Stanislav Máselník

Corbyn on Russia: diplomacy, evidence and common sense

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Jeremy Corbyn speaking at a political rally at Liverpool Adelphi Hotel banquet room on 1st August (2015). Author: YouTube/exadverso Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Corbyn_Liverpool_2.png

Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of the British Labour Party, who does not hide his adherence to principles of the “traditional left” – as opposed to the neoliberalism of the “third way”, which is still being advocated by ideological heirs of Tony Blair. Corbyn is a politician of quite a rare breed as he does not seem to give up on his principles only because it would be politically convenient to do so. This was now demonstrated by his reluctance to immediately point to Russia as the possible perpetrator of the attack by a nerve agent in Salisbury on 4 March. This earned him a lot of ire from the House of Commons as well as from English-speaking media. Keep Reading

Central Europe snubbed in the vote for EU agencies

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The EU tightens the grip on the institutions in its core while leaving Central Europe behind. Equality and geographical balance are pretty words, but when it comes to making decisions, Western Europe seems to have little patience for “snivelling” Eastern neighbours who don’t tow the line.

That is undoubtedly the main message that will be taken out by citizens in the countries like Slovakia, Poland, Hungary or the Czech Republic from the vote to relocate two EU agencies, which took place on Monday 20 November. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the European Banking Authority (EBA) are currently based in London, but have to be moved as a result of Brexit, which caused a fierce race between EU Member States to attract them to their national capital.

Given the supporting words of Commission President Juncker (who few months ago gave a reassuring speech in the sense that the EU is a Union “of equals”, where “its members, big or small, East or West, North or South,” would all be treated the same), there was a broadscale expectation that at least one of the two agencies will go to a Central European country. In fact, Slovakia and the Czech Republic cooperated in advance to support their respective bids – with Prague standing behind Bratislava’s effort to host EMA, while Bratislava advocated the Czech capital’s proposal to host EBA. Instead, Central Europe got snubbed and EMA will go to Amsterdam and EBA to Paris.

In practice, either Central European governments spell this injustice clearly and start to have a common position in the Council (and not just rhetorically, when speaking to domestic audience in national capitals), or this will worsen as Prague, Warsaw or Bratislava continue being sent against each other, as they scramble for small, individual concessions from Brussels.

“Architects don’t just make buildings, they create social spaces too”, interview with Bianca Gioada

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EurStrat: Bianca, welcome and thanks for taking part in the first of our interview series! To introduce you to our readers, you are a young architect based in Paris who took part in several intriguing architectural projects. You also have a Master’s degree from Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest and spent a year at Architecture Department of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Yours is a compelling personal story, so I wonder if you can tell us more about what motivated you to become an architect? And what first led you to Belgium and then to France?

Bianca: I always enjoyed drawing, ‘inventing’ and crafting objects when I was a child. In school I was keen on exact sciences. But my interest in literature, arts and crafting influenced me not to go for pure scientific studies. This led me to choose architecture. That was pretty much it. I did not have much knowledge about architecture before and had never met many architects. Once studying it, I found it fascinating and really enjoyed it. Architecture is a broad profession that covers a wide range of niches for every skill and every talent.

I studied for one year in Leuven, Belgium, at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Master of Human Settlements. This experience was defining for what followed next: professionally, it opened my mind to new concepts, and socially, because of the many international colleagues I encountered. The following year, I participated in the international competition ArtUrbain, organized by Séminaire Robert Auzellein Paris. Together with two colleagues, we received the first prize. Basically this led me to come to Paris, in the beginning for an internship and later on for a permanent position as an architect in an international architectural practice with the main office in Paris.

EurStrat: That’s quite some experience. Now let me ask you about your work. In your projects, you put a lot of emphasis on the use of traditional materials and, more broadly, on architecture that is in harmony with local surroundings. Is this your personal focus or is it a general trend in contemporary architecture? And would you say the role of architecture in towns and rural landscapes has developed a lot since modernism, the aesthetics of which many people found too “raw and cold”?

Bianca: Architecture is much more than form and aesthetics. Architects do construct things out of metal, concrete, wood, and glass, but what they really build is spaces, events, and places for living.

There is a tendency in 21st century architecture for iconic forms and their designers to get all the attention. Therefore, in the urge to innovate in a competitive field, architects often disregard focusing on people, spaces and buildings that are desirable to inhabit.

