Philosophical Garden

How Does One Live With Other People’s Stupidity?

26 minutes

BOHM DIALOGUE Vol. 22 | September 18, 2022

Julia Ovcharenko, Chris Keulemans, Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski

Vienna—Amsterdam—Kyiv

Summary

The example of post-nazi Germany is used to discuss the roots of resentment. The connection between nazism and marxism is identified. What are the social effects of guilt and impunity? Liberal tolerance is questioned in the context of Ukrainians interacting with russians. The limits of tolerance are discussed and illustrated by the examples of responses to Noam Chomsky and Jurgen Habermas. Aesthetics and cultural representation are described as contested domains. The phenomenon of ‘good russians’. The need to understand and re-evaluate russian cultural heritage in light of the preponderance of the hegemonic mindset.

Key words

Yuri Andrukhovych good russians aesthetics cultural representation tolerance liberal values russia Ukraine the future

Timecode

27:55 everyday cultural conflict

47:12 aesthetics

1:02:19 “good russians“

1:11:00 russian heritage

1:21:53 russian history

Participants

C — Chris Keulemans

D — Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski

J — Julia Ovcharenko

THE DIALOGUE

C: There’s been a number of books and documentaries which are very illuminating about human behavior. For instance, if your father or grandfather was a nazi and working with the nazis under German occupation of this country, then very often this would not be discussed at home, a taboo subject. The father or grandfather would maybe have been punished, maybe spent a few years in jail or maybe was forbidden to practice his profession. Which created very bitter and resentful citizens, because they were suspicious, they were angry, they were bitter, they were destructive. And this mentality of course invaded the whole family, the whole household for one or two generations. So the kids or the grandchildren also got poisoned by this without exactly knowing where this behavior came from, because nobody spoke about it. Some of them grew up to be destructive personalities themselves without understanding the roots of their resentment. So on a psychological level this can be a wave which spreads into society. This is true in all countries that have gone to war and occupation of course. We’re not talking only about Germany.

J: Germany is a big issue. This collective feeling of guilt that had to be kept in the society is supported on many levels: at schools, in media and public discourse, it’s there.

C: It’s also complicated in Germany. Because after the Second World War a number of the higher-placed nazi officials were executed or in prison, but thousands and thousands of them were not. And a surprising number of business owners simply continued and made the German economy reach again. I’m really surprised how many of those were actually allowed to continue their life.

D: Plus Argentine, plus Brazil.

C: And East Germany as well, it’s also interesting.

So yes, on one hand no other country ever dealt so openly with its guilt. On the other hand they let a lot of the fascists simply continue.

J: They have millions of these people, it’s hard to punish everyone or to change everyone. Who would be the punishers? How many people should control the situation?

C: Right.

D: How do you live when your country is nazi country? The question with myths, we all know that nazism and ruscism is only myths, like liberalism, like nationalism.

J: It’s an idea, a concept.

D: It’s only an idea. And then we choose what to do, how to think. Do we know how many younger people choose nazism, in Germany, only because they’re younger people?

J: Neo-nazi parties, is that what you’re talking about?

D: From Marxism to nazism it’s a very short path. We know how Germany supported Ulianov-Lenin. They supported communists from the Second World War. There was an unbelievable friendship between Germany and communists, it’s very strange. nazism and communism together built the myths in Germany. If we understand the myths, we can understand human behavior, and then we can understand how to transform this behavior. It’s not about tolerance, I don’t like to tolerate these people who are working with the occupiers. But I want to understand how to live on one planet with these people after the war.

C: Before we go there, before you introduce your question, Julia, can I ask one thing? It’s about Ukraine after the fall of the soviet union. How did society deal with the people who had responsible roles in the soviet system? Who were also responsible for the oppression of Ukraine during the soviet system? Were those people taken to court, were they punished, were they out of work, what happened?

J: Punished definitely not. Frankly speaking, I don’t really remember any open public cases about that. It feels like nothing happened.

D: Medvedchuk. Stus and Medvedchuk.

