Slaying Satan near the DMZ

About a week ago, Pope  Francis in an Interview concerning the Ukraine-Russia war said:  “We need to move away from the usual Little Red Riding Hood pattern, in that Little Red Riding Hood was good and the wolf was the bad one. Something global is emerging and the elements are very much entwined.” At first, I was relieved to see the head of the Roman Catholic Church speaking common sense, trying to insert a bit of nuanced reality into the black-and-white narrative. Then I remembered that Pope Francis is head of an institution that is exemplary in peddling one of the most egregious Little Red Riding Hood stories.  After all, it is founded on the assumption of a basic polarity in which the world is divided between God (good) and Satan (bad). 

Reading the Pope’s comments made me think of a sculpture that sits beside a recently built Catholic church not far from where I live, which is located right next to what was once the main highway between Seoul and Pyongyang, but which today is just a minor road. Running parallel to it is a wide dual carriageway that head up towards the DMZ, and, for those with permits, continues onwards to Panmunjom about two  miles away, where not so long ago President Trump met Kim Jung-un.  As you can see from the photograph above, the sculpture, which is actually a plastic cast, is very realistic.

A website called ‘Religious Decor’ says the following in answer to the question why Saint Michael statues are so popular: ‘he is the greatest enemy of Satan and the fallen legions and is specifically named in the Book of Revelation to fight against Satan, descending at the end of the world, and commanding the armies of the Lord in their final struggle.’ Now, in my opinion, a violent (and, it has to be said, homoerotic) representation of a man murdering another man does not seem a very appropriate one for a church  - or indeed any building - especially one located near the DMZ. I am deliberately bracketing out the Catholic iconography, and looking at it for what it actually depicts. 

The statue belongs to a church dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima, which has a small convent attached. It is actually a kind of bunker church, as the space is located  underground. In this picture you can see the steps down to the entrance:

Entrance of Our Lady of Fatima church.

Above ground is an open area where you can do the Stations of the Cross. There are also a shrine to the first apparition, and one to Our Lady.  Here they are:

Fatima, which is in Portugal, is one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations for the faithful. The  first photograph above shows a re-staging of the ‘Angel of Peace’ appearing to  three child-shepherds in spring 1916, and again  in the summer, and a third time in the autumn. The Angel told them that heaven had “designs of mercy” and taught them to offer prayers and sacrifices. In  May 1917 things started hotting up. Our Lady herself appeared to the children, in the end a total of six times, the last in October 1917, by which time a huge crowd had gathered, and weird things were reported to have happened to the sun.  

In passing, I note the association of such apparitions of Our Lady with the rose, my special interest. Witnesses claimed to have seen a shower of rose petals during and after the apparitions.  Annually a group of Catholic faithful in the United States named ‘America Needs Fatima’ makes it a special mission to deliver masses of roses to the site. On his pilgrimage to Fatima in 2017 Pope Francis declared: “Hail Queen. Blessed Virgin of Fatima. I implore to the world the concord between all peoples. I come like prophet and messenger to wash the feet to all, around the same table that unites us. Together with my brothers, for you, I consecrate myself to God, O Virgin of the Rosary of Fatima."

Saint Francis’ word help explain why there is a church dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima near the DMZ: because the “Angel of Peace’ and Our Lady asked the children to pray for peace and for humanity to do penance to help bring it about.  But ‘peace’ can have a strange way of happening. Read this, from ‘The Catholic Thing’ website, discussing the immediate aftermath of the apparitions on events in Portugal and beyond:

Historical changes began almost immediately. Physicist and theologian Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, who traveled to Portugal to undertake a thorough scientific investigation of eyewitness accounts and depositions regarding the “miracle of the sun,” observes in his book, God and the Sun at Fatima:

The day after the miracle of the sun Portugal’s history began to change in the voting booths, though at that time nobody could see the ultimate portent of this.  What, one may ask, if Portugal had fallen the prey of the plans of Lenin who described Lisbon as the most atheistic capital in the world? He would not have watched Lisbon so closely, had he no designs about it. What would have happened to Spain [during the Spanish Civil War], with Portugal already in the Communist camp? And what would have become of France, ruled by a “Popular Front,” if the entire Iberian Peninsula had turned into an outpost of Moscow?

 So, what is this person saying, exactly? That the apparitions at Fatima was God’s way of giving the green light to fascism?  

