A Bear - Poles Apart

February 5, 2020 / Congau

The Lawmaker’s Privilege

Doing bad is bad enough, but it’s only really bad when it’s illegal. We get that reaction all the time; that shrugging of shoulders whenever an unfortunate action is met with the reply: “well, it isn’t illegal.”

That makes a big difference in the eyes of the world, but what difference does it really make? “Illegal” only means that certain authorities have had the power to outlaw an activity they find inconvenient to themselves. Sure, there may be an ethical element also, but why trust the verdict of a random government more than your own judgment?

This almost superstitious belief in law is a great tool for authorities when justifying their own existence. They decide what is right and wrong, and obviously they always call their own action right.

This is particularly clear in the case of international law since it is mainly meant to regulate the action of governments. However, in international relations most governments are reduced to various degrees of subordination to other states. They are not free to accept or reject laws the way they can do it domestically. Some international regulations are not entirely to their advantage but dismissing them would come with the cost of international exclusion.

Only a few powers, and one in particular, can avoid that cost since the others can’t exclude them. The US can afford to accept only those laws that are convenient to itself, and therefore it will never run the risk of breaking international law. Other countries may find it bad that the US refuses to ratify the ban on landmines, but since it’s not breaking any existing law, it is somehow not all that bad.

The result of this strict legal thinking is that this great power would never be able to do anything really immoral, and isn’t that admirable?

February 4, 2020 / Congau

Social Superstition

There is no justice in the universe, it seems. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, hard work doesn’t pay, a man gets sick from no fault of his own and fatal accidents happen for no reason. Fate is a whimsical partner.

The old Presbyterians thought there was justice in this. Success in life was proof of predestined election. If that’s so, any attempt at redistribution would be tampering with God’s plan.

One can’t argue with faith, so if that’s your belief, you are excused for not wishing to relieve suffering by bringing a human sense of justice into the world. But if you are not a Presbyterian or otherwise believe in predetermination, you have no reason to accept the distorted state of the world. If you believe that the only just outcome is one that results from human beings taking care of their own destiny, it is inconsistent to think that there is much justice in any actual society.

The gospel of merit is a superstition as much as any fatalism. A formal equality of opportunities does not guarantee such an equality, and even if it did, the interference of bad luck and bad people often disrupts personal progress.

Superstitious individualists, especially on the right wing of the political spectrum, continues to reward all credit to individual strength and blame all misfortune on personal weakness. Homelessness and social misery are then the sufferer’s own responsibility and it would be a transgression of the natural order for anyone from outside to step in.

This superstition is found in the mixing of extreme individual responsibility with the notion of ultimate justice. These two ideas are incompatible. The Presbyterians were at least consistent if they refused any redistributive human intervention in what they regarded as God’s plan, but if that belief is rejected, all human beings have a responsibility for everything, even the misfortune of their neighbors

February 3, 2020 / Congau

Dangerous Art

Art is always dangerous. Wherever there is art, there is rebellion. Authorities may try to curb artistic expression and smoothen its sharp edges, but they either fail or are too successful. They may be able to kill the art altogether but to make it compliant, never.

The essence of art is to challenge conventions, but not necessarily in an overt way to be observed by the naked and untrained eye. From the perspective of narrow-minded government bureaucracy, it may all look safe as long as the critique of their power is not expressed in familiar categories.

Art doesn’t have to be political to be dangerous but luckily that often escapes the notice of the guardians of the state. The tendency to think contrary to established practices may be contagious and later cross over to the political realm or even if it stays securely outside of the affairs of the state, culturally non-conformist groups are also a potential threat.

The safest thing for a government of a totalitarian state would therefore be to destroy the arts. The alternative strategy, to make the artists work for the government, is either impossible or just another means of destruction.

If the artists really did what the authorities wanted them to do, they wouldn’t be producing art anymore. It’s not possible to create anything if you are told what to create since then it wouldn’t be a creation but a mere copy of instructions. The most dreadful examples of government art (like Soviet social realism) lack this basic qualification to be art at all.

Sometimes artists succeed in working in the twilight zone of government requirements and their own true artistic instincts. They accept certain formalities but still manage to break out of them in areas that are less noticeable to the state power. Then they can still create art and remain dangerous.

February 2, 2020 / Congau

Vengeful Justice

Would you let a murderer go free and a thief run away? Would you drop the charges and release them from prison? Do you care what happens to them?

You probably do care. Even people who normally don’t care much about the misfortune that befalls their neighbors, get upset when they learn about fortunate criminals escaping their punishment.

They call it justice, and it principally means that whoever deserves what is bad should get what is bad. Those deserving what is good, frequently fail to obtain it, but that’s a lesser concern for our champions of justice.

