We Have No Vocabulary for New Life

BOHM DIALOGUE Vol. 8 | July 19, 2022

Adrian Sinclair, Vanja Ristic, Julia Ovcharenko,
Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski 

Leeds—Berlin—Vienna—Kyiv

Summary

Participants discuss the paradox of borders in the context of global human culture. The problem of the country of origin is discussed. The concept of habitus is introduced. If communities are defined by the values they practice, how does one deal with the value-based conflict? What is the role of cultural diplomacy in a borderless world? In wartime? The impact of small groups is discussed. The concept of universal values is debated. The complexity of the relationship between Ukraine and russia is discussed. The theory of homo criminalis is proposed as a potential source of instruments to manage crime in general. 

Key words

habitus Berlin Ukraine russia values hospitality narratives homo criminalis borders

Timecode

10:18   country of origin

22:39   communities of values

33:59   Constitution in Britain

40:24   the impact of small groups

52:31   universal values

1:01:35   hospitality

Participants

A — Adrian Sinclair
D — Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski
J — Julia Ovcharenko
V — Vanja Ristic

THE DIALOGUE

J: I imagine the map. All the countries I keep in mind. And then I realize that, for a long time, I was focused on Europe, on Western Europe, or the USA. We haven’t given the same attention to the Arab countries, or the Middle East, or Africa. I feel ashamed, but I didn’t realize how big is a number of different countries, and if we talk about nations—I believe it’s an outdated word to describe societies.

D: Or people.

J: Or different groups of people and their identity. But still, if we zoom into different areas, we see how much information still stays unknown for us. Is it possible to really know anything about a society without visiting it? And is it at all possible to visit a place, and then dare to say that I know something about them? We believe that we can talk about any country, even not visiting, after learning from Wikipedia, from history, from literature, from art coming from this place. But it’s a really reasonable question: are we allowed to speak about it without ever having been there?

V: What are the sources that we have now? If you want to know something about our country, what’s the first thing you do? I think we all google, and it brings up another question of sources: who is creating the knowledge we find? What is true? We all know that the truth is a contested thing. 

D: Good point.

J: And it’s also the way we talk about things. Are we confrontational when we’re attempting to explain something to someone? Or am I starting a conversation because I want to learn more? 

D: When we want to know more about a country’s culture, for example, we say in general—I want to know about another culture. I say subculture, but we see the borders at this moment, we see our other and we explore the other. But we know that humanity has no borders, we don’t really have nations, countries, it’s only our stories, our fantasy. There is humanity, there are values, evolution, our general history, but we have different understanding of all of this. I want to welcome all people into dialogue—not cross-border, not cross-cultural—just dialogue. I want to change this mindset we have about borders. When we see only humanity, common values, common history, and we want to understand each other, the only borders we have are the limits of our understanding. Our bodies are not the borders. When we see the world this way, we immediately need a practice of philosophy, practice of questions. Our traveling across countries, across cultures—it’s traveling across languages only. It is only about instruments and our dialogues. 

[10:18] country of origin

J: Vanja, you live in Berlin now, right?

V: Yes.

D: What do you think, Vanja, about your country? The country you were born.

V: People ask me that a lot, and I have a problem, because I don’t know where to start a conversation. It’s never easy. I try to explain, depending on the audience, I try to connect. But it’s so complex and you’re trying to avoid black-and-white pictures, because there are a lot of gray spots in between. I thought with time it’s going to be easier, but it’s actually just harder, because I’m not living there anymore. Of course I read news, but I’m not there any more, that’s a different kind of experience. I feel in-between. Sometimes I don’t even feel competent to talk anymore about my country, because I feel like I don’t know enough.

J: We recently had a dialogue with Palestinian and Syrian poet, who has Swedish citizenship now, and is living in Berlin, Ghayath Almadhoun. He shared his experience with Berlin that was fascinating. I would like to listen to yours. Perhaps, not the whole Berlin, but some districts of it like Neukölln, where people from all over the world found their home. Places that might help us imagine a future society, with more migration, where people do not stay and live where they were born. 

