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Magdalena M. Aries: Liberalism has no good streak, though rationally thinking... should have it. Liberal values, human rights, attachment to liberal democracy as a strategy of governments can be exchanged, which, although in crisis, inactive remains the most meaningful 1 we know. In the meantime... enthusiasm cools, disputes grow, we're tired. William Butler Yeats wrote: “The best of them believe in nothing, and the worst of them all, until they boil from untapped passion” (The best catch all convention, while the worst are full of passionate intensity). Yeats writes these words at a circumstantial moment, just after the large War, after the tragedy in which thousands of people died, and along with them fell old myths of humanity, life attitudes, knowing of values. He writes about the world's imagination “after the war”, creating an apocalyptic scenario, in which a man seems to lose control, where we read tendencies towards force or anarchy. A terrible script in which he wonders, “What monster is going to Bethlehem to be born there?” A script that comes back again and again in a time of large crises.
Agata Bielik-Robson: This poem is definitely catastrophic, it describes the final phase of Western humanity, after which only demolition can occur. In the apocalyptic tradition, the end comes erstwhile the planet reaches its lowest possible level and falls to the very bottom: then we are either saved or condemned, but both are linked to the absolute end of this experiment, which is our human existence in this world. Hence, this beast creeping toward Bethlehem to be born and to initiate an age of decline, in which there will be complete disintegration, entropy erosion of all forms and structures: devour the full planet and bring it into chaos over which no 1 or anything will have control... erstwhile I read this poem, I don't see any hope of salvation there, and since I'm in a catastrophic temper lately, I've frequently had this uproar with Yeats. due to the fact that this poem is up to date again, though it can be better said: inactive current. This crisis that the Yeats diagnosed at the end of planet War I is inactive with us. Many speculated about the beast itself – that it has a direct political mention and this is about the then-born communism, russian communism, which Yeats personally feared. akin feelings were felt by Ortega y Gasset, and by Witkacy in Poland. These were people who thought that communism as a fresh kind of authoritarianism coming from the East would be what would forever devour the West with all its liberal values.But todayauthoritarian threats appear under fresh signs and bloom in the heart of the West itself. The line, erstwhile so surely designated by Rudyard Kipling – East is East and West is West – it has already broken down long ago, like all another expressive border lines, which present blur and relativize. This blurring of forms and definitions has always been characteristic of the decadent era – ours.
Immediately the thought of another poem opens to me, “Seven is my beast” by Smoke, about these beasts of loneliness, sadness, anger, despair, lust, anger, jealousy, each of which changes by cases the notion of voidness. A void that is filled in despair with something. It's like the next stages we go through, frequently unfortunately falling into authority. But I will return to the large War for a moment, until just after they sought reflection, for the protection of human rights, for any definition of the rules of war, for the unspeakable, minute of degradation of humanity (as in Remarque). And on the 1 hand, we have this man, while on the other, authoritarianism is coming. There's Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin... These cruel authoritarianism, which had no freedom or reason, yet possessed part of Europe and again pushed it into the abyss. And they wouldn't let her rebuild.
This is the contradiction of late-western culture that Yeats besides noted. On the 1 hand – in aesthetics, literature, philosophy, the full humanistic reflection of the late West– is the tallness of modernism, which focuses on the individual. As later, the Bolsheviks will be despised, even “the cult of the individual”. The individual with its inalienable rights is thus raised to the highest pedestal, and here, of course, liberalism celebrates triumphs – on the another hand, an authoritarian alternate emerges at once, which is to undermine the rights of the individual and on the opposing imagination of the collective, this powerful "million-fingered hand", to which, as Majakowski poeticly put it, "a unit nothing, an individual zero". From this point on, the clash of 2 large modern paradigms begins, in which we participate to this day: the liberal belief in the power of the individual clashes with the authoritarian belief in the power of the collective. At this phase of the West, the liberal option is starting to lose clearly, which was what the catastropheists warned us about, speaking about the arrival of the era of niwelism – the equations of individual differences in the name of collective unity.
And this melting in the mass is discernible, absorbable, in any postwar numbness for any may even be easy or attractive. At the same time, coming from the same time – after the Second War – we strengthen human rights, strengthen values that are the origin of liberalism. The post-war Western Europe, however, is simply a powerful consequence to the legacy of wartime authoritarianism, while at the same time trying to defend itself against the emergence of others. The values of liberal democracy are at the heart of a rebuilding European community. After all, these values are the values of the founding fathers of today's European Union, erstwhile they talk straight about freedom, equality, tolerance, further developing these principles towards solidarity, subsidiarity, responsibility. And yet... In 1 of my interviews with you, I read a large message that this is “democracy and liberal ideas, a planet of enlightenment, a respectable individual, having credible judging procedures that seemed to be the best of the worlds through which mankind has passed throughout its long history, has been targeted as the origin of all evil.” And it should be repeated: It's amazing! Yeah, even scary. The question is what happened somewhere between this large optimism of religion in liberal de facto the values that allowed us as a society or community to rebuild after the large crisis, and our political everyday life? Why the conflict?
