‘The temples, the palaces,
Gentlemen of the belly,
Not a single hut!”
(Taras Shevchenko, ‘Sen’)
Etos nobility as a model for Polish national ethos
Conservativeism in Poland has become associated with references to landowner culture, noble ethos and traditions of Polish court. The Conservative was mostly a nobleman or an intelligent nobleman in Poland. From noble traditions he wanted to bring out Polish national spirit. In his opinion, the Polish national thought should be a circumstantial "demeanor" of the people. Raising people to Polishness was to rise them to the moral and spiritual level of nobility. Etos nobility was to be a spore for the knightly national character of Poles.
In his left-wing version, this view was revived in the intellectual ethos. Genetically, intelligence came from nobility. It was different from its critical attitude to its own cultural tradition, so besides to the Polish national tradition. However, as well as noble conservatives, Polish intelligence besides felt a "younger sibling" of the more culturally mature Western. For conservatives, the mention point was the ancient Mediterranean civilization, Rome and Catholic France. For intelligent people, the same model was modern post-Revolutionary Europe.
Ingredients of folk conservatism: nativeism
We see, therefore, a common sense of civilisational “youngness”, a complex of “premural” and “periphery” to all our cultural exponents. due to the fact that erstwhile you look at the Polish Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque churches, Polish castles, palaces and old cities, they seem only a worse version of their western originals. And indeed they are, due to the fact that Polish advanced culture, following the Western one, was secondary to it. Of course, it has its regional colour and specificity, but it has grown from the transfer to our ground of ideas created elsewhere.
Traveler Grzegorz Rąkowski illustrates this fact with the following anecdote; “I callback how friends utilized to drive a friend from the West around Poland, showing him the most valuable monuments. Bored of churches, palaces and castles, he revived only in Białystok, he was delighted to see decorated huts, he had to drive from village to village, he took photographs. erstwhile his guides expressed surprise by saying that we have many more valuable monuments, he said to them: Perhaps, but specified huts are nowhere else in the world."1
The Western tourist's reflection expresses the fundamental problem of our “conservatism of advanced culture” and at the same time the fundamental direction in which Polish conservatism should be developed: Polish advanced culture is secondary in our country, while the authentic tradition of our ethnos is simply a tradition of layers of “closest ground”. By limiting conservatism to “high” Western culture, we deplete our tradition of everything that is most native in it and what makes us a separate people. Gothic or Baroque churches can besides be found on the Loire. Renaissance houses in Italy. What natively Polish begins only after the corners of cities.
“When we anticipate little of the foreboding abroad writers, little to trust on them, and an enterprise among ourselves, in our own space, in the nest of our fathers to search for all the news, we may find more than they have always been written. Let's just look at our land. possibly the Slavs left it for us as the most enduring book, possibly they spelled it, so that it would never come out of the inheritance of the descendants, and to this end they would captivate the modern way for it to be a witness to the latest grandchildren"2.
Ingredients of folk conservatism: rooting
Each people has the right pulse of cultural life. Its frequency echoes the rhythm of its biotop. The social structures and consciousness structures of the people evolve into a circumstantial form, adapting to the environment that it settles. Culture arises as an extended phenotype. Space has its spiritual content. It creates a framework for cultural growth. It can advance human spirit to the heights of metaphysics, or its distortion and underdevelopment. The genius of the people, the collective spirit of ethnos pictured in his totem, feeds on the juices of the native land.
“From a conventional point of view, between man and his land, between blood and earth, there was a hidden relation of existential and physical character. Since the land had a physical identity derived from its geographical identity, those who were born on it were profoundly influenced by it"3.
Thus, not only the distinctness and specificity of culture, but the lives of the people themselves are conditioned by their relation with the native land. surviving close the earth, in the rhythm of natural cycles of sunrises and sunsets and changing seasons, is simply a origin of moral and physical health. "In the countryside, all period brings its wonders, but eternal and unchanging remains mysterious, unfathomable deities of heaven and earth, dark boron, the grace of trees"4.
In the purest cultural form, the biological and spiritual identity of ethnos is preserved in what is provincial, local and earth-related. It is not in the foreign-infected palaces, but under the roofs of agrarian huts that lie the top decks of ethnos passion. The ecclesiastical nobility was a layer historically exhausted, washed out of the life force, while the people surviving close the earth are the youngest and most vital.
