miércoles, 27 de noviembre de 2019

1989: The regime of the Stasi was paralyzed when confronted by a civil society demanding liberation from enforced lies.

Beyond the Ideological Lie: 

The Revolution of 1989 Thirty Years Later

It is difficult for those of us who lived through a good part of the Cold War, where Communist hegemony over half of Europe (and many other places in the world) seemed more or less permanent, to fully appreciate that thirty years have passed since the annus mirabilis that was 1989. It was in that golden year that the peoples of East-Central Europe freed themselves from Communist bondage and began to reassert themselves as proud and independent nations. Communism was teetering in the Soviet Union, too, with Russians discovering that they were ill-served by an ideological regime that put foreign adventures—and utopian abstractions—above the well-being of the nation. That was the message that Solzhenitsyn had boldly articulated in his Letter to the Soviet Leaders as far back as 1974, a message that is crucial to understanding the fall of Communism.
Poland was the first to go, with the “round-table” agreements that peacefully turned over the governance of the country to a political opposition inspired by the Polish pope and the struggles of the underground Solidarnosc movement. Next, the Hungarians reburied Premier Imre Nagy in June of 1989, one of the heroes of the great anti-totalitarian revolution of 1956, with hundreds of thousands of people demanding political freedom and authentic nationhood. Even the relatively soft goulash Communism of Jânos Kádár was finished. East Germans began fleeing their prison-state in the summer and fall of 1989, making their way to Hungary and then Austria and West Germany. Massive demonstrations followed in Leipzig and other major cities. Soon the repulsive Honecker, the last of the East German hardliners, was summarily dismissed by the East German Politburo.
The regime of the Stasi was paralyzed when confronted by a civil society demanding liberation from enforced lies. The Berlin Wall was breached on November 9, 1989 after a mid-level East German official inadvertently declared it open. By June of 1990, Germany was whole and free. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev may have had false hopes in a “Leninism with a human face” but his refusal to use force to crush the revolutions of 1989 was surely a force for the good, and a precondition for everything that followed. And “perestroika” unintentionally took aim at the ideological lie: in 1987 Orwell was published in the Soviet Union, followed by Koestler in 1988, and then the unthinkable, excerpts from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in the fall of 1989. The end was surely near.
A passive and demoralized Czech people found their civic spirit and appeared en masse in the streets of Prague in 1988 and particularly in the fall of 1989. The dramatist, dissident, and repeated prisoner of the Communist regime Václáv Havel orchestrated a peaceful revolution from his ‘base’ in the Magic Lantern theatre in Prague. And the impossible happened on January 1, 1990 when Havel was sworn in as the president of a free Czechoslovakian state, promising not to lie, as previous governments had lied, to the Czech and Slovak peoples. In Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania, the old guard remained in power while declaring themselves anti-Communists and patriots, declarations that were difficult to take at face value.
Still, by the beginning of 1990, Communism had clearly lost its legitimacy and could no longer serve as a plausible basis of political or national life anywhere in the east of Europe. It unequivocally stood for violence, mendacity, shortages, corruption, and national humiliation. I would go further: the events of 1989 were the end of a two hundred year cycle of “total revolution” inaugurated by the French Revolution and ‘perfected’ by Bolshevism and its offspring (Maoism, Castroism, Pol Potism) in the twentieth century. The revolution of 1989 was a decisive repudiation of the ideological poisons that had deformed modernity. It is a decisive repudiation that many on the militant Left would like to erase today. There is no reason today for “socialism,” and even Communism, to have the prestige it has with many young Americans. Crucial lessons about the twentieth century have sadly not been passed on to young people in any serious or significant way.
The ‘ideological lie’ had been exposed as the chimera it had always been, and the peoples behind the Iron Curtain cried out for a ‘normal’ existence, freed from violence, lawlessness, and systematic mendacity. The economic motives and concerns were real but secondary. People can tolerate poverty, at least to some extent, but not the spiritual poverty of a regime built on force and deception. The soul revolts against efforts to suffocate it. The world was witnessing a new kind of revolution, one that vindicated human nature and the traditional moral contents of life, one that freely and proudly spoke the language of good and evil and truth and falsehood. The spirit of 1989 was far from the soft nihilism of fashionable and always ‘ironic’ postmodernism, which “deconstructed” all the old verities that resurfaced during the revolution of 1989. When Havel, Lech Walesa, John Paul II, and Solzhenitsyn evoked the imperative of truth against the ideological lie, they were by no means being ‘ironic’ or even ‘mystical’ or ‘poetic.’ They evoked the soul as an empiricalreality of the first order and saw their own struggles as a victory of reality over the deadly fictions that had been so tyrannically imposed on the Soviet peoples since 1917 and the people of East-Central Europe since 1945.
Impoverished Responses
When Richard Rorty reviewed two volumes of the writings of the great Czech phenomenologist and philosopher Jan Patočka in the New Republic in 1991, he expressed some embarrassment (Patočka, a founding spokesman for Charter 77, had died under Security Service interrogation in 1977) that Patočka and Havel seemed to really mean it when they appealed to the permanent imperative of “living in truth.” Rorty clearly admired the two men but regretted that they were so naïve to believe that good and evil, truth and falsehood, had roots in the very structure of reality and the permanent nature and needs of the human soul. Two incommensurable worlds met, and Rorty revealed, once more, the shallowness of his mind and soul. For him—everything, life, death, language, love, truth and falsehood—were “contingent all the way down.” He inhabited a world of linguistic constructions and “deconstructions”—and hence of a potential linguistic tyranny.
Rorty, a humane man in many ways, was not alone. In his famous essay “The End of History?,” published in The National Interest in 1989, Francis Fukuyama, then an obscure analyst for the Rand Corporation, interpreted 1989 in a dramatically Hegelio-Marxist, and thus reductive, way. 1989 was not a salutary and liberating return of the “Real,” of human nature in all its grandeur and misery, but the final moment in the ideological human drama. ‘History’ itself was over, and with the defeat of European Communism, humans had arrived, at least in principle, at “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government.” There was, of course, some cleaning up that needed to be done. Pockets of nationalist passion and religious belief would persist, at least for a while until the time they were domesticated by private life and shorn of all real genuine seriousness. But the “universal homogenous state” announced by Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-born Hegelio-Marxist philosopher and EU bureaucrat (and some-time Soviet spy), had indeed arrived in principle. It had “found real-life embodiment” in the countries of postwar Western Europe which Fukuyama freely admitted were “flabby, prosperous, self-satisfied, inward looking” and “weak-willed states,” to boot.
A few years before, the French political thinker Raymond Aron had called the rump of free Europe “decadent” and wondered if it had the civic and martial virtues to weather the challenges of the future. Aron had concluded that West Europeans saw themselves as the avant-garde of humanity, decisively leaving behind History “whose letters are written in blood.” But Aron was quite sure that there was no “end of History” and that the depoliticization of Western Europe was more of a pathology than a virtue. Aron died in November of 1983 but surely he would have seen in the revolution of 1989 a liberating moment that appealed to love of liberty and truth in their deepest manifestations.
In that sense, the men of 1989 were a challenge to a West that mistakenly thought history had come to an end. One mark of the intellectual poverty of Kojeve’s and Fukuyama’s approach is that the denizens of the ‘end of History’ could see the “universal homogenous state” embodied at various times in Bonapartist despotism (the World-Spirit on a horse, as Hegel described him at the Battle of Jena in 1806), in the full-scale murderous totalitarianism of Stalin’s quasi-personalized Bolshevism, and in the flabby, economistic, post-political European Community of the 1950s and 1960s. There is simply too much flexibility here, since the “end of History” can accommodate both the victory of liberal democracy and the murderous ravages of Communist totalitarianism.
