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How to Make a Carnival
Kenneth MischelAssociate Professor, Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, CUNY
Correspondence: [email protected]
May 2003
utopian \ yü-`tō-pē-ən/ [Utopia, imaginary and ideal country in Utopia (1516) by Sir Thomas More, fr. Gk. ou not, no + topos place] 1: of or pertaining to a desirable but impractical perfection in political or social life, or characterizing one who imagines or proposes such a perfection
carnival \ kär-nə-vəl/ [It carnevale, alter. of earlier carnelevare, lit., removal of meat, fr. carne flesh (fr. L carn-, caroē) + levare to remove, fr. from L, to raise] 1: a season or festival of merrymaking
This past fall in San Francisco, two peace activists lost their lives in a most
unusual way. Heading to a demonstration in a Volkswagen van welded to the top of a
school bus, the pair sang “Give Peace a Chance,” while sticking their heads out of the
van’s sunroof. So caught up were they in the abstract desire to preserve life that they
failed to notice that their bus was entering a concrete tunnel.
Ours is a season of tragicomedy. Protestors assemble in London (of all places)
under the historic banner “Peace in Our Time.” Berlin passers-by mistake the body of a
woman who has committed suicide for a piece of performance art. Delegates at a United
Nations’ conference on racism and xenophobia receive pamphlets bearing Hitler’s picture
and with the caption: “What if I had won? There would be NO Israel!” As these bizarre
events collect, I can’t help but be reminded of Lionel Trilling’s warning that we need to
be aware of the dangers that lie behind our most generous wishes. For these wishes, by a
paradox of human nature, frequently find a way to travel from generosity to coercion.1
1 See Lionel Trilling’s “Manners, Morals and the Novel,” in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Giroux & Strauss, 2000).
Efforts aimed at restoring a Golden Age have in the past more often culminated instead in
a bitter carnival2 of malicious buffoonery, violence and rage followed by a spate of
totalitarian rule.
In the aftermath of the tragedy of September 11th, biting attacks on religious
visions of the apocalypse have abounded. As an unintended consequence of all this
condemnation, the dangers of secular utopianism, which parallel those of apocalyptic
thinking, have been largely ignored and even inadvertently promoted. To make matters
worse, the recent criticism aimed at secular utopianism has tended to focus on its external
danger, namely, that those caught up in utopian patterns of thought can turn themselves
into pawns serving (for example) the latest Middle Eastern tyrant’s or terror-master’s
cause. A cursory glance of the headlines, opinion pieces and letters to the editor over the
past few years reveals the clarity and presence of this threat. But the greater threat, by
far, is a threat that is all but ignored: that secular utopianism has the potential on its own
to generate a carnival in its most malignant form. So, as certain European ministers and
visionaries tingle with excitement at being on the cusp of banishing the Hobbesian state
of nature from their neighborhood; as the UN Secretary General celebrates the “renewed
consciousness of the right of every individual to control his or her own destiny;” as tens
of thousands gather in Brazil at a World Social Forum under the rallying cry, “A New
World is Possible,” I find their towering aspirations hard to share. The quest to transform
human society—and human nature—once and for all may well and in the not so distance
future unleash the worst that mankind has to offer. It is my hypothesis that the
2 This phrase was coined by Michael Andre Bernstein in his important book Bitter Carnival (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
contemporary utopians may be on the verge of opening the door just wide enough for a
bitter carnival to sneak through and grab hold of us all.
The Essential Characteristic of Contemporary Utopianism
Utopianism is an ineradicable feature of the domain of human thought. No
empirical failure, no historical disaster, has had or ever will have the power to
permanently discredit utopian thinking. None can because utopian thinking is so
intimately bound up with the basic need we seem to have of making sense of the passing
of time by experiencing it as the unfolding of a story. Doing so requires an underlying
narrative structure. The “story begins,” the philosopher William Gass once wrote,
“when we set up along side this continuum of activity a metronome to mark the stages.”
By marking off a stage as a stage we invariably anticipate its end. There could be no
concept of “today,” if there were none of “tomorrow.” Naming requires a sense of
boundaries.
