Shallow Pessimism

Laurence Olivier as Hamlet.

In my post from March 16th, I ended by asking the question why is it we – by which I mean intellectual progressives - seem to enjoy ruthlessly deconstructing everything and finding our society “rotten to the core – that it is racist, sexist, imperialist society, one which can’t be trusted an inch”, to quote again the philosopher Richard Rorty. In this post I’ll explore a possible answer.

Yes. Western culture and society is very far from perfect. But around the time Rorty wrote his essay – the 1980s – the west lost confidence in its humanistic belief that the future will necessarily be better than the past and the present. It lost a special kind of social hope. But this loss of faith was already well under way by the second half of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche declared: “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” Albert Camus’ concept of the ‘absurd’ perfectly capturing the Zeitgeist of the 1940s and 1950s. The absurd is an experience so visceral Camus said it can hit anybody in the face at any time. The ‘sweet indifference’ of nature, as he calls it at the end of ‘The Outsider’ - challenged both religious faith in  divine purpose and humanist faith in the inevitable melioration of humanity guided by the light of reason that aimed to replace it.

The process of disillusionment speeded up at the end of the Cold War, which pretty much definitively put paid to the Marxist utopian dream of a ‘classless society’, a social hope that had sustained many radicals for most of the twentieth century. But there was also an increasingly pervasive loss of confidence in the liberal democratic dream of the welfare state, as well.  Both ideals, which are traceable to the eighteenth century Enlightenment, were now judged to be deformed birth, because, as Nietzsche had already announced over one hundred years earlier,  the Enlightenment itself  - the whole basis of modernity - was a sham.  One only needed to look around to see that the  so-called democratic ‘system’ was permanently rigged to let a tiny percentage of greedy and insecure people accumulate a huge amount of wealth and power, and that there was profound crisis of meaning, a slide toward nihilism.

In the past two decades, the recognition of existential meaninglessness and of failure to bring about social justice has  been joined by the disaster of climate change. This situation now means that, quite literally, there will be no better future. The future we are bequeathing to our children and grandchildren will almost certainly be worse than this present one is. Just how much worse its going to be depends on the amount of residual faith you can muster in a narrative of social hope that still attempts to build a rickety bridge - using alternative sources of energy, probably - to a less than terrible future.

But why aren’t we as a society genuinely responding to these awful truths? Why are we going to war and binge viewing shows of Netflix? Because mainstream society, the status quo, is based on keeping it all at arm’s length through incessant optimistic messaging, designed to shield people from the truth.  It disguises the loss of the hopeful dream of a better future by replacing it by shallow optimism. Western society hasn’t imploded. Instead, in genuine hope’s it place there was installed a shallow kind of optimism. What’s the difference?  As I noted in a previous post, optimism implies wish-fulfillment with the aim of pacifying the present, while hope involves imaginative responses to reality and faces up to the real and potentially cataclysmic challenges the uncertain world inevitably presents. This shallow optimism is generated mostly through the mass media, which throughout the twentieth century become more and more efficient and skillful in cranking out the kinds of positive messages that serve to distract people from a tragic reality. Hollwood is called the “Dream Machine’, and has played an especially significant role. But the emergence of the consumer society with its fetishization of consumer products, it’s subliminal message that to shop is the way to give life purpose (As Barbara Kruger has it in one of her artworks, ‘I SHOP, THEREFORE I AM’), its assumption that it’s alright to be selfish and to horde, to strive for happiness without caring about anyone else, meant that shallow optimism in the form of countless distractions and pointless goals managed to paper over the fact that we have lost faith in a better future for everyone. The value in the short term of optimism for society is that it brings a sense of social coherence by making everything seem comprehensible and controllable. As a result,  people feel strengthened through being able to make sense of, manage, understand, and feel masters of adversity. Optimism encourages  the idea of hardiness, making a stressful circumstance seem an opportunity for growth and strengthening. It helps ensure preparedness by encouraging readiness to confront setbacks and successfully take advantage of opportunities. It also brings self-affirmation  making decision-making in the present more efficient and collectively directed.

