Συζητήσεις, λοιπόν, όπως αυτή που δημοσίευσε την Κυριακή 20/11/11 η Ελευθεροτυπία στο φάκελο: “Έχει ζωή η ευρωζώνη, έχει θέση η Ελλάδα μέσα σ’ αυτή” (http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=327290)

ή το πρώτο θέμα του Economist της προηγούμενης εβδομάδας (http://www.economist.com/node/21540255) φανερώνουν πώς παρότι η κυρίαρχη πολιτική ασκείται με μια λογική business as usual, στην πραγματικότητα βρισκόμαστε σε μια συγκυρία συνολικής επαναδιαπραγμάτευσης. Με άλλα λόγια το μέλλον φαίνεται τόσο ρευστό, όσο το τρεμάμενο χέρι της πολιτικής ηγεσίας της ΕΕ που αδυνατεί ακόμα και να σηματοδοτήσει τη δυνατότητα επίλυσης της κρίσης.

Ωστόσο, η «συνολική» αυτή επαναδιαπραγμάτευση, είναι συνολική μόνο στον κόσμο του υπό την ευρεία έννοια δημόσιου διαλόγου. Στον κόσμο, δηλαδή, όπου με κάποιο τρόπο έχουμε πρόσβαση όλοι όσοι διαβάζουμε, γράφουμε, βλέπουμε τηλεόραση και ξέρουμε να χρησιμοποιούμε τα διαφόρων ειδών social media. Εκεί όλα τα ενδεχόμενα μοιάζουν να είναι ανοιχτά: από τη διάλυση της ευρωζώνης και της ΕΕ, μέχρι τη μονομερή αποχώρηση μιας ή περισσότερων χωρών, τη δημιουργία νέων νομισματικών περιοχών, την πολιτική ενοποίηση κλπ. Και σε ενα βαθμό είναι ανοιχτά, υπό την έννοια ότι η δυναμική των πραγμάτων είναι τέτοια που δε μπορούν να αποκλειστούν ακόμα και ακραία σενάρια παρότι σε άλλη περίπτωση ίσως να μην επιλέγονταν.

Στον κόσμο της πολιτικής πρακτικής, όμως, οι επιλογές δε μοιάζουν να έχουν την αντίστοιχη ευρύτητα. Παρότι η δυναμική που ανέφερα προηγουμένως παίζει οπωσδήποτε ρόλο στις όποιες εξελίξεις, το βέβαιο είναι ότι τα πράγματα δεν είναι αφημένα τόσο στην τύχη τους όσο τα κάνει να φαίνονται η αναποφασιστικότητα των ευρωπαϊκών ελίτ. Υπ’ αυτή την έννοια παρότι είμαστε πολύ κοντά στο να μάθουμε αν η ευρωζώνη (πιθανώς και η ΕΕ) έχουν φτάσει σε οριστικό αδιέξοδο, δεν νομίζω ότι είμαστε ακόμα σε θέση να το αποφανθούμε.

Ένας από τους λόγους αυτής της διαπίστωσης είναι οι πρόσφατες αποφάσεις του Ευρωκοινοβουλίου (28 Σεπτεμβρίου 2011) για την υιοθέτηση του λεγόμενου σιξ-πακ, μιας δέσμης έξι νομοθετημάτων (πέντε κανονισμών και μιας οδηγίας) που προτάθηκαν το Σεπτέμβριο του 2010 από την Επιτροπή στο πλαίσιο της Νέας Οικονομικής Διακυβέρνησης της ΕΕ και που μπόρεσαν να ψηφιστούν μόνο ένα χρόνο αργότερα με οριακές πλειοψηφίες. (σημείωση: μέσα στην εβδομάδα ο Μπαρόζο εισηγήθηκε την ενσωμάτωση άλλων δύο νομοθετικών μέτρων καταστρέφοντας την ωραία παρομοίωση του πακέτου με την καλογυμνασμένη κοιλιακή χώρα στην οποία παραπέμπει ο ευφημισμός σιξ-πακ).

Απλουστευτικά, θα μπορούσαμε να πούμε ότι το σημαντικότερο κομμάτι της Νέας Οικονομικής Διακυβέρνησης αφορά την αυστηροποίηση του Συμφώνου Σταθερότητας που κρίθηκε αναγκαία λόγω της τροπής που έχει πάρει η κρίση στην Ευρώπη αλλά και λόγω της ανάγνωσης των αιτίων της από την Επιτροπή.

Ο 1ος κανονισμός, λοιπόν, αφορά ακριβώς την τροποποίηση του προληπτικού σκέλους του ΣΣΑ. Συγκεκριμένα, ενώ διατηρείται ο στόχος του 3% για το ετήσιο έλλειμμα, προτείνεται οι αυξήσεις δαπανών να μην υπερβαίνουν ένα μεσοπρόθεσμο ρυθμό αύξησης του ΑΕΠ  (εκτός και αν η «υπερβολική» δαπάνη καλύπτεται από αντίστοιχα μέτρα από την πλευρά των εσόδων).