I assume that within the Little Red Riding Hood world of Catholicism Saint Michael and Fatima converge near the DMZ to signify the destruction of the atheistic  Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  For part-and-parcel of this kind of  stark dualism are polarizations like this in which opposing communism leads one to embrace fascism. But as the Pope says (but surely must find difficult to enact within the institution he leads) “the elements are very much entwined.”

It is  worth noting that the Russian Orthodox Church has sided with Putin, causing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to schism. The war, and the role of the Orthodox Church in condoning it, makes the implications of the following lines from the same website I quoted from above seem, to say the least, distressingly ambivalent:

 Signs [of Fatima’s influence on events]  in post-1989 Russia are many: Orthodox Christians number 60 million, including the president and prime minister. According a 2009 National Geographic article: ‘In 1987 there were only three monasteries in Russia; today there are 478. Then there were just two seminaries; now there are 25. Most striking is the explosion of churches, from about 2,000 in Gorbachev’s time to nearly 13,000 today.

Here, to end this post, is the uncompromising atheist Sam Harris writing  in The End of Faith (2005):

Many have observed that religion, by lending meaning to human life, permits communities (at least those united under a single faith) to cohere. Historically this is true, and on this score religion is to be credited as much for wars of conquest as for feast days and brotherly love. But in its effect upon the modern world – a world already united, at least potentially, by economic, environmental, political, and epidemiological necessity – religious ideology is dangerously retrograde.

So, back to the statue of Saint Michael slaying Satan. I think it is shockingly bad taste and should be removed. How about you?

 References:

Angela Giuffrida, ‘Pope Francis says Ukraine war was “perhaps somehow provoked”,’ The Guardian, Tuesday 14 June 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/14/pope-francis-ukraine-war-provoked-russian-troops

https://www.religiousartdecor.com/who-is-like-god-archangel-saint-michael-statues/

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2013/09/08/fatima-and-world-peace/

On the occasion of receiving the Russian translation of my book.

Last week, my UK publisher, Thames & Hudson, sent me two copies of the Russian translation of my book ‘Seven Keys to Modern Art’, which is published by Ad Marginem. In Russian, the title is:  

Семь ключей к современному искусству.

My name is:

Саймон Морли.

What a beautiful looking language! I felt proud when I looked at the book. But also very sad. Since the Ukraine-Russia war began in late February many commentators have lamented the fact that the land of Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Kandinsky and Tarkovsky is now behaving like what these same commentators call ‘barbarians.’ How did it happen?

I have asked my Korean friends and students if they think Russia is part of Europe, and most of them say it is not. It certainly doesn’t seem to belong in the “West’. As Putin himself declares, it is  the ‘West’ that is making war on Russia. By “West’ he means mostly the United States. But the animosity may go much deeper. After all, Russia has a significantly different history to western Europe because it straddles so much of the Eurasian continent. Not many people realize that Russia shares a border with North Korea! In fact, it’s thanks to Russia – or the Soviet Union, as it then was - that North Korea continued to exist, at least up to the early 1990s, at which point China stepped into the role of primary supporter of the sick and deranged child of Marxist-Leninism. But that’s another story.

In 1917, Russia chose a dramatically different kind of modernity to the rest of Europe. Marxism as a political philosophy was born in Germany and elaborated in England as a theory to explain the development of the new capitalist industrialized societies, but a predominantly agrarian nation became the first nation to call itself ‘communist.’ Strange. Very quickly the Bolsheviks adopted an authoritarian system of governance which claimed to be ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ but  obviously was not, which caused great confusion for left-leaning intellectuals and Communist Party members globally. But perhaps the actual story of what happened is now becoming more clear.

The ideology of communism was important not because of its intrinsic ‘scientific’ validity in predicting the inevitable evolution of capitalism toward the ‘classless society’, but because it served as a way of making a rapid and violent redistribution of power, glossed as a ‘revolution’, seem inevitable and benign. But actually, what happened in Russia (as later in North Korea, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, etc.) was a massively accelerated transformation that was sufficiently anarchic that power could be quickly transferred to those most ruthlessly wanting it. Marxist ideology, defined succinctly as “the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction” by the art historian Paul Wood,  served as useful window-dressing. But the reality was always the kind of redistribution of power that a democratic system cannot permit, and indeed, is explicitly designed to render as difficult as possible. The Russia of today is the result not so much of the practice of communism as of the rejection of the democracy that step by step (and very  imperfectly) the “West’ adopted over the period of two centuries. 

