Bahrain After Six Months

First published in 5PM Bahrain

Bahrain After Six Months

The Arab Spring has taken an unexpected dormant twist. The new reality of the Middle East, still authoritarian and increasingly chaotic, unstable and sectarian after the revolutions of spring swept all over, comes without the slightest surprise to those who have covered the modern history of the region. Chaos, instability and sectarianism have been present to some degree all throughout the region at some point or another with a just as varying degree of consequences; the present situation is albeit radically different as the unrest has spread in a matter of months to virtually every corner of the region, including relatively stable parts thereof such as the Arabian Gulf.

The tide of revolution reached the shores of Bahrain early in February when massive protests erupted throughout the capital and adjacent villages of the tiny island-kingdom and has never abated since then with different degrees of intensity and deteriorating at times into full-fledged violence. What began as a peaceful movement demanding better rights, an end to discrimination based on sect and to economic disparity, quickly escalated into a serious unrest of which now we understand even less, and that somewhat late, brought Bahrain to the headlines of the international news probably for the first time ever and probably not with the right background information.

In most of the Western world the opinions of the experts about the events in Bahrain and elsewhere demonstrated not only a very poor understanding of the obvious structural differences between the revolution that took place in Egypt and the situation in the Arabian Gulf (with some protests taking place in the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Saudi Arabia as well) but also of the internal conflicts inside Islam and the complex relationship of Islamic monarchies and republics to the West. Truth being said, the experts that dominated the public discussion knew as little as the man on the street and suddenly everyone turned overnight into a political commentator of the first order.

The word revolution became the household name for the uprisings in Bahrain and then an infinite number of additional demands were voiced by the activists in the ‘free world’ in order to complete a peaceful transition from regimes to democracies of some sort. Revolution, I would like to add, was too quick an addition to the repertory of Middle Eastern souvenirs, firstly because the region has a bad experience with revolutions overthrowing ancient regimes (with the cases of Iran, Libya and Syria in mind and a glance at Turkey with a lot of paucity) and also because a revolution constitutes a fundamental change of power taking place within a relatively short period of time in irregular, violent or at least extra constitutional fashion – somehow unmet in this case.

The intention of the peaceful protests at the now defunct Pearl Roundabout was very noble and a true momentum of political power was reached in Bahrain through the feeling of unity that took to the streets and that somehow, at the blink of an eye, extended the arm of the Arab Spring will into the oil-rich monarchies and faced not only the Arab rulers but also their Western friends with very difficult questions of nearly impossible resolution. This is however only a part of what we saw, and regardless of the feeling of unity among protesters and the coming together of diverse Sunni and Shia political elements, the popular support for the uprising was not universally accepted by many.

This created the two versions of the uprising proposed by Bahraini blogger and entrepreneur Suhail Algosaibi:  That of a people fighting for freedom and democracy and that of a nation intimidated by unruly mobs and rioters. It is unfortunate that both versions are actually true and co-exist within the same narrative. Although the protests initially did not have a sectarian focus and all what was demanded were better rights for people, it is clearly now and as of today that radical sentiments of resentment against the government and the ruling monarchy fueled the movement throughout and this did not only anger many Bahrainis but also alienated them.

The government’s response to the deliberate provocation caused by the blend of a demand for better rights and a challenge to the hegemony of the ruling families throughout the region, was completely brutal and out of proportion. This made it possible for demands of better rights to amalgamate masterfully with political agendas into a single continuum in which peaceful protests quickly escalated into riots and the response of the government forces and also of single individuals and groups in support thereof, matched just as well, the level of radicalism that was on top of it, promoted actively by state TV and that found its realization in countless sacking of workers, expulsion of students and other forms of sectarian discrimination, both publicly and privately.

According to classical political theory it is not revolutionaries who make the revolution – they only have the ability to sense when power is in the streets and then are able to drive the people en masse to take over this power; political power is a terrible force insofar as it is eminently human and therefore it is very hard to control or to predict whither it is going. One of the key limitations of revolutionary politics is that this political power of the kind needed for a revolution is out there in the streets for too little time and timing is crucial in the creation of a revolutionary momentum even if short-lived.

When the short life-span of political power lying in the streets is up, revolutionaries seize power through violence, and this is when political power is ultimately destroyed – violence is not political and it is not a power, it is the rather solitary strength of one man or one group against a whole people, unlike political power that as a force contains the wills of entire nations. This is critical to Bahrain’s current situation because in spite of the crucial demands made by the protesters, the climax reached at Pearl Roundabout might be already overstated and its life-span might be over by now. After six months it is possible to understand that there is no grand revolutionary moment in Bahrain for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, political power in the region is not only tightly controlled but also limitedly available to those who hold the reigns because the mixture of administering tribal political structures and membership in international global economies allows for very little of a public space without turning the pendulum in benefit of one or the other direction and destroying the fragile balance. A revolution in Bahrain demands not only local reforms but a change in Western policies toward the region, the cessation of military alliances; the end of the critical relationship of the global economy to oil and less turbulent expectations toward and about Iran.

Secondly, democracy and freedom are currently under fire in most of the Western world in a climate of multicultural unrest, financial crises and anachronistic policy-making so that the rule of majority – the way we have understood democracy for long – might prove lethal when transplanted to the Arabian Gulf in its current form: The heterogeneous ethnic, religious and cultural landscape of the region is likely to be atomized and further radicalized by the postmodern comeback of religion that would necessarily mean a religious rule in which liberalism in whatever form it might have existed until now, will be effectively gone up in smoke and the limited civil liberties achieved in the last decades evaporated for good. Secularism just like atheism, is an idea whose application is hard to realize outside a Western context and that no less than democracy, is greatly challenged today in the parts of the world that promote it.

Thirdly, not all the political channels have been exhausted. What has been exhausted until now is the stubbornness and unwillingness of all the political groups to find middle terms; it is usually the case in successful political negotiations that none of the parties involved will receive all what they demand and a large measure of compromise is necessary. Long before the current unrest, critical commentators on Bahrain such as K. Niethammer and J.E. Peterson have pointed out the stalemate in which the political process stands for long with authoritarian impositions on the part of the government and radicalized demands on the part of the opposition.

The spontaneous revolutions of which Rosa Luxemburg spoke once, the sudden uprising of an oppressed people for the sake of freedom alone without the ensuing chaos of military defeats, conspirators, propaganda plots, coups and unanimous agreement between all the fractions is not really what we have seen in Bahrain because such revolutions, as in the case of the short-lived Hungarian revolution in 1956, have virtually no leaders and in which freedom is the only moving force – this is certainly difficult to achieve amidst sectarian strife, political vendettas, organized media apparatus on both sides and the widespread use of marketing and public relations as tools of political pressure.

The National Dialogue that was meant to repair the tragic outcome of the events failed not only because the opposition withdrew from the talks but also because of the minimal representation they were allocated. This being said, it is also obvious to the onlooker that the feeling of unity among the different opposition fractions is found to be broken down once the climax of Pearl Roundabout fades from view and the pro-government and loyalist fractions are taking full advantage to the situation as they point a finger to the disorganized political agenda that cannot be separated from human rights plights that have been heavily politicized.

