The Origins of Anti-Authoritarianism

Nina Witoszek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138057975
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351674478
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

This book discusses the ongoing revolution of dignity in human history as the work of 'humanist outliers': small groups and individuals dedicated to compassionate social emancipation. It argues that anti-authoritarian revolutions like 1989's 'Autumn of the Nations' succeeded in large part due to cultural and political innovations springing from such small groups.

The author explores the often ingenious ways in which these maladapted and liminal 'outliers' forged a cooperative and dialogic mindset among previously resentful and divided communities. Their strategies warrant closer scrutiny in the context of the ongoing 21st century revolution of dignity and efforts to (re)unite an ever more troubled and divided world.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 The second renaissance in 20th-century Europe

The community of conscience

According to evolutionary science, for social solidarity and teamwork to exist at any given rung of the social ladder, there must be mechanisms that hold the “wolves of selfishness” and tyranny at bay (Wilson and Hessen 2014). These mechanisms are not just law-abiding democratic institutions, but also shared stories and beliefs that define a group’s identity and boundaries.

There are many signs in 21st-century Europe that the institutions and stories that have been selected by many national communities have failed to keep the wolves of selfishness at bay. This book is being written in the aftermath of the carnival of the Polish Solidarność (1980–81), an extraordinary anti-authoritarian revolution which began the process of European renewal. And yet, a mere three decades later, the notion of “renewal” has an ambivalent ring to it: the democratic gains of the 1980–1989 upheaval seem to have been short-lived. The euphoria of 1989 has long evaporated. The miracle of the Autumn of the Nations – a potential toolkit to forge a new European identity – has become relegated to spurious folklore, only occasionally invoked at national anniversaries. There is a surreal discrepancy between historical research which generates ever more sophisticated insights into what made 1989 a unique event in European history – and the darkening of the public sphere both in Eastern Europe and on the continent as a whole. Glorious deeds and stories of the recent past have been forgotten – or unmasked as the work of selfish agents and nefarious forces. Could it be that one of the reasons behind the crisis of European identity has to do with a failure to capitalize on the mobilizing potential of 20th-century Europe’s most compelling saga of anti-authoritarian mobilization and “family reunion”?

Once so bold and buoyant, the stories about the altruist daredevils challenging the authoritarian powers have been eclipsed by narratives of resentment and wrong. More, the very nation that once radiated the energy and bliss of Europeanness reborn, has turned into its own antithesis. Nothing can be more embarrassing than the post-Solidarity Party of Law and Justice (PiS) which, after coming to power in November 2015, began to replicate the old authoritarian protocol by violating the independent judiciary and purging public media. And nothing can be more ironic than the story of forward-looking, European Poland – once an emblem of class solidarity and caritas – morphing into a chronicle of a hurt, selfish and inhospitable community. As Adam Michnik put it: “We destroyed the great Polish myth at our own request. Poland of revanchism won over Poland of solidarity and compassion” (Michnik 2008). ¹

There are multiple reasons for this regression. One of them is the mixed blessing of democracy and neoliberal capitalism which has exacerbated inequality and made life painful and humiliating for the underdogs and the left-behind. Neither democracy nor the market – for all their virtues – function as guardians of human dignity: dignity understood as more than mere participation in economic growth and popular elections. They do not offer any safeguards against exclusion, lack of respect and violations of human integrity, whether inflicted by the state or economic piranhas. Thus, despite their initial successes, young and wobbly democracies face losing the battle with sacred symbols and certainties represented by absolute powers such as God, the Church or a populist government. The economic and political elites have been fixated on the gross national product, not on gross national happiness. They seem to have forgotten about the pivotal importance of human dignity in the making of the post-authoritarian national identity. They left it, as unoccupied territory, to the Church, family and the religious and populist healers of the national soul. In these conditions, the invisible legacy of cultural ligatures – a hotchpotch of earlier authoritarian, nationalist and religious traditions – has grown in importance and blossomed, often not in spite – but because – of economic achievements.