Why this contempt for the human spirit, for the view that the cardinal virtues—courage, justice, prudence, and temperance—will always speak to the human soul and be a permanent requirement of individual and collective life? Why this seeming complacency about the human spirit—and all the virtues—literally becoming obsolete? Of course, Fukuyama conceded that the end of history would make some, such as himself, sad. And in the book version of his article, The End of History and the Last Man (published in 1992), he went further in suggesting that “boredom,” and the absence of a viable field for spiritedness and high human endeavor, might reignite History after all. But it is fair to say that Fukuyama got the revolution of 1989 wrong, woefully wrong, by interpreting it in light of an inhuman and undesirable “universal homogenous state.” Such an inverted perspective—judging the high from the perspective of the low—is a crucial barrier to moral and political understanding, as Leo Strauss once suggested.
The Resurgence of the Real
Let us return to the notion of an anti-totalitarian or anti-ideological revolution. We have two great examples, Hungary in 1956, and the whole of East-Central Europe in 1989. Even before Havel, Solzhenitsyn had seen that Communism ideology was decayed and antiquated, and yet, paradoxically, the key to the entire “Soviet tragedy” as Martin Malia so suggestively called it. Marxism was wrong in all decisive respects, the Russian Nobel Laureate noted in his 1974 letter. It was, at best, “a primitive economic theory,” it ignored and dismissed the power of national feeling and loyalty, its nationalizations of property and industry, and the accompanying cruel and murderous collectivization of agriculture, had ground down its people and led to woefully distorted economic development (with mendacious economic statistics and growth rates) to accompany this pseudo-economy. Western academics, social scientists and economists, understood little of this fictive world, and believed entirely too many of its fantasies.
Solzhenitsyn told the cynical Soviet leaders—who were themselves prisoners of ideological categories and clichés, revealed in their using the wooden language of ideologyin private—that the persecution of religious believers was beyond irrational. No self-respecting state or pragmatic political class sets “useless good-for nothings” to harass and persecute its best citizens—those who work hard, don’t cheat, and live decently and honestly in their relations with others. Ideology had given rise to lies, great and small, that had suffocated ordinary people, and the most talented, energetic, and morally serious thinkers, artists, and workers, even as it sowed distrust and cynicism in society at large. “Nothing constructive rests upon it” and “everybody knows it,” Solzhenitsyn wrote.
This ideology was soaked with the blood of millions (in the Soviet case) and made tens of millions of ordinary people complicit in its lies, distortions, and phantasmagorical deceits. Ideological mendacity was even worse than state-imposed violence because it asked human beings to sacrifice their self-respect, and their innate appreciation of the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood. It asked them to sacrifice their consciences, their very souls. Solzhenitsyn appealed to the Soviet leaders to deprive this antiquated ideology of state support (he knew they would not give up power, at least not when he wrote his unwelcome letter to them in the fall of 1973). In and of itself, such a repudiation would lead to a recovery of a more normal life where “breathing and consciousness would return,” as Solzhenitsyn put it in an essay written at roughly the same time. Leaving totalitarianism behind would permit the gradual introduction of a lawful, democratic state. Authoritarianism as such was not the worst evil, especially as a transition point towards a truly lawful society. The crucial distinction between ideological totalitarianism and run-of-the mill authoritarianism should not be forgotten. Totalitarianism, not “dictatorship” per se, was the great evil of the twentieth century.
Writing in a less literary way, and without Solzhenityn’s prophetic insight, the British journalist Timothy Garton Ash noted in The Magic Lantern, a gripping account of the revolution of 1989 by an outside observer who seemed to be in the right place at the right time during those dramatic events of 1989, that “the residual veil of ideology” was still very important, far more important than scholars and politicians in the West recognized. Few rulers can justify their commands simply by brandishing a gun, Ash wisely observed. In 1989 in East-Central Europe, and even more so in the Soviet Union, ideology provided a residual, decaying, but still potent form of legitimation. As Solzhenitsyn and Havel had earlier noticed, ideology allowed what Ash helpfully calls “the semantic occupation of the public sphere.” It justified and structured colossal and seemingly invulnerable mechanisms of “organized lying.” In doing so, seventy years after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and over forty years after the imposition of the Iron Curtain, a discredited and even risible ideology “still prevent(ed) the public articulation of shared aspirations and common truths.” It poisoned the soul and destroyed an authentic body politic at one and the same time. The defeat of Communism was a spiritual as well as a political imperative of the first order.
Those who showed most clarity about the ideological lie knew that political, religious, and national freedom could not be attained by a revolution in the conventional sense of the term. The lie needed to be challenged, openly, truthfully, in the spirit of the indomitable St. George slaying the dragons of old. Pope John Paul II did this when he evoked eternal and temporal truths denied by the ideological regime and that were so central to the restoration of political, intellectual, religious, and national freedom. In 1983, speaking to young Poles at the sacred site of Jasna Gora, he beckoned them to reject fear, and “to be a person of conscience.” No Rortyan moral relativism there.
The Poles, the pope insisted, must learn once again to call good and evil by their names and to never confuse one for the other. They must have the courage to recover the “common inheritance whose name is Poland.” Here, and in his great 1993 book Memory and Identity(1993), John Paul II spoke as a proud and principled Polish patriot, one who recognized the nation as a “natural human association.” He knew that a patriotism worthy of the name would have a significant “historical price.” Poles are not “so easily free”: they must fight for it over and over again if need be. This was their fate, and their great privilege. This is far from the spirit of Kojève’s last man at the end of History, content with personal enjoyments and a post-historical descent into hedonism, softness, and self-indulgence. John Paul II called on Poles to be neither hard (aggressive and cruel) nor soft (passive and morally indifferent). Instead, he called on them to be both Christians and patriots (a call unthinkable under this Franciscan pontificate).
Moreover, in a manner that reminds one of Solzhenitsyn’s own “warnings to the West” in the 1970s, Pope John Paul II called on Poles and East Europeans more generally not to slavishly follow the flabbiness and soft relativism that was too often confused with liberty by many in the Western world. He hoped that the people of Eastern Europe had undergone such a “process of spiritual maturation” that they could still see, and vigorously affirm, “that God is the supreme guarantor of human dignity and human rights.” In doing so, they would surely reject “anthropocentric humanism,” or “anthropocentricity,” as Solzhenitsyn called it, and reaffirm the spiritual and moral foundations of democracy, rightly understood. This would demand civic courage and the ability to distinguish “liberty under God and the laws,” as Tocqueville once eloquently called it, from “negative cultural models, so widespread in the West,” that confuse the moral term liberty with a life of untrammeled autonomy and a reckless, groundless relativism.
Havel expressed similar thoughts, although in a somewhat more secular and even “New Age” idiom. Against the sophists, calculators, and economists whom Edmund Burke so famously lamented in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, the Czech statesman declared that “Communism was overthrown by life, by thought, by human dignity.” He believed, and he repeated this endlessly in all his dissident and presidential writings, that genuine politics is unthinkable without a responsibility rooted in what he called the “Memory of Being,” a transcendental ground for genuine conscience and genuine responsibility.
Like John Paul II, and yes, even like Solzhenitsyn, Havel supported the full range of public and private liberties that inform a rule-of-law society. He placed constant stress on “moral deliberation and moral judgment,” and thought relativism, thoughtless scientism, and reductionism ate away at “spirit,” “feeling,” and “conscience,” the crucial prerequisites of human dignity and a free and decent society. He was more of a cosmopolitan (and less of a partisan of the nation) than Solzhenitsyn or John Paul II. But he, too, feared that “Europe” in its dominant, technocratic form, corroded self-government and the things of the spirit. Europe, he once commented, could not be reduced to the regulation of carrots.
Leaving Utopia Behind?
