Through Western Eyes

I suppose I'm in a very small minority identifying myself culturally as a Westerner first, a Finn second and a European as a fairly distant third. For me the most essential identity is truly the membership of the modern, liberal and post-industrial West. One could no doubt draw crude Huntingdonian conclusions of this in line with the current hubristic atmosphere of the decadent Washington. But that is not my point: religion, history and ethnicity are irrelevant here. I do not feel any affinity with the old, Catholic and aristocratic, rural Europe that gave birth not only (somewhat accidentally) to Enlightenment but much more essentially to aggressive imperialism and all pervasive racism. In this inherent aggression it didn't essentially separate itself from any other agricultural and aristocratic civilization.

Where we do have truly new beginnings is in the Enlightenment, in the fresh, unique formulations of radical, progressive and inclusive philosophies and ideologies - so universal that any specific, local cultural background will surely be buried under the vast, limitless visions of the implied universalism. Of course, so pitifully little of all this has ever been realized, and maybe this is most that will ever be accomplished (in most areas in the modern West we see currently more deteriation than progress). Nevertheless, I would argue quite defiantly: so far all history has been a slow, irrational holocaust anyway - what is the only new thing is this radical attempt to break free of this circle of human aggression and ignorance. For this we should never apologize.

Ethics and esthetics

Having freshly read Alan Hollinghurst's excellent "Line of Beauty", I began to thing about this strange, complex connection, perhaps more implicit than explicit in the book itself. Of course, I see art as fusion of these two, but I have not regarded them as directly connected in any essential way. It would seem that might be a too hasty conclusion. There is a certain proportion to our mostly tragic, brief and ephemeral fates and actions here, to our wild, unsafe experience, so quickly forgotten. A sense that too fortright ethical conclusions are lacking depth and understanding. In that way it could be said that esthetics have a deep ethical dimension - and vice versa. There are appropriate endings and valuations in the particular contexts and shapes of our passionate lifes that escape any simple ethical conclusions. This to me is not devaluing ethics but the opposite: giving a deeper, more universal moral significance to our scattered, inpermanent persons and actions.

For Dockery a son

These past six months have been remarkable time: a new life on its way with all the attendant scarily high stakes and worries. And optimism - that cannot be denied. For a long time I shared Larkin's mock mock-distant attitude with the innermost feeling being pure relief at not having that harsh patronage. Of course it is always hard to tell with Larkin what would be that innermost feeling, probably as contradictory, as poised, as the poems (at heart) were. 

Of myself I can be sure - we do change, I have changed. Matured, yes, but there are many ways to maturity, procreation surely not the most significant of them. In this particular case, within this particular context, a new life does make sense, is fitting, despite all the attendant high stakes and worries. This no doubt is how we all arrive in the world: into other contexts, other constellations - hopefully welcome, hopefully loved. In these respects at least our new family member should not worry.

The past is dead

I suppose it is due to my most thorough historical education that I automatically view our modern society as something very strange, very odd. This week I was surveying the dark plains of my native Ostrobothnia from a sauna balcony, the freezing night lit by pale stars, the old way of living that preceded our last half-century as consumers seemed very real, very close. Slow centuries formed those fields, those roads. Not to mention that those slow centuries, or in many places, millenniums, were themselves a radical innovation after hundreds of thousands of uncounted years of hunting and gathering. Yet it is this mere decades old, frantic, ephemeral flux that is taken for granted, for permanent.

My current home town of Espoo is only a sizable suburb of Helsinki, grown from 12 000 to 220 000 inhabitants in 60 years, now the proud home of Nokia and other high-tech companies - but the past is still here to see: fields, placenames, patterns of roads and streets. But it is not seen, not imagined at all. The past is utterly dead for our society: we are completely unable to imagine other ways of thinking, of living, we can't picture what once was so real. This is will happen to us too, so immersed in this passing moment, so self-important. The high ship sails on.

