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To put it in a somewhat simplified way — I simplify it very much, I [[know]] — there are two basic attitudes discernible in the [[history]] of [[religions]] along the axis of the opposition between the [[global]] and the [[universal]]: On the one hand, there is the pre-Christian pagan cosmos, the divine hierarchical [[order]] of cosmic principles which, when copied on the [[society]], gives the [[image]] of a congruent edifice in which each member is at each/his/her own place. The supreme good is here the global [[balance]] of principles, while the [[evil]] stands for their derailment or derangement, for the excessive assertion of one [[principle]] to the detriment of [[other]] principles, of the [[masculine]] principle to the detriment of the [[feminine]] one, of [[reason]] to the detriment of [[feeling]], and so on and so on. The cosmic balance is then reestablished through the work of justice which, with its inexorable [[necessity]], sets things straight again by crushing the derailed element. With [[regard]] to the [[social]] [[body]], an [[individual]] is good when he or she [[acts]] in accordance with his/her special place within the [[social edifice]], when he respects [[nature]] which provides food and shelter, when he shows respect for his superiors who take care of him in a fatherly way, and so on and so on. And evil occurs when some [[particular]] strata or individuals are no longer [[satisfied]] with their [[proper place]] within the [[global order]], when [[children]] no longer obey [[parents]], when servants no longer obey their masters, when the wise ruler turns into a capricious, cruel tyrant, and so on.
So the very core of the pagan wisdom resides in the insight into this cosmic balance of hierarchically ordered principles, more precisely, the insight into the eternal circuit of the cosmic catastrophe, derailment, and the restoration of order through just [[punishment]]. Perhaps the most elaborated case of such a cosmic order is the ancient Hindu cosmology first copied onto the social order in the guise of the [[system]] of castes, and then onto the individual organism itself in the guise of the [[harmonious]] hierarchy of its organs: head, hands, abdomen, and so on. Today such an attitude is artificially resuscitated in the [[multitude]] of New Age approaches to nature, society, and so on and so on. So that's the standard, traditional, pagan order. Again, [[being]] good means that you fully assume your proper place within some [[Global Order|global order]]. But Christianity, and in its own way already — maybe, I'm not sure, I don't know enough about it — [[Buddhism]], introduce into this global balance, cosmic order, a principle totally foreign to it, a principle that, measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous [[distortion]], the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to the [[universality]] of [[nirvana]], or the Holy Spirit, or today, of [[Human Rights|human rights ]] and freedoms. The idea is that I can participate in this universal [[dimension]] directly, irrespective of my specific particular place within the global order. For that reason, [[Buddha]]'s followers [[form]] a [[community]] of [[people]] who in one way or [[another]] have broken with the hierarchy of the social order, who started to treat this order as something fundamentally irrelevant. In his [[choice]] of disciples, Buddha pointedly ignored castes and, after some [[hesitation]], [[true]], even [[sexual]] [[difference]]. And do [[Christ]]'s scandalous [[words]] from Luke [14:26] look, not point, in the same direction? "If anyone comes to me and does not [[hate]] his [[father]] and his [[mother]], his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own [[life]], he cannot be my disciple." Here, of course, I claim we are not dealing with a simple brutal [[hatred]] demanded by a cruel and jealous god. [[Family]] relations stand here metaphorically for the entire social network, for any particular ethnic substance that determines my place in the global order of things. The hatred enjoined by Christ is therefore not any kind of [[dialectical]] opposite of [[love]], but the direct expression of love. It is love itself that enjoins me to unplug, as it were, from my [[organic]] community into which I was [[born]], or, as St. [[Paul]] put it, "There are neither men nor [[women]], neither [[Jews]] nor [[Greeks]]."
We can see here how truly heterogeneous is the Christian stance with regard to that of the pagan wisdom. In clear contrast to the ultimate horizon of the pagan wisdom, which is the coincidence of the opposites — Namely, what is wisdom? The ultimate point of wisdom is that our [[universe]] is the abyss of the primordial ground in which all [[false]] opposites — good and evil, [[appearance]] and [[reality]], and so on and so on — ultimately coincide. That's wisdom. Wisdom always is basically a fake platitude, I claim. You can be sure of it. Make a simple experiment. I think the proper attitude of a proper Christian or [[leftist]] today is to despise wisdom. What's wisdom? What's wisdom? Wisdom is that whatever happens you have a good excuse. Wisdom means you do something. If you succeed, then you have a proverb which is a form of wisdom to legitimize it, like we in [[Europe]] have a proverb, a standard one which says, Only those who risk can succeed. If you fail we have another proverb to legitimize it which says in very vulgar [[terms]] — something, I don't have it in [[English]] — You cannot urinate against the wind. That's wisdom for me. Anything goes basically. The basic wisdom is that differences don't matter, what was up comes down, this eternal [[circulation]] of fortune, and so on and so on.
