America, and the future of humanity

By Matt Kennard • March 13, 2009

MK: Why did you choose to come to Leeds?

ZB: I don’t know, I have no idea. I was a refugee – I was kicked out of my country and there was an invitation from Leeds. I got a telegram – “Would you like to speak to the university?” – do you know what a telegram is?

MK: I’ve never used one!

ZB: Before you were born. So I said, “Yes, I will come,” and I came and they offered me a job and I took and…

MK: the rest is history

ZB: That was 35 years ago – quite a long time!

MK: You call yourself a socialist, is that right?

ZB: Yes, I believe so. I would like to believe so that I am Socialist.

MK: What does that mean to you?

ZB: I don’t understand socialism as a type of society or social formation. I don’t believe there is such thing as a socialist society. Socialism is postulating a point of view where you are looking at things – I very often use the metaphor of a knife pressed with its edge against the existing society. Socialism is believing that no society is just enough – that there is always some injustice which ought to be fought against. To give you another comparison: if you take a bridge and try to establish what is its carrying power, you don’t take the carrying power of every pillar add them together and then divide by the number of pillars – you don’t take the average carrying power of an average pillar. But you measure the carrying power of the bridge by the carrying power of the weakest pillar. And unfortunately in our societies, you measure the well-being of a society by G.N.P and G.N.P. is precisely like measuring the carrying power of the bridge according to the average carrying power, the medium pillar. It is wrong because the quality – and this is socialist belief and my own – that you judge a society by is the decency of living of the weakest.

MK: Are we talking about economics, specifically?

ZB: What economics?

MK: Well you talked about the weakest pillar – are we talking the weakest economically?

ZB: The weakest – the most humiliated, deprived and outcast kind of life. That’s roughly the issue. G.N.P. is roughly the measure of the amount of money which changes hands so if there are many invalids in the country which require a lot of medical care then the G.N.P is rising, and for every crash on the motorway the G.N.P goes up because there is plenty of removal business and rebuilding and rebuying and exchanging and so on and so forth. And that’s a misleading picture – that’s how we live actually. We watch what is happening in society but we apply the wrong yardsticks to establish whether it is all the way up or down or whatever. That’s what’s happening also at the moment in quite a few – you haven’t been to South America?

MK: I’ve been to Guatemala

ZB: You have been?

MK: Guatemala, Mexico and Honduras.

ZB: Well that’s a very interesting place because you see there what I am talking about being played on the stage. The lack of connection – not just difference between – but lack of connection between the economic growth on the one hand and the wellbeing of the nation on the other. You may have rapidly rising volume of trade, which will be immediately reflected in the figures of GNP; on the other hand people are living in poverty and actually sinking lower and lower. So that’s roughly I understand about socialism – it’s a different point of view. It is a clinical attitude towards reality focusing on the injustices which are there.

MK: Some people have said that since the Cold War that socialism is dead – or in the sense of how it was known to people growing up in your generation. Would you agree with that?

ZB: Well, you see, I’m very suspicious when a society prides itself that “We are the democracy implemented”; “We are perfectly just”; “We are a socialist society”, or whatever. These terms in their nature postulate demands – when they are used as the names of existing reality then there is some fraud involved – always. My definition of just society is that society is just if it thinks of itself as not just enough. By definition democratic society is a society which thinks that it is not democratic enough. So if you consider these postulates as a instruction, injunction or command for the future, for doing something then it is OK. But once you say the job has been done and there is nothing to be and whoever didn’t get benefit out of it it’s his own fault, then there is something wrong with it.

Socialism in the sense of the idea that simply by nationalizing industry can create a new end or a new movement, that by removing a certain kind of class culture that you can remove all unhappiness and all disasters and all troubles and all worries – that’s has something wrong with it. So in this sense the idea of the possibility of building here on Earth a perfect society – that is dead. That is dead to me as well. I don’t believe that there is such a thing as perfect society. But look at what perfection means: A state in which every further change will be a change for the worse – you can’t improve on it. I don’t agree with this; I believe that there is always something outstanding, not yet done, which needs a human dedication, effort and very often self-sacrifice in order to achieve it.

So if you want to call it Socialism, that’s up to you. I call it Socialism but I wouldn’t quarrel if you disagree. But Socialism in the sense of a given, pre-designed model of a society – that’s dead.