But all this comes at a high price. The façade of optimism has permitted the west to  maintain its global supremacy and sense of self-efficacy and self-assurance while it has been rapidly collapsing from within. Optimism is a debased and less challenging substitute for the genuine hope that is almost no longer within reach. For, as Terry Eagleton writes in his excellent book Hope Without Optimism (2015): “the most authentic kind of hope is whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees from a general dissolution. It represents an irreducible residue that refuses to give way, plucking its resilience from an openness to the possibility of unmitigated disaster. It is thus as remote from optimism as could be imagined.”

Which leads me back to the problem with the progressive’s default attitude of perpetual social critique.

Isn’t it simply the flip side of the west’s shallow optimism? Isn’t it shallow pessimism?  For it surely can’t be genuine pessimism. After all, some of the most audible advocates of cultural critique - the tenured professors at prestigious universities - occupy extremely comfortable niches within society, and carry on their day-to-day lives pretty much like everyone else – like all the dumb optimists, in fact.

Just as shallow optimism is a way of shielding oneself from failure and misfortune, so too is shallow pessimism. It simply embraces the failure, disillusion, and disappointment in advance so as to forestall the risk involved in having one’s hopes dashed.

Image Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ6ec4V6AJ4

Which one are you?

Marina Ovsyannikova interrupts the Russian state television news to protest against the war in the Ukraine. A still grabbed from the video available on The Guardian’s website ((https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/16/marina-ovsyannikova-russia-propaganda-putin)

When I saw the photograph above, I was led, perhaps like you, to ask myself an uncomfortable question: in such a situation, which one of these two people was I more likely to be, the newsreader or the woman holding the anti-war banner?  

Of course, I would like to think I’d be the latter, that I would have the principles and the guts to risk my comfortable future, perhaps even my life, because I believed in standing up to the orchestrated state aggression being perpetrated in my name. But what are the psychological and statistical odds that this really is the case?

Evidence coming from schoolyard to totalitarian regime shows that most people do not take risks like this anti-war protester, Marina Ovsyannikova. They will be like the newsreader, Ekaterina Andreeva, or the cameraman, the programme producer, the editor, the make-up lady. They will be silent. They will not rock the boat. They will  maintain the status quo. But of course, they will not admit that this means they are also complicit in horrible levels of violence and oppression going on.

We humans all basically want three things: to survive, to feel attached to others, and to have a sense of control over our lives. We will do almost anything to guarantee we don’t die, are not alone, and our secure existence is guaranteed into the future.  To ensure we get them, we are obliged to conform with the status quo. This inevitably entails compromising our innate sense of what is just and fair. For it seems a tragic fact of life that, while we all know instinctively what is right, we are willing to turn a blind eye to get the sense of security we need.

The most obvious reason not to speak out is fear. It’s clear that Putin will ruthlessly punish anyone who steps out of line. This fear if often freely admitted, but other times, rationalized excuses are offered.  A very common one is: “I have a family.” Another is: “What’s the point, protest is useless?” Another is:  “I am resisting in subtle ways, I am only  ‘playing the game’ just for now.”  A news report by Denis Kataev in The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/16/marina-ovsyannikova-russia-propaganda-putin)  added a specific example: ‘A source I know at VGTRK, the state media holding company, has said that many others at the main news programme were considering resigning, and the mood among remaining employees was nasty. They said: “If we didn’t have our mortgages, we would quit too.”’ Other excuses can feign or rationalize a commitment to the status quo: “I believe that, were it not for Putin, Russia would descend into anarchy. OK. I don’t agree with everything he does. But the alternative would be much worse.” Some - the weirdest of all, really - are fellow-travelers who are there out of ideological or religious conviction. Despite all the evidence that can be marshaled against the version of reality and truth to which they adhere, they will remain faithful. Indeed, evidence, or reasoned argument, are not significant determining factors. The ‘leap of faith’ is also a leap into fantasy.

