Bzzlletin. Jaargang 4

Lecture by: Stefan Heym
P.E.N. Conference 11th May 1976

This changing world

The changes taking place in our world are the material the writer works with for the writer's eternal subject matter is human conflict, and human conflict in the outgrowth of these changes and in turn promotes change.

Nothing is more fascinating than to observe the forces in motion that bring about change, forces of which each one of us is an infinitesimal part. Heraclitus exclaiming Panta Rei was their prophet; Galileo defiantly muttering And yet it moves established their scientific character; Hegel formulating his dialectics tried to determine the laws by which they function; and we who stare into the newly discovered black holes in space and into the black holes in our soul shudder at the immensity of these forces.

Though change is everywhere, outside and inside ourselves, generalising about it is not as easy as at first glance it may appear. Change, like love, is experienced individually. One man clearly sees and is deeply affected by a particular moment of change while another shrugs off the prospect, and a third one actually welcomes it; there even are people who say that nothing ever changes.

At this point I hesitate, I ask myself: are my views of change in this changing world, are my experiences at all applicable to someone else? I know how much I have changed. I suspect I would hardly recognise myself in the youth who stepped off the boat onto a New York dock, a refugee from Nazism, or in the soldier who came to occupied Europe in the ranks of a liberating army, or in the bewildered man who one fine summer day saw workers demonstrating against a workers' government in the streets of Berlin. And I wonder: which is the most crucial change in my life and in myself, and is this change of a sort that other men, at least of my own generation, might have experienced as well?

Things appeared to be more simple when I was young. There was a pattern into which everything fitted: on this side were the good boys, myself of course among them, and on that side were the bad boys, and though the good boys suffered one defeat after another, their final victory was certain. This may look like too primitive a Weltanschauung, but it helped at a time when Hitler was advancing wherever he chose and the good boys were sorely pressed. More sophisticated thinkers than I, I'm sure, did not share my views, but even the most sophisticated of them would not have been able

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to foresee the complexities of forty years later.

FOTO: PETER CAMPING

If anyone would have predicted that a time would come when two huge socialist powers would call each other names traditionally reserved for the class enemy, and would actually fight over some miserable river in some miserable prairie, or when the giant United States would be beaten by some far-off small Asian people just emerging from colonial rule, or when a country in the centre of Europe would remain divided for any length of time into a capitalist and a socialist sector and prosper not only despite of, but because of its division, we should have sent that crystal-gazer to the nearest psychiatrist.

Yet these are but a few of the more obvious features of this new and vastly more complex and contradictory world of ours - a world of which we're not even certain any longer that it always was and always will be. Serious-minded physicists are telling us that there well may have been an Urknall from which the universe arose. Now if there was such an Urknall it is to be expected that there'll also come an end to the whole world with perhaps an equally loud bang.

Except for the social injustices we see around us and which are as putrid as ever, ours is no longer the world that Marx distributed his tracts in and Rockefeller his dimes, that Ghandi tried to reform and Lenin to revolutionise. This is a world in which the sum total of scientific knowlegde doubles every few years, a world of the pill on the one hand and of overpopulation on the other - the four billionth inhabitant of the globe was ticked off a month ago - of man soaring into space and man choking in the pollution of his own making. Able to control genetic processes we are faced with dwindling resources, able to communicate with each other via satellite we can't cope with group passions that are throwbacks to the middle ages. In an address he gave in New York in April of this year, Linus Pauling, twice Nobel prize winner and one of the greatest scientific minds of today, warned that within 25 to 50 years ‘the greatest catastrophe in the history of the world’ would occur, threatening mankind with extinction, And he listed as possible causes for the catastrophe: mass starvation through overfishing, marine pollution and the destruction of the estuaries; or weather changes induced by governments to improve crop yields; or the rapid destruction of the ozone layer; or the accumulation of poisonous wastes that would make air unbreathable and water unpotable; and, of course, world war.