MK: Now do you feel like we are regressing? You talked about creating a society where we always push to make things better rather than having a utopian idea of where we will end. The logic of capitalism is basically being played out – it’s hard for people to fight that in the same way. Some people say that capitalism will follow its logic until something comes to replace it. There’s the quote from Michel Houllebecq…

ZB: You’ve met him as well?

MK: No I haven’t met him but I read his book Atomized. He says that “for a metaphysical transformation to happen, something has to replace it.” So something has to replace capitalism and if it doesn’t happen it will carry on. American capitalism is now spreading its tentacles everywhere which means I can’t really see much hope for the society me and you want…

ZB: Every society has its chances and its threats. I’ve lived a long time, 80 years, and I went through many different kinds of societies and I have first-hand experience of living in different types of social settings. My conclusion is that each one has its advantages and its disadvantages only they are differently distributed in various situations. I don’t believe that you can strike the right balance between two equally important values which are basic, essential for decent human life and that is: freedom and security. People need freedom and people need security. Freedom without security is hell really because it paralyzes, it’s disables from action – if you feel very, very insecure you are not able to make the proper human use of your freedom.

And of security without freedom is slavery. So on two extremes – the poles of the continuum – it’s hell. We are not moving between heaven and hell, we are moving between two hells. And all human societies are plotted along this line somewhere closer to one extreme or the other. Seventy years ago another Sigmund – Sigmund Freud – wrote a book called, in the English translation – “Civilization and It’s Discontents” and there he said that civilization means a trade-off – you just exchange one value for the other. And according to him – I repeat it was seventy years ago – civilization trades part of freedom for greater security. And what was wrong with civilization – I repeat for the second time 70 years ago – was that we have lost quite a lot of our individual freedom – freedom of expression, of going by our instinct, by our predalictions, by our preferences. We lost it for the sake of acquiring more security and my point is that if Sigmund Freud was sitting with you instead of me and explaining what kind of trade off civilization is, he would probably say that it is a trade off but the trouble with civilization is that it traded off too much security for more freedom and that is the situation today. That is the situation today because freedom comes only together with enormous risks and in order to be able to fight them back or to act under the circumstances you need quite a lot of resources.

There are a very many – perhaps a majority of many societies – don’t have these resources. It’s very much like being thrown into the waters of a sea or ocean – people who are very good swimmers actually enjoy it – “Ah, great, vast expanse of water and now I can really show my muscles!” – but very many go down. Even a better example is Titanic where it crashed against the iceberg, as you remember – it suddenly transpired that all the passengers on the top deck have the boats to save them. The other decks didn’t have them – so some went down.

It is a far example but take New Orleans after Katrina – it’s exactly the same story, another Titanic. There was a voice on the loudspeakers: “Please evacuate, Katrina is coming, danger is coming!”. Well, people who could jumped into their cars and went off – they stopped at the nearest motel or hotel, they didn’t worry about leaving behind their properties because the properties wre heavily insured, they knew that they would be repaid for the losses. But something like 75% of the population of New Orleans stayed behind because either they didn’t have cars or they didn’t have money for motels or hotels or they didn’t have their very meager possession insured. They knew that if they leaved these shacks behind them they would be completely without means of living so why do you have to look for the Titanic example, we have a very fresh example that nothing has happened for 100 years – nothing has changed.

MK: I’m interested in the idea of the trade-off between security and freedom, especially having come from America…

ZB: You come from America?

MK: I’m not American but I studied there for a year. And Libertarians there believe that society can’t have individual freedom with economic justice because a state that intervenes in the economy is necessarily restricting the freedom of its subject. Or the other argument it will naturally lead to tyranny – Hayek’s idea that as soon as you start interfering in the economy you will begin interfering in every sphere of human life. That’s something that has always troubled me because obviously we want to find a way to organize society where we have individual freedom and economic justice. Do you think that is possible?

ZB: It’s tremendously difficult. I told you a moment ago that I don’t believe that you can strike the perfect balance between freedom and security – we are always seeking it, all societies are always seeking it. But each one goes too close to one extreme in order to escape from the horrors of the other extreme and where to stop? Where is the perfect solution? It’s damn difficult to say, really. It’s like – you know this old ancient Greek notion of Scylla and Charybdis – two under water rocks – and the navigator has tremendous difficulty to go between them. Why? Because he when he wasnts to avoid Scylla he comes close to Charybdis.

So this is the kind of debate between Libertarians and the promoters and followers of the idea of the caring state will go forever. I don’t think it will ever come to an end. But, what’s encouraging is what I’ve found – I travel quite a lot around Europe, to America I stopped going because I’m too old and it’s very tiring – but in Europe there is the Scandinavian example which is working and the right-wingers who were against the constraining of freedom tried several times to break the wall and they never succeeded actually – it always returned to the same concept. I don’t think that they are the perfect solution, but they came as close as imaginable – so far anyway – to this balancing between these two things. Take Norway, for example: Norway, like Britain, had several dozens of years ago had this stroke of luck – God’s gift of North Sea Oil, enormous amount of income extra. What Margaret Thatcher did – and no-one has changed it – was to actually use it to lower the taxes and get the people are better off, more clever and so on to enrich themselves. As a result we have several thousands of new millionaires and several hundred new billionaires and so on.

What did Norway do with the same boon? They didn’t cut taxes, at all. What they did was invest this extra income from North Sea Oil into very long-term plans of providing what’s called “Welfare State” – I don’t like this term, I prefer “Social State” – to provide the Social State with funds for three generations for come. Which means that whoever happens to be a grandfather today in Norway can be pretty sure that his grandchildren already have a secure old age pension – not him, but his grandchildren! And that created some basic outcomes, really. I traveled to Norway several times and in different periods, with interruptions of several years and each time you go it is a more and more thriving country – amazing because there was no cutting taxes so no-one got more income. But the fact that people felt suddenly secure and provided for – that in case they slip, in case they’re suffering defeat, in case things don’t work as properly as they should they will be taken care of. That gave them enormous courage to dare, courage to experiment, courage to invent. And you have this feeling – it’s very difficult to describe it, you have to go through it and experience it and stay there and talk to people and look around – there is no ostentatious wealth in Norway, of course there is a difference in income but much, much less than in Britain but nevertheless there is disparity between the rich man and the relatively less rich people.

But you feel equality in the street. They go to the same shops, the same entertainment halls, to the same pubs and this sort of thing. And it is a country in which you feel everybody cares about public spaces – houses are repainted, there are not run-down areas, there are no rough districts etc. So you can try at least to balance these two things of freedom and security – I don’t think it will be 100% successful – it still may happen in Norway that a Party will come to power that will decide: “Why should we care about our great grandchildren, what about the state of the nation now?” You know Max Weber – he defined the beginning of modernity as the “triumph of the principle of ‘delay of gratification’”. Sacrifice in the name of some distant goal, some distant end. That is a very unfashionable slogan today, delay of gratification. Slogan today is: “Now, I want happiness now!”

MK: That’s what Keynes said isn’t it: “In the long-term, I’ll be dead!”. Anyway, how far do you think the play between individual freedom and security has got to do with capitalism itself. Do you think it is a balance that only has been drawn within capitalism? Outside of capitalism, can an economic system be created where you don’t have them in a dialectical relationship?

ZB: I’ not if it is a matter of capitalism in general because capitalism has stages. I’m fond of talking of “Solid Modernity” and “Liquid Modernity”. There was a solid phase of capitalism – capitalism created a society of producers and actually Karl Marx was part of it: he imagined future society as a huge factory in which everybody would be employed. It was a period of the time when space mattered and territory mattered – the slogan of the time was “Big is beautiful” and all the progress was measured by the amount of body able people who were prepared to serve in the army because there was universal conscription – everybody was a soldier. So in 1902 during the Boer War when the military medical condition rejected most of the prospective recruits because they were bodily weak and under fed, unhealthy and so on, there was a panic in Britain because you measure the might of the country by the amount of prospective soldiers. On the other hand, you measure the life success of a person by the amount of people whom he employed in his factory – big factories, dozens of thousands of workers working under one roof. Huge bulky, heavy equipment; they were staying there forever.

