FREE SPEECH VERSUS PROPAGANDA.

(The following acerbic entry easily applies to practically every nation without exception, as every nation sees nothing wrong in engaging in agitprop. In this sense, I admit that it may be slightly unfair to single out one country, which in our case happens to be America. But there are a few valid reasons for me to do it. This is, after all, the American section, where I am writing about America, blessings, warts, and all. Indeed, America is important enough to be singled out (with this proper caveat, of course), and big enough to take it.

Another good reason is that America is one of the most vocal countries regarding the wonderfulness of free speech, and probably the most self-righteous country, to attribute this blessing almost exclusively to herself. Thus let this singling out attempt wishfully produce a humbling effect, even if realistically such an attempt is probably futile.

Next, we have the so-called Kinsley Gaffe, mentioned in the text below, and Kinsley is an American pundit, which gives our singling out an additional, albeit less significant, merit.

It goes without saying that the British, as satirized by the great comic Benny Hill, are almost legendary for their insincere speech, which, of course, they no less zealously than the Americans are trying to pass off as “free speech.” But in the last few decades since the end of WWII, the British have shrunk in stature, whereas America, even if it is puffing up its global importance beyond all reasonable limits of international etiquette, is still a world superpower of the first magnitude, and to a certain extent the most conspicuous one, which makes my singling it out more consequential than merely speaking in generalities.)

Propaganda is the very opposite of free speech. It is speech for hire. Which means that for a large majority of our freedom-loving Americans free speech is a luxury they can seldom afford. Take America’s political leaders, for example. The speeches they pass off as theirs, are not their own. They are produced by a class of hacks, known as professional speechwriters, to the generalized dictation of the so-called “staffers,” who look down on their “bosses” with contempt, because elected officials come and go, but the staffers are there forever. In other words, it is not the elected officials who tell their “help” what to do, but the “help,” being the politicians’ daily pipeline to Mr. and Ms. Big, are there primarily to “straighten” their bosses out, which is obviously a pleasant euphemism for making them more and more crooked with each passing day.

The staffers produce the talking points which become the speeches, passed off as speech. The talking points are the quintessence of agitation and propaganda, and there is little to be added to that.

Whenever American politicians open their mouth to utter something unfabricated, extemporaneous, or even impromptu, they tend to speak in safe clichés, otherwise they might risk getting themselves in hot water, also known as “putting their foot in their mouth.” In other words, politicians, beware of free speech: in your case it is bound to be a disaster!

No wonder we have this satirical political dictum known as the Kinsley Gaffe (because it originates with the American political pundit Michael Kinsley), to the effect that “a gaffe is whenever a politician accidentally speaks the truth.” Three cheers for the dearly departed truth then, but why should we say it with a smirk on our face?

Public officials in this sense are only the tip of the iceberg. Observe all those actors in commercials, paid to say stupid things, immortalized in Benny Hill’s skits. How many of us are satisfied with, and even proud of, speaking in the language of these silly clichés, boasting of as much sincerity and truthfulness as the ones of Benny Hill? So why are we doing it? Either we are obliged to speak in thirty-second commercials as part of our job description, at our employers’ behest (and considering that our regular business life comprises by far the largest chunk of our wakeful existence, this fact says volumes!), or else, we have become so used to this meaningless talk that we see nothing tragic in transferring it into our private, personal lives as a ready-made substitute for thoughtful, creative verbalizing.

Well, in conclusion, let us get optimistic for a change. Three cheers for free speech!!!

…Free speech… what’s that?!

THE HOLIER THAN THOU SYNDROME

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that great powers have the legitimate right to project their strength, and to act in their own self-interest. I also believe that nations with a strong democratic tradition have the perfect right to be proud of it and to boast of it around the world. But then, it is all the more deplorable when a great nation would abuse her unquestionable moral authority to promote morally questionable goals. A possession of virtue means an exercise of this virtue at all times. A fallen angel must not keep showing off his former angelic credentials to force the world to accept his authority when his present behavior is demonstrably less than angelic.