For all their differences, and they were often significant, it might be said that Havel, John Paul II, and Solzhenitsyn all succumbed to a (very qualified) “utopia” of their own. They dreamed of a new kind of society, where freedom was accompanied by “repentance and self-limitation” (Solzhenitsyn); where the Catholic spirit informed a Polish democracy that valued persons as persons (John Paul II), and defended an understanding of free politics rooted in moral judgment and a civility that went much deeper than good manners (Havel). Solzhenitsyn knew that evil could never be expunged from the soul and the world and fully appreciated that all ideological revolutions (which he also called “bloody, physical ones”) only lead to tyranny, coercion, unprecedented mendacity, and a cruelty and fanaticism that ignored the inescapable drama of good and evil in the human soul.
But Solzhenitsyn hoped that democratic man might learn to pay more attention to his soul and overcome, at least in part, “the excessive engrossment in everyday life” in modern, democratic societies that he lamented in the Harvard Address of 1978. Havel speaks for all of our heroes when he wrote in his chapter “Politics, Morality, and Civility” from 1992’sSummer Meditations that a call for a conception of liberty and human dignity that does not ignore the concerns of the soul has nothing to do with some naïve hope that the internal struggle in each human soul between good and evil may one day come to an end. There will never be a heaven on earth, Havel insisted: such projects, always ideological in character, have been forever shattered and exposed by the evil, utopian enterprises of the twentieth century: “The world has had the worst experiences with utopian thinkers who promised all that.” And as Solzhenitsyn wrote in 1993, fraternity can never be imposed politically, through soul-crushing despotism. We need to return to the great anti-totalitarian wisdom of the twentieth century so that we don’t lose sight of these essential truths. Human nature can never be fundamentally changed, all three would agree. But while firmly and unequivocally castigating utopian and ideological “bloody and physical revolutions,” and their accompanying “socialist projects” that led to violence and lies on an unprecedented level, Solzhenitsyn holds out hope for a “moral revolution” over the historical horizon, that might elevate our souls while adding moral content to our precious political and civil liberties. But he concedes that this is a “new phenomenon which we have yet to discover, discern, and bring to life.” One might speak of the bon usage of utopia that at the same time acknowledges that theocracy and despotism do nothing to protect and promote the things of the spirit. Solzhenitsyn always insisted that there could be a despotism in the name of the soul just as an inordinate attention to material concerns could distort human freedom and well-being. He was a partisan of mesure or moderation, an equitable balancing of material and spiritual concerns. This is, of course, faithful to the best classical and Christian wisdom. And it has nothing to do with religious fanaticism.
A Past That Isn’t Even Past
These efforts to think beyond the limits of our shapeless, decaying, postmodern, and relativistic democracies are useful and necessary. But they quickly come across their own limits. Russia has freed itself from the worst evils of ideological despotism even as it lives with its powerful residues and unacceptable levels of private and public corruption. Yet the Church is coming to life again and regularly pays tribute to the thousands of new martyrs who perished under Communism. One can read and speak freely on almost all subjects, although criticizing the highest authorities is not without risk, books are available from every point of view, and no state-imposed lies are obligatory as in the Soviet days. Moreover, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, the greatest anti-totalitarian work of all time, is required reading in Russian high schools. Russia has come a long way but it still has a long way to go.
For its part, East-Central Europe faces a kulturkampf of great significance. The old apparatchiks oppose a truthful confrontation with the ideological past and benefit from corruption because they, above all, know how things work, or used to work. The genuine dissidents are content that totalitarianism is a thing of the past but wonder how the high moral aspirations at the heart of 1989’s great anti-totalitarian revolution have been forgotten so quickly. They fear that Ireland is their future, where gay marriage is celebrated and imposed on dissenting persons and groups, where Catholic nurses and doctors are required to perform abortions, and where Christianity is mocked by nearly the entire political and intellectual class. These were surely not the aspirations of Solidarnosc and the freedom-loving Polish pope.
It is hard to quarrel with Ryszard Legutko’s claim in The Demon in Democracy that “liberal democracy” no longer means what it used to mean only a decade or two ago. It is more openly relativistic and aggressively hostile to robust affirmations of the Good. Universities increasingly have no place for conservatives, traditional Jews, orthodox Christians, or other defenders of age-old marriage rooted in the natural complementarity of men and women. With the aggressive linguistic tyranny of gender theory and its 72 categories (and counting), human nature is denied in any recognizable, common-sense understanding of the term.
A new ideological “wooden language” is increasingly imposed on all. It might not be too early to call it a creeping totalitarianism. Legutko speaks boldly but with no real hyperbole when he writes: “Both sides,” Communists and our newly radicalized defenders of post-modern liberal democracy, “share their dislike, sometimes bordering on hatred, toward the same enemies, the Church and religion, the nation, classical metaphysics, moral conservatism, and the family.” In the midst of “the dictatorship of relativism” emerging around us, a rearguard action, largely defensive in action appears required to prevent the worst. But when the Law and Justice Party in Poland opposes LGBT ideology, they are fiercely denounced in the Western press as fascists, homophobes, and theocrats. And the absurd claim is made that the Polish (moral) conservatives threaten fundamental public liberties.
In Hungary, a talented statesman of impeccable anti-totalitarian credentials, Viktor Orbán, is dismissed as a hater and tyrant for refusing to open Hungary to limitless Islamic immigration (and this in a small, vulnerable nation of just under ten million people). By openly and unapologetically defending the Christian mark of Europe, he is anathema throughout Western quarters. And he is denounced as an anti-Semite for vigorously opposing George Soros’s vision of an open, i.e. borderless and relativistic, society. Soros, to be sure, is a non-religious Jew, one who has little or nothing good to say about Israel. But the same Orbán respects public liberties, wins free elections, and has repudiated the racist and anti-Semitic Jabbok party. As Christopher Caldwell recently noted in the Claremont Review of Books, Orbán’s Hungary has passed a law against Holocaust denial, reopened major Jewish cultural sites, and established excellent bilateral relations with Israel. Jews are undoubtedly much safer in Budapest than in Paris or Marseilles today. Indeed, can Orbán really be driven out of the human race for holding positions that were widely shared in the West until quite recently and are still held by many decent citizens? Europe’s establishment hates Christian conservatives and traditional patriots much more than it rejects or opposes former Communists. Legutko’s remarks do much to explain this strange and ominous inversion.
So let us return to the enduring wisdom to be discerned from the great anti-totalitarians who inspired the revolution of 1989 and the accompanying, and slightly later, collapse of Communist totalitarianism in the USSR. As the distinguished French political theorist Philippe Bénéton has summarized this tragic (but by no means hopeless) wisdom, “the worst is always possible.” This qualified pessimism was shared by all the great anti-totalitarians of the twentieth century, secular or religious. Bénéton adds that we learn from the great dissidents that “living in truth is a requirement of the natural law.” One can add that the totalitarian negation of the distinction between truth and falsehood, good and evil, provided powerful verification—existential verification—for the law in the heart of men that St. Paul appeals to in the Epistle to the Romans (2:15).
The experience of ideological revolution teaches us that all forms of Manicheanism that claim to know with certitude who is a victim and who is a victimizer, lack self-knowledge, political prudence, and spiritual wisdom. This insight is best conveyed by Solzhenitsyn inThe Gulag Archipelago. In a memorable passage he writes that
the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates within the years… It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to contract it within each person.
Words of wisdom for the ages, and very relevant as an angry politically correct moralism (paradoxically rooted in dogmatic relativism) takes hold in the Western world. We in the West need to draw on the best anti-totalitarian wisdom, as never before.
Between utopian mendacity and postmodern moral indifference, lies this path of spiritual and political elevation that aims to bring together, slowly but surely, politics and conscience, freedom and moral self-limitation with a healthy respect for human limits and imperfections. It is an arduous path that has nothing to do with false hopes and utopian illusions. Such wisdom is at the heart of the spirit of 1989, rightly understood.