But actually, all these dissembling alibis or motives are based on one sort of optimistic fantasy or another. An optimistic fantasy has two broad features: narrative structure, in the sense that we construct a plausible story-line, and an egotistical ideal, a way of maintaining self-esteem. The optimistic fantasy makes the story we tell efficacious (I am the bread-winner, and have people who depend on me.”) They help us imagine that some  - enough - of our desires have been satisfied (“After all. I have a family, live in a society which offers mortgages and well-paid jobs in the media.”). But optimistic fantasizing inevitably detracts from one’s ability to turn intention into action, and distracts from the ability to form plans responsive to real-world obstacles. It also disposes one to expect that things will improve, and that reality is better than is actually is.

This means we are all inclined to approach situations having already decided to shield ourselves from anything that could puncture our vulnerable sense of security. We cushion ourselves from unwelcome facts.   We will explain terrible events so that we can put  distance between them and us, and circumscribe their impact on us. In other words, we make excuses to lessen the impact of current and potential awfulness.

To this end, we externalize the awfulness by placing the blame on factors beyond our immediate social world and outside our control.  We tell ourselves that we really can’t do anything about it, and that we have more tangible and real responsibilities - a mortgage to pay, children to raise, grandparents to care for. We evaluate the awfulness going on around us as just temporary. We say that things will improve.  We conclude that, actually, things are really not so awful here and now. The awfulness is happening in some other places and to some other people. It doesn’t concern me.

Does this mean we are mostly all cowards? Probably. Life is about getting by, after all. We can’t all be heroes. But we are mostly not bullies or tyrants. We are, however, complicit with bullies and tyrants, because  by trying to keep our head down and being shallowly optimistic we make the bullies and tyrants possible.

So, I suppose this means I’m the newsreader.

But why did Marina Ovsyannikova do what she did? What turned her from a complicit cog in the tyranny machine into a heroic protester, a beacon of light?Apparently, according to another news item I read, a Russian colleague confided that up till that moment Marina Ovsyannikova had mostly been interested to talk about her dogs, clothes, and home.  She was definitely not a member of Pussy Riot. In her video statement she admitted she was someone who had played along, worked quietly for the state media propaganda machine, served the status quo. But something had forced her to stop making excuses or staying in the mental shallows so she could enjoy life’s little pleasures. What was it?

Interestingly, in the video she released Marina Ovsyannikova mentioned that her father was Ukrainian and her mother Russian. So, the war had a very personal dimension. It struck her as not just a war, or even a civil war, but as a repudiation of who she biologically and culturally was as a human being. In other words, the war was not an abstraction, something that could relatively easily be dealt with through dissembling. It was horribly personal.

This fact made me think of something I’d recently read which the American philosopher Richard Rorty wrote about Martin Heidegger in an essay from 1990 called ‘On Heidegger’s Nazism.’ Rorty asked himself what would have stopped Heidegger being a Nazi and behaving as he did. Another kind of thinker might have searched for some ideological, philosophical, or spiritual leverage. But Rorty asks us to imagine something very tangible, something very human:

Imagine that in the summer of 1930 Heidegger suddenly finds himself deeply in love with a beautiful, intense, adoring philosophy student named Sara Mandelbaum. Sarah is Jewish, but Heidegger barely notices this, dizzy with passion as he is. After a painful divorce from Elfride [his real-life wife] – a process that costs him the friendship of, among other people, the Husserls – Heidegger marries Sarah in 1932. In January 1933 they have a son, Abraham.

The point is that, had such a love affair actually happened, Heidegger would almost certainly not have given his support to the Nazis and condoned their antisemitism. If Heidegger had been personally involved in the tragedy of the Holocaust through love of a Jewess, and so gained intimacy through her with her culture, he would have been unable to have the beliefs and opinions he did regarding the racist nationalism of the Nazis. In other words, for something to really affect us it needs to be personally felt. It is very unlikely that we will be willing to sacrifice our secure lives for something abstract. And the chances are, if we did feel driven to action by some abstraction, we would be tempted to act in precisely the manner of those we thought we were opposing, because our actions do not come from empathy and compassion but from impersonal principles. Only when we act from genuine compassion, from personal experience of the Golden Rule - ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, or ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ - can genuine resistance to oppression be launched.

