With the recent amendment of the Hungarian media law, the idea of the "open society" has been spared at least further damage, even if it hardly marks much of an occasion for celebration. Perhaps the furore over the media law and its partial retraction are part of the current government's broader modus operandi: an initial blatant attack against the elements of Hungarian society that cannot be fitted into its perception of a "healthy national body", followed by a tactical retreat. Yet, if this is indeed a description of the official strategy, then it becomes clear that the actual legal code has never been the central issue for the Hungarian Right, in its respectable (FIDESZ) or less respectable (Jobbik et al.) forms. From this perspective, the real aim is not a transformation of public institutions so much as – and their own rhetoric often verges into such territory – a moral revolution within the "nation" – once again defined in strictly conformist yet still majoritarian terms.

The "class of 1989" and its enemies

Once again, the unctuous phrases of saccharine pseudo-humanism, the defences of "human dignity" and lowest-common-denominator morality, are being marshalled to enable the state to have a say in what can be thought and expressed publicly. It is this monotonous regularity that perhaps shocks those of us of an older generation more than anything. "Monotonous regularity" because totalitarian thinking is inevitably monotonous: its aim has always been to ensure that the future differs as little from the past as is technically possible. "Unctuous morality" because the totalitarian mind's pathological love of humanity in the abstract is always a hatred of the "crooked timber" of individual human beings, as Isaiah Berlin put it; always a yearning for a melding of the separate, the imperfect into a destructive transcendence.

It is hard to escape the feeling that Hungary is slipping backwards rather than advancing forwards, repudiating the entire past two decades, willingly slipping on the "mind-forg'd manacles" of William Blake that seemed so utterly, irredeemably smashed twenty years ago. Is the manacle really the right image? Perhaps one more evocative of infantile regression, evoking as much the English Victorian nursery as the Young Pioneer camp, or the safe camaraderie of the island of perverted children from Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, is more appropriate? Whichever metaphor best captures the discomfort felt at this shift away from the liberal-democratic world is not of primary importance: what should matter to all of us – whether inside or outside Hungary – who value the idea of the open society is why this is a matter for discomfort? Why discomfort, and not outrage, disgust or any other emotion?

One attempt at an answer could lie in the very idea of its expressing such a return to a past we thought dead and buried: the mummy rising up yet again from its sarcophagus regardless of how many stakes had been driven through its heart. Thinking back to the world at the outset of the new era after 1989, to what we thought was the triumph of freedom and the end of competing ideologies, something of this kind appears unthinkable. To those of us now firmly wedged into middle age – the "class of 1989" – the world of the totalitarian nursery-prison should rightfully be recalled, at most, with a sense of satisfaction at its impossibility, its pastness: the target of pedestrian irony or the object of quiet reminiscence. That it remains such an attractive force – and, in particular in Hungary, such a compelling ideology among the next generation, twenty-somethings in their Trianon-revisionist T-shirts – should make us all think about glib assumptions of "inevitability".

Censorship and cyberspace

A resurgent totalitarian mindset does not, of course, mean that the full weight of totalitarian institutions are likely to descend; that the entire apparatus of censors with their Dederon-fibre suits and rubberstamps will be brought out from the cellars of the ministries and placed back at their desks, among typewriters and dusty pot-plants. Nor is the apparatus of state thought-policing invariably the same. János Kádár's Hungary, it scarcely bears repeating, was hardly Gustáv Husák's Czechoslovakia, nor were either of these states in anything like the same league as the fantasy projections of Hitler and Stalin. Even if kept in its original form, the Hungarian media law could have been left uninvoked, remaining on the books without a single prosecution. Indeed, prosecution might well have been the last thing that the Hungarian Right wanted: appeals all the way to Strasbourg are an embarrassment to be avoided at all costs. Either that, or direct censorship could have been kept in reserve until a sufficiently unpopular victim – a minor producer of sadomasochist or coprophilic pornography, let's say – came along. Or, and this is most likely, it could simply have been bypassed in the increasingly de-materialized landscape of all advanced economies.

After all, what is cyberspace if not a medium that supports openness and, through the countless shifts and tweaks of the "crooked timber" of private individuals, undermines any one single Truth-Organ? Isn't the era of Internet media, to cite another of Berlin's metaphors, the victory of the sly, ambiguity-prepared fox over the hedgehog with his One Big Thing? And is not the old threat of the censor just as archaic as the artificial-fibre suit and typewriter? The image of a new Great Firewall of Hungary that blocks "violations of human dignity" on web browsers is not only laughable but doesn't begin to match the existential threat to information that the denial of paper and ink was only two decades ago. Now that it is technically impossible to prevent information flows with the high modernist precision that the communist states had at their disposal, do we really need to be worried after all?

Cybergemeinschaft versus meatspace

No, the worry is not quite as extreme as the dark visions of a true step backwards in time. Both the supporters and the enemies of open societies are aware of the irreversible seachange in human communication and consciousness that the existence of cyberspace represents. With only a few corners of the world excepted, modern despots know they cannot exist as small elites ruling through ideological mystification and rubber truncheons: all modern versions of a closed society have to be majoritarian. China's Great Firewall does not require the very highest of technical skills to circumvent; instead, the greatest force of conformity is the general consensus among the Chinese people that their system is the best possible alternative. Putin's Russia, likewise, rests upon the social consensus of "the people" versus the "elites".

It may seem a truism to recall that internal self-control is always a more effective motivator for human behaviour than external force. Yet though the old power-technologies of the totalitarian regimes of the past have lost their effectiveness, it often seems as if we have yet to escape from the idea that totalitarianism is necessarily authoritarian as well. If, following the US sci-fi author William Gibson, the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace is increasingly more important for our everyday lives than physical reality, then the physical world impinges less and less upon our mental spheres. Concomitantly, of course, those who have greater ties to the hallucination than to their immediate physical environment will be drawn further and further away from those who are shut off by digital or linguistic divides, trapped within the "prison of meatspace". And the danger that the resentments of the excluded will fill and then become the public space, the natural medium for despotisms of all types and degree, grows still greater.

In the end, the greatest devastation that censorship wreaks is no longer on the cosmopolitan dissident intellectual, but on the public sphere of the society on which it is imposed. As time goes by it no longer seems a backward-looking force, but actually a mere hastening of tendencies already in place: the "islands of positive deviance" cut off in their own individual cyber-Gemeinschaft, safely ignored or despised by an ever more homogeneous "healthy body of the nation". And so the actual public sphere – the engagement with those who do share the same immediate physical vicinity – grows ever more bland, ever more evenly processed, onwards forever, for whatever foreseeable future could be foreseen, without disruption from elements who no longer require suppression, but simply go off into their own little playroom.

Published 2011-03-01

Original in English
First published in Eurozine

Contributed by Magyar Lettre Internationale
© Martin Tharp
© Eurozine