Thus a dark, inverse version of the revolution of dignity has taken place: one where the dignity of the excluded is no longer restored and cemented by creativity and altruism but disfigured by selfishness, fear and hate. In the 21st century, the PiS project of “raising Poland from its knees” by defying the united forces of international capital, feminists, atheists, ecologists and cyclists, sounds as preposterous as it is distressing. And yet it seems to be successful. Solidarność has become a debased currency. The ever more inventive interpretations of the 1989 Roundtable Agreement – the founding event of Polish democracy – reframe it as an act of treason or collusion with national and ideological enemies (e.g. Bielik-Robson 2016). The founding fathers of free Poland are no longer even “controversial” – i.e. idolized or denigrated. They are about to be eviscerated.

That said, Poland is a country where everything is possible, even change for the better. This is what this book is about. It is an attempt to look again at the period 1976–1989 as an example of change which seemed not just impossible, but was perceived by many as a kamikaze project. And yet, as I will show, there is abundant evidence to the effect that these years were an inspiring, effervescent period, not just in modern Polish, but in European history – a time when the “wolves of selfishness” were held at bay and human altruism and wisdom flourished, if only for a stretch of time.

Alfred North Whitehead singled out two instances of such triumph of human sagacity and foresight in the history of Western civilization: the first was Rome under Caesar Augustus and the second was the generation of America’s founding fathers (Ellis 2008: 10). I suggest the list is incomplete without the 1976–1989 revolution of dignity, orchestrated by small groups of humanist outliers. It was then that an extraordinary gathering of political and literary talent – thinkers, poets and activists from all social strata – set out to restore human autonomy in an authoritarian state. Much of their work has been hardly recorded on cameras, reported by mainstream newspapers, or anatomized by political scientists. Rather, it constituted the revolution behind the revolution: an invisible, ongoing transformation which slowly erodes all authoritarian regimes and which, seemingly, has no direct political or economic telos. It advances and retreats and advances again. It does not belong to the progress of democracy but to the moral progress of humanity. It is a revolution which augments, and constantly refines, the idea of a “community of conscience”.

The concept of conscience – that inner voice that helps us to distinguish right from wrong and calls us to choose public good and suppress selfishness – is not as unsexy as it sounds. In one of the most poignant discussions of such a community of conscience – Shakespeare’s King Lear – we encounter the Jester, a Renaissance protagonist who replaces the ancient Greek Chorus. The Fool’s two main characteristics are wisdom and empathy. Empathy, like love, is a vestige of his original, preconscious oneness with creation. It permits the Fool to recognize the like in the unlike, to identify with King Lear’s confusion, Edmund’s villainy and Cordelia’s selflessness. According to Leszek Kołakowski, the philosophy of the Jester is based on “goodness without universal indulgence, courage without fanaticism, intelligence without discouragement, and hope without blindness” (Kołakowski, 1971: 58). The Fool’s head thinks with the diabolical reason of the scoundrels and the Machiavels, yet his actions run directly counter to his self-interest: in his dealings with the moral bandits he follows the ancient virtues of honour, compassion and loyalty. This makes the Jester into a sober dreamer who knows that there is no way back to a prelapsarian state – or forward to a radiant future which starts at point zero. He desires no new beginnings ex nihilo, and no wars to end all wars. It is as if he were a post-apocalyptic human who has stored up the desolate wisdom from all past defeats. His vision of social transformation is a passage to a “city of light” that is forged through the sheer power of will, wit and moral imagination.

The jesterly community of conscience is the opposite of the ghastly community described by Hannah Arendt in her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): a community which built Auschwitz and Gulags and created a world which “transformed human beings into uncomplaining animals” (Arendt 1951; 1973: 439). The origins and morphology of the community of conscience – one that opposes inhumane regimes and totalitarian barbarities – are as intriguing as the enigma of the community of evil which engineered the Holocaust, Kolyma or the North Korean Hoeryong. For, as the poet Wislawa Szymborska reminds us, it is not so much conscience, but hate and evil that are seemingly a more robust force in uniting the wretched and the downtrodden:

Does doubt ever really rouse the rabble?

Only hatred has just what it takes

[…]

Let’s face it:

It knows how to make beauty.

The splendid fire-glow in midnight skies.

Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns.

Above all, it never tires

of its leitmotif – the impeccable executioner

towering over its soiled victim.

