Rob Riemen

Why have we forgotten what is important in life? Lowlands Lecture In this lecture on ‘why we have forgotten what is important in life’, we’ll look at three main questions. The first question is: ‘what is important in life?’, the second is: ‘why have we forgotten this?’, and of course we need to ask the inevitable third question: ‘what do we need to do to give the important things a place back in our lives and in our society?’ Let’s begin with the first question: what is now important in life? To be able to answer this, we first need to know more about life! In particular: our spiritual lives. If we are thinking about knowledge of the human spirit, we have a very important aid at our disposition: art! All great art teaches us about ourselves, it holds up a mirror to our souls. I have chosen two films which can teach us a lot about ourselves through what they depict. The first is an old classic: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a film from the late 1960s. It’s a spaghetti western directed by Sergio Leone with a youthful Clint Eastwood playing the lead, and music by Ennio Morricone… The story is simple: three gunslingers go searching for treasure at the time of the American Civil War. It’s old-fashioned treasure: a large chest containing four hundred thousand gold coins. Today’s value: millions of euros! Anything goes for these guys: they lie, torture, murder - and preferably do the dirty on each other, since they all want to have the treasure for themselves of course. The most fascinating is everything that’s not in the film. More than two hours and no romance, no friendship, no justice, no mercy, no humour, no beauty, not even any sex! And yet for many this film contains a deep truth, that’s to say: we recognize a firmly-held conviction – otherwise it wouldn’t have kept millions of viewers glued to the screen for half a century: the firmly-held conviction that the most important goal in life is to have a lot of money, to be rich, and that anything is permissible to obtain it. If they weren’t wholly convinced of this, they wouldn’t put up with all the misery and torment they have to go through. It is obvious that this conviction – being rich is fantastic! and whoever manages it, by whatever means, is ‘successful’! – is familiar to us: look at the causes of the financial crisis, look at the dominance of the economic news, note the idolization of the rich… The second film is another classic, but unfortunately not as well-known: Stalker by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsi. The film is set in the Soviet Union of the 1970s: a depressing industrial city, a leaking nuclear plant, a lot of rain… Somewhere near a military site, there’s a ‘forbidden zone’ with a ‘Secret

Room’! What’s so special about it: your deepest longings can be fulfilled there!! And Stalker is the guide who takes you there. And one of the reasons he does that is because this ‘Secret Room’ is the last stop for people without hope… He has been hired by a writer and a professor. They are brilliant intellectuals but cynical, bitter, they are bored, no longer believe in what they are doing and are ready for something new. It is a dangerous journey: you could be shot dead, they are landmines. Stalker guides the men through the zone and in the meantime tells them the following story: ‘I had a predecessor who was responsible for his brother’s death. Burdened by guilt he goes to the Room and asks for his brother to be brought back to life! Then he goes home and he finds… a house full of gold, diamonds, jewels and money.’ The moral of his story: the ‘Secret Room’ fulfilled what his actual deepest desire was and not what he claimed his deepest desire was: namely that his brother would come back to life. When he realises this: that having a lot of money is more important to him than his brother’s life – he hangs himself. Stalker to the men: ‘This Room fulfils your unconscious deepest desires. It teaches you to know your own soul!’ When they arrive, the men decide not to go in. They don’t dare confront themselves! Everything The Good, the Bad and the Ugly doesn’t have, can be found in Stalker. It’s about a spiritual quest, love, compassion… What both films do have in common is that they confront us with the questions: what do you really find important in life? What makes life worth living for you? What is your deepest desire? These are the most ancient of philosophical questions: what is the right way to live? What gives life value? What makes it meaningful? They might be philosophical but that doesn’t make them academic questions! Inevitably everyone will ask themselves these things at some point in their lives. It was the great Greek philosopher Socrates who taught that your life can only ever become meaningful if you keep asking yourself these questions. The questions themselves are timeless. Answers should be sought within the context of our own times, our own culture. We no longer live in the Middle Ages, and Chinese civilisation is not part of our culture. Our time, the current zeitgeist might well be best summarised by another philosopher: Friedrich Nietzsche. He lived in the nineteenth century, became a professor by the time he was twenty-five but soon gave that up. He wanted to think for himself, and almost prophetically he predicted many important social developments of the twentieth century. Finally he went mad. Before he went mad, he wrote down the following thought:

‘The most universal sign of the modern age: man has lost dignity in his own eyes to an incredible extent.’ He seems to summarise the entire twentieth century and its boundless destruction of mankind and environment in just that one sentence. A question: why has life become so worthless to us that we make so little effort for it and put so much energy into destroying people and the planet? Nietzsche’s answer can be found in another prediction: Europe falls into the clutches of nihilism. Many of his books are about this, but his own shortest précis reads: ‘Nihilism is that the highest values no long have any value. There is no goal. There is no answer to the question why.’ This is not a philosophical statement, this is a philosophical time bomb! Because what Nietzsche is claiming here is that all those big questions, all those big life questions which we started asking again thanks to the films, the ones any of us can be confronted with every day, that all those questions are meaningless! You can ask them… but there is no answer! Why? Because nothing has absolute value. There are no spiritual values anymore! Of course, we talk about what is good, true and beautiful, but that’s only what you think about them yourself. Anything can mean anything – and so nothing means anything anymore. Only one thing does remain absolute: freedom. But it is an empty freedom: do whatever you want! Everything is permitted, indulge your desires, there are no spiritual values that can hinder you in this. Of course there are still morals, there are still laws. But the only true law and the only true moral is that of the strongest. Whoever has the most power determines what is or isn’t morally right, or why being amoral is the highest morality. Hence everyone’s longing for the will to power… Nietzsche anticipates that this kind of society would descend into violence, devastation and self-destruction. The twentieth century proves him right. Nietzsche made another prediction: once people have experienced all that violence, they’ll try to escape the meaninglessness of their existence and search for a replacement for the spiritual values that have been lost. You don’t need any complicated scientific research to know what we, as western society, really find important now, what we now believe in and attribute value to. One small, simple investigation that everyone can do, suffices. You go to a newspaper kiosk at any station or airport. Anyone who ever travels can see that everywhere in our society, in any country, there are always the same kinds of magazines. They are only there because there is a major demand for them! Well, what do we find everywhere then? There’s always a shelf on computers and technology. Belief in engineering and technological progress is always good and will remain so.

Always a shelf for sport and cars, motor racing. Belief : the faster the better. Speed is a value in itself! Inevitably a shelf for money. Money is god. Naturally there is always a shelf on lifestyle, celebrities, sex. We can’t imagine life without external appearances, amusement and physical excitement… Commerce, TV, the internet only confirm how dominant these values are in our culture. A question: why do we give so much value to technology, speed, money, fame, appearances and sexual pleasure? An interesting answer comes from our Greek philosopher Socrates, who two and a half centuries ago commented in a debate with a friend: ‘Your lifestyle is solely focused on pleasure and you ignore the best.’ This is a wonderful definition of the phenomenon which only becomes knownin the twentieth century and then begins an unstoppable rise: KITSCH! Our society is a culture of kitsch and the consequences are drastic. Since there are no longer any spiritual values, there is no objective measure for our actions – everything is subjective. My individual self, my ego becomes the measure all of things. The only thing that counts: what I feel, what I think. I insist that my taste, my opinions and how I am now are respected, otherwise I’ll be offended. The sensitive ego as the measure of all things allows for no criticism and knows no self-criticism. Identity: no longer an expression of spiritual values (who you are), but of materiality: what you have, what you look like. You can literally buy your identity, adapt it and change it. A permanent drive to buy and to own, not expressions of greed and consumerism, but a deep longing for an identity – and then to show it off to as many people as possible (Facebook!) in the hope and expectation that they’ll like you… Spiritual life is no longer relevant, it’s about feeling good. You feel best when everything is pleasant and therefore fun. FUN is the ultimate measure for all things you invest time in: your relationship has to be fun, your friends, your school, studies, your work. In your free time: amusement! The mass media, sports, games, going out, again, it all has to be fun. In the unlikely event that things go wrong and you really can’t change this: just give me a pill, so that I’ll feel good again. When nothing is absolute, nothing is eternal, everything is finite and transitory. This is why we no longer have any time or patience, why we are obsessed with speed and everything that is new. But it is also why our deepest fear is of death and why we have such a boundless need to remain eternally young. In a kitsch society, politics is no longer the public arena of serious debate about what a good society is and how we can achieve it. It has become a carnival of people who want to gain political power and hold on to it with slogans and their image.