The term "new creation" used by St. Paul is crucial here. It signals the gesture of [[sublimation]], of erasing the traces of one's past and the beginning afresh from a zero point. Consequently, there is also a terrifying [[violence]] at work in this uncoupling, that of the death [[drive]], of the radical wiping the slate clean as the condition of the new beginning.
So again, I hope my point where I am, to put it in these terms, pro-Christian is clear enough. I claim that the way we — how should I put it? — the way to imagine any radical social change was opened by this logic, which again is not the logic of this eternal circular movement, the logic of disturbed and reestablished balance, where we are part of some large [[chain]] of being; but it's the logic of miracle, miracle not in the [[religious]] sense — I'm a [[materialist]], to avoid misunderstanding — but miracle in the sense of you can begin from the zero point. We are not caught in an eternal movement. To be good does not mean to be identified to your place. And it's here I claim that human rights begin. Human rights do not mean you have your proper place and dignity comes to you through being identified to that place. Human rights means precisely, no, you are something independently of your proper place. Which is why every proper [[right]]-winger or [[Proto-Fascist|proto-fascist ]] always insists on one [[thing]]. This is the eternal [[organicist]] [[metaphoric]] of [[fascism]] or proto-fascism, that society is kind of a mega-organism, a body where the key to order is that everyone has to stick to his or her own place, and things go wrong when people want directly to participate at the universal dimension. While again, democracy, if this term has any [[meaning]] today, begins precisely when you have a direct access to the Absolute, where, independently of your place in this destructive, violent [[outburst]] you can acquire a distance towards the specific social structure. Because of this, against today's onslaught of New Age neo-[[paganism]], it seems to me both theoretically productive and politically salient to stick to this Judaeo-Christian logic.
Along the neo-pagan lines, for example, John [[Gray]], the [[author]] of Men Are From Mars, Women are from Venus, deployed in a series of [[Oprah]] Winfrey shows a vulgarized version of deconstructionist psychoanlysis. What is [[John Gray]]'s [[thesis]]? His thesis is the following one: Since we ultimately are the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, the solution to a [[psychic]] deadlock resides in a creative rewriting of the [[narrative]] of our past. What John Gray has in [[mind]] is not only the standard cognitive [[therapy]] of changing [[negative]] false beliefs about oneself into a more positive attitude of the assurance that one is loved by [[others]] and capable of creative [[achievement]], but a much more radical pseudo-Freudian [[notion]] of [[regression]] back to the [[scene]] of the primordial [[traumatic]] wound. That is to say, John Gray accepts the psychoanalytic notion of a hard kernel of some early [[childhood]] traumatic [[experience]] that forever marked [[The Subject|the subject]]'s further [[development]]; but he gives it, […?] the individual a pathological spin. What John Gray proposes is that after regressing to this [[primal]] traumatic scene and thus directly confronting it, the subject should, under therapy's guidance, rewrite this scene, this ultimate [[fantasmatic]] framework of his or her [[existence]], in a more positive, benign, productive narrative.
He himself presented, in a show that I watched, a [[woman]] in her late twenties whose primordial traumatic scene — that existed in her [[unconscious]], deforming, inhibiting her creative attitude — was that of her father shouting at her when she was a small [[girl]], "You are worthless, I despise you, nothing will come of you!" John Gray said simply that through his collaboration, this woman should rewrite this scene into a new scene with a benevolent father kindly smiling at her and telling her, "You are okay, I trust you fully," and so on and so on. And they tried to convince us that this worked, and that at the end the woman gracefully embraced John Gray, crying from [[happiness]] that she was no longer haunted by her father's despising attitude towards her.
The ultimate cause of this moralistic depoliticization is of course the retreat of the great leftist historical-political narratives and projects in our time. What do I mean by this? A couple of decades ago people were still discussing the political [[future]] of humanity. Will [[capitalism]] prevail, or will it be supplanted by [[communism]] or another form of [[totalitarianism]]? They discussed this while silently accepting that somehow social life will continue. Today, on the contrary, we can easily imagine the extinction of human life, of the human race, or the end of the life on earth, but it is [[impossible]] to imagine a much more modest change of the social system — as if, even if the whole life on earth disappears, capitalism will somehow remain intact. Again, it's possible to imagine the end of the world; it's not possible to imagine the end of capitalism.
In this constellation, rationally convinced that the radical change of the existing [[liberal]] democratic [[capitalist]] system is no longer even imaginable as a serious political [[project]], but nonetheless unable to [[renounce]] their attachment to the prospect of such a global change, the disappointed leftists invest the thwarted [[excess]] of their political [[energy]] that cannot find [[satisfaction]] in the moderate changes within the system into the abstract, excessively rigid, moralizing stance. So, to conclude, that's the problem I see. The term is not yet popular here, but as you maybe know, in Europe it's fashionable to [[speak]] about this new social democracy as the "[[Third Way|third way]]."