Ο 2ος κανονισμός αφορά το διορθωτικό σκέλος του ΣΣΑ και τη στενότερη παρακολούθηση του δημόσιου χρέους. Και εδώ διατηρείται ο ποσοτικός στόχος για δημόσιο χρέος μικρότερο από 60% του ΑΕΠ, προστίθεται όμως η υποχρέωση η όποια απόκλιση να μειωθεί με ρυθμός της τάξης του 5% ανά τριετία. Αδυναμία επίτευξης του στόχου συνεπάγεται υπαγωγή στις διαδικασίες υπερβολικού ελλείμματος εκτός εάν διαπιστωθεί ότι το μακροοικονομικό περιβάλλον δεν διευκολύνει την αποκλιμάκωση του δημόσιου χρέους.

Ο 3ος κανονισμός εισάγει τη δυνατότητα επιβολής κυρώσεων, πράγμα που δεν ίσχυε στις προηγούμενες συνθήκες. Συγκεκριμένα, η κύρωση αφορά αναγκαστική κατάθεση από την πλευρά του κράτους μέλους στο EFSF (μέχρι να αντικατασταθεί το 2013 από το ESM), η οποία κυμαίνεται από 0,1% – 0,5% του ΑΕΠ του προηγούμενου έτους. Η κατάθεση επιστρέφει στο κράτος-μέλος αν συμμορφωθεί με τις συστάσεις της Επιτροπής, ενώ διαφορετικά μπορεί να εξελιχθεί σε πρόστιμο (μη-ανακτήσιμη κατάθεση).

Ο 4ος κανονισμός αφορά την πρόληψη και διόρθωση των μακροοικονομικών ανισορροπιών και ανισορροπιών στην ανταγωνιστικότητα. Προϋπόθεση για την επίτευξή του είναι ο προσδιορισμός των μακροοικονομικών μεγεθών και η παρακολούθησή τους.

Τα βασικότερα από αυτά όσον αφορά τις εσωτερικές ανισορροπίες είναι το ιδιωτικό και δημόσιο χρέος, το επίπεδο μισθών, οι δείκτες παραγωγικότητας εργασίας, πόρων και κεφαλαίου, οι δημόσιες και ιδιωτικές δαπάνες για έρευνα και ανάπτυξη, τα ποσοστά ανεργίας και η εξέλιξη της, οι εξελίξεις των τιμών των περιουσιακών στοιχείων κ.α.

Όσον αφορά τις εξωτερικές ανισορροπίες μερικά από τα μεγέθη που παρακολουθούνται είναι οι πραγματικοί ρυθμοί ανάπτυξης του ΑΕΠ, το ισοζύγιο τρεχουσών συναλλαγών, η καθαρή θέση άμεσων ξένων επενδύσεων, η εξέλιξη των μεριδίων αγοράς των εξαγωγών εντός και εκτός της ΕΕ. Η Επιτροπή ορίζει μέγιστα και ελάχιστα όρια για τους παραπάνω δείκτες, ενώ τυχόν «υπέρβαση είτε των κατώτατων είτε των ανώτατων αυτών ορίων ενεργοποιεί μια διαδιασία (εμπεριστατωμένη επισκόπηση), μέσω της οποίας η Επιτροπή μπορεί να θέσει ένα κράτος-μέλος σε διαρθρωτική προσαρμογή η οποία υπό ορισμένες προϋποθέσεις καταλήγει στην επιβολή κυρώσεων- προστίμων.

Τα δύο τελευταία μέτρα αφορούν διαρθρωτικές μεταρρυθμίσεις που θα γίνουν στο πλαίσιο της στρατηγικής «Ευρώπη 2020». Εδώ υπάρχει μία βασική διαφορά σε σχέση  με τη στρατηγική της Λισαβόνας: ότι πρωταρχικός στόχος αυτή τη φορά δεν είναι η δημιουργία θέσεων απασχόλησης αλλά η ανάπτυξη. Μια ανάπτυξη το περιεχόμενο της οποίας συνεπάγεται από μόνο του πολλά για την αναπαραγωγή των παραγωγικών σχέσεων και κοινωνικών σχέσεων στην υπάρχουσα μορφή τους που μέχρι τώρα έχει οξύνει τη φτώχεια, τις ανισότητες και την επιβάρυνση του περιβάλλοντος.

Οι διαρθρωτικές μεταρρυθμίσεις έχουν δύο κατευθύνσεις. Η πρώτη αφορά την κατάργηση εμποδίων για την ανάπτυξη και η δεύτερη σχετίζεται με τα λεγόμενα αναπτυξιακά εμπόδια & την κοινωνική πολιτική (ενδεικτικά: αύξηση ορίου ηλικίας συνταξιοδότησης, μείωση πρόωρων συντάξεων και επιμήκυνση εργάσιμου βίου, συσχέτιση συνταξιοδοτικού συστήματος με την βιωσιμότητα της δημοσιονομικής πολιτικής, συγκράτηση των μισθών, ευελιξία της εργασίας,  αποκέντρωση των συλλογικών διαπραγματεύσεων κλπ.)

Απλά αναφέρω εδώ ότι επισήμως η Κομισιόν επιμένει ιδιαίτερα στη λέξη συστάσεις, για να επιχειρηματολογήσει ότι δεν είναι εκείνη που επιβάλλει τελικά τις αναδιαρθρώσεις, την αυστηροποίηση και τη λιτότητα, αλλά αυτά αποτελούν επιλογές των κρατών-μελών.

