Homines maxime homines

I have never found any classical control or proportion in the ancients. They have seemed untame, reckless, uncouth - dare one say - barbaric. Certainly there is much nobility in that wild leap forward, but such narrow nobility: no universal themes of redemption and compassion that our civilization was only infused with by Christianity (and then liberalism). But this said, with the burst of Athens into the world history a theme of emancipation was introduced that has not ever been since silenced. Yes, originally it was interpreted very narrowly, very harshly indeed, in a way almost contradicting itself, but that theme was of a nature to rupture any arbitrary boundaries.

So, even with the softening influence Christianity, we are fundamentally still in the same position: recklessly exposed to fate as free individuals, as individuals striving for freedom. That has led in history to similar bloody and cruel dominions and cul-de-sacs as Athens experienced, but our human experience has in any case been dominated by those issues: what is radically new is this new note, this promise and hope of emancipation, of reason and self-control. It is dangerous to exalt those barbarian times (remembering poor Friedrich, for example) but they nevertheless constituted a majestic beginning of a great experiment.

Joseph, my little man

In 1923 the Catholic Bulletin bitterly berated Yeats for his failure to write more like this: "Una, my little one, be a nun. Joseph, my little man, be a priest if you can." But the call went unheeded - instead Yeats kept stubbornly producing this kind of language: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The contrast is humiliating: this is Christianity shrunk and enfeebled by modernity, once universal, universally serious world view is shrivelled to a set of narrow rules, blindly and unquestioningly to be followed against all dictates of reason, esthetics and humanity. Today the equivalents of this parochiality of dogmatic religion can be seen in the clumsy, pseudo-scientific formulations of intelligent design and creationism. These forms of religion cannot any longer operate without denying reason and empirical observation - there was a time when Christianity self-confidently saw no reason to doubt that reason and empirical observation would be in any conflict with its teachings. If Christianity as a force in culture cannot any more reach to the complexity, the majesty and tragedy of our being in the world, it will have lost its meaning. It might remain popular as an easy pain killer, a handy blindfold, but it would not have any moral significance or value. 

I know from my native Finnish Pietism that there are approaches that can still easily escape any blunt Dawkinsian instruments - but outside such occasional oases of universal visions directly connected to the original revelation, we seem to have increasingly only a choice between bland, convictionless official churches or then shallow and escapist fundamentalist interpretations. Not really encouraging thinking of the gift, the vision once so memorably received.

Once out of nature

I have again immersed myself in the excellent biography of Yeats by R.F.Foster. Foster’s text does need several readings, a subtle and beautiful study. Surely that personality, those poems are one of the miracles of the Western world. Yeats must have been such a maddening person abounding with self-centred childishness, half-baked philosophies. In some ways craving for art, for otherness, must be a sign of immaturity, a sign of not having come to terms with the world, as it has dictated those terms. In that sense full maturity, full satiety is a kind of surrender: how could we not want more, strive for more than this? Yes, Yeats was childish, self-centred, maddening, but under what aesthetic control those forces were kept, what amazing, haunting poetry was written about our condition in the world. Perhaps real maturity is actually based on part on reckless folly, on not fully accepting this world, its harsh limits. “The light of evening, Lissadell, / Great windows open to the south”…

Well wadded

Today was saved early by coming accross two George Eliot quotes by A.S.Byatt in the Guardian:

"When the commonplace 'We must all die' transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness 'I must die - and soon', then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first."

"That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."

What a wise, serious voice we have here, so acutely concerned with our human experience. We surely have lost something when we have lost this scope, this aim. Perhaps it has made the situation easier to bear: the pace has quickened indeed, well wadded we pass through the moments, constantly entertained, amused, shielded.

That Shakespeherian rag

We don't know much anything about Shakespeare, one of the most pivotal artists of the modern West. I don't know if he wrote for all ages but he certainly did write for ours. It was all laid out almost before the age, our age, had even properly begun. Only we don't know much anything about him as a person: just a very bare outline of facts can be sketched. This seems to be hard to take for the more commercially inclined academia - there is today a veritable Shakespearean biographical industry in place with the most outrageous, farfetched and elaborate interpretations loudly presented. And not only outrageous, there are also some fairly plausible arguments, just totally unsupported by any actual evidence. There is next to no evidence. We just don't know.

