Social Research: An International Quarterly

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with this scene—15 years after september 11 brought a macabre closure to a dozen years of cheerful self-assurance—the curtain descended on Act II of the End of History. [End Page 375]

No one had expected this. It was the eve of the centennial marking Lenin's arrival in Petrograd via sealed German train car. One hundred years since the Bolshevik Revolution. The New Man. The omelet that required breaking some eggs. Famine, with cannibalism. Show trials. The gulag. Ethnic cleansing. Gas chambers. Crematoria.

Tens of millions of deaths later, Nazi Germany surrendered. Fascism was defeated. Stalin died. Eventually Mikhail Gorbachev renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine. The Berlin Wall came down. The Iron Curtain fell. It seemed, at least in Europe and the triumphalist United States, that the Wicked Witch was dead. Never again would we fall prey to totalizing ideologies. Francis Fukuyama announced the End of History: contrary to Marx's expectations, Hegel's Weltgeist had been leading us to liberal democracy.

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in january 2016, 10 months before the american presidential election and Kate McKinnon's shattering Saturday Night Live performance, my son learned about Martin Luther King Jr. in his kindergarten class. He came home distraught.

"Mommy, did you know … ?"

Before that day he had been aware, of course, on some level, that different people had different skin colors—he had seen that among his classmates at preschool, his teachers and babysitters, his parents' friends. Yet it seemed to me that he had noticed this the same way he had noticed that people had different hair colors, and different eye colors, and some were shorter and some taller, and some had longer and some shorter hair; and some people wore braids and some wore dreadlocks and some wore ponytails, some scarves, and some hats. He had been sheltered. That is, we, his parents, had sheltered him from the social coding of racial difference, an indulgence denied to parents of children of color. I did not want him to see racism—the same way I did not want him to see other bad things. I had brought him into this world. And I felt ashamed of the world I was giving to him. [End Page 376]

It is a fallacy that a child's innocence ends with knowledge about sex. Innocence ends with knowledge about human cruelty.

That night my son would not go to sleep.

"But why, Mommy? Why would people with pink skin be so mean to people with dark skin? That's not fair. If you give Anne a cookie because she has blonde hair, but you don't give Susan a cookie because she has red hair …" (His kindergarten teachers had used cookie analogies.) "But why?"

"I don't know how to explain it to you. I'm unable to really understand it myself."

"You have to try—tell me! Why were they so mean? Why?"

And I, a historian, was at a loss as to how to answer my five-year-old. I was at a loss all the more as he wanted to be reassured that this meanness was now over. His kindergarten teachers (two young women—one Black, one not—a fantastically creative and dynamic pair about whom I have only good things to say) had dissimulated a bit, too, implicitly suggesting to the children that Martin Luther King Jr. had won his battle for justice, that the cruelty he had fought belonged largely to the past.

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my son is now 11. this week we were reading together, in polish, a volume of the children's graphic novel Dog Man. In the book, the child cat, L'il Petey, asks his father cat, Petey, why his grandpa (also a cat) was so mean to his wife and child. Petey does not know how to answer. L'il Petey is relentless: "why? why? why?" (Pilkey 2021).

Children constantly ask "why?"

And we historians—parents and non-parents alike—who claim to know the answer overreach. In the best case, we can discover what happened: who, when, where, how. Our answers as to why can only ever be speculative—because it is impossible to do a control study on real life. There is no way to run the same scene again, isolating certain variables in order to determine which are unequivocally causal. When historians do pursue causality, we pursue immediate, or intermediate, causes. This is not unrelated to the fact that we tend to focus [End Page 377] our gaze on levels larger than the individual but smaller than the universal: religion, race, class, region, nation, ethnicity, generation. We operate on the middle plane.

Philosophers, by contrast, tend to focus on the relationship between the particular and the general, between the finite, empirical singular and the universal transcendent of time and space. In Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, we can extract a universal essence through precise description of particular instances. Any given apple, for instance, is unique, distinctive from any other apple. And yet each apple also discloses a changeless eidos, a generic quality of "appleness" (Husserl 2013). For Husserl, the goal of phenomenology was to reach these essences through reines Sehen, "pure seeing" (Husserl 1919).

