#4
Moscow Times
December 4, 2001
Food for Thought Off Menu
By Boris Kagarlitsky
"Our choice is limited to what's on the pre-prepared menu. If none of the items on the menu takes your fancy then you are condemned to sit in silence."
I was sitting in a restaurant with an old American acquaintance of mine, whom I hadn't seen for a number of years. We were not, however, talking about the food. Neither of us had any objection to the profferred menu, we were talking about the political situation in Washington and about the alternatives available to citizens of the United States.
Several days later I was invited to appear on the television talk show "Svoboda Slova." On one side of the studio sat members of so-called liberal parliamentary factions, while on the other side sat Gennady Zyuganov and his party functionaries.
"Which side would you like to sit on?" merrily asked one of the program organizers. I replied that I didn't feel any great sympathy for either side, to which I was told that I had to choose one side or the other, otherwise I wouldn't be allowed to take the floor.
I was skimming some web site the other day when I saw a reference to some statement or other of mine, which a journalist characterized as "anti-American." I wracked my brains to figure what he could have had in mind and then realized that I must have been speaking about the threat of civil rights being violated in the United States with the onset of the "anti-terrorist campaign."
The fact that U.S. human rights activists themselves have been outspoken on this issue didn't seem to have occurred to him.
Sometimes the choice we are offered is actually worse than no choice at all, for having to choose the lesser of two evils can be amoral and demeaning.
Whose side are you on, Bush's or bin Laden's? What do you prefer: a crusade or a jihad? Which slogans do you prefer to use to justify killing innocent people? What's better: haughty, "Westernizer" contempt for one's own people or Black Hundred-style hatred of non-Russians? Whom should we vote for at the elections, a corrupt political intriguer or a war criminal?
The contemporary rules of the game not only permit but also require pluralism and a multiplicity of different opinions.
When only one point of view is tolerated you effectively have a totalitarian system. There should be a minimum of two points of view.
Furthermore, critics of the status quo should without fail appear even more loathsome than the status quo itself, as this provides some guarantee of stability.
While encouraging different opinions, the system rejects nonconformism, i.e. ideas and views that do not fit into the pre-prepared and officially sanctioned menu. Everyone is painstakingly herded into one of a number of prearranged camps.
Diametrically opposed positions are little more than a mirror image of each other.
Nonconformism, on the other hand, presupposes the possibility of qualitatively new and different approaches to a given issue, and the possibility of breaking with a pre-made selection of positions. This is, in fact, the basis of freedom.
Fortunately, there is of course no such thing as a complete lack of alternatives. There is always some way of giving voice to one's position.
The main thing is to follow one's own path and not to be taken in by public opinion polls; to use as one's compass not officially sanctioned positions, but one's own fundamental understanding of honesty, conscience and personal responsibility.
If one does this, simple and self-evident things come to the surface. For example, the fact that one can defend one's civil rights and democratic freedoms without being a terrorist and wanting to "blow up civilization"; that those responsible for many of our problems need to be sought not in the West or the East, but at the top echelons of our social hierarchy; and that defending one's rights not only does not run against the grain of democracy, but on the contrary lies at democracy's very heart.
It is quite possible that others will draw different conclusions.
The most important thing is to break out of the straitjacket of officially sanctioned positions foisted upon us.
Boris Kagarlitsky is a Moscow-based sociologist.
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