|
|
|
|
Critical Review
The Postmodern Identity of Russia—and the West
by Boris Maizel
*
Abstract
In contrast to societies where socialization takes place through the transmission of anonymous and hence overpowering traditions, the typical way of socialization for Western people is through productive dialogue guided by the search for objectivity. Postmodernism, however, fosters a form of dialogue in which people should not look for objective knowledge but should simply register their diverse opinions. Just this type of dialogue has been the norm in Russia for centuries. As a result, Russian cultural and political initiative has been dominated by an all-powerful state. In the West, we now witness a similar process, as the culture of nonjudgmental relativism consolidates its dominance over an increasingly postmodern society.
The modern epoch, with its Enlightenment ideals of objective science, critical philosophy, and realistic art, is over, or at least so it is widely said. Many believe that we are now stepping into a new world without canons, “metanarratives,” “master-readings” and other instruments of the old intellectual order: the world of “postmodernity.” The question, however, is whether postmodern theories correspond to any reality. The short answer is that, yes, they do correspond to at least one: Russia has always been “postmodern.”
Truth-Seeking vs. Talking
All people are interested in gaining access to reality and truthful information. Everyone intends to know what is true, right, and real as opposed to false, wrong, and illusory. This absolutely universal human characteristic may be explained by the fact that the inability to obtain realistic information condemns human beings to death. Even though all the biological functions of the body—including the neurological and perceptive functions—are intact, if one’s capacity for sound reasoning and clear understanding is defective, one cannot survive without other people’s close attention and painstaking care. It is solely the ability to make the right choice between reality and illusion, truth and falsehood that is both our generic trademark and our personal license for life.
But cultures differ in how they promote objective knowledge and encourage people in their everlasting search for truth. Some societies institutionalize the search for objective knowledge as a social norm: they demand that their members always be critical, and self-critical, in the pursuit of truth. Other cultures are not so rigorous and do not explicitly emphasize objectivity as a supreme social value.
In most cultures, the question of what is true and false, right and wrong, good and bad, virtuous and sinful is answered by reference to a canon of mythology, religious scripture, or theoretical speculation. These intellectual guides are ritualistically transmitted from generation to generation as sacred.
Two cultures are exceptions to this rule: that of the West and that of Russia. If we ask people of these cultures what is right, good, or true, they commonly answer: let us talk and we will see.
The method of the “open cultural answer” was invented by the Greeks and became firmly established as a standard intellectual procedure in post-Renaissance Europe. Independently, a “culture of talk” was developed in Russia, which was virtually isolated from the rest of the world for its entire history.
But Western discussions and Russian dialogues are essentially dissimilar from each other.
In the West, there is an overarching cultural mechanism that provides a controlling and guiding device for all types of debate. This device, however, is not identical with the “metanarratives” (the authoritative stories or myths) that, in other cultures, regulate intellectual discourse and social life. Western culture does not rest upon a particular sacred text; rather, it adheres to a single anti-authoritarian instruction: “Critically investigate any claim about objective reality.” This dictum is applicable to legal, moral, and political debate as well as to journalistic and scientific research.
Western history has not produced a ready-made definition of “objectivity”; instead, people are urged to produce objective information on their own, using their critical, creative, argumentative, and discursive capacities. I call this approach the “philosophical culture” since ancient Greek philosophy prototypically initiated it.
Western dialogue is a public debate concerning momentous issues that is often framed by strict procedures. Though discussions in Western parliaments, universities, and mass media are far from being perfectly and completely honest and unbiased, they are culturally set up to arrive at definite conclusions. With that end in view, the disputatious parties are always rushing to bring forth evidence that exposes their opponents’ stands as objectively wrong. As this inquisitive procedure became customary, it produced several concomitant traditions: intellectual freedom, liberal democracy, and respect for independent opinions.