Analogously, philosophers, when they probe the question of causality, often ask about ultimate causes, explanations for Being as a whole. This is the task of metaphysics. And as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski often reiterated, the existence or nonexistence of an ultimate cause is an Either/Or, related to the existence or nonexistence of an ultimate meaning. In the absence of God—or an ersatz God, an unconditioned, noncontingent Absolute, itself not requiring a previous cause—we are at a loss to explaining how we came to be and why we are here. The impulse to ask this question about an ultimate source of all meaning is timeless (Kołakowski 1989).

"We shall never," Kołakowski wrote, "be free of temptation to perceive the universe as a book in secret code to which somewhere there is a key, and we will stubbornly go on searching for that key" (2001, 127–28).

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at the time of the november 2020 presidential election, my jewish children were attending a Catholic school in Vienna. Now my son wanted to know: "Why does the religion teacher only give God credit for all the good things? What about all the bad things?"

There are good reasons why theodicy has never gone away. "Why is there evil in the world?" is not only a child's question. I am writing this in a provincial corner of northeastern Poland, at the Borderlands [End Page 378] Foundation, which 21 years ago published the Polish historian Jan Tomasz Gross's Neighbors ([2000] 2001). The slim book is a microhistory of a July 1941 massacre that took place in the small town of Jedwabne, not far from here. Later, Gross wrote about postwar violence against Jewish survivors returning from Soviet and Nazi camps. In Fear: Antisemitism in Poland after Auschwitz (2006), he describes the 1946 Kielce pogrom, when Polish assailants pierced the stomach of a pregnant Jewish woman, killing her unborn child; stoned an elderly woman to death; and shot a newborn in the skull. Polish playwright Tadeusz Słobodzianek (2009) wrote a theater piece based on the Jedwabne massacre. In Słobodzianek's Our Class, the Jewess Rachelka survives the massacre, hidden by her Polish classmate Władek, in secret from his mother. Afterward, Władek arranges for Rachelka's baptism as Marianna, and makes Marianna his bride. They receive wedding gifts from their classmates who murdered their other classmates. One of these gifts is a tablecloth taken from Rachelka's own house after her mother and sisters were burned to death in a barn, together with the town's other Jews.

Jan Gross's next book, Golden Harvest, written with Irena Grudzińska Gross (2012), shifts the gaze to the tablecloth. The book opens in 1945 with a scene of Polish peasants digging for gold in Treblinka. Why, the authors ask, are they doing this? Antisemitism? Greed? Desperate poverty? Social pressure? Demoralization by two totalitarian occupations? Gross and Grudzińska Gross pose questions about immediate—and intermediate—causes. In truth, though, what they are searching for is the ultimate cause, the answer to the question: Why is there evil in the world?

In the summer of 2020, I spoke with an Orthodox rabbi in Vienna, who—when he learned that I was from the United States—asked whether I could explain to him why so many American Jews supported Donald Trump. Did they not see, the rabbi wanted to know, that he was a racist?

Afterward I wrote to an old friend in California, an ultra-Orthodox American rabbi, and passed along the Austrian rabbi's question. [End Page 379]

"Marci," my friend wrote back to me, "honestly after pulling out my hair over this I realize that I don't understand why people follow populist hate-mongers—I cannot figure out why a Jew would, or a non-Jew, or anyone."

The questions Gross and Grudzińska Gross, among the most sophisticated scholars of their generation, and the very well-educated rabbis of my own generation are asking are not so different from those of my now 11-year-old son or my 9-year-old daughter.

"I wish God were real," my daughter recently said to me, "so I could complain to him."

"Even though he's not real," her uncle Dan, composer of the opera Freedom Ride, assured her, "you can DEFINITELY complain to him."