Utopianism, at its core, involves a confusion of boundaries. It is at the interface
where the unfolding stage and the anticipation of its end meet that the author and the
contemporary utopian part ways. For the author holds (what Russian literary theorist
Mikhail Bakhtin once called) an essential surplus over the structural elements and
“contingencies” of his story that the utopian lacks. If the writer wants a character in his
story to be hit by a milk truck in chapter ten, or to fight with his wife in chapter two, he
can make these events occur. If he is under contract with a magazine to deliver a
detective story, he can pretty much insure that he delivers one. It is not like this for the
utopian. As protagonist in his story rather than its author, the utopian lacks the author’s
essential surplus over the full range of the unfolding story’s structural elements and
possible trajectories. The behavior of others, the weight of habits and traditions, the
vagaries of chance, the hand of God, these forces are beyond the utopian’s full control.
But the utopian refuses to give them their full due. Lacking an appreciation of the limits
of his power to shape the unfolding story, he loses sight of the fact that he is in the story
rather than over and above it. The essential characteristic of the utopian is his inability
to distinguish the difference between protagonist and author.
Lacking an understanding of this distinction, the utopian persistently exposes
himself and those around him to the force of unintended consequence in an exquisitely
heightened way. “Utopia” literally means “nowhere.” If utopia is to be brought to a real
town, the (as Trilling put it) wildly conceiving, madly fantasying mind envisioning it
must triumph in a battle for reality over the world of ordinary practicality. In a crisis
moment in the battle, the utopian may make choices—by no means out of malice—that
widely miss the mark. (“Making peace is, in some ways, like making love,” Israeli
minister Shimon Peres asserted twelve days before the wide outbreak of hostilities in the
Middle East in September 2000. “First you have to close your eyes a little but—if you
open them completely, you cannot be totally romantic.” The possibility of war, Peres
assured, was at any rate “out of the question.”3) 3 Shimon Peres, speech before the Weinberg Founders Conference, September 16, 2000, www.washingtoninstitute.org/pubs/speakers/peres_2.htm. For a brilliant exploration of the utopianism inherent in the Israeli government’s enthusiastic involvement in the Oslo process, see Charles Krauthammer’s “He Tarries: Jewish Messianism and the Oslo Peace,” June 10, 2002,
Though the consequences of possibly missing-the-mark can be disastrous, this
possibility does not unduly disturb the utopian. As the enthusiasm of a significant
fraction of world Jewry for the “road map” attests, many remain fully committed to
keeping their eyes closed. The New York Times spoke for many in its recent Christmas
Day editorial: “Have humans ever been able to bring this entire globe to peace at once?
The answer is almost certainly not. But that answer is no deterrent to trying to do so, no
obstacle to the hope that renews itself with particular freshness at this time of year.” Are
we then to believe that no past blood spilled in the name of a hope can ever be sufficient
to qualify as an obstacle to that hope in the future?
The utopian might respond to his end’s past failures with the assertion that this
end could be achieved if only people were made to see the regressive thinking patterns
that have impeded it up to now. If only people were made to see. Totalitarian means are
thus uniquely seducing to the high-minded. “Authority must now step in, patriarchal
authority, the authority of a father for his children,” the French modernist architect Le
Corbusier once demanded.4 We might say of the contemporary utopian that he possesses
an underdeveloped sense of tragedy.
The same cannot be said of Sir Thomas More, whose book introduced the word
“utopia” into the English language. In that book, Sir Thomas simultaneously expresses
both hope and concern about what that hope, if it were acted upon, might entail. Many of
www.biu.ac.il/Spokesman/Krauthammer.html .4 Cited in Colin Rowe, The Architecture of Good Intentions: Towards a Possible Retrospect (London: Academy Editions, 1995), p. 152.
the Utopians’ ideas he finds appealing, but practically unrealizable. And he worries
about their unintended consequences if in fact they were realized. Sir Thomas thus
names the character from whom he learns about Utopia “Hythloday”, meaning “expert in
nonsense.” And he closes Utopia’s second book on the ambivalent note that, while he
does not agree with everything Hythloday says, he finds in Utopia certain features that he
likes but does not expect to ever actually see.
