Who suffers most?

The American historian and political scientist Alfred Erich Senn pointed out that a characteristic feature of central and eastern European consciousness is a sense of vulnerability. This results in what he termed a 'comparative martyrology', best expressed by the question, 'Who suffers most?' One hypothesis might be that feelings of victimhood - also widespread in post-Communist countries - are nothing but an inversion of what J. L. Talmon described as 'political messianism'.^[1]

Experiences of depression and despair usually call for symbolic compensation. For example, the new and allegedly vulnerable nations of central and eastern Europe appear to be determined by a kind of inadequacy of self-consciousness and collective identity, and as a result tend - though not exclusively - to look backward in an obviously messianic manner. The Third Rome of the Russian Slavophiles, or the Athens of the North extolled by Lithuanian neo-Romantics - among them the French poet of Lithuanian Polish origin, Oscar Milosz - are both symbolic constructs grounded in a fundamental denial of modern western civilisation, and an emphasis on personal heritage. This was evident in the ideological disputes that took place, from the time of Peter the Great, between anti-western, anti-modern Russian Slavophiles, and Hegelian Zapadniki (westerners) sympathetic to reforms.

Central and eastern European messianism has its roots in a purist, ethnocentric ideology inherently wary of modernity and western Europe. The messianic tendency entered Lithuanian consciousness via the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz (whose vision of Poland as crucified nation and redeemer of other nations is the apogee of messianic thought) and Polish Romanticism in general. Another source for this trend of thought was Jules Michelet's revolutionary messianism and Giuseppe Mazzini's vision of Roma Terza, itself a product of the Risorgimento.

The Russian pan-Slavist Nikolai Danilevsky's enormously influential comparative study of civilisations, Rossia i Evropa [Russia and Europe] (1869), anticipated the morphological conception of culture later elaborated in Leo Frobenius's Ursprung der Afrikanischen Kulturen und Naturwissenschaftliche Kulturlehre [Source of African cultures and the natural historical lesson of culture] (1898) and Paideuma (1921), as well as Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The demise of the Occident] (1918-1922). Danilevsky also conceived of an independent Russian culture, which would replace Western civilization after the latter's inevitable collapse. In place of terms such as 'culture' and 'civilization', Danilevsky proposed a new vocabulary and a new theory of cultural-historical types based on a cyclical theory of history. Unwilling to claim full credit for this new perspective, he acknowledged his debt to Heinrich Rückert's Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte in organischer Darstellung [Textbook of world history in organic representation] (1857).

The case of modern Lithuania is provocative in view of Danilevsky's historical analysis and model for the future. Throughout the twentieth century, Lithuania's self-image as 'the Athens of the North' has cast this small nation as an important bridge between the East and the West (the former often reduced to Slavic civilization or Russia). This concept of a synthesis of civilizations - east and west - was elaborated and promoted by the Lithuanian philosopher Stasys Salkauskis, particularly in Sur les confins de deux mondes , a book on Lithuania written in French in Switzerland. Later, it was severely criticised by other Lithuanian philosophers and essayists, including Salkauskis's disciple Antanas Maceina.

However, the myth of Lithuanian as a bridge between eastern and western Europe persists. Lithuanians are still inclined to describe their country as combining unique qualities of opposing civilisations, those of eastern and western Europe. Even if the civilising mission fails, Lithuania, in this perception, can serve as a kind of economic bridge between eastern Europe (primarily Russia) and western Europe. The accession of Lithuania to the European Union may have altered this vision slightly, yet it would be premature to mourn its passing quite yet. A considerable number of Lithuanian politicians and public figures continue to use this concept and rhetoric, which is far from being genuinely Lithuanian: a closer look reveals it to be a variation on the time-honoured Russian theme.

Generally speaking, Salkauskis's vision of Lithuania as a bridge between the civilizations of eastern and western Europe is another term for the specifically Russian notion of Eurasia, a concept usually reserved for Russia and its historic mission. Salkauskis's concept of a synthesis of civilizations is a Lithuanian variation on a classic theme of nineteenth and twentieth century Russian social thought. 'Eurasianism', as a philosophical tendency and a model of cultural and civil identity, was a central concept of the Russian theologians Vladimir Solovyov and Lev Karsavin. The latter spent much of his time in inter-war Lithuania, where he established himself as a professor of history at Vytautas Magnus University, exercising a major influence on intellectual life at the time.^[2]

The culture of determinism

The phenomena of innocence and victimhood are instrumental in shaping what could be called the culture of determinism and the culture of poverty. Consciousness of victimhood is motivated by a belief in malevolent and sinister forces manifesting themselves through secret and elusive human agencies; these manipulate and dominate the world through activities targeted at the vulnerable. The principle of evil is permanently ascribed to the powerful majority, while the principle of good is reserved exclusively for the powerless minority. This follows that I cannot err because I happen to belong to a small, vulnerable and fragile group, or, vice versa, that I can never be right because, by birth and upbringing, I belong to the privileged or powerful group. This means my human worth is predetermined and can be judged by my race, gender, nationality, or class.

To see human beings as irrevocably shaped and motivated by biological or social forces, without the involvement of moral or intellectual choices, could be called a 'modern barbarity'.^[3] Regrettably, modern barbarity, which replaces human fellowship with animosity and struggle between irreconcilable groups or forces, tends to surface and extend its influence beyond 'underground' consciousness. Far from being qualified as a social pathology, it assumes the status of normality and even progressiveness. It is a conspiracy theory that prohibits critical reflexivity or self-discovery. In this sense, it is the enemy of moral philosophy. Whereas modern political philosophy, if properly understood, is an extension of moral philosophy, the point of departure of the conspiracy theory is the radical denial of critical judgement and moral accountability. The assumption of any conspiracy theory is that agencies of good and evil are established once and for all. The only distinction it makes between good and evil is that good is powerless and condemned to suffer endlessly, while evil is powerful and motivated solely by the desire for more power. Conspiracy theories posit a society too naive to unmask the tyrants whose manipulation keeps it in ignorance.

Vytautas Kavolis, the eminent Lithuanian émigré sociologist, suggests that this phenomenon is deeply rooted in a modern system of moralising, which he terms 'the culture of determinism'. He defines it as such:

A modern amoral culture, in the sense that it tends to eliminate the notion of individual moral responsibility without taking collective responsibility seriously, is the culture of determinism. In this culture it is assumed that individuals are shaped and moved by biological or social forces in all essentials beyond the control, or even the possibility of major choices, of individuals affected by them. The four major intellectual foci of this culture are the theory that 'biology (or racial inheritance) is destiny'; the belief that the human being is and should be nothing but a utility-calculating, pleasure-maximizing machine; the conviction that the individual is, in currently existing societies, only a victim of the 'oppressive', 'impoverished', 'devitalizing', or 'traditionally constricted' social conditions of his or her existence (without the ability to become an agent of his fate and assume responsibility for her actions); and the notion that he can be helped out of such conditions solely by the 'guidance of experts' who have a 'rational social policy' at their disposal, in the determination of which those who are to be helped participate merely as instruments of the experts.^[4]

Kavolis's concept of a modern amoral culture sheds new light on why victimised groups or societies relate to ruling elites as patients to specialists. At the same time, it allows us a point of entry into the crucial issue: how and why the culture of victimhood manifests itself as the culture of destiny and determinism, as opposed to the culture of freedom and choice.