This is simply a tendency to large disappointment, which has been increasing for any time, besides testifying to the decadence of our era: in the end periods, what was previously the strength and drive of the improvement of civilization, is pathological and becomes the origin of a large disease. specified a strength, present weakened and pathological, was the ability of the West to self-criticize: a completely unique property of the culture of enlightenment, consisting in learning from its own mistakes and drawing affirmative conclusions from it. Today, this self-criticism is besides easy to negate: simple, non-dialectic rejection of everything that seems imperfect, and thus only condemnable, incapable to repair. In my philosophical works for a long time I have already dealt with this phenomenon, in which criticism, erstwhile the main driving force of the West, degenerates for pure negativity. Much has changed since Michael Oakeshott, who praised the attitude of “loyal criticism” as the top virtue of modern liberalism. Today, it is uncommon to have a loyal criticism, due to what is criticised – that is, 1 that wishes to preserve and save an institution, proposing a certain line of repair. present criticism takes the form of an uncontested and uncompromising judgment, expressing an highly disloyal and absolutely negative attitude to the full Western formation. This can even be called far-flung oicophobia, or loath to our own world, which appears as an irreparable place, terrible, oversaturated with violence, hypocrisy and founding lie. The large lie of liberal democracy only covers Western imperialism, the colonial exploitation of weaker peoples, and also, which is completely unforgivable in the light of environmental discourse, the exploitation of nature. abruptly – as Leszek Kołakowski said in the late 1960s, already sensing this trend – civilization was placed on the bench of the accused. He already knew precisely what was going on, what was going on with the heads of sixty-eighty radicals who rejected reforming Western institutions for their revolutionary negation. He predicted a strong anti-civilization phrase that culminates today, after 50 years: The West lost its defence in its leading humanist reflection, which became unequivocally disloyal and accusing. Liberalism and enlightenment have been recognized as a large lie to Western humanity, hypocritically concealing monstrous exploitative force against weaker ethnos and nature. Today, anti-civilization tendencies everywhere flourish in alleged fresh humanities, in which the return to nature is praised and to the first communities that supposedly lived in harmony with it (which besides translates into the worship of the Global South as an alleged alternate to the Western way of life: a very dangerous dream). I completely competition this idealization, all this story of naturality and authenticity of primary cultures, which were later dominated by the Western instrumental sense. Everywhere you look, self-criticism has degenerated into simple negation.
Liberalism also, of course, comes out of this trial accused and condemned as a large lie that failed to fulfill its emancipative promises. After all, the full thought of individual rights truly – according to this anti-Western communicative – applied only to a narrow, chosen, elite group, mostly dead white men, and the remainder of the excluded could not usage them. So lie, hypocrisy, and falsehood: only to condemn, without the anticipation of repair. Hence, we request a large reset, another decadent feature: waiting for barbarians who will supply us with this reset. This reminds me of a fresh pro-Palestinian (or possibly pro-Hamas) demonstration at the University of Hamburg, where left-wing queer youth protested together with the Muslim community: "califat is the solution". From the interests of the group queerThere's no rational sense in this. However, it has a deep existential sense as an expression of a decadent desire for our corrupt planet to vanish erstwhile and for all and something rather fresh has begun – for example, this "wild beast" which will be an muslim Caliphate in Europe (this large desire was described by Michel Houllebecq in Submissions).
The thing is, waiting for barbarians, more or little imaginary enemies, turns into political fuel. In the meantime, although we look for them for a long time, they do not necessarily come, and if they start knocking on our door, it happens that they have a very different face than we were frightened to imagine. And any people would like this liberal world. There is no extremist liberalism – Kołakowski said that the state based on it would be a utopia. But we're not talking about specified radicalism. On the another hand, we have this reset... And erstwhile I perceive to young people, my students, they frequently look at liberalism unfavorably, and at the same time usage liberal categories and values to describe their values and aspirations, only they call it progressiveism. Liberalism in Poland was given a terrible mouth – first it was limited to economical issues and transferred to it the responsibility of systemic transformation. That's 1 problem. The second is inactive unworked enlightenment, getting stuck in romance and emotion erstwhile Western countries entered the age of reason. The 3rd thing, even more Polish, is the fact that our liberalism – the 1 known from Szielewski's writings or Kisielewski's texts – remained someway provincial, the 1 chosen, that we are inactive doing it as a lesson, while being forced to defend it from the temptations of authoritarians and low-levelists.
