The state is everything, and man is a pawn. The world has lived for millennia with an etatist life philosophy that absolutizes the role of the state. Therefore, every sound-minded person intuitively tries to keep clear of the millstones of power, although the government always intends, by hook or by crook, to place people under its vigilant surveillance. This paradigm of history remained unchanged for centuries, and only in the world of today are the interests of people being put above the banners of kingdoms, empires, republics, and caliphates.
After World War II, aware of the danger of state machines getting into the hands of fanatics and rogues, humankind established supranational organizations, believing that international courts, committees, banks, and troops might help control the antihuman actions of countries and regimes. Something was really achieved in the not-so-simple Cold War era. Dozens of successful humanitarian missions were accomplished on various continents, sanctions were imposed on man-eaters, and, what is more, thousands of repression victims were saved. Suffice it to recall Nelson Mandela, Vladimir Bukovsky exchanged for Luis Corvalan, or Petro Hryhorenko released from a “loony bin…” At the time, aspiration for democracy was not considered an abstract goal of “progressive thinkers.” It was a daily care of society, a manifestation of humanism and sympathy towards the people who suffered from police water cannons, army tanks, and secret police harassment.
Let us take the 1960s-1970s. Locally, it was a thaw after Stalinist frosts and, broader, it was the birth of a new Europe. It was a time when moral reference points were coming back to politics and intellectual attempted to solve the problem of mutually beneficial cooperation between man and the state; a time when countries were ruled by the compiler of a French poetry anthology Georges Pompidou, the brilliant academic and economist Ludwig Erhard, the Oxford professor Harold Wilson… That time flew by too fast, but, as anything genuinely significant, it left some traces. That time saw public intolerance to violence becoming a moral standard. Since then laws have stood above capital and the discreet charm of bourgeois morals has given way to the philosophy of existentialism. The protest rock music roared all over the world, hipsters outnumbered army servicemen, poets and musicians drew mass audiences, and even on “our” side of the Berlin Wall people were aware of inevitable radical changes on the planet. Then the 1980s came and brought along a new reality. Deeply immersed in tackling the routine problems of poverty-stricken and underprivileged people, the USSR did not feel this. Yet the most farsighted Europeans could already distinguish the outlines of an enemy that had risen like a mummy from an ancient sarcophagus. Professional politicians gradually replaced philosophers and academics in power. The anti-Vietnam war sentiments gave in under the pressure of militarization. “It’s better to be mean but rich,” “it’s better to be red than dead” were typical catchphrases in the 1980s, which meant a change of moral reference points. Everybody was tired of fighting for ideals.
In 1984 the Czech writer Vaclav Havel, not yet a politician but a harassed dissident, could not come to the University of Toulouse for the honorary doctorate award ceremony. The future president of the Czech Republic was just denied a foreign-travel passport. Havel requested his friend, the British playwright Tom Stoppard, to represent him in Europe’s oldest academic center but still wrote a several-page speech. It was printed a year later as an essay by some Czech and British publishers and became widely known in ten years’ time. Havel’s Politics and Conscience was a prophecy and a warning. In his article he reflected on how power turns into an anonymous technique of rule and manipulation, calling this a determining phenomenon of modern civilization. He viewed this as the root cause of a looming acute crisis of the state and public morality. Let me quote a fragment of this text, which will allow you to see the sincerity and farsightedness of Havel’s analysis.
“Rulers and leaders were once personalities in their own right, with particular human faces, still in some sense personally responsible for their deeds, good and ill, whether they had been installed by dynastic tradition, by the will of the people, by a victorious battle, or by intrigue. But they have been replaced in modern times by the manager, the bureaucrat, the apparatchik – a professional ruler, manipulator, and expert in the techniques of management, manipulation, and obfuscation, filling a depersonalized intersection of functional relations, a cog in the machinery of state caught up in a predetermined role. This professional ruler is an ‘innocent’ tool of an ‘innocent’ anonymous power, legitimized by science, cybernetics, ideology, law, abstraction, and objectivity, that is, by everything except personal responsibility to human beings as persons and neighbors. A modern politician is transparent: behind his judicious mask and affected diction there is not a trace of a human being rooted in the order of the natural world by his loves, passions, interests, personal opinions, hatred, courage, or cruelty. All that he, too, locks away in his private bathroom. If we glimpse anything at all behind the mask, it will be only a more or less competent technician of power.
“System, ideology, and apparatus have deprived us – rulers as well as the ruled – of our conscience, of our common sense and natural speech and thereby, of our actual humanity. States grow ever more machinelike; people are transformed into statistical choruses of voters, producers, consumers, patients, tourists, or soldiers. In politics, good and evil, categories of the natural world and therefore obsolete remnants of the past lose all absolute meaning; the sole method of politics is quantifiable success. Power is a priori innocent because it does not grow from a world in which words like ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ retain their meaning.”
Pragmatism and professionalism… Do we not hear these words daily from Ukrainian and foreign politicians who are trying to persuade us that there is no bias in or emotional influences on their work? But, at a closer look, we notice that those who wield power lack humaneness. A society of professional sympathizers and caretakers must not be formed out of those who are personally callous and indifferent. We must not live without principles, being only guided by where we can buy cheaper and earn more.
Now that this country is going to step on the rug at the entrance to Europe, we are supposed to revel over the coming changes. But even this first step shows such a defect as pragmatic flat foot. We have found ourselves in the zone of European interests not at all because we share their ideals. And Europe is receiving us without too much loving our reality. Simply, we are going to a place where we will earn more for our semi-finished products and loyalty, while Europe chose to sacrifice principles in order to push Russia farther away from its borders. Besides, 45-million-strong markets are not exactly thick on the ground during a crisis. For this reason, we will have, in all probability, to spend the night on the entrance rug.
The philosophy of pragmatism, which appeared in the 19th and vanished in the mid-20th century, is being reborn now. It is practical and irreplaceable for the flexible politicians who swiftly change their attitudes and persuasions. “‘What would be better for us to believe!’ This sounds very like a definition of truth” is one of the most popular phrases of William James, a father of the theory of functionalism. A state armed with such ideas is free to choose any ways. To live comfortably in a society of total compromises and benefits, people only have to follow the example of the authorities and become professional citizens of the country. Which we are in fact doing when we go to a public rally for money, vote for “the guy who repaired the road,” dodge the unpaid draft, and earn the profits of a small factory in a governmental office. We are now the creators of, not the cogs in, the system.