I believe it was Marx who stated: The philosophers only interpret the world; the point is to change it. How true - but in the last third of the twentieth century the world is being changed so fast and so furiously that the philosophers' interpretations seem to be sadly lagging behind; the old formulas have all too frequently turned into dogma and need to be re-examined and replenished by creative thougth; and no nation, no party, no school can claim that its particular solution works so well that it should rightfully be jammed down the throat of other peoples. The best our present-day master ideologues can say for themselves is they are trying to develop some features that look more or less promising, even though the road to a better life and a true understanding of ourselves seems to remain as long and as arduous as ever.

Never was there an age such as ours in which man brought about so many technical, social, and political changes, never a generation that held in its hands the means of destruction of life on this earth as we know it, but also the means to its survival. Now human progress has always been both a blessing and a curse. This is so since the day Prometheus stole the fire from the gods; but in centuries past people had more time to adjust to new developments, to sort out their aspects, to make a choice. You and I however have to live with nuclear physics and biogenetics, with electronics and cybernetics, with automation and faster-than-sound jet propulsion and what not, and every day we are faced with new technologies, new knowledge, new perspectives and must decide on the spot which to accept and which to refuse, which to develop and which to restrict, and I for one do not know of a committee or council or any collective body wise enough always to make the right decisions or powerful enough to enforce them. In a period of history requiring a world government of the highest intellectual and moral order we are stuck with political systems which, even at their most progressive, are fifty years behind the times; in a period of history requiring supra-national thinking we see the world torn by national and racial strife, and the only truly supra-national bodies are the multis who are concerned less with the welfare of mankind than with how much money they can make out of pushing mankind to the brink.

Just look at the level of corruption in some of our most powerful governments and look at the level of thought in the minds of some of our most powerful political leaders and compare these to the level of development of the technical means at the disposal of such governments

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and such men - the comparison will chill your spine.

The changes each one of us has seen and lived through in recent years add up to a gigantic revolution. The two opponents of this revolution - scientific and technological on the one hand and economic and political on the other - closely influence one another. Because of the many-faceted character of the revolution its actual beginnings are hard to date, especially since it cannot be considered quite apart from whatever revolutions preceded it. We do know, however, that this revolution is more wide-spread, more varied in its forms, more contradictory and more difficult to contain than any of its predecessors; moreover, the men who believed they were leading and controlling it had to learn that they were riding a tiger.

My own pet theory is that, technologically, our revolution began when a gentleman named Einstein sat down to ruminate on the correlation of mass and energy, and politically, when a few thousand workers and disgruntled soldiers set out to storm the Winter Palace in Petrograd. From these two events, I feel, grew the traits that give the revolution we live through its peculiar character and propel it on its breath-takingly erratic course: the gap between a science progressing by leaps and bounds and economic structures essentially incapable of dealing with this progress, and the split of the world body politic into two huge antagonistic groupings that hold each other in check and thus permit the rise of third forces.

I am perfectly willing to concede that my choice of the revolution's points or departure is arbitrary; the important point is that the contradictions we noted exist and determine the shape of things as they are and of things to come. Without the scissors effect between technological progress and the various superstructures we wouldn't have a situation where each case of political misjudgement, each small incident in a remote place may quickly escalate into an explosion threatening to blow all of us to hell: conversely, without the two big powers holding each other at bay we would have had no Cuban missile removal, no Vietnam withdrawal, no Berlin agreement, nor would the different national liberation movements have been able to raise their heads or the oil sheikhs, to raise their prices, and no forms of socialism divergent from the mother pattern could have asserted themselves. Even those minor wars that periodically pop up in odd places - minor in quotation marks - are made possible only by the two atomic umbrellas we live under.

World Government, then, by the threat of automatic atomic everkill, peace by mutual nuclear blackmail? But who foots the bill for that? Aren't the bankrupt, decaying cities in one part of the globe and the neglected, backward agriculture in the other too much of a price to pay; might not controlled total disarmament be less expensive and more foolproof than all those MIRV's and MARV's and other sophisticated delivery systems and electronic surveillance and steering mechanisms? And how long is the balance of terror likely to last? Some of the techniques of mass destruction have long since spilled over into smaller lands whose leaders often have quite conflicting ambitions. What if some lunatic colonel in control of a two-by-four country with an atomic energy station capable of furnishing him with the plutonium necessary for the making of the bomb decides to start popping it, or if some small nation about to be thrown into the sea by its more numerous neighbours decides to make use of the half dozen nuclear baubles which it has laid by for the emergency?