Economy in a kitsch society is dominated by commerce that wants to earn money at the cost of everything else (people, environment, quality), and requires all of us to be competitive, productive, efficient, commercial – in short, to do anything for money. Education no longer has anything to do with spiritual training and striving for wisdom, but it has to be useful, and what is useful is what is good for the knowledge economy. In brief: when kitsch dominates, nothing has any intrinsic value. Everything that exists is there because it is pleasant and/or useful. Kitsch is the irresistible temptation of pleasure and beauty – but it is a beauty without truth. It is like using cosmetics to seduce – and hide: hiding a fathomless, spiritual vacuum. Kitsch is the lie that would have us believe that something has value and is important, but in fact it is a flight from our own souls that know that appearances are deceptive. Hence the longing for complete oblivion, intoxication. An intoxication we can find in: noise (we are afraid of silence!); endless playing (gaming); everything that involves crowds (dance parties, festivals), all kinds of stimuli (drink, drugs), pornography for instant sexual gratification… But at a certain point the intoxication wears off, we notice that life is no longer nice and fun, the party is over, there are worries, there are crises… Not only that: we are also disappointed, even embittered. We have lost what was really important to us – and it turned out not to be really important at all. We feel deceived. Then you get the second phenomenon that characterises our zeitgeist: resentment, rancour. People become angry, there is spite, hatred in the community. And that too has political and social consequences! Max Scheler, a German philosopher, knew his Nietzsche, observed his surroundings at the beginning of the twentieth century and in 1912 published his book Resentment in the Framework of Moralities. He explains that resentment is a phenomenon that belongs to cultures with an ideal of equality. And Europe has had a culture of equality from the start. The Jewish and Christian religions foster the belief that despite all our differences, we are all equal in God’s eyes. Only one thing counts for God: whether you live your life righteously or not. The European humanism of Socrates and Spinoza fosters an ideal of equality too: true identity is not determined by your possessions, power, family, race, sex – everything that differentiates us from one another, but our true identity is determined by our universality, that which all men always have in common: the ability to live in truth, to do right, to create beauty. Only: these are universal spiritual values, but Nietzsche predicts that the meaning of these values will disappear. From the nineteenth century onwards, the ideal of equality has only been focused on the material, in particular, in the form of socialism with its ideal of social

justice (equal chances, equal incomes); and the desire for greater democracy: voting rights for all! Everyone to have equal rights and so on. However, once all these spiritual values are dropped, when you’re left with pure materialism, the ideal of equality becomes perverted: everyone has the right to everything! So: if someone else has more, I should have it too! Equality becomes a crude ideology that starts to dominate everything. Since you always find the greatest equality at the lowest level, all quality disappears: education, universities decrease in quality, because not only must everyone be able to study, but also to graduate. And art and culture have to be accessible. Not just affordable, but most of all: understandable. In a society of resentment, there is an enormous hatred of everything that is difficult! Difficult equals elitist equals anti-democratic equals should not exist! Resentment also influences our values. We no longer accept any higher, spiritual values (don’t exist, too difficult), so all values become subjective and the new measure is: I SHOULD BE ABLE TO DECIDE FOR MYSELF! IF I WANT! IF I LIKE IT! The paradox, as Max Scheler explains, is that the resenting human is a weakling, he doesn’t want to do things alone, he would rather adapt, in short: he is a mass-man who prefers to do and think what everyone else does and thinks. Resentment also influences our freedom. Freedom, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is difficult freedom, freedom as your own responsibility to live a righteous life. And for European humanism Spinoza will give freedom the meaning of: freeing yourself from desires, fear, ignorance, superstition, no longer being a slave to your passions. Only once you succeed in this, once you’ve learned to use your powers of reason, to live in truth, to create beauty, to love another and to do right – only then can you call yourself free. But: both traditions presuppose that there are universal spiritual values, which we can emulate. BUT THEY HAVE GONE! So freedom becomes: EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED! Do what you fancy, indulge yourself! Yet another paradox: mass-man is a weakling and a FEAR OF FREEDOM arises, the longing to fit into a group, to be the same as the others, join in, conform… Almost all the great thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw this social development coming. It is most brilliantly summarised in a famous short story by the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky. The story is called ‘The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’ and takes place in Spain in the sixteenth century, Catholism’s heyday. There is a religious festival, one hundred heretics are going to be burned: everyone wants to be there, the court, the people, all the Church authorities. Commotion: a stranger is coming! He can make the blind see again, he can make a lame man walk again, bring a girl back from her deathbed. The people hear this and know that… HE has returned. The cardinal, however, takes drastic action.