J: But was Medvedchuk under arrest after that? Medvedchuk was never punished for his actions.

D: Only now.

J: If we talk about communists and all the kgb agents who were active during the soviet time, I don’t remember any public movement against them. they sort of disappeared from public view. That’s what happened before with the soviets, and the bolsheviks, and the imperial russian aggression. They were never punished for anything they’d done. And someone who is never held accountable for their crimes then repeats them on a larger scale, and that’s a problem. The Western culture remembers only the german nazis for starting the war, but they usually forget that stalin was from the very beginning the same initiator of that. And having switched during the war and becoming a winning side after the war doesn’t make them less guilty of everything they had done.

C: No. But that’s why I find it an interesting question in the context of today. After independence, after the fall of the soviet union there was not a cleaning of society by punishing civil servants, the rulers, the governors, the military, the security people from the soviet system?

J: I hope I’m wrong. I hope I just don’t remember. But I really don’t remember any such cases.

D: Because we don’t have a reformed justice system.

J: That’s absolutely right. We haven’t changed our court system in these thirty years enough to get someone punished. Most of the people who belonged to the communist party and who were the party leader on every level from national to very local just stayed in politics. This should give you the link to a very good documentary made recently by Ukrainians about the events of independence, explaining the public inspiration and the people who made it happen. It has seven or eight episodes; it’s called The Collapse.

But here in this documentary we see only the tip of the iceberg. It doesn’t explain what happened in many other countries. Let me just describe the situation: there are 450 parliamentarians when the act of Independence comes to a vote. Only a small group of them are non-communists, and these are the people who are pushing for independence. The large majority of the parliament is communist, and they do nothing. They don’t know what to do, they have no initiative. They are incapable of making decisions. So, it was the hidden negotiations between this passionate group of non-communists and the head of the parliament who became the first president of Ukraine that brought about the result.

This makes me think of the many people who were just pawns in this game. They had a position of parliamentary representative, but they did nothing, they had no action in history. I can just imagine how many people on other levels stayed like that and maybe protected their own interests. They stayed in the system, because it was not possible to fill the system with new people, they were not here. The people in the system stayed, but they found a new way to be.

C: It’s interesting when you think about what is going to happen after the victory now in Ukraine.

J: Let me try to formulate my question again. Somehow, I have to avoid putting it like this: how does one live with other people’s stupidity?

D: How to be together.

J: How to be together. I’m not asking how to be united, but at least how to live together. I recall reading Trump and a Post-Truth World, the book by Ken Wilber in which he questioned the liberal tolerance that spread all over our western culture that’s based on everyone’s equality, freedom of speech, freedom of self-expression, all the values we protect. But it makes really transparent the borders between our values. If we really want to protect some values, how to respect the opposite opinion?

It’s really hard, it can be misleading, and it can be really fragile if we tolerate everything.

C: What triggered you to put this question on the table today?

D: We see human behavior around us. We of course love Ukrainians, but we see different Ukrainians, and don’t understand how to fight against a common enemy if we’re so different in our views on this enemy. Some Ukrainians speak about good russians or speak with russians, or work with russians right now.

J: Sometimes the reason is just in ignorance of stupidity. People can not explain why they did this or that, or they have no argument, or they never thought deeply. And then you feel like you have to convince them, or educate them, or bring them more knowledge, or you try to care about them while they don’t seem to care about themselves or about the others.

C: There is of course a difference between tolerating ignorance or stupidity and tolerating hate speech or evil. What are the intolerable forms of human behavior that you’re confronted with? What makes you ask yourself: should I tolerate this or do I refuse this?

[27:55] everyday cultural conflict

J: For example, an everyday situation: you are taking public transport and someone talks loudly on the phone or watches YouTube videos without headphones. I have the right to tell them this is inappropriate in our culture, but they respond by saying, oh, we’re from Muslim culture, and in our culture it is okay to be loud, to be very much expressive, to have a lot of self-presence. And here I can come to a really uncertain point: am I asking for an adjustment of everyday behavior within the frame of common culture, or am I being aggressive against someone’s identity? I can also be taken as a racist if I ask for a small thing.

