Winter 1994-95
American Purpose
Issue 4, Volume 8

Publication Date: December 1, 1994
Posted: Thursday, December 12, 1994

This issue includes 'Five Years After the Revolution'; 'A Mitteleuropa Gallery'; 'Remembering the Revolution'; 'Getting It'; 'Politics, Politics . . .'; 'The Comeback Kids'; and 'The Imperative of Cultural Reformation'.


In This Issue :

Five Years After the Revolution
History is not the inexorable working-out of impersonal biochemical, economic, or political forces. History is the actions, inactions, and interactions of men and women endowed with intelligence and free will, capable of nobility, beastliness, and banality. History, Hegel wrote, is a butcher's block; history is also Homer and Virgil, Dante and Michelangelo, Bach and Mozart, Einstein and Mother Theresa. The estimable Dr. Francis Fukuyama notwithstanding, history cannot be reduced to the institutional structures by which we govern ourselves and regulate our commerce; history is also art and architecture, music and poetry, the novel and the drama, philosophy and theology. History is custom and tradition, innovation and discovery. History is about sin, and history is about redemption.  [More]

A Mitteleuropa Gallery
Lothar de Maizière was the first and last noncommunist prime minister of "East Germany." He compares his people's experience and their current discontents to the experience of the Israelites in the Wilderness, between the fleshpots of Egypt and the promised land of freedom: "They told Moses that life in the desert was too difficult, and that at least when they were slaves they had food and water and places to sleep. Moses' friends asked him how long he thought the people would be complaining like this, and he replied, 'Until the last person born under slavery has died.' Our situation here is very similar. The psychological gap between eastern and western Germany will last for at least a generation, or until the last person born under communism passes away."  [More]

Remembering the Revolution
The primary impact of the Revolution of 1989 was felt, of course, in east central Europe. But that remarkable series of events also changed our lives, in the West, in ways that seemed, in early 1989, beyond imagining.  [More]

Getting It
The non-celebration of the West's victory in the Cold War, coupled with the ideological shock that many Western academics and journalists felt when a system they considered merely an alternative form of modern society showed itself inherently incapable of developmental reform, has led to a lot of curious, even bizarre, writing over the past half decade. Even as the opening of the archives of the USSR, the Soviet communist party, and the KGB has made unmistakably plain the aggressive intent of Stalin and his heirs, tenured American refugees from the radicalisms of the sixties continue to argue that the Cold War was all Harry Truman's fault.  [More]

Politics, Politics . . .
In these United States, that phrase "the rule of law" is often taken to be a piety in the civics books; the notion of being a law-governed polity rarely stirs the American soul. Our society is "normal," and a "normal" society is governed by law. So what's the big deal?  [More]

The Comeback Kids
In Poland today, ex-communists and their ex-communist allies in an ex-communist rural party enjoy a majority of seats in parliament, to which they were duly elected by a population that had been one of the most intransigently anti-communist in the Warsaw Pact. In Hungary, the Socialist (i.e., ex-Communist) Party won full parliamentary power. In Slovakia, ex-communists called "Social Democrats" replaced ex-communists called "Nationalists."  [More]

The Imperative of Cultural Reformation
The Revolution of 1989 in east central Europe, and the successes and failures of democratic and market transition that have taken place in the region in the five intervening years, are classic illustrations of the principle articulated by Paul Tillich: politics is a function of culture, and at the heart of culture is cult, or religion. The mega-politics of Marxism-Leninism collapsed in east central Europe when a sufficient critical mass of people said "No" to the system, on the basis of a higher and more compelling "Yes": a "yes" to some basic truths about human beings and their communities. If the enduring result of that revolution is to be something unprecedented in east central Europe—a band of democratic states, prosperous, at peace with their neighbors, flourishing internally in their cultures, and committed to tolerance and a genuine pluralism-then the foundations will have to be laid in the cultural and religious subsoils of those societies. A democratic Republic of Procedures, dedicated to serving the lifestyle whims of the Imperial Autonomous Self, the great god I, is no more possible in east central Europe than anywhere else. To consolidate their transition to democracy and the free economy, the nations of the region must build within themselves a new sense of social solidarity.  [More]