The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why the life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance.28
THE SHIPWRECK OF UTOPIA
The revolutions of 1989-91 dealt a mortal blow to the ideological pretense according to which human life can be structured in accordance with scientific designs proposed by a general staff of revolutionary doctrinaires. These movements countered the apotheosis of bureaucratic domination with the centrality of human rights. “Seeing like a state” (to use James C. Scott’s formula) turned out to be a strategy with catastrophic consequences.29 Some acclaimed these revolutions precisely because they were non-Jacobin, nonteleological, and nonideological. They were anti-utopian precisely because they refused to pursue any foreordained blueprint. In emphasizing the non-utopian character of Charter 77, Havel tellingly described the foundation upon which the resistance that fueled the 1989 upheaval was built: “An essential part of the ‘dissident’ attitude is that it comes out of the reality of the human here and now. It places more importance on often repeated and consistent concrete action—even though it may be inadequate and though it may ease only insignificantly the suffering of a single insignificant citizen—than it does in some abstract fundamental solution in an uncertain future.”30 The answer to the pervasiveness of a spuriously revolutionary ideology was to fill the gap between the public and the private existence by way of reestablishing “authentic human relations, which would preserve the direct and genuine communication of the private life, being at the same time politically influential as a counterweight to the oppressive, bureaucratic state.”31
With the exception of some vaguely defined concepts like civil society, return to Europe, and popular sovereignty, these revolutions occurred in the absence of and in opposition to ideology. Precisely because ideology had become the justification of state-sponsored lies, coercion, terror, and violence, dissidents, from Solzhenitsyn to Havel, insisted on the need to overcome the schizophrenic ideological chimeras and rediscover the galvanizing power of concepts such as dignity, identity, civility, truth, transparence, trust, and tolerance. For example, Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, himself a victim of Communism because of his central role in the creation of Charter 77, considered that Russian dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shared “a sense of the truth of their own humanity that outweighed any material advantage or dogmatic slogan that could be offered to them” [my emphasis].32 In response to the totalist pretension of a totalitarian movement, dissidents reaffirmed what Patočka conceptualized as “care for the soul”—that “which makes whatever is properly human in us possible: morality, thought, culture, history. It is the most sacred thing in us, something through which we become connected to that which is eternal, yet without having to leave this world.”33 Or, “the attempt to embody what is eternal within time, and within one’s own being, and at the same time, an effort to stand firm in the storm of time, stand firm in all dangers carried with it.”34 Communism was therefore faced with individuals who rejected both living a lie and messianic posturing. One author even remarked that this could also be an explanation for the aftermath of 1989: “Václav Havel’s idea of living in truth, as well as Adam Michnik’s new evolutionism, George Konrád’s antipolitics and other dissident conceptions, are actually long-term strategies of resistance—not instructions to civil societies after the reestablishment of liberal democracies.”35
In the aftermath of the demise of the Leninist order, the moral landscape of post-Communism was marred with confusion, venomous hatreds, unsatisfied desires, and endless bickering. This is the bewildering, often terrifying territory in which political mythologies make a return. In Václav Havel’s words: “The fall of communism destroyed this shroud of sameness, and the world was caught napping by an outburst of the many unanticipated differences concealed beneath it, each of which—after such a long time in the shadows—felt a natural need to draw attention to itself, to emphasize its uniqueness, and its difference from others.”36 The ideological extinction of Leninist formations left behind a vacuum that has been filled by syncretic constructs drawing from the region’s pre-Communist and Communist heritage (nationalism, liberalism, democratic socialism, conservatism, populism, neo-Leninism, and an even more or less refurbished Fascism). Ethnocentric ideology, as mendacious as the Communist one, has become a new salvationist creed, a quasi-mystical source of identification: “When the nationality conflict obliterates all else and the high priests of the intelligentsia support their nation’s obsession with romantic platitudes, we have what can be called political hysteria.”37 Moreover, Patočka argued that during the twentieth century, and especially under Communism, individuals had to be “shaken” into “an awareness of their own historical nature, their own possibilities for freedom via the assumption of a self-reflective stance and the rejection of ideology.”38 Dissidents themselves were “a community of the shaken,” but they were hardly the majority of the population. The persistence of ideological ruins within post-Leninist societies and the echoes of the last century’s totalitarian temptations made East Europeans vulnerable to resurgent specters of alternative or derivative salvationisms (e.g., clericalism, ethnocentric conservatism, and populism). Havel warned that ideology was “a specious way of relating the world. It offers human beings the illusion of identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.”39
At the very core of Marxism one finds a millenialist myth about justice, fraternity, and equality, a social dream about a perfect world where the ancient conflict between man and society, between essence and existence, would be transcended. More than anything else, Marxism represented a grandiose invitation to human beings to engage in a passionate search for the City of God and to construct it here and now. Leninism relied on its utopian aspect, as it proposed what Eric Weitz describes as a “capacious vision” of historical development: “By clearing the rubble of the past, they believed they would open the path to the creation of the new society that would permit the ultimate efflorescence of the human spirit.”40 This human adventure has failed, but the deep needs that Marxism tried to satisfy have not come to an end. According to Leszek Kołakowski, “Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of the twentieth century.” The professed unity between theory and praxis that Marxism found was its historical cul-de-sac: its practical failure was the confirmation of its theoretical fallacies. In other words, a philosophy that proclaimed praxis as the criterion of truth and maintained that concrete reality is the test of validity was dramatically belied by the practical impossibility of its implementation as originally designed and by the human costs linked to its Leninist and post-Leninist revisions and experiments. As Leszek Kołakowski concluded in his unsurpassed trilogy, “The self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical expression, has ended in the same way as all such attempts, whether individual or collective: it has revealed itself as the farcical aspect of human bondage [my emphasis].”41