This means that one of the primary ways in which the powerful maintain their power is by alienating us from each other. How do they do this? There are plenty of tools at hand. Some are very old, like a religion that teaches that only those who believe in our God are worthy of compassion. Or like a political ideology, which teaches that only our race or our class or our nation is worthy.  If one was to be especially gloomy about the human prospect, one might argue that it is almost impossible for people to extend the net of compassion much further than immediate biological family, or at most, their tribe. One might then conclude that being human means being aggressively sectarian. But then, the fact that almost all world traditions have sooner or later come up with a variation on the Golden Rule, suggests that this is being too pessimistic. For example, the xenophobic bully-God of the Old Testament was superseded by the Christ of the New Testament who said, “love they neighbour as thyself.” (Not that Christianity has in practice done very well on that score.)

In the modern age, the mass media have greatly extended the means through which the powerful can divide and rule us, making the Golden Rule difficult to live by, even as communication technology has turned the world into a ‘global village’. It has also created new kinds of warring tribe. The Internet and social media, in fact - all the visual communication media - have probably helped make us more compassionate. Images are more emotive. More conduits for empathy. Think of all the pictures from Ukraine, and how they create affective bonds much more effectively than words. But information overload breeds indifference, and greatly facilitates those who for one reason or another want to bully and cause pain. And images can be a poor basis for genuine compassion: because they work on our emotions, they short-circuit of rational faculties. The Golden Rule is not just about feelings. It is a considered, rational principle based on empathetic experience.

So, it is especially poignant that Marina Ovsyannikova worked for Russian state television. Because the media can be used to expose the powerful as well as protect it, those who crave absolute power can truck no genuine freedom of speech. Here is Denis Kataev in The Guardian article:

The programme she protested on, Vremya, is a legacy of the former USSR. It is perhaps the most prestigious news show on Russian TV. For millions, it is part of a daily habit for years, even decades, to watch the big evening news at 9pm.

Fitting for its Soviet beginnings, it has been an ideological weapon for decades, shoring up the government with strict pro-regime coverage. It is not subtle. The hosts look like robots, or Soviet or North Korean broadcasters. Just watch when Ovsyannikova makes her shocking move. The host Ekaterina Andreeva doesn’t even bat an eyelid. It doesn’t compute. I’m not sure she even sees herself as a propagandist, just a person with a social mission. This didn’t fit into it, and she – along with all the others – had no response.

If the Golden Rule is ultimately the only genuine way to fight tyranny, then that means the more cosmopolitan - the more open - a society is the more likely it will be to recognize that justice must be extended to all. At the very least, a cosmopolitan society will act to ensure that there are checks and balances in place to hinder those who want to divide and rule ruthlessly.

Ruthless Deconstruction

Edvard Munch, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche’ (1906), oil on canvas, 201 x 160 cm. Thiel Gallery (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

I recently read an essay from 1989 by my new favourite philosopher, Richard Rorty, in which he imagines what will have happened by 2010 to the ‘Nietzschean left’, a term he borrows from Allan Bloom, the author of the then controversial book The Closing of the American Mind, that  was intended to label the advocates of the hyper-theoretical social justice ideology that was taking over the Humanities departments of American universities in that period. This, Rorty writes, was an ideology that “tells the country it is rotten to the core – that it is racist, sexist, imperialist society, one which can’t be trusted an inch, one whose every utterance must be ruthlessly deconstructed.” Rorty was confident that by 2010 “the brightest Ph.Ds in English that year will be people who never want to hear the terms ‘binary opposition’ or ‘hegemonic discourse’ again as long as they live.”

Oh dear. He was wrong. Instead, the ‘Nietzschean left’ dug in and moved mainstream.