The great melody

I have always thought that the great admiration and respect Keynes had for Burke is very revealing - of both of them. Keynes was the archetypal pragmatic liberal, distrustful of hypothetical theoretical benefits as opposed to concrete existing and working structures. To see him as a doctrinaire left wing ideologue is simply plain silly (so, it is not a great surprise that this is how libertarians see him today). And Burke really was a whig, as traditional and conservative as imaginable (with many silly ideas), but a whig still, and it is only with some violence that he is now fitted to be a part of the English conservative tradition.

Well, I suppose this only shows that modern Tories are actually nothing but a branch of liberalism. I wonder if there is anyone alive today that you could say would still be the genuine article? A few decades ago the most anti-Burkean intellectual tradition around was Marxism-Leninism, and after its unmourned death, the position has been held by free market doctrinaires. An abstract theoretical mechanism is seen as the universal answer to all human problems without regard to any particular place or time. This is pure folly.

For Burke - as for Keynes - we have unique constellations, particular contexts, things and structures that work in practice (something we have always had great difficulties in creating). Pure reason becomes only too easily the prisoner of our animal and fearful natures, violent means turn into nightmarish ends. The French Revolution certainly proved that, but we got an even more awful example with the Russian Revolution. But where Keynes is more logical than Burke is that he sees more clearly that pragmatism should then be the most logical answer for political ideology. Sometimes, often, the existing structures are a danger to a free society without being reformed but reform itself should not be doctrinaire and unempirical, irrational, but particular, particularly suited to the existing, unique conditions.

I adopted this view while becoming acquainted to both Keynes and the marvellously optimistic and exuberant young Walter Lippman, whose "Preface to Politics" is one of the great specimens of 20th century liberal thought. His faith got obviously badly shaken by the nightmares then still only looming, but I don't think that it would be reasonable to abandon his outlook. So we should see a society as a living thing, organic in many ways with meanings and coherence beyond any abstract logic. This makes gradual reform a very difficult and unpredictable task but, I would also argue, an absolute necessity: humankind is best at destroyal, without intelligent reform, structures will collapse with all the attendant irrational destruction that it entails.

Liberal beliefs

I have often wondered what really would be the core foundation of liberalism: yes, anyone can recite its historical structures (for some reason liberalism is always criticized based on its concrete - and meagre - achievements and not for its ideals like all the other political ideologies...) For what it's worth, and maybe not much, I have come to hold that there are two core beliefs that sustain the liberal project: a conviction that people are able to create coherent meanings (combined with a suspicion that all coherent meanings are thus created in our finite minds) and a faith, a trust in the human will to ethical behaviour. If these premises are accepted, it is easy to see how they would sustain and support each other; if we are able to create coherent meanings, no crude (and fictional) divine being is needed to give absolutes readymade, if there is a will to ethical behaviour it will find its goal defined by our ability to coherent creation which in turn will then be directed by that will.

So, then there follows of course a third, mostly unspoken argument, or instinct: that the world is inherently in harmony with this premise, that we have to only discover, only be aware, only use our intelligence and wisdom - and there we might even have use for absolutes and divine beings, whether or not they pre-exist materially. The alternative to this is conservative fiction, an eternal, mostly bloody and unjust existence in history - perhaps some made up stories can dicipline us enough to live in those conditions and even moderately prosper but the intellectual and moral cost would be awful. Even if our liberal instincts are correct, this might be the situation we will find ourselves in - there is prescious little enlightenment and awareness, prescious little wisdom in humankind: we might not even perceive the truth should we be confronted by it.