In order to return back to earth from either version – peaceful revolution or unsettling chaos – it is necessary to stop all violence (symbolic and physical) on all sides so that a true sense of normalcy returns in order to re-open political channels again. If this is achieved, perhaps it would be intelligent to realize that no reforms are possible unless a certain degree of trust – even if small – is achieved between the parties involved. The results of BICI are important but they are not what will mend what is broken inside Bahrain’s society, they only constitute information necessary in order to move on and adjust the necessary political and legal means to repair what has been broken and to bring to justice all those who were involved in violent acts from either side – regardless of how much powerful or not was this or that side.

The best that can be expected under present circumstances is a large degree of reforms embodied in the King and the Crown Prince that might open the way for more transparent political processes that in time (and this means years and decades) could change dramatically the weight of power held by the hardliners inside the government and the monarchy, shifting it toward a more inclusive environment that will allow for political normalization and a transition to open democratic processes that should keep in line radicals in whichever form they exist. Whether this process is going to be called a democracy is not something we can predict right now, but a constitutional monarchy in which power is shared with more equality and fairness, might be the temporary solution to the chaos that the radical alternatives will unavoidably give in to.  Bahrain is not a war zone, and being such a small country with some degree of resources, the problems can still be fixed before all hell breaks loose in the form of either more violent crackdowns or extreme political solutions that the whole region will come to regret.

Written By: Arie Amaya-Akkermans, freelance writer and translator

Er Norge en øy?

Er Norge en øy?

Fredag for drøyt en uke siden (22/7 2011) lærte vi alle en leksjon i politisk geografi. Vi lærte en lekse vi aldri vil glemme – såfremt vi da ikke virkelig ønsker å glemme den. Vi lærte lærte å kjenne den fra før så lite kjente Utøya. En øy så liten at mennesker fra utenfor Norges grenser vil ha problemer med å finne den på et kart. Det har ikke vært vanskelig å finne eksempler  på denne typen lærdom i 2011, et år der vi har fått en rekke leksjoner i smertefull politisk geografi: Misrata, Manama, Daraa, Tahir. På den annen side har disse hendelsene hjulpet oss, ikke bare til å bli kjent med nye deler av verden, men også til å forstå noe om egenskapene til de landene disse stedene ligger i. Bahrain viste seg å være mye større og viktigere politisk enn det landets størrelse skulle tilsi; Syria mye dødeligere; Egypt langt mindre forberedt på revolusjon, USA mindre innstilt på endring, og EU mye raskere til å reagere, osv. Leksjonen som Norge ga oss, var imidlertid svært annerledes. Først og fremst fordi vi ikke forventet den. Dernest fordi den ga oss overraskende informasjon om det norske samfunnet. Vi lærte at Norge ikke bare er et land som ligger i det rikeste nordlige hjørnet av verden. Vi lærte også at det norske samfunnet meget vel i seg selv kan være en øy. Som Utøya idyllisk og vakker, perfekt og sivilisert, hovedsakelig skogkledd, eid av et politisk parti og overveldet av en katastrofe.

Norges øy-karakter fremkom som en overraskelse da landets regjering og store deler av folket i kjølvannet av de tragiske hendelsene der én mann massakrerte flere titalls mennesker (mange av dem på en øy), forlot rammene til det kontinentale Europa og flyttet til øya: Utøya. Der er en selvtilfreds uskyldsfølelse enehersker.  Kriminelle og radikale individer som Anders Behring Breivik, med sine talltike internasjonale forbindelser, ideologiske påvirkninger og politiske bevegelser som har lite eller intet å gjøre med Norge, ble på fastlandet. Det ser ut som om få andre mennesker ble værende der, kun noen få isolerte selvkritiske røster.

Når resten av nordmennene ankom øya lovet landets regjering å reagere på terrorisme, ekstremisme og vold med mer frihet og mer demokrati. Dette ble mottatt med høylytt ros fra hele den øvrige verden, bare med den effekt at det forsterket det plettfrie selvbildet til enhver naiv øyboer som ikke hadde gjort noe galt.   De av oss som ble værende på fastlandet, så på Utøya, og så med beundring på hvor raskt man der gjenopptok aktiviteter og gikk tilbake til den vanlige rutine. De var tilsynelatende forberedt på forbli uberørt, med uendrede idealer og intensjoner om å begynne gjenoppbyggingen av øya si. Dette slik at folk raskt skulle innse at det som hadde skjedd, bare var en ekstremists handlinger. Den Utøyiske øya Norge sa farvel til de vanskelige realitetene i terrorismen med en kjærlighetshandling, og satte umiddelbart i gang med sorgprosess-politikk.

Det er likevel veldig vanskelig å være en øy som er omgitt av en korrupt, ondsinnet verden full av ekstremistiske ideologier, politisk ukorrekte partier, fakta-fri journalistikk, mulige internasjonale konspirasjoner og utilfredse, men undertrykte dissiderende stemmer. Dersom dette hadde vært et hvilket som helst annet land, ville vi nok ha sagt at de nå går igjennom en smertefull periode der de ennå ikke er fullt klar over dimensjonene i det som skjedde. At de kanskje trenger litt tid og mye terapeutisk rådgivning for å begripe den aggressive virkeligheten rundt seg. Vi ønsker kanskje å bidra med å sende inn eksperter innen mental helse fra hele verden, folk med erfaring fra konfliktsoner, for å hjelpe dem med å lege sårene og sørge over sine døde. Men budskapet de formidler til oss fra øya tilsier at det går bare bra.

Vi prøver å sende dem signaler, men de er for opptatt i gjenoppbyggingen av øya. De døde – for det meste unge mennesker, uskyldige som de var – blir martyrer for en politisk sak. De ikke like siviliserte følelsene som uttrykkes av dem som ble værende på fastlandet – sinne, tårer, frustrasjon, angst for fremtiden, trakassering av minoriteter, og følelse av mangel på reell politisk deltakelse - er virkelig ikke hjelp  for dem i det Utøy’ske prosjekt for mer demokrati og mere frihet.

Det virker som om Norge har delt seg i to ulike leire med ulike oppfatninger av hva som skjedde. I den ene versjonen blir det sett på som en tragisk og unødvendig konsekvens av ikke å adressere mange menneskers skuffelse over systemet? – at denne har blitt omdannet til forakt.  I den andre versjonen ser man bare det som skjedde som et bevisst angrep på de høyeste og ukrenkelige verdier i regjeringens politiske prosjekt.