C: So, you’re talking about tolerating different cultural behavior in public space, let’s say. And certainly, that’s absolutely something. But again, that’s different from ignorance, stupidity or from hate speech and evil. So give me more.

D: I don’t understand and I try to avoid hate speech about Mr Habermas or about Mr Noam Chomsky, who have strange views on putin, on this war. They are not stupid people, they are smart people and they are excellent thinkers. And what happened? Why are these liberal democracy scientists so stupid?

J: They don’t seem to see the connection of what they are saying with the influence that it has. They don’t see they’re protecting the aggressor and not helping at all.

C: I think this is a very interesting discussion in both cases. Either with the guys in the bus who make a lot of noise or with the world-famous scientists who have a dangerous influence on the opinion of many thinking people in the West. In both cases you can ignore it, or you can oppose it in words, or you can oppose it with violence.

And that is actually the choice we as human beings, as citizens in diverse societies have. We are making that choice all the time, every day, all day long.

J: Yes, we are controlling the rules of being together and controlling ourselves, our own emotions. It’s trying to be productive and not destructive, and reorganizing the rules in a way that helps us to be better together.

D: I think we have three ways. The first way for me to understand the person with opposite views is to research their biography. I research their childhood and the possible reasons for their view, the environment in which they might have been formed. Then I form my opinion and I am ready to express it. I really like the form of open letters. Such as the one written by Ukrainian scientists in response to Chomsky. Or Yermolenko replying to Habermas, because he translated Habermas many years before.

This is a good way to communicate, because we don’t have destruction with own-selves, with our emotions, we don’t sit with this. We’re just writing and we’re thinking about these arguments. And if you write well, then your words might have more influence on readers than speeches by Habermas and Chomsky.

But what about not public persons? What do we do in our daily lives, as Julia described, in her neighborhood in Vienna? Or, Christ, in North Amsterdam. You are an expert on different cultures in one neighborhood, how do we live all together?

C: It’s a really interesting question. I think the secret of good relationships—and this is true for a marriage or for a city—is to ignore some things. In cities like Vienna, Amsterdam, Kyiv, it doesn’t work if everybody is constantly commenting on each other. Good relationships with people imply that everyone understands they can’t interfere with every little thing they don’t like. But then there’s a line. When somebody does something violent, or destructive, or dangerous, or simply unacceptable morally, ethically, what do you do? Do you ignore that too? Or do you step in and interfere? Do you raise your voice? This is a very important question and especially coming from you, I understand this question. If you’re living in a war situation where every day is about life and death, you have no patience, you have no tranquility to simply let things pass you by. You have no patience for stupidity, you have no patience for ignorance and you certainly have no patience for destructive behavior and destructive language. If I read Habermas or Noam Chomsky on this war, I can think, okay, you’re very old and I know your agenda. And everybody knows your agenda, so congratulations that two hundred people still believe your work, but otherwise you’re not dangerous anymore. I can afford to think that and not to respond, but for you that might be different, because you have no time for this. You see the damage, you know that these individuals are speaking dangerous language, so you have no room to simply ignore it, you have to interfere and respond in public. So it pushes you to a moral question actually in daily life, in street life, but also in public life.

J: I agree with you about this emotional condition. Ukrainians cannot let some things go now, because we see the long tail of consequences. And that may be why we see others as asleep, or lazy, or complacent—it makes us nervous. I see this difference in myself, as well. A year ago I could stay quiet in many cases and find an explanation. But now it feels different.

C: Which can be a good thing, because if the whole society is awake like this, and if the whole society is capable of keeping the standards very high for yourself and for the others, then potentially this can be a very good situation for the society of the future.

J: Thank you for saying that, Chris. That helps not to feel too traumatized. Oh, Ukrainians are traumatized, they cannot tolerate normal things. Or if they are overthinking something, that’s fine, let’s keep it this way.