V: That’s a great thing about Berlin, because actually a lot of people don’t consider Berlin as typical Germany. It’s very intercultural and very different from other cities. There is a great flow of people, students, people who were born in other countries, but are now living here. For example, you have three or even more generations of people from Turkey living here and their children who are being born here. When they say, we are Germans, we were born here, but where are you actually from? Sometimes it feels great in Berlin, because actually not a lot of people ask you where you are from. You don’t feel stressed about your citizenship, the country where you happened to be born. But on the other hand, of course, when you have to deal with bureaucracy, then you have to deal with people who are not that open-minded or still thinking in different categories. 

In the Balkans Yugoslavia was seen as a very prosperous time. Here in Germany it’s considered as a dark time and they always have this reaction: oh, Yugoslavia, that was really bad. It once again reminds me that of course, when we’re talking, we’re starting from our own position and our own experience, even if we are open to learning different things and experiences from other people. We are standing somewhere in our context and our habitus. 

Also in literature and science you’re looking across so many terms like cross-culture, cross-national, transnational, multicultural—they are still based on very fixed things like culture as a set of values, the customs, clothes, etc. 

J: So life goes ahead and we see that we have no vocabulary for new life. The old one is not useful anymore.

V: No.

D: But many continue to identify themselves through nationality or citizenship. How do you feel about the issue of global citizenship being a matter of tomorrow or days after tomorrow? 

V: I think it’s a matter of the past. I can refer to my personal experience, I’m expecting a baby. I was born in Serbia, my partner is Italian, we’re both living in Berlin. What’s our baby? What is it going to be? With greater mobility, this is the question that will just be more profound in the future. But I don’t think it’s a question of the future,  migrations are not a new thing. This is something that people faced also in the past.

D: I see communities according to practices of specific values, not according to nationality or citizenship. It’s more interesting, and for me it is our future. It’s about integrity, of course, and it’s about temporary groups, it’s about small groups, because we know how effective small groups are for practices. Of course it’s about freedom and freedoms. We want to connect with each other to practice something, and at that time we can identify as, for example, Bohmian dialogue participants. Or, we might share some physical practices. 

J: Belong to a yoga group, or be marathon runners.

D: Yes, it’s more natural for people. My question is, is this a vision for tomorrow, for after the victory, or is this how we bring about the victory against rashism, against nazism? Or is this a vision for the next generation? I don’t know. I see what I can say and what my children will say. Writers without borders, translators without borders, people without genders. It’s fantasy—but it isn’t.

[22:39] communities of values

A: It’s interesting what you said about gender. In different places it’s different, but I come from a culture value set which identified gender as a very fixed thing. The next generation doesn’t, and one of my worries with this is what happens when you have people splitting into communities of opposing values. How do we deal with that, because we seem to find it really difficult to accept differing values.

But at the same time the things that we struggle or have struggled with, sometimes it feels like the next generation just accepts them. I work with young people now, and they just don’t worry about calling someone ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘they’—they don’t need fixed rules about it, it’s fluid. Sometimes I think the struggles that we had sort of just disappeared. 

The other thing I am interested in is what you said about the war. I’m really conscious that my cultural experience of war is very limited, only through my parents and grandparents.  I know that at the end of the war that we had with Germany, there was a big movement in this country to say «Never again», and all the European institutions, the United Nations, came from this impulse. But I’m sure there were discussions during the war. It wasn’t just the case that between 1939 and 1945, people fought the war and then suddenly things changed. I think it is important to be able to say: we can’t do this any more, we’ve come to this point. For me, there is something really wrong about how nations deal with nations. I hope the next generation just accepts that war is unacceptable and works out new ways of being, but I struggle to find them. It starts to feel that these questions are all linked, but did these five questions come from one person?

J: Yes.

A: They are linked, because you can see the narrative, and at some point the question becomes, what is truth? The idea of somebody representing a country, how mad is that?

D: I believe in cultural diplomacy, but it works by building bridges across borders between subcultures. If we can as a humanity live in the global culture and understand global culture, even with different languages, what is our cultural diplomacy then?