What we do have is the body of his work and so these modern scholars mainly work backwards from that: based on this and that reference, a few lines in a play, a few plays, he's a Catholic, or no, he's a Protestant, an atheist, you name it, gay, straight, bi-sexual, soldier, sailor - anything does go, anything can be claimed. It is after all a huge body of work, in all senses of the word. Previously it was quite typical that somehow miraculously, the Shakespeare that emerged resembled in his views and attitudes quite a bit his humble biographer. In these, more practical days the interpretation just needs to be anything that can be marketed as "new and groundbreaking". So the more outrageous and daring you can be within some distance of the empirical matter, the better. Capitalism in action in literary studies.

But we just can't know. We won't know. Some writers can be fairly obvious in their sympathies and experiences of life (though even then we can't extrapolate any detailed biography out of the text), some then can be like chameleons adapting into all kinds of skins and shapes. Shakespeare very obviously belongs to the last category - contradictory positions get marvellous lines, no obvious lessons are learned, no perspective underlined as being the "correct" one. There is a scary comprehensiveness, a scarily life like openness and uncertainty of view. To cherry pick individual positions and experiences from this kind of almost uniquely multidimensional text is not only folly, but criminally stupid: forcing, flattening arbitrarily one note out of a polyphonic melody. Of course we can't help ourselves, we read the text and form impressions, guesses about the author. It is natural, even fascinating, but no material for a serious study.

For what it's worth, for me he remains an ever lasting mystery: that open endedness, that incompleteness is baffling, scary. Who knows, maybe it was accidentally dictated by the pressures of commerce or the primitive Tudor era politics, or perhaps it was innate, his organic vision of the world. It would seem to be a clue that he absolutely didn't write any religiously motivated text which would have been perfectly easy even for a secret Catholic of the time. Instead he seems to be only concerned with this chaotic, uncertain human experience of the world and not in any proposed supernatural aspect of it. A modern person, stranger in a strange land. (Oddly enough this position would, surely coincidentally, be sympathetic to my own preferences...)

On human constellations

In my student years it was quite a revelation to acquaint myself with classical sociology: such unreal, formal approach to our messy human organizations. As if you could replace people, their connections, their persons with abstract, dispassionate functions. Schooled in the rigorous standards of the Helsinki History Department it seemed like an elaborate and pointless game of meticulously misportraying our chaotic human reality as timeless, rational construct of formal relationships – in jargon filled dead language, as dead as the thought behind it. This was the epitome of academic blindness for me: any moment, any constellation in history is surely unique, brief and passing. A totality of chaotic, passionate, blind strivings for short term gain, constantly shifting, constantly improvised.

Yes, it is hard to build a science on this shifting, ephemeral foundation. But surely it is not sensible, not rational to opt for manageable, logical, clean and clear unreality instead. This has remained my firm conviction ever since: I approach all situations in time as unique constellations, as particular, momentary systems fuelled by human passion and partial vision (or, so often, complete blindness). This is not to deny themes and structures in history, but to argue that they interact chaotically forming always unique combinations, unique moments. Thus history, our mad projectory through time is uncontrolled, uncontrollable – whatever sociology and sociologically based human sciences imply, or wish.

The dissociation of modernist sensibility

I currently have the pleasure of reading a collection of Edmund Wilson's essays (published in 1950). That confident, coherent, serious tone does bring back feelings of regret. Surely in that tone, in that moment, our liberal Western civilization achieved its peak. I do not see any other competitors to moral seriousness than this great liberal tradition of literature and literary criticism. Certainly not organized religion with its feverish and comforting, undisciplined imaginations, as much as it has been a historical source for meaningful ethical thinking. Nor really in the artificially abstract, dry formulations of formal philosophy. But it is 2007 now, and books don't matter any more, or no-one any longer believes or pretends that they do - instead the chorus of primitive Bible (or Koran or for all I know Bhagavad Ghita) thumpers is actually growing ever louder. Loud they might be, but not serious, there is no seriousness in that atavistic escape to wishful thinking. The kind of ethical, secular, austere tone that is so proudly ringing in Wilson (among many others) has mostly disappeared. Naturally one should be careful when establishing glorious pasts, Eliot himself being a good example, but I still would argue that something valuable has been lost in the relentless onslaught of postmodern all-doubting scholastism. Essential foundations have been needlessly undermined and nothing really ethically and morally serious and durable has been built to replace the current ruins. Ruins are all we have left, if you don't count the entertainment industry, of course.