This kind of ambivalence is no longer in vogue. When the Franco-Swiss
philosopher and playwright Denis de Rougemont, who founded the European Cultural
Center in Geneva in 1950, added luster to Victor Hugo’s 1849 prediction that the idea of
Europe was on the threshold of becoming reality by suggesting that “Alas, Hugo was a
hundred years ahead of history,” it was clear that More’s caution and keen sense of
tragedy were nowhere to be found. Utopianism between More and de Rougemont had
profoundly changed.
Where might contemporary utopianism be heading? Perhaps we can get a sense
of a possible trajectory from de Rougemont’s spiritual heirs. In the 1990’s, the Council
of Europe briefly circulated a poster promoting the European Union. Based on
Brueghel’s 16th century painting, the “Tower of Babel,” the poster superimposed modern
cranes and workers on the unfinished tower. In the skies above the tower floated the stars
of the EU. The poster’s caption read: “Europe: Many tongues, one voice.”5
5 The poster was reprinted in International Currency Review, 23(4), 1996, p. 46.
Why the Tower Doesn’t Get Completely Built
The recurrent “edifice of Europe” (as Helmut Kohl once called it) has its foundation
in fear. Living in the shadow of two World Wars, the edifice’s architects hoped that the
centrifugal forces of nationalisms that had ripped their continent apart might be
countervailed by the centripetal force of a massive joint construction project. That is why
the European Union’s main decision-making organ needs to devote almost two hundred
pages to a document specifying permissible placement of seats and doors on a European
bus,6 and why Brussels-leaning Europeans continue to insist that the political importance
of their edifice dwarfs whatever substantial economic benefits that edifice brings.
In building its magnificent edifice on a foundation of fear, contemporary Europe
owes a debt to Biblical Mesopotamia Living in the shadow of the great flood, the Tower
of Babel’s architects had also once hoped that their massive joint project might stave off
the forces of dispersion. There is a rabbinical exegetic tradition on these biblical verses
that culminates in Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin’s (1817-1893) commentary to the
effect that God was not so much aroused by anything the Tower’s visionaries may have
said as by the fact that their speech was “one.” Their plans, unimportant in themselves,
required a unity for implementation impossible to achieve in an environment of scattered
peoples, cultures and ideas. The Tower was thus both a building project and a means of
potentially totalitarian social control.7
6 See Bret Stephens, “Good Europeans,” Jerusalem Post, May 31, 2002. 7 See Rabbi Ezra Bick, “Parashat Noach,” The Israel Koschitzky Virtual Beit Midash, Yeshivat Har Etzion, http://www.vbm-torah.org/parsha.59.02noach.htm.
It still is. In July 2001 then EU President Louis Michel warned Austria against
putting the Nice Treaty, expanding the EU, to a referendum: “I personally, think it’s very
dangerous to organize referendums when you’re not sure you’re going to win them. If
you lose it, that’s a big problem for Europe.” Michel continued with a rhetorical
question. “Has a country the right to prevent the progress of Europe? I am not giving
you an answer. But I am asking the question.”8 Similarly, a number of Eastern European
nations aspiring inclusion in the EU were warned by the French President, Jacques
Chirac, over their support for the U.S. position towards war with Iraq. These
governments had “missed an opportunity to shut up,” he declared. (So much for “unity in
diversity.”)
Few understood the totalitarian impulse behind the Tower and its potential
consequences better than George Orwell. His essay, “The Prevention of Literature,”
explores the ways in which lying is an inherent feature of totalitarian outlooks and the
ways in which such lying erodes creativity. Has literature, much less reportage, ever
widely flourished in totalitarian settings or among those in the thrall of a totalitarian
regime? Orwell invites his reader to consider the case of a British communist during the
Second World War. Prior to Hitler’s pact with Stalin, the communist was expected to
stew about the horrors of Nazism. For the year-and-a-half that the pact was in force, he
was expected to believe Germany was more sinned against by the Allies than sinning
against them. Finally, after Hitler abrogated the pact the communist once again had to
8 “EU head warns Austria against a ‘dangerous’ referendum,” July 11, 2001, http://www.eubusiness.com/news/stories/525/52403.html.
view Nazism as the greatest force for evil the world had ever known. This twisting and
turning of sentiment at just the right moment comes at a terrible cost. The communist
must either lie about his feelings or repress them. Either way he stalls his creative
engine: “not only will ideas refuse to come to him, but the very words he uses will seem
to stiffen under his touch.” Orwell has discovered God’s clever trick of causing post-
Babel tower builders to reenact for Him His own response to the Tower.