Not washed into rinds by rotting winter rains

The weather has continued to be unseasonably mild in Finland (one wonders what connotations this type of innocent phrase will have in the coming decades). For the most part I have quite enjoyed these subdued November colours and mists - as dismal as I have usually considered this time of the year be even with better weather: so little light, people busy and tired, withdrawn inwards to withstand the subarctic winter. There is now actual clear daylight for about 3-4 hours but most days even the midday feels dark with heavy grey clouds overhead and no snow in sight. A strange, still atmosphere: quiet earth waiting for winter to come. Snow would instantly bring more light and a certain wintry sharpness into the landscape, blue colours lit by the city lamps. This Friday on my afternoon train back from work I was thinking of just these bleak joys of Finnish November (in the native tongue it is called 'marraskuu', "dead month") and was struck by how little I remembered of last November: I staggered to work and back home in darkness, literal and mental, often seeing none of the daylight hours, with no resources anyway left for esthetic observation. What a difference a year can make.

Some say the Devil is dead and buried in Killarney

Having a long, though comfortable, early morning work trip I have succumbed to a MP3 player instead of the customary book. This week has been quite Irish: The Pogues, Cruiskeen, The Dubliners and the excellent Tartu band Paddy have been providing Celtic mornings and afternoons. Listening to those familiar and confident, defiant cadences I have been reflecting on this wonder of Irish anti-imperialism - the colonization of the English language itself. It is undeniable that Ireland, real and imagined, has stayed triumphantly un-English even with the loss of the native language. This is an interesting fact for a Finnish person coming from a tradition of very strictly language centred nationalism (albeit in many senses a bilingual tradition). Nationalism is not necessarily bounded with language, it can have many, even polyphonic and pluralist incarnations.

Of course it is an ideology that has very negative connotations - often expressed by writers and thinkers from great powers. Somehow, they do not often seem to notice that their imperial and metropolitan nation is also nationalist and narrow, so English, French, Russian, American nationalisms go often unnoticed, excused. Non-threatening, non-expansionist small nation nationalism is something not even perceived. I welcome a world with vibrant and thriving small nations and national cultures, such as Finland, Ireland, Estonia and many others - the tradition of Finnish nationalism has been one of the central factors preventing this country from being subsumed into the Russian imperial sphere and gradually losing her language, her uniqueness. A process that is now heart breakingly happening for several small Finno-Ugric peoples and languages within the neo-aggressive and uncaring Russia. Of course we have to always beware exclusivist, aggressive and narrow ideas and movements everywhere, perhaps especially when they are disguised under false "universalist" labels of selfish great power politics.

I say he rose again and joined the British Army...

Being Descartes

I just finished an excellent biography of Descartes by Desmond M. Clarke. I had been curiously ignorant of his life and personality despite being well familiar with his gigantic impact for philosophy and Western thought. So, it was most interesting reading - I had for example no idea how effectively he isolated himself both from ordinary human society and from his intellectual peers. On the whole Clarke's portrait is not very flattering: he was reclusive, secretive, quarrelsome man more gifted in making enemies than friends, always paranoidicallyfearful of seeming to be openly defying the Church. But then again, it was an age when you could get burned on the stake for denying the orthodox geocentric and thoroughly Aristotelian world view. Descartes emerged through such deep mists of scholastic thought and irrational religious and social ideas that it can be easily seen that the society around him was so violent, so paranoid, so mad that his own isolation, his own paranoia and caution can be understood.

He might have been a fearful, difficult man but his thinking was revolutionary and proudly free of nonsensical conformist schackles. We have now largely forgotten the arcane pre-Cartesian philosophy that once reigned over Christendom but his times were still dominated by it. In that sense there is a straight line from Descartes to Enlightenment and to our present Western mind. The post-modern attacks against many Cartesian crudities are understandable but one wonders where the aim really is. Probably not in any clumsy and unreal dichotomies of body and mind.

Fundamentalist mind

I am now pleasurably rereading Siltala’s wide reaching analysis of 19th century Finland and was much struck by his description of the ”totalitarian personality”. Nothing really new there as such but it is strange how specifically modern and widespread that mentality still is. The typical individual has deep inner contradictions (often violently repressed) seen in millennial and apocalyptic terms – and millennial and apocalyptic visions of their total redemption through outside ideology. The personality and its extension, the world, is seen in absolute, black and white terms. Fanatical ideology is the externalized, barely hidden rage towards self and other.