Naputäis püssirohtu

It is strange to think back to times when I did not pursue the origin and course of love but was instead so hopelessly lost in the abstract maze of my mistaken lordly studies. Now, having found my person, my place by finding another person, every aspect of life has come so integrally together that those once so vividly dark days seem distant and hazy. I can't now easily recollect that frigid, frozen atmosphere where no quick thought was ever quick enough to escape through the impasse. Of course, this present brightness gives most distinct shades: bitterly, relunctanctly offered hostages to indifferent fortune, but to have achieved this, to have this, to have arrived here, is still an incredible, indescribable feeling. There is such joy in this moment having survived the desert of years that constituted my intellectual education: come what may, and perhaps mainly good things will come, I have found my person, my place by finding love. And that's such a huge thing that it is scary even to acknowledge it in language - so much importance, meaning in someone other, protected by no special providence.

Will to meaning

Often our various enlightened quests for understanding come bogged down with Nietzschean counterarguments: there never are good enough reasons for action, so we stand still, paralyzed by the infinity of the possibilities of the world. Out of this cul-de-sac we must then manouver ourselves: I have come to see us as meaning giving beings, the physical world is observed with varying degrees of accuracy, but those observations don't in themselves contain any self-evident meanings, any automatic significance. So, we give, generously, out of our own beings, and in that sense continuously diminish our separateness, merging, cohering with the world.

Thus I see the nature of our experience in non-rational terms: passionate, wild, untamed, personal. But to see it so, is making a rational conclusion. This is the proposed solution then to the Nietzschean dilemma - even if only a partial one: what exactly is the mechanism of this passionate will to meaning remains an unsolved mystery in the context of any attempt to a universal explanation. We exist locally, are served with local contexts, cultural meanings, and supplied with those tools we then proceed to our semi-independent directions. Any conflicts that arise cannot then be objectively resolved, unless it can be argued that the structure of our experience will neutrally point us to a specific conclusion. That is the question that does remain stubbornly open, not kept open by Nietzsche but by the world.

Politics and the English language

In these pleasant times when the Kremlin is busily replaying the 1930's and the theocon administration of George W. Bush establishing the "unitary executive" (as liberty must really be destroyed in order to protect it) one reaches instinctively for Orwell. This is not to say that he would have been perfect, or not faintly ridiculous - he was deeply flawed and faintly ridiculous. It doesn't matter one bit: his fearless, moral analysis is one of the high points of our liberal, enlightened civilization. And now that those values, of liberalism, of enlightenment, are engulfed and growing ever fainter, his example shines even brighter. You don't find such analysis, such honesty in the modern mainstream media. News are merging with the entertainment industry and fewer and fewer serious efforts are made to penetrate the political kabuki theatre of spin and obfuscation. 

The masses are kept satisfied with mindless entertainment and tired with the ever increasing demands of work efficiency, the elites, blind, shortsighted and greedy are no longer motivated by our enlightened heritage - we go on, but with no real conviction, no memory. So one does reach instinctively for Orwell: he surely wrote and lived in even darker times, bleakly surrounded by hysterical, irrational ideologies and hatreds. It doesn't matter what the odds are: our only obligation is for truth, not power. The mainstream media might be quiet as the grave, but the net is full of islands of understanding and honesty, a strengthening chorus of protesting voices is slowly gathering. History is not predictable, hope will never be lost.

Stalin's willing executioners - Pro Estonia

Now I suppose it is the influence of Burke and other conservatives that makes me believe that there is a built-in reflex, a built-in capability in humankind for terror and violence. It is in our blood. It can find its expression through fittingly atavistic and primitive racial or religious beliefs but it can also dress itself into stolen clothes of progress and rationality. These latter are easier for the intellectuals and media to take seriously as a motive for action: it is hard to imagine brutal violence in its disgusting, sadistic reality, but quite easy to see from afar that progress and enlightenment, those comfortable abstractions are necessary even at some "cost".