J: Then the diplomat is the person who represents human values. If we take humanity on the global level, culture is just the general way humanity organizes the relationships among people and we try to make it in a harmonic and balanced way. More love, less aggression, more understanding, less war. Life itself is the biggest value. Then cultural diplomacy represents life values in contrast to death values.

D: Then the function of cultural diplomats might be to retain these values and to practice them regularly.  For example, I see how we are cultural diplomats and we practice it.

J: In this way, yes. Just to be a voice of reason or to be a voice of love.

D: My question is: what’s the power of cultural diplomacy? Because we know about the power of governments, politics, and official institutions. We also know about soft power. So what’s the power of cultural diplomacy in the future? Really empowered, it’s about Logos. Because we need this type of power, another power, different from government rules. In my opinion, we need a statute. I like statutes and constitutions, but many of them are too conservative for this moment. For example, the constitution of our NGO—we can review it every year, with the general assembly and council of the directors. We do it and we have a living document.  Why don’t we have this practice with countries? 

J: I agree that on many occasions the documents we have written before are not being lived, so they are not alive in this case. The constitutions of our countries should be lived, but they are just written down and often forgotten.

A: Or in our case we never wrote it down, we haven’t got a constitution. But we have a queen, so what more do we need?

J: How does it feel, Adrian? How is it to live without the constitution but with a queen?

D: I see the British constitution, one moment.

[33:59] Constitution in Britain

A: I don’t think about it being lived, because it’s complex, it changes, but there isn’t a set of values.

I feel I find it difficult to represent my country to others. I wonder sometimes, are my values different or at odds with the general values that my country espouses, certainly my government espouses? If I visit a country, I pick up things, I understand, I see the truth, but that’s framed through my own background experiences, beliefs and values. I might decide only to go to a certain section of Berlin that gives me those values or reflects the values back in me as opposed to other places. I worry that  we can talk about a world community, and we can talk about mobility, but there are different types of mobility. There’s forced mobility. I have a Syrian family that moved in, who were refugees in Lebanon for ten years. They haven’t had any choice about where they are mobile to. I also work with people who for generations of their families never left the part of the city that they live in. I worry that we can hide ourselves in our own experiences of mobility that other people don’t have.

About the constitution project. There’s been lots of talk that we ought to have a constitution. Iceland wrote their constitution in a collective way in only a couple of years I think.

D: The Constitute Project collects all worldwide constitutions. And we see here the constitution of the United Kingdom, very old.

A: It’s not a very live document, Magna Carta, 1297. Habeas corpus, I learned about that, it’s cool. But actually what our culture is about is never written down. Except from at the moment everyone’s saying we’re the best in the world.

D: We can not destroy borders, of course, we cannot rebuild people’s mindsets, but we can work with new institutions, new concepts, we can build new communities and then welcome other people. If we, for example, create many small groups, working groups like yours, we share and understand. I believe that we can create strong institutions, cultural institutions, and we need many of them, not just one, or two. And my question is: is this small-group way a way to build powerful institutions or not? Or is this the way to build only marginal institutions for some people who don’t like governments and nations?

[40:24] the impact of small groups

J: How to measure the impact? From history we know how big changes are made by small groups of people or just by individuals.

D: Like Adam Smith for example.

J: I believe small groups of people can change the future or can bring ideas of new practices. But this is history and in the past the connections between people worked in different ways. Now we have technologies, now we have mass media, now we are billions of people and not millions. How can we talk in the same categories if we live in different conditions? What is enough then to be called an influence? What is an influential, or powerful group? 

Tiktok as an example of influence, isn’t it? Or, rather, of a powerful group of people. In numbers it’s just massive, but the impact is damaging, it is destroying civilization. In this case I would say no, thank you. These big groups it’s not good for humanity, but small groups attract fewer people. Do we believe them to be really powerful?

D: This is my question. Adrian, Vanja, what are your ways of building institutions which can have influence beyond your community? Or do you like this life with very small communities and is this enough for you? 

