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Leonidas Donskis
with an Introduction by Sigurd Skirbekk
modernity in crisis
© Leonidas Donskis, 2011
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-10879-0
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United
States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the
world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-29158-8 ISBN 978-0-230-33919-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230339194
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Donskis, Leonidas.
Modernity in crisis : a dialogue on the culture of belonging / Leonidas
Donskis.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Group identity—Europe, Eastern. 2. Group identity—Europe,
Central. 3. Political culture—Europe, Eastern. 4. Political culture—Europe,
Central. 5. Europe, Eastern—Politics and government—1989– 6. Europe,
Central—Politics and government—1989– 7. Europe, Eastern—Social
conditions—1989– 8. Europe, Central—Social conditions—1989– 9.
Europe—Civilization—1945– I. Title.
JN96.A58D66 2011
306.20943—dc22 2011005480I
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: August 2011
To Zygmunt Bauman—
with all my gratitude, affection, and love
They are like people anywhere. They love money, but that has always been
true . . . People love money, no matter what it is made of, leather, paper,
bronze, or gold. And they are thoughtless . . . but, then again, sometimes
mercy enters their hearts . . . they are ordinary people . . . On the whole, they
remind me of their predecessors . . . only the housing shortage has had a bad
effect on them . . .
You were always an avid proponent of the theory that after his head is
cut off, a man’s life comes to an end, he turns to dust, and departs into non-
being. I have the pleasure of informing you in the presence of my guests—
although they actually serve as proof of a different theory altogether— that
your theory is both incisive and sound. However, one theory is as good as
another. There is even a theory that says that to each man it will be given
according to his beliefs. May it be so! You are departing into non-b eing,
and, from the goblet into which you are being transformed, I will have the
pleasure of drinking a toast to being.
— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Chi son’io tu non saprai.
(Who I am, you shall not discover.)
— Lorenzo Da Ponte/Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
We miss community because we miss security, a quality crucial to a happy
life, but one which the world we inhabit is ever less able to offer and
ever more reluctant to promise . . . Insecurity affects us all, immersed as
we all are in a fluid and unpredictable world of deregulation, flexibility,
competitiveness and endemic uncertainty, but each one of us suffers anxiety
on our own, as a private problem, an outcome of personal failings and a
challenge to our private savoir- faire and agility. We are called, as Ulrich Beck
acidly observed, to seek biographical solutions to systemic contradictions;
we look for individual salvation from shared troubles. That strategy is unlike
to bring the results we are after, since it leaves the roots of insecurity intact;
moreover, it is precisely this falling back on our individual wits and resources
that injects the world with the insecurity we wish to escape.
— Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World
(cid:39)(cid:83)(cid:82)(cid:88)(cid:73)(cid:82)(cid:88)(cid:87)
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction by Sigurd Skirbekk 1
1 Troubled Identity, or the European Canon
and the Dilemmas of Memory 7
2 Secrets, Mysteries, Conspiracies, and Art 43
3 Eastern Europe after Communism: Identity
and Morality in a Boundary Region 81
4 The Crisis of Modernity and the Age of Anesthesia,
or Life According to Zygmunt Bauman 133
5 In the Name of Civilization, or the New Forms of
Angst and Longing 167
Works Cited 195
Index 201
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For encouragement, power of judgment, and my sense of projet de la vie,
I am immensely grateful to my dear friend Zygmunt Bauman, Professor
Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, the United Kingdom, one
of the greatest thinkers of our times. He became my major inspiration and
source of my confidence in myself, my work, and my sense of raison d’être.
More than that, he anticipated and identified the emerging trajectories of
my thought. I would not have done it myself.
For encouragement, sensible anticipation of the new forms of my pro-
fessional life and work, and invaluable lessons in the art of academic writ-
ing, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my dear friend Robert Ginsberg,
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He gave
me a second academic life by allowing me to enter the English language
academic world of writing and editing.
For a long- standing professional dialogue, valuable advice, and critique,
I am indebted to my colleague Sigurd Skirbekk, Professor Emeritus of
Sociology at the University of Oslo, Norway.
My warmest thanks are owed to Lena Pasternak, Director of the Baltic
Center for Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden, for graciously allow-
ing me to spend my happy time at the Center, putting the finishing touches
on my book.