Ingredients of folk conservatism: creativity
“The bare head and the name of Christ went out into the field and sowed; he was as large and clumsy as a stump, to which 2 human arms were attached, but in his breasts the heart of the kid beat. He cast grain in godly focus, in the serene humility of the spirit, as though he had performed a mystical, spiritual rite. Look, here the grain rises and turns into a ears abounding in seeds many, many, and so it happens all over the earth, wherever the grain is sown. In the East and in America, and in Gubrandsdal—ah, how large is the earth, and how tiny was the field sown by Izak! But it was the center of everything.”5
The folk conservatism we postulated here, in addition to nativeity and rooting, besides emphasizes the cultural function of working on the field and craft work. Man realizes his spiritual possible in his work, working with natural materials, the farmer and artisan are closer to artists than workers. Unlike capitalism and real socialism, in the organic economy of the identity state the work of a craftsman and the work of a farmer regain their dignity and precedence over trade and speculation.
“So you walk with heaven and earth, with heaven and earth you are one, 1 with all this space, a rock. You are the ones who sustain life. You have 1 generation following the erstwhile generation, erstwhile 1 dies, the next takes its place. That's the point of eternity. And what reward do you have in return? Being in immaculate law and incorruptible justice, being in actual and sincere attitude toward everything."6
In identity order, society will become an organic and state society. Individual states, in order to regain their identity, must regain not only their privileges and position but their appropriate social function. In the case of aristocracy, this would mean returning to the ethos and the function of chivalry. In the case of a 3rd state, this means ethical and material reconstruction of agriculture and crafts.
"An old German peasant, for example, considered his agricultural business to be noble, even if he could not see in his business how his Persian counterpart, a symbol and an episode were active in the fight between the god of light and the god of darkness. Members of medieval corporations and guilds were just as arrogant of fulfilling their professional traditions as the aristocracy was arrogant of its blue blood"7.
Ingredients of folk conservatism: localism
Such ideas were intended in the mid-19th century by Kashubian national activist Florian Ceynów (1817-1881). In the face of the force of Germany and Poland on its native Kaszuba, he intended to awaken awareness and cultural pride and professional pride among Kashubian peasantry. He expressed his ideas in the texts “Kashebji do Pollochov”(1850) and “Go Nation and I Speak” (1850). He advocated in them the defence and care of Kashubian language and folk culture, however, seeking for this intent a support in the Russian carat, not in the colonized noble and church elite.
Ceynov besides postulated the professional organization of the Kashubian people as part of the Rzemjejno- Przemésłovégo Kaszébsko-Slovjnskjeho Nation, established in 1866. He felt that Kashubian culture and language had to improve in order to survive. So they request to learn crafts and make themselves tiny - sized. The national Kashubian ethos was to be a folk ethos, different from the Polish nobility ethos. He was expected to emphasize the value of work, rooting, separate language and folklore, surviving in the countryside, and in the case of small-townity – the virtues of the townspeople.8
For a reason, we are recalling the character of Florian Ceynow, due to the fact that he expressed a circumstantial ideology of the folk Kashubian region, which gave emergence to today's Kashubian regionalism. Traditionalism and peasant conservatism should inactive be noted, that their natural predisposition is to focus on local issues.
“The homeland is – leaving aside nationalistic talk – only with the space that man looks at erstwhile he climbs the hill.” (Nicolás Gómez Dávila). Unlike a nobility whose consciousness horizon included the region (earth, county), the peasant consciousness horizon closes in what is local; parish and commune. A applicable request for folk conservatism is, therefore, the expanded local and municipal government, with adequate financial resources.
Ingredients of folk conservatism: Realism
The burden of the Polish national thought is republicanism, the thought of citizenship and the derivative of insurrectionism. They come from a noble tradition, which was then extended to the remainder of society, along with its progressive nationalization. These attitudes and tendencies led Poles to a series of national disasters expressed in subsequent partitions in the 18th century, in the bloody suppression of independency conspiracy and national uprisings in the 19th century, as well as in the progressive parallel regulation of self-government and worsening of economical conditions by possessive states.
The Polish people utilized to be reluctant to conspiracies and insurgent movements, and at worst only granted them conditional trust. The November Uprising and the January Uprising were actually wars of nobility. The peasants caught rebels and gave them to the authorities. Support for the rulers who brought the peasants an embezzlement in 1848 (Kingdom Galicia and Lodomeria) and 1864 (Kingdom Polskie) was comparatively advanced among the people.
In 1846 the Galician people even acted actively in the defence of the emperor and defeated the noble revolutionaries, even before they could begin the uprising. The hero of the Polish counter-revolution was Jakub Shela (1787-1866). As a result, until the end of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, it was no longer disturbed by the nobility's insurgent conspiracy. In this context, it is only regrettable that the authorities did not decide in the Kingdom of Poland to make akin mention to the faithfulness and patriotism of the people.
