Edwin Landseer, "Saved" (1856)
What keeps cynical leaders from restructuring reality to suit their ends? Modern democracies have a number of institutions to keep us grounded in truth and principle. In times of stress, these can become the targets of extremist political movements.
In America we have rightwing commentators and rightwing media (most notably Rush Limbaugh and Fox “News”) attacking universities, school systems, news organizations, governmental departments, our judicial system, and the town meeting ideal itself (which is to say, the notion that people of different political views can assemble and solve communal problems). Their payoff is that they get to say reality is whatever they want it to be—there is no climate change, the budget can be balanced with tax cuts and without cutting Medicaid or defense spending, an unregulated market will bring us untold wealth.
Suddenly, the novels of Milan Kundera seem particularly relevant. And if you’re willing to read through my political vent, you’ll learn at the end how he sees dogs as providing us a model our society can follow.
A continuing theme in the Czech writer’s work is how unscrupulous people remake reality. How do the Czech Communist Party and then the Russian invaders restructure facts in ways that suits their needs? My student who is writing her senior project on Kundera has been studying the ways.
In Book of Laughter and Forgetting, for instance, a photograph is doctored to remove a party member who was once in the upper echelons but has since been executed. When the Soviets invade, they fire 40 historians from the University of Prague so that they can control the historical past. They also change street signs so that places will be experienced differently, and Kundera (writing in 1984) fears that’s Czechoslovakia’s very identity is at risk.
Then, to take the population’s mind off the Russian invasion, those in charge use the newspapers to whip up public frenzy about peripheral issues. In one instance the issue is (of all things) the dangers posed by dogs:
People were still traumatized by the catastrophe of the occupation, but radio, television, and the press went on and on about dogs: how they soil our streets and parks, endanger our children’s health, fulfill no useful function, yet must be fed. They whipped up such a psychotic fever that Tereza had been afraid that the crazed mob would do harm to Karenin [her dog]. Only after a year did the accumulated malice (which until then had been vented, for the sake of training, on animals) find its true goal: people. People started being removed from their jobs, arrested, put on trial. At last the animals could breathe freely.
As a result of the onslaught on reality, Kundera starts getting a sense that
history is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.
Political discourse in today’s United States has also become unbearably light. According to a vocal minority—a minority which, however, has its voice boosted by powerful media outlets and is well funded by billionaires—we cannot trust professors, teachers, scientists, government workers, newspaper reporters, judges, jurors. That’s because they are all elites who are brainwashing their students, making up facts about climate change and evolution, wasting tax dollars, twisting the facts to suit their ideological agendas, legislating from the bench, and finding terrorists innocent (which means that those accused of terrorism should only be tried by courts that are guaranteed to find them guilty—or maybe kept in indefinite detention without trials). Overlook the fact that the overwhelming majority of those the right is attacking are citizens of good will who are trying to do their best (and often doing a good job). The critics paint them with a single brush and then throw the Constitution at them. But only those parts of the Constitution that say what they want it to say. Forget habeas corpus or birth citizenship.
The tactics of these people are to shout loudly and turn everything upside down. Whoever finds racism in their rants must be a reverse racist for pointing it out. Whoever tries to reply to their claims with reasoned arguments is an elitist who is out of touch with the people. Glenn Beck is put on a par with the New York Times, even though the newspaper has fact-checking procedures and an ombudsman and a long history of credibility while Beck makes things up.
Incidentally, in American history these kinds of attacks haven’t only come from the right. I remember students in the late 1960’s disrupting administration buildings and libraries. Theodor Adorno, a former German Marxist who had fled the Nazis, was appalled at actions that seemed to resemble those perpetrated by Hitler youth. While I was an anti-war protester at the time, I was disturbed as well. The students seemed to be thugs and vandals, not lovers of democracy.
In 2010 America, however, the temper tantrums are coming mostly from the right and they are making governing all but impossible. One recent victim may be a “trust but verify” arms treaty with the Russians that Republicans would once have embraced.
If the credibility of all these institutions has been undermined, where can we look for grounding? Well, there is art.
And then there are dogs. Exiled with Tomas to the Czech countryside, Tereza comes to the conclusion that her companionship with her St. Bernard provides a model for society. I’ll conclude with her utopian vision:
From this jumble of ideas came a sacrilegious thought that Tereza could not shake off: the love that tied her to Karenin was better than the love between her and Tomas. Better, not bigger. Tereza did not wish to fault either Tomas or herself; she did not wish to claim that they could love each other more. Her feeling was rather that, given the nature of the human couple, the love of man and woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog, that oddity of human history probably unplanned by the Creator.
It is a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
And something else: Tereza accepted Karenin for what he was; she did not try to make him over in her image; she agreed from the outset with his dog’s life, did not wish to deprive him of it, did not envy him his secret intrigues. The reason she trained him was not to transform him (as a husband tries to reform his wife and a wife her husband), but to provide him with the elementary language that enabled them to communicate and live together.
Then too: No one forced her to love Karenin; love for dogs is voluntary….
So find a dog to hug. Then enter the world with the resolve that you will find an elementary language that will allow you to communicate and live together with your fellow citizens.