Three discussions on Ukraine today
Some days I can write, some days I talk. Three public events on 2 March.
Dear Friends,
I have many thoughts and observations that I want to share with you in coming days about the Russian invasion of Ukraine -- on the contradictions of Russian propaganda, on the way the war is being fought, on the experiences of Ukrainians. Today (2 March) however is a day when I will be speaking publicly three times on the war and related issues, and I thought some of you might be interested in knowing more about that.
1. At 9:00am US eastern standard time today I will be speaking with Yuval Harari about
The War in Ukraine and the Future of the World
in a conversation moderated by Anne Applebaum, hosted by YES. Â You can join via this link.
2. At 1:00pm US eastern standard time I will be giving a lecture on
Russia and Ukraine: The Origins of the Crisis
hosted by Emory University and Georgia Tech. You can join via this link.
3. At 3:00pm US eastern standard time (8:00 London) I will be speaking with Jonathan Freedland about the graphic edition of
On Tyranny,
and about Russia and Ukraine, in a conversation hosted by Jewish Book Week in the UK. You can join via this link and find more information here.
If you would like to help Ukrainians, please see this list and this list of charities and NGOs. I will make substantial donations today, and I hope you will join me.
Thank you for some very important* comments in response to Anne Applebaum’s question about the danger of assuming that events unfold inevitably, that democracy will always spread, that Ukraine can survive without us having to do anything in particular, and that the world is getting inevitably better. Specifically, she asked you to give us advice on how to think about Ukraine and to act in the world, having learned that these assumptions are false.
You said:
(short version) Many, many people in the West thought that capitalism would automatically bring democracy…you can hand over the process of democracy to a larger impersonal force, to an invisible hand, and if the invisible hand is doing the work, then maybe you don't have to do anything at all. That turns out not to be true...Freedom is all about recognizing impersonal forces, resisting impersonal forces, acting against impersonal forces, becoming a personal force yourself … The first step … is to recognize …that history is … made by us, is to recognize that freedom is a value, not the result of some kind of process, and it has to be affirmed, sometimes with risk-taking by us. It’s to resist notions of progress, but also to resist notions of fate. ...We have to resist … inevitability, our own thoughtless optimism, and ideas of eternity… And the way to do that is to be creative. It’s to imagine multiple futures.
(longer version) A big intellectual mistake that a lot of people made after communism came to an end in Europe in 1989, or the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, was the notion that now there are no alternatives, to quote Maggie Thatcher. That was incorrect. There are always alternatives. Many, many people in the West thought that capitalism would automatically bring democracy and that’s a very comforting thought because you can hand over the process of democracy to a larger impersonal force, to an invisible hand, and if the invisible hand is doing the work, then maybe you don't have to do anything at all. That turns out not to be true. Both Russia and China in their different ways have shown that tyranny can be wed very easily to capitalism, and, what's worse, if you delegate all the work of freedom to impersonal forces, you're forgetting what freedom is. Freedom is all about recognizing impersonal forces, resisting impersonal forces, acting against impersonal forces, becoming a personal force yourself -- and if you take this to an extreme, and just imagine that letting everything hang out is all you need for freedom you end up in these catastrophic situations like the one that Russia is in where wealth is so centralized in so few hands that the kinds of tyranny that Yuval was talking about become very hard to resist. So, the first step to repairing all of this is to recognize -- and here the Ukrainians, as everyone has been saying, have done something essential – has been to recognize that history is also made by us, is to recognize that freedom is a value, not the result of some kind of process, and it has to be affirmed, sometimes with risk-taking by us. It’s to resist notions of progress, but also to resist notions of fate. What Mr. Putin’s talking about, is fate. It’s Ukraine’s fate to be with Russia. It’s Belarus’ fate to be with Russia. A dictator’s imagination of the past creates a single lane along which the future is going to travel. We have to resist both inevitability, our own thoughtless optimism, and ideas of eternity, that there is just one way that the past and the future can go and it’s determined by a dictator’s imagination of the past. And the way to do that is to be creative. It’s to imagine multiple futures. And here the Ukrainians have been very helpful. From Maidan to the present, they’ve been helping us to imagine how things could be different. They’ve been helping to shake us out of undue optimism and undue pessimism. And I think, if this moment that we’re in now, which is a terrible moment, is going to have a positive outcome, that positive outcome will be to have to do with Ukrainians helping us to think out our way out to multiple better futures.
* worthy of a prominent placement in a book about freedom
Thanks! Is there a recording of the talks mentioned? The zoom link expired.