The third forces that were able to arise only because forces One and Two counter-balanced one another are about to upset this equilibrium. How long can the new socialist alliances that are forming in Western Europe be held on the leash and kept from threatening conservative positions both West and East? How long can a final, crual race war be kept from breaking out between the young black nations of Africa and the whites still ruling the South of the continent? How long can the strivings for greater self-rule be kept under control that manifest among the different national minorities within the boundaries of superannuated multi-nation states? Of what manner and shape will the new regimes ultimately turn out to be that rule over people who must take the jump from colonial underdevelopment, or even from primitive tribal existence, into the age of the computer? Will they be socialist? And if so, what sort of socialism will theirs be? Or will we observe the emergence in these countries of new ruling classes, with new social upheavals to follow?

It seems the revolution we live through has by no means run its course.

And what about freedom in this age of change and upsets? Or should we rather say freedoms, using the plural so as to anticipate the usual contention that there is freedom from and freedom to, freedom from want, from hunger, from fear, freedom to think, to speak, to print, to assemble, to act.

The argument on freedom suffers from the word having several connotations which are bandied about loosely. Along with love, freedom happens in any man's langueage to be one of the most beautiful, soul-stirring words; that's why all sorts of demagogues just delight in using it. No oppressor ever admitted that he was going to put people in chains; on the contrary, every one of them proudly proclaimed that he was handing out some of the choicest freedom to the citizens of his own country and of the adjacent countries he was about to liberate. And there isn't a politician alive who, given a microphone and an audience, would not spout about the lack of freedom just across the border while keeping prudently silent about the state of civil liberties and the power of the police in his own bailiwick.

Seriously, what is freedom? It is the range within which a man can move without getting embroiled with another man's freedom. The enterpreneur's freedom to pocket a larger share of the surplus value produced by his workers may be limited by his workers' freedom to organise and strike; the students' freedom to demonstrate may be severely restricted by the policemen's freedom to club them on the head. And speaking of the writer: his freedom to express his thought always was and is restricted by the freedom to suppress him which is enjoyed

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by any person having the economic or administrative power to do so, usually a man or a group of men who feel insecure in their high positions and threatened by criticism. Permit me at this point to add a word of caution to those inclined to claim that they possess absolute freedom of expression: do not mistake for genuine artistic freedom the court jester's freedom to amuse the reigning duke by somersaulting and ringing the fool's bells.

The very concept of freedom is inthinkable without its dialectical opposite: limitation - the limits always being set by the other fellow. Naturally, no one admits to being so egotistical as to want freedom just for his own person; all of us desire the greatest possible freedom for the greatest possible number of people. But as someone always does have to impose restrictions - and be he the most noble-minded representative of the most social-minded and democratic of societies - the question becomes one not merely of freedom from and freedom to, but of freedom for - freedom for whom, and who has the right to limit it and to what extent and for what purpose and for how long. This is the cardinal question in any social order, including socialism, and particularly in times of change and revolution.

However, this is only one aspect of the thing. Just as freedom necessarily is paired with its opposite, restriction, so is the desire for freedom paired with its opposite, frustration. Out of the interplay in the hearts of men of these two emotions, there may arise a force of explosive power. Delacroix in his painting of Freedom, a beautiful woman, leading the men to the barricades, or Beethoven, in the chorus of the prisoners rising from the dungeon in his opera Fidelio, have given artistic expression to this force.

Yet we are again caught in the web of dialectics. While no doubt political revolutions are made, among other good cases, for the sake of greater freedom for the oppressed, there hasn't been a political revolution anywhere that did not see itself forced to restrict some of the newly won freedom and to suppress a number of people, sometimes quite large in order the better to defend itself and its purposes and achievements. Restrict freedom so as to defend freedom? - that contradiction can be solved only by answering the question already posed: freedom for whom. But this much history has taught us: a political revolution depriving too many people of too many freedoms for too long a time tends to defeat its own revolutionary aims.

