Apropos “armchair” mentality of the Ukrainian intelligentsia

Millions of people are walking out in the street to protest George W. Bush’s military plan in Iraq. On February 1, several hundred people marched through Kyiv streets, carrying signs condemning war. Only several hundred individuals who represented the Communists, the Natalia Vitrenko bloc, pensioners longing for the Soviet past, and several dozen young Green activists, obviously joining the demonstration for selfish reasons. I was among them, carrying a poster reading “Democrats Against War,” feeling like a liar. I had no cause to act on behalf of all the Democrats because I was there alone. Nor did any Liberals and Democrats appear at the rally. Most importantly, among the protesters, there were few people whom we habitually call intellectuals. I don’t mean those defined by the Soviet encyclopedia as “people earning their livelihood by mental work,” but those defined by Kant as being able to know the world and live in it, while improving themselves intellectually as well as ethically. There were practically no such individuals at the antiwar rally in Kyiv. Communists were present as the only champions of peace. These people had been perfectly content with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979. They are scared not so much by the imminent war in Iraq as by the fact that it will be started by the United States, the former Soviet Union’s key adversary.

But why did the Kyiv intelligentsia ignore the antiwar rally? It is not a rhetorical question. I tried to find an answer, marching with my poster, surrounded by Red and Green adherents. I would like to share my ideas with the reader. Our intellectuals, just like the Communists, are the product of the Soviet epoch which was oriented only to collective values. Our intellectuals are not accustomed to defending a position. They are not aware of their personal responsibility for what is happening in their country, even less so elsewhere in the world. The Soviet way of life taught them to consider themselves small cogs in a huge machine. Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote in Vladimir Ilyich Lenin : “What’s an individual? / No earthly good./ One man, / even the most important of all, / can’t raise a ten- yard log of wood, / to say nothing / of a house / ten stories tall.”

During the perestroika campaign, our intelligentsia tried to reach beyond the usual notions. But when it transpired that the new times were not exactly favorable for the intellectual’s survival, they hastily returned to their niches and closed and locked the doors. Worst of all, none of them know how all this will end. What is happening may well be described as intellectual suicide. No, it is not a metaphor. Obviously, yesterday’s intellectuals have to survive under extremely difficult conditions. Hopefully, most of them will be able to adjust. But I am afraid that survivors will no longer be intellectuals. Some of them are aware of this situation. A noted Kyiv film director, one of those traditionally considered to belong to the intellectual elite, declared recently that he wanted to quit introspection and start doing business.

However, quitting introspection is tantamount to departing from the intellectual realm. Introspection, after all, is the main, probably the only way to know oneself and build one’s own microcosm on that basis. Schelling wrote that what is contained, only potentially, in a principle known as the true substance of soul, must be raised to the level of true reflection in one’s thoughts or spirit, before it manifests itself at its highest point. True, with the Soviet intellectual such introspection did not often end in a declaration of intent and attendant action. This may well be the reason why that film director decided he would do without introspection. He was obviously unaware that he would then always act not of his own but of someone else’s will.

The Soviet intellectual’s introversion was obviously caused by external conditions. Acting out one’s own free will was dangerous under the totalitarian regime. There was that constant fear. It must have been most oppressive. The intellectual had always wanted to shake off that burden. Given a bit of freedom, he would immediately try to rid himself of that fear. Thus, the intelligentsia responded to Khrushchev’s “thaw” with the 1960s movement and to Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost.

Fear, however, was not the only thing scaring the Soviet intellectual away from public activity. Everybody remembered only too well what had come of active social experimenting in a recent past, resulting in bloody revolutions and terror. A considerable part of the intelligentsia got scared by the Russian revolution of 1905 and refused to participate in any social projects, indulging instead in religious rejuvenation or “pure art.” It was then “semi-intellectuals” and plain ignoramuses decided to cope with social problems, in their own way. That childish passion for philosophy and aesthetics of the “silver age” is still present among the intelligentsia. No one paid attention to Russian liberals lashing out at the Vekhi (The Landmarks) , also known as A Collection of Articles on the Russian Intelligentsia (Moscow, 1909), published by a group of Russian religious philosophers such as N.A. Berdyayev, S.N. Bulgakov, P.B. Struve, and others), criticizing the ideology and practices of revolutionary, Socialist-oriented intellectuals, stressing the supremacy of spirituality, that “the individual’s inner life is the only creative force of human existence.” Half of them were committed Ukrainian autonomists such as Maksym Kovalevsky, Dmytro Ovsian nykov-Kulykovsky, Maksym Slavynsky, and Mykhailo Tuhan- Baranovsky. No one was worried about the absence of keen interest in legal and political matters on the part of the Russian and Ukrainian intelligentsia. That attitude is still there.

Intellectuals had to somehow justify their desire to lock themselves up in those ivory towers or in many cases, simply sit tight in their niches. Otherwise they would be haunted by an inferiority complex. Thus emerged a kind of intellectual snobbery disguised as free individuals refusing to be trampled by the mob. I find it funny but true that the celebrated US linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky regularly demonstrates resistance. Together with thousands of people harboring different political views and with different levels of education, he opposes something which, in his opinion, impedes the implementation of humanistic ideals. In contrast, our feeble, provincial ex- intellectuals are too bashful to emerge in an “alien” environment. They feel proud that they have never taken part in any public actions. But there is nothing to feel proud about, primarily because living in isolation from society impoverishes one’s inner world. A Zen Buddhist will probably object to this idea, but a modern philosopher will second it, knowing that man’s microcosm expands through inter-subjective contacts. In other words, by sharing experience, directly or via books, for example. In fact, our intellectuals are also aware of this point, so they prefer communicating in close circles to seclusion. These circumstances spare them both solitude and contact with the rude and undereducated mob. Yet they also reduce them to introspection, necessary but insufficient, depriving them of an opportunity to be active and effective in the social field. Our intellectuals communicated in their narrow circles, in Moscow and Kyiv, until the perestroika campaign, and then found themselves pushed to the social periphery where they again hid in their niches.

Now there is scarcely time to communicate even in close circles. Besides, their interest in the lasting topics has dwindled. If this attitude continues, I am afraid that our intelligentsia will become extinct. This prospect does not scare everyone. I was told by a German diplomat that the disappearance of the intelligentsia would not be too exorbitant a price to pay for the establishment of market relationships. I wonder if he had a point there.

All this is theory, of course, but what can be the practical outcome? Without that socially active intellectual stratum there will be no civil society. Consequently, there will be no democracy. Those with power and money have a lot of opportunities to manipulate the moods of the masses, using all kinds of promotional campaigns. Only the analytical brain of the intellectual given to introspection can associate the specific with the general, singling out things transient and universal. Only this intellectual can help people figure out what actually serves their common good and what serves the interests of a handful of characters bamboozling the majority.

A citizen is not born in the mob. History shows that all more or less socially significant ideas were conceived by intellectuals and then spread to the masses. True, they spread in a variety of ways and often would be forced on the rest of the people. But this is how the mentality of the mob can be formed, not that of the citizen. The ethic of being intellectual is a social necessity precisely because the intellectual is ideally loath to deceive anyone. He wants to convince everybody of his notions by way of mutual communication. Let me stress that reciprocity is a must. If you want others to believe you, you have to learn empathy. To do so, you must try and overcome barriers separating people, rather than build new ones. In other words, the least you can do is stay out of your niche. The intellectual element of introspection has a social meaning because an individual determined to establish the truth must know his opponent’s stand. In other words, the intellectual is always interested in a dialog and fair debate. If such discussions are held in public, our burghers will learn to analyze what both sides have to say and arrive at their own conclusions. So that when it comes time for them to make socially meaningful decisions, during elections, for example, they will do so not as burghers but as conscious citizens. Leading them astray, using various promotional campaigns, will become a problem.

I have touched on only one of many aspects of forming a civil society. In Ukraine, the process without doubt involves the political reform and the emergence of more or less independent media, ones that will not have to take orders from those in powers or investors. Thus, it would be important for a periodical to allocate a page for social problems as a dialog between intellectuals, regardless of their political views. Many newspaper and magazine editors will say that they are doing just that, yet practice shows that they carry out tasks assigned them by political parties or politicians long before the election campaign. It means changing the editorial policy. In contrast, a dialog between intellectuals cannot be interrupted. Readers must get accustomed to that dialog. They must read that page regardless of the political climate and the editors’ orientation. Under the Soviets, thick journals acted as intermediaries among the intellectuals of the vast empire. Now the place is vacant, in Ukraine anyway.