This concept reveals the links between all kinds of deterministic theories, especially in the social sciences. Kavolis starts by quoting Freud's dictum, 'biology is destiny', and goes on to show other modes of discourse that speak out in favour of inexorable laws of racial inheritance, history, milieu, social life, social organisation, and so forth. A modern amoral culture denying individual responsibility and moral choice, or in Kavolis's parlance 'the culture of determinism', is a system of moralising disseminated in the modern moral imagination. It is characteristic of anti-modernist reactions, including racism, technocracy, and other forms of deterministic consciousness. It also includes a belief in inexorable historical laws, a phenomenon that Popper described as historicism. That the culture and the spirit of determinism are a driving force behind totalitarian regimes need not be emphasized: totalitarianism without determinism would be a contradiction in terms. At the same time, the culture of determinism penetrates all 'minor' forms of organised hatred. It appears wherever hate figures are sought. The culture of determinism is the ideal breeding ground for conspiracy theories of all shades; they are symptoms of the modern barbarity. I suggest that totalitarianism and the spirit of technology are both the offspring of modern barbarity.^[5] Though the largest appeal of cultural determinism and amoral logic may be to modern anti-Semitism, it is attractive to many other anti-modern sentiments. The culture of determinism has also incorporated the medieval demonological, quasi-animistic and exorcistic principle that replaced personal responsibility with the action of the Devil; rape, for example, was excused by the presence of sinister and seductive powers in the body of the woman. Into its symbolic (anti-)logic, the culture of determinism incorporates beliefs originating from even earlier periods: for example the crime of maleficium, the secret act of collective magic. In the Roman Empire, the first Christians were accused of maleficium, (incest and the use of blood in religious rituals); since the medieval period, the crime has been reserved for Jews. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are people in Lithuania who believe that Jews use the blood of Christian babies for baking matzo, - a perfect example of a charge of maleficium.

Hence the rise of what might be called 'natural innocence' and 'victimhood'. According to this attitude, people cannot in principle control biological or social forces - on the contrary, particular individuals, and even entire societies, are shaped by those forces. Since the world is controlled and dominated by powerful groups, clandestine international organisations, or secret agencies and their elusive experts, individuals cannot assume moral responsibility for their actions; nor can they influence or change the state of affairs. Such an attitude is characteristic of marginalized and victimized groups, but it is equally characteristic of the kind of consciousness shaped by anti-liberal and anti-democratic regimes.

The culture of poverty

The culture of determinism is also characteristic of what Oscar Lewis described as 'the culture of poverty'^[6] Lewis studied for many years the trajectories of the identities of people living in the shanties of Puerto Rico and Mexico. He observed that the culture of poverty is not identical to actual poverty; there are cases of groups living in poverty maintaining social networks, conspicuous cooperation, and social forms (for example, eastern European Jews in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century). Lewis noted that the culture of poverty was not characteristic of Castro's post-revolution Cuba, since the society (even the poorest layers of it) acquired a sense of the value and meaning of life. Conversely, Lewis discovered the main characteristics of the culture of poverty - isolation, disbelief in the possibility of social ties, fatalism, universal distrust - among the thinking and worldview of wealthy people.

The culture of poverty is manifested primarily in an absolute distrust of institutions and state, in an unwillingness to participate in the life of the state, and in the conviction that everything is predetermined, be it social roles or the degree of power and wealth. A matricentric family structure, with the man distancing himself from the most important family problems, is another characteristic of the culture of poverty. This anthropological complex of the culture of poverty indicates clearly that it is a variant of determinism.

Kavolis asked as early as 1996 whether the culture of poverty existed in Lithuania. There is ample evidence to show that this is the case. As recent sociological surveys suggest, there is in Lithuanian society a strong sense of helplessness, fatalism, and failure, accompanied by a growing hostility to liberal democracy and democratic institutions. A considerable proportion of Lithuanians would prefer an authoritarian leader to a parliamentary democracy, the rule of the sword over the rule of law, representation, and the division of power.

In Lithuania, the forces of association have deteriorated considerably. Social atomisation and fragmentation has gone so far as to allow us to talk about the new forms of cultural colonization, isolation, and marginalization. The Soviet regime seems to have transformed Lithuania into a kind of low-trust nation, where distrust in authority and public institutions threatens the fragile foundations of civil society. Yet, oddly enough, people place enormous trust in the media, and television in particular. This sort of destructive potential was revealed and successfully exploited by Lithuanian populists during the presidential election in 2002 and after. People of the older generation often feel that their lives have been spoiled, if not wasted entirely. Many of them lost their jobs and savings; their children have left the country to settle in Ireland or Spain, while they must live on miserable pensions. It is impossible to convince these people that Lithuania has a vibrant economy, that it is 'a Baltic tiger' (as Poland's Leszek Balcerowicz recently described it); a large section of Lithuanian society is unaware of the EU reality.