You’ve heard about Richard Sennett probably. Richard Sennett wrote a wonderful book about a new spirit of capitalism. What he suggests is that if you take the two symbols of capitalism – of capitalist prosperity, capital style, capitalist advantages – in two eras on the one hand you have Rockerfeller and Ford; on the other hand you have Bill Gates. Rockerfeller and Ford were proud of having these big, huge factories miles long, surrounded by walls – thousands of people working for them. They were proud of their oil rigs, they were proud of their railways. Everything tied to the ground, immovable – they couldn’t actually pack it up, they could not send it by the internet to Thailand and Asia. There workers were tied to them – they were fixed to the ground; but they were also fixed to the ground – that was the solid capitalist. It was a society of producers. We don’t have it any longer. We have a liquid modernity now, and liquid modernity arrived with differentiating very essentially the conditions of these two sides of the conflict. In solid modernity workers were dependent on Ford for their livelihood and Ford depended on his workers for his worth, and his prestige, and his position. So they were both interdependent – they were in equal situation. Which, of course, created a lot of conflicts – in every marriage you have a lot of conflicts because people stay together all the time so there is friction. Also, both sides understood that they would meet again together again and again and again – now up to 10 years up to 20 years. Therefore, they have to elaborate some modus vivendi – a way of cohabiting which is roughly agreeable to both. And so you had conflict and you have negotiations and on both sides you had long-term planning.

Daliacoigne, the famous French economist, points out that when a young person who went to a factory of Renault or Ford at the age of seventeen, eighteen, he could reasonably suppose that he would retire from the same place at the end of his working life. He could plan his life in a sense. Now, even the most favored youngsters who go to Silicon Valley or work for Bill Gates and earn an enormous amount of money – they have absolutely no idea what will happen to them next month, let along mention next year – so it is fluid, liquid.

So the relations are asymmetrical. On the one hand there are people who are resourceful and well-off and so on. They are not dependent on the workers here – if the workers here are too hard-nosed, too stubborn, they just imagine that they can fight – then there is a very simple thing to do: you can transfer the capital elsewhere where the grass is greener. But the other side is not in such a position. Tebbitt, once minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, used to say “On yer bike” – it’s not so simple because you have your family, you have your children, you have an unpaid mortgage for your house. You can’t get on yer bike and go – it’s a fantasy, it’s a lie. So when one side is fixed to the ground and has no mobility then the context of liquid modern life is of very little use for them. So that situation differentiates very considerably the life situation, life prospects, life chances, of different kinds of pleasure – it is polarizing.

MK: Which one do you think is preferable for a human?

ZB: I don’t know. This question is wrongly put because people who lived in solid modernity don’t live in liquid modernity. People in liquid modernity didn’t experience first-hand solid modernity. So it’s all too easy to idealize the other thing in which you haven’t been because it was untried. People in solid modernity suffered because, after all, being fixed to the ground isn’t a very pleasurable situation – now I am 30 but when I am 60 I will be still there standing at the same machine. It’s cutting my wings in a sense. So it’s oppression, depression – whatever – there’s something inhuman in it. But once that disappears – this solid ground under your feet – and you feel suspended in the air, it’s not pleasurable either. I repeat what I said before: Each society has its advantages and disadvantages. The one disadvantage of this society we have now which is unheard of in as sense – which is completely normal, it’s not just shuffling around of advantages and disadvantages – but it’s a new real difficulty, it that in a highly individualized in which everybody is on his or her own and there are less and less communally provided safety-nets. In this kind of environment there is very little inducement for human solidarity and very little inducement in terms of thinking of common goals – matching together, fighting together for some general purpose. If all forms of togetherness in contemporary society tend to become simply a collection of individuals, they don’t create new quality; they just reaffirm, reconfirm the individuals in that the realization, the acceptance that whatever you want to achieve has to be done by you – by alone and if you fail it will be your fault and nobody else.

I will give you an example. Typical meetings, very popular meetings in solid modernity and now. In solid modernity there were trade union meetings – now by and large forgotten but once they were very heavily attended. People came there and one worker came with his own complaint: “Oh my foreman is an awful person, he bullies me and he doesn’t allow me to stop for a moment to stop for a cigarette or a cup of tea.” They are sad about unsocial hours: “I lose touch with my family.” Another says, “Well I am working here for five years and my wages haven’t gone up and I am left behind,” and so on. They are talking and talking and then they come to the realization, “We are all in the same damn plight and let’s stick together, let’s refuse our work, let’s go on strike and perhaps we acquire some sort of an influence on our condition by sticking together; individually we can do nothing but together we can do something”. So in the course of such long, boring meetings, perhaps in the end a new quality will appear – instead of simply the aggregate of personal complaints, you have a common code. Instead of individuals struggling hopelessly without the prospect of winning alone, there will be some solidarity.