Jeg ønsker å sende en invitasjon til øyboerne om å gjennomføre et besøk på det norske fastlandet før de erklærer sin uavhengighet. Dette for en siste gang å forsikre seg om at spøkelsene fra fortiden vil ikke komme og hjemsøke dem i søvne, slik at de kan vedta lover som vil forhindre fastlandsfolk, agitatorer og ekstremistiske elementer fra å besudle deres utopi. Invitasjonen er ikke en oppfordring til en rettssak, slik den som foregår på fastlandet, der morderen møtes med bevisste fornærmelser og beskyldninger; det er snarere en formaning om å reflektere over hva som kan muligens ha gått galt. Ikke med politiske og administrative forordninger, men med våre holdninger, vår medfølelse. Om å tilby et lyttende øre til andre som ikke tenker som en selv. Til den menneskelige siden av demokratiet.

Kanskje vi da kan være i stand til å overbevise dem da, om at Utøya, det tapte paradis’ øy, tilhører hele Norge og ikke bare tilhører saker, grupper eller politiske ideer. At øya tilhører hele Norge, med sine bragder og sin stolthet, men også med sine fiaskoer, sine feil og sin til nå selvpålagte stillhet. Kanskje vi kan da i stand til å overbevise dem om å komme tilbake.

Is Norway an Island?

Is Norway an Island?

Last week we all learnt a lesson in political geography. This lesson will not be forgotten easily - unless we really want to forget. We learnt about the existence of the otherwise little known island of Utøya, that people outside Norway would have difficulties locating on a map.  Lessons of this kind have not been hard to come by in 2011, a year in which we have learnt a lot of painful geography – Misrata, Manama, Daraa, Tahrir.  On the other hand, these lessons have helped us, not only to identify new parts of the world, but we have also learned something about the nature of the countries containing these places. Bahrain turned out to be much bigger and important politically than its size reveals; Syria much deadlier; Egypt much less prepared for revolution; the United States less committed to change and the European Union much quicker to react, etc..

The lesson of Norway however, was very different. First of all because we were not expecting it. Secondly because it gave us surprising information about Norwegian society. We learned that Norway is not only a country located in the wealthiest northern corner of the world. We also learnt that Norwegian society may very well in itself be an island. Like Utøya, idyllic and beautiful, perfect and civilized, largely forested, owned by a political party and overcome with disaster.

The island character of Norway came as a surprise when in the aftermath of the tragic events in which dozens of people were massacred by one man, the government of the country and many of the people left the confines of continental Europe and moved to an island.  There, a smug sense of innocence is the absolute ruler. Criminals and radicals like Anders Behring Breivik stayed in the mainland, with an assortment of international connections, ideological influences and political movements that have little or nothing to do with Norway. It seems that few people, only a few isolated self-critical voices stayed in the country. As the rest of Norwegians arrived in the island, the government promised to respond to terrorism, extremism and violence with more freedom and more democracy, receiving loud praise from all over the world for this. 

Only to reinforce the immaculate self-portrayal of the naïve islander that has done nothing wrong.  Those of us who stayed in the mainland looked onto the shores of Utøya and marveled at how quickly they resumed activities and went back to the normal routine. They were seemingly prepared to go on unmolested with the same ideals as before and intent to begin the reconstruction of their island. This so that people would quickly admit that these were just the acts of an extremist. The Utøyan island of Norway said good-bye to the difficult realities of terrorism with an act of love and immediately set in motion the politics of mourning.

It is very hard nevertheless to be an island surrounded by a corrupt evil world of extremist ideologies, politically incorrect parties, fact-free journalism, possible international conspiracies and discontented but silenced voices of dissent. If it were any other country, we would say that they are going through a painful period in which they are still not fully aware of the dimensions of what happened and that they might need some time, and a lot of therapeutic counseling to come to grips with the aggressive reality around them. We might want to ship in mental health experts from all over the world, trained in conflict zones, in order to help them heal and mourn their dead. But the message they conveyed to us from the island tells us things are just fine.

We try to send them signals, but they’re too busy in the reconstruction of the island. The dead – mostly young people – innocent as they were, are being turned into martyrs of a political cause. The not so civilized feelings of those who stayed in the mainland - anger, tears, frustration, anxiety about the future, harassment of minorities, and lack of true political participation – are truly not helping them in the Utøyan project of more democracy and more freedom.

It seems as if in the understanding of what happened; Norway has split into two alternating versions. In the one version it is seen as a tragic and unnecessary consequence of failing to address the disappointment – turned into resentment – of many people. In the other, one only sees what happened as a deliberate attack on the supreme and sacrosanct values of the government's political project.

I want to extend an invitation to the islanders to pay a visit to the Norwegian mainland before they declare independence. This in order to make sure for a last time that the ghosts of the past will not come and haunt them in their sleep, so that they can enact laws that will prevent the mainlanders, agitators and extremist elements from tainting their utopia. The invitation is not a call for a trial like that taking place in the mainland against the murderer with deliberate insults and accusations; it is rather an exhortation to reflect on what might possibly have gone wrong. Not with policies and administrative decrees, but with our attitudes, with our compassion, with lending a listening ear to the other that doesn’t think like me – to the human side of democracy.

Perhaps we might be able to convince them then, that Utøya, their island of lost paradise, belongs to all of Norway and not only to causes or groups or political ideas; to all of Norway with its achievements and pride, but also with its failures, its mistakes and until now self-imposed silences. Perhaps we might be then able to convince them to return.

Welcome to the New Norway

Note: This article will likely appear published in Norwegian elsewhere, when it comes up, I will provide a link for the Norwegian, nonetheless this is the original version.

Welcome to the New Norway

“We have a good country to live in” is what a Norwegian interviewee told me exactly a week after the deadly attacks of which we all have heard, and I kept wondering to which extent normality had returned to Norway, how far had they embodied the words of Prime Minister Stoltenberg, delivering on themselves the promise of more freedom and more democracy.

My initial reaction was one of curiosity and then of surprise as I spoke to more and more Norwegians and found out that in fact nothing had changed and that life went on, business as usual. Regardless of their walk of life – a public servant, a film maker, a student of political science, a hotel chef and a party goer – there seemed to be a consensus among them that Norway was such a good country to live in and looking at the facts, there is no doubt that they’re correct.  

I kept wondering however, what could be so wrong with Norway that would bring up such headlines as last week’s – but then I found out that what happened in Norway was after all, the heinous act of one man – Anders Behring Breivik. With great dignity the Norwegians had managed to go on with daily life while newspapers and political commentators in Norway and elsewhere had a different take on this; we hear from them to no end the words “alarm”, “crisis” and “catastrophe”.

I decided to act with caution, kept myself from asking uncomfortable questions and began to dig elsewhere. Nothing of what I found was news to me and yet I remembered well the reactions of the street in France and the Netherlands when the multicultural order was challenged by violent events in the course of the 2000’s – The anxiety of the Dutch and the French was nowhere to be found among the Norwegians.

This is very admirable but I cannot help looking at it with some suspicion. Perhaps Norwegians are dismissing the issue too quickly and have focused on the acts of the perpetrator without some conscious self-examination about whether there might be more to it than just Breivik the man.  Behind this all there’s also a society where this has happened and speaking only against the incitement and hatred engendered by the people behind this all is righteous but not entirely a fair assessment.