That evening, in the prison, the cardinal launches the following tirade. Freely translated he says: ‘What kind of a moron are you? Why did you return? We, your Church, my colleagues and I, have spent ages improving your work! Idiot, you thought people wanted to be FREE. But that’s nonsense: people want to be HAPPY. Freedom makes them unhappy. Then they have to think for THEMSELVES, make their own choices, be responsible for good and evil… That’s not nice, that’s not what they want. We as the Church want to help. How: by providing the people with marvels, mystery, authority. Naturally the people need to be obedient, or better still: believe blindly in us. But they are happy to do that. They are no longer free, but we make them happy! And we don’t want your return to ruin that! Tomorrow you’re going on that pyre too…’ Fear of freedom is not a new thing. In 1937, there’s a Dutch cultural critic, Menno ter Braak, who sees that there is an emerging movement in our country which is going to use the fear of freedom and resentment in society for political means. Ter Braak notes, with growing amazement and perturbation: ‘A political movement is growing which is continually angry and is stirring up anger and aggression in society!’ ‘They are not interested in real solutions, they need the inequalities in order to be able to carry on fulminating.’ ‘That is really the only thing they understand: fulminating and hating. They don’t have a single positive idea, the only thing they want is to be able to live out their resentment.’ ‘They hate Jews most of all, because ALL the country’s problems are down to the Jews. The Jews are the scapegoat! See them off and everything will be alright again.’ ‘Judaism is not a religion for them. It is a political ideology which will destroy their Netherlands.’ ‘One thing that’s remarkable about the new political movement is that they claim that they are ALWAYS VICTIMS. They are always neglected, the others always have it better.’ ‘Another remarkable thing: they hate intellectuals, they hate artists, they hate culture, they hate everything that is not as ordinary as they are.’ ‘Remarkable is that their leader keeps claiming that things used to be better! Throw out all the foreigners, if we can be a SINGLE people again, everything will be alright.’ ‘Remarkable is that the movement has a firm belief in a leader – without whom the Netherlands doesn’t have a future – but this man has never been proven a leader.’ ‘Unremarkable, completely logical, is that the leader is a populist who says everything the masses want to hear, everything he can use to mobilise the masses for his own purposes.’ This is what Menno ter Braak said in 1937.

The titles of his essay was NATIONAL SOCIALISM AS A DOCTRINE OF RESENTMENT. As a PS: In his essay he also points out that the elites and intellectuals would rather stick their heads in the sand than look the facts in the face. They say: it will be alright, it will sort itself out, once the economic crisis is over… And: first we need to do a bit more research. But that’s nonsense, as Ter Braak knows. The economic crisis is not the core of the problem, since fascism is the consequence of a crisis of civilisation. And you don’t need research to understand what it is, because fascism is rooted through and through in a total lack of ideas. Ter Braak: ‘you can recognise it from the clichés of hatred, the inflections of malice, the shrillness of its slander…’ We now know what fascism leads to: Away with freedom, away with truth, away with thinking for yourself. Away with compassion for your fellow human beings. Away with the arts, away with culture. Away with humour, away with quality. What’s left is a grey, uniform mass society, and then violence, endless violence. After the war we said: never again! And every 4th of May we say it again: never again! And so we’re talking about populism now – because fascism? No, that doesn’t exist. And yes, there is populism, in America, in Europe, in the Netherlands. It is everywhere – where ideas no longer matter, but rather viewing figures, print runs, in short: wherever the power of numbers decides everything. Populism is also present in politics. It is present where politicians exchange principles, visions and ideals for the false currency of currying favour with voters and drifting with the spirit of the times. What these characters driven by self-interest and imagination-less pragmatism offer is populism. The true populists in politics can be found on the right and the left, in the government and in the opposition! Fact is: these days many politicians are populists. Wilders and his gang are much more than populists, though. They are prototypes of contemporary fascism. Of course they will never admit that, they’re not that stupid. And they won’t wear silly suits or go about saluting. Those things don’t have much to do with fascism. But the fascist mind can be recognised by its vision of society and its political techniques. Amongst other things, it consists of the following: A crude materialism.