Now, if you juxtapose with that with now – I think the most popular regular meetings today in Britain is Weight Watchers. No really, I mean it! Weight Watchers is a very powerful organization – a lot of people are fighting their fat. They come to meetings – several dozens of thousands come to the meeting every Friday – what for? They are publicly put on scales – their weight is announced; if it’s 1 pound more than last week they are booed; if they are 1 pound less than last week they are applauded. Now they are coming to this meeting as individuals and they are leaving reinforced in their individuality because they know damn well that by marching together not a single inch will disappear from their waste. Whatever happens depends entirely on them; whether they observe the diet or they neglect the diet: it’s all up to them. So no new quality is emerging – it’s still a collection of individuals – separate unions, uncollected unions and I call the communities we have here in liquid modern time “Peg Communities”. Why Peg? It’s like people come to a performance in the theatre – they hang their anoraks on pegs for the duration, 2 and half hours, and then they pick them and up and each one goes in different directions. It’s exactly like the type of community here. No lasting bonds

MK: I agree with you. But we can sit here talking about this but the world isn’t static – there are ways to change it. Where is the hope of fighting this individualized, atomized society?

ZB: It’s very difficult to say. I repeat all the time: I am not a Prophet.

MK: But there must be forces working…

ZB: I agree with you. But look all the great departures in modern history – every one of them came completely unexpected and from the areas, from the corners of the globe which were least attended to. I have been a sociologist for 60 years – I have learnt a lot of sociology and I am quite sure that we sociologists have wonderful apparatus or wonderful tools and stratagems to explain everything which happens. We can say: Why did it happen? Not only that we can say that it had to happen like that retrospectively. But we don’t have any tools to predict the future. We are not prophets, we are not soothsayers, we are not Oracles. I don’t think I have a single tool which puts me in a better position to predict the future as everyman layman has, every ordinary person without any sociological education. So I am quite sure that somewhere something is growing which will probably make a change. One commandment which I think is completely binding for anyone claiming to be doing some kind of scholarship is to be responsible for their words, not to say things irresponsibly when we have no idea about it.

But responsibly the only thing I can say is what are the present tendencies – which one of them will prevail, that I am unable to say responsibly.

MK: But as a layman are you hopeful?

ZB: I am hopeful because there was such a very, very intelligent regional thinker in France – a Greek called Castoriadis who became one of the most interesting social philosophers in France – and he was asked a very similar question to the one you are asking and the interviewer was even more insistent than you are. And the interviewer said: “Mr. Castoriadis do you want to change humanity?” And he said: “God forbid: it never occurred to me to change society; what I want is for humanity to change itself and it has done so many times in the past.” That’s the hope. If you trace the development of human kind then you will see that there were many quite amazing departures which no-one predicted.

When the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg in 1917 in the Times there was a little note on the 5th or 6th page in small print: no-one knew or understood what was happening. No-one believed that Hitler would come to power. So the two greatest disasters of the 20th century came completely unexpected. No-one really, seriously feared that they would make an impact, that they would last. So beware of predicting the future. One of my teachers about half a century ago – a very, very wise professor – told me “Zygmunt never predict and in particular never predict the future”.

MK: When I interviewed Noam Chomsky he said that there is a stark choice: he said that if an alien came to Earth now they wouldn’t put very high odds on human survival with the environmental situations and the proliferation of weapons.

ZB: Well sometimes you can be apocalyptic when you look at the situation you mention because what is most disquieting in the contemporary position of the globe with America and the hegemonic power – what is most disquieting to me is that every great power tries to create a world, a planet, in such a way as to make it hospitable for the kind of strengths which it possesses. Every country wants political power – not only the States. You can explain divisions of good society which were penned down by intellectuals in modern times by their deliberate, unspoken or tacit, latent wish to make society hospitable for the kind of intellectual work they were doing. Everybody going to Opera, everybody going to concerts, everybody reading thick books, the classics and going to exhibitions. I can understand that. A good society for intellectuals is a society which is kind to intellectuals, in which intellectuals are held in very high esteem and so on. It has its advantages. But in the case of America as a world power it has a tremendous dangers because America is clearly the greatest military power in the world – military only. Not any longer economically, not any longer intellectually – just in this one field.

