Confusion and Common Sense
Where is reason to be found?
The modern categories of left and right have increasingly lost their explanatory power. Some parts of the political landscape have regressed, some have taken on wholly new forms. The left has partly discarded tolerance and reason as guiding principles and has instead practiced an activist-led progressivism at increasingly high costs. Whether this actually constitutes progress is not up for debate on grounds of morally superior value judgments. The right has in parts abandoned its conservatism and instead dressed it up with some more or less absurd conspiratorial or revisionist world views. Their brand of a better future is a blend of classic libertarian individualism, a romantic return to glorious heydays and a little spice of occult accelerationism. That last part is a whole cluster unto itself. Suffice it to say that what has been described as the alt-right last decade is now a bewildering mixture of classical far-right ideology and a techno-utopian contempt for humanity. Some on the right hate globalism and universalism, while some embrace it as they’re still good middle capitalists. The splinters on the right are becoming more and more visible, and even the “no enemies on the right” mantra of the MAGA movement is slowly starting to crack under the convergence of exponential technologies, Israel, war in general and migration. Clusters such as hippiedom have traditionally been associated with the left anti-war movement, wanting to disengage from repressive society. Since Covid-19, many of the Neo-hippy elements, such as anti-vaccine and remaining clean from pharmaceuticals can be found more on the conspiratorial right. Ideology is not a fixed object. It adapts itself to fit the needs and drives of the people in a specific moment. So there should be no reason to keep using static left and right categories if they don’t fully serve their purpose anymore, which in this case is attempting to explain the political polarization and disarray. All these groups have become too slippery and too extreme to still be accurately understood along this binary.
This week, I went to a podium discussion on the topic of “a divided Europe”, which coincided with a magazine launch presentation of Libratus at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna. The magazine is about a year old and they have emerged in reaction to the deteriorating state of legacy media and an intellectual monoculture in journalism and academia. This piqued my interest. I didn’t know of them before and simply went to this event because the topic interests me and I go there for lectures occasionally, due to my fiancé being an alumna of the Academy. It took a while to understand that while the Diplomatic Academy was hosting this event, the curation and moderation were entirely done by Libratus themselves. That could’ve been better framed for those who know the Academy but not this publication.
The editor-in-chief, Gudula Walterskirchen, kicked it off by shortly presenting the magazine. Its stated founding principle is a wirklichkeitsbezogener Journalismus. In German, we distinguish between Realität and Wirklichkeit. Realität refers to reality in an objective, factual sense, in the way things actually are, independent of our perception or experience. It’s about the concrete, material facts of existence. When you say something is real (real), you’re talking about whether it objectively exists or corresponds to facts. Wirklichkeit, by contrast, is a native German word derived from wirken, to work, to act, to have an effect. It refers to reality as it works upon us, the effective, experiential dimension of reality. It’s about what is actually present and impactful in our lived experience, reality as it manifests and affects us.
On the left (literally) of the panel sits Dr. Emil Brix, a former Austrian ambassador to countries such as the UK and Russia, and the former director of the Diplomatic Academy. Next to him sat Petr Drulák, political scientist, former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic and Ambassador of the Czech Republic to France. Bence Bauer, a Hungarian lawyer and the director of the German-Hungarian Institute for European Cooperation. Lastly, on the right, Wendelin Ettmayer completes the panel. He is an Austrian politician, former member of parliament, diplomat and now author. Pretty quickly, it turns out, the reality of three out of the four panelists and an even larger ratio of the audience believe Hungary and Russia are the victims of a moralizing, undemocratic EU and that freedom of speech is under threat more so in our part of the world than elsewhere. Dr. Emil Brix respectfully disagreed with his co-panelists, especially on the reversal of culpability in the Ukraine war. Ironically, he could not finish a sentence without people from the audience shouting in. Whenever he spoke, a loud murmur rose up and people around us started disparaging him, as if he were a pathetic idiot. I say ironically because it seems as though freedom of speech and plurality of opinions is only afforded to those who share their opinion. It seems as though their groundedness in reality may well be self-referential.
To their credit, Walterskirchen and the rest of the panelists did not behave in this way. They did not interrupt and debated respectfully. Walterskirchen also performed her role of moderator as best she could, asking the audience to allow Dr. Brix to finish his responses, which were not nearly as long-winded as his co-panelists’. The double standard was so glaring and the crowd so unapologetically self-righteous that it seemed useless to point out the hypocrisy.
The title of their newest magazine issue, “Verwirrung und Vernunft”, can be translated to “Confusion and Reason” if we take the translation of the Kantian term “Vernunft” as the epistemological grounding of human thought. I choose to translate it to common sense in my title, as in our contemporary context, it is taken to be a refuge back to positions rational people would have to agree upon to reclaim common ground in making sense of this confusing situation. I agree with this sentiment and I think it would be greatly beneficial to disagree more constructively about things that require deliberation. Often, the panel decried ideology as opposed to the groundedness of reality as the dialectic of our time, the fault lines along which societies are divided. They touted the moralizing of the EU and liberal institutions as the end of our glorious culture and historical identity. They proclaimed themselves as alternatives. Of course, the rooting of their own ideology didn’t factor in, they are simply a reasonable counteraction to the madness of the times.