A: When we have done things that have influenced things at a bigger level, it was about creating a narrative that people  suddenly found made sense, like a switch flipped. Everybody at the same time, that sort of change. But my worry is that everybody could use narrative but with the difference that the values can be just as powerful and that’s what I think we’ve seen in the last few years. Certainly in the West, in America and in Britain we’ve seen a small group of people creating a really different narrative that people have suddenly gone: oh, yes. Conspiracy theories, all those sorts of things are narratives—they’re stories that people love. My worry is now that if that’s the way for small groups of people to influence things and create change, then actually it might not create the change that I want to see. It’s that bit of really wanting people to think and to believe, and to understand, and to think through and have the sorts of discussions we are struggling with. But if I just tell them a story and ask them to get on board, then someone else can do the same thing. 

V: In my case it was more about working with small groups. At a certain point it became a larger group or a network of small groups. I use a lot of non-formal education, because it gave an alternative to everything that people were surrounded by: educational system, very traditional values and concepts in society in general, media, families, institutions, etc. not telling them this is not the right thing to do, but giving them alternatives or other perspectives, so they become more critical, and that’s something that helped a lot. Unfortunately if you don’t have support it’s not sustainable. If you are one voice in your society, it’s most probable that you will be just shut down. Networking, connecting with like-minded people, joining forces helps but it’s not that easy. 

D: It’s not easy, but I believe in, for example, writing practices. I believe in writers and in composers and artists. I believe in Logos and in Sofia, the wisdom. We have humanity with different values, we have different small groups, we have working groups, we have unworking groups, we have destructive criminal people too in this humanity. We have all of this and different languages, but there are good news, too: every day we can create a new essay and one day one of these essays becomes a manifesto.

And it’s a manifesto not of one small group, but group of groups, community of communities. This is the way for sharing, welcoming, and dialogue with different people. We just need to translate these essays into different languages, but I believe in the writers’ community and writers’ practices.

[52:31] universal values

J: Let’s imagine that there are values that everyone on the planet can agree on. Something that is so universal that can be accepted by everyone. This should be or could be in this manifesto.

V: What do you think is a value like that, at least one that is acceptable? Because for example, I am an anthropologist, and I still haven’t figured that out. I thought that human life is at least one thing. But there is a famous anthropological example of a tribe in which when twins are born, they’re killed because they see them as bad spirits, bad luck, etc. For me that was shocking, but it’s actually part of their cultural values. If I go there and I try to explain to them that’s not good, they will think that I am somehow imposing different values to the culture. I don’t think I have an answer.

J: Same here, I have no answer. Even if you say «life itself is the biggest value», even that can be questioned and is regularly questioned. If death is a part of life, we cannot say it is the only one best value. Or is the life of this particular being valuable for life in general, so life in general is going on on the planet, the planet itself is alive. But who knows what it looks like from the other perspective, the perspective of the woods or the mountains, if we take them as subject, not the objects as humans believe them to be. From their perspective is it important to have more humans or fewer humans? Life itself is going on. That’s why I also haven’t found an answer for that. We don’t have access to the consciousness of other sentient creatures, so we can only think within the limits of our human consciousness. That’s why human life is the only value we can talk about. There’s always a limit of perception and understanding. We are absolutely not the first to be asking these questions, so I do wonder, how many times do we have to repeat our lives to come back to this dilemma and try to solve it?

D: Small thought: we can find some common practices. We should recognize that we need an agile practice to work with. A  manifesto is not enough, it’s distorting, so we need practices to rebuild and work, for example open source systems. It’s more sustainable than conservative system, because we have this world and we need sustainability. And sustainability is the way, the process of course.

J: It’s not a fact, it’s not a finished result, right?

D: Sustainability it’s not a fix, it’s only a process. And for the process we need rules, and these rules are about practices. What are the practices for open source systems? Agile is one model we have right now—what might be others? We do not need constitutions, we need a backlog of product and a backlog of scrum interaction.

J: What are we producing right now?

