A Cultural Disaster

As we approached the gate departing Amsterdam for Kiev, we could feel around us that something had changed. The faces around us were hard and darkened, unsmiling and immovable, untrusting and suspicious, the collars of dark coats upturned not against the cold but against each other. It was as if each person were a fortress, closely guarding love, sorrow, pain, and any sort of weakness lest another come and steal away what little source of satisfaction remained to her. We did not understand the words spoken among the passengers. Words offer a window into one’s emotions, even when spoken in a foreign tongue, but the passengers spoke few words. What they did speak seemed intended to end conversation rather than invite it. Perhaps it was an eccentricity of the language. Some languages sound harsher than others. Or perhaps the language had, over many years, begun to sound harsh because of how it was spoken. We sat silently, apprehensively, guardedly feeling as though we were about to enter the site of some great cataclysm.

Days later, we found ourselves driving north through the icy windswept countryside little knowing where we came from or where we were going. The snow blew in delirious flurries past our frost-encrusted windows and drifted into little crests along the plowed edges of vast black and white fields. They lay fallow and ominous, blasted by the cold and scraped by the driving snow. The sky above was a silver grey, adding neither light nor color to this monochromatic world. In the summer the fields would sprout and the sky would shimmer. By autumn, these fields would shine like gold beneath pale blue skies, just as the gold and blue of the Ukrainian flag. But the harvest was many months away and the cold and white and black were here now, enfolding us like death.

As we drove through this mortuary of summertimes, we saw every now and then long low barns break the contact between land and sky at the crests of the hills. Their peeling, grey, whitewashed walls were set off in skeletal angles from the ground punctuated by empty black sockets of broken glass windows. Built to house enough golden grain to feed ten nations, they are now only the weathered gravestones of one nation’s youthful hope. They are the emptied husks of mans’ industry after that industry has gone mad and begun to rabidly feed upon its master – after the millstone slips from it’s axis and crushes the miller.

All of that was eighty years ago, but the stench of death still lingers. It was then that the Thousanders arrived. Before they came, life was poor, but it was also happy. The thatched roofs of Ukrainian villagers might only cover a couple of rooms and a clay floor, but the floors were warn smooth with dancing and the rooms were open to family, neighbors, and strangers alike. A few acres, a few vegetables, a few chickens, and perhaps a cow or horse. It was all one needed. That, and a town square full of fellow villagers with which to make music and drink moonshine and make merry. In the summer came the plowing and seeding and harvesting and in the winter came warm fires and stories. The cries in the street were from young children sledding gleefully down snow-covered hillsides.

But in 1929, the Thousanders came, and with them a mandate from Stalin himself. Small farms were to join together into large collective farms and small villages were to join together into one collective state. Twenty-five thousand officials sent out into every corner of Ukraine performed this work with loyalty and precision. Of course, most farmers resisted, but they were as grains of wheat struggling upstream against a flood. They made explanation and the explanations were good. They had worked their own land for a generation, for two, for three, for four, and wished to remain as they were, to pass the soil they had tended down to their sons and their grandsons. But what were such narrow longings when the dawn of a new age of men was at hand? When the good of all mankind was taking root and was growing south, south from Russia toward the Black Sea. The farmer was ordered to answer for his foolishness and what answer could be made. The farmer must come before the official at night and answer, but he had no answer and so the official would berate him for his selfishness, for his insubordination to the great cause:

Stand and do not sit and answer, and if you have no answer, then walk. Walk to the next official as the cold deepens and the snow begins to fall. Perhaps the next official will listen to your petty reasons or perhaps he will send you out again through the cold, knee-deep in snow to the next official. Perhaps you will come back to me tomorrow and make the same answers and walk the same cold paths.

The loose parochial structure of village government did not fit into the larger mechanism of the soviet state, and so it was replaced, with the Thousanders at the regional apex of a strict hierarchy. The Thousanders were responsible for the collective farms. They must fill the quotas imposed on them from above. But the Thousanders hands were not creased from labor and they could not sooth a horse with the sound of their voice. The farmers worked as the Thousanders directed, but it was not as before and the land suffered. It did not yield as it once had, but the quotas must be met. Not only met, but increased every year.

