Live Not by Lies

by Rod Dreher

  In his 1989 book, How Societies Remember, the late British social anthropologist Paul Connerton explains that there are different kinds of memory. Historical memory is an objective recollection of past events. Social memory is what a people choose to remember—that is, deciding collectively which facts about past events it believes to be important. Cultural memory constitutes the stories, events, people, and other phenomena that a society chooses to remember as the building blocks of its collective identity. A nation’s gods, its heroes, its villains, its landmarks, its art, its music, its holidays—all these things are part of its cultural memory.

  Connerton says that “participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory.”4 Memory of the past conditions how they experience the present—that is, how they grasp its meaning, how they are to understand it, and what they are supposed to do in it.

  No culture, and no person, can remember everything. A culture’s memory is the result of its collective sifting of facts to produce a story—a story that society tells itself to remember who it is. Without collective memory, you have no culture, and without a culture, you have no identity.

  The more totalitarian a regime’s nature, the more it will try to force people to forget their cultural memories. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the role of Winston Smith within the Ministry of Information is to erase all newspaper records of past events to reflect the current political priorities of the Party. This, said the ex-communist Polish intellectual Leszek Kołakowski, reflects “the great ambition of totalitarianism—the total possession and control of human memory.”

  “Let us consider what happens when the ideal has been effectively achieved,” says Kołakowski. “People remember only what they are taught to remember today and the content of their memory changes overnight, if needed.”5

  We know from the history of communist totalitarianism how this can be achieved through a total state monopoly on information, including ideological control of education and media. Laura Nicolae’s experience at Harvard, where the next generation of American and global elites are trained, suggests how this can be accomplished even in free countries: by teaching those who aspire to leadership positions what it is important for them to remember, and what does not matter.

  It is not news to Western conservatives that ideologues in power, both in classrooms and newsrooms, manipulate collective memory to capture the future. What is much less present in the consciousness of modern people, as Connerton avers, is how the liberal democratic, capitalist way of life unintentionally does the same thing.

  The essence of modernity is to deny that there are any transcendent stories, structures, habits, or beliefs to which individuals must submit and that should bind our conduct. To be modern is to be free to choose. What is chosen does not matter; the meaning is in the choice itself. There is no sacred order, no other world, no fixed virtues and permanent truths. There is only here and now and the eternal flame of human desire. Volo ergo sum—I want, therefore I am.

  Cultural memories function to legitimize the present social order, says Connerton. This is why people in “subordinate groups”—that is, social minorities—have such a hard time holding on to their cultural memories. To keep the memories alive means fighting against the dominant order.

  Communism had a particular ideological vision that required it to destroy traditions, including traditional Christianity. Nothing outside the communist order could be allowed to exist. Similarly, in contemporary capitalism, cultural memory is subordinate to the logic of the free market, whose mechanisms respond to the liberation of individual desire. Christians today find it difficult to pass on the faith to the young in large part because all of us have become habituated to a way of life in which there are few if any shared beliefs and customs that transcend individualism. This is what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger meant, on the eve of his election as Pope Benedict XVI, when he condemned “the dictatorship of relativism.”6

  To those who want to keep cultural memory alive, Connerton warns that it is not enough to pass on historical information to the young. The truths carried by tradition must be lived out subjectively. That is, they must not only be studied but also embodied in shared social practices—words, certainly, but more important, deeds. Communities must have “living models”7 of men and women who enact these truths in their daily lives. Nothing else works.

  Tamás Sályi, the Budapest teacher, says that Hungarians survived German occupation and a Soviet puppet regime, but thirty years of freedom has destroyed more cultural memory than the previous eras. “What neither Nazism or Communism could do, victorious liberal capitalism has done,” he muses.

  The idea that the past and its traditions, including religion, is an intolerable burden on individual liberty has been poison for Hungarians, he believes. About progressives today, Sályi says, “I think they really believe that if they erase all memory of the past, and turn everyone into newborn babies, then they can write whatever they want on that blank slate. If you think about it, it’s not so easy to manipulate people who know who they are, rooted in tradition.”

  True. This is why Hannah Arendt described the totalitarian personality as “the completely isolated human being.” A person cut off from history is a person who is almost powerless against power.

  Communism was a massive use of lethal state power to destroy memory. Back in the United States, Olga Rusanova, a naturalized American who grew up in Siberia, says, “In the Soviet Union, they killed all the people who could remember history.” This made it easier for them to create false history to serve the regime’s needs.

  Yes, in the late Soviet period, most people had ceased to believe the communist line. But that doesn’t mean that they knew what was true. As historian Orlando Figes says of those who came of age after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, “for anyone below the age of thirty, who had only ever known the Soviet world or had inherited no other values from his family, it was almost impossible to step outside the propaganda system and question its political principles.”8

  Create Small Fortresses of Memory

  Figes’s observation points to one source of resistance: the family and the cultural memories it passes on. Paul Connerton highlights another: religion.

  Both come up in my conversation with Paweł Skibiński, one of Poland’s leading historians, and the head of Warsaw’s Museum of John Paul II Collection. We are talking about what Karol Wojtyła, the great anti-communist pope, has to teach us about resisting the new soft totalitarianism.

  When the Nazis invaded Poland, they knew they could subdue the country by superior force of arms. But Hitler’s plan for Poland was to destroy the Poles as a people. To do that, the Nazis needed to destroy the two things that gave the Polish their identity: their shared Catholic faith and their sense of themselves as a nation.

  Before he entered seminary in 1943, Wojtyła was an actor in Krakow. He and his theatrical comrades knew that the survival of the Polish nation depended on keeping alive its cultural memory in the face of forced forgetting. They wrote and performed plays—Wojtyła himself authored three of them—about Polish national history, and Catholic Christianity. They performed these plays in secret for clandestine audiences. Had the Gestapo discovered the truth, the players and their audiences would have been sent to prison camps or shot.

  Not every member of the anti-totalitarian resistance carries a rifle. Rifles would have been mostly useless against the German army. The persistence of cultural memory was the greatest weapon the Poles had to resist Nazi totalitarianism, and the Soviet kind, which seized the nation in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat.

  In Poland, Skibiński explains, the only long-lasting social institutions that existed were the church and the family. In the twentieth century, the twin totalitarianisms tried to capture and destroy the Polish Catholic Church. Communism attempted to break apart the family by maintaining a monopoly on education and teaching young people to be dependent on the state. It als
o sought to lure the young away from the church by convincing them that the state would be the guarantors of their sexual freedom.

  “The thing is, now such tendencies come from the West, which we have always looked up to, and regarded as a safe place,” he says. “But now many Poles start to develop the awareness that the West is no longer safe for us.

  “What we see now is an attempt to destroy the last surviving communities: the family, the church, and the nation. This is one connection between liberalism and communist theory.”

  Skibiński focuses on language as a preserver of cultural memory. We know that communists forbade people to talk about history in unapproved ways. This is a tactic today’s progressives use as well, especially within universities.

  What is harder for contemporary people to appreciate is how we are repeating the Marxist habit of falsifying language, hollowing out familiar words and replacing them with a new, highly ideological meaning. Propaganda not only changes the way we think about politics and contemporary life but it also conditions what a culture judges worth remembering.

  I mention the way liberals today deploy neutral-sounding, or even positive, words like dialogue and tolerance to disarm and ultimately defeat unaware conservatives. And they imbue other words and phrases—hierarchy, for example, or traditional family—with negative connotations.

  Recalling life under communism, the professor continues, “The people who lived only within such a linguistic sphere, who didn’t know any other way to speak, they could really start believing in this way of using of words. If a word carries with it negative baggage, it becomes impossible to have a discussion about the phenomenon.”

  Teaching current generations of college students who grew up in the postcommunist era is challenging because they do not have a natural immunity to the ideological abuse of language. “For me, it’s obvious. I remember this false use of language. But for our students, it’s impossible to understand.”

  How did people keep hold of reality under communist conditions? How do they know not only what to remember but how to remember it? The answer was to create distinct small communities—especially families and religious fellowships—in which it was possible both to speak truthfully and to embody truth.

  “They had social spaces where the real meaning of words was preserved,” he says. “For me, it’s less important to argue with such a view of the world”—progressivism, he means—“than to describe reality as it is. For example, our task is to show people what a normal, monogamous family looks like.”

  To paraphrase Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is not by winning an argument but by keeping yourself grounded in reality that you carry on the human heritage.

  Make the Parallel Polis into Sanctuary Cities

  Families and religious fellowships were places of retreat. So were underground educational seminars. These things were part of a communal concept that one prominent dissident called the “parallel polis.”

  Under communism, Czech mathematician and human rights activist Václav Benda knew that there was no place in the public square for noncommunists to have a say over how the country was to be governed. Communists held a monopoly on politics, on the media, and on the institutions of Czech life. But Benda refused to accept that dissenters had no choice but to resign themselves to surrender.

  He came up with the idea of a parallel polis—an alternative set of social structures within which social and intellectual life could be lived outside of official approval. The parallel polis was a grassroots attempt to fight back against totalitarianism, which mandated, in Benda’s words, “the abandonment of reason and learning [and] the loss of traditions and memory.”9

  “Totalitarian power has extended the sphere of politics to include everything, even the faith, the thinking and the conscience of the individual,” he writes. “The first responsibility of a Christian and a human being is therefore to oppose such an inappropriate demand of the political sphere, ergo to resist totalitarian power.”