A stifling nationalism and xenophobia. A deep aversion to the arts and spiritual values, and therefore a deep desire to destroy the transmitters of culture. An aversion to intellectuals, artists and anyone who is different. A politics of resentment, hatred and permanent lies. A fierce resistance to the European spirit and to a cosmopolitan Europe of multiple traditions and cultures. An anti-democratic spirit: there is no democracy in the party and instead of serious public debate and arguments, there’s a chatting and twittering of buzz words, slogans and propaganda. An aversion to judicial power. And you can hear the desire for violence in the language they use (send in the troops on them, throw criminal Muslims out of Europe), you can see it in the aggressive behaviour of the men themselves – and it all culminates in the repulsive actions of a murderous Norwegian fascist who finds his inspiration in the body of thought of his hero, Geert Wilders. Let’s not be surprised that the poisonous plant of fascism is growing again. After the war, in 1947, two great writers and staunch anti-fascists, Thomas Mann and Albert Camus, warned us: Watch out! The war might be over but this doesn’t mean fascism has disappeared! It won’t disappear because these cancer cells belong to this society, dominated by kitsch and run by populists, that’s to say a society in which we have collectively forgotten what is important in life. And at the first signs of crisis, the fascist cancer will spread again like weeds and slowly but surely the entire social body will be overrun! The first bullets have already been fired in Oslo!! What now? What can be done? History doesn’t just teach us about fascism and why it can always return, but also about the fight against fascism in order to ensure the continuation of a civilised society. In my book Nobility of Spirit the last chapter is devoted to an exceptional man, a fighter against fascism, Leone Ginzburg. Leone Ginzburg was a Russian Jew, born in 1909, whose family emigrated to Italy when he was a child. He was a brilliant man who translated that wonderful brick of a novel, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, into Italian when he was just eighteen. Transmitting and making the best of the European spirit, great literature, accessible would become his great passion. He translated, taught, founded a publishing house, set up a magazine, Cultura – “culture” to do justice to the original meaning of the word: making room for the collection of the many roads people can travel in their search for the truth about themselves and human existence. Realising that only culture can help people figure out the truth about their own lives and actions, he made transmitting European culture his life’s work.

But then Mussolini and his fascists rise to power in Italy. Mussolini insists that all professors sign a declaration of loyalty – or lose their jobs. Of the eleven hundred professors only ten (!!) refuse to sign. Leone Ginzburg is one of those ten. (Courage is a rare trait in the academic and intellectual world too.) Ginzburg joins the resistance because he knows that culture and freedom can’t exist without each other. He also knows that fascism – which always crops up in the name of freedom – only wants to destroy freedom. Ginzburg is arrested and deported. Then Mussolini is overthrown. Ginzburg returns to Rome to fight against the Nazis, who have taken over. Again he is arrested and then tortured to death by the Nazis. He is thirty-five when he dies. A letter he writes from the prison to his wife Natalia, a letter which will turn out to be his last letter, ends as follows: ‘Don’t worry too much about me. Just imagine that I am a prisoner of war; there are so many, particularly in this war, and the great majority will return home. Let us hope that I’m part of that majority, eh Natalia? I kiss you again and again and again. Be brave.’ I will never forget my silent amazement when I read those words for the first time: be brave. What did he mean by ‘be brave’? I found the meaning of this salutation in Socrates, who teaches courage as the ability not to conquer others but yourself, the courage to be wise and just, the courage to cultivate your soul. Whoever does not do this is not free, and life without freedom, an empty and accommodating life, is meaningless and ultimately loveless. Natalia Ginzburg knew this. She carried on her husband’s work. Went to work in his publishing house, wrote beautiful stories and essays, including a short text entitled ‘The Little Virtues’. I’ll read the first two sentences out to you: ‘As far as the education of children is concerned, I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but a love of one's neighbour and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.’ Half a century later, we all know how true these words are. In our society we do not honour true human greatness, no: small-mindedness, stupidity and trivia prevail. Whoever excels in those things is successful! What has this got to do with the return of fascism? Unfortunately, everything. Listen to what another film maker and friend of Natalia Ginzburg, Federico Fellini, has to tell us after the war: ‘Fascism always arises from a provincial spirit, a lack of knowledge of real problems and people’s refusal – through laziness, prejudice, greed or arrogance – to give their lives deeper meaning. Worse, they boast of their ignorance and pursue success for