The political parties and movements out of which extremist violence might have risen have not fallen from the moon, they have been in fact created by means of legitimate democratic processes and people have voted them in – not aliens or mass murderers but rather European citizens of flesh and bone, people beset by the anxiety caused by the dawn of the “new Europe” and who felt that they were not being represented by traditional parties, that they were not being heard and that someone had to do something about this.

There is a need now for an open confrontation with them about many key social and political issues, not only because the future of Europe depends on that but also because the consequences of believing that the social and political order is perfect and, thus must remain unchallenged are not only potentially dangerous but the writing on the wall in Oslo and Utøya as of last week. The confrontation with the uncomfortable is not just a matter of more or less political openness; it has become now a condition for the future.

The multicultural society that came under attack last week is a noble idea even in a country as small and historically homogeneous as Norway, but, the belief that multiculturalism is a policy that is to be dealt with by official channels and government bodies rather than peoples, is potentially dangerous.

Multiculturalism – in so far as it deals with something as unstable as culture and at the same time as concrete as peoples – is not a matter of policy but rather demands a change of heart, an attitude, acts of compassion or love, and ultimately an open negotiation about what is going to be acceptable or not, with both the host and the guest being upfront about their viewpoints, not being deluded by supposed friendships in between peoples that were never such – not even between Norway and its neighbors.

Multiculturalism demands a change of heart as much as policies and on the other hand, terrorism needs to be tackled with a little bit more than love – it also demands serious political decisions to be made. In both cases, policy without social change or the other way around achieves nothing but a temporary truce that can be breached anytime.

More freedom and more democracy cannot mean more of the same freedom and democracy. People must settle down in this new situation that has irreparably shifted things in the political and social landscape. Pretending that by keeping quiet because “we have a good country to live in” they will move on is nothing but an irresponsible delusion.

Going backwards to restore former glories of Europe as the conservatives want or prolonging the status quo of the present – that is, the present that was before last week – as the liberals want, are both dead options now. The new Norway has arrived without a working permit and is going to stay regardless of whether refugee status is granted or not.

What happened in Oslo and Utøya is not only an attack on multiculturalism or a political party – that would be the equivalent of assuming that 9/11 was an attack on the bank whose offices were in this or that floor of the towers – but rather an attack on the whole of Norway’s citizenry and must be understood as such without allowing for one moment on anyone to capitalize political gains on the basis of the crimes committed.

There’s no collective responsibility or collective guilt here, but the time has come for making ourselves responsible for the things that happen in our midst and this means nothing but the possibility to ask difficult questions not only to the perpetrators of this unprecedented act of evil, but also to ourselves, to the political system, to the structural conditions that gave to such ideas the power to act.

The new Norway is already the future of Norway and unless we let go of the moral comfort and speak out the truth about where our fears and hopes on ourselves and the others lie, we will not be able to stop the past from clashing against the future and becoming once again the writing on the wall of what we are avoiding to address.   

Norway – A Room of One’s Own (Uncertainty)

Norway – A Room of One’s Own (Uncertainty)

Until last Friday whoever would have asked “what might possibly be wrong in Norway?” would have been met with puzzling looks on the part of the experts, for what we are dealing with here is a senior member in the ivy-league of nations and not just one another infamous country in the ever so media-popular Middle East or elsewhere in war and famine savaged lands. Norway – idyllic northern playground of socialism, wealth and tranquility – what might possibly be wrong with Norway? Nothing really. However today after the Oslo blast and the deadly massacre in the island of Utøya both the question and the answer have changed and so far we do not know the answer but the question unmistakably is “what went wrong in Norway?” As it is often the case with a tragedy of this nature, our minds are still somewhat wandering in the dark and we have begun to look for an explanation.

Apparently there’s nothing wrong with Norway as far as we can see from the ever so dignified and human reaction on the part of the Norwegian government to the catastrophic events and the concomitant promise that terrorism will be met only with more freedom and more democracy. We all wanted to know how this tragedy fell upon the peaceful Norwegians and quickly enough, saving us time for popular wisdom and conjectures, the media of the world began doing the job for us. The obvious first plausible explanation was of course a terrorist attack against the West carried out by Islamic extremists and then the relationship of Norway to the Arab world was brought under fire by the critics. When we found out that the perpetrator was an ethnic Norwegian – Anders Behring Breivik – the situation changed dramatically and then – to the relief of many people – we were speaking of an attack by a right-wing extremist.

Even though so little information was available, the media of the world sat in front of their computers and began fishing out information about this man. First a file emerged from user comments of Mr. Breivik in the Norwegian web; file that without further ado, was Google-translated from Norwegian into English and posted online by a journalist who probably hadn’t had enough time to read the fifty pages of the manuscript and that he curiously labeled “The Political Writings of Anders Behring Breivik”, probably bringing political theory and writing to an all-times low level of discredit. The situation was further aggrandized when another manuscript emerged from the internet – a hefty book of over one thousand five hundred pages apparently written by Mr. Breivik in English and titled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence”. The content found in both manuscripts rang alarms all the world the world – except in Norway where the reception on both fronts remained more or less cool overall – and then journalists and experts all over the world took to the task of digging deeper into the meaning behind what we read.

In these writings Mr. Breivik quite speaks out his mind and goes to great pains to detail his views: He hates Islam and multiculturalism, condemns the entire political and educational system of Norway and Europe as a Marxist attempt to destroy European culture and lays out in different ways his project to restore Europe to former glory by a mixture of violent and less violent methods which include not only ideological indoctrination by means of youth movements and newspapers but also the extermination of Islamists and Marxists alike. The details are no doubt chilly but of no less concern is the ways in which mainstream media dealt with the subject: Journalists turned to experts in international affairs – a very misleading term as it explicitly makes out of the world a single continuum of facts that we receive from the news as “truth and world” – which they cited verbatim, commenting on the content on the manuscripts (one from a Google-translated version and the other from a copy just fresh out of the internet) as they read it for the first time and raised voices of outrage at this new situation in which the legitimate institutions of democracy and right are assaulted by extremist forces.

Given the nature of Mr. Breivik’s writings, it is surprising that none of the experts consulted were experts on Norwegian history or politics, European right-wing movements or neo-Fascism. At best the experts were able to establish the obvious – some connections to other right-wing movements (EDL in the UK, PVV in the Netherlands and the home-grown FrP in Norway) and then drifted onto even unlikelier connections that link Israel and also some scholars with dubious credentials directly with the attacks and then lastly the sources of Mr. Breivik’s ideology were highlighted and brought under fire to the avail of no one. Conclusions were gathered before they had even read the entire manuscript and whatever we had wanted to believe, we began to believe. It is not only that mass media fails to distinguish between fact and truth but that fact-free assumptions have taken the central stage of information.

There are two crucial aspects of the particular Norwegian case that have been completely overlooked and that I wish to address only in passing: Firstly, investigative analysis is of little use unless we address the fact that this kind of literature is not unique to Mr. Breivik and that in fact has been widespread in Europe at least, for a long time now; insofar as the act is inseparable from the book and that there are many of these books out there, we’re speaking only of one symptom and not of a unique or isolated phenomenon. It is also necessary to mention at this point that Mr. Breivik, just like the “liberal right-wing” movements in the past decade or Nazism, have not fallen from the moon into a peaceful conflict-free zone, but rather, they have emerged out of specific structural conditions already existent in our societies.