[47:12] aesthetics

J: For Ukrainians who choose the enemy’s side, that also affects their lives. This is where it’s more complicated to talk about tolerance to some really tiny things that are not obvious, but they matter. They matter because they frame our everyday life or our perception of what is good, what is beautiful. Even talking about beauty, and aesthetics it’s really not black and white. Ukrainian designers discuss even the phones that should be used in public communication. Or our ministry, cultural ministry, tries to redesign logotypes, or visual communications in cultural programs. And that’s done really bad. And those of us who are sensitive to these small details protest against bad wording, bad visual communication, bad logos, bad design and often are not understood. How can we speak out and say that this or that cultural product is not allowed to represent Ukraine now?

Everyone wants to do something for Ukraine, so they invite everything and everyone who is eager to participate. And if the representative product or program is bad, it makes things only worse. But the counter-argument is, it’s more important to be doing something than to worry about these shades of meaning.

C: And this is something you’re dealing with right now?

J: Yes, with some movies that are on the market now. They are shown because they are already made and there are no better movies that could be shown at festivals. Ukraine is represented with Bad Roads by Natalya Vorozhbyt, or a new movie Luxembourg, Luxembourg that was presented at the Vienna Film Festival recently. As for my personal opinion, I wouldn’t like Ukraine to be represented through these films, but it happens.

D: Julia, can we explain a very interesting question: Chris, what do you think about ‘good russians’? Are you familiar with this phenomenon? Liberal russians who are against putin and who have emigrated from russia, but we see how they are still ruscist and have hegemonic mentality. They still hate and don’t understand Ukrainians, and don’t respect Ukrainians, and don’t respect the independence of countries. But they’re against putin and for some European liberal politicians, writers, and scientists, they are good russians because they are against putin. They invite them to festivals and stages and so on.

At the same time, we have the case of Yurii Andrukhovych which raises the question of how we can unite Ukrainians around our great writers. Mr. Andrukhovych has been translated into many languages. He is around 60 now…

J: I will explain. The topic of good russians and canceling russian culture is really good to talk about in connection to tolerance. For Ukrainians basically now it’s a rule not to appear in any public event together with russian representatives, just nothing. There’s been a lot of discussion around this, and the rule developed over time. Especially in the beginning, every European institution tried to put Ukrainians, Belorussians and russians on one stage to do panels. It felt like putting a bunch of animals into a cage in order to watch them fight, so this approach was much criticized by Ukrainians and they appealed to organizers of the festivals, of these public events not to do that. A lot of effort went into explaining why it’s not appropriate for Ukrainians at the moment. So every time someone does appear on the stage with a russian representative, it’s now taken as an act of violence against the Ukrainian agreement inside our society. If the individual is not important for Ukrainian culture, this may be forgotten. But if it happens to people who are really relevant to Ukrainian culture, hate arises really fast. And a recent event was a panel with Yurii Andrukhovych, who is Ukrainian patriarch of contemporary literature, and often a representative of Ukrainian literature abroad, because of his good knowledge of German language. He is a good diplomat of Ukrainian culture. And after several months of being quiet, he appeared on the same stage with Shishkin, who is not a known person in Ukraine, but he’s russian. He hasn’t lived in russia for the last 27 years, he is officially a citizen of Switzerland. But still, Andrukhovych was really criticized for this panel discussion, these 40 minutes that happened at a festival somewhere in Sweden. This is a short story, but really big for Ukrainian cultural society.

This is part of a big “cancel russian culture” discussion. Tchaikovsky is not great anymore, Tolstoy is not great anymore. People find reasons in history and philosophy, and explanation, in propaganda also. But this Ukrainian position is not accepted in other countries at all, because of the left liberal position or democratic way to stay in a dialogue. If you are not in a dialogue, if your voice is not strong, how can you protect your position? And at the same time Europeans are not eager to cancel russian culture in general. That’s how we find a gradation: it’s putin’s war, or the war of putin’s regime, or it’s the war of the whole country. There are many people who say: we don’t have anything to do with this country, but we are russians. They keep their identity as russians, but try to avoid connection to the actual political regime. And that is still the question with no clear answer. Do we really think that all people within this border, territorial border are our enemies? How do we deal with all the culture, if we can call it culture, that came from russia? How do we stay in dialogue and convince our European partners that they should revise their understanding of russian culture and everything they know about it?