We talked about a crisis of liberalism in the global sphere, which is all over the West. This is simply a young generation – and I am reasoning about my English and American students – it is very antiliberal, due to the fact that it is actually anti-Western. It outweighs the feeling of fatigue with the western paradigm and the will to cross it towards something completely different, new, even rather "barbaric". They besides call it progressiveism, or ideas of the cultural left, which very much comes upon specified a revolutionary reset. The objectives and strategies of liberalism and cultural left are rather different, although both formations are progressive. erstwhile the liberal pattern is based on negotiations between different social groups and seeks a compromise as the best form of social life – the fresh left's pattern rejects the compromise as unsatisfactory and rotten. Therefore, the old model of liberal emancipation, based on negotiations and compromises, has ceased to be attractive to young people: due to the fact that it is besides slow, due to the fact that not enough, because...
Because they request to rapidly say to everything, “I check!” The point is that neither evolution nor democracy are processes or express systems. It's just not in their nature.
That's right! And they are actually already raised on social media and the alleged rule of direct gratification, so they would like to have “all, everywhere, at once” (that I would quote the title of the Oscar film). The second issue is Polish specificity, very local, connected with the period of transformation, but besides with the problem of the deficiency of liberal tradition. In Polish culture, this is besides a kind of misinformation – and I am reasoning about my English and American students – which is simply a very powerfully antiliberal unfortunate association of liberalism with neoliberalism, that is, the direction very late and limited to the principles of economical freedom, associated with the name Leszek Balcerowicz. Almost all anti-liberalism of Polish progressive youth is about the perception of the transformational era as cruel and unimportant to social justice.
I have a serious problem with this criticism due to the fact that I don't think it's going far enough. It is very frequently associated with a completely mistaken idealization of the PRL period, where everyone supposedly had a job, housing, and the full looked like a land of milk and honey flowing. And it's not truly clear why a fistful of these creepy old-timers-styropanists tried to destruct this wonderful strategy and bring in predatory capitalism instead. I, of course, disagree with this vision. If you do not consider what happened here before 1989, you cannot realize the mechanisms of transformation itself. But this is the unfortunate Polish specificity, which additionally imposes on the bad streak of liberalism in the world. Young people themselves are at the minute absolutely globalized, through constant contact with the net and social media, and it has its own ghastly “everything, everywhere, at once”. due to this, it is not located in a sense – it does not think in the way of the people of Poland, the country in east Europe, but alternatively geopolitically located, but very easy adopts views of progressive youth from fresh York or London. It's like a place and a local communicative doesn't matter.
Meanwhile, we are faced with another conditions, cultures, identities. There's no simple one-to-one ratio. due to the fact that even if problems may seem similar, they cannot be solved without context, and it will not be possible to do so “for a hurrah!”
In addition, there is large force created by the cultural left to always be on the right side: against the perpetrators and on the victim's side. This insanely simplistic imagination that no racial liberal would always agree to, knowing that these divisions never run so trivially that the individual is always between, always in the alleged inter-section, that is, at the intersection of various kinds of forces and groups that do not let simple dualism of executioners and victims. Hence, the terrible ethical chaos which results from the ever-changing, fluid position of accusers and accused. Take, for example, specified an example of this disorienting oscillation: in 1 moment, feminists are defended as victims of a patriarchal tradition – but in a minute already attacked as terrible terfki which defends their privileged position of ciskobiet towards trans people. It's a completely dysfunctional perspective.
Such force must be exhausting, actually burning. The request to constantly confirm anti-systemicity ultimately... enslaves, submits. specified constant confirmation is demanded by another excruciating utmost activistic mentality (those not abolishing opposition, but besides preventing rational conversation), but besides by all populism. The last fewer years are besides a time when, in consequence to the crises we are talking about, a full array of books about the crisis of liberal democracy appeared on the shelves of the bookstores. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Fareed Zakaria, Adam Gopnik, John Gray, Michael Walzer or yet Yascha Mounk, they all see the problem. The question is how to solve it. I am most convinced personally by Mounk erstwhile he talks about the request for renewal of civilian faith, about assurance in politics as a trial. Thus I return to what is fundamentally crucial for liberalism, i.e. values, to ethics. I think: this ethical persuasion, whose strength and place should be as widely understood public sphere as possible. For here is the place for what Mirosław Dzielski erstwhile described as a “reasonably guarding freedom”, which is fundamentally a work for liberals. And that is what we must learn again if we do not want to fall into dogmatism, which is the origin of violence. possibly this is the beginning of the way out of the crisis we're talking about.