The golden grain which was the lifeblood of rural Ukraine grew weakly and much of what did grow was loaded into freight cars and sent north to the throbbing hub of empire. Starvation crept in but still more grain was required. Soviet officials in the Bread Procurement Commission prowled from house to house looking for signs of hoarded grain. Smoke from a chimney was one such sign. Perhaps the fire was used to bake bread or cook porridge out of wheat intended to fill the state’s quota. Often the commission would find only the dead, emaciated bodies of peasant farmers huddled around their last source of warmth, watched from the dark corners of the little house by the lifeless, hungry, longing eyes of the children they had watched starve. Still the Commission searched on.

The villagers were often recruited as officials and asked to spy on their fellow villagers. The neighbor whom you grew up with might report you to the Thousanders for keeping a cow or a garden. Doors that once opened to strangers closed to friends and family. There was food aplenty to the north, but travel there was forbidden. Soon, even the nightingale (the symbol of Ukrainian nationalism) was being hunted by villagers for food or killed by Soviet officials for sport. Every emotion was looked at suspiciously.

By this means, in only four years, the Soviet Union achieved the decimation of Ukrainian village life. Interdependence was turned into subservience to the party line. Hospitality was turned into suspicion and paranoia, the kind farmer who once offered his hill for sledding stayed alive through the famine by feeding on the flesh of the children who trusted him. The Ukrainian identity as individual, village, and nation was almost completely destroyed. The Ukrainian villagers no longer knew who they were.

A Lost Culture

In Ukraine the scars of Soviet brutality have not healed. Still present is the fear and paranoia bred from systematized terror and still absent are open smiles and open doors. How is one to recover from the legacy of state-sponsored starvation? How does one regain one’s cultural footing when it has been so thoroughly destroyed?

The Soviet regime introduced not only new forms of action into these rural villages, but new forms of knowledge as well, and it is the legacy of this knowledge, rather than the legacy of Soviet actions that still forms scar tissue over the Ukrainian soul. The cultural footing that has been destroyed in Ukraine is ideological, and for it to be replaced, some of what has been learned must be unlearned.

When a culture is lost, it may seem at first as though something has merely been forgotten, but that is not exactly it. If something is forgotten, then it can be remembered, but a loss of culture cannot be so easily remedied. One might hit closer to the mark by saying that the loss of culture is a loss of knowledge; that once it is lost, the bereaved no longer knows as he once knew. In this predicament remembrance is insufficient, for one might remember who one was without regaining current self-knowledge. I can remember that I was a child, but I can no longer know myself as a child, feel the same emotions, have the same internal assurances. I can no longer believe that a kiss will heal my wounds. One might urge the Ukrainians to dress in the old garb and speak with the old language and live in the old way, but what they once knew of themselves they no longer know. The outward form of a lost culture may be easily reconstructed, but its inward substance cannot. This is because the inward substance involves a way of knowing, or sometimes of not knowing, that has been lost. And so the exiled soul searches and searches for home, but on finding it is unable to walk the old pathways with the same settled lack of self-consciousness.

At the center of the Soviet ideology was a reductionism born from assumed objectivity. In other words, the Soviet Union was born of a system of thought masquerading as the system of thought and forcing the subcategories of reality into the subcategories of a systematic ideology. A country is a broad idea having to do with land and customs, heritage and beliefs, loyalty and allegiance, but a state is a narrow idea including only selective components convenient to the sovereign of the state. It is not the terms that are important: state or country; what is important is the reductionism of a broad concept into a narrow concept in order to fit inside the confines of a narrow ideology. Similarly, the structural hierarchy that the Soviet Union imposed upon Ukrainian village government had little to do with the organic structure of people living in community. Instead of leadership emerging out of hard-won respectability, it was imposed from above with no regard to the particular and unique governmental needs of the village. The village, in fact, had only a conceptual definition, but such a loose definition did not fit the model of an organized state. The rigid stratification imposed on village government was not a servant to the village but to the larger state, which without such structure at the local and regional level could not have functioned at its center. Furthermore, the nuanced relationships of friends, spouse, and child were also redefined in a much more selective fashion in the Soviet Union. Since each individual’s primary loyalty was to the state and its large-scale aims, the particular provincial relationships had, of necessity, to be placed in tight strictures. Even the spiritual bond which the peasant farmer felt with the land he had long tended was replaced with a rigid and unyielding reductionism of land to the productive unit.