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"the habit of civilization is fragile," the polish poet czesław Miłosz remarked (1990, 122). That was in the early 1950s, shortly after his defection from Stalinist Poland, as he tried to convey the experiences of his friends who had succumbed to "the Hegelian bite." The allure of identifying with the Weltgeist, the iron logic of History moving inexorably toward a telos in which all contradictions would finally be reconciled, was difficult to resist. As it turned out, the End of History, in its own time celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, revealed itself to be yet another version of this Hegelian bite.

When the right-wing populist party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice) took power in Poland in 2015, the new government wrenched control of the then soon-to-be-opened Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk from director Paweł Machcewicz. Law and Justice party leader Jarosław Kaczyński and Minister of Culture Piotr Gliński accused Machcewicz and his team of insufficiently expressing "the Polish point of view." The first change Gliński's new appointees made was to remove the original five-minute film that concluded the permanent exhibit. They replaced it with the four-minute Niezwycįeẓeni. (The unconquered), glorifying Polish heroism.² [End Page 380]

While there was much very real Polish heroism during the war, this particular film is cringeworthy in its cartoonish kitsch. The original film is a documentary collage set to the music of "House of the Rising Sun." It moves chronologically from the Nuremberg trials through the Korean War, Elvis Presley, the Ku Klux Klan, Stalin's death, the Beatles, Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, John F. Kennedy's assassination, the testing of an atomic bomb, Poland's "anti-Zionist" campaign of March 1968, Nelson Mandela, Polish Solidarity, Ronald Reagan's meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, September 11, the Iraq War, the bombing of Aleppo, and Syrian refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. It refutes the End of History without making a single editorial comment.

In the years since that film was made, and the body of a three-year-old Syrian boy named Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, we have witnessed—in the United States alone—white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue, terrified children wrenched from their parents and thrown into cages on the American-Mexican border, presidentially summoned "little green men" (perhaps inspired by those dispatched by the Kremlin to illegally occupy Crimea; Shore 2018), brutalization of Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, and the revival of blood libel accusations in the cyberspace form of QAnon—among other things.

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civilization is fragile. and masculinity is fragile. in recent years, the connection between the one and the other has been glaringly illuminated. "I'm not a woman. I don't have bad days," snapped Vladimir Putin.³ Trump introduced competitions over penis size to presidential debates. He bragged that a man as rich and famous as he was could just "grab 'em by the pussy."⁴ Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko declared, "Our constitution is such that it's difficult even for a man to bear its weight, and if you thrust it onto a woman, she'll break, poor thing."⁵ The incels—brought together on the internet by their public protest against women who would not sleep with them—came into being as real-life caricatures of insecurity about masculinity. [End Page 381] They were followed by the more militant Proud Boys, who, together with QAnon believers, were prominent among those who stormed the Capitol building in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021.

When in August 2020 hundreds of thousands of Belarusians protested Lukashenko's stealing of the election from opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Lukashenko cast twenty-first-century insecurities about masculinity into Stalinist form: Tsikhanouskaya, first detained and then expelled, was forced to articulate a public self-criticism: "You know, I'd thought that this whole campaign had toughened me a lot and given me enough strength to endure everything. Yet likely I remain the same weak woman I was when I began" (www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNLcr2HtgUE).

This was, self-evidently, a projection of Lukashenko's own fantasies about women. In the meantime, the Belarusian dictator's siloviki, "men of force" employed by the security services, brutalized those who protested the falsified election results, men and allegedly weak women alike. Lukashenko's officers taunted those they detained: Oh, so you want to go to Europe? You want to hang out with fags?⁶ An oil painting by 24-year-old Belarusian artist Yana Chernova titled Belarusian Venus depicted a voluptuous female nude hideously bruised by beatings (Chernova and Akryshora 2020).

"When I found myself at the very bottom, I heard knocking from below," wrote the Polish poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec (1957).

On May 23, 2021, Lukashenko hijacked a Ryanair European Union flight traveling from Athens to Vilnius. The plane was forced under false pretenses to land in Minsk, where Lukashenko's siloviki captured the 26-year-old opposition journalist Roman Protasevich and his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega.⁷ Now Lukashenko drew still more gruesomely upon the genre of performative-confession-extracted-through-torture.