But extreme, wholesale violence and terror will never be just means, they will always transform themselves into ends - this call for the bloody, mad dance is too much bred in the bone, too deep in us, not to awaken and take control. This is what we witnessed in Hitler, in Stalin, in Mao, in Pol Pot during the 20th century: the ancient ritual of running amok through innocent, powerless victims. It is our age-old instinct, and whether it's awakened or not depends more on the random historical circumstances than on individuals, thus no-one can ever be completely guilty, completely innocent: history is not only a crime, it is also a punishment for a crime. We all need absolution.

I was recently reading the Finnish Civil War History Commission's report on the ethnic Russians summarily executed or otherwise perished in the disturbances in Finland during 1914-1922. 1604 names are listed in the report (see the link above). The Civil War of 1918 is still a surprisingly traumatic subject in Finland but it has been discussed and debated exhaustively and often painfully for many decades now. The once dominant White narrative has lost its prominent, official status and the losing side has had justice finally done to it. All victims are now mourned, including these Russians, mostly killed by the White nationalists regardless of the level of their actual revolutionary aspirations or lack of them (as was the case for the most victims).

Names are listed, remembered, a kind of justice is done - people ending up on the losing side are thus, belatedly, honoured. And so there starts to be a certain cartharctic understanding for all sides involved in that nightmarish storm of history. Touchy, sensitive issues have been breached, motives and later narratives debated and at least partially understood. An absolution has thus been clumsily, gradually seeked, and partially also found, with countless benefits to the national discourse and atmosphere: a poison has largely been expelled from the historical memory, hateful lies and fantasies have been replaced with factual, even compassionate understanding.

It struck me that those 1604 Russians are probably the only ones to be so exhaustively reported and remembered of that horrific period. Many more Russians were killed in the revolution and the civil war than perished in the First World War. Awful terror, counter-terror and famine raged throughout that wide country. Horrific, sadistic scenes were acted, millions of innocent, powerless lifes were lost. Now I guess they are forgotten, seen as necessary price for history, if seen much as anything. The ground is overly rich in remains but, no, no live memory lingers.

For other things followed: Lenin's terror system was horrible enough but Stalin raised it to unseen heights: forced collectivization repeated the bloody visions of the civil war, terror and famine raged along with totally irrational, outlandish political repressions. Chillingly this new horror has been seen as necessary in order to arm the Soviet Union for the coming Nazi attack - despite the fact that Stalin did so much himself to create that very threat with the Comintern undermining all left-liberal forces in Germany during those fateful years of Hitler's rise and with Moscow stubbornly seeing the liberal-democratic West jus as bad, or actually for most of the time much worse enemy than Hitler.

A Finnish historian has used a painfully insightful metaphor to describe the Finnish Communists that survived Stalin's terror in the 1930's (mostly by being in Finnish prisons). He sees the situation as similar to a family with a history of prolonged incest and rape: a dirty, horrible secret that must not be ever mentioned - Stalin had utterly slaughtered that brilliant generation that escaped the Whites to Russia, but he and his state had to be praised as it was one with their cherished ideology - to give up that faith would have meant seeing those innocent murdered as having lost their lives totally in vain.

So, iron entered their souls. They were rigid, orthodox, mortally afraid of straying from the correct line dictated in Kremlin. They never were a match for their flexible, quick Social Democratic enemies that could operate within the protection of the liberal democratic state, with no terror, no slaughter having been introduced to our Nordic society. In those conditions the Finnish Stalinists could not compete - and, perhaps, in the innermost reaches of their hearts, maybe they even didn't want to compete for the fear of winning...

The Russian nation would seem to have a somewhat similar relationship with Stalin - but complicated, horribly twisted by one crucial matter: his leadership against the genocidal onslaught by Nazi-Germany (no matter that he contributed so much to that very same attack). So you have a psychopath, a murdering and torturing father as the head of an extended family: you can never be sure that you will escape his murderous, irrational rages, still many escape, and all fear. Then occurs a sudden and brutal attack by another mad psychopath with the intention of burning down your house and killing all the family. The brutal, sadistic father leads the defence of the house, and finally after awful, savage scenes and merciless sacrifices the house is saved and the attacker destroyed.