The ideological content portrayed in the book is not only restricted to a few dubious scholars but is deeply entrenched within the intellectual traditions of Europe – the apocalyptic mood, restorations of law and order, religious enmities, cultural superiority – and in the same books and schools of thought that we read in classes of philosophy and law. These cultural moods have prevailed in the European scene all the way back to Hegel’s pupils and were part and parcel of the struggle between German liberalism and conservatism in which conservatism was politically and intellectually suppressed, what ultimately led to imperial disintegration all over Europe and that ended in two world wars so that the older notions of left and right may be considered defunct already then in between Bismarck and Hitler. What we call today liberalism in Europe does not differentiate between right and left in practical matters (such as the economy) and does not come from continental Europe.

Already in the end of the 19^th century, though no one remembers them now, the Leipzig School of Sociology had adopted this worldview based on a particular reading of Hegel and then in opposition, the Marburg School of Philosophy developed the intellectual platform for the coming century based on the critical reason of Kant and it is through them that Hegel’s critics, Kierkegaard and Marx, entered the intellectual scene and were instrumental in shaping directly or indirectly the spiritual life of the Western world and the role models for politics and philosophy. However, these ideologies still survived, they can be thoroughly seen at work in Carl Schmitt and they never entirely disappeared officially until the 1960’s when the new European university rose out of a revolution with Marxist outlook. Suppression of the past – which is what took place all over Europe – is a helpless tactic and the forces at work do not disappear from the social and political scenario even if the references are deleted from the textbooks – Germany and Austria come to mind immediately.

Secondly, Norway is also a very idiosyncratic nation similar to no one. The independence of Norway came very late and the idea of the nation is rather belated by both European and American standards; the constitution of Norway drew heavily on elements from similar British, French and American experiments, a new monarchy was shipped in from elsewhere in the 20^th century after independence from Danish rule and the idea of national identity and the re-making of national history were quietly negotiated; leaving the country at the mercy of little autonomy in an international context. The passion for equality that apparently characterizes the Nordic countries – just like tolerance is admittedly a trait of the Dutch, arguable concept in both cases – played a role here because the Norwegian aristocracy disappeared in medieval times and the construction of the new modern state was for the most part the work of a small group of politicians, bureaucrats, artists and academics.

It was this tiny minority what formed the Norwegian elites and from then on began a series of tensions between the center elites based in Oslo and the periphery embodied in the peasants’ movement of the 1880’s. The official state in Oslo was met with a certain measure of resentment over dependence on the part of the periphery, conflict which was solved through politics rather than policies and negotiation over participative politics. What constitutes elites in Norway was constantly challenged and changed in the course of the 20^th century but what did not change was the certain measure of discomfort about this central state that though a minority; has always not only ruled but also been seen with suspicion and resentment by many people.

National unity has been important especially after the discovery of oil but nevertheless its terms have been as unstable as the terms of national identity and autonomy, being a small country in the periphery of the European Union and other major economic blocks; for this reason intervention of the official state in private affairs is unparalleled to most other nations so that during the late 1990’s it was said in international economic contexts that Norway was the last Soviet state: Freedom of speech is rather limited outside the scope of established political consensus and economic growth is defined by politics by a much larger extent than by entrepreneurs. 

The two points outlined above are essentially important to bear in mind when analyzing the Breivik case because we must place ourselves against the background of this tragedy, how they are interrelated, why and what we can conclude from them: The ideological premises behind Breivik’s heinous deeds have not been taken seriously by the Norwegian and the European populace because having achieved the status of being the most perfect, peaceful and egalitarian nation on earth, Norwegians are not open to self-criticism on their society or politics and it is usually the case that criticism of the country abroad is ignored at home or quickly dismissed – something that fluctuates between smug and pride; attitude that is replicated by the minority political system itself so that dissenting political opinions are not socially acceptable, what becomes a grave accusation in such a small and socially homogeneous land. It is not only Breivik and its possible accomplices, intellectual friendships and supporters but Norway as a whole and Europe that need to scrutinize themselves and ask how it is possible that structural conditions were ripe for these movements, ideologies, suppressions of opinion and acts of horror, ultimately.

The history of Norway is by no means free of blame. There has been widespread Anti-Semitism and occasional outbursts of xenophobia, the participation of Norwegians in Nazi totalitarianism, the Norwegianization of the Sami peoples of northern Norway and the official state policy of demonizing dissenting opinions. As we know from this horrible life-example, the problems of the past are not going away when we build a wall around them and perhaps it is the time to deal with the past and the present without euphemisms and without mythical figures of demonization and ostracism. The government has earned much praise in saying that they will respond to terrorism with more democracy and more freedom, however nobody knows specifically what it means other than maintaining the status quo of pre-22/7 politics at the benefit of the minority political system.

Some have said not without sound arguments that this is the end of the extreme right wing parties as we know them and that Geert Wilders and company have been ultimately defeated because it is their spread of hate ideology what has somewhat made this possible. Without addressing the nature of the demands made by Mr. Breivik and his kind of people in manuscripts, protests and ultimately acts of violence, nothing could be further from the truth. Even at the risk of not liking or being comfortable with what some segments of society want to say, they must be heard instead of silenced and their questions must be addressed with more than ideology: An open confrontation with the past and the present has become a condition for the future.

Multiculturalism is a noble idea but the cracks are now evident, more so in Norway than for example in the Netherlands and Britain that truly have a history of multiculturalism. It is not because there is anything wrong with it but because multiculturalism has been understood in Europe as policy-making and never as a change of heart, as an act of love, and ultimately as a personal negotiation between the members of different fragile communities to agree on what is acceptable or not – in this point both the host authorities and the guests are to stand on trial for their misgivings. On the other hand Norway responds to terrorism apparently with nothing but love and this is just so wrong because both multiculturalism and terrorism must be addressed with a change of personal attitudes as much as with sound policies. More democracy and more freedom it seems to appeal only to the continuation of the same, that great as it might have been, Norway has to realize, it is already a long by-gone past. Yes. Everything that Norway was before last week, it is already in the past. What Norway is going to become, we don’t know but it is clear that it cannot stay the same. Policies are not enough to protect people from being discriminated or isolated behind thick invisible walls.

We are living in times of great uncertainty and anxiety, product of the breakdown of the traditional sense of community and many people attempt in vain to seek an already lost security under the wings of a culture understood as identity – in this sense the Muslim communities and disenfranchised Europeans are looking for the same things – and this loss doesn’t have to do with being losers or winners in globalization or local societies than it has to do with a nostalgia over having lost a sense of belonging and membership that provides identity and values. Identity in the modern world is not something stable or fixed and furthermore, both the cultural conservative project of restoring the past and the left or socialist or cultural Marxist project of maintaining untouched the fragile structure of the present, these projects are doomed to fail and this is why I asserted the paradigm is dead; in reality, beyond the realm of ideology, both are subject to the same anxieties and unsettling feelings of insecurity.  The true potential of Europe is its vision for the future and the ability to re-make political history for every generation and not a fixed potential for either conservatism or liberalism – that’s dead letter. Resorting to pessimism is also to no avail, for both the modern world and Western civilization cannot survive without Europe, unless we understand our civilization and the modern world as economic and social structures free of values.