There is no question that America is the highest placed military power – America spends on armaments as much money annually as the 25 countries next to America taken together. So there is no competition in arms, there is no question about that. But if that is the case then America wants to make the world in its image; namely, that what decides in this world is application of force: who has more bombs, who has more smart missiles and things like that, the more mobile army and so on. And that’s a danger. Economically the power has shifted already. If you take China – China is amazing really; on the one hand it is the most rapidly growing economic power in the world, getting richer by the day, probably by the end of our interview they will have several hundred billion dollars. On the other hand it a most peaceful power because they don’t see any need in fighting the rest of the world in terms of military confrontation.

MK: What about Taiwain?

ZB: You know economically they will do it. China is not interested in territorial conquest really because it can go its way without it. What China would like everybody doing is trading. There is a difference between America’s actions and China. China tries to introduce cars into China – so far the Chinese have traveled on bicycles; they don’t want everybody to have a car, which is disastrous – first of all there is not enough oil in the world to supply two billion Chinese with cars. But anyway that’s what they want to do but they need oil. America when it needs oil sends missiles against Iraq and Afghanistan and garrisons all around the Middle East – not accidently because in 50 years time according to all statistics the Middle East oil supplies will be the only working in the whole planet, all the rest will be toasted. The idea is that if we militarily capture these oil sources then we can dictate the conditions to the rest of the world.

But China works differently. I read in the French newspapers about the Chinese buyers who went to Venezuela and other places in South America and other places they produce oil in Africa – Nigeria and so on and buying oil fields – buying! They have a lot of money. Not sending armies to conquer but buying. So it is up and go but I started saying that that is the most disquieting consequence of the US emerging as the greatest by far superpower in the world – because of its weakness. A skewed balance in a sense. It’s an Empire which is strong only in one respect – in coerncion. And all the other legs of Empire are rather weak so that is troubling.

MK: Have you spent time in America before?

ZB: Yes, I’ve been there several times.

MK: What do you make of the culture there? Is it the extreme of what you were talking about as the individualized culture?

ZB: I have gone to America several times and each times I have entered at different points, stayed in different parts. I have failed to link them together – I find it very different to generalize about California and New York and Middle America and the outskirts along the coast. It’s a very disjointed country which has a festival of patriotism but daily it is a very divided and scattered place. Besides, I was in this redneck Bible-belt for example, which suddenly emerged as a tremendously important part of America because it votes Presidents in – it had never happened before, it was the first time it happened. I don’t know, generalizing is very hard.

MK: Have you read the essay by Baudrillard on America which is very scathing about the fake smiles and the superficiality…

ZB: It has a long history behind it. There were so many – in every generation – European intellectuals who went and were appalled – the incarnation of hell for them – everything they were afraid by. Another of my teachers, Theodore Adorno, his idea of mass culture was formed when he spent time in America – the replacement of high culture by base culture, vulgarization, commercialization and all this kind of stuff. That was how the idea of mass culture was born – the derogative idea of mass culture was born.

Long, long before that Alexis de Tocqueville went to America and wrote “Democracy in America” and he expected exactly the same: that there would be the tyranny of the material majority in that sense – stifling of the individual daring and there is something like that. The impression of what is the current standard, or the current objection of attention is tremendously American and to deviate from this current obligobatory standard is to take a tremendous risk.

On the other hand, you have a very differentiated society in America – you can always find a niche where you can feel at home because it is such a big country, because the distances are so great and so long. Allegedly if the whole of Europe was transferred to America and settled there – still the density of America would be about 5 times lower than today in Holland. So it’s a tremendously big country and that probably allows people to manage somehow – some of them do it voluntarily: they buy themselves, in a sense, into the areas, the surroundings which are more to their taste and some others are condemned to be in surroundings which are not necessarily to their taste but they can’t afford anything else. You have urban ghettoes in America, which are more or less the dispose of Europe.

So it’s a very complex picture. I think all generalizations are misleading…

MK: Some leftists came out during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in support of the neo-conservative policies. In the Observer Nick Cohen, in America Christopher Hitchens – people like that said that sometimes the views of the American government will coincide with the wishes of progressives…

ZB: It’s silly because America does support a lot of dictators and it was never very provident for saying to co-operate with tyrants – it works in the interests of America. Why Afghanistan? Why did with they not co-operate with the Taliban or Saddam Hussein? Because they were reluctant to co-operate they had to be removed they were obstacles. But if the tyrant is willing to co-operate there is no problem. After all, who supplied Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons and all the beginnings of WMD’s which was the pretext for the war? It was when Iraq was at war with Iran which was supported by the US – Rumsfeld, the Secretary for Defense, went there and actually made the deal with Saddam and supplied him with the same murderous gases which were used later to poison the Kurds.

