Mike, our friend and colleague, used this phrase last night to describe Czech society in the aftermath of communism. As I told him, life under communism is one of the things I was most curious about before coming over here, and one of the things about which I've discovered least since arriving. People simply don't want to talk about it very much, for two reasons. The first is that those 40 years are now a bad memory, and people have been trying to put it behind them ever since. The second reason, the importance of which I had completely neglected in my own thinking, is that so many people were "compromised" under the system. That is, in order to survive under that system, almost everyone had to sacrifice something of themselves; almost everyone was guilty of some degree of complicity in the name of pragmatism. The extent to which people were willing to sacrifice was perhaps greater than one might think, given that, in the pre-revolution mindset, the communist system would last into perpetuity. It never occurred to people simply to "hold out" until 1989, when it would end.

Dr. Charles Hall, our teacher at the TEFL summer school in Pilsen last summer, was in Prague on a Fulbright during the revolution in 1989. He described for us some of the tactics used by the government to turn that complicity to their advantage. Say, for instance, that Mr. Novak wanted to leave the country to travel to England for a week. He was, most likely, denied permission to leave. If for some reason, however, his request was granted, at the last minute a representative of the party might visit his home and give him a package to deliver to someone in England. If he refused, his permission to go was denied. If he accepted, he suddenly found himself acting as an agent of the Communist Party. Were Mr. Novak to cause any trouble later, or were the government later to need Mr. Novak to provide some information about, say, a friend or family member, they had evidence that he had been an agent of the party. "Do you want your wife to know, Mr. Novak, that you work for us? Do you want your children to know? Of course not. . ."

Tactics such as these, and in general the culture of mistrust created by them, conspired to destroy the interpersonal bonds that are necessary for any functional society to exist. "Civil society," Mike called it, quoting an historical Czech figure that he admires. Dr. Douglas Pressman, a sociologist I interviewed last year for the English Department newsletter, had published an article in Vital Speeches of the Day in which he referred to the force that binds together the individuals in a society as "social capital." As Dr. Pressman explains,

. . . Just as businesses need to invest in new factories and equipment and just as people require investments in education and health care, a society runs better when its institutions encourage trust and cooperation. Indeed, an economically developed society requires and operates from a base of robust social norms in combination with vital social networks; formal norms such as those embodied in contract law and government regulations simply cannot be effective and efficient without this base. Voluntary political, civic and religious associations--which are inherently time-consuming--are the warp and weft of what [Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone (2000)], borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu, termed "social capital."

It's not the case that every Czechoslovakian citizen was a willing and eager agent of the party. Some were; others, such as Mr. Novak, had no choice but to act as agents of the party; some were completely uninvolved. As a result, in Czechoslovakia under communism, one simply never knew who to trust. Whatever the motivations of the individuals in question, the end result was that the government had largely succeeded in breaking the bonds between individuals. The possible exception to this was family, because the trust that exists between flesh-and-blood relatives is significantly harder to break. Mike posits that people could generally trust their own family not to rat them out even under duress, and further, that the government knew this and rarely tried to force the issue.

This explains why family is so important to Czechs. Without examining it too much, I've all along been assuming that family forms such a cornerstone of the society because there was so little else in the way of consumerism and vacuous entertainment for 40 years. The importance of family in Czech society seems similar to how I imagined life was in the '40s and '50s in America, before pop culture beat it up, when the nuclear family was still alive and kicking despite the impending extinction of the extended family. The new information gives a much stronger explanation for the phenomena: Young Czechs live with their parents until their mid-20s or later, basically until they marry (though this is also explained by the shortage of housing and high rents). Children tend to settle in the same town as their parents, allowing the social network of extended family to flourish. Above and beyond anecdotal evidence such as this, however, is the undeniable fact that, for Czechs, relationships among family members are close, and remain so for a lifetime.

These things are changing slowly now that the society is open. New generations that have very little memory of that time are growing up. One of C.'s students, when asked how she would define her generation, said, "We are the first generation that was not affected by communism." They remember it, but a 20-year-old, for instance, was five when the revolution took place. Some of our older students may have been 10 or 15 in 1989. In fact, as Mike pointed out, younger people are more likely than older ones to talk about life under communism precisely because they have some memories of it, but they were too young to be compromised. No one who was compromised will give details.