So, in 2022 we have Russell Brand’s entertaining cheerleader version to enjoy on YouTube. Now, as I mentioned in my last post, I am a fan of Russell. It’s exhilarating to listen to a handsome guy who talks so fast and so furious, while also making you laugh. But as I mentioned in my last but one post, since the Ukraine-Russia War began, Russell’s brand (sorry) of ‘Nietzschean leftism’ suddenly seems rather awkward, even callous.

He always begins by saying something like: “Now, I know there’s no excusing the brutal aggression of Putin, and I totally empathize with the suffering of the Ukrainian people. But….” And then he shares with us yet another iteration of basically the same story: western society is “rotten to the core – that it is racist, sexist, imperialist society, one which can’t be trusted an inch, one whose every utterance must be ruthlessly deconstructed.” The Ukraine-Russia war seems to be just another opportunity to do some “ruthless - but fun- deconstruction.”  

Now, ‘ruthless’ may not seem like an appropriate word to use in relation to Russell, who seems to be a genuinely nice guy, someone who’s been down to Hell and come back up again, and wants to share his wisdom with the world. But what else is it, really?  A typical dictionary definition of ‘ruthless’ is: ‘having or showing no pity or compassion for others.’  As I said, Russell is definitely a guy who is full of pity and compassion for others. In fact, he would probably want to say that he is all about the very opposite of ruthlessness: he is into mercy, compassion, and gentleness.  But is this true, in practice?

I wouldn’t say so, at least not in his ‘Under the Skin’ podcasts on YouTube. I’m not talking about the subscription ‘Luminary’ podcasts in which he interviews people.  In the former, I think he’s unfortunately often pandering to his immense audience’s resentment and anger, our perverse desire to see everything as “rotten to the core.”  Yes. I see myself as participating in this destructive impulse. Especially when I was young I was very keen to see everything as conspiring to hide the terrible truth.

Weird isn’t it, how the usually pretty nasty official ‘‘mainstream’ version of the terrible things going on is always less appealing than the alternative nasty versions spotlit by radical deconstruction?

I can’t talk for anyone else, so I will ask myself: From where within me comes this seemingly insatiable desire to see things as being “rotten to the core”? I think it probably comes from the sorrowful feeling that there’s a great and disheartening chasm between how I believe things should be – for myself and the world in general – and how they actually are.

What would Richard Rorty say? Rorty is a neo-pragmatist. Pragmatists, Rorty writes, “do not believe there is a way things really are. So they want to replace the appearance-reality distinction by that between descriptions of the world and of ourselves which are less useful and those which are more useful. When the question ‘useful for what?’ is pressed, they have nothing to say except ‘useful to create a better future’.” I think this puts a finger on the problem with my younger self and the so-called ‘Nietzschean left’ in general, but perhaps most especially its hipster incarnations.  We still assume there’s an ‘appearance-reality distinction’. The ‘appearance’ is the tawdry facade that has been erected by the rich and powerful, and our ‘ruthless deconstruction’ is driven by the belief that this nasty ‘appearance’ goes all the way down.

This is of course precisely what Nietzsche said. There is no reality, or truth, or essence, just different perspectives, and these perspective, so he pronounced, are driven by the ‘will to power.’ Rorty agrees. At least with the first bit. There are indeed no bedrock essences to dig down to. But he fervently disagrees with the second bit. Thinking about the ‘will to power’ is not the best way to explain how the world is the sad way it is. Rather, one should consider the relative usefulness of a given perspective in relation to how well it carries forth the project of creating a better future.

So, I ask: is Russell Brand helping us to feel our way to a better future?

He surely thinks he is. And indeed he is, in the main. But he is also the victim of the default perspective of the ‘Nietzschean left’, which is  to see the corrupting influence of power all the way down. And it gets its intellectual and ethical sustenance - and also an emotional ‘high’, and certainly a sense of superiority and clannishness - from this apparent insight into the truth.  