The countless losses of lives in Oslo and Utøya are not an attack on specific political ideas or platforms and understanding them as such is allowing for parties and ideologies to capitalize gains on the horrible deaths of young people – these deaths were heinous acts committed against humanity and as such we must responded to it on the basis of our humanity, not as an abstract institution but as a community of people different as much as diverse. When it is said that “We’re all Norway” not so much as much it achieved as it could be by saying “I am a Jew and I stand behind Norway”, “I am a Muslim and I stand behind Norway”, “I am a Christian and I stand behind Norway”, “I am a liberal and I stand behind Norway”, “I am a conservative and I stand behind Norway”. There is no such a thing as collective responsibility here and each man must be held accountable for his own deeds to the same way that only he, beset by inner turmoil over his own identity can stand up against terror by demanding not only accountability of the criminal(s) but also the political openness that could prevent this from happening.

Yes, it is very difficult to live with so much uncertainty, but nobody said that freedom is an easy thing – Western philosophy and theology know this very well – and it comes with a price. There’s always the easy solution to keep silent, to capitalize on tragedies for ideological and political gain, to act as if nothing happened in order to move on. I can only conclude by telling the people of Norway that a little more than freedom and democracy is needed in order to move on. The future of Norway will not begin until we all accept that it is not only Breivik but our whole political institutions that need to be asked difficult questions; the future of Norway will not begin until the moment when we realize that the past as we know it – political institutions, ideological enfranchisements and social structures – is no more.

Either/Or – The Business of Academic Thinking

Note: This article was originally written for another website where I hope it will still appear in a shortened and substantially different form.

Either/Or – The Business of Academic Thinking

“A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity” –Søren Kierkegaard

‘Humanity’ – that endless rant we hear time and again through the loud speakers of radio, TV, social media and casual conversations. There is no single day that goes without someone advocating a bit of humanity; it doesn’t matter which country you choose, which armed conflict, which sectarian division, we hear it over and over, no less in the felicitous notion of ‘crimes against humanity’  whose definition is limited by strict practical-legal boundaries. According to the dictionary definition, ‘humanity’ (hyoo-man-i-tee) has been defined as 1) all human beings collectively; the human race; mankind 2) the quality or condition of being human; human nature 3) the quality of being humane; kindness; benevolence. Throughout history, nevertheless, humanity has been understood in manifold ways and the concept itself, on which we rely today, abstract as it is, arose sometime between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; it constitutes by no means a given fact, part and parcel of the history of mankind. Truth being said, ‘values’ such as goodness, kindness, good judgment and ‘humanity’ itself are not inborn qualities in any human being or group, unless we are understanding humanity as the uninterrupted continuum of Western education – the kind of education whose aim is not to teach, but to develop such values in people.

This is how humanity has been long associated with the ‘study’ of what academics have termed and perhaps not without irony, ‘the humanities’: a household name for the otherwise ‘useless’ and rather loose assemblage of various disciplines and fields of knowledge that are thought of as ‘unscientific’ and lacking the precision of ‘exact’ and ever more reputable sciences such mathematics and physics, as if, the study of mathematics and physics wouldn’t constitute in itself a human or humanistic enterprise to be more precise, but a wholly practical endeavor pursued in order to dominate the natural world – not without the inherent melancholy in that this has been so far, the greatest broken promise of the modern world. If we put asides the currents of historical definitions ‘humanities’ as the study of ‘humanity’ and ‘human values’ can be tracked back to the classics of Greece and Rome – not only the Platonic academy and its sacred grove of olive trees dedicated to Athena, but also the Sophists schools, the Orphic cults, the Homeric bards that preceded and also everything that followed uninterrupted until the late Middle Ages. At least in from the Platonic academy onwards, the study of humanity, it figures, also included the study of science.

This ‘classical’ education, considered a means of intellectual training in the broadest possible terms, covered at once the study of philosophy, history, material culture, logic and foreign languages – what they called in the Roman Empire ‘liberalia studia’ available to both boys and girls offspring of free men and extensively discussed by Seneca The Younger. The subjects included in this study would become the standard liberal arts of Roman and medieval times and comprised the basic curriculum of ‘education for the sake of education’ in late Classical and Hellenistic Greece. Pagan writer Martianus Minneus Felix Capella defined the liberal arts in the 5^th century AD as: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy; they were then split in the medieval University into the Trivium – grammar, logic, rhetoric – and the Quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, music, astrology and astronomy – establishing the importance of the full spectrum of the liberal arts as the foundation of civilized and educated citizenry, all of the above rooted from times immemorial down to our own times in the teachings of Plato and his master Socrates.

It wouldn’t be compelling to reconsider lengthily the nature of this education if it weren’t for a telling passage in Plato’s Republic that discusses the nature of this education that stands for the very foundation of what we consider civilized and educated and indirectly, liberal, inquisitive and open. In the Republic (379a) Plato speaks for the first time of ‘the speech of the Gods’ or better said ‘theology’, that for being the earliest historical use of that notion known to date, comes not entirely devoid of surprises: ‘but this very thing – the patterns or norms of theology, what would they be?’ Then this is followed by an all-encompassing discussion about the role and nature of education, pointing out that for the sake of the youth, poets should adhere to strict norms and that heresies of the likes of Hesiod, Homer, Heraclitus and the Sophists will not be tolerated – ‘The true quality of God we must always surely attribute to him whether we compose in epic, melic or tragic verse’ – because they are a threat to the founders of the state, who must know and enforce the patterns on which the poets must compose their fables, for it has become clear that the rulers of the city are graceful In the eyes of the deity and therefore, the true quality of God being only that which coincides exactly with the interests of the city.

In another earlier passage (377b-c) the political impact of this ‘theology’ is more evidently manifest: ‘Shall we, then, thus lightly suffer our children to listen to any chance stories fashioned by any chance teachers and so to take into their minds opinions for the most part contrary to those that we shall think it desirable for them to hold when they grow up?’ The answer to this question is univocal and by no means supported in the classical virtues of argumentation, persuasion and discussion – ‘By no manner of means will we allow it. We must begin, then, it seems, by a censorship over our story makers, and what they do well we must pass and what not, reject. And the stories on the accepted list we will induce nurses and mothers to tell to the children and so shape their souls by these stories rather than their bodies by their hands. But most of the stories they now well we must reject.’ In what follows, they go on to discuss what kind of stories might be deemed acceptable or not.