Bibliographical Note
My narrative of the events of 1989 in East-Central Europe is indebted to Duncan White,Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2019).
Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History?” first appeared in The National Interest(Summer 1989). It was translated into over a dozen languages.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s seminal, and widely misunderstood Letter to the Soviet Leaderscan be found in Solzhenitsyn, East and West (New York: Harper & Row Perennial Library, 1980), pp. 73-142. I have drawn on the crucial section entitled “Ideology,” pp. 120-129.
For my discussion of Havel I have drawn on his seminal dissident essays such as “The Power of the Powerless,” as well as his chapter “Politics, Morality and Civility” from Havel,Summer Meditations (New York, Knopf, 1992). This luminous chapter is a defining expression of his moral and political philosophy. Duncan White’s lucid summary of Havel’s thought and action was also quite helpful.
Pope John Paul II’s profound and powerful sermon and address at Jasna Gorna (June 18, 1983) is readily available on the internet.
John Paul II’s fullest account of the nation and its natural and Christian roots can be found in Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium(New York: Rizzoli, 2005), especially pp. 57-87. The memorable quotation about the dangers of slavishly following the culture of the contemporary West can be found on pp. 143-144.
For an insightful discussion of the crucial role of ideology in the legitimation of Communism right to the bitter end, see Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern (New York: Random House, 1990), p. 137.
The remarkable comparison between decayed liberal democracy and Communist totalitarianism can be found in Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in a Free Society (New York: Encounter Books, 2018), pp. 138-139. Legutko’s book is both prescient and discerning, and thus bound to be controversial.
On the relentless assaults on Orban’s Hungary, see Kevin J. McNamara, “How America’s European Allies Got Stuck in a Foreign Policy Triangle,” The National Interest (August, 16, 2019) and Christopher Caldwell, “Hungary and the Future of Europe,” The Claremont Review of Books (Spring 2019), pp. 57-63.
I have drawn freely on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “An Orbital Journey,” a profound speech delivered in Zurich on May 31, 1974 on the occasion of receiving the Golden Matrix Prize of the Italian Catholic Press Union. It appeared in English for the first time at National Review on-line, January 7, 2019, with a “Preface” by Daniel J. Mahoney. It is Solzhenitsyn’s most philosophical and suggestive discussion of modernity and its discontents.
The luminous passage from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago at the end of this essay can be found in the chapter, “The Ascent,” in The Gulag Archipelago, with a “Foreword” by Jordan B. Peterson (London, Vintage, 2018), p. 312. Peterson’s lucid and penetrating “Foreword,” an eloquent and forceful warning against ideological Manicheanism in all its forms, is highly recommended. Peterson makes clear that the ideological virus is taking on new and dangerously virulent forms throughout the Western world. History, most assuredly, has not come to an end.
At the end of this essay, I have drawn on a private correspondence with Philippe Bénéton with his kind permission.