[1:02:19] “good russians“

C: I’m talking about these things very regularly here as well, of course. What is your position?

D: About Andrukhovych?

C: In general.

J: About good russians.

C: This is an interesting example, because I don’t know Andrukhovych, but I’m checking Mikhail Shishkin now. I think I saw one of two of his texts in the Guardian. He’s obviously against this war and against putin. So these are complicated examples.

D: It’s a very old story, how evil uses artists for something. And Shishkin is part of this story. If we think about a political nation, as a concept, it can only emerge after culture: if you have Ukrainian culture, then we can have the chance to see a political nation. If we do not have a culture—we do not have a political nation. And with the russians, we see only views, views are not culture.

My father is from Saint Petersburg and I was born there. I’m a political Ukrainian now. I’m not the same with Shyshkin. It’s important for me that Ukrainians are now fighting against Andrukhovych. They are not fighting against Shishkin. It’s really dangerous.

And I don’t like that Andrukhovych spoke on a panel with Shishkin, but Andrukhovych is Ukrainian and a genius Ukrainian. And very important for Ukrainians right now, and he’s working hard for the victory.

[1:11:00] russian heritage

J: What’s my position on good russians? For me it’s based on knowledge. The more knowledge I have about russia, the more understanding I have of what we can respect there or call the cultural heritage and what we cannot. Unfortunately the more I know, the less I can respect it as a cultural heritage, because every time I’m really suspicious of where it comes from and if it is really valuable. russia tries to call everything they have created great. But self-naming doesn’t mean it is great at all, so maybe we can go inside the content of the books written by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and try to understand what was great about what they have written? What are the values they stood for? Compared to the literature of other countries, other writers, it’s not really meaningful, and sometimes even the opposite, sometimes it’s really perverse. It’s not about the good sides of humanity, it’s not highlighting moral values and being complicated. Talking about other names, even Tchaikovsky, we have to go deeper into their biographies. I’ve seen facts that even Tchaikovsky has Ukrainian roots, or other people who are understood as russian cultural actors right now, they don’t have this russianness… The more I understand, the more I think “russian” is an artificial concept, because it was an empire that took everything under imperial name and people were not allowed to say who they were, where they came from and what local culture they represented. They had only one chance to get famous—only under a russian name, otherwise they were neglected or destroyed. I know too many facts from Ukrainian history, of intellectuals, creators and cultural workers, artists being physically destroyed, killed, sent into the camps in Siberia. The political system didn’t allow the development of local arts.

At the same time we know the names of Ukrainians who were very well connected to the international art scene, but russia did a lot to get them forgotten or forbidden. That’s why we don’t know enough composers, we don’t listen to their music as much as we listen about Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky or something else. That’s a problem of media and representation, but not of creation. That’s why I have more and more doubts about russian culture. It’s so much mixed with violence and aggression against others that I cannot respect it. I can respect talent, but please don’t connect it all the time to being russian. Even those liberal russians who emigrated now and who speak out from their position, I’m asking myself, why don’t they fight against the system? Why do they insist on being called russians and not find it problematic? Why not go deeper, why not take the knowledge that we have now, and why not transform that into something different? Something new that has no association with this system of violence?

C: It’s very clarifying to hear both of you talk about this, because here we have a similar discussion, but on an intellectually quite lazy level. You have people who say: oh, no, we cannot listen to Tchaikovsky anymore. And other people are saying: oh, but we should stand in solidarity with everybody from Ukraine. Very lazy positions. My position is that any platform in the West should not have this lazy reflex of oh, let’s put somebody from Ukraine and from russia together on a stage, because that simply denies reality. It illustrates an ideology which says: art can bring people together, art can bring peace to the world and if everybody would behave like us, the world would be a perfect place. We simply deny the power games and the crimes that are actually at work. So as a western organization I would simply not do that right now. You said earlier, Julia, that among Ukrainians the agreement is now, you do not get on stage with a russian representative. I guess you mean with anybody from russia?