The ’West’ opted for the ‘open’ society rather than the ‘closed’ society.  These terms were first used by Karl Popper in his two volume ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’ (1945). Popper argued that what was so important about the democratic principle central to the modern ‘open’ society was not, as was the case in the Classical world, because it focused on the question “Who should rule?” (although this continues to be a fallacy dear to modern democracies) but rather because it confronted the problem of how a state can be “constituted so that bad rulers can be got rid of without bloodshed, without violence.”

What is so striking about much of the Russian propaganda about the war is the projection onto the Ukrainian and ‘Western’ Other of precisely the characteristics of Russia itself. After all, a good synonym for a ‘closed society’ is ‘Nazism.’ So, if you switch the pronouns from ‘they’ to “we’ you get quite an accurate accounting of Russian actions. Putin and the Russian elite’s current war is essentially a war not against ‘Nazism’ but against the principle that bad rulers can be got rid of without violence. This is what Putin hates about the Ukraine. They got rid of their bad rulers more or less without violence, and are leaning decisively toward democracy.  The idea that he and his kleptocratic system could be voted out is unthinkable because it depends on a profound transformation in society that would make his kind of rule impossible. This transformation is one in which leaders are made accountable to large numbers of people and do not simply base their rule on consolidating power and privilege and protecting themselves from potential and aggressive rivals.

Seeing my name in Russian, a script that is now more illegible to me than Korean, and thinking of the Russians who made it possible for my book to be published there, is therefore a melancholy experience. Can they continue to publish books like mine? In fact, another of my books, ‘The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art’ is due to be published by Ad Marginem. But maybe now it won’t be. How much censorship is being exerted? Is modern art sufficiently harmless these days that the Russian leadership doesn’t mind?  It seems highly unlikely there will be a compelled return to Socialist Realism (see my blog post of North Korean ‘Juche Realism’).  Then again, maybe these days there is no need. As the Russian art historian Boris Groys pointed out in ‘The Total Art of Stalinism’ (1992), Socialist Realism grew out of the same heady cultural climate as the modernist avant-garde, in that both believed art could change the world. Maybe no one believes that anymore. It’s all part of the ‘culture industry’. But insofar as that ‘industry’ is radically oriented toward the values of neoliberalism and America, it does seem feasible that there will be a clamp down in Russia. 

So I hope Russians can find my book. I hope that what I write about the artists I discuss, and the seven ways of thinking about art I offer, helps them celebrate and have confidence in the values of an open society in which bad rulers are regularly peacefully voted out of power.

Juche Realism and False Optimism

My interest the art of North Korea derives in part from a broader fascination in how the mass media create reality-proof delusions. This is especially interesting right now in relation to the Ukraine-Russia conflict and how the Russian state has sought (quite successfully, so it seems) to control the Russian people’s perceptions of the war. To those outside the deception, it seems hard to believe that people can be so gullible. But as several commentators have pointed out, the alternative to existing within the reality manufactured by the state is too dangerous and harrowing, too radically at odds with the kind of reality in which people can bear to live. People prefer the delusion, which at least offers consolation and security, and allows them to continue to have a sense of self-efficacy and confidence.

The close links between Russia and North Korea in terms of shared ideology have been underlined by Kim Jong-un’s recent congratulatory message on Russia’s Victory Day. But in the case of North Korea, the disconnect between the reality as we on the outside see it and the one ordinary North Koreans perceive through being fed on a mono-diet of ‘Juche’  and racist propaganda is even more extreme. Nevertheless, the same basic psychological mechanisms are surely at work in the North Korean people as innate only other authoritarian regimes, but in democratic societies like the United States, where conspiracy theories are rife..

In this second post on North Korean Juche Realism, I consider just what thoughts and emotions the North Korean people  are buying into, and why.

A young Kim Il-sung contemplates the future. An example of Juche Realist painting.

Another Juche Realist masterpiece.

Juche Realism shares an important social function with religious art. It ensures social cohesion through images that rise above time and chance. It binds together through transforming the unspecifiable, pervasive, and uncontrollable state of existence into a specifiable, identifiable, and controllable state of named fears and offers the promise of protection.