Marat Markov, a slick television personality in his early 50s, is host of the Belarusian talk show Nichego lichnogo (Nothing personal). The bald-headed, broad-shouldered, and clean-shaven Markov conducted the interview with Protasevich in a sleek studio with velvety [End Page 382] lighting. He leaned toward the younger, slighter, battered Protasevich with an avuncular solicitousness and a malicious delight.

It was no accident that Protasevich expressed his admiration for Lukashenko as a man with "balls of steel," just as it was no accident that Tsikhanouskaya was made to confess to being "the same weak woman" she had always been. A whole country has become captive to fragile masculinity. Olga Shparaga, a philosopher in Minsk imprisoned for taking part in the protests, explained that in Belarus, the language feminists had developed to speak about domestic violence became, for women and men alike, a language to speak about Lukashenko's dictatorship (Ackerman et al. 2021; Shparaga 2021; Barkouski 2020). (Shparaga, when taken in prison to meet with her interrogator, a man with well-groomed nails wearing an expensive watch, told him about phenomenology and gender equality; see October 28, 2020, post at www.facebook.com/olga.shparaga.)

It is also no accident that Roman Protasevich's statement under duress recalls the confessions at the show trials. It is a reminder of Stalinist terror. The tropes and the syntax are not so different from, for instance, those used by Nikolai Bukharin in the closing statement of his trial on March 12, 1938:

At the trial I did and do confess my guilt to those crimes that I committed and which were imputed to me by the Citizen State Prosecutor. … At the trial I declared, and I now underscore and repeat, that politically I admit my [End Page 384] responsibility for the totality of crimes committed by the Right Trotskyite bloc. … The wise leadership of the country ensured by Stalin is apparent to everyone.⁹

During a June 2021 discussion about Belarus, the sociologist Anna Schor-Tschudnowskaja pointed out that Bukharin and the Old Bolsheviks had confessed as a service to the Party; theirs was an offering to a higher cause. In contrast, this was not true for Protasevich (Ackermann et al. 2021). There is something postmodern about Protasevich's confession: there is no grand narrative, no eschatology. There is little if any attempt to cast Protasevich and Lukashenko as actors in a coherent story with higher meaning. Moreover, the listeners, in contrast to those of Bukharin, are not even necessarily expected to believe the confession. The point, as the Belarusian political scientist Aliaksei Kazharski has said, is rather to make the audience believe that those in power can force anyone to do anything (see June 3, 2021, post at www.facebook.com/alex.kazharski).

In one scene from Anton Chekhov's The Duel, a zoologist says to a Russian Orthodox deacon much younger than himself: "The abstract studies with which your youthful head is stuffed are called abstract just because they abstract your minds from what is obvious. Look the devil straight in the eye, and if he's the devil, tell him he's the devil, and don't go calling to Kant or Hegel for explanations" (Chekhov 2004). I looked at Marat Markov and thought: This is what evil looks like. He played his role with a gleam in his eyes. There was a quality of obnazhenie—"laying bare"—in his performance. He knew exactly what he was doing. And he knew that the audience knew it too. And he conveyed to them his pleasure in the performance qua performance.

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stanisław jerzy lec (1957), who conjured up the image of "knocking from below," also coined the phrase "sumienie czyste, [bo] nieuẓywane"—a conscience clean, having never been used. If Markov was the incarnation of evil, what role did Lukashenko play? And Putin? Trump? Can we carry out a phenomenological description of evil, a distillation of [End Page 385] a universal essence on the basis of exhaustive descriptions of particular examples? What would that universal essence be—an absence of conscience? An incapacity for empathy? What about the banal, opportunistic bureaucrats, the Adolf Eichmanns, the source of whose evil Hannah Arendt (1994) located in a failure to think? Christopher Browning's (1998) "ordinary men"? What about the collaborators like Lindsey Graham, who, after having accused Trump of being "a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot" and a disaster for the Republican Party, later got in line (Kopan 2015)?