What if the murderer goes free, why does that so much disturb your sense of justice? Well, there may be a risk that he goes on to kill other people, but to prevent that from happening is not a matter of justice being fulfilled. Wild animals are shot to prevent them from attacking livestock without anyone thinking that the wolf or the lion deserve punishment. You would want to see the murderer behind bars even if you were absolutely certain that he would never kill again. Justice demands it, you say.

Justice is presumably something rational. There appears to be a logical weighing of values and a right conclusion to be reached. But how can it be? There exists no equilibrium in the universe that gets reestablished every time a criminal is punished in proportion to his crime. Rather, there’s an emotional urge to obtain an illusion of balance. Our feelings imitate logic by demanding symmetry to cases where it doesn’t belong. Punishment is not the negation of crime; they are not opposites and cannot cancel each other.

The demand for punishment is related to the instinctive wish for revenge whenever we feel anger. We are like children hitting back at the rock that hurt our foot. It is just as irrational to want something bad to happen to others when there’s no advantage to be gained from it.

February 1, 2020 / Congau

The Moment of Artistic Freedom

No one is as free as an artist. He is a bird among humans, flying off to foreign skies when the rest of stay behind. We can only watch him as he soars wishing that we dared to follow; but we don’t.

Being an artist is to dare. An artist is no longer safe. He goes where no one has gone before. Every step leads into the unknown.

He must be brave. He must be fearless, for if he is afraid, he is not free, and if he is not free, he is not an artist.

There are very few true artists.

An artist creates, and he who creates makes something out of nothing. Before there was nothing, and now there is something. What now is, has never been before, and what has not been, is unknown. The artist steps into the unknown.

An artist is not always an artist. He spends most of his time being normal: a prisoner like the rest of us. He must also make copies, walk that beaten path that life makes us walk. He too must use those ready-mades and place them in predetermined order. He must toil for his bread.

But there are moments: instants when art is born, when something rises out of nothing, when he takes off and flies.

The artistic moment happens when the human becomes an artist, that is, when he becomes himself. At all other times, he is half himself, a quarter himself, a tenth himself, or not himself at all. We are never ourselves.

At the moment of creation, he grabs what has come into being only within himself, and therefore he is himself, and therefore he is free.

Freedom is to do what no one tells you to do, what you truly want to do, what comes from yourself. Only an artist is free.

January 31, 2020 / Congau

The Artistic Moment

Every art has its medium. A painter handles paint, a composer uses tones etc. That constitutes the general language of the artist and obviously it is indispensable when creating his particular form of art. A painting could not be translated into a piece of music and not into a text of mere words. (If one tries to convert between the forms of art, and that is sometimes done, it’s a matter of interpretation and not translation.)

That means that whatever preliminary work an artist does before sitting down to produce his art, it is not really a part of his unique creation. This may seem like an insignificant pedantic point, but I hold that it’s important to make clear where the originality of a piece of art is to be found. After all, originality is the essence of art, that is commonly understood, but misconceptions about its locality have led to the unfortunate practice of artists trying to outbid each other in coming up with spectacular schemes.

The planning of a work of art is not art. If it were, the artist could be someone else than the artist. Suppose I, who can hardly draw a stickman, suggested to a painter an unusual motive for a painting, who would be the artist of the finished work, me or the painter? The painter, of course, and entirely him.

Art is being created when the particular language of that art is spoken, and in the above example the language is paint. The artistic moment of a painter occurs when he is painting since the original idea he may express, can only be uttered in the painting language.

Art is idea, but it is not an idea that can be transmitted independently of an art. Only at the artistic moment is art created.

January 30, 2020 / Congau

Fascist Rules

Rules make perfection possible, that’s why it’s so great to have them. You follow a limited set of commandments and then you worry no more. There’s no need to ransack your conscience for hidden transgressions for all possible duties are already written down in a book of laws for anyone to read and when obeyed nothing more can be asked of you. You are perfect.

That’s why these model citizens are so arrogant. They know they have no stains on their record and that makes them superior to those imbeciles who are so vicious that they can’t even perform the simplest tasks.

The perfect moralist is a grumpy gentleman who always pays his metro fare but never lends a hand to unfortunate strangers. “If everyone were like me the world would not be in such a mess,” he thinks as he steps over the homeless man on the sidewalk.

But unfortunately for him, there are not ten commandments; there are thousands of them, tens of thousands, a million. Every step we take we may encounter another obligation or prohibition, another order. It’s just that we don’t know them. We can’t know them, and even if we knew it would be impossible to follow them all.

They are not written down anywhere for they are way too complex, although it starts out quite simple: “Don’t hurt people.” “Be nice.” But what would that mean on each and every occasion? One would need a separate law for all potential situations. Millions of them would not be enough.