However, ideas and concepts about the purpose and place of architecture are changing a lot. The architect’s work cannot be reduced to the single role of designing buildings. On a broader scale architects can employ their skills in design by drawing on multiple fields of knowledge and expand beyond classical notions of creating architecture.

We notice this preoccupation in the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, titled Reporting From the Front, curated by Alejandro Aravena at La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition links architecture to broader concerns of society such as migration, segregation, traffic, waste and pollution, inequalities, peripheries, natural disasters, housing shortage. These represent “urgent issues facing the whole of humanity”, as Alejandro Aravena puts it, “not just problems that only interest architects”, but a broader audience. The focus pivots from the architecture in society to the humanitarian role of the architect as a social figure.

I wonder what if instead of designing impressive expensive buildings, our real preoccupation would focus more on innovating living conditions. This seems to me it could be the real challenge for contemporary architecture and society.

The basis of architecture practice is not only about building with less money, low cost solutions, using common materials, but about an ethic of working and an ethic of how to understand society. This is the change in the future of architecture I believe in.

EurStrat: You imply that architecture should be about more than the architect and hers or his self-expression. In a way, you believe your profession can play a more “universal role” and is part of a society. I imagine that this isn’t a generally acknowledged position among architects and you may well be in a minority? There are arguments, for instance, that public’s sense of aesthetics should not at all guide architecture or that architects should concentrate on “building good buildings” and not meddle in ethics or politics. What would you reply to that?

Bianca: Architecture might be seen often as an autonomous discipline, but it is an arena where investment, communications, marketing and other fields come together. Moreover, built objects are only one of the various outcomes of architectural production.

We could argue to which extend architecture is political. Architecture is related to power and can serve  financial or political interests. But without financial cover, architects appear insignificant actors in this highly complex process of design of the built environment. And despite its image of avant-garde creativity, the making of architecture remains a game in which architects cultivate those with financial power in return for commissions. But the challenge for architects is to find means in which they can use their awareness not to simply produce new buildings on demand, but rather to participate to a better, in a social sense, above all, environment. An ethical architect and citizen should not lose the focus on the social responsibility beyond practice and his role as a mediator between the investors, planners, the public and users.

EurStrat: How do you contrast this present role of the architect to the one in the past? To those who aren’t experts, it may seem that “back then”, people simply used to build houses in the same manner as their neighbours. Were architects back then commissioned only by the rich or, for example, by the feudal or government authorities to undertake larger constructions?

It is true that in the past, but nowadays too, monuments and iconic, representative buildings have been created as a symbol of power. These are also the kinds of projects that attract largest budgets. But I do not believe that these are necessarily the true values of architecture, at least not in our present times where maybe 90% of the people do not even afford architects. Like I previously stated, the first role of architecture is to fulfil the needs of society by creating places to work and live. I wonder what if instead of designing impressive expensive buildings, our real preoccupation would focus more on innovating living conditions. This seems to me it could be the real challenge for contemporary architecture and society.

Cities are now run more than ever on a business approach and gentrification practices have driven cities to be successful in the global market. In Romania, for example, the restoration of the old town centres during the last years has been received very positively. But it was very soon after that urban strategies followed the model of the other European cities and their focus on capital interest in the detriment of the interests of citizens. These approaches have given way to mass consumerism, reducing the city centre to a global advertising board, turning citizens into consumers and pushing them to the periphery of the city’s civic life.

EurStrat: Our conversation also relates to the nature of contemporary European cities. Do you think that cities, towns and their centres have changed a lot in the last decades? Some people speak of their commercialisation, while others mention what at first looks aș opposite trends of pauperisation and gentrification. How can we understand this?

Bianca: Robert E. Park in his book On Social Control and Collective Behaviour asserts that “man’s most successful attempt is to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself.“

Accordingly to Park’s statement, what if in order to interpret the changes you mention we assist to in cities, we look firstly to understand what kind of people we are, our present behaviour, needs, desires, social relations, aesthetic values or technological demands and how these elements model the city. Indeed, the incredible transformations on people’s lifestyle that the last decades have brought a major impact on the quality of urban life and therefore the city itself. Consumerism and tourism have become major aspects of the urban political economy. Along the same lines, the city centre has become a catalyst for consumption, tourism and leisure, concentrating restaurants, shops, fashion and cultural-based industries.