Lithuania has the highest suicide rate in the world - an alarming fact that highlights the degree of social alienation in Lithuanian society. Moreover, emigration has deprived the country of many young and highly qualified people - in the last ten years nearly 300,000 people have left Lithuania to settle in the US, the UK, Ireland, and western Europe. The countryside has been deprived of the prospect of more rapid economic and social development, and the country as a whole has lost much of its potential.

The fragmentation and segmentation of Lithuanian society has reached a degree that threatens democracy, not to mention civic cohesion and solidarity. During the Paksas scandal, which ended in 2004 with the impeachment of Lithuanian President Rolandas Paksas, political commentators and politicians coined the phrase 'two Lithuanias'. This divided Lithuanian society into the 'sugar-beets' - the Lithuanian word runkeliai in this context is derogatory - and the elite.

Lithuania's future is deeply uncertain. As the presidential scandal has shown, there are still all too many temptations to talk of 'two Lithuanias'. On one hand, there is the westwards-looking and dynamic Lithuania, rejoicing over the nation's accession to the EU and Nato. On the other, there is the long-suffering Lithuania, divided, depressed, and abandoned by its elites, nostalgic for the equality-in-misery it knew during the Soviet Union. Whenever there is an election, a certain segment of society perceives it as the time to take revenge on the hated, semi-mythical elite. These voters are described as the 'sugar-beets', though it would be naive to limit this problem to the countryside. A good many Lithuanian tycoons and public figures overtly supported Rolandas Paksas and then Viktor Uspaskich, another populist who founded the Labour Party (made up of graduates of the Higher Institutions of the Communist Party, former functionaries, and the nouveau riches), who is now minister for the economy.

Nevertheless, this does not explain the roots of the culture of poverty in Lithuania - bearing in mind Lewis's idea that the culture of poverty does not necessarily coincide with actual poverty. According to the results of a survey conducted between 2 and 5 December 2004 by the market research group Rait, 34.2 per cent of Lithuanians believe that the period between 1990 and 2004 (ie the early stages of Lithuanian independence) was the most unfortunate period in the country's history. Only 29.7 per cent of respondents reserved this honour for the Soviet period, and even fewer (22.7 per cent) for the period under Tsarist Russia (1795-1915).^[7] Small wonder that many commentators, shocked by this outcome, have diagnosed a new social disease, the symptoms of which are identity crisis, historical amnesia, political illiteracy, and ultimately the disappearance of national pride.

The culture of complaining, coupled with the culture of poverty, depicts Lithuania as unfortunate, corrupt, cynical, predatory, and amoral, devoid of justice, benevolence, and respect for human dignity. The country is said to have no future among the 'civilized' countries of the EU. On closer inspection, it appears that the main characteristics of the culture of poverty - isolation, disbelief in the possibility of social cohesion, fatalism, and distrust - are stronger in Lithuania than ever. It is the price Lithuania has paid for its rapid and drastic socio-cultural change.

Faster than history

Our contemporaries proclaim that the twentieth century was the era of the end of history, morality, and politics. Postmodernism, post-materialism, post-ideology, post-Christianity, post-industrialism, post-capitalism: no aspect of politics and culture remains untouched by the postmodern propensity, not to say obsession, for relegating the phenomena of modernity to the margins of history. It is hard to imagine a pronouncement on any modern social phenomenon that does not include this sonorous 'post' to indicate the death of the moral imagination and modernity itself. Now we are to question the validity and existence of history itself.

Zygmunt Bauman describes many writers and commentators' temptation to write off our stage in the history of modernity in terms of endings:

What prompts so many commentators to speak of the 'end of history', of postmodernity, 'second modernity' and 'surmodernity', or otherwise to articulate the intuition of a radical change in the arrangement of human cohabitation and in social conditions under which life-politics is nowadays conducted, is the fact that the long effort to accelerate the speed of modernity has presently reached its 'natural limit'.^[8]

Societies which have experienced ideological terror are tempted to treat history as another form of ideology, to question its validity or deny its existence. Central and eastern European artists and intellectuals know better than anybody else what it means to live under the terror of 'the inexorable laws of history'.