In Russia, as was made particularly clear by the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, the cultural norm is for people to talk endlessly and aimlessly, while not listening to each other, in the chaotic manner of a carnival. This form of dialogue is not a pastime in Russia but the only available instrument of social contact, whether privately staged (as with notorious alcoholic binges) or sanctioned by the state (official festivities and hollow political ceremonies). 1
Carnivalesque Russian dialogue has given rise to an idiosyncratic society. Since a Russian dialogue is not supposed to lead to definite conclusions, its cultural function differs from that of a Western dialogue. The real purpose of Russian dialogues is not learning other people’s ideas and not even persuading others of one’s rightness, but simply confronting each other. This permanent and rather hostile confrontation makes social cooperation difficult.
Having no impersonal, intersubjective standard of knowledge, Russians typically indulge their subjectivity. “The kind of debate that is usually conducted between individuals in the West often rages even more acutely within individuals in Russia” (Billington 1966, ix). As Nicholas Berdyaev (1990, 268) put it, “Russian moral judgments are determined with reference to the person, not to the abstract principles of property, state, nor to the abstract good. Russians have a peculiar attitude to sin and crime; there is pity for the fallen and the humiliated and dislike for grandeur.”
In Russia there are many small islands of community life. But they are communities of family and close friends bound together only by blood ties and personal attachment, not by principles or ideology. Unlike communities that are formed either around a specific civic ideal (religious, moral, social) or around a clearly articulated economic interest, Russian comradeships are casually formed and are bereft of any common basis for mutual trust. Consequently, Russian communities are unable to produce a civil society at large.
Russians sometimes realize the sterility of their type of cultural interaction. But this realization never leads to a more productive form of dialogue. History inexorably reveals another pattern: to preserve a modicum of social cohesiveness, Russians willingly give up their “culture of talk” for the practicality of totalitarianism. A Western historian keenly identified this cultural pattern in Stalin’s rise to power: one “factor explaining the compliance of the party’s lower echelons to manipulation by the Stalin machine,” he writes, was “the widespread disquiet over public displays of disunity and the sense that it was pathological... for party meetings and media to be constantly taken up with conflicts of policy and personality” (Rigby 1977, 71).
Russian social diversity does not lead to greater tolerance. On the contrary, Russian society becomes prey to forced and total uniformity. Since it has no regulative mechanism in and of itself, the government imposes its own indisputable order on all branches of public life and even infringes upon Russian private lives. The monotony of political totalitarianism is the permanent underside of superficial cultural flamboyance.
To illustrate my assertion concerning the postmodern character of Russian society, I would like to give examples from three spheres of Russian social life: law, politics, and economics.
Concrete Postmodernism
Russian society may be characterized as lacking a continuous legal tradition and the basic concept of law.
In Russia, Roman law was never adopted as the foundation of civil society, as it was in Western Europe. Nor was the Napoleonic Code, the most universal formulation of civil law, the model for Russian justice. At the same time, Russia failed to produce a common-law judiciary.
Even the Russian bureaucracy, which is the only structure in Russia capable of settling disputes and prosecuting crimes, has no uninterrupted tradition of administering justice. Russian law was formed and administered by the arbitrary rule of the almighty Russian autocrats. Many detailed instructions that strictly determined the economic, political, and civil life of Russian subjects relied not on any tradition but completely depended on the will (and whims) of an individual ruler.
The next example is from the sphere of politics. Everywhere politics is an ideological pursuit. In this sense, “ideology” is a concatenation of principles that ruling elites more or less consistently try to put into practice. Although each nation has its own spectrum of ideologies, some ideological underpinning is a common feature of political life in all societies.
Yet James Billington (1966, 217) noted that Catherine the Great was “the only articulate ideologist to rule Russia between Ivan IV and Lenin.” The historical interval between the death of Ivan the Terrible (1584) and Lenin’s revolution (1917) covers nearly three and a half centuries and would seem too long to contain only one ruler who could articulate an ideology. Even Billington’s assessment of Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great, however, is questionable. The Russian-American historian Georgiy Fedotov (1989, 203), in a 1945 essay, wisely observed the difference between a Russian ruler and an Oriental despot: “An Oriental despot, who is not limited by law, is confined to a tradition, especially a religious one.” But a Russian autocrat is never confined to any ideological tradition.
The avoidance of ideological constraints benefits the government since it allows Russian rulers not to explain their actions or inaction. Thus they are in a position to pursue any policy without a justification and sometimes even without an announcement. “Mr. Gorbachev’s achievement,” a Western journalist observed, “is a perfect instance of the post-modern as defined by Lyotard: ‘The text he writes or the work he creates is not in principle governed by pre-established rules and cannot be judged according to a determinant judgment, by the application of given categories to this text or work’” (Atlas 1995, 5).
Never consistently formulated, the policies pursued by different Russian leaders are largely similar to each other: all of them essentially seek to maintain the status quo. The difference in policies really concerns only administrative methods and bureaucratic forms, not political goals or ideological content. The real question is, most often, whether to exert more or less pressure on society to conserve it; that is, simply put, whether to make the Russian autocratic regime more or less rigid.
The legitimacy of the Russian government is also uniquely nonideological. Despite their enormous political might, autocratic Russian rulers constantly feel that their power is not ideologically (legally and morally) justified. In fact, Russian history informs us of the almost permanent threat posed by political impostors (the “false czars”) who competed for power with official leaders on equally nonideological ground (notably, among them were not only members of the nobility but illiterate peasants such as Pugachev, Razin, and Bolotnikov). Ideological illegitimacy is the main reason Russian rulers tend to intensify political struggle even when absolute power is already in their hands. Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Stalin, and practically all other Russian leaders used the full weight of their sophisticated repressive apparatuses to strike preventive blows against potential and even imaginary claimants to the throne.
The third example concerns the applicability of the capitalist system to Russia.
Capitalist societies combine market practices and the “philosophy of greed” with other, sometimes even opposite, cultural mechanisms and values.
Capitalism was created by the Renaissance spirit of innovation and exploratory adventurism. Its critical moral and legal components were supplied by the Protestant and, to a lesser extent, Jewish religions (so argued Max Weber and Werner Sombart). Aristocratic and peasant ideologies were permanent companions to capitalism until the twentieth century. The working class culturally counterbalanced bourgeois civilization. And finally, in some non-Western regions capitalism was in a symbiotic relationship with local cultural traditions.
Russia alone, due to its deficiency of well-embedded political principles and legal norms, has developed a system of chemically pure “economic” capitalism without a cultural backstop, so that capitalism in Russia turned out to be an entirely unlawful and criminal enterprise.
The Historical Continuity of Russian Postmodernism
Lyotard (1984, xxiv) has defined the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” Exactly this posture was always appropriate in Russia, for no abstract rule or formal procedure was ever honored there. Ernest Gellner (1979, 346) formulates the “Russian tradition” in the following way: “If the ruler is good, procedures are quite redundant, and indeed offensive; if he is evil, they will not save you.” As Geoffrey Hosking (1997) has lately demonstrated, Russia is a nation without the concept of nationhood, where public affairs are not close to its people’s hearts and patriotism is never a popular idea.
It was always up to the ruler to decide singlehandedly major political, economic, administrative (including the order of succession to the throne), and even religious and cultural questions. This czar’s prerogative was not a remnant of the old customary law: the autocratic principle was fully developed and universally applied by Peter the Great in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, destroying the scanty autonomy the Russian nobility had enjoyed over the previous centuries and eliminating the residual signs of the rather imaginary independence of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The Russian Church was subordinated to the Russian state at least from the time of Metropolitan Iosif Volotsky (the fifteenth century). More important, however, while Russian Orthodoxy became world famous for its splendid rituals and its unique religious art, it never developed any significant body of theology. No system of ethics or religious philosophy was produced in Russia until the nineteenth century. “If a historian of Western medieval thought addressed the Russian Middle Ages, he would be stunned by the complete absence of needs and interests in the theoretical justification and in the analysis of faith and church teaching” (Shpet 1991, 260). This is why the Orthodox religion was unable to be the intellectual center of Russian culture and society.
The case of secular philosophy in Russia is even worse than the case of religion. Many cultures possess abstract cosmologies and ethical systems that, while functionally and structurally different from myths, were historically and thematically rooted in mythological narratives. But the civilized period of Russian history and the written records of Russian culture do not preserve a single meaningful piece of early Russian mythology. As a result, Russia has been effectively deprived of an intellectual foothold for its own overarching worldview. As late as 1922, Gustav Shpet could still characterize Russian philosophical culture in the following way: “Philosophical consciousness as a form of social consciousness, philosophical culture, genuine philosophy itself as pure knowledge and as a liberal art belong exclusively to Russia’s future” (Shpet 1991, 238-39).