It will take generations (two, maybe three?) to purge the effects of communism from the psyche of the land. Many in the generation that were young adults in 1989 put on suits, started businesses, and began comparison shopping. Many older people did as well. But changing your economic outlook is a superficial change. We notice when walking around our neighborhood that everyone's curtains are religiously drawn tightly closed at night. It would be anathema for a stranger on the street to be able to see into your house. Tight-lipped people waiting at bus stops rarely make small talk, except in the smallest of villages. There are more examples, but I hope that suffices to illustrate the pattern. On the other hand, children growing up now are increasingly influenced by the west. Left and right, kids in baggy jeans, tee-shirts, hair gel, and bling listen to Eminem at top volume on their walkmans. But these children are still being raised by parents who grew up in a culture of profound mistrust and you can see, despite the outward appearance of Western pop culture, the social norms that differentiate the people in one's close network of friends and family from the anonymous mass of suspicious strangers are still very strong.

So an experimental recasting of the society as a whole has had disastrous side-effects on the psychologies of individuals and the relationships between them. This fact is curious because, from one point of view, a society consists primarily of the web of individual relationships that compose it. A national government--even a regional or municipal one--seems largely to be an arbitrary structure imposed over the organic, self-generating entity underneath. Whether you look at it in terms of Rousseau's social contract, or through Hobbes' eyes, people come together and erect the government that represents them. The difference between the two, in my mind (not having read either one in a couple of years and my memory being notoriously myopic) is the source from which the government is understood to derive its power.

Hobbes gave primary authority to the government, since government is the only means by which order emerges from chaos, the only conceivable tamer of the savage brutes worldwide who constantly war among themselves for precious resources. Government, in his view, bestows certain rights upon the individuals in proportion to its magnanimity. The rights, however, lie first with the government and are doled out to the people on an as-needed basis. Rousseau, on the other hand, gave primary authority to the people who, through the rational principle, sign away certain of their rights in the name of the protections of an orderly society. That's the social contract we all remember from high school social studies.

But wherever you stand in the political philosophy debate, the government does not create the society. Humans being gregarious creatures by nature, the society exists primarily due to the coexistence of individuals. For a harebrained example, think back to summer camp, or imagine how it might have been if you, like me, never got to go. All the kids show up from their various hometowns, and within a few days various orderly networks have emerged: social hierarchies; networks of friends; pairs, triangles, and other elaborate geometries in the pursuit of love and/or lust, and all this despite the best efforts of the camp counselors to stamp their own vision of order onto the whole thing.

Of course, the communist government had a lot more power than camp counselors do, and was able through its policies to sculpt the society in thorough and far-reaching ways. That, in effect, was the noble goal that started the whole thing going back in 1917--social engineering, creating the perfect society out of the raw material of individuals and the forces that bind them together. My question lies in where the transition from noble social engineering to totalitarianism happens. C. has made the point, in a couple of our discussions about the matter, that no government sets out to be evil (certain despots excepted). Governments, ever since our clever little constitution made it hip to create governments with a moral agenda, set out in some document or another the moral structure by which they promise to operate and the moral goals they aim to achieve. Under communism, it was the eradication of the class struggle, the elimination of the established bourgeois aristocracy. It was to reunite the workers with the fruits of their labor. Certainly, there is nothing ignoble or evil in those goals. Thick-headed, perhaps, but not evil.

Lest one think that the rhetoric about the glorious struggle of the proletariat to throw off the shackles of class society was simply a convenient rhetorical shroud for totalitarianism, listen to this:

Last night over beers, Mike's Czech girlfriend, a lawyer who is about to begin a new job in Brussels as the "National Expert" (her real title) to liaise between the Czech Republic and the EU concerning issues of food safety legislation, explained how the communist government made judges. A worker was chosen somehow from the ranks, given a three-month training, and then (poof!) he was a judge. The workers judged the workers. This was possible, Monika said, because Czech law under communism was not a common law system with all those pesky "precedents" and such that muddle the American system and make it impossible for non-lawyers to understand. Instead, it was a system of codal law: everything was written down and quite explicitly delineated. To find the punishment for someone who stole $350 worth of livestock from his neighbor, simply flip to the appropriate page of the legal code, and there it was for all to see. A perfectly fair and just system, right? In theory, is a worker judging workers that different from, say, twelve peers judging a peer? The numbers differ, but the goals are not wholly incommensurate.

More on this topic, and its relation to "social capital" in the US later.

i know somebody who went in and added some stuff when he thought i wasn't looking. he also corrected a misspelling that i had thought was kind of charming, because it made me think of "as dumb as a bag of hair".

i'm watching you. sir.