Some people are of the view that when the world emerges from the COVID-19 crisis, our political and social structures will not return to the status quo.
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| Status Quo? |
This may be an opportunity to consider the flaws in our political, economic, and social structures and consider a methodology of change that dates back to the end of the Cold War that involves a “Parallel Polis”. Self isolation practice has opened opportunities to learn by reading and using podcasts. Recently Eleanor Wachtel, host of CBC’s Writers and Company, interviewed Masha Gessen on the nature of power and morality.
The topic of “Parallel Polis” is discussed on the podcast from 22:22 min to 29:40 min of the 57:58 min of the production. They discuss Václav Havel's Charter 77 that was developed as Czechoslovakia moved away from the Communist model. The power of polis essay written by Havel asserts we can create a parallel society not by splitting off or separation but by conversation across work areas about one change we can make in our economic, political, social, or religious practice.1
Pankaj Mishra, writing for the New Yorker, examines Václav Havel’s lessons on how to create a “Parallel Polis” in the shadow of the Trump Administration disruption of our political processes. A key component in the examples given by Masha Gessen, from Israel and Palestine relations, is to focus on changing one thing in the new community that is formed as a “Parallel Polis”.
The spontaneous and vigorous opposition to Trump, whether at the women’s marches the day after his Inauguration or at the protests at U.S. airports in support of a viciously demonized people, has already manifested many of the qualities that Havel wished to see in civil society: trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, and love. Many more people realize, as Havel did, that arbitrary and inhuman power cannot deprive them of the inner freedom to make moral choices, and to make human community meaningful. They are shaping a redemptive politics of dissidence in the free world, nearly three decades after the fall of Communism. To measure the American dissidents’ success in electoral or any other quantifiable terms would be beside the point. For they are creating a “parallel polis”: the vital space where many, over the next four years, will find refuge from our age of anger, and learn to live in truth.2
The desirable moral changes cited by Pankaj Mishra suggest that “kinship” might be a key element in economic and political change in an emerging “Parallel Polis”.
The problems before humankind, as Havel saw it, were far deeper than the opposition between socialism and capitalism, which were both “thoroughly ideological and often semantically confused categories [that] have long since been beside the point.” The Western system, though materially more successful, also crushed the human individual, inducing feelings of powerlessness, which—as Trump’s victory has shown—can turn politically toxic. In Havel’s analysis, politics in general had become too “machine-like” and unresponsive, degrading flesh-and-blood human beings into “statistical choruses of voters.”
According to Havel, “the sole method of politics is quantifiable success,” which meant that “good and evil” were losing “all absolute meaning.” Long before the George W. Bush Administration went to war in Iraq on a false pretext, Havel identified, in the free as well as the unfree world, “a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalize anything without ever having to brush against the truth.” In his view, “ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages and political slogans” had amassed a uniquely maligned power in the modern world, which pressed upon individuals everywhere, depriving “humans—rulers as well as the ruled—of their conscience, of their common sense and natural speech, and thereby, of their actual humanity.”2
This rediscovered “kinship” could be applied to healing right vs left divisions in politics and economics and very relevantly in restoring the “kinship” that is missing in our failure to understand our complex relationship with the species on this planet,
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| A "kinship" energy source needed |
including ourselves, that are endangered by our headlong selfish destruction of life through global warming.
References
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