Looking again at contemporary Ukrainian culture, one can see the influence of these ideological forms continuing to bind the Ukrainian mindset. One might even posit that the dearth of Ukrainian adoptive parents is due to the Soviet-style recategorization of fatherless children into the more convenient packaging of orphan. It may be hard to learn, but it is even harder to unlearn what has been so thoroughly inculcated.

A Definition of Culture

I do not think that the sensibilities of most people would be offended if I proposed a limited definition of culture as an environment in which people flourish. In other words, human culture is intended to enable people to be themselves, but moreso: More loving, more musical, more creative, more productive, more virtuous. One could easily describe as the opposite of this an environment in which people are less than themselves: Less loving, less musical, less creative, less productive, less virtuous. The aspects of culture may vary, but what sets a good culture apart from a bad one, or at least gives us a basis for comparison, is the degree to which a culture brings out what is truly human or good in us and suppresses what is inhuman or evil.

Problems With Culture

It would seem that we have cracked the nut and all that is left is picking at the bits of shell. We must simply construct a model for human culture that allows ourselves to flourish. We can establish programs for the arts, systems for production, planning institutes for creativity, and universities devoted to the pursuit of virtue.

It is at this juncture that we encounter a problem, and it is the same problem that the Communists encountered in reformulating the Soviet culture. The problem is that as soon as we attempt to look at culture objectively and put in place practical, tangible means for its improvement, we begin down the same reductionism as that practiced by the Soviets. If we place ourselves over and above culture as its architects and planners, then the culture we create takes on the limitations of our own imagination and understanding. We begin to say things like “all we need is…” and “creativity is merely…” and from there begin to turn whole, organic systems of human experience and endeavor into neatly defined holding pens which contain only a fraction of the materials necessary to meet our goal of human flourishing.

Furthermore, from this objective vantage point, standing over and above culture as it’s examiner we are unable to enter into culture ourselves. We find ourselves aliens and strangers to the very object we intended to improve. It is the peculiar aspect of culture that it can only be experienced from the inside. If one is aware of culture as culture, then for him, it ceases to be culture. As soon as one adopts a vantage point exterior to culture by which to analyze its operation, one can no longer be nourished by it. The reason this is the case brings us back to the elements of human flourishing. In order for us to excel in love, we must not be mindful of ourselves as lovers or of love as a medium between ourselves and the beloved. If two people are in love, they are by definition, extended toward each other in their thoughts, actions, and emotions. They are not thinking of themselves at all, but of the other person. To the extent that their focus shifts away from the beloved to the emotions aroused by the beloved or to the way the beloved makes them act, it is to that extent that they have fallen out of love. This is the same for two lovers as it is for any relationship. If the content of the relationship is centered in the self, then it is mere solipsism. Love is centered in others. Similarly, in order to excel in art, in creativity, in production, or in virtue, then the center of operation must be located outside the self. One must think of melody while making music and one must be concerned with wood while making furniture. Thinking of oneself destroys by degrees our ability to flourish as does thinking of the subject of our activity as merely a thing rather than encountering it as something unique and irreplaceable. Even taking part in custom must be done unconsciously. If we are self-conscious of our role-playing in cultural customs and festivals, then we have not fully entered into these enjoyments. We are on the outside of culture, inside our own heads, analyzing our part in the drama like an anthropologist taking part in a primitive tribal ritual all the while taking mental notes for her dissertation. It is the culture that the anthropologist is not aware of that she is really a part of.

