TRUTH, HISTORY, AND HYSTERIA

Once I was at one of those East-West humanities conferences typical of such gatherings since December 1991. As usual, a lot of ground was covered, from the fall of the Wall and culture without frontiers to the rapprochement and confrontation of mentalities to new nationalist trends on the old turf to third millennium European architecture.

The debates were not too heated; such scholarly gatherings held in a cozy Old or New World corner are seldom emotionally saturated, because hardly anyone expects to see Li Peng charging in astride a horse to deliver a fiery speech or Zhirinovsky dancing Kalashnikov in hand, or Karadzic reciting a poem about love for one’s native land. No action! No evil geniuses, zealots, or other sons of bitches, just “almost like-minded” colleagues, doctors of philanthropy, and university universalists.

Yet stumbling blocks appear now and then. These are easily explained by many years of life under totally different systems – and the situation is actually the same. Another explanation is the presence of all those other chimeras such as Byzantine consciousness or Protestant depletion.

Anyway, on that particular occasion one of the scholars (he was from Sweden, I think) made a statement (I cannot guarantee a verbatim account): “We don’t need to know our history, because we never appeal to it. Happy communities have no need for history, only unhappy ones do, because by using it they strive to explain their misfortunes to others.”

At another conference a lady scholar insisted that historiocentrism is identical to phallocentrism, being that vector which, that axle which constitutes the essence of the Weltanschauung of many Western intellectuals, that very rod with which we constantly flagellate ourselves. Free yourselves of history and make yourselves adequate to the reality, she urged those present.

But our troubles come not from our immersion in our own history, nor protested representatives of unhappy communities. Rather to the contrary, we seem to know too little about our history, because what we were taught it, it was too heavily censored and falsified, presented as the “only correct method.” In other words, we are just beginning to reconstruct it, and we have to.

How very naive of you, exclaimed those from the happier communities. You are trying to rely on history, but historical vision never envelopes all complexity and fullness. History is always masked mythology with a heavy admixture of ideological necrophilia. Just that and nothing else. It was love for history that begot all those villains like Il Duce and FЯhrer, for where else would they have got all those lictor’s fasces and Runic signs, all those pompous Nordic attributes with caesars and Siegfrieds? Why not consult your history textbooks? What do they have to say about your neighbors? Read this and then ask your questions about hatred and where it comes from in this world.

You will never understand us, complained some of the unhappy historiocentrists. You have atrophy of the organ with which man understands fellow humans. Your supermarkets and six hundred sixty-six TV channels have made you indifferent and self-satisfied. Spengler was right, you will end in a bad way.

Look at yourselves, countered the above-history lucky devils. Instead of fumbling xenophobically with myths, you’d be better off doing something about the racket and corruption in your own countries. In a situation that has developed you mustn’t count on joining “inner Europe” quickly.

It was thus, to the accompaniment of mutual threats, that fruitful discussions passed, although in most cases they ended on an amicable note. Someone would suggest that there were terminological misconceptions and inadequate translations that had to be worked on. Finally, everybody would agree that opinions differ and this is a sure sign of the world’s intellectual wealth.

And the final banquet would settle the remaining differences, of course.

True, there was a learned colleague from Moscow who snarled and bit quite painfully, but the man was practicing his own concept of the impossibility of understanding. The police were never called, though. What for? We were there to find the truth, weren’t we?