Too much history can become a burden. Territorial claims, bloodshed, and the teaching of hatred are nearly always justified by referring to history and religion: the subordination of the two to politics is a disease of our time. The same applies to territorial conflicts over holy sites, or the rivalries of religions exploited for worldly matters. Competing memories, loyalties, pain, and suffering have no better justification and reference point than history. Although our infatuation with history is itself a sign of modernity, too much history may be at odds with our modern intellectual and moral sensibilities. We respect and cherish a strong sense of history in ourselves and in others, yet tend to object strongly to the domination of the 'eternal yesterday' (to use Max Weber's term) over today or tomorrow. Where the liberal imagination speaks out in favour of today and tomorrow, the conservative imagination raises its voices in defence of yesterday.

Let it suffice to recall the dystopian visions of Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Arthur Koestler. Here, history is an empty vessel, signifying nothing, at the mercy of the will-to-power, which identifies reality with its conscious transformation or 'rationalization'. According to this mode of thought, history is measured in hours and minutes, instead of decades and centuries, made and unmade constantly. If so, we have to treat human lives as clay or bronze or oil on our brush: we have to clean the canvas or dismantle the construction instantly as the need for an adjustment or new configuration arises. How on earth can we abolish art only on the basis of someone's claim that we consume too much oil or bronze?

O'Brien, the character in Orwell's 1984 , points out that empirical reality does not exist other than through the Party, its politics, and its interpretation of that reality. The human being is merely a construct of the Party's will, without independent existence. The means with which the individual may identify himself or herself - perceptions, memory, and language - are supplied by the Party. In fabricating these, the Party forges consciousness and human existence. History is constructed by the politically predominant modes of discourse.

Yet it is quite possible to belong, mentally and intellectually, to mutually exclusive symbolic designs of memory, loyalty, participation, and self-comprehension. Some people claim to act in postmodern world, and accordingly, to think within the framework of postmodernism; others speak out in favour of modernity. As Bauman reminds us, the history of time began with modernity; moreover, modernity is the history of time - or, to put it another way, modernity is the time when time has a history.^[9]

There is another problem here, however. Postmodernism, with its well-known inclinations towards historical and ethical relativism, is capable of putting into question what undoubtedly constitutes the moral substance of many people. We can call into question the existence and validity of nearly every social and political phenomenon, but if we deny the Holocaust, then we deny history, and vice versa. What is behind such a stance is value, rather than sheer fact. History exists insofar as value precedes truth. A narrator of history is a moralist, rather than a sheer executor of scholarly technique, scientific method, or truth.

Announcements of the end of modernity, of modernity's decline along with history itself, appear to have been premature.

the news of modernity's passing away, even the rumors of its swan song, are grossly exaggerated: their profusion does not make the obituaries any less premature. It seems that the kind of society which has been diagnosed and put on trial by the founders of critical theory (or, for that matter, by Orwell's dystopia) was just one of the forms that versatile and protean modern society was to take. Its waning does not augur the end of modernity. Nor does it herald the end of human misery. Least of all does it presage the end of critique as an intellectual task and vocation; and by no means does it render such critique redundant.^[10]

Interestingly, the 'faster than history' idiom acquires a special meaning when dealing with social change in central and eastern Europe. The speed of time in what Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, each in his own way, described as 'yet another Europe', is beyond the historical, cultural, and political imaginations of western Europeans and North Americans. To paraphrase the title of Kundera's novel, which became an admirable idiom to express the eastern central European sense of history and grasp of life, it is the experience of 'the unbearable lightness of change'.

What in western Europe was one of the greatest civilization-shaping movements of centuries, in central and eastern Europe took the form of the mandatory economic and political programmes to be implemented by the successor states of the Soviet Union. The new democracies had to catch up with Western European history in order to qualify for the exclusive and honorary club of Europe. Moreover, "yet another Europe" had to become even faster than history, transforming itself into a recognisable collective actor in global commerce and politics.