This dynamic is strange and paradoxical. It is strange because we have come to believe that it is from the objective vantage point of rational, disinterested observation that we can come to know things truly and it is the plain fact that such a vantage point destroys our ability to know anything or anyone. Either we will reduce the thing to a shell of its former splendor for the purposes of examination and classification or else, like love when it is studied in isolation, it will disappear under our scrutiny. It is from within the context of culture that we can learn and grow but we are somehow barred from full entry by our own psyche just as surely as the Ukrainian of today cannot reenter the village life of the 1920’s. We are all anthropologists, taking from one culture to augment another, entering into festivals self-conscious of our image and role. We are analysts  and scientists more than participants. Watching a modern person’s involvement with culture is like watching a fugitive, running from activity to activity, seeking enrichment and relationship as if sampling hors d’oeuvres, staring at love until it disappears. It is as if we are a child in a funhouse, going from mirror to mirror to see what we look like with no one to tell us definitively which mirror is true.

I have described this as a modern problem. It is so, but it is more than that. When we look at the history of humankind and our unending wars, domestic strife, the meanness and frustration, the upheavals and rebellions, the sexual exploitation and racial hatred, we can see the fugitive running long before we were born, always seeking to enter into relationship, purpose, and festival and always expelled by his own objective self-consciousness and reduction of whole truths to partial systems.

A Lost Father

It is only in this light that the words of scripture become explicable. While we assume that we are full participants in human culture, at home in the human world as a deer is at home in the forest, then all the talk of fallenness and sin seems overblown. When we see, however, the extent of our disconnectedness from our own kind, not to mention our own selves, from a stable sense of purpose and a fulfillment in our occupations, then the scriptures may be heard for the first time. For the message of scripture is that not merely one particular culture has crumbled beneath our feet, but the substrata of all culture. We have fallen fundamentally and irrevocably. We can never reenter the primordial cultural soil from which we grew for that soil was the familial relationship with the Father who formed us and breathed us into existence, and whom we have offended and spurned. In the beginning, we knew ourselves, we knew others, and we knew our Father. We flourished because our self-knowledge was so sure and so thorough that the self could be forgotten and our attentions focused elsewhere. Then a catastrophe of our own making swept all of that away and all we knew was that we were naked and afraid.

The particular nature of the catastrophe was one of overreach. We knew so much, but we lusted after the kind of overarching, objective knowledge of all things that only our Father possessed. Not content to know in part and let our relationship with the Father supply the substrate into which our knowledge must lodge, we broke free and found ourselves floating, unable to comprehend the whole, but always believing that we have glimpsed it and must pass judgement on the parts based on our flawed vision. Our knowledge was Godlike in kind but not in scope and we have been swinging it wildly ever since, its misapplication serving alternately to destroy our cultures or to exclude us from them.

And yet. And yet despite our cultural rootlessness, we still have a sense of place, as if our feet know the steps to a dance long after our minds have forgotten the tune. As we look around us we see others dancing too, and their feet follow the same patterns, in step with music everyone has forgotten. “How can this be?” we think, and yet it is. The pagan world sways and twirls to the silent tune of sacred music. This gives us hope. Hope that in remembrance of the dance the tune also might one day be recovered, and with the tune the old way of knowing and the the former relationship with our Father.

Cultural Orphans

The severance from our Father was violent and traumatic and we are still shaken. We cannot reenter Eden any more than we can reenter childhood. We are an orphaned culture, always seeking and never finding, hunting about for something, anything to inform our sense of self and make us whole, to connect us with the means of human flourishing. It is a fruitless pursuit, made the more fruitless by our attempts to enter into culture through objective analysis. But if the scriptures are to be believed, then our Father offers us a new childhood via a new life lived by means of another son’s unbroken relationship. He offers us a new way of knowing, or rather a way of giving up the knowledge we had no business grasping and stepping down from our isolated, objective perch. We cannot come back to the Father in our life, but another life is offered.