What is left of the project as its builders’ creative energies begin to stall? In his
parable about the tower, the “City Coat of Arms,” Franz Kafka imagined that the city
workers’ thoughts turn from the tower to their more immediate housing. Each wants the
finest quarters for himself.
Consider, for example, the honor of hosting the European Parliament. The
Parliament’s recently constructed home in Strasbourg, France is a sight to behold. An
enormous steel and glass structure, its tower is replete with a fiber optical lighting system
designed to blink, like the stars, as the sound of parliamentary debate rises. At a cost of
$400m, no expense was spared.9 Not to be outdone, Belgium has also had a no-expenses-
barred home built in Brussels for the European Parliament’s extra sessions. Caprice des
Dieux—“mood of the gods”—the locals call it, playing on the name of a popular kind of
cheese. When the added costs to the European Parliament of locating itself in three
homes (the General Secretariat remains based in Luxembourg) were estimated by the
9 “Europe: New EU Building Spares No Expense,” BBC, July 20, 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/399112.stm.
Parliament itself to amount to about 15% of its budget,10 Kafka would not have been in
the least bit surprised.
Consider, as well, the honor of winning a soccer tournament. A South Korean player
under contract with the Italian soccer club, Peruggia, scored the goal that eliminated the
Italian national soccer team from the 2002 World Cup Tournament. (During the World
Cup, players return to their native homelands to play for their national teams). When
Peruggia’s owner fired his South Korean player on the spot—“I am a nationalist and I
regard such behavior not only as an affront to Italian pride but also an offence to a
country which two years ago opened its doors to him”—Kafka would again have
understood. The “City Coat of Arms” ends on the note that the songs and legends born of
the workers’ city are filled with the longing for the day when the city will be destroyed
by the great blows of a gigantic fist.
Two Paths Towards A Bitter Carnival
How does the city workers’ longing for the giant fist bring down the fist’s blows
upon them? The city workers hasten the fist either for the sake of Heaven (so to speak)
or for the moments of rapture they feel as the fist’s blows crash down. Each hastening
involves opening the door to a bitter carnival.
10 Lord Moynihan before the British House of Lords, May 21, 1998, http://www.parliament.the-stationary-office.co.uk/pa/ld199798/ldhansard/vo980521/text/80521-12.htm.
Carnivals and utopianism are essentially connected. The impatient utopian
protagonist who is frustrated that the unfolding story isn’t turning out in the way he
anticipates may well try to clear a path for his anticipated end by inverting hierarchies,
thereby turning the recalcitrant current realities topsy-turvy. The fifth chapter of the book
of Isaiah contains these two contiguous warnings: “[Woe to] Those who say, ‘Let Him
hurry, let Him hasten His Action, so that we may see it; let the plan of the Holy One of
Israel Approach and take place, so that we may know it.’ Woe to those who speak of evil
as good and of good as evil; who make darkness into light and light into darkness; they
make bitter into sweet and sweet into bitter.” The genius of the contiguity of these
warnings is that they together convey the single message that carnivals are the by-product
of frustrated utopianism.
Consider, for example, the behavior of Shabbatei Tzvi’s followers. After their hoped-
for messiah converted to Islam in the 1660’s, those Jews who continued to hold out hope
for Tzvi reasoned that his conversion was evidence that the world could not be redeemed
until it had debased itself even further. Amongst themselves they playfully changed the
wording of a phrase in the Standing Prayer referring to God as One who frees the bound,
“Mateer Asoorim,” to “Mateer Eesoorim,” meaning One who permits the impermissible.
Consider, as well, the example of Seeker preacher William Erbery, who pursued a proto-
secular millennium in England at about the same time by insisting that the “people of
God turn wicked men, that wicked men may turn to be the people of God.” As a means
of hastening this end, Erbery charged his flock with the task of being “sober to God but
stark raving mad” with the English Church.