D: Literary essays. If we write white papers, I don’t believe that the government will accept them. But literature, non-fiction, or fiction is the format for every one of our thoughts.

[1:01:35] hospitality

J: Fiction has the right level of freedom and flexibility to be accepted by others and not seem too dangerous.

D: For example, have you read Chris’ book?  Chris Keulemans, «Welcoming strangers». 

This is a great example, because people don’t know Chris, but if they read this text, then something happens in their minds. And that was his intention: to write something that changes people’s minds. 

A: Also I do think there’s something really powerful about people speaking together, to actually make sense of things. What we’re talking about is wanting shared values and shared understandings. We need to find ways for people to do that as well. In terms of cultural diplomacy, I’m just really aware that we’re in a situation where Ukraine and russia are at war. What’s the role of cultural diplomacy for you now? And to share values—that one of the most difficult arenas to do that would be between Ukraine and russia, between people from Ukraine and people from russia, recognizing the limitations of borders and boundaries. I’m not saying take on the most difficult thing, but it makes me think  that actually we need to do that. In the same way that I feel there are so many massive cultural differences between my world and the world of people in the United States. I just don’t understand how we can have such—or does it just feel this way?—that we have such different values?

J: Even in the relationship between Ukraine and russia, we have different dimensions. The relationship has historical issues, some from a long time ago, and some that are recent, for example, the differences in the historical interpretation of the soviet period.  You, Adrian, talked about his narratives, so we have different narratives. We also have different points of view on the relationships between the US and more broadly Western culture, Western civilization and russia. In this dimension, this is a war between rashism and the Western culture. Ukraine is a battlefield there, but the conflict, this collapse is between different world views. 

russia has common interests with other countries like Iran, Brazil or Venezuela. Demyan did a research and discovered at least 40 wars in the world where russia has a very active role. Either they have initiated these wars or they have supported some local wars. They are keeping the world on fire. Ukraine has made its choice in favor of what we call Western values, and has had a war imposed on it. It’s not a national question; the conflict is cultural. 

D: And here let me propose my theory of homo criminalis as a way of understanding this.

J: A human being we know as homo sapiens is a reasonable being who is organized, who tries to create civilized society. This is a creative way to be. There is also the opposite, a being who is oriented onto destroying anything created by others. A human being becomes this homo criminalis by committing a crime. 

D: Homo criminalis it’s not another race, but it’s another way of being.

J: After committing any act of criminal behavior.

D: Yes. In this theory we don’t have answers how to…

J: …deal with those who became criminals or how to prevent the criminal behavior.

D: We need to understand it. Because if you have another type of humans, it’s not only about people from russia. If we understand how to win this great battle, we understand how to prevail against russia. If we understand the nature of homo criminalis, we will have the instrument against criminals in general. 

J: It’s described very well in many religions, or beliefs. There’s good and evil inside humans, but it’s revealed only by acts. Any time you choose, any time you decide, your action makes a difference.

D: Now we have another question. Against russia we need only strength, we need only our values and we need only our practices, and we are doing it right now. All over Ukraine we see how different small groups help each other. I’m proud of Ukrainians right now and every day. 

A: My mind is expanding. I’m going to think about homo criminalis for a long time, it challenges me. 

V: Every time I have a conversation without a complete conclusion, it’s actually inviting me to think more. 

Questions 

1. In sociology, habitus is the way that people perceive and respond to the social world they inhabit, by way of their personal habits, skills, and disposition of character. Habitus can be defined by any common cultural background. Can you identify your habitus? How do you feel when you are experiencing being in it? What, in your opinion, might be the relationship between habitus and the work of cultural diplomacy? 

2. Small groups of people sometimes exercise great influence. Can you think of such a group you have encountered? What were the conditions which made the group’s influence possible? How do you see the relationship between small groups and institutions? 

3. A manifesto is a statement of values, aspirations, and principles. What is the value of creating a manifesto? What can it be used for (by an individual or a small group)?

Resources

Keulemans, Chris. Gastvrijheid. Jurgen Maas: Amsterdam, 2021. 244 p.