Daniel J. Mahoney

Daniel J. Mahoney holds the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College. His latest books are The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker (St. Augustine’s Press, 2014) and The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity (Encounter Books, 2018). He is working on a book called The Statesman as Thinker: Ten Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation, which is under contract with Encounter Books

Massive repression driven by ideological fanaticism is part of the 21st century too


In response to: Beyond the Ideological Lie: The Revolution of 1989 Thirty Years Later

by Flagg Taylor

Thank you to Law and Liberty and to Professor Mahoney for marking this glorious anniversary. I am in full agreement with Mahoney that the events of 1989 were most fundamentally a revolt against enforced participation in ideological lies. He provides an eloquent account of that “anti-ideological revolution”—a message also delivered in that year and some of the preceding ones by figures like Václav Havel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Pope John Paul II. I have two points to make in response to Mahoney’s insightful essay. First, I will reflect briefly on the peculiar moral deformation the human person undergoes in the midst of an ideological regime. This will allow me to make a suggestion about why the promise of 1989 seems unfulfilled. Second, I wish to amplify Mahoney’s argument about the so-called “end of history” with reference to China.

It is given to human beings to say what we think. Saying things usually helps us think about things more clearly. Further, our thoughts and speech inform our actions—these actions then become sources of reflection in themselves. Herein lies the basis of human freedom. According to the totalitarians, however, our thinking is wholly determined by our membership in a class (whether that be racial or socio-economic). Our speech is not really evidence of our freedom, but only a reflection of certain conditions for which we are not responsible. In the Marxist formulation, being precedes consciousness. Once social and political conditions are transformed, all can be made to think correctly—and if they can’t, they can be safely discarded and left in the dustbin of history.

The totalitarian experiments never achieved anything resembling what they promised. And this fact was visible to all. These failures did not deter these social and political engineers from their goal—and they still do not. They might be attributed to various causes unrelated to the political project itself: a surprisingly recalcitrant population filled with enemies; an implacable enemy in the West; or the legacies of the bourgeois era. Whatever the cause, the totalitarians remained undeterred throughout the century and insisted on total ideological conformity in speech and deed. This meant that one’s personal appraisal of the meaning of events could very rarely be indulged without fear. Indeed, ideological speech is the very opposite of personal speech: it is wooden, predictable, empty, abstract, and uniform. Everyone knew the proper phrases and the necessary acts of conformity. And one grew so accustomed to these adaptations that they almost became second nature. One could safely assume that nobody’s speech was congruent with their thoughts. One could also safely assume that any “official” statements or information bore little correspondence to reality. Hence it is not surprising, to quote Hannah Arendt, that “the experience of a trembling wobbling motion of everything we rely on for our sense of direction and reality is among the most common and vivid experiences of men under totalitarian rule.”

.....................

Read more: www.lawliberty.org

lunes, 25 de noviembre de 2019

What about “nations acclaiming God’s glory?” Nations are not persons...


On the Nations




by James V. Schall, S.J. (1928-2019)


In the Breviary and in Scripture, we often read passages like these: 
  • “All nations will acclaim His glory”; 
  • “He shall judge between the nations”; 
  • “All nations will see the glory of your Holy One”; 
  • “The nations shall know that I am the Lord”; 
  • “All the kings of the earth will bow down in worship”; 
  • “The nations shall see your justice”; 
  • “What great nation is there that has gods so close to it as the Lord”; 
  • “King of the nations, you called the Magi to adore you as the first representatives of the nations”; 
  • “Many nations shall join themselves to the Lord on that day”; 
  • “All nations will walk in our brightness”; 
  • “Men and women of every nation will serve him.”

These and similar passages strike us because these things do not happen in this world. And what’s this about “nations acclaiming God’s glory?” Nations are not persons. No political entity is a substantial being, though we do have “corporations” or “legal persons” created by law for some limited purpose. So what is this telling us that “nations” will “worship” God? And even if they could, it is extremely doubtful if many nations would worship God as He has urged them to do and in the manner He has indicated. We even come across the notion of a “wicked nation,” almost as if it were a person of some kind.

Some 195 entities we call “states” exist in the world. The word “state” is a modern term with a modern meaning. It is a form rising above the actual citizens who are its subjects. The Greek word “polity” referred rather to the way citizens who have chosen differing moral ends organize themselves to promote and protect those ends. The classical terms – monarchy, aristocracy, polity, democracy, oligarchy, tyranny, and mixed regime flow from this classical approach.

The term “nation” was discussed by Maritain in his Man and the State. The word comes from “natus,” that is, from birth. So tribes and nations technically refer to those of the same blood origin. We do not “choose” our blood lines. Whether a state should force the disappearance of nation is a delicate issue. If we remove all signs of family, kinship, and nation from our states, we are left with a concept of unattached individual citizens with no roots in blood or place, with nothing except a formal and legal relation to a distant sovereign. In this sense, the term “nation-state” is much preferred to that of “the state”, lo stato, as Machiavelli called it.

...
The term “secular” means the things properly of this world (saeculum). We can talk of kings, queens, presidents, emperors, or prime ministers worshiping God as persons, each with his own chosen transcendent destiny. They can also “speak” in the name of the people they represent. Can a “state” that limits itself to what it is pay proper homage to God? A state honors God precisely by being only what it is.
...

domingo, 24 de noviembre de 2019

For over 50 years, Holodomor was erased from history



Holodomor Memorial Day in Ukraine and Around the Globe



For over 50 years, Holodomor was erased from history through cover-ups and denials and was never memorialized.

As the holidays approach us, we are reminded to give thanks for the things in our lives we are most thankful for. For me, the fourth Saturday in November is dedicated to the remembrance of the millions of human beings who were murdered in the mass genocide by starvation: Holodomor, translated to mean “killing by starvation.” Between 1932–1933 approximately 7 million farming families were exterminated by deliberate, centrally-planned, forced famine in Ukraine and another 3 million just outside of Ukraine, totaling 10 million unnecessary deaths of innocent, hard-working people. There was no drought, no war, no reason for these deaths to occur; especially in one of the world’s richest and fertile farmlands of the Black Earth Region.

Last year when I made a pilgrimage to visit my roots and birthplace in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, the one place I visited that affected me more than any other place was the Holodomor Museum in Kyiv, Ukraine, which opened in 2008. It’s hard to imagine that only 87 years ago, the tyrannic authoritarian Soviet leader, Stalin, robbed Ukrainians of all their grain and confiscated all their valuables as part of his conspiracy and socialist plan for collectivization. This was all part of Stalin’s 5-Year Plan and the Communist regime to industrialize and collectivize agriculture by destroying the kulak class. State police and party brigades were sent to the Ukrainian countryside to confiscate any and all food they could find, targeting farms that produced grain.
Even though the Soviet authorities cut off all food supplies, peasants and farmers still managed to somehow survive by hiding just enough food to scrape by. So Stalin implemented more laws forbidding people from getting on trains or leaving cities, while simultaneously not allowing any aid in from the outside.
Ukrainian farmers resisted giving up private farms for government collectivization of agriculture for as long as they could, but ultimately, approximately ten million people died an agonizingly slow death in the span of just one year from 1932–1933. To survive, you had to steal, prostitute, eat dead animals and human corpses, and even kill. Authorities were permitted to give someone 200 grams of bread for each dead body that he or she brought in. If you’re a parent, you can imagine what lengths parents would go through to secure food for their child.

