The more things change, the more they stay the same

 I have been reading a lot but haven't had the blogging bug. Until today, because I read two very different things that clicked together.

I'll start with the Serious Reading: I'm reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a very philosophical novel that I won't attempt to summarize in full. I'm about a third of the way in, in chapter three of Part 3 ("Words Misunderstood") He's describing the experiences of Sabina, a Czech woman who has moved to Switzerland after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Sabina is talking to some other Czech emigres, and one of them starts inquiring into her anti-communist bonafides. Did she engage in sufficiently dissenting activities back in Czechoslovakia? Did she do enough to oppose the Soviet-backed regime?

Sabina's realization is that this guy is the mirror image of the communist functionaries who would scrutinize people's dossiers before they could get jobs or travel visas or official approval for other activities of life. It also reminds me of a point that Vaclav Havel made in his essay "The Power of the Powerless": These modern authoritarian regimes care deeply about appearances. It's not enough to just threaten to kill anyone who tries to thwart the dictator's material interests, they also need to keep up the veneer of ideological uniformity.

Related to the veneer of ideological uniformity, today I learned that in the official Dungeons and Dragons rules they will no longer refer to Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, etc. as "races." They are now "species." It seems that the essentializing of group differences in Dungeons and Dragons comes too close to racism in our real world.

There are two levels on which we could look at this. If we approach it purely on the level of the specific term, well, I don't know what the "right" term is to describe a world of fantasy and magic, with trolls and wizards and lizard-men and gnomes and all sorts of other weird stuff. Surely trolls and humans and lizard-men differ from each other more than, say, humans from different continents differ from each other. On that level, "race" seems an inapt term, and trying to equate the difference between an orc and an elf to the difference between two groups of real humans seems illogical. On the other hand, the existence of half-elves, half-orcs, half-giants (in some stories), etc. suggests that these creatures can mate with humans, and maybe do differ less than most species.

Not to mention that they mix and mingle in many of these fantasy societies, which may be the far more salient reason to say that they are more akin to different human races than to, say, dogs and cats. From a story perspective, Elves and Dwarves and Lizard Men (or Lizard Thems, to be gender-neutral?) are groups that often have their own separate kingdoms but frequently trade and sometimes even mix in bustling trading ports. Their interactions are fantastical, exaggerated stand-ins for conflict and cooperation between human groups, as magical creatures in fairy tales have long been. "Race" captures their story function quite accurately, if sometimes uncomfortably. (And who said fiction is or ought to be uniformly comforting?)

But that's not the real point here. It's not about dogs and cats versus human groups in modern society. It's about moral hygiene. It's about trying to ensure that this fantasy game doesn't corrupt the youth with ideas that run counter to the morality that adults are trying to install. And we've seen this game before, with the 1980's freak-outs about D&D being satanic. Now a new group of prim, proper grown-ups with strict moral codes is trying to parse games of fantasy and imagination for anything that might corrupt the youth, and lo and behold they've found it. How long before Tipper Gore starts bitching about music again?

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Havel: Systems seek legitimacy

I've read about half of the Havel book so far, including the famous essay "The Power of the Powerless."  I'm linking a .pdf copy with a few of my favorite passages highlighted.  The essay is largely about how people try to live honestly in a system that demands lies.  He returns repeatedly to the metaphor of a Greengrocer, a store manager who puts up a sign that says "Workers of the World Unite!" in his window.  The manager isn't an ideological man, and almost certainly doesn't think of his government as one that's particularly concerned for the plight of ordinary workers.  But the system demands that he put up this sign so he puts it up.  He has bills to pay, a family to care for, and a life to live.

Of course, the real message of his sign is not one of labor solidarity, but rather a way of saying "I am a man who complies with the system and does what he has to, so please leave me alone."  However, he can't just post a sign saying that explicitly.  For starters, it would offend his own dignity if he were to admit what he's really doing.  It's much better to have a pretext, so that if somebody were to ask him why he displays that sign he could respond "What's wrong with worker unity?"  It would avoid him having to say what he's really doing.