Capitalism, which had long been presented in Soviet high school textbooks as the major menace to humankind, seems more aggressive and dynamic in post-Soviet societies than in more egalitarian, welfare-state oriented, post-capitalist western European countries. Nordic countries can only marvel at what they perceive as the old-fashioned, historically recycled, ruthless capitalism of the Baltic states, or in more conventional terms, the liberal economy of Estonia and other Baltic countries. The countries that used to symbolise to Soviet citizens the embodiment of 'wild west capitalism', with its glorification of the winners and contempt for the losers, now appears astonishingly communitarian and humane.

Indeed, such economies are benign compared to the 'first come, first served' mentality that paradoxically, albeit logically, blends with inverted Marxism. This vulgar variety of economic determinism and materialism in Lithuania and other eastern central European countries barely surprises those who know that the last thing one can expect to be prioritised there is culture. Nevertheless, almost all agree that the West should pay for 'the culture, uniqueness and spirituality' of post-totalitarian countries: grants in exchange for suffering and experience.

Lithuanian society seems locked mentally between two poles. On one hand, there has been the discovery of the intrinsic logic of capitalism, characteristic of the nineteenth century and the post-Weimar Republic period: incredibly fast economic growth and passionate advocacy of the values of free enterprise and capitalism. On the other hand, there is anomie, social fission, stark social contrasts, corruption, and poverty culture with all its symptoms. Combining nineteenth and twentieth century phenomena of consciousness, politics and culture, the postmodern and post-totalitarian era has squeezed two centuries of European history into one decade: the 'transition' of Baltic states from the regulated economies of communism to the free-market economies of global capitalism. Lithuania and other Baltic states have become laboratories in which the speed of social change and cultural transformation is measured and tested. The results have exceeded what we know from the grand historical narrative. These societies have developed 'faster than history'.

Faster than history, but slower than a lifetime. People often complain that their lives and careers have been ruined by the rapid social transformation. They take it as a tragedy, arguing (not unreasonably) that their lives, energies and careers have been wasted, if not completely spoiled. A human lifetime proves insufficient to witness the sweeping change of a society.

Vytautas Kavolis worked out a theory of postmodernism as the attempt to reconcile what was separated by modernity. At the same time, he used the idea of postmodernism as an interpretative framework for the split between the modernist and the anti-modernist. He applied the concept of the postmodern to the process of de-sovietization, too:

If de-sovietization, in its diversity of forms, continues relatively unhindered and does not become complacent in its own rhetoric, it has the potentiality of becoming a first-rate (that is, 'enriching') civilizational movement. If the concept of the 'postmodern' can still be retrieved from the cultists who have made it a monopoly of their own exuberance, de-sovietization could even be considered, in some of its cultural emphases, as 'postmodern'. (I conceive of the 'postmodern' not as anti-modernist, but as the building of bridges between the 'modernist' and the 'anti-modernist'.) ^[11]

How to react to the challenge of modernity? How to accept it? How to reconcile and bridge what has been ruthlessly separated by modernity: truth and value; rationality and emotional intimacy; expertise and sensitivity; hierarchy and equality; tradition and innovation; the canon and the creative experiment; metaphysics and science; individual and community; community and universal humanity?

Artists and humanists in Lithuania are in a position to fill many gaps and bridge some parts of human sensibility divided between disciplines and scattered across global culture. They are ahead of many social and political processes on their way to Lithuania. They predict and passionately deny these processes, laugh at them, make fun of them, anticipate and criticise them. Contemporary art has become a social and cultural critique in our postmodern world - this applies to central and east European societies better than any. Contemporary art and culture may prevent the spread of one more disease of our time: unlimited manipulation of public opinion in the name of freedom and democracy. Artists and scholars find their raison d'être in calling into question everything that fails to respect human dignity in an age in which words and meanings, power and politics, and politeness and sensitivity are divorced from one another. Their efforts help restore the power of association crucial for their societies. In the twentieth century, modern artists detested the crowd; postmodern art, if properly understood, reconciles the individual with community.