(Szymborska 1995:181–182)

While agreeing that hatred is a powerful glue, there is evidence to the effect that, at some historical periods, acts of altruism have equal potency. Though, as I suggested in the previous chapter, such acts are most likely to occur at the small group level, they are occasionally scaled up and penetrate into national and supranational movements.

There are now countless studies of a fascinating mobilization against violence and hatred in Eastern and Central Europe which had preceded the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. There is a gripping library of books about August 1980 and the birth of the Polish Solidarity movement): a massive, peaceful protest of 10 million people challenging the communist regime and the Soviet tanks. But the Eastern European revolution of dignity did not start in 1989, or even in 1980. I argue that its origins can be traced back to 1976, to the ideas in the heads of several brave and eccentric individuals who liked strong cigarettes, vodka and intelligent women. These ideas were not new; they had figured in the post-WW2 émigré publications and in masterpieces of philosophy and poetry banned by the communist inquisitors. But in 1976, they stopped being mere explorations and speculations. They became embodied ideas. Their trigger was the Shakespearian jester’s impulse: something had to be done to demonstrate empathy and solidarity with the victims of the workers’ state repressions. In this particular case, the topic of deliberations concerned the arrests of workers from Ursus and Radom who had protested in June 1976 against the rising price of meat. As the Russian poet Joseph Brodski put it in his imaginary socialist Book of Genesis: “In the beginning there was a can of meat”. In the striking workers’ case it was, literally, a can of meat. But in the heads of a small group of intelligentsia gathered in a Warsaw apartment on 23 September 1976, it was a stirring of conscience, a spur of goodness. This was an unusual impulse, because usually the intellectuals give the people what the intellectuals want. But not this time.

The group decided to publicly announce that they were taking the imprisoned workers and their destitute families under their protection. They called themselves the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR) – a clever rhetorical ploy, invoking the romantic-proletarian tradition that the Communist Party in Poland preached but did not practice. They issued an “Appeal to Society” calling for financial, medical and legal help for the oppressed workers. They went on tedious trips to Radom and Ursus, where they sat through the workers’ trials as Samaritan witnesses of communist ignominy and mock-justice. They knocked on people’s doors, gave out money, and collected names and addresses of victims of state repression. More importantly, they did it openly, publishing their own names and telephone numbers in a regular information bulletin which they circulated through their network.

This is not to say that KOR was group of righteous do-gooders who agreed on a virtuous strategy of action. On the contrary, many of them had inflated egos, a penchant for argument and squabble and a talent for insubordination. They split and improvised and they went along. But whatever their differences, they followed their selfless vision to the end. Already they were forging a new meme: a story about a community that no longer drew on motifs of national victimhood and pity, but rather on actions of Shakespearian moral tricksters intent on outsmarting the oppressive state. KOR members were not depressingly manic-depressive; rather, they were manic-impressive – a style and air which was found irresistible, especially by the ladies. When they were not in prison, they partied, romanced, argued and schemed. They obsessed endlessly about dignity and solidarity, but, as has been observed, often amid “four letter words flying in the air”. ² They worked on “how to make a plus out of a minus”, to use the expression of the world’s most famous political electrician, Lech Wałęsa. Tirelessly, they built alliances with students, Catholics, workers and peasants. Soon, they created their own press bureau, with a link to the BBC, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which started broadcasting every single case of communist tyranny. Their modus operandi was courtship and seduction rather than supplication: they enticed leading international poets and thinkers to embrace their cause; they sent endless appeals to influential political leaders in the West; they persuaded, ironized and cajoled.

And thus, in the course of four years, the core group of humanist outliers – counting 34 members and several thousand supporters – changed the fate of the authoritarian state. During that ti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The revolution of dignity and its drivers
• 1. The second renaissance in 20th-century Europe
• 2. Re-enchanting modernity: Comparative perspectives on the legacy of 1968
• 3. Friendship and revolution: The Eros and ethos of the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR)
• 4. Three weddings and a funeral? The “dialogic revolutions” of 1980 and 1989
• 5. The power of the hinterland
• 6. The power of Sanctum
• 7. The power of women
• Epilogue
• Index