The complexities of our time have outdated the pat answers and the patent solutions. Unfortunately, this has led some people, especially among the young, to conclude that there are no answers at all and no solutions whatever. Since reality is frightening, they flee into fancy, since a workable Weltanschauung is hard to find, they take to fads, since enthusiasm leads to disappointment, they retire into indifference or even cynicism. There exists a subtle tie between the Hare-Krishna adherents mumbling their gobbledegook and the flip-outs muttering Fuck it, between the drug addicts squirting the stuff into their veins and the terrorists firing off their submachineguns. When the prevailing systems prove shoddy, violence rises: when philosophies turn into dogma, all ideas become suspect, when the true prophets fail, false ones will take their places.

Are we really going down the drain, then? True, whenever we look on this globe, we see moral and intellectual crises which have their roots in the possibilities of science and technology having far outstripped the possibilities of science and technology having far outstripped the possibilities of the various economic and political systems. But was there ever progress without problems, change without pain, revolution without struggle? The dilemma itself is a sign of hope. The world is in motion; perhaps we can help somewhat in pushing it in the right direction.

We in this case meaning the writers, especially those associated in the PEN. I am aware, of course, that considering the size of the forces in motion this is a little like asking a person to go with a pea-shooter after a fifty-ton tank. I am also aware of the diverse nature of the men and women who form the membership of the PEN and I know that, while agreeing on certain principles, we could at best agree to disagree on a great many other questions; nor do I think that writers, inside or outside the PEN, are in any sense an elite who, by virtue of their talents and their typewriters, could arrogate to themselves the right to proclaim panaceas for the ills of the world.

Looking back over the history of the PEN, we observe that it, too, has changed through the years and that this change, in a modest way, parallels, the huge changes we have noted. From groups of fellows working in the same craft and meeting irregularly at more or less social occassions, the PEN has grown into an organisation that has a certain moral weight both internationally and, through its chapters, within their respective countries; and spokesmen of the PEN, feeling the moral obligation that goes with that moral weight, have been known to raise their voices effectively and to good purposes. One reason for the growth of prestige of the PEN may be that in a number of countries the writer's word in general has gained some weight. This is a curious phenomenon as writers, by and large, are neither theoreticians nor politicians, neither prophets nor leaders. Basically, all they want to do is to make people laugh or weep; but in doing this, they happen to reflect in some way the world we live in. It is this reflection of the world in the writer's work which can aid people to see a little more clearly what goes on around them and to find answers to some of the questions puzzling them. Thus, quite innocently, the writer comes to provoke thought and himself becomes an agent of change, one of the moving forces, and his pea-shooter may turn into a quite formidable weapon, as attested to by the frequent efforts to censor him, to suppress him, to buy him off.

But censorship is no longer so potent; and it has become difficult to limit people's minds and to control their thinking. The electron, which jumps any barrier, outsmarts the smartest censor; the radio wave and the impulses dotting your television screen slide past any border patrol and any watch tower and make it impos-

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sible to silence entirely what the other fellow has to say. In order to have your side prevail, just having better bombs and bigger police forces won't do; you also have to have the better arguments and to present these more ably, which again brings the writer back into the picture.

The German poet, Heinrich Heine, musing on the problem of thought control and the crossing of borders, wrote in his Wintermärchen:

Ihr Toren, die ihr im Koffer sucht!
Hier werdet ihr Nichts entdecken!
Die Kontrebande, die mit mir reist,
Die hab' ich im Kopfe stecken.

You fools who look through my trunks and bags!
You're searching there quite in vain!
The contraband that's coming with me
I carry inside my brain.

Travelling by coach as he did, what would Heine not have given to be able to use the electron as the vehicle for the spread of this thought? Of all the forces moving and changing the world, the tiny electron seems clearly to favour the side of progress and, incidentally, to support thereby the noble aims of our PEN.

FOTO: PETER CAMPING.