Hannah Arendt is truly illuminating on the import of Plato’s ‘theology’ (‘What is authority?’ in ‘The Portable Hannah Arendt’, Penguin 2000 pp. 494) when she argues that Plato was the first to become aware of the enormous and strictly political potential in stories, tales and alas mythologies. The fact that it was him who coined the term ‘theology’ in this educational-political context referred to the founding of cities in the Republic is very suggestive because this new theological god is neither a living god nor the god of the philosophers or a pagan deity; it is a political devise according to which cities may be founded and the rules of behavior for the majority laid down. Moreover this ‘theology’ teaches how to enforce these standards absolutely even at the risk of committing injustice – for example the death penalty – with the argument (615a) that ‘for all the wrongs that they had ever done to anyone and all whom they had severally wronged they had paid the penalty in turn tenfold for each’ – meaning ultimately that even those who caused injustice either because of law or war would receive their punishment during their lifetime (615b-c) and that this was beyond the scope and consequence of the law – the state comes first. Socrates, who was ultimately wronged under the same policy tried to reverse this awful state of affairs by claiming that ‘It is better to suffer wrong than do to wrong’ (Gorgias, 469b-c) and then he went to prove it rationally but he failed and thus dealt a deadly blow on moral philosophy from the moment of its very birth.

This is the background against which the liberal arts and the different versions of Western education were engendered – as means for the free or educated classes to enforce their interests on the great majority. The definition and scope of what later became theology as the discipline of reasoned discourse about God and not merely mythologies was not rooted in these passages but in another set of passages in the Republic (506d-511e) that deal with the proper method to distinguish between false mysteries and divine truth – of course falling under the rubric of false mysteries anything that could contradict in anyway the founding principles of the city. The great political import of Plato’s ‘theology’ was nonetheless never forgotten and accordingly, Christian theology did not for one moment forget its Platonic background as it is evident in St. Augustine’s versions of hell and purgatory and the speculations of both Origen and Clement of Alexandria after suffering. These political principles in the education of the ruling elites remained more or less unchallenged through history and are still prevalent today. Its tools however, the so-called ‘humanities’ have come under fire for a long time now since the Age of Reason and the rise of ‘scientific history’ in the 19^th century, time from which they have fallen prey to disrepute and harsh criticism because of their unscientific claims that they themselves have tried to revert by adopting ‘scientific methodologies’ – this applies for each and every field of knowledge, theology included.

In this spirit of reason and truth, the social sciences rose to life in the course of the 19^th century with a therapeutic task in mind – to cure the unscientific nature of the humanities applying to them the same rigorous treatment until them only afforded to the always so respectable exact sciences; this process gave birth to an unexpected flow of new disciplines that wouldn’t have been successful in finding a hall of fame in the grandeur of academic discourse, hadn’t they appealed to the scientific flair demanded by the reasonable men of their times – sociology, linguistics, anthropology, ethnology, etc.  This felicitous momentum coincided with the last grandiose vernissage of European culture: An assortment of civil and international wars and Imperialism and Colonialism in their climax, planted the seeds of the bloodiest totalitarian movements that grew happily into mythical trees in the nicest palatial gardens as the European greedy attempts to monopolize the natural resources of the entire earth went on unmolested.  The spectacular demise of the humanities for the sake of ‘true knowledge’ sheltered upon the wings of Plato’s selfsame theology paved a self-defeating way to pursue progress in lieu of ‘mere knowledge’. In this age of progress – that among other achievements burnt dozens of libraries in the course of imperial and civil wars – nothing more disgraceful than having the epitaph of philosopher over one’s grave, that, in case he was lucky enough to have one.

One must be always a scientist, because science does something after all, no? It serves as means to an end, it has a purpose. The ‘humanities’ that deal with ‘humanity’ are totally unnecessary since what we need is people who can do things, who can build things and above all – who can add a peg or two more to the endless chain of accumulation of capital. Humanity, that humanity embodied by the liberal arts has become nowadays nothing but a form of education available only to the few privileged who need not worry about pursuing ‘careers’ that will bring bread home. I should correct myself – this has been the situation always ever since the days of the Platonic Academy, however this has significantly deteriorated overtime on the basis of the transformation of man ‘homo sapiens’ into the ‘animal laborans’ – heritage of the Industrial Revolution – who is entirely dependent on the produce of his labor; people who are not engaged in labor are no longer considered a functional part of society and consequently, such as pre-historical man, must survive on labor alone. There’s no space for work (e.g. works of art of literature) or action (of the political and social kind); one is ultimately condemned to labor so that even a college professor and an artist or a politician must see their activity not in the light of a vocation but only as a job, raw labor that cashes a pay check and then home.  ‘Creative minds’ cannot flee this structure, that is why there are (in the spirit of the functional division of labor) chairs in universities, artists-in-residence, fellowships, stipends, state galleries, art communities and studios. Everything wants to make sure than there is no distinction whatsoever between works and jobs. Nothing can be left at the fringes of society – indeed a Platonic dream.

What kind of individuals are those riddled with questions and doubts? What happens with their ill spirits that leads them to seek no (functionally tiered) glory, pleasure and gratification other than knowledge? How can one dare pursue anything for its own sake? Everything must have a reason, a wherefore, a destination, an aim and most ultimately, a compensation – even truth. Popular wisdom can put it best in ‘everything happens in the world because of a reason’. Nothing is haphazard. The human condition of the animal laborans has been severed from the humanities and not without a reason – the animal laborans is by no means homo sapiens. Since it is clear that being human is not a profession then there’s clearly no argument in favor of the humanities unless they constitute the political education of the wealthy; however since it is not possible to be a professional human, it is possible to be a humanities professional – a liberal arts professor in one of our prestigious universities. The great majority of this academic job holders wind up as members of an ‘intelligentsia’ and erect themselves into cults from within academic halls packed with initiates and converts. 

We learnt much about the modern university – e.g. the modern Platonic academy, from Icelandic philosopher Páll Skúlason (‘The Nature and Purpose of Academic Thought’, 2006 http://vefir.hi.is/pall/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=34&Itemid=8) who claims that because the university is a place of academic or theoretical thinking, it is not political, religious or commercial. It seems that according to him the only interest of the university is to understand and explain; even further, he makes an ‘useful’ distinction between problems of reflection and problems of life – there is no place in the university for problems of life.  He is not saying anything outrageous but merely stating out the obvious. According to Skúlason (former rector of the University of Iceland) scholarly detachment is a moral virtue that it can turn to the vice of indifference once the scholar ceases to think of himself as part of society and of his scholarship possessing social context. Northrop Frye in his essay ‘The Knowledge of Good and Evil’ (in ‘The Morality of Scholarship’, ed. Max Black, Cornell University Press, 1967 pp. 9-10) points critically to one particularly important case: ‘Psychology is a science, and must be studied with detachment, but it is not a matter of indifference whether it is used for a healing art, or for motivational research designed to force people to buy what they neither want nor need, or for propaganda in a police state’. The limits of this detachment have never been less clear because it is a seriously complicated matter to define such limits when firstly, scholarship derives its method from scientific formal logic and not from human pursuits, and secondly, when there exists such overriding contradiction between training for the job market and educating for understanding in the total absence of ‘problems of life’. I am highly skeptical over the meaning of humanity found in this kind of academic study and the obvious relatedness of the humanities to educate civilized citizenry.