After some years of continued terror the psychopathic leader of the household then perishes peacefully in his bed: you are now all survivors, some favoured, some disfavoured, some tortured to the point of death, but all can feel pride in your common struggle against the invader that threatened you all with extinction. How could you really detach that pride from that leadership? Iron enters souls: awful, hysterical injustices can, maybe should, be accepted. And gradually the memory hardens, becomes selective, is used to benefit the regime, the abuse is not mentioned, its victims are forgotten: they are now a necessary price.

The Great Patriotic War becomes thus the central piece of the new state religion of boastful nationalism, the central foundation of modern Russia. This is then the psychological narrative of the modern Russian nation and state - and the moral cost is obvious, huge: millions of forgotten graves, countless acts of terror and slaughter accepted, even honoured. Millions and millions of Russians were killed through the actions of other Russians during the 20th century. Many were forced to participate in the killing, many were willing.

In 1939 Estonia had a million inhabitants, Finland with a similar age structure had 3,5 million - today Estonia still has circa one million inhabitants that are directly descended from the population of 1939 - Finland has 5,3 million. We would be missing about 2 million people had Stalin gotten here during the Second World War, though they would have been replaced by at least similar number of Soviet immigrants, mostly Russian. (Likely our losses would have been even bigger in proportion given the nature of our deeply rooted civil society and proximity to Sweden.)

Helsinki would likely have a Russian majority as would the whole of the south coast. Our cultural, economical, political and academic elites would have been physically liquidated. Our economy would be in ruins, as would most of our towns after 60 years of Soviet construction work. The countryside would have been unimaginably desolated and wrecked by bloody and chaotic forced collectivization. The postwar cultural classics in literature, film and art would largely be missing, replaced by soulless "socialist realism". All families would have murdered, deported or escaped members in their ranks. The new minority (a majority in many places) would see our awful, unimaginably horrific rape as "liberation" from "fascism".

This is not science fiction: all this happened to Estonia during the Soviet occupation. In 1939 it had a protected civil society without any state violence, no whole classes of people were exterminated or faced the threat of extermination. True, the political structure was one of quite mild authoritarianism with Päts having assumed power to forestall a rightwing coup during the global depression. The process of slow, much too slow re-democratization was interrupted by the war. In effect, especially in the bitter hindsight, that deeply flawed republic was really an idyll of civilization and peace.

There were under 100 political prisoners in the country, no executions, summary, wholesale or otherwise, no torture, no terror - people couldn't imagine a totalitarian police state, what it means to live in a society where opinions, or mere identities, can lead to state sponsored organized murder. In other words it was an unimaginably more civilized society than those two awful terror states led by the two madmen Hitler and Stalin. First Estonia was brutally occupied by the latter, then came the Nazi attack (with Hitler sharing an identical view of Estonian independence and cultural existence as Stalin). Murder took over a small civilized country.

There were a few genuine collaborators as in all occupied territories (including on the Channel Islands of the UK) - and certainly much fewer, and much less willing, than were in the Vichy France for example. There was no Estonian state: anyone disobeying the German forces were directly disobeying Gestapo and SS. Still the overwhelming majority stayed away from the German atrocities. In those nightmarish circumstances the Estonians could not do anything but hope for a Western liberal democratic victory, for that famous "White Ship" from the West. In the meanwhile first the retreating Russians and later the hardpressed Germans forced tens of thousands of Estonians to their armed forces.

Estonians were of course absolutely motivated to defend their soil against the advancing Red Army and thousands perished in heroic struggles (largely unassisted by the retreating Germans) - there was even a national government declared and the Estonian flag hoisted in Tallinn between the brief time of German flight and Soviet advance. Some people even dared to hope, there was the Atlantic Charter after all that "guaranteed" democracy and national self-determination to all nations. Maybe the West would help, the White Ship would arrive and peaceful, lawful national rebuilding would start once again after these awful experiences in the hands of the two terror systems.