Whatever the speed of life and the intensity of change, our epoch can be faster than history, especially if measured as it was measured a century ago. Yet it will always be slower than the lifetime of a particular human individual. Contemporary culture's effort to reconcile the individual with him or herself, with the community, society, and history would therefore come as a perfect tribute to what always remains beyond or ahead of history - the values of humanity and dialogue.

Intellectuals: roles and identities

What is the role of intellectuals in the nation- or community-building process? Some scholars of nationalism suggest that intellectuals invent traditions, set up interpretative frameworks for collective identity and self-comprehension, establish collective identities, coin political and moral vocabularies, even shape nations politically. At the same time, dissenting intellectuals may challenge their nations by offering an alternative vision of their societies and cultures.

In the early 1990s, some Lithuanian intellectuals were fairly optimistic about their social roles in society. Ricardas Gavelis, the recently deceased Lithuanian writer, caustic public intellectual, and libertarian critic of society and culture, described the role of what he termed 'the free intellectual' as such:

Due to Lithuania's having missed out on the general development [of western culture], we have managed to preserve an almost extinct species - the free intellectual. Such creatures are virtually extinct in Europe, and even more so in America. There, the intellectual is almost always part of some kind of academic circle. That means he unavoidably becomes a member of the state hierarchy, even if he teaches at a private university. Whether they like it or not, intellectuals must accommodate to the rules of an academic career, of the narrow world of academia, of a narrow context of specialised reference. The era of the free intellectual - in the mould of Russell and Sartre - has long passed. In Lithuania, the true intellectual is free whether he likes it or not, since there is no influential academic world. For that reason, individual intellectuals have a greater influence on overall cultural development than elsewhere. I consider this to be positive. In times of change and confusion, free intellectuals are more useful than inflexible academic structures. Individuals are more flexible, more inclined to take risks, are not afraid to jeopardise their academic posts. It is my hope that free intellectuals will be the ones to launch the process of synchronising Lithuanian culture with world culture.^[12]

However, quite different positions have been expressed on the role of the intellectual in society. Donatas Sauka, a conservative literary scholar, wrote in 1995 that Lithuanian intellectuals had forgotten their mission to preserve cultural traditions. He offered the exhausted paradigm of the intellectual who defended the nation against those who tarnished its image and international reputation. Sauka warned that "the liberals of the younger generation and their older colleagues among émigrés" threatened the injured nation:

Who, then, defends society's conservative opinions - who speaks in the name of the injured nation, who expresses its historical insults, who mythologizes its moral reputation? There is no point trying out the sharpness of one's arrows when attacking a monster created by one's own imagination; but please give us a true picture of its traits, give us its first and last names! The liberals of the younger generation and their older colleagues among the émigrés have a specific target which could embody the essence of such an ideology. The target of their polemic is not fresh, but the faded ideas, moral directives and statements expressed by the current leaders of the nation during the euphoria of the period of rebirth.^[13]

Here we have two opposing concepts. Gavelis depicts intellectuals as critics of the establishment, society, and culture; Sauka takes them as defenders of the nation's pride and prejudice. What is the real raison d'être of modern intellectuals? Dedication to the nation's historical injuries and moral traumas or social and cultural criticism? The politics of loyalty or the politics of dissent? Work towards a sustainable society or the preservation of historical memory?

The established ideas of mainstream Lithuanian nationalism have been put into question over the last ten years. A new approach has introduced the concept of civil society in place of 'the people' or 'the nation'; the intellectual is no longer an educator, builder, and shaper of the nation, but a social and cultural critic. Increasingly, Lithuanian intellectuals associate themselves with civil society, community-building, and the public domain. This tendency has been extremely timely, bearing in mind the deterioration of social links and networks, anomie, and social atomisation of Lithuanian society. The eminent Lithuanian philosopher Arvydas Sliogeris anticipated this shift, calling into question Gavelis's enthusiasm for individual intellectuals, and emphasising community-building over personal emancipation. Despite undertones of Kulturpessimismus, an extremely harsh and exaggerated critique of Lithuanian public life, Sliogeris's standpoint shed new light on the critical importance of public debate for a society under transition.