I feel that it is only very recent that we feel the repercussions of such behaviour. Cities are now run more than ever on a business approach and gentrification practices have driven cities to be successful in the global market. In Romania, for example, the restoration of the old town centres during the last years has been received very positively. But it was very soon after that urban strategies followed the model of the other European cities and their focus on capital interest in the detriment of the interests of citizens. These approaches have given way to mass consumerism, reducing the city centre to a global advertising board, turning citizens into consumers and pushing them to the periphery of the city’s civic life.

EurStrat: On the other hand, people in towns and citizens are becoming increasingly more active. I don’t mean only political activism, charities or voluntary work, but for instance both performing and performance art. How do you see such developments and do they add something to our urban landscapes and public space?

Bianca: In the contemporary context defined by the privatization of life we mentioned earlier, or by new forms of public spaces that are emerging, like the internet, we could question to what extent we still use public space.

I have recently frequented a series of live music concerts organized by independent musicians in Paris and I questioned exactly the same thing you bring up. People are very active and willing to express, share, participate and gather. And all this is very enriching. At the same time, there is a need for physical spaces where artists and basically all citizens can meet. Art is reclaiming public space and is reshaping cultural landscapes in cities today.

Public space today is often used for public gatherings which engage various kinds of performances and artistic expressions. And this is such a great quality that cannot be ‘designed’, but through design the use of such spaces can be encouraged.

It is not only about creative activities, but about the everyday liveliness which is absolutely essential for the social vitality of cities and societies.

Bianca Gioada (30)

- Graduated with Master's Degree in Architectural Design of Ion Mincu University, Romania, and studied Master of Human Settlement at Katolieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.
- Works as an architect in Manal Rachdi Oxo Architectes, Paris, and previously at Moussafir Architectes and Dietmar Feichtinger Architectes, France.
- In her projects, she focuses on urban regeneration and puts emphasis on creating "spaces, events, and places for living" rather than "just" buildings.

*Interview conducted by Stanislav Máselník

European Commission’s neoliberal agenda in France: weaker employee rights

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If you are following political developments in France a bit, you couldn’t have missed the recent waves of massive strikes and protests that hit the Hexagon. The cause is Hollande’s government push for “reforms” to the labour law. Obviously, the word reforms here stands for a range of measures in line with neoliberal tenets that take away rights from employees and give them to corporations. Namely, allowing less favourable local agreements on wages (to undermine collective bargaining of national trade unions) or making it easier to hire and fire staff. Crucially, the French government decide to invoke Article 49.3 of the Constitution that gives it the power to bypass parliament and impose reforms by decree. That way it also sidestepped critics in its own ranks, such as Parti socialist MP Laurent Baumel, who called the move ‘anti-democratic’ and labelled it as ‘a heavy-handed way of using the constitution to prevent the nation’s representatives from having their say.’

What is less apparent is that the French government’s attack on employee rights has a European dimension. Revealed recently by the association Corporate Europe Observatory, the European Commission is using all its new powers gained after the financial crisis of 2008 to move France in the direction of ‘liberalisation of labour code’. ‘Simply put, France has been required flat out to ensure higher profitability for businesses by driving down wages,’ say the authors of the study. For those interested in how the European Union stands on the side of austerity and neoliberalism, this is an interesting read that shouldn’t be missed.

Dostoyevsky 125 years on: secret yearnings of the human soul

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The statue of Dostoyevsky in Tallinn, Estonia

125 years ago on 9 February 1881 died arguably the most well-known Russian novelist in Europe, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский). What should a today’s reader remember about him as a writer, thinker and a man?

In his vast work consisting of 11 novels, three novellas, 17 short stories and many other publications, Dostoyevsky depicted a staggering amount of social plots and characters. What they share is not just the urban and rural backdrop of the tsarist Russia, but Dostoyevsky’s ceaseless pursuit to understand the human soul. And no wonder, already during Belle Époque intellectual circles in European cafés considered that the Russians with their “great soul” are particularly apt at perceiving the fragile and complex fabric of our anima. The vastness of Siberia, chill of continental winters, and constant threat of a foreign invasion from several directions explains the emergence of tsarist autocracy. But perhaps it also led the Russians to start being strongly attuned to suffering and passing moments of happiness. In this Dostoyevsky’s writing is exemplary: with the same blow, his work can put the human soul at the top of a pedestal of virtue and ethics, only to strike it down the very next moment to the abyss of despair, insanity, or petty day-to-day maliciousness.

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky’s last novel, is such a work. Sons to a debauched father, who spent his life as a womanizer and careless buffoon, capture in their personalities different aspects of Russian character. Dmitri seems like the national archetype, a sensualist with a short temper but a warm heart, contrasting him to the haughty intellectual Ivan, who is actually concerned for humanity to such an extent that it leads him to reject God as the ultimate cause of grief and misery. Dostoyevsky’s Christian ideal is clearly Representation in the third brother, caring Alyosha. Alyosha does not deny there is suffering, but he tries to sublimate it through help, compassion, and perceiving the good even in the shades of darkness.

In The Brothers Karamazov, human yearnings reach their full play. The seductive beauty of Grushenka, a woman whose abuse by a Polish officer had led her to torment men, sparks off a vicious struggle between a son and father for her attention. Proud and beautiful Katerina, on the other hand, is trying to save her fiancé Dmitri from himself. Even if that means creating a barrier between her and Ivan, all the while the two of them share an actual, yet hidden love. Next to these colourful characters, Alyosha’s good nature might seem to go to such extents that his personality is almost disappearing in the background. This draws a parallel between him and Count Myshkin, the hero of another Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Idiot. Both are Dostoyevsky’s answer to what he saw as problems of his time: that a lot of suffering comes from the fact that one gives in too greatly to human passions and relies on rationality alone to solve complex social ills. The political manifestation of this was, for Dostoyevsky, nihilism and socialism, as portrayed on the revolutionaries of The Possessed.  The effort to uproot and reorganise all social structures is only one consequence of deeper forces at play in the human psyché.

Our Russian author tried to demonstrate that we eternally, perpetually yearn for bliss, satisfaction, and perfection, while the struggle to reach them here and now fuels rifts, conflicts, and creates even more destruction. My happiness might be your doom, as Dmitri realises as his madness deepens from the thought that Grushenka may “fall into his father’s clutches”. The ancient Greeks understood this very well too, but, unlike Dostoyevsky, they saw the conflict as without a resolution and not needing any higher justification than itself. Life could be regarded as beautiful still, because its greatness and its misery portray one whole, in a kind of a piece of art that is tragedy. In one of the highly memorable quotes from The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri observes that “[t]he awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” Dostoyevsky therefore agrees with the premise that human passions clash; even in beauty darkness and the light are intertwined. Yet for him this conflict can be reconciled in God, specifically in (Orthodox) Christianity. While human beings cannot entirely forgive injustices, Christ did and can. The best one can do, Dostoyevsky believes, is therefore approximating our behaviour to the Christian ideal, which is the background of the characters of Myshkin and Alyosha. Their strength of character is not supposed to be “diminished”, but to offer a glimpse of a different form of acting: understanding and letting people reach their potential for goodness, rather than making a constant effort to impose one’s will and subject others to the individual’s schemes and plans.

In Ivan, who represents Western modernity, we are offered strong rebukes to Orthodox Christianity. Ivan rejects Christianity, because even if God existed, he says, he could not love humanity at all: meaningless pain and sorrow that he creates are without an excuse, particularly for children who could not yet even commit any sin. Chapter 4 of the book contains this horrifying paragraph, narrated by Ivan to Alyosha:

“There was a little girl of five who was hated by her mother and father. . . . This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy [outhouse], and because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child’s groans!

Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark in the cold and weep her meek, unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted?”

Where was God then? asks Ivan. To press this point further, he also tells to Alyosha a Biblical apocrypha about the figure of a grand inquisitor—which since then became known as a story on its own. (The reader can see it below in the riveting performance of John Gielgud in the 1975 short film from the Open University.)

In this story, which is happening during the times of Spanish inquisition, Christ once again walks the earth, performing miracles. But the grand inquisitor puts him behind the bars, claiming that Jesus interrupted their work. He is not needed; he is actually the reason behind human misery, the inquisitor tells him. Instead of offering to humans bread, guidance in the form of earthly rule, and certainty of afterlife, he only gave them freedom. And that freedom, the inquisitor says, is good for nothing, because it cannot satiate passions and needs. With freedom, human beings will only go after each other’s necks. Perhaps Christ therefore did not love humanity at all, when he put on them such otherworldly demands, Ivan and the grand inquisitor say together. To that Jesus replies only by a kiss.

I will leave the reader to make his or hers own conclusions. What is clear is that the author of The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, or short stories such as The Meek One or The Gambler was always dominated by the quest to understand what is happening in human minds, hearts and souls. Perhaps this might give us a few thoughts to ponder about even in the digital 21st century?

-Stanislav Máselník

(updated on 19 February 2016)

Grave of the Fireflies

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Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

On 9th December at age 85 died Akiyuki Nosaka (野坂 昭如), an author of story Grave of the Fireflies (火垂るの墓), which earned him a prestigious literary award Naoki. Born in 1930 in the former imperial capital of Kamakura, not far from Tokyo, Akiyuki Nosaka lived through the death of his mother and then of his adoptive parents, who perished during the 1945 American air raids. He and his younger sister were firebombed out of their homes, and she then died by starving to death. Writing Grave of the Fireflies, Nosaka said, was his way of making peace with his past and overcome guilt over some less worthy aspects of his wartime behaviour.

Akiyuki Nosaka, © MyDramaList
Akiyuki Nosaka, © MyDramaList

Probably unknown to many a European, this captivating tale has much to say, precisely during such merry time as Christmas holidays. The story of two orphans struggling through the penury of wartime Japan is based on Nosaka’s own childhood experience. Yet, it transcends its historical moment and shows that virtues and solidarity hold the greatest significance in harsh times. That is when they are put under test and that is when they have to play themselves out not just in words but also in deeds. Why not to remind ourselves of the importance of noble acts precisely during Christmas?

Most accessible introduction is in the book’s adaptation into a highly appraised anime of the same name from Isao Takahata of Studio Ghibli. Animation may at first seem like an odd choice for a ‘serious storyline’, but that is explained by the author himself. Nosaka thought that Grave of the Fireflies places such high expectations on two young protagonists, that an acted film would not fully capture the story (Shoten 1994, p. 8). The quality of the animation itself is spectacular, demonstrating smoothness and detail perfected in later Ghibli films as Secret World of Arrietty. In the first-ever such experiment in anime, most of the film’s illustrations are drawn with brown outlines and not in the customary black. While more difficult technically (brown does not provide such a good contrast as black), it fulfilled its purpose in giving Grave of the Fireflies very soft visual feel. On the one hand, that contrasts with the wartime havoc everywhere on the scene, on the other, it highlights the vulnerability of each of the characters. Fireflies are the story’s symbol for a reason: just as they brightly sparkle only for a while before vanishing, a similar fate might await the main child protagonists.

The fourteen-year old Seita and his four-year old sister Setsuko live in Kobe with their mother, while their father, a navy admiral, fights for Japan on the high seas. Yet, the whole city is soon burned to ashes as B-29 “Superfortress” bombers make a raid on their town. Separated from their mother, Seita discovers her afterwards in a school that serves as a makeshift infirmary, her whole body covered by bandages and with horrid, fatal burns. She dies soon after, but Seita decides not to tell his sister, not to cause her any pain. With so many dead, for the assistants in the infirmary, the mother is just ‘another rotting corpse’, which they make clear when they put her on one pile with other bodies destined for mass burial.

Isao Takahata, © Zimbio
Isao Takahata, © Zimbio

The siblings make their way to a distant aunt. But food is scarce, so Seita reluctantly parts with his mother’s last kimonos, to exchange them for rice. That only causes distress in the four-year old Setsuko, who holds to the clothes as they are the last tangible reminder of her mother’s warm and reassuring presence. Soon the aunt who was initially welcoming (particularly after they shared rice with her family), starts reminding them they are a burden on the household budget. They find themselves without rice and called lazy bums for not working to aid the war effort. A proud son to a navy admiral, Seita decides that a life will be better on their own and the siblings part to a cave not far from their aunt’s village. They are able to grow some plants and exchange some of their possessions for food, but that does not last long as the strain on local farmers pushes them to keep the provisions for themselves. Seita resorts to stealing, but even then Setsuko becomes increasingly more malnourished.

Without revealing the full story, the scenes above reveal a deep connection between the two siblings. That attachment is strengthened, not weakened in the wartime, and they both are forced to grow up very soon, which mirrors Akiyuki Nosaka’s own experience. The only person Seita can exchange words with is his sister, while Setsuko eventually becomes affected by the change in the environment as well as in her brother and assumes more motherly role at times. The story shows that Seita’s and Setsuko’s life is also full of bright moments – whether when playing on piano or when we see how Setsuko joyfully awaits her brothers return from ‘a food hunt’.

On the other hand, the ‘outside world’ becomes increasingly more hostile as people close up but to themselves. The pressing need for survival, thinning food rations and looming death pushes everyone to egoism and cynic neglect to the suffering of others, even to children. We see that many times in the film, whether in the opening scene when a dead child lying at the train station is ‘just another corpse,’ or an examination where the doctor shows complete ignorance as to the ability to survive of his young patient.

Nevertheless, the above does not make Grave of the Fireflies an anti-war film. In a way, the Japan’s war – which none of the characters in the film ever questions – possesses the capacity to bring both the best and the worst in people. Commenting the story, Nosaka spoke about his hate for the films ‘where the main character is placed into cruel situations for no other reason than to provide a cathartic focus for the audience’s sympathy’ (Shoten 1994, p. 10). For Seita and Setsuko, it is a very harsh journey, yet one which makes them extremely close. Most of other characters demonstrate almost complete lack of solidarity, although they might behave differently when it comes to their closest ones.

While the film happens in a wartime setting, its purpose is not to criticise war as such (which is distant, seen only in the form of falling bombs), but to show how people behave within it, together with the capacity for better and worse. War itself might be an inevitable human condition, but our individual behaviour within in – or during any strenuous times in general – depends on ourselves. Nosaka and Takahata are idealists in the sense of having high expectations for human comportment, even when they put their child characters in front of total misery, a force majeure. Symbolism of fireflies is apt. Life might not last long, the settings might be harsh, but it is the way each person takes up own behaviour, that makes up for its brightness. Akiyuki Nosaka’s Grave of the Fireflies and its anime adaptation by Isao Takahata give us exactly that reminder.

-Stanislav Máselník

 

Bibliographie

Shoten, Tokuma (1994) Two Grave Voices in Animation. In : Animerica, vol. 2, n° 11, p. 6–11. Online : http://ghiblicon.blogspot.cz/2011/04/animerica-interviews-isao-takahata-and.html.

Forsaken by gods: a short reflection on Ancient Greek religion

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Forsaken by gods. Copyright 2015 - Stanislav Maselnik

A strange question, to ask if gods abandoned us. After all, many people in Europe today stopped believing in God at all. To speak of gods is then even stranger. It seems to point to pagan religions gone from Europe for a millennium or more, if we do not count some odd cults, whose efforts to revive dead beliefs usually turn into a caricature. Others may even feel uncomfortable to speak of “divine matters;” as some recent events, whether in France or in the Middle East, could indicate that we are better off without god, be it in singular or plural.

But let’s just consider one possibility: that we don’t really know who or what gods are. A brief consideration will show that the God of Christianity or monotheistic religions starkly differs from gods worshipped by our ancestors in Ancient Greece. It is then possible that over the course of this examination, we will discover that what is divine can be actually quite familiar to us. Even to the extent that we could find out that life has a holy dimension that our civilisation is not sensitive to. If this were to be the case, the fact that gods are “missing” would receive a new meaning. We could then start asking how did this happen and whether we can thing beyond such circumstances.

To start with the three big monotheistic religions, their answer to what is God is well-known. God is one and all-powerful. “He” sits at the top of hierarchy of beings; uncreated, he is the creator of all. He rules, orders, commands, but is also deemed to merciful towards his creation. Obviously, for the increasingly atheistic Europe the problem is to believe in this God at all. How can God be kind and compassionate, when he allows so much individual and collective suffering? Unless one is deeply convinced of their faith, it is hard not to sympathise with Stephen Fry, who considers God “utterly, utterly evil“ and asks „[w]hy should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?”

There are also philosophical problems with this conception of God. Christians often say that our ethics nowadays lack transcendence. And by that they mean that our moral standards are hollow, because in a “Godless time”, they don’t have an origin in God’s command and providence. If all moral rules are based on human consent and opinion, there is no reason to prefer one to another, they say. Apparently, only the existence of a greater being that will tell apart good and evil provides us with such transcendence ground our behaviour and moral principles. Without going to argue against that conception, we will see that the Ancient Greeks had an entirely different view of transcendence. If we look more closely on transcendence, it will also give us hints about their understanding of gods.

For the Greeks there was something else around us than just “mere things”, which means to say this or that entity. What fundamentally “is” is that something is or is not. And that it is this way or that way. It is a sort of basic miracle of human existence that we are and we won’t be. But as long as we are, we recognise ourselves as existing, here along with other humans, animals, things, or the world. We are born into a certain time, into definite conditions, and deep down we know that our ultimate fate is to die and cease existing. This means to say that we understand being, in all its temporal and historical dimensions. To our knowledge, we differ in this aspect from every other being, be it a stone or an animal. For this reason, German thinker Martin Heidegger spoke of human beings as Dasein, which in German means “being-there”. Humans are of such kind, that we have the power to understand being of our time and place, precisely as we proceed towards death. For us, stone is not just a stone – it may be a familiar rock lying next to our homestead, where we played hide and seek as children and where we gave our first love kiss on her lips. We live in the world of meaning, that is in the realm of being, which is, existentially speaking, more fundamental than any facts that science may subsequently discover.

The Ancient Greeks, according to Heidegger’s reading of pre-Socratic philosophers and Homeric texts, tacitly understood all this. Being. How things are. What they are like. How we are. How the world is. That things are rather than are not. For them, being is the true transcendent. And this transcendent is reachable only because there is one being whose fundamental feature is understanding – of its own existence and of being as such with it. We could say that humans are a sort of a portal or “a clearing in the forest” (Heidegger’s expression), where everything gains its meaning. In the eternal play of birth and death, struggle and stillness, love and hate, all things shine with significance. No supreme being, not even Christian God as traditionally understood, can be transcendent enough in the light of such transcendence. He is “just another being”, even if highest in the rank, while the dimension that transcends beings – being itself – is omitted.

Our understanding of being changes. Under most circumstances, we go on about daily routine, without realising it is a routine in the first place. How often we stop and think why do we engage in this and that, what future does it have, where is it heading, why is it meaningful? In Being and Time, Heidegger calls this inauthentic behaviour, but that may be misleading: to a great extent it is unavoidable, it is how we are. We all know the humdrum of a regular working day. Waking up after the alarm clock can’t be ignored anymore. Sun inconspicuously shining through the windows of the bedroom. Outside the construction site wakes up into existence as machines rumble to finish everything off before the arrival of winter frosts. A long sip of coffee to fire up brain cells and then a tram that jolts along the rails and on which all carless employees rely to carry them to the office. Whether we spent the day diligently or incline more to procrastination, afternoon ends and if it is the right, perhaps we will finish the day with the right company over a drink. But do we realise all this? When do we notice if something or someone does not point it out to us? The state of normalcy seems to be that we don’t grasp this being of our daily regime. Yet there are more fundamental things that we forget. What also slips away from us as we go about day-to-day affairs is that we are mortal; beings who are born and who have to die. It is also the apprehension of our mortality that throws us back against the mystery of being: that “things” are, but they just as well might be not.

A conversation with a good friend, a thoughtful film in a cinema, loving relationship with someone who opens to us other important things in life, in all such crucial moments the real understanding of our situation can emerge. It erupts. It does justice to the saying that we sometimes use – that a realisation comes down on us as a “lighting out of a blue sky”. Truth comes, it appears, disappears again, and we have no control of it. Is it then any surprise that our Greek ancestors saw gods as messengers of being, messengers of truth? We are surrounded by the familiar. By this or that being in our daily routine that we go about as if we “know” it. Only at moments the ordinariness breaks and we can say to see the truth. We gave a small example of such occasions above, but how does it work?

A first kiss between lovers can be a message, perhaps. It is a sign. A sign of a relationship, but also that the world is now a different place, a more liveable place, one brighter and happier. Since happiness is fragile, the kiss just as well might not have happened. The lovers could have never met in the first place. Or, a mistaken word, a foolish action, could have never led them to build that relationship. The truth of being suddenly emerged – and it could just as suddenly disappear and hide into concealedness that is also part of truth. It is in human power to understand being, but not to control it. We can machinate and dominate beings, we can smash atoms and modify genomes, but we will never change what things and how things are. Happiness, sadness, inspiration to action, laziness, keenness of an eye for a scientific discovery, they rush down with force and change our sight. That is why a kiss can be divine. It “transcends” us as individual beings, it transforms us from the ordinary day-to-day experience that we don’t properly realise, into the realm of being, of meaning, of truth. It is extraordinary, tremendous, daemonic. Love is a fundamental truth, just as friendship, hate, or revenge for example. For that reason “behind” or “in” a woman that we kiss there may appear a goddess. There can’t be a “mere woman” when she carries the message of the transcendent, of being beyond the ordinary appearance of beings, even beyond two people standing there. Do we have to still wonder that the receptive souls of poets and artists could “divinise” women or “divinise” warriors? That they could identify that behind this man or this woman, there is a divine being? Was theirs really a naïve anthropocentric religion, or was it rather an essential part of their attunedness to being?

It may still seem peculiar that Greek gods appear in human form. Perhaps the Greeks were simply “poetising” and gave names to universal concepts? Or did they really think that the gods had a personality and we could come across them walking on the meadow, so to say? Such understanding would miss what the Greeks saw and were trying to express. The fact that gods appear, Heidegger notes, has a connection to our capacity to understand truth – to understand being. Understanding of being we carry in our behaviour, we adopt a look. That look is open to others, it awaits other beings, because in our existence we living in communication and sharing this world with other people. Human beings are distinguished precisely by a look, as only through such “looking” being appears and can express itself in truth. To put it bluntly, being can appear only in us and through us, just like in the example of two lovers that we gave above. We have a relationship to being that can’t be found in stones, plants, or animals. As Emilio Brito observed, it is “[p]recisely because the tremendous has to appear in the figure of something ordinary, that the Greek god appears in the human form, because human being is a being that has a special relationship to being, as a place where being itself is revealed” (Brito 1999, p. 156).

It means that in the Greek world, gods have a special connection to us the mortals. Human beings can see and be struck by the divine, because it is in human heart alone where being appears. Gods “look” out of human form, because it is only in speaking, struggling, fearing and believing in each other where we can grasp being, in lightning and flashes. And it is precisely gods who reach beyond the ordinary and point out the daemonic message of transcendence. Are we forsaken by gods because we are not attentive but to daily affairs, that we treat everything as faded, ordinary, just as “mere beings”? Can a world dominated by calculative thinking, logic of capital markets, or non-committed relations on social networks still find itself rediscovering the subtle message of what it means to be?

Bibliography

Brito, Emilio (1999) Heidegger et l’hymne du sacré. Leuven : University Press; Uitgeverij Peeters (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum theologicarum Lovaniensium).

The Dark Barn 2015 art exhibition

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Dark Barn 2015 Exhibition Poster. Copyright: Alice Maselnikova

We’re very happy to announce The European Strategist is now sponsoring and supporting The Dark Barn 2015 art exhibition.

This is a part of our on-going effort to promote Europe’s culture and art, both contemporary and old. The real value of art isn’t commercial – works of art show us different worlds and the truth they contain. They elevate our eyes to pierce through the ordinary and see the extraordinary. This aspect will be never accessible to those who see in art nothing but valuable merchandise to be bought and sold and boasted about in their social circles. Our view of art is therefore essentially “unmodern” and going against the calculating, commodity fetishist spirit of capitalism.

Now to the exhibition itself. Set in the rural context of Kladná Žilín in the Zlín region, Eastern Moravia, the exhibition is starting in July 2015. Presenting the works of over 15 international artists, the show is based around the concept of “anti-exposition”, and has been accepting submissions from both established artists, recent graduates and art enthusiasts.

Here’s an excerpt from the exhibition’s description:

“We do not like that too many artists today are exhibited solely based on their fame/name and in order to bring profit to the exhibiting gallery. Artworks are displayed only for the sake of being seen and without the quality of the work being questioned. It is all a Big Humbug and Show Off and a Bore and a Problem.

Dark Barn targets the opposite concept. The works will be displayed without the intention to be seen by anyone. It is a non-profit exhibition. No one will probably see it and it will not be widely advertised online.  (Yes, we get the point, it might as well not exist but let us not get too existential here.)”

The European Strategist also provided help with restoration of the exhibition premises.

You can find more information on the project’s web page.

Force Majeure (review): ethics swept by avalanche

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A promo image for Force Majeure, a film by Ruben Ostland from 2014

What it means to have a good character? And how can we tell that someone has it? The Swedish film Force Majeure (2014) is bluntly unambiguous on both accounts. A character and ethics are inner and arguably deepest part of our selves. Unpredictable events well may come down on us with ferocity and mercilessness that remind of a divine act. Yet how we stand up to them is far from random. And it is this pattern to our response that we know as character.

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Roman poets: modern and old

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Satyr and Maenad in the ancient Roman city of Aizanoi. Photo by Efendi, 2005.

Latin is often regarded as dead as any language can be. Stories, poetry, love letters, simple daily correspondence: everything in this tongue seems to belong to a vanished past, thither behind us, a vestige of a civilisation long begone. We postmoderns would rather go and look for Latin inside dusty tomes at far shelves of a town library than on the internet among music videos, where, among sound bites and trendy pop clips, it just seems out of place.

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