Sadly, 31 percent of those who starved to death were children under the age of ten. Anyone caught trying to leave was shot. Children were so hungry, they had lost all fear and were shot on the spot when begging for a single grain. Parents swapped children as they had to resort to cannibalism to survive. Most city dwellers had no idea this was happening and those who did know had to remain silent for fear of execution.
The silence was finally broken in 1933 by a brave young man by the name of Gareth Jones from the UK, who exposed the tyranny and famine and was desperate to uncover the truth. He was a hero in the true sense of the word and believed his job as a journalist was to never waver from exposing the truth, no matter what. He received an exorbitant amount of criticism from Walter Duranty, a NY Times journalist (and Soviet sympathizer) who deliberately misled the world and denied the famine to collaborate with the Communist regime. He stated that the hunger was due to natural circumstances of malnutrition and disease and not human action.
Lawrence Reed writes, “Duranty penned a piece for The Times in which he claimed Jones’s report to be a fabrication.” Even today, the danger of fake news and the power of media to cover up stories for personal or political gain are real. Unfortunately, Jones was labeled a liar and discredited by mainstream media. Then tragically, he was shot twice in the back and once in the head in 1935 in China (there is strong evidence suggesting it was orchestrated by Russian Secret Police). He was only 29 years old.
For over 50 years, Holodomor was erased from history through cover-ups and denials and was never memorialized. Finally, In 2006, the United States officially recognized this atrocious historical event as genocide, followed by Canada in 2008. Also in 2008, Gareth Jones was honored and awarded the Ukrainian Order of Merit. This Saturday, November 23, 2019, the world remembers the atrocities inflicted by the horrific communist and socialist policies of Stalin and the USSR. There is nothing more important than human rights and continuing the fight for freedom for every human being.
For more on this topic, watch the documentary called Hitler, Stalin, and Mr. Jones.
For additional resources, visit the International Holodomor Memorial Day or watch the movie Big Lies. You may also visit the Victims of Communism as well as access education materials at https://education.holodomor.ca/.

Marianna is the Director of Outreach at the Foundation for Economic Education aimed at teaching the humane value and ethical principles of free markets and entrepreneurship to FEE’s student audience.


Read more: fee.org/

Federico Jiménez entrevista a Stephane Courtois, autor de 'El libro negro del Comunismo'.


Entrevista a Stephane Courtois por 'El libro negro del comunismo'


https://youtu.be/sj65u2l560A

The bureaucrats want people to believe – notwithstanding reams of evidence – that higher taxes are good for prosperity.



The OECD’s Recipe for Continuing Poverty in Africa


by Dan Mitchell
....
Here’s a look at the aggregate tax burdens in various nations.
I’m not surprised that South Africa’snumbers are so bad.
And here’s a look at how tax burdens have changed over the past 10 years.
Kudos to Botswana...
.....
Read more: danieljmitchell.wordpress.com

jueves, 21 de noviembre de 2019

Why are the neocons willing to join forces with the Left?


Conservatism: A Vanishing Tradition

Read more: mises.org/


[The Vanishing Tradition: Perspective on American Conservatism. Edited by Paul Gottfried. Cornell University Press, 2020. 223 + pages.]
Paul Gottfried’s excellent anthology of essays on American conservatives chronicles a key phenomenon of our times. Understanding it is important not only for those, like Gottfried and his contributors, who are traditionalist conservatives, but for anyone concerned with freedom. The phenomenon in question is the takeover of American conservatism by neoconservatives.
Why should this development concern us? In brief, the neocons, interested in their own agenda, have joined with the left in enforcing a public orthodoxy that excludes certain views from discussion. As Gottfried explains: “We might note some of the offenses for which an older Right was read out of the movement by the 1990s. Such presumed enormities included opposing the First Gulf War, supporting Patrick Buchanan’s presidential bid in 1992, and complaining about the influence of the American Israeli lobby. Some of the same people had also been critical of the cultural effects of Third World immigration, the extensions of the Voting Rights Act that would increase the electoral strength of the Left and bring the electoral process almost totally under federal administrative control, and the elevation of Martin Luther King — a controversial figure of the Left in his own time — to iconic status with a national holiday.”
Obviously, those who favor the suppressed positions should be concerned, but others should be as well. The Left, joined by the neocons, not only insists on its agenda but will not allow dissent. If, for example, you don’t think that Martin Luther King was a “moral saint,” as more than one eminent philosopher has termed him, the Left will not try to show that your arguments for your view are mistaken. It will deny you a forum to express your arguments at all and then try to destroy you personally. Even if you admire King or accept other tenets of the public orthodoxy, you should be troubled by the suppression of free speech.
Two of the contributors, Keith Preston and Boyd D. Cathey, discuss in detail one such smear campaign against a dissenter from the Official Truth. This was directed at Mel Bradford, a literary scholar and historian, who criticized Abraham Lincoln. In 1981, Ronald Reagan intended to nominate Bradford to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Bradford’s opinions about Lincoln would on the surface seem irrelevant to his fitness for the post. But Lincoln’s role as the savior of the Union and scourge of slavery is a key part of our public orthodoxy. The Left joined forces with the neocons to strike at Bradford. Preston writes: “As a legal scholar, Bradford was an advocate of a ‘strict constructionist’ approach to interpreting the Constitution, his view of the American founding as a conservative revolution, and his defense of the South against what he considered to be the usurpations of state sovereignty by President Lincoln during the Civil War [aroused neocon ire].”
Because he had attacked Lincoln, Bradford had to be denied the nomination. “Among the prominent neoconservatives who expressed opposition to Bradford were Irving Kristol, a former Trotskyite and the coeditor of The Public Interest, who is credited with having coined the term ‘neoconservative.’ The neoconservative movement’s other leading intellectual, Norman Podhoretz, another former leftist and the publisher of Commentary magazine, also expressed opposition to Bradford’s nomination.”
Why are the neocons willing to join forces with the Left? Doing so permits them to advance more effectively their own goals, strong support for Israel and for an interventionist foreign policy. Marjorie Jeffrey gets at the heart of the matter: “In what may be considered one of the founding documents of what became Bush-era neoconservatism, [William] Kristol and [Robert] Kagan wrote in ‘Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy’ that instead of either Clinton’s ‘Wilsonian multilateralism’ or Buchanan’s ‘neo-isolationism’, America should seek a policy of ‘benevolent global hegemony.’” Those who opposed this policy were assailed: “Against these efforts [opposing war], David Frum penned his famous ‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’ essay in the pages of National Review, charging antiwar conservatives and libertarians with being anti- American: ‘They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation’s enemies.’” As Jeffrey accurately notes, Ron Paul has with characteristic insight brought into question whether an interventionist foreign policy is in America’s interests, and for this he has been vilified.
Preston in his excellent essay makes the same criticism of neocon foreign policy, but he wrongly traces interventionism to the Jacobins: “A former assistant secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, Paul Craig Roberts, has described the foreign policy views of the neoconservatives as emanating from the fanaticism that emerged during the French Revolution, observing ‘there is nothing conservative about neoconservatives. Neocons hide behind ‘conservative’ but they are in fact Jacobins. Jacobins were the 18th century French revolutionaries whose intention to remake Europe in revolutionary France’s image launched the Napoleonic Wars.” A similar critique of the neoconservatives has been offered by the conservative scholar Claes Ryn.” The Jacobins in fact were mainly concerned with internal reform: it was the Gironde that wished to spread the Revolution abroad.
But this minor error pales into insignificance when put beside Preston’s indispensable point, also drawn from Ryn: ”The ongoing project of the neoconservatives has been to purge from the American Right any tendency that is suspected of opposing aggressive military interventionism, the revolutionary spread of ‘democratic capitalism’ on an international level, the geopolitical agenda of Israel’s Likud Party, or the cultural values of urban cosmopolitanism. Meanwhile, the neoconservatives will make common cause with anyone on the left they deem aggressively militarist enough.”
Some of the contributors find an epistemological source that in their opinion accounts at least in part for the errors of the neocons. The neocons favor principles that are universally true, regardless of historical time and circumstance. This contention seems to me mistaken. Isn’t the problem rather that the neocons favor the wrong universal principles? If like Murray Rothbard we support self-ownership, property rights, and peace, we would not fall victim to neocon delusions.
Mention of Rothbard of course brings to mind that he too was the victim of smear campaigns by both Buckley’s National Review and the neocons. As Gottfried remarks: “In some cases, however, those thrown off the bus were subject to at least intermittent abuse intended to justify their fall. This happened in a particularly bizarre way to Murray Rothbard, in the form of an obituary that Buckley inserted into National Review shortly after Rothbard’s death. Here Buckley offered a comparison between Rothbard and cult leader David Koresh. Neither apparently had more than a handful of followers: Rothbard had ‘as many disciples as David Koresh had in his redoubt in Waco.’ ‘Yes, Rothbard believed in freedom; David Koresh believed in God.’ It had not been enough forNational Review’s founder to scold Rothbard during his lifetime.”
Fortunately, neither Buckley nor the neocons succeeded in suppressing Rothbard. His teaching continues to guide and inspire us.
Author:
David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute, and editor of The Mises Review