Several years of independence have proven our inability to rationally order our present. What can the pitifully few active and thinking people still capable of seeing the world clearly, simply, with a sober and cold eye, accomplish? Some such individuals exist, but they are powerless, because the parade is being led by the mobile vulgus and its idols. Is there any hope? Yes, there is, but it is hazy and cannot be transformed into a technical project, because in its deepest essence it is non-technical, anti-technical. All my hope is tied to the spontaneous emergence of small communities in which organic forms of communal existence can begin to grow. However, these new forms of community can only develop somewhere beyond the boundaries of existing 'organized' forms of (political, religious, economic, educational) life. The instigators of these communities must say a determined 'no' to all, absolutely all, dominant structures of public and private life, because those structures are dead and continue to exist through habit alone. Democracy, freedom, prosperity, spirituality, truth, conscience, Christianity, culture, tradition - all of this has turned into ideological chatter and self-deception. If 'values' and forms of existence remain as they are, it is no longer possible to breathe life back into these things. Why do I speak about the creation of new types of communities? After all, there is the danger that such a new community will be nothing but a herd of slaves and schizophrenics ruled by paranoid and cynical Rasputins. There are already more than enough such sects in today's world. The formation of authentic communities involves enormous risk. But there is no other option, because individuals are ultimately helpless.^[14]

It is widely and rightly assumed that loyalty and betrayal are among the key concepts of the ethic of nationalism. The marriage of state and culture, the congruence between political power and collective identity, offers a simple explanation of loyalty and betrayal. Loyalty is seen as the commitment of the individual to his or her nation and its historical-cultural substance, while betrayal is identified as a failure to commit to a common cause, or a diversion from the object of political loyalty and cultural or linguistic fidelity. However, yawning gaps exist between different patterns of nationalism.

For conservative or radical nationalists, social and cultural critique of one's people and state is regarded as nothing less than treason; for their liberal counterparts, it is precisely what constitutes political awareness, civic virtue, and a conscious dedication to the people, culture, and state. On closer inspection, it appears that the concepts of loyalty, dissent, and betrayal can be instrumental in mapping the liberal and democratic face of nationalism.

Loyalty, dissent, and betrayal are political and moral categories. It is impossible to analyse them without touching upon crucial issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: political culture, liberal democracy, poverty, hatred, populism, political manipulations, social criticism, and political commitment. I hope the analysis of the aforementioned phenomena reveals what it means to live in a society where they become the nexus of social and political existence. History, sociocultural dynamics, and the dialectic of identities are best understood where social change accelerates to a climax, where it becomes 'faster than history'.

• ^[1] See J. L. Talmon, (New York: Frederic A. Praeger, 1960), 242-277.
• ^[2] See Leonidas Donskis, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 13-34.
• ^[3] see Leszek Kolakowski, (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.)
• ^[4] Vytautas Kavolis, (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), 48.
• ^[5] see Kolakowski, op. cit., 14-31.
• ^[6] For more on this issue, see Oscar Lewis, 'The Culture of Poverty', in Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, eds., (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 217-224.
• ^[7] For more on data provided by Rait, see www.rait.lt
• ^[8] Zygmunt Bauman, (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 10-11.
• ^[9] Ibid., 110.
• ^[10] Ibid., 27-28.
• ^[11] Vytautas Kavolis, (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), p. 166.
• ^[12] Ricardas Gavelis, 'Kulturine situacija: Vakarai ir Lietuva: 1' [The Cultural Situation: the West and Lithuania: 1], [Patterns] 64 (1993), 80-81.
• ^[13] Donatas Sauka, 'Ideologija, kultura ir absurdo karusele' [Ideology, Culture, and the Carousel of Absurdity], [The Years] (1995), 123.
• ^[14] Arvydas Sliogeris, [Confessions of a Conservative: Texts 1988-1994] (Vilnius: [The Beginnings], 1995), 22-23.

Published 2005-04-26

Original in English
Contributed by Kulturos barai
© Leonidas Donskis/Kulturos barai
© Eurozine