MK: But Hitchens argument would be that you now have even more responsibility to take him out now…

ZB: Well he thinks America is against anti-democratic regimes – but in order to be anti-democratic and arouse the wrath of America they also need to be anti-American and not co-operate. There is the legendary meeting of President Rooseveldt who was a liberal, not a conservative, not a redneck, a very progressive man and so on. Rooseveldt met with the Saudi King on the deck of an American warship and promised him solemnly that America will support the Saudi regime in Saudi Arabia which is an awful regime – a Wahhabi regime, you know, the most extreme wing of the Islamic world and really very intolerant, very anti-feminist, very unpleasant sort of regime. But America will support and defend it providing that in exchange Saudi Arabia will regularly supply oil to America. So you see let’s not take the world at face value. Of course it is easy to say that we went to Afghanistan and Iraq to defend democracy. Let’s wait and see now because the democracy that is emerging now in Iraq will be very unpleasant for the US – it will be fundamentalist Islamic regime probably which will be much less human, much less tolerant even than Saddam Hussein was.

MK: Their support of Israel’s expansionist policies is another example of what your saying. It’s a complete double standard.

ZB: The propaganda is one thing but the facts are fundamentally different. America doesn’t have a good record of defending democracy – that’s the problem. It co-operated very wholeheartedly with the most awful regimes. Remember who was the democratically elected president of Chile?

MK: Salvador Allende.

ZB: America actually organized the killing of Salvador Allende. Democratically elected president was killed by a CIA-organized coup.

MK: Have you heard of Andrew Roberts? He’s a conservative historian. I interviewed him the other day and he was telling me about how the neo-cons were idealists who wanted to spread democracy around the world. I mentioned Allende and Chile and Guatemala, Nicaragua etc. He said that what you need to understand is that during the Cold War that the stakes were so high that you couldn’t mess around. I said that he was democratically elected! He said that every communist gets democratically elected once – they just don’t hold another election.

ZB: Bush is unusually frank and sincere because he’s said it openly: “Who is not with us, is with the terrorists”. There is no third place in the world – either you are a terrorist or you are for sending bombs and occupation forces to Iraq. There is no third solution. And if you think in these terms then of course we are democratic so whoever co-operates with us is a democrat and whoever does not is an anti-democratic. That’s unfortunately the problem.

MK: How do you combat the threat of Islamic terrorism, then?

ZB: Take the glossy magazine of the last Saturday Guardian. There is a confession of one of the pushers who actually was employed by the American government to blackmail the democratically elected presidents in Latin America. The formula was here is $200 million in one hand in the other hand is a shooter with bullets with your name on it. You choose.

MK: Was that with Allende?

ZB: This wasn’t only Allende. It was an interview with Gary Younge interview. So if you can get it still it’s a very important document.

MK: I wanted to quickly ask about the fact that young people now are so depoliticised at a time when there is so much carnage in the world. What are the sociological reasons for that? Especially in America – we can sit here now talking about how it is doing such terrible things in the world, but they don’t know anything about it. What are the reasons for having a population of such uninterested people who have no conception of the world outside of their own borders?

ZB:: Well one part of the answer is related to the question before. We live in a time of a very acute crisis of the long term idea – the idea of long term, uncertainty of the future, life in fragments – from one episode to another, one project to another. It’s virtually impossible to plan in the long-term. There are no career tracks that end in the grave which you can follow. So the result is that people are – one could use the phrase which was recently coined by one sociologist “living in the tyranny of the moment”. We are so engrossed in the present – in the task nearest to hand – that we can’t think in the long-term. And if you can’t think in the long-term then you can’t think of the state of the world in 20 years because that is something that is beyond your understanding.