In other words, it is quite all right to act in your best self-interest, and everybody who was not born yesterday understands it. But let us not involve morality in it. Let the sun rise and warm all the earth with its life-promoting heat, but when it also scorches and kills, let it not try to convince the desert that it is being done for its own good. Virtue is never self-serving, and when performing self-serving deeds, let us not insult her by claiming to work in her behalf…

Physician, heal thyself!, is an apt prescription for the proverbial faultfinder. As another saying goes, he sees a straw in the other’s eye, yet he is unable to notice a thick log sticking out of his own. But the best nuance is revealed by the peculiar psychological condition bordering on mental illness when a person, or in our case a nation, is obsessed with championing a certain virtue which it believes it possesses, when in fact it doesn’t.

America’s newly rediscovered neo-Wilsonian (I am referring to Woodrow Wilson) morality of freedom, her absolute conviction that she possesses it, and that it is her international mission to impose it upon the world, raises at least two questions: is America indeed free as absolutely as she claims to be (which may not be the case, as I have been pointing in many places already and will further demonstrate in other sections to come); and whether genuine absolute freedom should imply a morality of the higher order (which is by no means a given).

In both cases, America claims to possess these poorly defined, slogan-sounding virtues, neither of which she possesses to the extent alleged. But her insistence on making such a claim at all, may be a symptom of that rather sorry mental condition which I have called here the Holier Than Thou Syndrome.

The following passage from Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life Section 6, provides us with a fascinating insight into the depths of human psychology that can just as well be applied to the psychology of “an age,” as he puts it, or of a nation, which I intend to do for a very good reason:

“Socrates took it to be a malady, approaching insanity, to imagine that one possesses a virtue, when one does not possess it, and certainly such an imagination is much more dangerous than the opposite delusion of suffering from a shortcoming. For, through this delusion, it is possible to become better, but the former imagination will daily make a man or an age worse, that is, more unjust.”

This observation, quite significant for human psychology, becomes politically and socially priceless, when applied to nations. There are two reasons for such imagination: one pathological, when those who possess it and spread it around actually believe in it; the other, not at all abnormal, representing the product of a cold-hearted manipulation of the public psyche, in order to touch some subconscious layer in that psyche, where sufficient receptivity can be found to support a certain policy, or a specific action on the part of the political leadership, which otherwise would surely prove unsupportable. I am making a pointed reference here to the latest American wars in Iraq and elsewhere, where the initial public support had been the direct product of such manipulation.

Another important question is how such political manipulation, when it is administered in large doses, affects the society itself: whether it builds up a contemptuously cynical reaction to all kinds of propaganda, as was the case within Soviet society, or otherwise, a society which has none of the adequate protective mechanisms against indoctrination falls victim to the sudden onslaught of propaganda offensive, and becomes sick, in the sense that it starts to believe that it indeed possesses those virtues which it is alleged to possess (in the case of modern American society, it is the belief in some special moral virtues which the society has exchanged for its social freedoms. All said, I am still confident that some kind of antidote to cynicism may be produced in sufficient quantities within the body of society, to avert insanity. The question, however, is whether excessive cynicism could cause some kind of social breakdown, and what kind of harm, even temporary, it can then do to the society in question.

ELITISM AND POPULISM

Another pertinent variation on the hero theme in modern American culture.

During the American presidential election campaign of 2008, when the present entry was originally written, the heavily loaded term elitism had rather suddenly moved to the top of the word count in its contemporary political vocabulary. As usual, it was rather poorly defined, except that, used interchangeably with such an apparently self-evident whip of condemnation as being “out of touch,” its shocking pejorative connotations and the ruthlessly inevitable conclusion of unelectability extended to Senator Obama’s chances of winning the White House that fall, had overwhelmingly defined elitism as one of the dirtiest qualities to be found in a politician, and perhaps, even the dirtiest of them all.

