GEORGE KENNAN, the dean of American diplomats, called “The Gulag Archipelago”, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of Stalin’s terror, “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times”. By bearing witness, Solzhenitsyn certainly did as much as any artist could to bring down the Soviet system, a monstrosity that crushed millions of lives. His courage earned him imprisonment and exile. But his death on August 3rd (see article) prompts a question. Who today speaks truth to power—not only in authoritarian or semi-free countries such as Russia and China but in the West as well?
The answer in the case of Russia itself is depressing. Russia’s contemporary intelligentsia—the should-be followers of the example of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and the other dissident intellectuals of the Soviet period—is not just supine but in some ways craven (see article).
Instead of defending the freedoms perilously acquired after the end of communism, many of Russia’s intellectuals have connived in Vladimir Putin’s project to neuter democracy and put a puppet-show in its place. Some may genuinely admire Mr Putin’s resurrection of a “strong” Russia (as, alas, did the elderly Solzhenitsyn himself). But others have shallower motives.
In Soviet times telling the truth required great courage and brought fearful consequences. That is why the dissidents were a tiny minority of the official intelligentsia which the Soviet Union created mainly in order to build its nuclear technology. Today it is not for the most part fear that muzzles the intellectuals. Speaking out can still be dangerous, as the murder in 2006 of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist, showed. But what lurks behind the silence of many is not fear but appetite: an appetite to recover the perks and status that most of the intelligentsia enjoyed as the Soviet system’s loyal servant.
In Soviet times telling the truth required great courage and brought fearful consequences. That is why the dissidents were a tiny minority of the official intelligentsia which the Soviet Union created mainly in order to build its nuclear technology. Today it is not for the most part fear that muzzles the intellectuals. Speaking out can still be dangerous, as the murder in 2006 of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist, showed. But what lurks behind the silence of many is not fear but appetite: an appetite to recover the perks and status that most of the intelligentsia enjoyed as the Soviet system’s loyal servant.
The problem of authoritarianism
In China the intellectuals’ silence is easier to forgive because voicing dissent is still sharply controlled. For all its new openness, China has created few opportunities for Solzhenitsyn-type greats to emerge. It has tolerated a modicum of writing about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, but then the government too now says the Cultural Revolution was horrific. You would search in vain in China itself for literature about the misery of the 1950s after the communists took over, or the deaths of tens of millions in the famine of the early 1960s. The window opened a bit in the 1980s, but the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 banished free thinking well into the 1990s.
The emergence of the internet and a market-driven publishing industry has changed China less than it should. Several intellectuals post critical views of the party online. A good example is Hu Xingdou, an academic who lays into the party at every opportunity. But not even he goes as far as to call for the end of one-party rule. In 2004 a Chinese newspaper caused a stir by publishing a list of 50 public intellectuals. They included Gao Yaojie, who helped expose an AIDS epidemic in Henan, Wen Tiejun, who has written about the suffering of peasants, and He Weifang, a law professor who has spoken out about the rights of the marginalised, such as migrant workers.
These are impressive people, to whom China will one day be grateful. But the voices of the dissidents count for less than they did in the 1980s. China then, like the Soviet Union, was a bleak place with little other intellectual stimulation. People yearned for provocative ideas. Now access to information is freer, the economy is flourishing and for a lot of intellectuals life is good. China has its bold thinkers, but in its present mood it is hard to imagine one of them galvanising an entire class the way Solzhenitsyn did.
It is a bit too easy for people in the West to deplore the failure of intellectuals living in unfree societies to follow the example of a Solzhenitsyn. Such stories are rare. His arose from an unusual confluence: a great crime, a great silence, a receptive audience and personal courage well above the ordinary. There are parts of the Islamic world where secular thinkers, such as Egypt’s Nobel novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, have faced violence for daring to prick a suffocating conformity. The Western intellectual, by contrast, enjoys a charmed existence. In France, which pampers its men of ideas, De Gaulle is reputed to have ordered the release of the inflammatory Jean-Paul Sartre in 1968 by remarking, “You don’t arrest Voltaire.” Most democracies have pulled off the remarkable feat of creating in the universities a class of tenured academics whose salaries are paid by the state but who are free, and often inclined, to savage the hand that feeds them. Nice work, if you can get it.
The problem of democracy
The West has printed a lorryload of angst-ridden books about the demise of the intellectual. Political correctness and academic over-specialisation have indeed hurt the quality of much that is said in the media and taught in the universities. But at the root of most complaints is the supposed problem of surplus. Authoritarian places nurture a class of recognised intellectuals whose utterances are both carefully listened to and strictly controlled. Democracies produce a cacophony, in which each voice complains that its own urgent message is being drowned in a sea of pap. “Repressive tolerance”, one ungrateful 1960s radical called it. It would cause not a ripple if MIT’s famous intellectual subversive, Noam Chomsky, were invited to speak to the annual capitalist jamboree in Davos.
The cacophony is the lesser evil. Ideas should not be suppressed, but nor should they be worshipped. Kennan was right to call “Gulag” a powerful indictment of a regime. Remember, though, that in 1848 two well-meaning intellectuals published another powerful indictment of a system, and their “Communist Manifesto” went on to enslave half mankind. There is no sure defence against bad ideas, but one place to start is with a well-educated and sceptical citizenry that is free to listen to the notions of the intellectuals but is not in thrall to them—and, yes, may prefer the sports channel instead. The patrician in Solzhenitsyn hated this lack of deference in the West. That is one respect in which the great man was wrong.
From The Economist print edition, Aug 7th 2008
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário