THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE : Freedom in the East
Scruton, Roger
THe PuRsuIT of knoWleDGe Freedom in the East by roger scruton D uring the 1980s it was increasingly easy to travel to Eastern Europe, to make contact with the dissident underclass,...
...The students of our underground university in Prague were not in search of the socialist alterna tive...
...Whatever challenge to the old order of Europe is demanding to be normalized—be it radical Islam or open homosexuality—it will gain official endorsement, as the European Court of Human Rights rules that nondiscrimination requires us to include it...
...And the most important of those rights will be the right to “non-discrimination...
...You could move with enough freedom around the occupied parts of our continent to observe just what had happened in the 50 years since the socialists had decided to divide it among themselves...
...We approached the Freie Universität Berlin, the Open University in Britain, and finally Britain’s only university that is fully independent of government policy—the University of Buckingham—in the hope of being able to link our dissident colleagues and their students to structured courses of study and RoGeR scRuTon genuine examinations...
...Will this be experienced by the Poles as a new freedom, or rather as a state-imposed oppression, and one against which they are powerless to defend themselves...
...That was the phrase used by the Czech philosopher Jan in his wonderful underground lectures on the legacy of European culture—lectures which I was able to obtain in samizdat, and which inspired the young people who attended them to imagine what Europe would be like without socialism, and without the huge legacy of sacrificial violence that socialism had required...
...For them the rejection of Communism was what it was for me: a vomiting forth from the social body of a terrible poison, the very same poison that had inflamed the veins of our Western universities The society of the future is to be a society without clear duties, since it will be defined purely in terms of “human rights...
...But the full impact of the new militant secularism has yet to be experienced...
...But the full impact of the EU is yet to be felt in Poland...
...It was while helping to set up a system of examinations for the underground university in Czechoslovakia that I came to see how successful the Soviet machine had been, not only in suppressing free institutions and autonomous education in the occupied territories, but also in securing the acquiescence of Western officialdom in the fait accompli...
...Václav Havel was one of them...
...Our universities were full of experts on the social and political systems east of the Elbe, and all of them depended on the precious visas that were granted only to those who endorsed the official lies or at any rate passed over them in silence...
...S hortly after the graduation of our first alumni the wall came down...
...As the only member of the college who had the slightest acquaintance with those who were emerging as political leaders in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, I waited to be invited to the feast...
...The roles of Thatcher, Reagan, and Pope John Paul II remained unmentioned and unmentionable, and America, previously despised for its aggression, was now to be despised for its triumphalism...
...Currently Poles are migrating by the hundred thousands to the rich economies of Western Europe, causing massive resentment among the indigenous working populations...
...The event was marked by the politics society of my college (Birkbeck College, in the University of London) with an emergency discussion open to the whole academic body...
...A few years later Eric Hobsbawm, who had by then perforce left the Communist Party of Great Britain, though only because the Party had, in a rare access of embarrassment, dissolved itself, was rewarded, on the recommendation of Tony Blair, with the second highest honor that the Queen can The students of our underground university in Prague were not in search of the socialist alternative...
...Once incorporated into the 170,000 pages of the acquis communautaire a law becomes part of the European Treaties, and therefore immune from any legislative process that a single nation could initiate...
...They were seeking for the culture of the old European city, the culture that consisted, as Plato put it when the first of those cities achieved selfconsciousness, in the “care of the soul...
...The society of the future is to be a society without clear duties, since it will be defined purely in terms of “human rights...
...It was clearly one of those “anti-communist,” CIA-sponsored attempts to destabilize Europe, and no university was prepared to jeopardize its official contacts for the sake of a few pathetic dissidents who probably deserved to be out in thecold in anycase...
...50 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008...
...The aspirations of the people of Eastern Europe were to be reinterpreted as aspirations for a real and “democratic” socialism...
...national feelings are to be extinguished, and in their place there is to be a “multiculturalism” which looks with bland acquiescence on all cultures save the one that is “ours...
...In the brief twilight years prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall you could obtain an inside view of the collaboration between the left establishment in Western Europe and the official organs of “socialist culture” in the East...
...and infected the official culture of Europe...
...Sure, there have been protests against the EU’s insistence that laws forbidding abortion are to be removed from the Polish statute book—abortion being defined by the European Court of Human Rights as a “human right...
...And from Eric Hobsbawm to Jürgen Habermas, our most important left-wing intellectuals maintained links with the official universities and institutes in the Eastern Bloc and would not dream of jeopardizing those links by any flirtation, however, brief, with the dissident minority...
...By then I had come to see that the episode of human history that I had had the privilege of witnessing, so to speak, from the worm’s-eye view, was one whose meaning would never be understood by our official institutions or by the social democratic ideology that was, is, and will be the philosophy of the new Europe...
...And the interesting feature of EU legislation is that it is irreversible...
...Anne Applebaum writes eloquently of the Polish situation, and of the way in which Poles have recuperated their elementary freedoms...
...The long-term impact of this on a community that has endured only thanks to the sacrifices contained in the old form of marriage is yet to be properly experienced...
...The discussion was to be led by Eric Hobsbawm, long-standing member of the British Communist Party and a notorious collaborator, and by Perry Anderson, former editor of the New Left Review, representing the only known alternative to the Old Left, namely the New Left, whose revolutionary credentials dated not from 1917 but from 1968, when Parisian cobblestones had replaced Molotov cocktails as the preferred weapon of the self-appointed representatives of the working class...
...We in Britain experience this as a massive loss of freedom...
...Finding a name for this poison is hard: If I settle now on “social democracy” it is only hesitantly, and in full consciousness of the fact that such an expression does not capture the deep rejection of the European inheritance that has, since the early years of the 20th century, been the refrain of our political class...
...Even this great event—the final collapse of socialism as a worldwide movement— was to be treated as an internal quarrel on the left...
...But I waited in vain...
...None of them would have anything to do with the project...
...They will not be allowed to return to a society in which life follows an age-old pattern of willing sacrifice, as one generation quietly gives way to the next...
...And the most important of those rights will be the right to “nondiscrimination,” which forbids any attempt to exclude, to judge, to grant privileges, and which is shaped by a radical secular agenda...
...They were the ones who knew in their hearts, even if they could not APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 49 THe PuRsuIT of knoWleDGe express it in their words, what that great event was about...
...The Americans were to become notorious for their failure to understand that the oppression in Eastern Europe was the result of the “capture” of the Russian Revolution by Stalinist forces which had more in common with the old imperial culture of Tsarist Russia than with those who had worked so heroically, whether through the Old Left or the New, to bring emancipation to the working classes...
...But they were also the self-conscious ness of the “velvet revolution” of 1989...
...They will be herded into the secular age, in which the old norms are relativized, and in which Christianity, marriage, family, and all that goes with them are reduced to “options” that no one has the right to impose...
...S ocial democracy, as i understand it, works for a society without attachments, without loyalties, without anything of “ours...
...The society of the future is to be secular, even irreligious...
...And the EU-sponsored rallies for “gay pride” have given Poles a foretaste of the ideological battles to come...
...It is only in such circumstances that the nations of Europe wake up to the fact that the law that governs them is no longer theirs, and that their ability to live as they wish and as custom requires of them has been taken away...
...bestow (that of “Companion of Honour...
...It will not be long, I suspect, before the populations of Eastern Europe will feel the same way...
...In the West the left-wing intellectuals had willingly 48 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 joined in the project...
...Wheneventuallywewereable to offer genuine degrees—taught and examined in secret—it was through the Cambridge theological faculty, which had retained its right to grant a degree-level qualification without reference to the university, and which happened to contain some good Christians who were prepared to take pity on their colleagues in that “faraway country of which we know nothing,” as Neville Chamberlain notoriously put it on his return from Munich...
...Roger scruton, the writer and philosopher, is most recently the author of Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (Encounter Books...
...From the World Council of Churches, with headquarters in Prague, to the KGB fronts such as the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, a network of institutions had been established whose aim was to normalize the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe while impressing on the people of Europe that they had a common future and that that future was socialism...
...The ideology of “non-discrimination” is currently targeting schools, youth groups, even churches, insisting that children should be brought up to regard homosexuality as normal—not a temptation, but a lifestyle, to which they might themselves be legitimately drawn...
...Of course only a few people had the privilege of attending those lectures, and those people were, socially speaking, the lowest of the low, without any prospect of social advancement...
...But suppose Turkey is admitted to the EU, and Poland becomes the first victim of a similar mass migration of Muslims...
...They were seeking for the culture of the old European city, the culture that consisted, as Plato put it when the first of those cities achieved self-consciousness, in the “care of the soul...
...This is the official philosophy of the EU, and those Eastern European populations that have escaped from the grip of Communism into the welcoming arms of the new Europe will soon become aware of the fact...
...THe PuRsuIT of knoWleDGe Freedom in the East by roger scruton D uring the 1980s it was increasingly easy to travel to Eastern Europe, to make contact with the dissident underclass, and to observe the extraordinary contortions of the peaceniks and the fellow travelers as they endeavored to explain away the militarized oppression and everyday hopelessness that the Soviet occupation had engendered in those forsaken parts...
Vol. 41 • April 2008 • No. 3