A fitting follow-up question now pops up: what will the opposite of elitism be? In other words, if the villain is an elitist, then what do we call the hero? Aside from our hero being ever “in touch” with the regular folks (that is, bowling and drinking beer with them, without ever standing out of the crowd), is he also a devout populist, always telling them what the folks wanted to hear and never-ever committing the ultimate political blunder of spilling the beans of the truth? No wonder then that cheap populism and its shameless pandering to the masses had become a distinctive feature of American politics, exemplified by Candidate Hillary Clinton, and to no lesser extent previously by the incumbent President George W. Bush. Judging by the looks of it, Senator/Candidate McCain was (and still is) no exception to the rule. In fact, the one and only breath of fresh air at the time happened to be that poor newcomer Barack Obama, literally dragged through the mud for paradoxically exhibiting the best in American politics.

This silly discussion of who is an out of touch elitist in the running for the presumably heroic, yet never to be confused with uncommon and extraordinary, post of the President of the United States, speaks volumes about the aesthetic direction of modern American society, making it sharply different, and even culturally incompatible with the respective proclivities of Soviet and American societies, as I used to know them just forty years ago, and, considering that what can be described as my distinctive Russianness is still with me, and, therefore, still characterizing Russianness an-Sich, whether or not things in Russia have changed dramatically in the past three decades, during which I have been an expatriate.

Interestingly enough, Western audiences could get an inkling of the Russian attitude toward elitism from the rather unlikely, but in this case exceptionally perceptive source: the early British James Bond movie From Russia With Love, where the beautiful Russian spy tells her recruiter that she does not mind being intimate with a foreigner (in the service of her Motherland, of course), but only if that person is Culturny, which can be interpreted as a man of culture, classy, well-polished, in other words, not a man of hoi polloi, but, in fact, a consummate elitist…

In the Russian psyche, elitism or aristocratism is always a positive, but not in the sense that I am better than them, superior to them or holier than them. Russian elitism is the desired state of cultural enlightenment and self-improvement, striving for better education, refined aestheticism, and classier tastes. The Russians want their leaders to be superior to foreigners or at least on a par with the best of them, looking and behaving not like a Joe-next-door but as a distinguished member of the most elite club on earth. There was a sense of sad disappointment concerning the demeanor and behavior of such Soviet leaders as Nikita Khrushchev and a few lesser others, who did not meet the high standard the Russians have judged their leaders by, but I remember the reverence everybody I knew had for Stalin in that respect, as in the famous set of pictures of the Great Three: Stalin, Churchill, and FDR: the conditions of the elite club membership were fully met by each participant, and exemplified the concept of elitism as well, as, in more recent days, the pictures of Mr. Putin on the memorable 2003 State Visit to the United Kingdom, being received by the British Queen Elizabeth II, or the selfsame Mr. Putin on numerous official occasions in the Kremlin, or meeting other world leaders with all the pomp and circumstance that befits such royal occasions.

Ironically, although Comrade Brezhnev was not held in a particularly high regard by the Russians, the superpower grandeur of the Brezhnev-Nixon summitry, wisely appreciated and promoted on the American side by Kissinger and Nixon, turned those Nixon years of 1972-1974 into a veritable golden age for elite politics in the Russian memory of the post-Stalin era. Conversely, the populist appeal of George W Bush hosting Mr. Putin in the less-than-royal settings of his Crawford ranch could not produce anything but intense disappointment for the Russian senses, but, I guess, by that time, the Russians had already been so incensed by the American betrayal of their pro-American fantasies in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that no super-reception in the world given by either President Clinton or President Bush for Russian dignitaries, could have made any difference to sway the Russian opinion in America’s favor.

Getting back to our discussion of modern American society and its attitude toward elitism, I somehow refuse to believe that it is anti-elitist. The splendor of Hollywood still captures America’s imagination, and I am confident that under normal circumstances the American people would still favor the Camelot of JFK and his First Lady over the grotesquely affected unexceptionality of the George W. Bush era. But there are definitely certain social psychiatrists at work who wish to bring the exception crashing down in American public psyche, and so far the media follows their cue. There will be no more Camelot for Mr. Obama, and not because the American people would not love to have it back, but because the controllers of American public opinion will use all their skill, and all their considerable power over the shaping of public opinion, not to let that happen.

