers, revolts without any scientific justification, has arrived.

it is dreadful toknow that we

exist only to theextent that we are

marked on

American maps


16/17

From the demonstrations in Seattle we can catch the scent of a new polylogy.Human Society, Public Citizen, the Sierra Club, the Green Cross,

farmers from Europe, people defending their own bodies against geneticmanipulation, thousands of spontaneous organisations - each with their own localreasons for their revolt against the globalisers' cynicism, motivated by their own life

histories. They all agreed only on one thing: that revolt could no longer bepostponed. Not a revolt against Evil in the world but against the evil somebodyhere and now is doing to somebody else here and now, before our very eyes!

What made the greatest impression upon me was the sight of a girl who simplyheld up her pocket mirror to the policemen clad in anti-riot gear, who resembled robots or Martians: this iswhat you look like in the interests of the globalisers, you are victims too! There is an element of unconsciousEuropean cultural memory in this, the legend of the Medusa who could not survive the sight of her ownimage reflected in Perseus's shield.

CER: Some of comments you have made in the past about the "totalitarian" character of the consumersociety or the global market remind me of Herbert Marcuse.

Blohradsk: I take Marcuse's theory of the "one-dimensional man" very seriously. Marcuse used thisexpression to describe the transformation of consciousness caused by the fact that in mass society theenergy of utopian thinking critical of the status quo is pulled into the workings of everyday life, into thefunctioning of that status quo, and thus tamed and abolished in its liberating negativity. In the past,meditating on Plato at a distance from everyday life was the preserve of elites isolated in monasteries.Today, pocket editions of Plato lie on the kitchen table beside the toaster. Education has been democratisedbut at the price of being integrated into the workings of everyday life. It has been harnessed to thereproduction processes of the status quo.

Marcuse is asking a fateful question here: what has happened to "negativity of thinking" in mass industrialsociety, to that distance from the process of mere reproduction that was the exalted core of the great worksof art of the past? Popular art has been emasculated, its liberating vulgarity, which transcended the universe

of the powerful, has been reduced to mere obscenity; high art has been deprived of its utopian distance fromthe everyday. Does that not fatefully weaken the democratic public space?

CER: Have any other the 'critical theorists' influenced you?

Among the "critical theory" authors, I set greatest store by Adorno and his Negative Dialectics. I understandthe work as a philosophy of revolt in the sense I formulated it a moment ago. Negative, because after

Auschwitz we can no longer be on the side of any eternal truths or positiveprinciples, only on the side of mortal, trembling, injured human bodies and theexperience that resides in them. In his "Meditation on Metaphysics" Adorno wrotethat it is essential for a philosopher never to forget how they felt as a child on seeing

a dog that has just been caught being dragged off to a grilled van in a noose to betaken to the knacker's yard. Today's children probably no longer know what aknacker's yard is, but, I believe, they too have their own unforgettable archetypes of

revolt - like the dog's head in the noose.

CER: For example...?

For example, the battery farm where each cage is crammed with hens whose beaks have been cut off toprevent them attacking one another. Or the Martian robocops of Seattle. Will they rise up and revolt at somepoint against their own image as seen in a girl's pocket mirror? Is the difference between a large battery farmand a large city that great, moreover? Somewhere I read that Chaplin's "anti-battery farm" film ModernTimes was declared the greatest film of the century. So, the managers of the battery farms will perhaps notemerge victorious after all; culture serves as a memory, warning us and offering us persuasive reasons for

revolt.

Interview conducted by Sen Hanley, 20 May 2000

the Left today canonly mean a

repeated dailyattack on the

serenity ofdefenders ofvalues, principles

and morality

Will the Martianrobocops of

Seattle rise up

and revolt againsttheir own image?
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


17/17

Sen Hanley is Lecturer in Politics at the Department of Government at Brunel University, West London.

Moving on:

Return to CER front page

Archive of Sen Hanley's articles in CER

Articles on the Czech Republic in CER

Vclav Blohradsk's publications include:

Il mondo della vita: un problema politico, Jaca Book, Milan, 1981.

La vida come problema politico, Encuentro Ediciones, Madrid, 1988.

Pirozen svt jako politick problm, Ceskoslovensk spisovatel, Prague, 1991.

Kapitalismus a obansk ctnosti, Ceskoslovensk spisovatel, Prague, 1992.

A kapitalizmus s polgri erny, Kalligram, Bratislava, 1994.

Mezi svty a mezisvty, Votobia, Oloumouc, 1996.

"La precession de la legalit ou l'Empire d'Autriche comme metaphore," in Messager europeen,1987.

"La modernit comme passion du neutre," inMessager europeen, 1988.

"Contre l'Etat Europe," in Cahiers du Cefres, Prague, 1998.

"Il conflitto presidente-sistema dei partiti nel consolidamento della democrazia ceca," in Studi politici3, 1999.
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/govn/http://www.ce-review.org/index.htmlhttp://www.ce-review.org/authorarchives/hanley_archive/hanley_main.htmlhttp://www.ce-review.org/thematicarchives/czech/ta_czechmain.htmlhttp://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/govn/http://www.ce-review.org/index.htmlhttp://www.ce-review.org/authorarchives/hanley_archive/hanley_main.htmlhttp://www.ce-review.org/thematicarchives/czech/ta_czechmain.html

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Realism in Politics Worries People