Parts of Chapter One previously appeared in Leonidas Donskis,
“The European Cultural Canon and the Predicaments of Memory Poli-
tics,” in Ineke van Hamersveld and Arthur Sonnen, eds. (2009) Iden-
tifying with Europe: Reflections on a Historical and Cultural Canon for
Europe; Amsterdam: Boekmanstudies, EUNIC and SICA: 103– 126 (ISBN:
978- 90- 6650- 097- 6). I thank Ineke van Hamersveld, Arthur Sonnen, and
the Boekman Foundation for their kind permission to incorporate parts
of this material.
Parts of Chapter Two previously appeared in Leonidas Donskis,
“Secrets, Mysteries, and Art,” in Timo Airaksinen and Manfred J. Holler,
eds. (2009) Homo Oeconomicus 26 (1) Munich: ACCEDO-V erlag: 97– 121
(ISBN: 978- 3- 89265- 070- 6). I thank my colleagues Timo Airaksinen, Pro-
fessor of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Manfred J.
(cid:92)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:3)(cid:37)(cid:39)(cid:47)(cid:50)(cid:51)(cid:59)(cid:48)(cid:41)(cid:40)(cid:43)(cid:49)(cid:41)(cid:50)(cid:56)(cid:55)
Holler, Professor of Economics in the Institute of SocioEconomics at the
University of Hamburg, Germany (executive editor of ACCEDO Verlag),
guest editors of the special issue of Homo Oeconomicus, for their gracious
permission to incorporate parts of this material.
In addition, my warm thanks are given to Professor Airaksinen and
Professor Holler for their valuable advice, from which I greatly benefitted
working on the book.
I am indebted to my dear colleague Olli Loukola, Docent of Philosophy
at the University of Helsinki, for his critique and inspiring suggestions.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to Mykolas Drunga, a Lithuanian phi-
losopher, translator, and journalist, for translating my unpublished essay
on Zygmunt Bauman from Lithuanian into English. This essay laid the
foundations for Chapter Four.
I thank Albina Strunga and Darius J. Ross for translating parts of Chap-
ter Three from Lithuanian into English.
I thank all the good people at Palgrave Macmillan with whom I have
had the pleasure and privilege of working on my book.
Finally, with all my affection and love, I wish to thank my wife Jolanta
for her unfading love and support, which were vital for me to accomplish
this book.
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In 1992, shortly after the breakdown of the Soviet empire, Francis Fuku-
yama published a book titled The End of History and the Last Man, where
he predicted a future free of previous ideological battles. The ideals of the
West— liberal democracy, free markets, and human rights— had appar-
ently won worldwide acceptance, at least as standards for modern society.
During the following two decades this optimistic picture of a bright
future has been challenged by several events. We have recently experienced
an economic crisis, demonstrating that prosperity and wealth for all is not
an automatic result of a free market economy. We have experienced a grad-
ual shift in political power from an American superpower to new powers in
Asia and elsewhere, and not all of them support Western ideals of democ-
racy. We have witnessed examples of popular distrust and protest, not least
in several European countries, against supranational bureaucracies who,
in the name of universal human rights principles, will overrule decisions
made by local democracies. And, above all, we have witnessed scientifically
based predictions of a future in a worldwide ecological unbalance, which
are not adequately corrected by any contemporary political ideologies.
In addition, we have witnessed a wide range of symptoms of a culture
in crisis, not the least in the midst of countries supposed to be leaders of
modern democracy. These symptoms can vary from outspoken protests
to manifestations in art and a dystopian literature to examples of human
identity crises and statistics of self-d estruction. According to the French
sociologist Emile Durkheim, suicide rates in a population can be the result
of a dysfunctional anomic culture. In later years Lithuania has had the
highest recorded suicide rates in Europe.
Leonidas Donskis is a Lithuanian. He is a philosopher, a political theo-
rist, an historian of ideas, a social analyst, and a political commentator. He
is also a member of the European Parliament. I first met him as a member
of a Nordic delegation of researchers who were given the task of evaluating
academic papers written by Baltic scholars during the first ten years after
1989. My job was to read and evaluate everything sociologists in Lithuania
had written in English or German during these years. It then struck me
that Lithuanian sociologists had much to tell that did not fit well into the