It was not to happen - the Red Army reoccupied Estonia and the brutal process of Stalinization was continued: the Estonian civil society was destroyed, the agriculture was forcibly collectivized, a state of terror reigned in the country. And so today the Bronze Soldier memorial has become to be the symbol of either the "liberation" or the brutal subjugation of Estonian freedom. History can never be seen in completely neutral, objective light. But what I have described here are the facts, these things truly did happen. These events and processes can be and have been empirically verified. So it happened. There was no liberalization, there was only enslavement.

Yes, the Red Army protected the Russian nation in a heroic defence against the murderous Nazi attack. But it was representing an equally awful terror state and being led by an equally mad dictator. Once it crossed the Estonian border and didn't return after the Germans retreated, it turned into an army of occupation. Estonia was then not liberated, it was brutally raped. Estonia did not represent fascism, it represented civil society, a state free of casual governmental terror and aggression. The Red Army and the Soviet state were the closest thing to fascism in the post-war Estonia - actually a very close thing indeed.

Now I understand that Nazi-Germany can be seen as an even more awful terror system than the Soviet Union. It murdered less people but did its slaughter in a uniquely industrial manner, by a nation central to European civilization. I think it can be legitimately said that it descended even further into the heart of darkness than the Soviet Union (though with these vast numbers of innocent, powerless dead it is a fairly meaningless debate, both systems are so deep in this unspeakable horror that it really doesn't that much matter what, if anything, separates them). But which one was more dangerous? How many educated people, how many major powers still honour the Germany of Hitler and Goebbels? How many trendy, even politically active youths sport a swastika on their t-shirta?

And  which victims are forgotten, unmourned? What do the words Solovetsk and Vorkuta connotate to you? How about Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen? Germany has undergone decades of agonizing self-reflection, painful traumas have been under a constant process of analysis - the victims of Nazis are today remembered, mourned, honoured. There has been a collective resolve never to let that horror to be repeated. So, I do seriously ask: which system was more dangerous, more tempting invitation to this bloody age-old rite of violence and terror?

This is not to say anything against the magnificent Russian nation and its magnificent cultural tradition. It is exactly in the Russians' own desperate interest that this historical poison would be eradicated from the mind of the nation and it's rulers. For the victims to be properly mourned and the perpertrators be really forgiven or at least understood. But this the Kremlin won't allow: poisonous Stalinist propanganda about recent history is distributed far and wide, starting from schools and nurseries, a false national pride is created, militaristic aggression and cruelty exalted.

This is not the ordinary Russians' fault: when has the Russian nation been able to determine the leadership of the Kremlin - and when has the Kremlin pursued the vital interests of the Russian nation? If this ghost of the 1930's is not excorcized from this great European power, Europe will one day get into trouble due to its existence. Estonia already has. (This is not to say that the Estonian conduct would have been perfect during the present crisis, only that it is not based on any false and poisonous interpretation of history).

So, this macabre dance on the graves goes on and on: the millions of victims are not named, not listed, not honoured, not remembered, not mourned. A huge moral collapse is thus celebrated and exalted: iron has entered the centre of a great state's soul, poison lingers about its political elites and public discourse. As long as this goes on Russians will be viewed by their rulers not as individual citizens of independent value but as nameless cannon fodder of power politics, as perpetual pawns of history to be thoughtlessly sacrificed whenever needed by the morally corrupt elite organs.

And thus the mad, bloody rites of 20th century still go on even today wounding new generations, newly reborn nations. When will we put stop to it?

Via media or an illustrated book about birds

After a stormy and, truth to be told, quite comical intellectual journey, I settled in my later student years for this extreme middle way that I have supported ever since. It has been quite an old-fashioned attempt to connect, to cohere, to reconstruct a rational, enlightened way to think, to live. (At least it used to be very old-fashioned in these postmodern times but it seems that finally this dissatisfactory, semi-irrational mood is maybe finally lifting even in the humanities.)

In politics this position has been informed by Burke, Keynes, Hobson, Hobhouse and the young Walter Lippmann: highly pragmatic liberalism with a strong awareness of the base human nature and the rarity of historical structures that do actually function. I guess in my more conservative modes it has been Burke that has had the last word and in more optimistic, more forward looking moods, Lippmann and Keynes with their pragmatic, stubborn belief in progress, in the possibility of progress. But politics is such a narrow field - art, philosophy and religion are much more meaningful perspectives - art comes always first, encompassing philosophy, but with my native Pietism there has been also a living connection to an older world, rural and Christian. 