Rorty writes of Michel Foucault, a key figure for the ‘Nietzschean left’: “when asked why he never sketched a utopia, Foucault said ‘I think that to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system.’”  Really? Oh, come on! Rorty rightly call this “one of Foucault’s most fatuous remarks”, but  it  reflects the general resistance amongst today’s radicals to imagine a better future, simply because the present is so rotten and one can never free oneself from its rottenness.

Russell Brand will rightfully protest vociferously. He will say that of course he is all about imagining another and better future,  but that first of all you have to ‘ruthlessly deconstruct’ the present. But I ask: at what point does the secret joy of deconstruction become an end in itself? The feelings and thoughts it panders to make one feel smarter, freer, more exclusive than the dumb masses, less bowed by the powerful,  and part of a community of like-minded deconstructors who think the scales have fallen from their eyes and who see the bitter truth.

***

There’s a Korean Seon (Zen) Buddhist saying that has been resonating in my mind ever since I first read it. It goes like this:

Mountains are mountains. Rivers are river.

Mountains and not mountains. River are not rivers.

Mountains are mountains. Rivers are rivers.

Now, this can mean many things – or nothing at all.  But in the present context, I like to think it means this:  we start our naively thinking the world we inhabit is the real and only world. Then we get savvy and see that it is a mere appearance, one foisted on us when we were to young to defend ourselves. But then, there’s the third stage. It seems to be a reversion to the first stage. But it’s not. In the third stage, we realize that the ‘reality-appearance’ binary is the cause of all the problems in the first place. It is in itself an illusion.

Where does that leave us? Back with ‘Mountains are mountains. Rivers are rivers.’ But now we understand them as a pragmatist might:  we don’t go around constantly pointing out that the mountains really aren’t mountains, and the rivers really aren’t rivers. Instead, we strive to live with the version of mountains and rivers that is most useful for helping to realize a freer, more egalitarian, and more fraternal future.

Russell Brand is undoubtedly deeply committed to articulating the values of the third stage. But it’s the second stage that brings him the high ratings.  The NOT stage. It can be useful, and it can be fun. But, frankly speaking, I don’t think the NOT stage is a useful platform from which to deal with the tragedy unfolding now in the Ukraine.

War and Peace

Driving past the DMZ on the Ja-yuro - the Freedom Highway. Along a stretch of about 3 miles, one can actually look across the estuary toward North Korea itself.

In a previous post (September 28, 2020) I discussed the Roman General Flavius Vegetius Renatus dictum, ‘Si vis pacem, parabellum” -  “If you want peace, prepare for war. “ My home, a few miles from the DMZ,  provides exemplary evidence that this is sound but sad advice. War between the two Koreas has so far been avoided, and peace has reigned precariously here for almost seventy years largely thanks to military deterrence.

Now, suddenly, thanks to the war in Ukraine, the awful truth of the General’s dictum has been brutally rammed home once again. 

“War is the father of all things” (Heraclitus). “Only the dead have seen the end of war” (Plato).  For the people of the ancient world - actually, for pretty much the whole of human history - war was a fact of life, even a glorious fact of life, insofar as the ideal of the warrior is so important for patriarchal societies. But for us, it is not. By ‘us’, I mean the amazingly privileged people living in those societies an parts of the world that have not experienced warfare for decades. As a boy growing up in England, I spent a huge amount of time and energy on what, in retrospect, I understand was getting acquainted with the ‘warrior’ archetype so as to define myself as a ‘male.’ I played with toy guns, read war comics. One day, I recall I went to visit my best friend, a girl named Mary. I must have been about seven years old, and it had recently dawned on me that boys weren’t supposed to have girl best friends. So, I took my toy revolver along with me, and pulling it out in front of Mary, said ‘You don’t want to play with this, do you?” OK, Freudians, laugh at my infant self. What more obvious evidence could there be of the link between being a ‘warrior’ and having a penis. But as a British baby-boomer, I have never had to put on a military uniform and learn how to fire a weapon.  The ‘warrior’ isn’t exactly a suitable role-model for people like me – a fact that people like Jordan Peterson are grappling with, and which is a major reason why he is so popular amongst young men. The ‘warrior’ archetype just doesn’t resonate. But it is still unclear what positive archetype for a young male can take its place.