miércoles, 20 de noviembre de 2019

Roy Schoeman’s mystical experiences and conversion to Catholicism


A Harvard Professor’s Conversion to the Catholic Faith

The testimony of Roy Schoeman’s mystical experiences and conversion to Catholicism has already touched many souls who have heard him at retreat centres and similar venues throughout the world. In the newly released video below, the former Professor at Harvard Business School speaks about his acceptance of atheism when he went to university and how it dragged him into a pit of hopelessness. He shares how God personally intervened in his life in a miraculous way. Now working as a Catholic speaker and inspiring thousands of believers and nonbelievers with his story, he has found the true meaning of life and the overflowing ocean of God’s Love.
Roy Schoeman is the author of Salvation is from the Jews (available in Uk here and US here) and Honey from the Rock (UK here and US here).
https://youtu.be/EWDevlijGUI




Source: catholicismpure.wordpress.com

El libro de Patrick J. Deneen titulado "¿Por qué ha fracaso el liberalismo?" se ha convertido en un éxito internacional...


Patrick J. Deneen: “La izquierda y la derecha comparten la misma filosofía básica del liberalismo”

El libro de Patrick J. Deneen titulado "¿Por qué ha fracaso el liberalismo?" se ha convertido en un éxito internacional, recomendado tanto por el ex presidente Obama como por el arzobispo Chaput: una muestra del amplio abanico intelectual al que interesa. El pasado viernes Deneen conversó con Nueva Revista.

El estadounidense Patrick J. Deneen (55 años), profesor de Ciencias Políticas en la Universidad de Notre Dame (Indiana), es un reconocido experto en la obra de Alexis de Tocqueville y un convencido defensor de la importancia de las artes liberales en la educación. Su libro ¿Por qué ha fracaso el liberalismo? se ha convertido en un inesperado éxito internacional, recomendado tanto por el ex presidente Obamacomo por el arzobispo Chaput: una muestra del amplio abanico intelectual al que interesa. El pasado viernes Deneen estuvo en Madrid y conversó con Nueva Revista.
–¿Cómo resumiría el tema de su libro?
–Mi argumento es que el liberalismo como proyecto social, político y económico ha fracasado no por no haber estado a la altura de sus propias aspiraciones, sino por haber triunfado en lo que pretendía llevar a cabo: crear un mundo en el cual los seres humanos estarían en gran medida liberados unos de otros, y particularmente liberados unos de otros por medio del mecanismo de la despersonalización del Estado y de la despersonalización del mercado. En la medida en que la gente ha descubierto que está libre de los otros, más se ha hallado sujeta a las fuerzas de un mercado globalizado y de un Estado cada vez más distante. Muchas de nuestras crisis políticas actuales, lo que estamos viendo en Occidente, son una reacción simultánea contra ese sentido de impotencia respecto de un mercado globalizado y frente al Estado. Es en parte lo que está sucediendo con el Brexit, con el alza del populismo en Occidente, con la Unión Europea; lo que ha contribuido al ascenso de Donald Trump. Lo anterior se manifiesta también en muchas patologías sociales, como la soledad, el suicidio, la adicción a los opiáceos… De tal manera que surge una suerte de crisis política, pero también una crisis de la vida humana. Mi razonamiento en el libro es que justamente el éxito del proyecto de liberarnos unos de otros ha provocado ciertas patologías: políticas, sociales y económicas.

“El gran debate de los últimos cincuenta años ha sido ganado por los mecanismos de despersonalización del mercado en el campo de la derecha política, y por los mecanismos de despersonalización del Estado en el campo de la izquierda política”.