Μερικά σχόλια:

1.     Όσο και να φαίνεται αντιφατικό, αυτό που αποτυπώνει το καινούριο στοιχείο στον περιγραφικό τίτλο Νέα Οικονομική Διακυβέρνηση δεν είναι η λέξη Νέα. Τα μέτρα αυτά δεν είναι νέα. Είναι μέτρα που συνεχίζουν με προσήλωση τον παλιό νεοφιλελεύθερο δρόμο οικονομικής οργάνωσης στις χώρες της ΕΕ. Η λέξη που φέρει το νέο στοιχείο στην υπόθεση είναι η λέξη Διακυβέρνηση  και κυρίως η αντιπαράθεσή της προς την έννοια της κυβέρνησης. Για να γίνει πιο σαφές το περιεχόμενο της καινοτομίας, παραπέμπω στο τελευταίο σχόλιο.

2.     Η Νέα Οικονομική Διακυβέρνηση και το σιξ-πακ δεν απαντούν στη σημερινή κρίση. Αυτό δεν είναι μια δική μου αξιολόγηση – παρότι προφανώς είναι και δική μου. Είναι η επίσημη θέση της Κομισιόν που έχει διατυπωθεί πολλές φορές και δημόσια. Στην πιο κρίσιμη καμπή της ευρωπαϊκής κρίσης, και ενώ οι οικονομικοί αναλυτές σε Ευρώπη και Αμερική χύνουν τόνους μελάνι (η γλώσσα δεν έχει προλάβει να παρακολουθήσει την τεχνολογία σ’ αυτή την οικεία έκφραση) για την καταστροφική διαχείρισή της, η ΕΕ «προνοεί» για την επόμενη.

Από την πλευρά της Κομισιόν το επιχείρημα είναι ότι σ’ αυτή τη φάση της κρίσης η λιτότητα, η ευελιξία της αγοράς εργασίας και όλη η δέσμη μέτρων που γνωρίζουμε πολύ καλά και που γνωρίζουν ή πρόκειται να γνωρίσουν και οι εργαζόμενοι σε πολλές άλλες χώρες τις Ευρώπης είναι ο επίπονος τρόπος να ξεπεράσουμε μια δύσκολη περίοδο αποκαθιστώντας την εμπιστοσύνη των αγορών για να ξαναμπούμε στη φάση της ανάπτυξης που διακηρύσσει η στρατηγική της «Ευρώπης 2020».

Στην πραγματικότητα, συνεχίζει το επιχείρημα, στόχος του προγράμματος της ΝΟΔ είναι να προστατεύσουμε την ευρωζώνη από τις κρίσεις του μέλλοντος (το αν θα υπάρχει ή όχι η ευρωζώνη μοιάζει να μην έχει καμιά σημασία στην ανάλυση αυτή) διασφαλίζοντας τη δημοσιονομική υπευθυνότητα των χωρών. Αυτό που λέει δηλαδή η Κομισιόν είναι ότι η σημερινή κρίση έχει τις ρίζες της στη μέχρι τώρα δημοσιονομική ανεθυνότητα

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0gEc1TKPgY&feature=related).

Ωστόσο, εκείνο που δεν κατανοεί ή κάνει ότι δεν κατανοεί ή εν πάσει περιπτώσει κατανοεί αλλά αγνοεί με επικίνδυνο τρόπο για την κοινωνική και την πολιτική τροπή που μπορεί να πάρουν τα πράγματα σ’ αυτή τη συγκυρία είναι πως το πρόβλημα έγκειται ακριβώς στην ανάλυσή της για την κρίση. Χώρες όπως οι Ιρλανδία και η Ισπανία αντιμετωπίζουν πολύ σοβαρά δημοσιονομικά προβλήματα χωρίς να έχουν υπάρξει «δημοσιονομικά ανεύθυνες», χωρίς να έχουν «τεράστιους δημόσιους τομείς» και «σπάταλο κοινωνικό κράτος». Αντίθετα, η δημοσιονομική κρίση εκεί ξέσπασε λόγω της μεγάλης τραπεζικής κρίσης και της έκρηξης του ιδιωτικού χρέους που μετατράπηκε σε δημόσιο, καθώς και εξ’ αιτίας της φούσκας στην αγορά ακινήτων. Αυτά τα θεμελιώδη αίτια της κρίσης χρέους που φυσικά σχετίζονται με τη συστημική φύση της κρίσης συνολικά βρίσκονται, όμως, εκτός του πλαισίου παρέμβασης.

3.     Το τρίτο σχόλιο αφορά τον τρόπο με τον οποία αντιλαμβάνεται η Επιτροπή την αντιμετώπιση των λεγόμενων μακροοικονομικών ανισορροπιών μια από τις οποίες είναι και τα ελλείμματα-πλεονάσματα του ισοζυγίου τρεχουσών συναλλαγών. Πολλοί αριστεροί (αλλά όχι μόνο αριστεροί) οικονομολόγοι έχουν σχολιάσει το γεγονός ότι τα πλεονάσματα του ισοζυγίου τρεχουσών συναλλαγών της Γερμανίας για παράδειγμα (αλλά και άλλων χρών όπως η Αυστρία και η Φινλανδία)  αντικατοπτρίζονται στα αντίστοιχα ελλείματα άλλων χωρών της ΕΕ, συμπεριλαμβανομένης και της Ελλάδας. Η “κλωνοποίηση” του μοντέλου της Γερμανίας που συνεπάγεται αποπληθωρισμό με σκοπό τη βελτίωση των εξαγωγικών επιδόσεων των χωρών και που προωθείται μέσω της ΝΟΔ θα οξύνει τις μακροοικονομικές ανισορροπίες και αφού περάσει μέσα από ανταγωνιστικές εσωτερικές υποτιμήσεις θα καταλήξει σε ένα αδύνατο παράδειγμα εμπορικών συναλλαγών δεδομένου του ποσοστού των συναλλαγών που διεξάγεται εντός της ΕΕ, αλλά και της παραγωγικής εξειδίκευσης που έχει παγιωθεί όλα αυτά τα χρόνια στην πορεία λειτουργίας της ενιαίας αγοράς.

