{"id":8253,"date":"2017-10-18T01:28:14","date_gmt":"2017-10-18T01:28:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/?p=8253"},"modified":"2017-10-19T07:52:15","modified_gmt":"2017-10-19T07:52:15","slug":"historian-speaks-lviv-media-forum-morality-meaning-miracle-metaphysics-maidan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/historian-speaks-lviv-media-forum-morality-meaning-miracle-metaphysics-maidan\/","title":{"rendered":"Historian speaks at Lviv Media Forum on morality, meaning, and the miracle of metaphysics on the Maidan"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Marci Shore<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Truth and lies. Facts and fiction. Reality and the unreal.<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s unsettled, and often bizarre, media landscape the very definition of these basic terms takes on an urgent meaning. How they are defined\u2014and more importantly, who has the power to define them\u2014shapes the political climate.<\/p>\n

And the resulting political climate can force citizens to confront unpleasant ethical choices.<\/p>\n

These fundamental issues were tackled by the American historian Marci Shore in her recent inaugural address to the Lviv Media Forum 2017.<\/p>\n

Dr. Shore is an associate professor of history at Yale University in the United States. She is the author of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe<\/em>.<\/p>\n

She also wrote Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation\u2019s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968<\/em>, and translated Michal Glowinski\u2018s Holocaust memoir The Black Seasons<\/em>.<\/p>\n

She writes frequently for the international press on European cultural and intellectual history.<\/p>\n

Dr. Shore has devoted the last few years of her academic work and journalism to Ukraine. She is the author of the forthcoming book on the Maidan called The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution.<\/em> This book, as well as her recent talk in Lviv, ultimately asks the question: What is worth living\u2014and dying\u2014for?<\/p>\n

Dr. Shore\u2019s speech in Lviv was called \u201cThe Power of the Powerless\u201d and opens with the paradoxical remark that so many of her friends in Ukraine wanted their country to be more like the United States. In other words, for Ukraine to become a liberal democracy.<\/p>\n

But, times have changed. We now have, Shore points out, the irony of \u201cpost-factuality\u201d moving today from East to West, from Moscow to Washington.<\/p>\n

Shore\u2019s Lviv talk focused on former Czech dissident, and eventual president, Vaclav Havel\u2019s 1978 essay, \u201cThe Power of the Powerless.\u201d She reminds us of the meaning of his moral imperative \u201cto live in truth.\u201d Havel believed that \u201cliving in truth\u201d meant speaking the truth.<\/p>\n

But living the truth in the repressive conditions of 1970s communism in Eastern Europe was risky. So most people were \u201cliving a lie.\u201d But Havel believed that living a lie did not make empirical truth disappear from the world. He believed in the reality of truth and the stable distinction between truth and lies. For Havel, one might choose to live an inauthentic life, that is, \u201cto \"to live a lie.\u201d But this doesn't make empirical truth go away. For V\u00e1clav Havel, the ethical imperative was to reclaim one\u2019s authentic self.<\/p>\n

Dr. Shore\u2019s writing has pointed out that new moral challenges emerged after the fall of communism.\u00a0 These challenges include the rise of populism. The triumph of the market economy enthroned the superficiality of the everyday.\u00a0 In this triumph Vaclav Havel saw the development a of consumerist global civilization that grows a mass of people who do not create any values.<\/p>\n

And in Putin\u2019s Russia, we see the cynical postmodernism of a regime where nothing is real and everything is possible. Dr. Shore\u2019s Lviv talk noted we have many alternate realities that can be explained in many ways. This creates a feeling like a true reality does not exist.<\/p>\n

Dr. Shore believes one challenge stands before everyone now: How to find the truth in a post-fact world. She has thought a lot about the meaning of truth and lies during the Communist era and in postmodern society. At the Lviv Media Forum she wanted to hear from older journalists, whose experience gained in communist times may have a special educational value today. She wanted to discover what journalists and writers see is similar and different in Soviet propaganda and PR in the \u201cpost-truth\u201d era.<\/p>\n

It may be the most startling irony, but Dr. Shore argues for the West to turn to Eastern European dissident philosophy of the 1970s to address current ills. She calls this a philosophy of responsibility. In Shore\u2019s view this philosophy is an antidote to the poison of \u201cpost-truth\u201d now rampant and reigning in our society.<\/p>\n

Dr. Shore reminds us that for the dissidents of Eastern Europe liberty was the great priority before 1989. But after that was achieved, individualism began to dominate all other values. No longer did anyone pose metaphysical questions like \u201cWhere does evil come from?\u201d The dissidents, as Shore reports, still felt the need for an \u201cexistential revolution\u201d for a \u201ccivilization that needs metaphysics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Metaphysics returned to Eastern Europe, as Shore sees it, on Kyiv\u2019s Maidan. She calls the Maidan the \u201cmost amazing thing she has seen\u201d in all the years she has spent in Eastern Europe. In her view what happened was not only a political transformation, but also an existential transformation. A transformation of souls.<\/p>\n

She writes, \u201cthe Maidan protests were a miracle: Divisions were suddenly overcome, ideas mattered, moral stakes were high. The concept of human dignity became urgent, immediate, and palpable. People proved willing to sacrifice themselves. The existentialist moments of making a choice, taking responsibility, being shaken into authenticity, were illuminated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Shore captured the drama when she wrote about that \u201cexistential moment of making a decision on which everything is staked. At some point one could feel, as if palpably, that on the Maidan people had made a decision: If necessary, they would die there.\u201d<\/p>\n

And they did.<\/p>\n

This has been Ukrainian Jewish Heritage on Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio. From San Francisco, I\u2019m Peter Bejger. Until next time, shalom!<\/p>\n

Listen to the program here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ukrainian Jewish Heritage is brought to you by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE), a privately funded multinational organization whose goal is to promote mutual understanding between Ukrainians and Jews<\/em>. Transcripts and audio files of this and earlier broadcasts of Ukrainian Jewish Heritage are available at the UJE website<\/a><\/em> and the Nash Holos website.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Truth and lies. Facts and fiction. Reality and the unreal. In today\u2019s unsettled, and often bizarre, media landscape the very definition of these basic terms takes on an urgent meaning. How they are defined\u2014and more...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":8251,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,64,124,126,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-nash-holos","category-sponsored-projects","category-audio-visual-media","category-commentary-and-analysis","primary-category-124","primary-category-sponsored-projects"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8253"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8281,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8253\/revisions\/8281"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ukrainianjewishencounter.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}