themselves or their group, through bragging, unsubstantiated claims and a false display of good characteristics, instead of drawing from true ability, experience or cultural reflection. Fascism – Fellini continues – cannot be fought if we don’t recognize that it is nothing more than the stupid, pathetic, frustrated side of ourselves, which doesn’t belong to any political party and of which we should be ashamed. To curb that part of ourselves we need more than activism for an anti-fascist party, because latent fascism hides in all of us. It once gained a voice, authority and trust and it can do so again…’ Fellini, the Ginzburgs, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, people who have personally experienced what fascism is, have all understood something you must never forget. It is this: fascism’s most important weapon is not violence but IGNORANCE! And what is ruling over our country…? What is that says: ‘What you have and can buy is more important than who you are!’ What is it that says: ‘Life always has to be fun! So don’t think too hard, don’t be critical!’ What is it that says: ‘Art and culture aren’t important! Go for a bike ride, that’s easier and healthy too!’ What is it that says: ‘What’s good for the rich, what’s good for the banks is good for us too!’ What is it that says: ‘Why be wise? Education should be useful!’ What is it that says: ‘You don’t have to read books anymore! The internet is more fun.’ Or this: ‘The politician with the smoothest tongue is the best for our country.’ And this: ‘Foreigners, Islam, are the root of all trouble!’ And: ‘Everything that’s big and popular is fantastically important!’ What is it that says: ‘Every opinion is equally right, knowledge and truth aren’t important.’ It is the loud voice of IGNORANCE! In this country, Wilders is the general of the growing army of ignorant forces and his lieutenants are everywhere: in politics, academia, the media, business. They all have a single interest: self-interest! And this is best served by… letting ignorance rule. Because just imagine for a moment that people were less ignorant… Who would vote for them, listen to them, read their articles, buy their trash…? Fellini is right: the fight against fascism begins with the fight against ignorance… in ourselves! Therefore: dare to think! Dare to be critical!

Insist that your school, education, university teaches you meaningful things. Teaches you wisdom! Ignore what’s easy. Because Spinoza was right: everything that is outstanding is as difficult as it is rare! Foster the Muses: the arts, poetry, music, literature. Only they can tell you who you are, what you feel, what you experience, teach you to talk and think about these things! The lust for money and fame should be treated as an illness! Socrates is right: a meaningful life means living in truth, creating beauty, being righteous. And don’t conform, don’t compromise. This is not easy, so: be brave, don’t be afraid, conquer yourself and dare to opt for what is true, what has true value – because it will continue to exist. And resist! Resist ignorance in politics, in the media, in academia, in society… Resist: don’t let them fool you. This is your life, your society and you want a lot, but not to live in ignorance. So resist, it’s not that hard: If something is stupid, don’t buy it. If something is stupid, don’t read it. If something is stupid, don’t watch it. If something is stupid, don’t support it! If something is stupid, don’t vote for it! Resist: let yourself be heard, let yourself be seen, wake up people, get them moving, and let the ignorant forces know that: Your lies, Your kitsch, Your politics, Your time - is over! Resist! Be brave! Good luck!! Rob Riemen, August 2011