FREE SPIRIT AND AMERICAN FREE SOCIETY

(This entry opens a series which ponders on the lack of genuine freedom of spirit within the American freedom-talking society, which is increasingly finding itself under a despicable censorship, disguised under the intellectually offensive term “political correctness.”)

The colossal damage done to the thinking capacity of the American society from having been inoculated, by its manipulative psychiatrists, with the poisonous germ of political correctness, is the resulting complete and permanent misunderstanding of the nature of philosophical inquiry, whose foremost virtue is precisely that Nietzsche-like fearlessness of the independent thinker, which, alas, this society so tragically lacks today. The truth is that if any kind of socially-imposed “political correctness” is ever to be applied to human discourse and communication, it must always be kept away from the vicinity of the philosophical deliberation, and limit itself entirely to the sphere of social etiquette and general matters of style, rather than substance. No questions of any significant philosophical or social substance should ever be branded as politically incorrect. It is only the answers, whether rude, or hateful, or such, which may be occasionally disallowed in civil society, along with all other explicit instances of anti-social behavior. Unfortunately, we are often too eager to ban a question, as we anticipate, sometimes even with little provocation, a particularly rude answer to it, by offhandedly filling in the blanks, in this case, by answering the question ourselves in our own mind in the ugliest possible way, with some arrogant and insensible guesswork, like some poor people talking on the phone and having a bad reception, who try to figure out for themselves whatever the other party is saying. Such a device can work in some shallow small talk, when the subject matter is extremely unimportant, and likewise is everything that both parties are going to say to each other, concerning their subject. But as we know, banning silly small talk should be an unimaginably horrible infringement on human rights, as well as an utterly ridiculous one, too, as such talk has always been the essential fodder of social communication. However, in all matters of philosophical and social importance, the following two rules must be observed at all times.---

One, we must never commit the crime of disqualifying any question from being asked, on the grounds of its political incorrectness. There are of course good and bad questions. The good ones double-click legitimate files of inquiry; the bad ones act like some computer viruses, messing up our ability to think and understand anything. But our determination of which questions are good, and which are bad, must always be made on the basis of solid mental evaluation, and, as a matter of principle, even the ostensibly bad questions must not be preemptively disallowed from being asked, but only from being hastily answered, before an appropriate evaluation of them has been made.

The other rule demands the absence of presumptions, of any attempts to shortcut the process by guesswork. Are we trying here to suppress our worst fears about the answer? For a few hundred bucks, any psychiatrist should advise us not to pent up our fears of the answer inside our psyche, individual or collective, creating a monster known as “the rage within,” but to bring the question into the open, trying to debate it privately, in the former case, or publicly, in the latter case, so that the worst possible answer can be mollified by the vast diversity of alternative answers, and, thus improved, restored to some measure of sanity, to the benefit of all parties concerned.

The question of diagnosing this peculiar mental illness, one of whose symptoms is this sick obsession with political correctness at the expense of free speech, makes one wonder whether, for instance, this pathology is characteristic of this country only, or it may in some form be also present in Europe, with her own huge immigration problems, and such. This particular form of disease, however, is not to be ever confused with various forms of normal censorship. And, lastly, in psychological terms, which of the two familiar complexes does political correctness reveal: that of superiority, or that of inferiority, or maybe a combination of both? Indeed, the only reason for a constant reaffirmation of one’s superiority must be the existence of an underlying feeling of inferiority.

Translating this discussion, to apply to nations, Soviet society had many speech taboos, carrying within its psyche a deep historical fear of foreign aggression. But no one ever claimed, except for perfunctory propaganda reasons, that it was a free society. Furthermore, very few would experience an actual discomfort from being unfree: the majority happily traded any potential benefits of freedom for the security and protection afforded to them by the State, and every free Russian spirit was rejoicing at the fact that their free spirit was so much alive in them, generously nurtured and tempered by the adversity itself!