J: At the moment, yes.

C: Because good people from russia would not see themselves as representative of the russian state, or government, or culture, or whatever. But then you made a good point, if a serious independent critical writer, artist, or academic from russia wants to speak, okay. But if they still carry this hegemonic attitude, if they still somehow are educated and infected by this imperial mindset, then they have work to do before they speak. They have to go home and do their homework first. And I’m sure this happens a lot, and I’m sure you are very capable of sensing that in their choice of words. And in the end, it’s obvious that there are serious independent critical artists and writers in russia or from russia today. There’s no question, but they have work to do and their first responsibility is of course to themselves, to their work, with how their work is being presented, how their work is being contextualized. And how they can use their public role to oppose the system that they live in. That’s their responsibility.

[1:21:53] russian history

D: I see the difference between people from russia who want to be russians and people who are from russia, but they are not russians.

C: Anybody, any writer who now emphasizes that he or she is russian, has to be very good in explaining why he or she chooses that right now.

D: Because all russian history is a synonym of empire.

J: And violence, a lot of violence.

D: And if a person understood this, they would not hold on to the concept of being russian anymore, they would not be so attached to that.

J: They would give it up. Unless these people say something different from «russia is a great country» or «we are so sad about losing our great country, it’s just bad politicians who rule the country now, but the country is great», my question to them would be: tell me the time when russian politicians were better than today? Everything is stolen from others, they have created nothing by themselves. Tell me something that russian brought to this world. Ballet, really? A good practice of ballet doesn’t mean they invented ballet or they brought something good. Saint Petersburg, its architecture—it was built by foreigners and it’s an artificial city. I really don’t know of anything that russia created and humanity would say, we never had that and this is a great contribution to our planetary culture. Still, russians tend to point to someone else to blame for the situation, they insist it’s not russia at all. So please go into history, learn this history, see the truth and then come back. And then we can with these arguments, we can talk about what is it for the world, do we have to keep it at all?

C: After the victory there will be another russia of course. This russia will implode and then it’s important to see how thinking people from russia take their responsibility. Right now they don’t. I guess they don’t need to reach out to you, they have to take care of their own affairs first.

D: Interesting case with Hermitage in Amsterdam, wasn’t it? What about the case in New York? russia invested in real estate, bought a piece of land and built a new building for themselves to call it «russian house» in New York.

And New Yorkers gave this house to Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians put the Ukrainian Cultural Centre there. They made it a Ukrainian house with Ukrainian colors and exhibitions. That’s the American way.

Here, in Amsterdam, I believe it might be better to turn the building into a Museum of authoritarianism. Or a museum or center about de-imperialization, an international center. With an international team of creators, with Ukrainians invited to participate. Currently, it’s the Museum of the history of Amsterdam there, right?

C: Temporary, before they return to their original place. I have no idea what’s going to happen to the building. This building of course had a long history before it became Amsterdam Hermitage. So it’s just one more chapter in the history. I would like to see what vision of program and exhibition you would come up with.

Questions

Chris Keulemans says, “There is of course a difference between tolerating ignorance or stupidity and tolerating hate speech or evil.” What is the social value of tolerating ignorance or stupidity? What responses do you find yourself practicing when faced with ignorance or stupidity? What should be the role of the government in regulating responses to intolerable behavior?
Poka Laenui, a Hawai’ian thinker, offers a model of five phases of decolonization: 1) Rediscovery and Recovery, 2) Mourning, 3) Dreaming, 4) Commitment, and 5) Action. Each phase can be experienced at the same time or in various combinations. How does this model resonate with your personal experience? How can it inform the practice of cultural diplomacy?