The case of Lindsey Graham fascinated the journalist Anne Applebaum, who watched her own conservative milieux—on both sides of the Atlantic, in the United States, in Poland, in Great Britain—break up as a new Right emerged from the old. She thought about Nazism, and about Stalinism, and about what was similar and what was different now:

Many Americans in public life began to adopt the strategies, tactics, and self-justifications that the inhabitants of occupied countries have used in the past—doing so even though the personal stakes were, relatively speaking, so low. Poles like Miłosz wound up in exile in the 1950s; dissidents in East Germany lost the right to work and study. In harsher regimes like that of Stalin's Russia, public protest could lead to many years in a concentration camp; disobedient Wehrmacht officers were executed by slow strangulation. By contrast, a Republican senator who dares to question whether Trump is acting in the interests of the country is in danger of—what, exactly? Losing his seat and winding up with a seven-figure lobbying job or a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School?

(Applebaum 2020a; see also 2020b)

Applebaum (2020a) explored answers to the question that seems impossible to answer: Why did people sell their souls to the devil? [End Page 386] Was it "the mystical pull of that connection to power"? "A friend who regularly runs into Lindsey Graham in Washington," she wrote, "told me that each time they meet, 'he brags about having just met with Trump' while exhibiting 'high school' levels of excitement, as if 'a popular quarterback has just bestowed some attention on a nerdy debate-club leader—the powerful big kid likes me!'"

Applebaum mused, too, over an answer that recalled Freud: "If there is no such thing as moral and immoral, then everyone is implicitly released from the need to obey any rules" (2020a). In this new world, there is no longer a distinction between the everyday and the carnival, when for one night the forbidden is sanctioned. Bakhtin's carnival is Dostoevsky's world without God: everything is permitted. This is the world of figures like Paul Manafort: there are no boundaries. For Freud, these boundaries, the constraints repressing our instinctual desires, are the necessary condition of civilization. Given this, civilization will always make us unhappy. Liberation from this repression—the permitting of everything—is real liberation. For this we pay only the small price of the destruction of civilization (Freud 1989). The Polish philosopher Marcin Król, writing in 2020 during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, implored us not to turn our gaze from evil. "Pretending that the devil exists only in children's fairy tales," he wrote, "constitutes a tragic feature of contemporary culture" (2021, 201). To speak as Chekhov's zoologist: if there has been an obnazhenie of evil as such, we should look it in the face and name it.

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applebaum wrote about the effacement of the distinction between the everyday and the carnival in Trump's Washington. Peter Pomerantsev (2014) wrote about the effacement of the distinction between reality and reality television in Putin's Russia.¹⁰ Anxiety about masculinity is anxiety about the effacement of differences. Lukashenko's officers taunted their prisoners: "So you want to go to Europe and be homosexuals? You want there to be no more 'Mommy' and 'Daddy'? You want to be called 'Parent number 1' and 'Parent number 2'?" [End Page 387]

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966, 1979) and René Girard (1986) both point out that cultural turmoil sharpens not when there is too much social differentiation, but when there is too little. That is, societies find themselves in a state of crisis when boundaries fade between high and low, man and woman, humans and gods, sacred and profane. In Girard's anthropological model, this crisis intensifies until it finally resolves itself in a coalescence of the mob against a scapegoat. All perceived sources of anxiety and strife are displaced onto the scapegoat, who is then violently expelled, a collective murder that, in Girard's (1986) description, "cannot fail to be literally gripping."

"[The] victim is at most a catalyst and at least only the passive object of the violence," explains the theologian Robert Hamerton-Kelly:

he or she is not the cause. The mob, however, makes the victim the cause, and by so doing obscures its own violence from itself and transfers it to the victim. The first illusion is "… the illusion of the supremely active and all-powerful victim"; it makes the victim a god, placing him or her above the group as the transcendent cause of both order and disorder.