–¿Qué se desconoce del liberalismo con frecuencia y sin embargo conviene conocer?
–La parte de mi libro que probablemente haya recibido más atención quizá sea la que describe el liberalismo como una doctrina con una dimensión progresista y conservadora a la vez, o, dicho de otra manera, de izquierdas y de derechas. Ha servido mi ensayo para ilustrar que en gran medida la izquierda y la derecha comparten la misma filosofía básica del liberalismo. El gran debate de los últimos cincuenta años ha sido ganado por los mecanismos de despersonalización del mercado en el campo de la derecha política, y por los mecanismos de despersonalización del Estado en el campo de la izquierda política. Ambos, el Estado y el mercado, han crecido en la misma medida en que nos hemos fracturado más o fragmentado más.   
–¿Qué piensa usted de figuras clásicas de la escuela liberal económica, como Ludwig von Mises y Friedrich August von Hayek, o, por ceñirnos más a la actualidad, de obras recientes tipo “Dios y el dinero”, de Samuel Gregg?
Von Mises y Hayek son pensadores extraordinariamente importantes de la tradición liberal clásica. Al menos en los Estados Unidos han sido frecuentemente descritos como conservadores precisamente porque defienden lo que atacan los liberales progresistas hoy. Es decir, Von Mises y Hayek se oponen a las interferencias en el mercado o a la intervención del Gobierno en la economía. Muchos que se llaman a sí mismos conservadores acogen el pensamiento de Von Mises o Hayek o de Sam Gregg, o de figuras en esa tradición. Es una forma de oponerse al progresismo. Hayek tiene un capítulo, en uno de sus libros más importantes, “Los fundamentos de la libertad” (el capítulo se llama “Por qué no soy conservador”), en el que él de una forma realmente explícita subraya que no busca conservar nada: ni la tradición, ni la cultura, ni una forma de vida. Ve la sociedad como un mercado libre, como una comunidad dinámica y progresista, que cambia constantemente. Razona que una sociedad así, orientada y ordenada alrededor del mercado libre, genera más y más desigualdad, más y más cambios, y que aquellos que están en posición de desigualdad sienten que siguen el ritmo de los situados en la escala alta económica. Hayek es bastante franco: lo que describe es una versión progresista del mercado libre. Esto tiene su punto de rompecabezas para alguien a quien se cataloga de conservador.
–¿Qué piensa que los lectores sacarán de “¿Por qué ha fracasado el liberalismo?”?
–Un sistema político es como estar en una pecera donde el pez no puede ver el agua. Vivir en un sistema político siempre quiere decir que no se es capaz de percibir la naturaleza de ese orden político, de divisar sus presupuestos profundos. Y quizás más que eso: el liberalismo es una filosofía que argumenta que nosotros somos libres para hacernos a nosotros mismos, que existimos en una condición en la que estamos desinhibidos para hacernos a nosotros mismos. La ironía es que esta creencia proviene del mismo orden liberal. Se observa la paradoja: nuestra propia psique se forma por un orden que a la vez clama que somos libres. Incluso una filosofía de la libertad termina constituyendo los tipos de seres humanos que somos.
–¿Qué le llevó a escribir este libro?
–Supongo que fue la culminación de unos quince años de reflexión acerca de los retos profundos e inherentes a nuestro orden político. Yo llegué a la mayoría de edad cuando cayó la Unión Soviética, cuando se hundió el comunismo, cuando Francis Fukuyama escribió su famoso “El fin de la historia”. Reinaba la sensación de que las grandes cuestiones de la política habían sido resueltas: cuál es el mejor sistema político, cómo tenemos que organizarnos, cuál es el mejor camino para establecer un orden político… Daba la impresión de que todas esas preguntas habían sido finalmente respondidas de forma irrefutable, de que no había ya más interrogantes. Eso se me antojaba por lo menos problemático, excesivamente entusiasta y optimista. De ahí que empezara a explorar los caminos en los que me parecía que el orden liberal contenía las semillas de su propia debilidad. Es una vieja forma de examinar los sistemas políticos, que llega hasta Alexis de Tocqueville y hasta Platón. Considero que es más necesario obrar así cuando impera el triunfalismo rampante en un sistema político. Hay que reflexionar sobre el propio sistema político con capacidad crítica.

“Un sistema político es como estar en una pecera donde el pez no puede ver el agua. Vivir en un sistema político siempre quiere decir que no se es capaz de percibir la naturaleza de ese orden político, de divisar sus presupuestos profundos.”

–¿Se puede salvar el liberalismo? ¿Se debe? ¿Puede usted ofrecer una alternativa al liberalismo?
–Lo más problemático del orden político liberal es su teoría de la naturaleza humana; no es tanto una cuestión institucional. Es menos cómo organizamos nuestros partidos políticos. Por supuesto que el liberalismo toca nuestro sistema económico, pero pienso que la raíz del problema del liberalismo es antropológica, es un problema de la teoría de la naturaleza humana, es la idea del ser humano como la de ser que se hace autónomamente. Muchas de nuestras patologías hoy surgen por este entendimiento desordenado de la naturaleza humana. Si hay una alternativa al liberalismo de alguna manera se puede decir que es más radical que la mayoría de lo que la gente piensa, porque requiere un replanteamiento real de lo que es la naturaleza humana. Pero en otro sentido puede ser menos radical: no requiere una transformación completa de nuestro orden político. Me parece que si se “puebla” nuestro sistema político con asunciones antropológicas diferentes, ese orden mismo reflejaría esos cambios y de diversas maneras se podría trabajar dentro de las instituciones.
–¿Puede decirme quién ha alabado y quién se ha quejado de su libro?
–La recepción de mi libro me ha fascinado. Frecuentemente se me califica de conservador, aunque algunos de mis amigos que son conservadores piensan que estoy muy lejos, a la izquierda, desde el punto de vista económico… De cualquier modo, supongo que en muchos casos es la misma gente la que alaba y la que critica mi libro. Hay muchos conservadores a los que les gusta el libro especialmente por las críticas a un tipo de liberales progresistas, pero al mismo tiempo no les gustan otras partes. Quien usted ha mencionado, Sam Gregg, sería un buen ejemplo. Sam ha escrito un artículo en el que expresa su admiración y simpatía con muchas partes de mi libro, pero a la vez ha sido crítico con algunas de mis objeciones al liberalismo clásico. Muchos lectores de la izquierda política han reaccionado al revés: disfrutan con algunas de las críticas al liberalismo clásico, pero están descontentos con algunas de mis pegas al progresismo. Un lector de esos sería el presidente Obama, que alabó el libro pero que a la vez dijo que tenía ciertas reservas acerca de algunas de sus conclusiones. “¿Por qué ha fracasado el liberalismo?” pienso que ha sido interesante porque tiende un puente ante la división y apela a una amplia audiencia. Anima a la misma gente pero por razones diferentes y en algunos casos despierta cierta queja predecible.

“La raíz del problema del liberalismo es antropológica: es la idea del ser humano como la del ser que se hace autónomamente. Creo que muchas de nuestras patologías hoy surgen por este entendimiento desordenado de la naturaleza humana”.
(sigue) ............

Doctor en Periodismo (Universidad de Navarra). Licenciado en Ciencias Físicas (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). Corresponsal y periodista de ABC. Director de Comunicación del Ministerio de Educación. Ahora coordinador editorial de Nueva Revista.

Leer más aquí: www.nuevarevista.net