The other thing is, well in Britian for the first time in history, the art of living in debt is part of the national cirriculam because all students are obliged to live in debt officially – by the decree of government – and living on credit is a very powerful tool to stop people thinking about more global affairs and the taking of risks and so on. If you are in debt then your hands are tied down. The thing which I observed already before I had left Poland – actually when the Communist regime was already collapsing and there was no ideological grip any along with the population – one needed alternative means of exacting discipline and obedience and so on. And one of the inventions which was introduced in a late stage of Communism in Poland was the idea that there was no free-market of lodgings – lodging was part of social service – but, say, the family had children growing up and they wanted to be on their own and so on. So the condition of that was that you need to keep for 10 years a saving book for which you need to save – it was not living on credit but it was the civilization of saving books and credit cards – you have to put aside the same amount every month and if you lose your job – if you are removed because you are, I don’t know, too courageous or if you are against the managers or whatever – then you lose this continuity and you lose your chances. And that had a tremendous disciplining impact – people were afraid: “What will happen to me? I need this flat tremendously. I need my own home. I want a wife and children and so on. So I can’t take risks.” I think there’s some sort of an impact of this kind on student populations. Before they get their diplomas, their degrees they are already above their ears in debt – what if I lose my place in university and be left with all this debt and unable to repay it. Even if people don’t think clearly in these terms I think somewhere in the subconscious there is a feeling that they are not free.

When I was a professor at Leeds University – different eras ago – everybody had scholarships and grants and you could make student revolution. The state is obliged to pay for my studies! It doesn’t matter – I don’t lose anything. I came to Leeds in 1971 – after 1968 already but it was still brewing, this independence of students and they were demanding – if they didn’t like something then they protested and so on. It was a very interesting time – not particularly comfortable for the Head of Department like myself. But interesting and now students are – as my colleagues tell me – they are mostly interested in passing exams easily. They don’t demand but they don’t want demands to be made of them – they want to be left alone.

MK: How conscious a tactic of control is the building up of debt?

ZB: That is a general impression today – that is a generality that one can risk. Humanly produced things are hitting us today in the style of natural disasters. There is very little to distinguish between terrorist assault on the towers in Manhattan, the havoc which resulted from the American invasion of Iraq, and Tsunami and Katrina. They all, you know, came completely unexpectedly – they couldn’t be predicted and took everybody by surprise. They were completely contrary to the intentions. And the general impression that people get probably is that there is very little people can do to countervail, to counteract, let alone to prevent and pre-empt the sudden disasters. Whether they are man-made or whether they are natural disasters doesn’t matter. In 1755, in the era when the Enlightenment started and modern thinking started and so on, there was an awful disaster in Lisbon, Portugal – first there was an earthquake which caused the equivalent of the contemporary Tsunami – sea waves which hit the city and then there was fires – Lisbon was destroyed and 20,000 people were dead, owners lost their property and so on. And that was the beginning of secularization – the idea that God doesn’t do his job properly because we would understand if He penalized and punished the sinners but in Lisbon there were very decent people, there were some sinners, but the great majority were decent and he just blindly hit them. So there is something wrong with divine creation – nature must be tamed, must mastered. We will take the world under human management guided by reason we will do the better job out of it. Well 250 years passed and we are very much at a starting point because it is not that the behavior of nature became more guided by reason. On the contrary: the outcomes of reason dictating actions meant behaving more like natural disasters.

That’s the problem; that’s why there is a general impression that eventually it is beyond human power to do something about bringing order into the world. The ambition, the optimistic, the belief in progress which was typical of late 18th and 19th century and part of the 20th century has gone. And if you hear today the word “progress” it often means the hopeful vision of the future, but it is a sort of grip over your head: If you don’t hard enough, you don’t compete strongly, then you’ll be left behind, you’ll be kicked out, you’ll fall over the boat from the accelerating vehical of progress and so on. So it is a frightening prospect progress, not any longer encouraging.

And that is one of aspects of what I told you before: I think that this is a most unpleasant aspect of the contemporary situation. We have lost our ability to do long term thinking – to be daring, to be imaginative. We don’t see how we can go about improving things. When I was your age the major question then to be itself was “What is to be done?” Today, I don’t think that is a question because most of use know, roughly, what is to be done. If you took a planetary poll of opinions, 99% would say to you that there should be no war, there should be no overheating of the planet, there should be no pollution. We know what is to be done but the big question today is “Who is going to do it?” That’s the question today – where are the institutions, where is the social force, where is a category of the population who is likely to do it?

100 years ago some people thought that the category would be the business and entrepreneurs who were paying their way to a happy world all over. Other thought it is the working-class: they will revolt and they will bring the just system. Some other people were state-orientated and said “Wise government! Wait till the next elections and we will elect a powerful government who will do the things right.” All these answers sound ridiculous today.

Source: www.thecommentfactory.com, March 13, 2009