(1994, 142)

Girard developed his anthropology through an attempt to extract the general from the particular. The scapegoating impulse, he insists, is a universal one. The desire to conceive of the source of evil, of that which threatens as transcendent, coming from the other side of a border, motivates the memory laws enacted in Putin's Russia (Snyder 2021). It similarly motivates what in Poland is called "historical policy." Today, Polish law declares that Poles are innocent of Nazi or communist crimes. Those who claim otherwise can be sentenced to a prison term of up to three years. The "Polish point of view," which Law and Justice demanded be expressed by the Gdańsk museum, assures Poles that all that was bad came exclusively from outside. Inside, among themselves, all are safe. [End Page 388]

Historical policy, conspiracy theories, and scapegoating all serve as evasions of responsibility, an attempt at psychic consolation through the exporting of guilt, a desire to find a safe place in the world. They are all also forms of what Freud called Verschiebung (displacement); unable to face the true sources of our anxieties, we displace those anxieties onto other sources. Once, on a long American flight, I watched the film Carol, a lesbian love story set in the 1950s that was nominated for several Academy Awards. A message at the beginning of the film explained that some scenes with sexual content had been edited due to the presence of children on the flight. I had no strong feelings about this one way or the other, but I could not help noticing that other passengers were watching films depicting beatings, shootings, murders, and all kinds of graphic violence, from which children apparently did not need to be sheltered. American prudishness toward sex and promiscuousness toward violence is a kind of Freudian Verschiebung, a refusal to face the actual sources of our fears. The United States is a country where children participate in active shooter drills at school, where the mayor of Baltimore pleads with city residents to stop shooting one another because the hospitals need the beds for coronavirus patients,¹¹ and where teenage survivors of a mass shooting at a Florida high school devote their youth to gun control activism on behalf of their dead classmates because the adults have let them down. Yet we focus our attention on the alleged threat posed to our children by transgender women using women's bathrooms.

With respect to displacement, Poland is not so different from the United States. In May 2019, Tylko nie mów nikomu (Tell no one), a two-hour documentary film about the sexual abuse of children by Polish Catholic clergy, received over 10 million views within days of its release on YouTube.¹² In the meantime, Law and Justice supporters in Poland declared "LGBT-free zones." Magazine covers depicted the rainbow as the Nazis had depicted the Star of David in the 1930s. The trope was the same: Protect your children. [End Page 389]

The Bulgarian political analyst Ivan Krastev (2019) has described elections as "a form of therapy session in which voters are confronted with their worst fears—a new war, demographic collapse, economic crisis, environmental horror—but become convinced they have the power to avert the devastation." The fear, of course, is real. Our insecurity is justified: our existence is precarious. ("Neoliberal capitalism"—another Bulgarian political theorist, Albena Azmanova [2021], has argued—has "surreptitiously mutated" into "precarity capitalism.") Yet our attributions of causality are often self-interested, distorted, perverse. Homophobia and antisemitism, like other forms of xenophobia, are variations on a universal theme. Displacement and projection will always beckon—we will always struggle with the temptation to find a safe space in an unsafe world by externalizing the source of our fear, pushing it to the other side of a border, away from us. Understandably, we prefer to fear others than to fear ourselves.

A profound moment in second-generation Holocaust literature came with the New Yorker's 2011 publication of Nathan Englander's "What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank."¹³ The story, set not far from Miami, opens with a reunion: Deb and Lauren grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community in Queens; throughout school they were inseparable. Then Deb married a secular Jew and embarked on a suburban American life. Lauren married Mark, the child of Holocaust survivors; they became Hassidic, moved to Jerusalem, and took the Hebrew names Shoshana and Yerucham. Now Shoshana covers her hair with a wig; she and Yerucham have 10 daughters. After years of separation, she and Deb find each other again through Facebook. The two couples meet at Deb's home in Florida. They drink vodka, smoke Deb's teenage son's cannabis, and reminisce. The women recall a game they invented as adolescents in New York: the Anne Frank Game. It involved choosing a person they knew, a non-Jew, and imagining that person in occupied Europe during the Holocaust. Would this person have hidden them? Now, no longer sober, they begin to play the game again, decades later, with one another. Deb has to look [End Page 390] at her husband, imagine him as a Gentile at the time of the Holocaust. Would he risk his life for her?

