A happy dog is an enviable creature – for other dogs. We humans cannot envy it. We may perhaps admire this animal for having reached the highest achievement of the canine species, but never, never can we envy it. We are human. We are unhappy human beings, but we are human. We know something that the dog doesn’t know. We have sniffed at a happiness of which the dog cannot have the slightest idea.
It is true that happiness is the highest aim for all living creatures, but the kind of happiness that each species can achieve is of course different. A perfectly happy dog would be much less happy than a perfectly happy human being and if that is right, it may also be the case that a half happy person may be happier than a fully happy dog. Accordingly it is logically possible that even a miserable person wins the comparison.
In a way we can understand the dog, but it has no understanding for us. When it finds pleasure in gnawing on a bone, we recognize our own satisfaction for a good meal, and when it has fun chasing a stick, we see ourselves in simple games. We can also doze off on a soft pillow and enjoy the warm sunshine in spring.
But that is not enough for us. The pleasure and happiness given us through such animal acts are nothing compared to our truly human joys. If you were a dog, you would have to renounce those good books, Beethoven’s ninth and your dear stamp collection or whatever you enjoy the most in life. True, as a dog you would not miss those things, but now that you know what they are, it is unimaginable to give them away. You know the pleasures of a dog already for to a certain extent you have them yourself and you know the kind of happiness they can bring, but it is nothing compared to what really makes you happy.
Even the unhappiest human being is capable of feeling a happiness that is unavailable for the dog, and that is enough to want to be human.
A foreigner is not a human being. He is not an individual, only a foreigner, and as such he is always regarded. When a countryman does something strange, you think he is a strange person. When a foreigner behaves oddly, you assume that’s how people act in his country.
We don’t do it like that here, you say, smiling tolerantly. The poor alien shrugs his shoulders, but inside he is screaming: No, people from my country don’t do that either, but I do that! Besides, my good native, there are millions of people in this country and you only know a tiny fraction of them. What do you know? Some of them may do exactly like this.
When migrants are entering the old continent, we see the masses. It is harder to notice the individuals and even when we do, we tend to dismiss their unique features as somehow also derived from the group. Foreigners cannot be seen for what they are and that frustration must be added to all the other mental strains that they are sure to encounter so far from home.
Tolerance is of course a good thing, but we shouldn’t be so tolerant that we don’t even bother to notice the differences. If people are strange, be so good as to notice their strangeness. Accept what you see, but only after you have looked at it.
A foreigner is actually a human being and a subject of human psychology and that’s how he must be considered. Are you surprised?
Some countries have minorities, others have minority problems. In some countries the smaller ethnic groups are celebrated as a curious addition to national wealth, in others they are suppressed. Now it seems easy to praise the first and blame the latter, but it is not quite that simple. Usually the official perception of the minorities within a state is quite artificial and in either case, whether they are regarded as a problem or a resource, it usually reflects a government’s strategy to consolidate its power.
Typically the minorities are a “problem” in areas where the state is not fully in control, whereas they become an asset when they are no longer a potential threat to the power. Then they may even be granted the honor of assisting the state in increasing its tourism revenues, showing off their colorful costumes as a propaganda tool for a seemingly benevolent government.
Minorities are in a way a modern phenomenon. They have always been there, true, but only in modern times, with the arrival of the national state, did they emerge as something in need of an official attitude. Within empires everyone was a minority anyway and anyone belonged as much or as little as anyone else. There was rarely a need to give them any special attention either in a positive or a negative sense.
The national state makes an issue out of the nationalities. Whether they are suppressed or supported they are pawns of power. They should be just people.
The fate of the Middle East was decided in Florida by a few hundred very ordinary American citizens who had no idea what they were doing.
It is intriguing and frightening to look back at the events that have shaken Iraq and Syria during the last decade and a half, but of course wars and violence have always shaped that ancient land of Mesopotamia. A lot of tiny pieces have encountered each other and set off a chain of reaction like rolling billiard balls. We can start our observation at any point in history and see how kings and caliphs, Mamelukes and temple knights have played each other off and sent the region stumbling unwittingly into its next stage.
The field is messy and it looks like a game of nonsense, but the most nonsensical of it all happened in far away Florida in the year 2000. Some slightly confused citizens, probably mostly retired people, misread their ballot papers, cast the wrong vote and made George Bush the winner of that state and thereby the presidency. The same Bush, having thus by this ridiculous joke been granted the most powerful office on earth, went on to pursue his own faulty whims, invented facts and started a war game in Iraq. The continuation of that game is now being played and it is messier than ever.
Bush is out and the Florida voters only had their one day of unconscious meddling, but they changed the Middle East and the fate of millions of people. It’s the crazy story of a crazy world.
The Palestinians live in material misery – occupied, harassed and oppressed. They are squeezed into their narrow strip and locked up on the West Bank, removed from the rest of the world. But they are also in the center of the world. No other spot on Earth get as much attention and no other land is associated with greater ideas.
It must be strange to be Palestinian – so insignificant as only poverty and oppression can make a man, but at the same time so significant in the middle of the global spotlight. The very misery is a reminder of their importance.
The Palestinians cannot be poor, for they have something to fight for; the idea of the most important land in the world – the promised land. It is lucky to have a battle to fight, a purpose and a higher meaning. We should be holy Muslim warriors and Jewish pioneers, but instead we eat in abundance and drowse in apathy.
In Europe there is no fire. The politics is boringly ordered and the ideologies are dismissed with indifferent tolerance. Aimlessly, we fill our belly. In Palestine life has meaning; in Europe they are not so sure.
Whoever believes in something cannot be poor, for something is dear to them and that is their treasure. We should envy the Palestinians. Their land is holy for there the ideas dwell. Palestine is the beacon of the world; Europe sees the shadows.