Juche Realism is aesthetic experience manipulated to create a permanent condition of collective dispositional optimism. This is achieved through ritualistically ‘aestheticizing’ life, in the sense of keeping life’s inherent uncertain and fearful dimensions at bay through turning life into something idealized that can be safely viewed from a distance.  Optimism is channeled along four avenues indicated by psychologists. It aestheticizes the optimism that comes with feelings of social coherence by depicting the world as comprehensible. As a result, the North Korean people feel strengthened by being able to make total sense of, manage, understand, and feel masters of adversity. It aestheticizes the optimism of social hardiness by depicting stressful circumstances and re-casting them only as opportunities for certain growth and strengthening. It aestheticizes social preparedness by focusing only on readiness to confront setbacks and successfully take advantage of opportunities. Finally, it aestheticizes the optimism of self-affirmation. For example, many paintings depict the North Korean people as inherently superior, casting historical achievements of the pre-modernized Korean people and of the DPRK and its leaders in a manner that has not historical veracity but fosters a sense of confidence and pride in the present, thereby making decision-making more efficient and collectively directed.

Juche Realism is a ritualized fantasy space in which the three core positive life-goals are satisfied in the present: the desire for survival, the desire for attachment, and the desire for mastery. By depicting imagery of encounters with and management and self-regulation of fearful and potential despair-inducing situations, Juche Realism encodes collective feelings of trust, calm, safety, protection, and successful survival.

Through images of trust and openness, and total love of the leader, it encodes the confirmation of ‘sociopolitical’ bonds and attachments. Through signs of absolute efficacy, power, and control, it encodes ‘sociopolitical’ security and mastery, and implicit within this is the wish-fulfilling certainty of the DPRK’s triumph over time. Especially through faith in the skill, wisdom, and power of the leader, the North Korean people can adapt to circumstances in the present and to display a remarkable degree of social cohesion.  The regime uses three basic defences against the encroachments of a reality that would inevitably presents challenges to this positive illusion. It uses externalizing explanations by placing the blame for bad or failed outcomes on factors outside the DPRK, such as the United States, The Republic of Korea, or Japan. It uses variable explanations by casting setbacks or problems as temporary rather than endemic and likely to continue in the future. Thirdly, it uses specific explanations, in that it describes failure as occurring in only one context rather than as systemic.

***

The brutality of the Japanese colonial era and the horrors of the Korean War set the stage in the DPRK for the emergence of a nation obsessed with national myths of persecution, suffering, and endurance. The state’s dogmatic intransigence demanded in the cultural sphere the rote reiteration of fantastical narratives. Juche Realism is a form of ideologically tailored visual illusion that breeds dependency and instils over-confidence in the level of control the Kim regime has over the past, present, and, above all, the future. It creates a ritualized virtual reality in which the world appears better than it is. In this sense, Juche Realism serves to artificially bolster self-esteem in a situation in which the people have actually lost all individual agency, all genuine social value. In the dystopic reality of the DPRK the ‘sociopolitical’ self is the happy hostage of the state’s absolute power.  All action is determined by externalized forms of interaction coordinated by the state. Juche Realism forces the North Korean people into supine and dependent roles which to those beyond its zone of hegemonic influence are reminiscent of the submissiveness of a child to a parent.  The Kim leadership is cast as all-powerful parent, capable of granting the wishes of the children who please them. But behind the façade of optimism constructed by Juche Realism lies the reality of a brutal totalitarian regime, and the North Korean people also know that any deviation from the allotted ‘sociopolitical’ role within the state ideology of delusional optimism will be ruthlessly punished by the all-powerful father. The marriage of art and power which obliges North Korean artists to work within the absurd and demeaning constraints of Juche Realism’s simplistic messages of optimistic edification places what is produced, however technically accomplished and expressive, at the antipodes of genuinely ‘real’ or ‘truthful’ art. Its ‘realism’ cannot be discovered beyond the works themselves. It cannot be described in terms that are not blatantly at odds with what anyone outside the DPRK knows about the world. Because the ‘truths’ of Juche Realism are not susceptible to present inquiry, any desire to have genuine knowledge about the outside world must be crushed. There can be no progress, because the regime would be incapable of surviving any change that progress brought. But, when a gust of contradictory reality somehow does finally find its way past the facade, and it becomes clear how greatly the leadership has failed to match its grandiose claims, the disappointment and disillusionment of the North Korean people will be rapid and devastating.

Kim, Father and son, do a bit of sailing.

NOTE: The images in today’s post are reproduced from (top to bottom) 1. Min-Kyung Yoon, ‘North Korean Art Works’, Korean Histories, 3.1, 2012; 2. and 3. Min-Kyung Yoon, “Reading North Korea through Art’, Border Crossings. North and South Korean Art from the Sigg Collection, ex. cat., Hatje Kantz/Kunstmuseum Bern, 2021, 72 – 95.

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.

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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.