Here is a reason for despair that our model gentleman could never understand. The Fascist world view expects simplicity on all levels and shuns intricate thinking. It wants perfection to be possible.

But even if you are not a fascist you shouldn’t despair. Since the rules are so infinitely many, they don’t really exist as rules. All we can say is: Do your best. You are not perfect. You are human.

January 29, 2020 / Congau

The Riddle of the French Revolution

When asked about the significance of the French revolution, the Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai famously replied: “That’s too early to say.” This quote from about 1970 is no less relevant today. It is still too early, and in fact, it will always be too early.

The French revolution defies any attempt at interpretation, or alternatively, it is too readily available for interpretation, which amounts to the same thing. It was surely a momentous occasion, letting lose ideas that had hitherto been confined to philosophers’ solitary chambers and literary salons, but it was also just another upheaval with the arbitrary effect of spurring a pan-European war. Great wars had happened on the continent before and all of them reshaped history and contributed to the existence of today’s world. The Thirty Years’ War, the War of Spanish Succession, the Crimean War, pick anyone you like, and you will realize that the world is still under the influence of its legacy.

But the special significance of the French Revolution goes well beyond the physical realities of the Napoleonic Wars. After all Waterloo seemingly restored the power structures of Europe to normal, and one might think the wheels of history could have squeaked on pretty much like before.

Well, maybe they did. If it’s extremely difficult to assess the lasting impact of the clash of physical forces and it’s impossible to determine how a swarm of ideas could affect the minds and continue to stir the tranquility of later generations.

All those isms and convictions, the difference between right and left, the ardent will to change or preserve, it all finds its mythical culmination in the events following the 14th of July 1789. But since we are talking about ideas, there are no facts on the ground that could really prove their ability to shape the world. The significance of the French Revolution lies both in its abstract symbolism and its concrete manifestation, but which is which and where to find it, that’s forever too early to say.

January 28, 2020 / Congau

Only One Freedom

Freedom is one thing; constraint is many.

Freedom is what is right; constraint is all that is wrong.

The bull’s eye is one point; everything else misses the point.

You might think it’s the other way around. The one thing they force you to do, is the one thing that constrains you, and everything else, any fleeting whim you may have, is freedom.

Freedom is pluralism, you think. Is it?

Pluralist society does give you the option to follow a different path. It does let you choose what is wrong for you, if that had been your desire. It lets you hurt yourself if you want. But do you want to? Of course not.

If you are free, it is not because of the many options you are given, but because of the choices you are making.

A so-called free society gives you one chance to choose freedom and thousand others to choose your own prison. That’s the best this society can do, the rest you must do yourself.

A real free society would make it easier for us to choose our freedom. It wouldn’t give an endless array of choices and claim that they were all equally desirable.

Philosophers have strived to construct this ideal society and have come up with schemes that make the laws force people into their freedom. Since freedom is one thing, this sounds doable, but it isn’t.

Your freedom is one thing. Mine is also one, but not the same. A common law would take away the freedom for at least one of us.

Society can’t make us free. It either gives too much or too little and it can’t possibly get it right for only you can see your own bull’s eye.

That is, maybe you can see it if you are lucky, and maybe you can hit it if you are even luckier.

Freedom is personal.

January 27, 2020 / Congau

Liberation

When a town or a country is liberated, it passes from one conqueror to the next. Conquest is liberation for the winner, and liberation is conquest for the loser. It is all words.

We read about liberation in history and we then know which side history is on. History is on the side of the winner.

A conquest is a temporary setback: Your country was conquered before it was liberated.

Or a conquest is a memory of distant times and has become a neutral occurrence devoid of judgement: Alexander the Great conquered.

For description we should never talk about liberation. From the perspective of history, history has no winners. There is just a perpetual recurrence of events, looking much the same if you don’t happen to identify yourself with some of them. And why should you? The past is gone, and the motives of its actors are clouded in mystery.

The present wasn’t meant to come about; it happened, and here we are. Our independence, if that is what we have, was not given to us by liberators, and our subordination was not a conquest. Only the bias of the present bestows such names.

One authority is changed for another. The one you prefer is the liberator, the other was the conqueror. Who asked you?

True liberation is a personal thing. Freedom is not collective. A town cannot be liberated; a country cannot be free.

A free people is one that decides for itself, they say, but what is a people and how can a random collection of millions of individuals decide anything? (The counting of votes is an artificial imitation of a decision)

You are an individual and you can decide. Your ability to do so makes you free or not free.

How can you be free? Liberate yourself by conquering yourself. Whatever that means, it doesn’t depend on armed forces.

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