  A key institution of the parallel polis was the seminar held in private homes. In these events, scholars would lecture on forbidden subjects—history, literature, and other cultural topics necessary to maintaining cultural memory. Benda’s parallel polis was not merely a federation of discussion groups biding their time by talking about intellectual and artistic topics. Rather, its driving purpose was first, cultural preservation in the face of annihilation, and by doing so, the cultivation of the seeds of renewal.

  Sir Roger Scruton was one of the few Western academics who participated in these seminars, and who even helped establish an underground university that granted degrees in secret. Other prominent Western intellectuals, including philosopher Charles Taylor and literary critic Jacques Derrida, joined the fight. Derrida, like Scruton, was once detained by the Czech secret police and declared to be an “undesirable person.”

  When he and his British academic colleagues began to visit communist Czechoslovakia in the late 1970s, Scruton tells me, they were astonished to discover that the Czechs “were determined to cling to their cultural inheritance because they thought that it contained the truth, not just about their history, but the truth about their soul, about what they fundamentally are. That was the thing that the communists couldn’t take away.”

  Scruton and his team discovered that the Czech students were starving for knowledge, and not just theoretical knowledge. They wanted to learn so they could know how to live, especially under a dictatorship of lies. Along those lines, in Notes from Underground, his 2014 novel set in Czechoslovakia of the 1980s, Scruton’s protagonist, a young man named Jan, finds his way into Prague dissident circles. His guide tells him what to expect:

  And he added that there would be special seminars from time to time, with visitors from the West, who would inform us of the latest scholarship, and help us to remember. “To remember what?” I asked. He looked at me long and hard. “To remember what we are.”10

  These seminars forged what Scruton, quoting Czech dissident Jan Patočka, described as “the solidarity of the shattered.” They were an act of responsibility by the old—those who still had their memories of what was real—toward the young. The formal institutions of Czech life—universities first among them—could no longer be trusted to tell the truth and to transmit the cultural memories that told Czechs who they were. But the task had to be done, or as Milan Hübl said, the Czech people would disappear.

  Bear Communal Witness to Future Generations

  There is a field in the far southern reaches of Moscow called the Butovo Firing Range. Under Soviet rule, it belonged to the secret police, the NKVD, who used it for target practice. During the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, in a fourteen-month period between 1937 and 1938, the NKVD killed 20,761 political prisoners in that field—most of them with a shot to the back of the head—and buried them there.

  In 1995, four years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church took possession of the Butovo field. Today, there is a tiny wooden chapel on the site and a large stone church nearby dedicated to the martyrs of the Soviet period. The field itself is a national memorial site in which a monument to the dead stands, the name of each carved onto a granite wall, with the date of his or her death.

  On October 30, all Russia observes a national Day of Remembrance for victims of political violence. Here at Butovo field, Russians gather on the site to read the names of the murdered aloud. There I stand in the clearing surrounded by bare trees, wet snow falling on a somber crowd of heavily bundled Russians, observing this ritual of collective memory. After a while, my translator Matthew Casserly and I wander over to an exhibit on the site’s periphery, where the story of Butovo field is told in Russian.

  An old man wearing a flat cap overhears Matthew translating the Russian for me. He sidles over, introduces himself as Vladimir Alexandrovich, and asks what brings us to Butovo today. Matthew tells him that his American friend is here
to learn about the communist era, because émigrés in the West see signs of its potential rebirth there.

  Like what? asks Vladimir Alexandrovich. I tell him about people afraid of losing their jobs for dissenting from left-wing ideology.

  “Losing jobs?” he says. “That’s a bad sign. It can happen again, you know. Young people don’t know this, and they don’t want to know. History always repeats, one way or the other.”

  Matthew and I make our way over to the large wooden cabin that serves as the national memorial’s office. Father Kirill Kaleda, whom you met earlier in this story, is the Russian Orthodox priest who oversees the shrine and the nearby church. Father Kirill is the man chiefly responsible for convincing the Russian state to set aside this bloodsoaked land as a place of remembrance—and, he hopes, repentance. He had spent the morning telling students at a nearby school about the history of the site.

  As we prepare to sit down with Father Kirill around a kitchen table laden with herring, salads, cheeses, breads, and other delicious things for the day’s pilgrims to eat, I tell the priest about what we have just heard from the old man: Butovo could happen again.

  “Unfortunately, he’s right,” says the priest. “I could clearly see that young people I was talking to today know nothing about what happened here. When I started talking about very simple things, I could see they knew nothing.”

  These are young people who live close enough to the Butovo field to have heard the sound of the gunshots back in the Great Terror. The signs of the mass murder here have been preserved in granite for all to see. Yet if not for Father Kirill visiting their classrooms to tell this story, the great-grandchildren of the murdered generation would have minds untroubled by the memory of mass murder.

  Father Kirill was thirty-three years old when the Soviet Union fell. This man who grew up in the culture of official lies, and who has given his life to maintaining the historical memory of Bolshevik crimes, emphasizes that propaganda did not die with the USSR.