American society, on the other hand, prides itself in its inalienable freedoms, whereas it is riddled, as if with bullets, with insecurities and phobias of every imaginable kind. Whatever it wants to call free society it may well have, to its infinite satisfaction, but it seems to subsist at the expense and to the detriment of America’s free spirit. Politically correct thought is not free thought, and without free thought the spirit cannot be free.

This sounds like an awfully grotesque, crooked and unkind paradox, but it is much preferable to have a free spirit in an unfree society than a free society housing the spirit of a slave.

Unless a third option becomes available: free spirit in a free society. But is such a thing even possible? Yes, it is, and certainly in America!… But what a priceless rarity!

REBELS, AND NOT CONFORMISTS!

Continuing in the vein of the preceding discussion, what kind of men and women must a great nation honor? Which biographies are worth reading? Which lives are worth living?

Not so simple. In order to become a biography, a great life must first become a legend. Heroic legends have much in common, the most striking similarity being their non-conformity to the normal ‘standard of living.’ It turns out that greatness transcends the rules, disregards them, breaks them. A hero is always a revolutionary of sorts, a rebel against the norm; and there is something in each great life which proves it. It is the stuff all legends are made of.

Stable, well-to-do societies have little appreciation for heroes. In a sense, heroes are anathema to those who measure life in terms of perpetuity, survival, and success: the earthly goals of the middle-class mentality. It is worth noting that in Russia the rather unique social class of the intelligentsia (habitually misunderstood, and hopelessly mistranslated into other languages as intellectuals, there is no similar concept in existence within non-Russian societies, as will be properly explained and elaborated in the Russian Section) encourages an extraordinary state of mind where higher goals and hero-worship are the norm. The American society, on the other hand, has depreciated the value of heroes to such an extent that the proper meaning of the word hero has virtually been lost with too many “heroes” walking around, just as the true meaning of winning is also lost, under the rules where everybody gets a blue ribbon of the winner, to bail out the sensibilities of the losers.

The American society of today loves the pre-scripted freedoms of political correctness in the broader sense of the word and does not suffer self-propelled rebels in its midst gladly. But, alas, without such rebels, there can be no heroes, and America is paying the price for the grounding of her dream.

Albus Dumbledore, commenting on Harry Potter’s character, observes a certain disregard for the rules, as an integral part of his heroic nature. Even Harry’s friend Hermione, purportedly the epitome of the teacher’s darling, resorts to rule-breaking, as soon as she enters the realm of the heroic. Considering that the genius of J. K. Rowling as an adept in authentic folklorizing is established, and folklore is the domain where legends are made, we are learning something else about the nature of the hero, namely, that he is most likely to be a maverick, a rebel, and never a conformist, which word sounds offensive both to the heart and the mind, like a sentimental impossibility and a logical contradiction in terms.

And here is Nietzsche of course with his On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, Section 6:

“…And if you want biographies, then not those with the refrain “Mr. So-and-so and his Time,” but rather, those, on whose title page shall be inscribed: “A Fighter Against His Time.” Satisfy your soul on Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourself, when you believe in his heroes. A hundred such men, educated against the modern fashion, that is, men who have ripened, and who are used to the heroic, could now silence forever the whole noisy pseudo-education of our time.”

How modern, how urgent does this sound, against the backdrop of this hero-free, education-free American society! And yes, the best of history is necessarily great and splendid fiction. So, to return America back to her greatness, give back to her the greatness of her legends! Return her to Plutarch!

DEFICIT OF HISTORICAL MEMORY

The distorted sense of American nationalism, discussed in the concluding paragraphs of the previous entry, needs further clarification. Not that I am that much objecting to the presence of an Imperial Nationalism in the American attitudes toward the outside world (which, after all, can be well reasoned and even justified!), as much as I am reproachfully pointing to the absence of any cohesive substance in the domestic life of the nation. The loud clatter of stereotyped pseudo-patriotism is more than matched by a deafening silence in so far as America’s historical memory is concerned. In fact, that historical memory, having been condemned as politically incorrect, has been reduced to shameful insignificance on that account.