Yes, the question of trust is absolutely fundamental here. Liberal democracy cannot function without a advanced level of social trust, which at the minute has simply fallen dramatically, practically to zero. And this is due to the fact that the way social media communicates is terribly brutal and does not foster a sense of social trust or even good being among others. Others become hell, as Jean-Paul Sartre erstwhile described rather professionally. As we know, Thomas Hobbes in his conception of human socialization utilized the story of the state of nature from which we came out, recognizing the right of others to exist. I feel that this story of the state of nature before our eyes ceases to be a myth: it becomes a frightening, everyday social reality.
We trust each another less, we become suspicious, we go into solutions, but besides extremist ideology in our assumptions, patterns, claims and divisions. The second is increasingly... alien.
And the motive from Hobbes comes back: “man man wolf.” And that's the state of nature. There may be maximum freedom in it, but this is freedom forged by absolute fear and distrust of another individual, which is always cast into the position of possible enemy, possible torturer, possible threat. Liberal knowing of freedom has always been a limited knowing due to the symmetrical powers of others. present it fades for the sake of chaotic freedom—the freedom of me and my bubble to have everything, at the expense of the freedom of others and their groups. I have the feeling that today's freedom has not so much diminished as it has savaged. Hence the popularity of authoritarian populisms, which do not intend to take freedom distant from everyone equally: they always put on 1 social group, which they want to give everything at the expense of others, cast as strangers, traitors, enemies and subhumans. What do you mean in a state of nature...
Participants in this fresh mode of pseudosocial life, which is virtual online life, have thus in no way given up their freedom. The problem is that they no longer realize this freedom in a liberal way. Rather, it is evil freedom, like limitless freedom, which is at the same time forged by inevitable fear and distrust of others. The only “community” is then being among people absolutely the same as us, or inhabitants of the same bubble. In contrast, he does not let any motion of assurance toward others.
Bubbles – prisons our own... In this way, we are going straight into the full deconstruction of our communities, into the problems of our countries, into drift towards authoritarianism. For our misfortune, Carl Schmitt comes to the level with his categories of enemy and friend. And this is besides the minute erstwhile the second 1 disappears, erstwhile we no longer see – so pure in Levinasowski – Faces of Another.
Because we don't see her online.
It's true. Worse still, we frequently form relationships according to the model we want to make in social media. And here, between the bubbles, the spheres of freedom are not doing very well. To my students I always translate them as 3 circles – what is most mine (and no 1 can live on the freedom of thought or conscience), what happens to my freedom with the freedom of another (like freedom of speech or worship) and yet this widest ellipse engaging or better said touching larger groups of people. possibly I have besides much religion in Zetka, but the greater their diversity, the more they open up to each other, especially erstwhile they cannot make apparent camps or bubbles. It's like... more freedom and little theater. They clash and at the same time find space for each other, the minute where cooperation is possible, and not only due to the fact that it is needed.
This is the situation of average social life, in which, as you rightly said, the Levinasian regulation of the Face of Another operates, the peculiar individual who enters a surviving relation with us and in a good way limits our freedom. However, this is simply a completely natural limit, due to the fact that erstwhile we see this individual in a living, direct relationship, most of us will not want to hurt her. specified restrictions vanish in this strangely unonymized online sphere, where Levinasowski's ban ceases to apply and we all become sociopaths: then the primates begin to tell all kinds of Internets small tyrants, which nothing stops in their violent attacks. The sphere free from specified force is few, and the university is inactive producing this kind of space, although I think it is becoming little and less. These spheres shrink under force of reglamation, banishment, identity policies, which fundamentally completely prevent communication between identity trench groups in their dogma. I have been observing this for respective years with specified a growing, alternatively catastrophic feeling that even us academics are already withdrawing from the spheres of good socialisation. specified experiences exist, but they are increasingly rare, increasingly unique.
I am looking for this sphere where we are able to realize ourselves, where specified a gathering of 2 freedoms has a chance to happen; these open windows in monads, moments of crossing the thresholds of our own bubbles. possibly even moments erstwhile we are not eager to run to specified meetings, and yet we function in any kind of work, social, state arrangement, in places where the full atomicization is possible and feasible, but in a way imposing and undeniably harmful. possibly that's why erstwhile I think of liberalism, besides today, it's next to Locke or Rawsl (although abstract is simply a combination) that I get back from Szielski. In his essay “Who are Liberals” he writes that “it must be a burden of work on society all day, only then will it be able to reasonably defender freedom”. It's any kind of key...