4.     Το τελευταίο σχόλιο αφορά το ζήτημα της δημοκρατίας που έχει ανοίξει σε πολλά επίπεδα λόγω της ταυτόχρονης εξέλιξης της πολιτικής κρίσης: Στην ομιλία του στο Ευρωκοινοβούλιο κατά την ψήφιση του σιξ-πακ τον περασμένο Σεπτέμβριο ο Μπαρόζο είπε το εξής: «Χρειαζόμαστε, περισσότερο από ποτέ την ανεξάρτηση εξουσία της Επιτροπής για να προτείνει  και να αξιολογήσει τις δράσεις που πρέπει να εφαρμόζουν τα κράτη μέλη. Ας είμαστε ειλικρινείς, οι κυβερνήσεις δε μπορούν να το κάνουν αυτό ούτε μόνες τους, ούτε σε συνεργασία μεταξύ τους. Η ανεξαρτησία της Κομισιόν σ’ αυτή τη συγκυρία την καθιστά εγγυητή της δικαιοσύνης». Τι άλλο μπορεί να σημαίνει αυτή η δήλωση πέρα από μια  παραδοχή ότι αφού η δημοκρατία δεν εξυπηρετεί την οικονομική αποτελεσματικότητα- όπως την εννοεί ο Μπαρόζο φυσικά- τόσο το χειρότερο για τη δημοκρατία.

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes.

Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand ‘under the shelter of the wall,’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism—are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life—educated men who live in the East End—coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.

Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered. There will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings. The security of society will not depend, as it does now, on the state of the weather. If a frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work, tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night’s unclean lodging. Each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a frost comes no one will practically be anything the worse.

Upon the other hand, Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism.

Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment. But for the full development of Life to its highest mode of perfection, something more is needed. What is needed is Individualism. If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first. At present, in consequence of the existence of private property, a great many people are enabled to develop a certain very limited amount of Individualism. They are either under no necessity to work for their living, or are enabled to choose the sphere of activity that is really congenial to them, and gives them pleasure. These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture—in a word, the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation. Upon the other hand, there are a great many people who, having no private property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want. These are the poor, and amongst them there is no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilisation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life. From their collective force Humanity gains much in material prosperity. But it is only the material result that it gains, and the man who is poor is in himself absolutely of no importance. He is merely the infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far from regarding him, crushes him: indeed, prefers him crushed, as in that case he is far more obedient.

Of course, it might be said that the Individualism generated under conditions of private property is not always, or even as a rule, of a fine or wonderful type, and that the poor, if they have not culture and charm, have still many virtues. Both these statements would be quite true. The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralising, and that is, of course, one of the reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the institution. In fact, property is really a nuisance. Some years ago people went about the country saying that property has duties. They said it so often and so tediously that, at last, the Church has begun to say it. One hears it now from every pulpit. It is perfectly true. Property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore. It involves endless claims upon one, endless attention to business, endless bother. If property had simply pleasures, we could stand it; but its duties make it unbearable. In the interest of the rich we must get rid of it. The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted. We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid. I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.

However, the explanation is not really difficult to find. It is simply this. Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them. What is said by great employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation. Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any express desire on their part that they should be free. It was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really. It was, undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the whole thing. And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the slaves found themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted the new state of things. To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendée voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism.

It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do. For while under the present system a very large number of people can lead lives of a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness, under an industrial-barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would be able to have any such freedom at all. It is to be regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish. Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, his work will not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for others. And by work I simply mean activity of any kind.

I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours. Humanity has got beyond that stage, and reserves such a form of life for the people whom, in a very arbitrary manner, it chooses to call criminals. But I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.

But it may be asked how Individualism, which is now more or less dependent on the existence of private property for its development, will benefit by the abolition of such private property. The answer is very simple. It is true that, under existing conditions, a few men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realise their personality more or less completely. Not one of these men ever did a single day’s work for hire. They were relieved from poverty. They had an immense advantage. The question is whether it would be for the good of Individualism that such an advantage should be taken away. Let us suppose that it is taken away. What happens then to Individualism? How will it benefit?

It will benefit in this way. Under the new conditions Individualism will be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is now. I am not talking of the great imaginatively- realised Individualism of such poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally. For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.

Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road, and encumbering them. Indeed, so completely has man’s personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man’s property with far more severity than offences against his person, and property is still the test of complete citizenship. The industry necessary for the making money is also very demoralising. In a community like ours, where property confers immense distinction, social position, honour, respect, titles, and other pleasant things of the kind, man, being naturally ambitious, makes it his aim to accumulate this property, and goes on wearily and tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of. Man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him—in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living. He is also, under existing conditions, very insecure. An enormously wealthy merchant may be—often is—at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control. If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone. Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a personality, except on the imaginative plane of art. In action, we never have. Caesar, says Mommsen, was the complete and perfect man. But how tragically insecure was Caesar! Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority. Caesar was very perfect, but his perfection travelled by too dangerous a road. Marcus Aurelius was the perfect man, says Renan. Yes; the great emperor was a perfect man. But how intolerable were the endless claims upon him! He staggered under the burden of the empire. He was conscious how inadequate one man was to bear the weight of that Titan and too vast orb. What I mean by a perfect man is one who develops under perfect conditions; one who is not wounded, or worried or maimed, or in danger. Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. Byron’s personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English. Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us. Shelley escaped better. Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible. But he was not so well known. If the English had had any idea of what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could. But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and consequently he escaped, to a certain degree. Still, even in Shelley the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong. The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace. It will be a marvellous thing—the true personality of man—when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child. In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men desire that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none the less surely. For it will not worry itself about the past, nor care whether things happened or did not happen. Nor will it admit any laws but its own laws; nor any authority but its own authority. Yet it will love those who sought to intensify it, and speak often of them. And of these Christ was one. ‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written. And the message of Christ to man was simply ‘Be thyself.’ That is the secret of Christ. When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not developed their personalities. Jesus moved in a community that allowed the accumulation of private property just as ours does, and the gospel that he preached was not that in such a community it is an advantage for a man to live on scanty, unwholesome food, to wear ragged, unwholesome clothes, to sleep in horrid, unwholesome dwellings, and a disadvantage for a man to live under healthy, pleasant, and decent conditions. Such a view would have been wrong there and then, and would, of course, be still more wrong now and in England; for as man moves northward the material necessities of life become of more vital importance, and our society is infinitely more complex, and displays far greater extremes of luxury and pauperism than any society of the antique world. What Jesus meant, was this. He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.’ It is to be noted that Jesus never says that impoverished people are necessarily good, or wealthy people necessarily bad. That would not have been true. Wealthy people are, as a class, better than impoverished people, more moral, more intellectual, more well-behaved. There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor. What Jesus does say is that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what he is. And so the wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is represented as a thoroughly good citizen, who has broken none of the laws of his state, none of the commandments of his religion. He is quite respectable, in the ordinary sense of that extraordinary word. Jesus says to him, ‘You should give up private property. It hinders you from realising your perfection. It is a drag upon you. It is a burden. Your personality does not need it. It is within you, and not outside of you, that you will find what you really are, and what you really want.’ To his own friends he says the same thing. He tells them to be themselves, and not to be always worrying about other things. What do other things matter? Man is complete in himself. When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them. That is inevitable. The world hates Individualism. But that is not to trouble them. They are to be calm and self- centred. If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. If people abuse them, they are not to answer back. What does it signify? The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection. There was a woman who was taken in adultery. We are not told the history of her love, but that love must have been very great; for Jesus said that her sins were forgiven her, not because she repented, but because her love was so intense and wonderful. Later on, a short time before his death, as he sat at a feast, the woman came in and poured costly perfumes on his hair. His friends tried to interfere with her, and said that it was an extravagance, and that the money that the perfume cost should have been expended on charitable relief of people in want, or something of that kind. Jesus did not accept that view. He pointed out that the material needs of Man were great and very permanent, but that the spiritual needs of Man were greater still, and that in one divine moment, and by selecting its own mode of expression, a personality might make itself perfect. The world worships the woman, even now, as a saint. Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism. Socialism annihilates family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling. Jesus knew this. He rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and community in a very marked form. ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him. When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, ‘Let the dead bury the dead,’ was his terrible answer. He would allow no claim whatsoever to be made on personality. And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation in morals and in life is wrong. Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation. Father Damien was Christlike when he went out to live with the lepers, because in such service he realised fully what was best in him. But he was not more Christlike than Wagner when he realised his soul in music; or than Shelley, when he realised his soul in song. There is no one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all. Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a natural result the State must give up all idea of government. It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as governing mankind. All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people’s thoughts, living by other people’s standards, wearing practically what one may call other people’s second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. ‘He who would be free,’ says a fine thinker, ‘must not conform.’ And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of over-fed barbarism amongst us. With authority, punishment will pass away. This will be a great gain—a gain, in fact, of incalculable value. As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for school- boys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of crime. It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as far as it thinks it can. Wherever it has really diminished it, the results have always been extremely good. The less punishment, the less crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness. For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat. When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes against property, though such are the crimes that the English law, valuing what a man has more than what a man is, punishes with the harshest and most horrible severity, if we except the crime of murder, and regard death as worse than penal servitude, a point on which our criminals, I believe, disagree. But though a crime may not be against property, it may spring from the misery and rage and depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and so, when that system is abolished, will disappear. When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere with anyone else. Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under Socialism and Individualism will die out. It is remarkable that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown. Now as the State is not to govern, it may be asked what the State is to do. The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful. And as I have mentioned the word labour, I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine. And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labour, is the aim of man—or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other. An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all. And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it in an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of people who knew nothing about science; if a philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in any sphere at all—well, nowadays the man of science and the philosopher would be considerably amused. Yet it is really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected to brutal popular control, to authority—in fact the authority of either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of course, we have to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it does more than linger; it is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising. In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public do take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true, but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work may be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is when one comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to one’s own views, this acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not dwell upon the point. But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of the drama either. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions—one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France, is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters, and fortunately make the establishment of such an institution quite unnecessary in England. Of course, the public are very reckless in their use of the word. That they should have called Wordsworth an immoral poet, was only to be expected. Wordsworth was a poet. But that they should have called Charles Kingsley an immoral novelist is extraordinary. Kingsley’s prose was not of a very fine quality. Still, there is the word, and they use it as best they can. An artist is, of course, not disturbed by it. The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever. Perhaps, however, I have wronged the public in limiting them to such words as ‘immoral,’ ‘unintelligible,’ ‘exotic,’ and ‘unhealthy.’ There is one other word that they use. That word is ‘morbid.’ They do not use it often. The meaning of the word is so simple that they are afraid of using it. Still, they use it sometimes, and, now and then, one comes across it in popular newspapers. It is, of course, a ridiculous word to apply to a work of art. For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid, because the public can never find expression for anything. The artist is never morbid. He expresses everything. He stands outside his subject, and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects. To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote ‘King Lear.’ On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect. Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are. They are subjects for study, like everything else. And it is only fair to state, with regard to modern journalists, that they always apologise to one in private for what they have written against one in public. Within the last few years two other adjectives, it may be mentioned, have been added to the very limited vocabulary of art-abuse that is at the disposal of the public. One is the word ‘unhealthy,’ the other is the word ‘exotic.’ The latter merely expresses the rage of the momentary mushroom against the immortal, entrancing, and exquisitely lovely orchid. It is a tribute, but a tribute of no importance. The word ‘unhealthy,’ however, admits of analysis. It is a rather interesting word. In fact, it is so interesting that the people who use it do not know what it means. What does it mean? What is a healthy, or an unhealthy work of art? All terms that one applies to a work of art, provided that one applies them rationally, have reference to either its style or its subject, or to both together. From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is one whose style recognises the beauty of the material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect. From the point of view of subject, a healthy work of art is one the choice of whose subject is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it. In fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both perfection and personality. Of course, form and substance cannot be separated in a work of art; they are always one. But for purposes of analysis, and setting the wholeness of aesthetic impression aside for a moment, we can intellectually so separate them. An unhealthy work of art, on the other hand, is a work whose style is obvious, old-fashioned, and common, and whose subject is deliberately chosen, not because the artist has any pleasure in it, but because he thinks that the public will pay him for it. In fact, the popular novel that the public calls healthy is always a thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public call an unhealthy novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art. I need hardly say that I am not, for a single moment, complaining that the public and the public press misuse these words. I do not see how, with their lack of comprehension of what Art is, they could possibly use them in the proper sense. I am merely pointing out the misuse; and as for the origin of the misuse and the meaning that lies behind it all, the explanation is very simple. It comes from the barbarous conception of authority. It comes from the natural inability of a community corrupted by authority to understand or appreciate Individualism. In a word, it comes from that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called Public Opinion, which, bad and well-meaning as it is when it tries to control action, is infamous and of evil meaning when it tries to control Thought or Art. Indeed, there is much more to be said in favour of the physical force of the public than there is in favour of the public’s opinion. The former may be fine. The latter must be foolish. It is often said that force is no argument. That, however, entirely depends on what one wants to prove. Many of the most important problems of the last few centuries, such as the continuance of personal government in England, or of feudalism in France, have been solved entirely by means of physical force. The very violence of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a moment. It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat. They at once sought for the journalist, found him, developed him, and made him their industrious and well-paid servant. It is greatly to be regretted, for both their sakes. Behind the barricade there may be much that is noble and heroic. But what is there behind the leading-article but prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle? And when these four are joined together they make a terrible force, and constitute the new authority. In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralising. Somebody—was it Burke?—called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time, no doubt. But at the present moment it really is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism. In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever. Fortunately in America Journalism has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme. As a natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt. People are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments. But it is no longer the real force it was. It is not seriously treated. In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people’s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary. The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole. That is much worse. And what aggravates the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers. The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who is a leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful. The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all. In France they manage these things better. There they do not allow the details of the trials that take place in the divorce courts to be published for the amusement or criticism of the public. All that the public are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of one or other or both of the married parties concerned. In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist. English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent newspapers. It is no exaggeration to talk of compulsion. There are possibly some journalists who take a real pleasure in publishing horrible things, or who, being poor, look to scandals as forming a sort of permanent basis for an income. But there are other journalists, I feel certain, men of education and cultivation, who really dislike publishing these things, who know that it is wrong to do so, and only do it because the unhealthy conditions under which