One of the features of dogma and unfreedom is to carry within itself immanent contradictions that help uphold its own truth and legitimacy. Therefore, it was impossible to actually talk to anyone there without getting shouting responses like “What’s wrong with you?”, “Yes, I know it’s tough to hear.”, “A little less emotions.” They were the classic reactionary responses to someone who didn’t agree with them. If they’d been as open as they had preached, then they could have found out from me that I have been critiquing leftist institutions, especially media and universities but also politicians for years. I oppose relativistic moralizing stances and their extreme reliance on value judgments in lieu of reason. I could have discussed with them the poststructural theories on which those views haphazardly stand. There are bad ideas on all political “sides” and the left has developed particularly dangerous ones of late, especially because at face value they seem morally absolute and inscrutable. But that was not what this crowd, for the most part, was interested in. When their team was speaking their gospel they listened intently and applauded with fervor after every other sentence. If their worry was ideology fragmenting societies then they would make an earnest attempt at seeing themselves as one side of that coin, not merely the alternative. It was an identitarian reversal of a multicultural Europe, not a new vision based on freedom, plurality and democracy. Ultimately, it was just populism disguised as independent free thinking. Bitter cliquy behavior with a veneer of rational superiority, the new mode of parts of the right capitalizing on the cult of irrationality on parts of the left.
Brix carried himself quite well considering that he was clearly surprised but remained mostly unfazed by the hostility. Drulák didn’t say much but when he spoke it was clear that he thought the European Union to be an undemocratic institution and that the analysis of the war in Ukraine simply boils down to: the West provoked it by hinting at NATO membership.
Bauer, for the most part, stayed true to the veneer of respect and reason. He was rhetorically excellent and concise in his responses. He was actually interested in dialogue and he would have bested any half-witted attempt to morally oppose his stances and obfuscations of the Hungarian regime’s civil rights transgressions. He did, however, steer into trademark conspiratorial territory when he proclaimed that Germany, among other countries, prohibited “alternatives”. The crowd roared. This is simply untrue. AfD was able to garner 21% in this year’s national election, gaining 69 seats in the German Bundestag. His points on not being anti-European simply for critiquing the EU are clever. The debate on whether Hungary is anti-European based on values, however, is another one. I don’t know enough about Hungarian politics to enter this arena, but I would like to live in a country where dissidents can freely publish and sexual orientation is not a state matter.
Ettmayer steered most into emotional and populist territory. When asked about the state of European unity and the reasons for its seeming division since Bruno Kreisky was the chancellor of Austria, which saw the UN and many other international organizations move to Vienna, he gave a speech about the history of diplomacy in major European conflicts. From the Vienna Congress, where victorious powers invited the French foreign minister to join the negotiations, onto the humiliations and revenges of the Franco-Prussian war, the First World War and the subsequent deluge of World War 2. His point was that resentment builds up if one side is simply out to humiliate the other. He also showed an Economist cover from 2003 with the caption “Vlad the impaler”. He translated it to “Vlad the bloodsucker” in German. His point was the West’s pejorative framing of Putin from the beginning. The point aside, the translation was wrong and the actual meaning of this caption is less extreme. It was a historical reference to a 15th century Wallachian (now Romania) ruler who instilled fear into his people to keep them loyal and deter betrayal by the famous method of impaling people and putting their impaled bodies on public display. Obviously, this is not Putin’s exact method but I would be interested to hear an honest rebuttal of the fact that Putin rules through fear with dissidents disappearing or getting assassinated on foreign soil. Ettmayer also vigorously cited JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference that “free speech in Europe is under threat” but mentions no instance or example of this.
I don’t outright dismiss these stances. I’m sure Russia felt humiliated by how Western diplomacy excluded and vilified them. However, anyone listening to Putin and his followers can believe them when they tell us what they believe and who they are. They do not believe there is an independent Ukraine. Putin was quoted saying: “Only in a world where a man can be a woman, is Ukrainian not a Russian”. I do think the point about diplomacy needing to include enemies is well-taken. You can only make peace with your enemies and being too morally superior to talk to them is nonsensical. However, there is a fine line between diplomacy and appeasement. We saw what that brought the UK when Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler. A historical fact Ettmayer conveniently left out of his soliloquy.
The distinction between left and right as political categories has succumbed to petty tribalism. Obviously, those terms still mean something in the political realm of aisles and parliamentary seating charts. However, the right has increasingly appropriated the notions of freedom and peace and the left has increasingly become associated with repression and the forging of a new world through violence or at least a higher price than I would be willing to accept. That is, however, only one side of the coin.
Hitler also strongly purported to fight for peace, for the German people. Which coincidently meant invading half of Europe to ensure this peace. Interesting logic. Internally, this can be coherently packaged, but with a little critique applied the ideology crumbles quickly. This kind of peace is born out of supremacy and paranoia, the building blocks of all autocratic and barbaric societies. This kind of freedom and peace is conditional and usually fleeting. Soon, a new enemy will be conjured up as a means to an end other than peace.
During the French Revolution freedom quickly shifted into terror once the tyrants were beheaded and the obscene had to be further redirected. The ones fighting for freedom had become the rulers and had themselves turnt into tyrants. The self-congratulatory fight against political and cultural repression can only reify itself without immanent critique. A reproduction in different colors but no relief in sight, no reason to be found.
After Charlie Kirk was murdered, parts of the leftist camp celebrated it. That is a clear sign of the degeneration of civil society. It undermines the rule of law, the dignity of individuals and due process. However, the counter-reaction from the American right to climb onto high horses and declare who would now be under close watch or censored shows the truth about this entire debate. Those who claim to be free speech vigilantes while being the opposition become the censors and tyrants when in power, and vice versa. The smugness of this reversal expresses one of the most cynical developments of our political moment: we are more interested in dehumanizing and defeating our supposed enemies than in actually building something beyond this moment. The people in the room at that discussion showed that they’re no different.
I try to live by Max Horkheimer’s maxim:
“The dividing line runs between respect and contempt for living beings, not between the so-called left and right, the already outdated bourgeois opposition.”1
Max Horkheimer, Notizen 1949 – 1969, in: Schriften Band 6, S. 408f.