Laughter is amongst the most powerful tools for regenerative leveling (clearing the
way for a new order by tearing down the old one currently in its place). Fools, freaks and
buffoons enjoyed privileged places in royal courts because their laughing view of the
world allowed them to deliver a message of subversion and consolation far too
threatening if launched from more dignified quarters. That which seems so solid today
may be gone tomorrow, their mockery seems to say; that which was in the past may yet
be again. Postmodernism is not modern. The Romans set aside seven days each year for
Saturnalia, during which they temporarily and playfully inverted hierarchies, master
becoming slave and slave becoming master. The word satire comes from “satura,”
meaning mixture.
While it may be true that today one has to travel at certain times of the year to New
Orleans or Rio de Janeiro to observe modern-day carnivals labeled as such, this in no way
means that the carnival’s leveling impulse has become a diminished force. On the
contrary, the impulse has managed to escape its traditional temporal and spatial shackles.
We observe it in the post-modern attack on the notion of culture as a hierarchical
repository of our noblest spiritual and intellectual aspirations, on the idea that a text may
have meaning apart from the meanings that the interpretive community of the moment
wishes it to have. We observe it at the Jewish Museum’s recent exhibition, Mirroring
Evil, which inverted by thoroughly mixing together the categories of victim and
victimizer. What is the significance of Libya’s ascent to the pinnacle of the UN Human
Rights Commission? Only the realization it should provoke in us that there is nothing
new under the sun.
What makes the carnival impulse, unshackled as it has become, potentially
menacing is the violence that perpetually looms in its shadow. In the Golden Bough, Sir
James George Frazer writes of the history of a prologue to Saturnalia practiced in certain
regions of the Roman Empire. One month before the festival, soldiers drew lots. The
selected soldier was dressed in regal garb reminiscent of Saturn and allowed to publicly
indulge his passions, whatever they might be. At the end of the month he was expected
to slit his throat on the altar of the god he was personating.
Last year I was shown an excerpt from a Qatari television program, whose plot
involved an Israeli joint venture with Count Dracula to bottle Palestinian blood under the
label “Dracola.” When the Count became infuriated with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon, he bit him on the neck only to die of blood poisoning. At numerous points
watching this I simply could not overcome the urge to laugh, so over the top was the
whole thing. So powerful was the show’s carnival impulse that I found it impossible to
get a sense of just who was the primary object of its mocking derision: Israel, the show’s
absurd looking actors, or its viewers. Yet behind the buffoonery lurked rage. As with the
lucky and then unlucky Roman soldier, what we have here is a spectacle with the specter
of bloodshed lurking on the horizon.
***
Those seeking a more durable clarity than the latest pundit can offer about our current
flirtations with bitter carnival would do well to turn to Dostoevsky’s political novel, The
Devils. They may be surprised to learn that we are not the first to have anticipated a
widely liberal “End of History” or to have engaged in a global struggle against terror. In
the early 1860’s, Tsar Alexander II of Russia freed one-third of Russia’s population from
serfdom with the stroke of a pen, relaxed censorship of the Russian press and instituted
limited self-government. The unanticipated result was a global wave of bombings and
assassinations aimed at people sitting in cafes, theaters and office buildings.
Russian revolutionaries and anarchists of the 1860’s were at the forefront of that
wave. Among these was Sergei Nechaev, whose Catechism of a Revolutionary was a
kind of training manual for would-be bombers the world over. In 1869, Nechaev was
convicted in a sensational trial of murdering a young student and disposing of his body in
a pond. In 1873, Dostoevsky sent a copy of The Devils to Alexander III, the heir to the
Russian throne, along with a letter explaining his reasons for writing it. The novel
amounted to “almost a historical study,” exploring how the Nechaev debacle could take
place in Russia. Dostoevsky placed the ultimate blame for the ensuing carnival on the
country’s liberal visionaries. Though they may have been unaware of it, these visionaries
were the spiritual fathers of Nechaev and his gang. The Devils sketches out the
transmission from father to son.
Stepan Tromfimovich Verkhovensky is the father of the bitter carnival that overtakes
his previously undistinguished little town. A once prominent liberal, Stepan is a man
who in his prominence spoke frequently about “humanity in general.” When accused of
atheism, he defends himself on the grounds that he believes in God, but as a being that is
conscious of Himself only through him. One of Stepan’s early poems culminates in an
image of the Tower of Babel.