Also after Poland regained its independence, the folk parties and referring to the ethos of the bourgeois endecia, they polematically reacted to the thought of insurrection and postulated pragmatism in their relations with the obsessive Baldish Russia. Even today, modern PSLs and agricultural trade unions rise the importance of economical contacts with the East and hold a comparatively greater distance than another participants in the political scene towards pro-American and brawl abroad politics of post-solidarity elites.
Summary: Poland as a state of folk conservatism
Despite the comparatively advanced proportion of nobles in the I of the Republic of Poland, most of us have peasant or small-town roots. Our grandparents were peasants, workers or craftsmen. Snoring on noble heritage, identifying with noble tradition, assigning themselves to noble roots and viewing the past of Poland from the position of the noble state are so something profoundly unnatural for most of us. Especially since this attitude and tradition were negatively verified by history.
The evolution of the Polish state towards an identity state should include de-masification and circumstantial social decentralisation. The modern nation must be internally differentiated in its vertical and horizontal dimensions. As part of specified a renewed organic society and internally formed, the modern equivalent of knighthood should besides be distinguished. However, an indication of the form of his state ethos, which should be rejected in this ethos and what should be preserved from the historical ethos of the Polish nobility, would require inclusion in a separate text.
At this point, instead, we will show what content the popular component of the renewed Polish identity political community should bring. Since the society of identity Poland is to be an internally diverse and established society, not everyone in it will be a nobility and not only the nobility will should be the rulers.
It should so be a state of folk ideology, resembling the ideology of modern Belarus; a strong (and established succession) ruler loved by his people; cultural and moral conservatism; patriarchal social relations – without the closure of a female in the surviving area would be "lying and smelling" as it was in the higher nobility; the value of the creative work of a farmer, a craftsman, a intellectual worker, even a worker; communityism; protectionism; censorship.
The state of folk conservatism should besides be a state with a proprietary structure akin to that of distributionism. conventional society in our part of the planet was made up of freelings and richer than them and enjoying certain privileges of the elite of the powerful. The Latin-American economy created by the nobility was based on the exploitation of the people a strategy of social injustice, while completely inflexible historically. Unlike noble conservatism, therefore, folk conservatism does not long for your country and does not condemn the thought of agricultural improvement itself.
In identity Poland, the economy will have a folk character and will be based on household farms and crafts. Its key sectors, as in Belarus, should be nationalised to service the welfare of the full political community, not simply part of the global capitalism system. State regulations, economical protectionism and subsidiarity policy will complete a strategy that will enable people to live on their own.
The identity state should be regionalised and self-government. The closest individual is his immediate surroundings, so the municipality. The municipality should so have not only extended powers but besides a financial base to usage them. Local authorities should besides get lower-level units, specified as settlements or villages. The region government, on the another hand, reflects the possible of a appropriate nobility (identification with lands) and in the absence of one, its sense becomes questionable.
People's conservatism is so a proposal for a doctrine that can fund the creation in Poland of a political community of a different character than today's demoliberal community. It is simply a proposal that responds to the conditions of a society in which nobility ceased to exist, while ownership relations marked communist agricultural improvement and early capitalist privatization. This is besides a proposal to give conservative identity to the folk layers in the future identity state, which they will should be the most basic and extended social base.
Not only will the nature of the political community in the framework of folk conservatism be different from that of the erstwhile one. Another will besides be the perfect person. His own patterns and ethos will have an aristocratic elite. As mentioned earlier, their discussion would require a separate text. The ethos and individual pattern should besides have a simple people, any of whom, if not the majority of today's supporters of identity and conservative doctrine, should count. Let us so usage as a mention the image drawn with the pen quoted here respective times by Knut Hamsun (1859-1952):
“There he walks, walking through the fields and sowing. Izak, strong man, bronze man. He's wearing his own clothes, he took wool from his own sheep, and the skin on his shoes from his own calves and cows. According to the spiritual custom, he walks through fields with his head bare and sows... Izak is simply a peasant of the wilderness of blood and bone, a farmer of blood and bone. A man of the first agricultural era, a man known along and across, in mountains and valleys, a man of 9 100 years old, yet again a man of today. Izak is sowing... The setting sun enlightens a grain thrown with a busy, sacred hand in a broad arch and the grain falls on the dirt like golden rain. And behold, the Siwert approaches, and he defends, and then he rolls, and then he defends again. The ancient forest and the ancient mountains stand around looking at godly work. Everything here is power and dignity, origin and effect, large purpose”.9
Ronald Lasecki