I recall a few years ago talking to a German who at the time was in his mid-sixties and so  born not long after the end of the Second World War, and sharing with him my militaristic upbringing. He surprised me by saying he’d never ever played at war as a kid. War was taboo in Germany for obvious reasons. But now, because of Russian aggression, Germany has announced a huge increase in its military budget. But as several commentators have noted, including the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQqthbvYE8M&t=3s) this is good news. The Germans are no longer afraid that everyone thinks they’re closet Nazis, and they realize they must play their role in trying  stabilize  the new situation.  Prepare for war if you want peace.

The almost miraculous fact that I have never been compelled to wear a military uniform, let along go to war, is impressed on me  almost every day here in South Korea, where all able-bodied males must do two years military service.  But living near the DMZ I am obviously even more acutely aware of the way in which peace is guaranteed by preparedness for war.  The other day, for example, we were obliged to wait at a nearby traffic intersection as a convoy of huge tanks rumbled by. We often hear guns being fired by soldiers training in the nearby bases. Every time we take a walk, we pass pillboxes and trench lines (see the photos below).

The view from a gun emplacement, and from a strategic hilltop. That’s North Korea in the distance.

As I wrote in my previous post: “the current state of so-called ‘peace’ on the Korean peninsula has come at a high price.  There may have been  no  armed conflict since 1953, but  the result of a situation in which ‘peace’ is guaranteed by the perpetual preparation for ‘war’ has been the creation of   militarized surveillance societies on both sides of the DMZ. This is obviously the case in North Korea, but who can deny that South Korea is also constrained in far-reaching ways  - social, economic, political, cultural - by the necessity of its perpetual preparedness for war?”

I am against war. Any sane person must be. But although we think we no longer live in the endemically belligerent world of Plato, Heraclitus, and General Flavius Vegetius Renatus, or even of our parents or grandparents, we are only a small way along the road towards guaranteed peace. Here are a couple of graphs:

The graphs clearly show that war is less deadly and less pervasive than ever before. For us in the west, with the terrible exception of the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, it has only seemed to happen just over the horizon – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.  Well now, it’s happening rather closer to home, and on a potentially much more disastrous scale.

Our pacific existence has had enormously positive consequences, but also some intellectually negative ones for people like me.  For example, I can see now that when I wrote the above quote in my earlier post I was succumbing to an intellectual relativism  which too readily flattens opposites down to a state of moral parity so as to chastise my own culture. Of course, South Korea has suffered as a result of its need to be ever-ready for war. But the stance it has adopted is defensive, not offensive.  The Ukraine war makes this all to horribly obvious.  There is a world of difference between preparing for peace through defensive military action and using one’s army for offensive action like the Russians have done. 

Being a progressive and being critical of one’s own society’s many shortcomings has led to a dangerous loss of conviction. For example, it has made patriotism very difficult. But as Richard Rorty observed back in 1994 in an essay about the political left’s dominance of the Humanities in the American academy (which has only got stronger since then): “like every other country, ours has a lot to be proud of and a lot to be ashamed of. But a nation cannot reform itself unless it takes pride in itself – unless it has an identity, rejoices in it, reflects upon it and tries to live up to it. Such pride sometimes takes the form of arrogant, bellicose nationalism. But it often takes the form of a yearning to live up to the nation’s professed ideals.” As Rorty concludes: “A left that refuses to take pride in its country will have no impact on that country’s politics, and will eventually become an object of contempt.”

In 1941 at a low point in the war against Hitler, George Orwell penned an essay entitled ‘England, Your England’, which begins: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” Orwell reflected on what it was he loved about England - what was worth dying for - and observed:

An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

So, let’s try to remember as we scramble to make sense of and form an opinion about what’s happening in the Ukraine that half a loaf is NOT the same as no bread.