Naturally this does awful violence to both of them. I was recently visiting a fairly moderate conservative Christian forum and was struck by the aridity and rigidity of thought there. A great fear seemed to be lurking behind the compulsive urge to view the “Doctrine” as something absolute, unchangeable – and thus, unreal. I was eerily reminded of my long forgotten youth and my own deep contradictions and conflicts, and the unreal, unrealistic way I connected them with ideology and philosophy. Luckily I was able to gradually resolve them, to come to more inclusive and balanced terms with myself and the world. A long and painful road it was, and it seems that for scarily many people in the modern world, one that is not taken, out of fear, out of rage.

Praising Billmon

This is already a second post on the subject, but I just can't stop marvelling that there is to be found in these sad, all accepting, all ignoring times a political commentator that really is reaching the levels of Mencken and Orwell. Billmon is easily as savage as Mencken (though without Mencken's Nietzschean amusement) and as politically radical as Orwell (without Orwell's grim optimism or his English sentimentalism - this latter really a weakness rather than strength, it was this eccentric warmth that elevated Orwell into greatness). 

Even if you would not agree with his politics (I by and large do) the mercilessly hardhitting language itself is joy to read although it doesn't yet quite reach up to Orwell's personal majesty or Mencken's steely intricacy. Strange that the Internet these days really does beat the mainstream media hands down as regards political criticism and satire. The centralization of the media into giant corporations and news merging into a branch of the entertainment industry plays a role here no doubt. Luckily we still have these fiercely independent voices, hopefully amplified in the future - talking of which: a book of political essays by Billmon would be treasured, an instant classic surely if it would have the same quality as his blog.

The history of Finnish anxiety

When historians are good, they are scarily good. Of course it very rarely happens - I wonder whether there is any other academic field where so much meaningless drivel is being published, where incredibly muddled "common sense" passes for sophisticated analytic thought, where so much energy is devoted into getting a superficial but selling media profile. Typically this last happens as a ritual patricide of the previous generation: a non-specified "myth" is being non-specifically "disproved" while usually simultaneously a confused faith into relativistically interpreted post-modern theory is endorsed - never mind that it would take into question the whole idea of "objectively disproving" anything. But when there are exceptions, they truly are scarily good.

One such brilliant exception in Finland is Juha Siltala whose two first books of an ongoing trilogy of study on the formation of the Finnish mind are by far the best and most significant historical studies published in Finland in the last 20 years. It is strange how undervalued "Suomalainen ahdistus" and "Valkoisen äidin pojat" are considering their brilliant and groundbreaking approach. Of course there are some faults: at times Siltala's psychological approach does seem overly deterministic and underestimating our human capabilities to self-awareness and self-control - but these observations, as significant as they are, are much beside the point. Siltala approaches historical experience with such analytical seriousness that has never been matched in the Finnish study of history. Processes and structures are revealed and analysed in the most comprehensive of ways, the iron controls of history are brought to light and discussed. A joy to behold such penetration and reach of thought in humanities.

That would be waving and that would be crying

In earnest, liberal, quite Victorian tones I have seen art as fusion of ethics and esthetics. This is to be most oldfashioned, passé, in these, hmm, more dynamic times with all things being in our coldly certain flux, perpetually indetermined and under doubt. Not that they weren't for earnest liberal Victorians. Maybe unjustly, George Eliot comes to mind here: to me she is the epitome of the high liberal worry as regards the cold ways of the godless world. Yes, things certainly were in flux also for them - but in a different way, the structure of doubt itself had not been undermined by any grand and fashionable French theory. Doubt meant the ultimate integrity - as it still does for me.

So, I do see literature, poetry especially, as the most serious form of human thought even when including the theory of natural science or ancient and modern philosophy, and even religion. Or, rather, I see art, literature, as the place where these majestic traditions and languages come together, fuse in the most meaningful way possible to humankind. Esthetics for us is the most direct route of expressing our otherhood, of being on this strange pilgrimage that we are being on. And so we continue wondering whether the fault is with the soul and its sovereigns or perhaps then with the lions. And if so, let us by all means send them back to Monsieur Dufy's Hamburg.