In the days of the Cold War the world was rational. The great global antagonism was apparently about fundamental ideas, capitalism or communism, and what kind of social system might be the best. It makes sense to fight for whatever you believe in.
Now it looks like another cold war. America and Russia are again competing to extend their influence around the world, but what is it all about this time? The same as it always was: Power.
There seems to be a basic instinct or an animal law that whenever two or more human beings inhabit an area, they will either be dominated from outside or struggle to dominate each other. That is human history, that is our world today and that was probably also the essential nature of the Cold War.
But humans are supposedly rational and their animal instincts cannot morally justify their behavior. Therefore it is somehow edifying to look at the old east-west, Soviet-NATO rivalry and interpret it as an ideological dispute. (After all back then many people did believe that that was the nature of the conflict.) We may now suspect that the ideologies were just a camouflage for primitive strife, but it was more rationally convincing that what we see today. It had the character of an epic struggle between good and evil, and whatever your conviction you had a rational incentive to support either side.
Today the antagonists are openly fighting for themselves and their national interests only. It is a petty quarrel without principles and universal ideas. The Cold War was a grim story, but it made sense.
The people have no will. A referendum is a game of dice that has hardly any more moral power than any other arbitrary political event. But people like being flattered and they want their opinion to be taken seriously even when they have no opinion at all.
The Brexit vote was a close call decided by a multitude of intricate factors influencing the uncertain voter up to the last moment. The Trump vote was a circus luring the unsuspecting electorate by flashes of deceiving colors leading to an unpredicted outcome.
Actually all elections are essentially like that, but the two examples from this year stand out as particularly scary balancing acts on the edge with a subsequent frightening fall. Few of those who tipped the scale knew what they were doing, but the result was as bombastic as if it had been expressed with the utmost conviction. It is treated as the will of the people, grandiose and sovereign, but the people didn’t will anything.
The will of the people, if there is such a thing, cannot be the sum of all individual wills for they are not equally strong. Some are sure what they want, but many are led to their decision by random circumstances being uncertain about what to choose until they do it.
The indecisiveness of the people is well known, but the fictitious will is still taken dreadfully seriously. The people are so respected that they are granted what they don’t want.
When was a nation born? At what time in history did a nation start being essentially what it is now? This question can probably not be answered for what is really a nation?
It may be defined as a group of people sharing a common language, blood relationship or common land area, but all these are rather uncertain quantities. Languages have changed, blood has been mixed and people have migrated.
If we still were to take the question seriously, we would have to decide on at least one of these three considerations. From when was the language sufficiently similar to the one spoken today as to be regarded as the same language? From when was the racial content approximately the same as today? When did the ancestors first enter the land? Neither of these questions can be appropriately answered and any attempt would probably be at odds with existing national mythology.
Let’s illustrate this by using the English nation as an example: The English language, approximately as we know it today, may have come into being in the 14th or 15th century. Was that also when the English nation was born? Most patriotic Englishmen would probably prefer an earlier date.
The racial make-up of England cannot have been established until several centuries after the Norman Conquest, but of course there is no racial unity even today. Race must therefore be disregarded.
When did the first ancestors of the English people set foot on the island? Well, whenever the first human beings did, thousands of years ago, that is, and no one would probably want to go that far back.
In national mythology the date of birth is often fixed at some political event, the Norman invasion, for example, since that can be easily determined. But a nation’s origin can hardly be dependent on the establishment of a state since many nations have fought to create their own state which means that the nation must have preceded it. (And of course many nations don’t have their own state even today.)
No, nations have never been born, but national mythology is not concerned with reason and science. It is a fairy tale.
The world was divided in masters and slaves. The masters were white men from Europe. They grabbed the land of inferior peoples and ruled them for a century. Then the slaves rose against their masters. Wars were fought, slaves were killed; they sacrificed themselves for their freedom. But they won, they won, and now they are free.
That is the story. It is told and retold in the national mythology of those who fought. The former masters are a little ashamed, but they have mended their ways and are now rulers of justice.
Colonialism is a thing of the past, bizarre in its overt injustice. It had to end and it ended. Today there are other ways to control the world; more subtle, but effective. The colonies are not colonies anymore and people rule themselves, they think.
Could there possibly have been one single country left bearing the name of Colony? No they are all independent in their dependence. Those who fought have the same kind of freedom as those who didn’t. Then why did they fight?
If we were to rewrite the history of one of those colonies and imagine that they had never taken up arms against their masters, where would they have been today? If Algeria had never fought, would it still be called a colony? If Vietnam had not risen, would it now have been the last remaining colony of the world? That is highly unlikely.
They are all called independent now. The colonies are called countries. Did they sacrifice their blood for a change of names? Maybe not even that was necessary…
What should a free society demand from its citizens? Nothing! Any demand is a reduction of freedom. But since no society can exist without laws, complete freedom is impossible; there has to be a compromise and that is the liberal state. The question would then be: What should a liberal state demand from its citizens while still calling itself liberal? As little as possible.
The demands would have to be of a negative nature only. Thou shalt abstain from this and that, don’t steal and don’t kill, but if the state is to be truly liberal it cannot require any specific services from its members let alone any particular belief or attitude.
Some talk about a republican spirit that ought to pervade the minds of the citizens, some civic virtue that fosters loyalty to the state. Well, that might be a social advantage, but it is not liberal. The liberal state cannot actively encourage one set of attitude and still claim to be fundamentally different from authoritarian systems. If liberalism is to be honest it needs to include itself in its freedom of belief, that is, a liberal state cannot require people to believe in a liberal state.
Most people have not chosen the state in which they live and therefore it is unfair to ask for any particular devotion to it. If that puts the state itself at risk, nothing can be done. Freedom cannot be saved by giving up freedom.
A Bear - Poles Apart 