Without that conservative beginning it surely would have been more straightforward, more superficial to exist in this blindly commercial, materialistic civilization with no history and no future. But how then meaningfully connect these extremes in this scattered time? A strange, strange experience of the world we have: our passionate, disconnected existence seems impossible to be made to cohere, to be wholly rational. In a sense it no doubt is impossible, so this personal project will end in failure - but that's the way of this world: we will always remain incomplete here, we will always fail. 

Thinking now back my own experience has been much of the time cruelly limited: who needs action when you got words. Still, I evaluate life based on how unconditionally, how compulsively it is lived, and I can say that I have surely lived mine unconditionally, compulsively - I have not wasted this limited time as painfully much as I have lived it in error, in helpless confusion. It does feel strange to write down these words, remembering the times when having a conscious, self-assured voice seemed such a terrifyingly distant prospect, a hopeless dream. A desperate, extreme middle way it will be for me. Reason and human sympathy or nothingness.

Pater familias

I had been wondering, worrying about fatherhood already much before this Sunday's miraculous event. Beyond words these things are, as tightly folded buds, in Larkin's words, we arrive here. Tiny and helpless, full of promise and daring recklessly leaping into this cold, random world. A miraculous event indeed and it did enforce my earlier thoughts: surely the only way of being a meaningful father, capable of love and protection, is to be a meaningful person. The same goes for all our human roles, being a man or a woman, a citizen, a member of a civilization. The essence is inner, it is not found in any outward characteristics, in any boastful embellishments. Having a true security about oneself but at the same acknowledging also the precariousness of all human life, the brutal limits of all personal power and aims. Acknowledging the terrible defencelessness we have here and daring still to feel, to risk love. Surely, surely the bravest thing in this world is to love: such fierce hostages to fortune we do give - should we be so lucky.

The myriad ways of Islam

I have lately been reading descriptions of modern Islam written from within the faith itself - admittedly from the more liberal end of the spectrum. The latest has been Ziauddin Sardar's most fascinating and enlightening Desperately Seeking Paradise. What strikes me most in these descriptions is the polyphonic multitude of different interpretations of Islam, a polyphony of individual voices.

When you then turn towards the Western, especially US media, what you get is an undifferentiated, ridiculously simplified monolith. Highly placed officials can't even tell the difference between Sunni and Shia, or place al-Qaida correctly within the Islamic tradition. Such criminal ignorance is guiding and leading this absurd "Global War on Terror" which in practice often translates as a somewhat random war against somewhat randomly chosen varieties of political Islam.

What the various elites offer to the electorate instead of any deep understanding are silly platitudes, slogans, whether politically correct or incorrect: "Islam is a religion of peace", "No, it's a religion of war!" etc. etc. ad infinitum et nauseam. Of course, any great religion is a huge spectrum of interpretations, from the most eloquently mystical, open and tolerant to the most pitifully literalist, primitive and aggressive. So with Islam.

This is not to say that some forms of these current fundamentalist interpretations (much in evidence for example in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan) wouldn't be a threat to Western enlightenment and liberal democracy (and the same can be said also of much of George W. Bush's fundamentalist Christian base), but that Islam in itself cannot be that threat: there is no one Islam. Perhaps one day the majestic potential for liberation and openness that is contained in those universal visions will be released.

Against painkillers

Namely the triple curse of our modern age: cheap sentiment, fundamentalist religion and reflexive cynicism. All three serve a common purpose of distancing ourselves from the scary reaches of our infinite, passing, ephemeral experience. All avoid living with loss, avoid giving hostages to fortune, to time. They offer easy escapes from our human predicament. But to turn away from experience is to avoid living, of being in the world - a cruel, random place surely, where all of us, quickly passing in any case, offer our loved ones, ourselves to a daily barbaric lottery of life and death, yes, but without that offering how could we perceive this sharp, harsh, amazing beauty of existence, the breathtaking vistas that open before our eyes, the ice cold, purifying shock of water as we plunge into every day? Without that sense of living without any false comforts, without any safe conducts, how can we live truly - and if we don't truly live, how could we live ethically, esthetically?