The Godgame

Talk about pleasures recalled in tranquility. Last week I encountered and bought for 50 cents The Magus by John Fowles in Kauniainen Library. It is the revised edition - I am not totally certain but I think I read exactly this version of the text (in Finnish) for the first time at the tender age of 13. I was burningly unhappy, just beginning a desert of long, painful years, and it was such a sublime experience to forget my surroundings in that dark winter month. I happened to be in a hospital and asked my parents to bring it in order to finish it. Such ecstasy. It is a novel to be read when young. 

The Magus was one of several literary, artistic gates that dramatically opened my way and expanded the sometimes cruelly narrow circumstances that I unluckily (and through personal inadequacies) found myself in, in that now very distant youth. I have of course reread it since and largely share the author's own views (as expressed in the Preface to the revised edition): it is not disciplined, mature enough, disguising undoubtedly deep personal uncertainties. That is why it so strongly appeals to young people. Of course, those faults in a strange way are its strengths. A hugely meaningful book indeed.

Eesti ajaloost

I think that ever since I read Jaan Kross's subtle, but defiantly Western tones in "Czar's Madman" (I must have been twelve or thirteen) I have felt particular sympathy towards Estonia. Of course the whole cultural climate of Southern Ostrobothnia and its Pietist circles was very positive towards the Estonians even in the middle of the blackest Finlandization. (Realpolitics aside, the way the majority of our late Kekkonen era intellectual elite chose not to see, not to hear and not to understand the Soviet crimes against humanity is unforgivable.) Jaan Kross has remained a great favourite and my understanding of the incredibly tragic history of modern Estonia has slowly developed and deepened along the years. By 1945 Estonia had lost a quarter of her 1939 population and was in the grip of the triumphant, hysterical Stalinist state that immediately started to undermine her national traditions, her language and culture after having already destroyed Estonian elites, economy and state. From those ruins this astonishingly determined, astonishingly rooted nation has risen to be a full member of the EU, Nato and the UN.

Of course for us Finns there is this special bond of linguistic closeness - I'm listening at the moment to Justament's "Petseri tsura ja Hiitola ätt", you basically physically feel how the languages are situated so near to mutual intelligibility:

Mis on salmide sisu, mis on jutu moraal.
Igaühel on isu meist surra isade maal.
Las see eestlane aasib, las see soomlane neab,
et poliitilist fraasi “loll” laulu sisuks vaid seab.

Minge elage nädal või paar parem Laadoga rannal.
Minge Petserimaale ja tehke seal tilluke tiir.
Ja siis küsige endalt miks igatsus koju on kallal,
ja siis pärige poistelt kust kohalt küll jooksma peaks piir.

And yes, there also are some common, very bitter historical experiences... "Läevad tunnid ja päevad ja kuud aga rahu ei anna, et üks naaber võib olla nii kuradi sitt ja nii sant!"

But we are also divided by this closeness as it hides the differences: whereas Finland still enjoying the long period of post-war peace and stability looks towards Scandinavia, many of the structures of the deeply wounded Estonian culture are more Central European. There is also much too little understanding in Finland of the cruel trials and traumas of recent Estonian history, and too much easy Nordic arrogance that comes with this profound lack of imagination and knowledge. Still, the bonds easily are far more significant than these temporary discords. Our solutions might differ but the geopolitical challenge is quite the same - an archaic, still very militarized and territorial great power next door. This is not to say anything about the great Russian nation and its brilliant cultural tradition - but the state that rapes Chechnya in the way it has raped Chechnya, the state that lets Anna Politkovskaja be slaughtered at her own doorstep, the state that makes mockery of liberal democracy will remain deeply corrupt and immoral, deeply unpredictable, a perpetual problem for all its small, civilized and Western neighbours.