At the same time, Russian culture during its formative period was basically (philosophically, politically, and even geographically) cut off from the rest of the world. While religiously isolated from Asia, Russians could not pick up philosophical ideas in the West because they were politically estranged from Europe for three centuries by Tatar and Mongol dominance, and for many more centuries by the autocratic arrogance of their czars. They were also culturally alienated from the Greek and Latin inheritance due to their unfamiliarity with the classical languages.
As a result of all these factors, no truly authoritative culturewide narrative has emerged in Russia, and Russian society was bound to turn into a postmodern one.
Western Convergence with Russia
The postmodern cultural syndrome whose presence is so visible over the last quarter of a century in the West has changed the nature of Western dialogue and made it much closer to the sterile Russian model. The final verdict from both the analytic and Continental philosophical traditions (from Wittgenstein as well as from Heidegger) was clear: the existence of objective reality is doubtful and truth is socially contingent. Therefore all generalizations are ungrounded and rather purposely deceitful. (Although postmodernism is a fruit of intrinsic Western evolution, we should take notice of a direct, albeit small, influence from Russia: one of the early theoreticians of postmodernism, the French semiologist, writer, and philosopher Julia Kristeva, used some of Bakhtin’s ideas, such as “polyphonic dialogue” and “carnival consciousness,” to galvanize the postmodern movement.)
Both analytic and Continental postmodernisms have found their most eloquent mouthpiece in Richard Rorty. According to Rorty, it is not true that abstract intellectual principles may be responsible for our everyday conduct and for our culture. Contrary to this “objectivist” and rationalist approach, he assumes that it is communal dialogue that actually shapes social practices and cultural forms.
The problem is that a dialogue is not just an act of communication but also, at least implicitly, a search for a better explanation of the world or for a better organization of social life. If our society is altogether free of normative elements, the paramount norm of truth-seeking will be absent from our dialogues. This indeed is the case in Russia, where dialogue that does not follow any cultural norm and does not pursue any definite goal has long been the predominant form of communication. And this is exactly what postmodernist theory recommends for all: “It is hard to see what difference is made by the difference between saying ‘there is only the dialogue’ and saying ‘there is also that to which the dialogue converges’” (Rorty 1995, 357). Postmodernists proudly operate within the narrow framework of the “lonely provincialism” of isolated communities: “Everybody is ethnocentric when engaged in actual debate, no matter how much realist rhetoric about objectivity he produces in his study” (ibid., 359).
Rorty is right that the starting point for any intellectual discussion is a “pragmatic” one, that is, “where we are now.” But it should not necessarily be our destination.
Postmodern cultural pragmatism is the ideology of a soft, “non-sadistic” community, where nobody struggles to impose “his” or “her” truths upon others. Practically, it means that, for the sake of not slipping out of the framework of a communal dialogue, everyone should brainwash his or her mind according to the latest intellectual fashion. A difficulty, however, is that the typical contenders for popularity are usually the most primitive ideas, which present reality in a crudely schematic and formulaic way.
But the worst thing in this situation is not the lowering of intellectual standards and public taste as such; it is the impossibility of raising them again. The real problem of “mass society” is not that so many vulgar and tasteless cultural forms are available to the public. The problem is that nothing is opposed to them, because there is no turf to compete on, nor reason to challenge prevailing norms or be original and bold: where the sociological criterion of popularity dominates, the ideal of objective truth is abandoned. The pragmatic principle, which states that what is socially agreeable and conventionally acceptable is really good, denies the values of objectivity and reason. If people do not believe that they are sometimes able to be more right than others and meaningfully argue about that, then they have to follow some familiar pattern: market trends, social conventions, or intellectual fashions.
If we base our viewpoints and our policies on public opinion, we are doomed to eliminate real intellectual competition, individual creativity, and inventiveness, because people usually vote for the familiar and urge their intellectual and political leaders to imitate well-known cultural examples and duplicate previously established policies. “An expression such as ‘popular initiative’ is... misleading and propagandistic.... Ideas... can only be the work of single individuals,” even though “many people are subsequently able to see whether the ideas were good or bad, especially if they have had direct experience of their consequences” (Popper 1996, 72).