Among many other things, the health of national consciousness can be judged by the nation’s treatment of her heroes. But who are America’s national heroes? The proper definition of a hero is sadly twisted beyond reason, these days, in the American parlance and comprehension.

To begin with, the hero is never a victim, yet in the current American consciousness most victims of violent crimes, particularly, of terrorism, are quickly pronounced as heroes. An otherwise undistinguished prisoner of war, or an innocent hostage held by some terrorist group, becomes a hero ipso facto. A sports champion is always a hero as well, just because he is a winner. A man who saves himself by cutting off his hand, which got trapped some place, is also an undisputed hero… Not that I intend to withhold my pity, my admiration, or my sympathy in some compelling cases of heroic deeds associated with the situations above, but unfortunately the shortchanged loser in all this is the real hero, who is properly defined by an act of supreme self-sacrifice for a cause far higher than personal survival or glorification. In a nutshell, you are a hero not for getting shot, but for consciously getting in the line of fire, saving the lives of others.

And now, the bottom line in appreciating your everyday heroes. There can be no such appreciation in separation from a keen sense of history.

Most national heroes have become part of their nation’s past, and even the heroes of today become separated from the here and now, and by virtue of their heroic act, belong to the national past. Accordingly, nations that do not honor the heroes of their past do not deserve the glory of that past, and do not measure up to the potential of their future greatness.

It is quite tragic that American society, while beating the drums of some inalienable right to greatness, has, in fact, alienated itself from the true greatness of its past, having trivialized the concept of national hero, and having effectively lost or renounced its historical memory.

THE UNITED JEKYLL AND HYDE OF AMERICA PART III

And finally the third class of morality residing in America. It is the immigrant morality, without any desire, or likelihood, or even reason to enter the common American melting pot. It is that diverse variety of unassimilated cultures in the United States, who somehow seem to exist on their own, outside the domain of the American master culture, and inside the shells of their own respective minority communities, characterized by their general moral disapproval (usually subdued, for political reasons), of the overall moral tenor and way of life of mainstream American society. Mind you, I am specifically focusing on the secular, and not the religious morality of the mainstream, which somehow trivializes the Morality of God, itself reduced to some sectarian underground. This problem of alienation of modern secular morality from the traditional religious morality is by no means as vivid and noxious among the minorities, who often resentfully counter the social morality of the American majority with their sectarian, but workable, morality of God. The latter is only possible inasmuch as these minorities that I am talking about, even though they are happy to accept the social reality of dwelling among the American mainstream, with its material advantages, comfort, luxuries, even the permissiveness of the free society, refuse to identify themselves with the mainstream culture. They never consider that decadent and decaying culture as master culture. They are content with it only for as long as it enables them to live as they wish, and they are quite happy that the “white man’s culture” is so weak that it makes no claim on their own lifestyle, allowing them to maintain their cultural non-American roots, keeping their allegiance to them, and no allegiance, really, to their “common American home.” There are stars and stripes, of course, still evoking respect among the immigrant minorities, but these can clearly sense that the culture of stars and stripes has been suspended in a dream-world out-of-body existence, and the mainstream “white man’s America” can no longer have a claim to it, having renounced its past, in favor of an acultural, anational, amorphous subsistence.

Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Not for as long as there is no movement toward the light. America is stuck in that dark tunnel between the twilight’s last gleaming and the dawn of a new day. No help can be expected from the new waves of immigration: each immigrant culture understandably wants to survive by preserving itself against the backdrop of a cultural darkness. Only a renewed great-American spirit can extricate America as one nation from her dilemma of being stuck in a dark tunnel, and make her start moving again in a meaningful direction.

But is there a sufficient national will for that? Will our arrogant Dr. Jekyll, the world’s self-appointed physician, ever realize the morbid presence of Mr. Hyde in his own psyche? Will he ever be humble enough to admit that he is sick and needs an effective treatment? In that case, and only in that case, can he really heal himself, because there is no physician in the world today or in the world to come who can do it for him.