Now my first [[sign]] of perplexion here is 'the third way' — Tony Blair and so on — okay, but which is the second way? I mean, isn't it significant that the talk about the third way becomes so popular at exactly the point when the last traces of second way disappeared? There is no second way today. So what the third way means is precisely there is no second way. In the same way we spoke decades ago about [[socialism]] with a human face, the third way is simply capitalism with a human face; that is to say, we accept the basic capitalist game, capitalism is the only game in town. All we can do is to present it a little bit more, how should I put it, with a human face. And again, the only way for the excess to articulate itself is in this helpless moralism.
Q: […?] are you not depriving other groups, including your own country, of historical [[agency]]?
SZ: What do you mean by historical agency? I mean, I claim that each of other groups did have its agenda. What I know, because I was ten years ago pretty much involved in politics, and, for example, there was only one person at that point in '88 between me and Tudjman. And I can tell you that Tudjman, the president of Croatia, in '88, didn't have not even a minimal idea of Croat independence. In '88, Tudjman's [[dream]] was a big pact with Serbs dividing Bosnia and kind of a sharing power with Serbs within [[unified]] Yugoslavia. So what I claim is that we simply have different agendas. I don't think we were less agents because of that. We Slovenes did have our own agenda. Croats did have it. But what I claim is that [[The Act|the act ]] which triggered disintegration was Milosovic. And I'm not blaming the Serbs, to avoid the minimum of misunderstanding. I say this without even the minimum of [[cynicism]]. I claim that of all — that's the saddest paradox — of all nations in Yugoslavia, the one[s] with the longest historical democratic tradition are without any [[doubt]] the Serbs. We Slovenes are no one, are backwards, copulating with sheeps, animals. I don't have any illusions about us Slovenes. The point, the tragedy is that — you know, this is historical [[contingency]]. There was an open situation of, as my friend [[Ernesto Laclau]] would have put it, struggle for [[hegemony]] in the mid-'80s. There was an open situation. The point was who would seize the moment.
We Slovenes were simply lucky, not because we had any greater democratic tradition, but because of a series of totally [[contingent]] decisions, I claim. For example, proportional electoral system: we were lucky that in Slovenia, when socialism disintegrated, we didn't get one big nationalist movement monopolizing, hegemonizing, the political [[space]]. The political field was much more dispersed, and this simply prevented any nationalist logic along those lines. So again, I think to prove that you are an agent, it's not necessary to push into independence. The more [[tragic]] thing was that all other republics played too much opportunist [[games]]. For example, even in Bosnia, the true victims, are not quite innocent. When the war started — okay, in Slovenia it was only a kind of operatic short war — but then in Croatia it really exploded — Bosnians did play a strange game there. Their secret idea was, "let Serbs and Croats fight each other and then we'll take over" — But of course this backfired terribly. So again, no, I'm not depriving them [of agency]. I'm just saying that what makes the war so horrible for me is that retroactively — okay, it's easy to be a wise general after the battle — but how easy it would have been to prevent it earlier. I spoke with a lot of [[analysts]] who all agree: One simple measure would, one can reason, prevent the war. You remember when Yugoslavia disintegrated, or, as others would have put it, when Slovenia, Croatia, and others seceded. The usual American bemoaning is, Oh my god, didn't we recognize Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia too early. I agree with it. But I think they should have withdrawn recognition also from Yugoslavia. I think a very simple thing that the West should have done in '90, '91, is to establish the fact that Yugoslavia no longer [[exists]], and then to set a certain series of minimal criteria, and every entity — which is of course not only political democracy but also respect for national ethnic rights, and so on and so on — and then only states which respect this will be recognized. Instead of this, the West, I claim, played a game which was for a long time basically a pro-Serb game. I'm not saying this as being anti-Serb; on the contrary — and I can prove it to you, I wrote this eight years ago — at the end, the true victims of this are Serbs themselves now. So again, this is for me the tragic aspect of it: how easily it may have been avoided. I don't see any deep fate, any deep necessity in this war. And in one thing I do agree. I had a public discussion with Zoran Djindjic, the [[leader]] of Serb opposition, who told something else, which is that, in contrast to this stupid journalistic cliche according to which people in the Balkans have this long [[memory]], they never learn anything new, they never forget anything old. No. The Balkans, if anything, is the area where people forget extremely quickly, extremely fast. Already now, you can imagine how much black [[market]] and so on is going on between Serbia and Croatia, between Serbia and Bosnia, and so on. I don't believe in any deep promise which will last I don't know how long. I'm here now cautiously, moderately, an optimist, even as to this Serbian [[loss]] of Kosovo.