If Stepan is the carnival’s instigating cause, his son Peter—at once a loose sketch of
Nachaev and a prescient prefiguring of Stalin—is its orchestrating force. Peter is no
visionary; he treats his revolutionaries with barely disguised disdain, particularly its
utopian dreamers. Rather, as a shrewd and ambitious politician, Peter understands that
the real engine of his carnival must be his “brother” Nikolai Stavrogin.
Stavrogin, Stepan’s former student, lives life as a carnival. Upon returning home to
Russia from a period abroad, he commences a series of what are widely perceived as
“insults on society.” Among these, he takes an elderly liberal who is in the habit of
proclaiming, “No, sir, I won’t be lead around by the nose!,” at his literal word, grabbing
the man by the nostrils and dragging him around the room. Invited in a reconciliatory
gesture by a prominent liberal to a birthday party for his wife, Stavrogin next makes a
public pass at the woman. When called to the provincial governor’s mansion to explain
his behavior, Stavrogin beckons the governor close only to bite down hard on the man’s
ear. (The contemporary reader of the novel may find society’s response to its insult
disturbingly reminiscent. It is decided that the root cause of Stavrogin’s behavior must
have been a brain fever, and the whole town expresses contrition towards him. “You
didn’t expect me to challenge you to a duel, did you?,” asks the man whose wife
Stavrogin made a pass at.)
Why does Stavrogin insult society so? As he later states in a “confession,” written
purely for the titillation of shocking its reader, the purpose of his misbehavior is the
ecstasy of residing in tortured awareness of how far he’s sunk. I can do no better here
than recite Stavrogin’s own words:
It was the same every time I stood at the barrier waiting for my adversary
to fire his shot in a duel; I’d experience the same despicable, savage
sensation…I confess I often sought it out, because I found it stronger than
anything else of that kind. When I got a slap in the face (I’ve had two in
my entire life), this feeling was also present in spite of my terrible anger.
But if one can restrain one’s anger at the time, the rapture exceeds
anything one could possibly imagine.
Here is the fully sketched out portrait of what Kafka hinted at in his parable. Behold the
city worker, the carnival reveling son of a utopian, who hastens the blows of the fist
entirely for their own sake.
While there are undeniably important differences between Dostoevsky’s Russia and
Western Civilization today, there are also some striking similarities. Like the 1860’s, the
1990’s were a time in which “something new was in the air” which no one could quite
get a handle on. General Ivan Ivanovich Drozdov, who was castigated in St. Petersburg
salons simply for being a general, might meet a similar reception in many a Western
European salon today. We too have our carnival revelers. A prominent Columbia
University Professor who uses a keynote address at an academic conference to deliver a
paean to suicide bombing as performance art. A major American novelist who tells a
French newspaper that New York City became interesting to him again after September
11, “because it was a town in crisis.” The effect of all this longing for the great blows of
the giant fist is to create a climate conducive for the fist to come down.
A Plea For Moral Realism
Some today are coming to the conclusion that events in and hatched out of the
Middle East owe a significant “debt” to the West, these events being the continuation of
the gruesome festivities that possessed Europe for a large part of the twentieth century.
While this conclusion seems increasingly credible, we should not infer from it that this
case of possession has ensconced itself in the Levant to the exclusion of the West for the
foreseeable future. Disturbing patterns of thought and behavior of the kind that
Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor would surely have recognized are reinvigorating
themselves in certain European capitals and in universities on both sides of the Atlantic.
Carnival—the flaying of flesh from the bone—has just knocked and many are answering.
We cannot now know whether this carnival-in-the-making has moved too far past
the doors to be pushed back out again. History will judge that on hindsight. If it has,
great energy and effort will be needed (especially in little Israel) to figure out how to
simply get by amidst the rage, malice and buffoonery.
If it has not, we will at the very least be facing a kind of international crisis of
manners. The fictions of “world community,” “human rights” and “international law”
around which people and governments organize their words, never really solid, are now
exposed in all their flimsiness for everyone to see. Out of necessity, ideas will step in to
fill the void. But it would be a tragedy if the door were closed on one bitter carnival only
to open it for another. Hence a plea for moral realism: recognition of the dangers in our
most generous wishes and the fantasying mind that unleashes them.