Although cultural primitivism may seem beneficial to political elites, in fact the permanent use of only popular or commercially successful values is a double-edged sword. Unlike political or economic measures to control society, this tool is detrimental to elites as much as to the public because it levels everybody down to a single mental standard, taking away from the entire society its intellectual integrity and ingenuity.
The appeal to cultural tolerance, which eliminates productive dialogue and intellectual competition guided by the concept of objective truth, is, in fact, a recipe for forced uniformity (either cultural or political or both). If it is not the pursuit of truth that motivates and mobilizes people, then either a cultural example imposes itself on them as their social standard solely because of its fleeting popularity; or political institutions will have to put society in order; or, in the worst-case scenario, a single political center will be responsible for everything, and surely for culture.
The first Russian nationalist writer, Ivan V. Kireevsky (1911, 268), discovered the flaw deeply embedded in Russian society:
If there is an evil in Russia, if there is a disorder in its social relationships, if there are always reasons for the Russian man to suffer, all of them are firmly rooted in the disrespect for the sanctity of truth.... A Russian... does not value his pronounced word at all. His word is not him, it is his thing he owns as if under Roman property law, that is, he can use and destroy it without any public responsibility.... He considers a lie as... a kind of superficial sin that originates in the necessity of social relations which he regards as a kind of unreasonable force.
But now in the West many are doubtful that they could ever get a firm grip on reality, political or psychological, individual or social. When there is a pervasive feeling that nothing is certain and nobody is credible and different viewpoints are basically equal, the ideal of searching for objective truth is naturally replaced by the pragmatic strategy of finding comfortable agreements and useful myths (even the term “truth” becomes suspicious and often yields to nebulous euphemisms: “authenticity,” “transparency,” and so on). The retreat from reality in twentieth-century culture that first marked philosophical speculation and artistic experimentation has eventually reached public life and mass psychology, making it impossible to distinguish any longer childish fantasies from social and historical facts, public debate from entertainment, and cultural values from their market prices.
If postmodernism is nothing other than a mirror of failed culture, then the postmodern West now finds itself exactly at the point the Russians are trying to leave, in a desperate attempt to escape the unfortunate pattern of their civilization.
References
Atlas, James. 1995. “Pinpointing a Moment on the Map of History.” The New York Times, March 19, Section 4.
Berdyaev, Nicholas A. [1947] 1990. “Russkaya ideya [The Russian Idea].” In O Rossii i russkoi filosofskoi kulture [On Russia and on Russian Philosophical Culture]. Moscow: Nauka.
Billington, James H. 1966. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Fedotov, Georgiy P. [1945] 1989. “Rossiya i svoboda [Russia and Freedom].” Znamya, December.
Gellner, Ernest. 1979. Spectacles and Predicaments. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hosking, Geoffrey. 1997. Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917. London: HarperCollins.
Kireevsky, Ivan V. [1845] 1911. Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy [Complete Works], vol. 1. Moscow: Moscow University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François. [1979] 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Popper, Karl R. 1996. The Lesson of This Century. London: Routledge.
Rigby, T. H. 1977. “Stalinism and the Mono-Organizational Society.” In Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation, ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton.
Rorty, Richard. [1985] 1995. “Solidarity or Objectivity?” In Voices of Wisdom, ed. Gary E. Kessler. Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth.
Shpet, Gustav G. [1922] 1991. “Ocherk razvitiya russkoi filosofii [Outline of the Development of Russian Philosophy].” In Russkaya filosofiya: ocherki istorii [Russian Philosophy: Historical Essays]. Sverdlovsk: Ural University Press.
Venclova, Tomas. 1998. “The Pluralist.” The New Republic, May 18.
Endnotes
*: Boris Maizel teaches in the Department of Philosophy, Baruch College of the City University of New York, 17 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10010, telephone (718) 372-1028. This essay is dedicated to E. P. Back.
Note 1: See, for example, Venclova 1998. Back.