"Of course he would," says Deb.

Then it is Shoshana's turn; she has to look at Yerucham—her husband, the son of Holocaust survivors, the father of their 10 children. Would he risk his life to save her?

"Yes," she says.

But at that moment all four of them know that it is not true, that neither Shoshana nor Yerucham is certain. And that which can never be said becomes the source of silent terror in the room.

Englander's message is incisive: what is threatening is never securely outside of ourselves.

"You know, Mommy," my son said to me on yet another night when he could not fall asleep, "home is not a safe place."

"Why do you say that?" I asked him.

"Well, I was thinking: a meteor could hit our house. Or a storm could blow the roof off. Or a robber could break in through a window …"

I wanted to tell him the truth. I wanted to say: I know exactly how you feel! I feel the same way! The problem is that not-at-home is not a safe place either. The tragedy of the human condition is that there is no safe place in the world.

This is what Hannah Arendt meant when, after the war, she wrote: "For many years now, we have met Germans who declare that they are ashamed of being Germans. I have often felt tempted to answer that I am ashamed of being human" (2003, 154). And it is what the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka meant when he told his students that we were a ship that necessarily would be shipwrecked.

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given that this adventure at sea cannot end well, how can we answer the Russian question: chto delat'? What is to be done?

Barack Obama, an Enlightenment figure, believes in reason. On January 5, 2016, while signing an executive order on gun control and speaking of the first-graders shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary [End Page 391] School, President Obama broke down in tears. These were tears of powerlessness from the then most powerful man in the world. He had tried to reason with his opponents. But he had put too much faith in reason. And reason had failed.

In 1935, the young Jan Patočka invited the elderly Edmund Husserl to give in Prague the lectures that, as a non-Aryan, Husserl could no longer give in Nazi Germany. In Prague, Husserl spoke about the failure of Enlightenment reason: it had failed because it was too thin. It had been conceived too superficially—as a leap into the realm of pure objectivity that failed to ground itself in the subject. Because of this existential thinness, reason had left itself vulnerable to the forces of unreason. The only way now to save the world from the irrationalism that had brought Europe to barbarism, Husserl told his audience, was through a deeper reason, one binding subject and object, a philosophy that would enable us to reach absolute truth.

Husserl and Freud, who shared much of their biographies, believed that our only hope was to find a way to see more clearly. Their methods for reaching this clarity were radically different. For Husserl, the most essential part of the self was a consciousness that was absolutely transparent; for Freud, the most essential part of the self was an unconscious that hovered between translucent and opaque. Freudian psychoanalysis and Husserl's phenomenological reduction reflected opposing sensibilities. For Husserl, the task was to describe exactly what we saw. For Freud, the task was to coax what was buried in our unconscious out into consciousness. Husserl insisted passionately, and desperately, on the possibility of achieving absolute clarity. Freud was resigned to the fact that success could only ever be partial; the self would always remain, to a greater or lesser extent, concealed from the self. Yet they shared the goal of unconcealment, and both devoted their lives to pursuing truth through epistemological clarity. Kołakowski admired Husserl, but he considered Husserl's project a failure. Absolute clarity—the Holy Grail—was an impossible fantasy. And yet—Kołakowski insisted—we must continue the search. He shared with Patočka the conviction that epistemological questions [End Page 392] were always already ethical questions. The seeking of truth was our moral responsibility.

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"is it going to be the end of the world anytime soon?" asked my then eight-year-old daughter on a New England beach last summer, three months into the time of plague.

Today, a year later, I am writing this in the forest along the Polish-Lithuanian border, less than 50 miles from Belarusian Grodno, in a pension that once belonged to Czesław Miłosz's mother. Miłosz died in 2004; the restored manor in the forest is visited still by Miłosz's friend, the Soviet dissident and great Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova. "During my childhood I had a strong, although vague, sense that the world was twisted," Venclova wrote, "turned inside out and maimed. Later I began to think, and I do to this day, that we are living after the end of the world, which does not incidentally absolve us from any responsibility" (1999, 120).