But what struck me most was how much the government itself preferred the soft message.  The Communist governments apparently desperately wanted the legitimacy that comes from ideology.  None of them believed in the ideology, but having an ideology meant not having to say what they really were: Men (and women) with guns who could compel people to do what they were told to do. They didn't really want to be gangsters.  It just sort of worked out that way.  As he says:

This explains why ideology plays such an important role in the post-totalitarian system: that complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts, and indirect instruments of manipulation which ensure in countless ways the integrity of the regime, leaving nothing to chance, would be quite simply unthinkable without ideology acting as its all-embracing excuse and as the excuse for each of its parts.

He keeps referring to these systems as post-totalitarian because they aren't interested in naked power in the way that Stalin and his ilk were.  Yes, there were thugs in those systems, men who would be happy to just do away with pretense and rule by force (and the collapse of Communism arguably enabled some of them to shed their pretenses and act more openly, as evidenced by the exploits of gangsters and oligarchs in the post-Soviet era), but there were plenty of men who had to persuade themselves that what they were doing was not gangsterism.  They surely knew that they weren't really building a workers' paradise, but having ideology on paper meant that they were at least following codes and laws.  They were products of civilization, heirs to Hammurabi, following a code, however flawed it may be.  They were not the barbarians living by the rule of might.  Some of them needed to believe that.

I see surprising analogies in the egalitarian ideologies of academia.  We pay lip service to so many mantras about student success and opportunity, we deny so many obvious facts about how not all students will succeed, and we tell ourselves that our every benefit is really for their benefit.  We drink this kool-aid and tell ourselves we're engaged in a project of changing the world rather than conferring credentials on those who show up while truly educating only those who work for it.  We tell ourselves that we believe the things we're told because it's easier than admitting that we only repeat these words in order to receive our paychecks.

When I prepare documents with ritual phrases in them, I am a greengrocer who needs to keep paying his bills. I speak some truths, but only at the edges of the permissible.  I don't cross certain lines because I make far more money than my wife and I need to keep us supported.  I know what I am and what I do. I don't like it, but I know it.

I would have made a shitty Communist, and I would have been almost as shitty as a dissident.

Next book: Open Letters by Vaclav Havel

The Federalist Papers were tedious.  I read the first 30 in detail, then skimmed the next 30, then read about the Electoral College and then gave up.  There are common themes, but they are tediously developed.

Now I'm reading Open Letters, a collection of writings by former Czech playwright, anti-communist dissident, and eventual Czech President Vaclav Havel.  It's kind of eerie how some of his critiques of communism could also be critiques of capitalism.  For instance, in his 1975 letter to Gustav Husak, the leader of Czechoslovakia, he notes that after a moment of freedom in 1968 (swiftly crushed by Soviet tanks), the Communist Party focused on economic development in order to appease people, while not easing up on political and social oppression:

Yet these same authorities obsessively justify themselves with their revolutionary ideology, in which the ideal of man's total liberation has a central place!  But what, in fact, has happened to the concept of human personality, and its many-sided, harmonious, and authentic growth?  Of man liberated from the clutches of an alienating social machinery, from a mythical hierarchy of values, formalized freedoms, from the dictatorship of property, the fetish and the might of money?  What has happened to the idea that people should live in full enjoyment of social and legal justice, have a creative share in economic and political power, be elevated in human dignity and become truly free themselves?  Instead of a free share in economic decision making, free participation in political life, and free intellectual advancement, all people are actually offered is a chance freely to choose which washing machine or refrigerator they want to buy.

Is he talking about communism, or about the ways that conformity is enforced in any society?  The grand ideals of failed communism don't sound so different from the grand ideals of any other reformist movement.  Yes, central economic planning enforced by secret police is a particularly stupid and destructive approach to "reform", and I don't want to sound like I'm trivializing it by equating it to other reformist projects.  I'm glad that modern reformists have (mostly) given up on that stupid idea.  Still, they haven't lost whatever it was that drove privileged kids to read Marx in the first place.  They still think they can free society if you just put them in charge.  Technocrats and techno-utopians are still self-servingly stupid.