Scandalous as it is, this has not been always the case – for Lessing, a German dramatist of the Enlightenment, humanity meant experiencing the world in anger and laughter, experiencing the artifacts and works that complement our life on earth only in regard to their effect in the world – relating study and the activity of either reading or producing art and works of literature to the most obvious problems of life. The new trend has little to do with the death of God, for it was not the old crowd of unbelievers and heretics who declared him dead but rather the professors of theology in the academic chairs, and their disappointment is more a disappointment with the broken promises of the modern world than it is a disappointment with religion per se – still a dominating force in public discourse everywhere. This disappointment however is neither novel nor solvable – already in an Assyrian tablet from 2800 BC unearthed in Iraq, we read the following inscription: ‘The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a tablet, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching’. This pessimism translated into apathy and powerlessness is rooted not only in man’s inability to make himself at home in the world but also in the technological possibilities afforded by the previous century that dealt a deadly blow on the human imagination because we have become unable to imagine or describe all what we are now able to do. Instead of relating to the actual life problems of the day, fleeing into the comfortable zone of academic detachment seems the most feasible option for these young men and women that enter the world educated for everything but citizenship.

During her last public appearance before her death (Bicentennial Address, 1975) Hannah Arendt ran ahead of the times and left us with a cunning warning for our current situation: ‘We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut off the past. At such moments of history when the writing on the wall becomes too frightening, most people flee to the reassurance of day-to-day life with its unchanging pressing demands”. People are no longer able to move in the world of thinking and therefore are also impaired in the world of the real – social and political, and feel the pressing need to flee the world of human affairs because they have been indoctrinated in two suspect versions of truth – 1) That truth is correctness of fact in the style of ‘if this is correct or accurate, then it must be true’ 2) That truth is the result found at the end of a thought process; both of them promoted by reckless elitist Platonism in politics, by the life cycle of the animal laborans and by infinite economic disparity.

Education no matter what its content is should not be the measures of measures to learn how to act in the world but rather the provider of critical tools for people to decide what these measures are. Necessary measures in any case if we look at 2011 with paucity of mind and assess the recent political and historical developments that might radically transform the social texture of our world: The Arab uprisings spreading to every corner of the Middle East, the scandalous corruption of the media and the world superpowers exposed to the public, the communication possibilities enabled by the internet and the powerlessness of traditional armies to combat in the highly decentralized warfare of our times. Regardless of what young men and women want to do with their lives – either academic or not, education must be entirely independent of preparation for the job market, worthwhile mentioning at this point that a great percentage of the people enrolled today in graduate schools in business programs will probably never find a job after graduation. To achieve this, it is to no avail to keep building new universities or providing endless funding for scholarships; it is those institutions that have perpetuated for centuries the model that must be combatted. The model of the Western university must be challenged from bottom to top.

Greek and Western philosophy in the traditional sense and theological politics is of no help here, for like Eric Voegelin pointed out (in ‘The New Science of Politics’, c. II, ‘Representation & Truth’ in ‘Modernity without Restraint’, University of Missouri Press 1999, pp. 139) in relation to Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, ‘Aristotle had no illusions on this point. To be sure, like Plato, he attempted a paradigmatic construction of a social order that would express the truth of the σπουδαιος (the morally perfect man) in Politics VII-VIII; but he also asserted with firm regret that in none of the Hellenic poleis of his time could there be found a hundred men who were able to form the ruling nucleus of such a society: any attempt at realizing it would be utterly futile’. The self-defeating project of classical philosophy as a foundation for politics, education and morality has found a home in the modern political arena where political officers of the Western countries say for example that the Middle East cannot be changed, without adding of course that this has to do with the fact that such political education as that demanded by Plato and Aristotle on the free men of the cities is the exact equivalent of today’s ivy league – an ivory tower where only the elites are educated to dominate the majority through despotism of power, capital and information; in this spirit there is too little these philosophers can help us with, as we are facing almost entire generations of disenfranchised youth willing to subvert the order of truth and politics raging over the entire earth.

The possibility of leaving the realm of academic and scientific thinking – barely qualified as thought – is not only instrumental but elementary in halting the oceans of frustration that have fueled terrorism and channel them through truly legitimate and transparent political processes – hardly the case in the Middle East today for example – that the people themselves have been unable to realize because of the clearly apolitical and narrowly defined scope of the education they have received if at all, to what the Platonists of our times – international think tanks, NGO’s and political officers – reply condescendingly arguing that they’re not ready for change, that we have to wait, that it’s not time yet, while they continue unmolested abusing us and them by depriving us not only from education but from the whole specter of rights.  Many of these disenfranchised youths are led by another true successful multinational – global terror – to express their frustration appealing to supposed ancient traditions and ‘classical’ interpretations of religion that are nothing but the other side of the strictly modern opposition between radical universals. This global terror is no less part of the despotism of capital, power and terror that the respectable leadership promote and no one better than philosopher Agnes Heller to have put this in words in an interview with Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita (09.07.05): ‘The people behind global terror are themselves global capitalists, just like Hitler was supported by German industrialists and financiers. Anti-capitalism merely serves as a slogan to direct massive resentment against the rich and to wage a racist or religious war. Many of them are frustrated intellectuals – young people who want to be remarkable in a very unremarkable world, with big ambitions but little talent, or whose careers were hindered for other reasons’. Whoever thinks that this should not be addressed, must be too deluded to understand the gravity of the rupture in the social texture of the world today cause by the political nature of education.

I propose to begin with adopting a yet fresher definition of truth that I have drawn from British philosopher and theologian Philip Goodchild: Let us make a proposal for truth as a power and as its own power instead of correctness or fact or the result of investigation – truth as an attitude and a principle. This truth does not engage in particular projects or agendas; it defies no opponents and never exercises violence. Unlike the critical reason of philosophy (indifferent to problems of life obviously) it does not aim to undermine other truths or to master the future or representations. It is the force of itself because its orientation is precisely a mode of orientation. It is a knowledge before knowledge (and not thereafter); it expresses actual problems so that one might begin to think, it demands investment in experience and adapts imagination to experience rather than to concept. Its true power is nothing but awareness. In the old sense, authority had been since times immemorial (by both Plato and the Biblical prophets) the guarantor of truth, today however, we do not have to ask the question of what authority is but rather like Arendt did, of what authority was! We can no longer fall upon old experiences common to all and the gravity of the demands of peoples all over the world express this faithfully. The old canons of state, capital, media and government must be replaced by new ones and this is nothing but a very slow process, however it must begin at the beginning – not with yet another re-enacting of perfunctorily established institutions such as the university and the government. Truth is a public power, and that is what we the people, must rely on, for anybody who comes today from the position of defunct authority to offer us a truth he has, kind as he might be, he’s no less deceived than we might have been once.