Yes, only that the reasonable guarding of freedom of necessity assumes the participation of reason, and we have a serious problem with that today. Many books have been written about the primacy of emotionality over rationality in the modern public sphere.
It will come out that I am the 1 from the glass and eye, due to the fact that “feeling and faith” someway evaporated...
These beautiful feelings and religion have no longer been beautiful. Actually, all this romanticist investment in passion and emotion is starting to show a beautiful scary face. Reasonably guarding freedom recognizes the primacy of reason and certain rules of the game that we consider reasonable. What restricts freedom in liberalism is the designation of rational rules of the game, which, of course, permanently links liberalism with enlightenment. I can't imagine how he could last without further enlightenment, even if it is critical, due to the fact that the rule of self-criticism itself created. I want to return to this Oakeshott concept again – it should always be loyal criticism. The 1 in which the Western Enlightenment is admonished for all its errors and perversions, but it is done in the name of its repair, so that, as Theodore Adorno said, "defence enlightenment from himself." This lesson of the Frankfurt School is very close to me, among another things, due to the fact that present it is mistakenly regarded as a matrix of the full critical theory, from which all these anti-civilization trends in today's anti-Western reflection, which I have already mentioned. It was Adorno who was the first to inform us of the criticism of simple negation, which obliterates everything and leaves us with no thought for the future – in addition to “waiting for barbarians”.
But this thought for the future would gotta start with Kant. due to the fact that if we're going to save liberalism, we gotta scope out to his maxim. Sapere aude!,That is, the courage to usage your own mind. due to the fact that our time is moving out and there will be no better time to dare to be wise, but besides to usage our wisdom, knowledge, expertise, problems and solutions. This is simply a "I stand here, otherwise I cannot".
Yes, exactly, which means a certain accession to enlightenment and rationality. And, of course, designation of how founderly Kant's essay “What Is Enlightenment” is for us. It is the end of the 18th century, and Kant concludes that the diagnosis is inactive valid today. It says that we are not yet surviving in an enlightened age, but in an age of ongoing enlightenment, or alternatively enlightenment. Enlightenment is not yet a fact, but inactive a challenge: possibly even more hard than at the time of its dawn.Today we are very clear about the main obstacle in this process, which is the irrational emotiveism of raging collective unawareness, completely opposed to the ideals of conscious and rational "ego" of a peculiar individual. We are immersed in a sphere of unleashed "id", unleashed psychosis, where the notion of freedom has besides lost its connection to rationality, i.e. with certain rules limiting us. It's freedom that's savage, but it's besides psychotic, that is, 1 that doesn't admit any boundaries, and surely not a frontier in the form of another.
In the context of the challenge of enlightenment, and which is facing today's not yet full liberals, it is crucial to reconstruct the way of reasoning about politics and the public sphere as a place to put and solve problems. This is precisely the wise defender of freedom. And here, of course, I am reminded of Steven Pinker, who was terribly ridiculed by the fresh left behind for in fact a very simple request that we return to an enlightened approach to politics as a sphere of putting and solving problems. Problems request to be diagnosed, and then knowing that they are and what they are, effort to find a solution for them. It does not should be perfect, but at least we will feel that we have made specified a “map of the world” for now that we know what and where needs to be solved, thought or repaired. In the meantime, this, apparently, apparent thought encountered large resistance. Why? Because, as it turns out, even naming any phenomenon a problem places a liberal on the side of a black reaction. In the planet of a fresh identity policy and alleged "empathic affirmation", which replaced the old tolerance, there are simply no problems: there are only fresh wonderful phenomena that request to be welcomed joyfully with open arms. Illegal migration? sex auto-identification? It's not a problem to solve, but beautiful fresh ones that welcome bread and salt. While the conservative side is not better, its identity policy is equally uncritically affirmative. home force in conventional families? Exclusion of LGBT people? Again, no problem, due to the fact that only the enemies of tradition, which is sacred and has a ready answer to everything. In this way, the affirmation of our own group, combined with the negation of another, closes the way of sensible rational criticism of our common reality, causing only expanding polarity and, at the same time, paralysis in the area of concrete political action. No wonder liberals do not find themselves in this planet and feel tired. Nec Hercules contra plures.
So let us want for reason, peace that is not there, and time that is inactive lacking. And yet we must find them all to find ways out of the deadlock, not to proceed in a permanent crisis, but besides in constant concern for freedom; not to gotta prove that "you are not a camel." due to the fact that it's exhausting. And liberals can't be tired...
Well, I am, and I am.