their occupation is carried on oblige them to supply the public with what the public wants, and to compete with other journalists in making that supply as full and satisfying to the gross popular appetite as possible. It is a very degrading position for any body of educated men to be placed in, and I have no doubt that most of them feel it acutely. However, let us leave what is really a very sordid side of the subject, and return to the question of popular control in the matter of Art, by which I mean Public Opinion dictating to the artist the form which he is to use, the mode in which he is to use it, and the materials with which he is to work. I have pointed out that the arts which have escaped best in England are the arts in which the public have not been interested. They are, however, interested in the drama, and as a certain advance has been made in the drama within the last ten or fifteen years, it is important to point out that this advance is entirely due to a few individual artists refusing to accept the popular want of taste as their standard, and refusing to regard Art as a mere matter of demand and supply. With his marvellous and vivid personality, with a style that has really a true colour-element in it, with his extraordinary power, not over mere mimicry but over imaginative and intellectual creation, Mr Irving, had his sole object been to give the public what they wanted, could have produced the commonest plays in the commonest manner, and made as much success and money as a man could possibly desire. But his object was not that. His object was to realise his own perfection as an artist, under certain conditions, and in certain forms of Art. At first he appealed to the few: now he has educated the many. He has created in the public both taste and temperament. The public appreciate his artistic success immensely. I often wonder, however, whether the public understand that that success is entirely due to the fact that he did not accept their standard, but realised his own. With their standard the Lyceum would have been a sort of second-rate booth, as some of the popular theatres in London are at present. Whether they understand it or not the fact however remains, that taste and temperament have, to a certain extent been created in the public, and that the public is capable of developing these qualities. The problem then is, why do not the public become more civilised? They have the capacity. What stops them? The thing that stops them, it must be said again, is their desire to exercise authority over the artist and over works of art. To certain theatres, such as the Lyceum and the Haymarket, the public seem to come in a proper mood. In both of these theatres there have been individual artists, who have succeeded in creating in their audiences—and every theatre in London has its own audience—the temperament to which Art appeals. And what is that temperament? It is the temperament of receptivity. That is all. If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question. This is, of course, quite obvious in the case of the vulgar theatre-going public of English men and women. But it is equally true of what are called educated people. For an educated person’s ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends. A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art. And true as this is in the case of the appreciation of sculpture and painting, it is still more true of the appreciation of such arts as the drama. For a picture and a statue are not at war with Time. They take no count of its succession. In one moment their unity may be apprehended. In the case of literature it is different. Time must be traversed before the unity of effect is realised. And so, in the drama, there may occur in the first act of the play something whose real artistic value may not be evident to the spectator till the third or fourth act is reached. Is the silly fellow to get angry and call out, and disturb the play, and annoy the artists? No. The honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions of wonder, curiosity, and suspense. He is not to go to the play to lose a vulgar temper. He is to go to the play to realise an artistic temperament. He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament. He is not the arbiter of the work of art. He is one who is admitted to contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its contemplation and the egotism that mars him— the egotism of his ignorance, or the egotism of his information. This point about the drama is hardly, I think, sufficiently recognised. I can quite understand that were ‘Macbeth’ produced for the first time before a modern London audience, many of the people present would strongly and vigorously object to the introduction of the witches in the first act, with their grotesque phrases and their ridiculous words. But when the play is over one realises that the laughter of the witches in ‘Macbeth’ is as terrible as the laughter of madness in ‘Lear,’ more terrible than the laughter of Iago in the tragedy of the Moor. No spectator of art needs a more perfect mood of receptivity than the spectator of a play. The moment he seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers. With the novel it is the same thing. Popular authority and the recognition of popular authority are fatal. Thackeray’s ‘Esmond’ is a beautiful work of art because he wrote it to please himself. In his other novels, in ‘Pendennis,’ in ‘Philip,’ in ‘Vanity Fair’ even, at times, he is too conscious of the public, and spoils his work by appealing directly to the sympathies of the public, or by directly mocking at them. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to the popular novelist. One incomparable novelist we have now in England, Mr George Meredith. There are better artists in France, but France has no one whose view of life is so large, so varied, so imaginatively true. There are tellers of stories in Russia who have a more vivid sense of what pain in fiction may be. But to him belongs philosophy in fiction. His people not merely live, but they live in thought. One can see them from myriad points of view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who made them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate to him or influence him in any way but has gone on intensifying his own personality, and producing his own individual work. At first none came to him. That did not matter. Then the few came to him. That did not change him. The many have come now. He is still the same. He is an incomparable novelist. With the decorative arts it is not different. The public clung with really pathetic tenacity to what I believe were the direct traditions of the Great Exhibition of international vulgarity, traditions that were so appalling that the houses in which people lived were only fit for blind people to live in. Beautiful things began to be made, beautiful colours came from the dyer’s hand, beautiful patterns from the artist’s brain, and the use of beautiful things and their value and importance were set forth. The public were really very indignant. They lost their temper. They said silly things. No one minded. No one was a whit the worse. No one accepted the authority of public opinion. And now it is almost impossible to enter any modern house without seeing some recognition of good taste, some recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, some sign of appreciation of beauty. In fact, people’s houses are, as a rule, quite charming nowadays. People have been to a very great extent civilised. It is only fair to state, however, that the extraordinary success of the revolution in house-decoration and furniture and the like has not really been due to the majority of the public developing a very fine taste in such matters. It has been chiefly due to the fact that the craftsmen of things so appreciated the pleasure of making what was beautiful, and woke to such a vivid consciousness of the hideousness and vulgarity of what the public had previously wanted, that they simply starved the public out. It would be quite impossible at the present moment to furnish a room as rooms were furnished a few years ago, without going for everything to an auction of second-hand furniture from some third- rate lodging-house. The things are no longer made. However they may object to it, people must nowadays have something charming in their surroundings. Fortunately for them, their assumption of authority in these art-matters came to entire grief. It is evident, then, that all authority in such things is bad. People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous. It has been stated that under despotisms artists have produced lovely work. This is not quite so. Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over, but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to create. There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all. But there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad. There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People. The Prince may be cultivated. Many Princes have been. Yet in the Prince there is danger. One thinks of Dante at the bitter feast in Verona, of Tasso in Ferrara’s madman’s cell. It is better for the artist not to live with Princes. The Pope may be cultivated. Many Popes have been; the bad Popes have been. The bad Popes loved Beauty, almost as passionately, nay, with as much passion as the good Popes hated Thought. To the wickedness of the Papacy humanity owes much. The goodness of the Papacy owes a terrible debt to humanity. Yet, though the Vatican has kept the rhetoric of its thunders, and lost the rod of its lightning, it is better for the artist not to live with Popes. It was a Pope who said of Cellini to a conclave of Cardinals that common laws and common authority were not made for men such as he; but it was a Pope who thrust Cellini into prison, and kept him there till he sickened with rage, and created unreal visions for himself, and saw the gilded sun enter his room, and grew so enamoured of it that he sought to escape, and crept out from tower to tower, and falling through dizzy air at dawn, maimed himself, and was by a vine-dresser covered with vine leaves, and carried in a cart to one who, loving beautiful things, had care of him. There is danger in Popes. And as for the People, what of them and their authority? Perhaps of them and their authority one has spoken enough. Their authority is a thing blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious, and obscene. It is impossible for the artist to live with the People. All despots bribe. The people bribe and brutalise. Who told them to exercise authority? They were made to live, to listen, and to love. Someone has done them a great wrong. They have marred themselves by imitation of their inferiors. They have taken the sceptre of the Prince. How should they use it? They have taken the triple tiara of the Pope. How should they carry its burden? They are as a clown whose heart is broken. They are as a priest whose soul is not yet born. Let all who love Beauty pity them. Though they themselves love not Beauty, yet let them pity themselves. Who taught them the trick of tyranny? There are many other things that one might point out. One might point out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great and individual men. One might point out how Louis XIV., by creating the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist, and made things monstrous in their monotony of repetition, and contemptible in their conformity to rule, and destroyed throughout all France all those fine freedoms of expression that had made tradition new in beauty, and new modes one with antique form. But the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical, and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV. was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result. All the results of the mistakes of governments are quite admirable. It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation. In fact, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens. And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop Individualism out of himself. Man is now so developing Individualism. To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism. Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death. Individualism will also be unselfish and unaffected. It has been pointed out that one of the results of the extraordinary tyranny of authority is that words are absolutely distorted from their proper and simple meaning, and are used to express the obverse of their right signification. What is true about Art is true about Life. A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one’s neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid. Or a man is called selfish if he lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realisation of his own personality; if, in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development. But this is the way in which everyone should live. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of ones neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses. Under Individualism people will be quite natural and absolutely unselfish, and will know the meanings of the words, and realise them in their free, beautiful lives. Nor will men be egotistic as they are now. For the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and the Individualist will not desire to do that. It will not give him pleasure. When man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously. Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life’s sores and maladies merely, but with life’s joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom. The wider sympathy is, of course, the more difficult. It requires more unselfishness. Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist—to sympathise with a friend’s success. In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such sympathy is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England. Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be. It is one of the first instincts of man. The animals which are individual, the higher animals, that is to say, share it with us. But it must be remembered that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain. It may make man better able to endure evil, but the evil remains. Sympathy with consumption does not cure consumption; that is what Science does. And when Socialism has solved the problem of poverty, and Science solved the problem of disease, the area of the sentimentalists will be lessened, and the sympathy of man will be large, healthy, and spontaneous. Man will have joy in the contemplation of the joyous life of others. For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through pain or in solitude. The ideals that we owe to Christ are the ideals of the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists society absolutely. But man is naturally social. Even the Thebaid became peopled at last. And though the cenobite realises his personality, it is often an impoverished personality that he so realises. Upon the other hand, the terrible truth that pain is a mode through which man may realise himself exercises a wonderful fascination over the world. Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk about the world’s worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it is rarely in the world’s history that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world. Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods—Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living, men could not understand Christ. Even Art shows us that. The painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with another boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother’s arms, smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble, stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life. Even when they drew him crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had inflicted suffering. But he did not preoccupy them much. What delighted them was to paint the men and women whom they admired, and to show the loveliness of this lovely earth. They painted many religious pictures—in fact, they painted far too many, and the monotony of type and motive is wearisome, and was bad for art. It was the result of the authority of the public in art-matters, and is to be deplored. But their soul was not in the subject. Raphael was a great artist when he painted his portrait of the Pope. When he painted his Madonnas and infant Christs, he is not a great artist at all. Christ had no message for the Renaissance, which was wonderful because it brought an ideal at variance with his, and to find the presentation of the real Christ we must go to mediaeval art. There he is one maimed and marred; one who is not comely to look on, because Beauty is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment, because that may be a joy also: he is a beggar who has a marvellous soul; he is a leper whose soul is divine; he needs neither property nor health; he is a God realising his perfection through pain. The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great. It was necessary that pain should be put forward as a mode of self-realisation. Even now, in some places in the world, the message of Christ is necessary. No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his perfection except by pain. A few Russian artists have realised themselves in Art; in a fiction that is mediaeval in character, because its dominant note is the realisation of men through suffering. But for those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. A Russian who lives happily under the present system of government in Russia must either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not worth developing. A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he knows authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through that he realises his personality, is a real Christian. To him the Christian ideal is a true thing. And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority. He accepted the imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute. He endured the ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and would not repel its violence by any violence of his own. He had, as I said before, no scheme for the reconstruction of society. But the modern world has schemes. It proposes to do away with poverty and the suffering that it entails. It desires to get rid of pain, and the suffering that pain entails. It trusts to Socialism and to Science as its methods. What it aims at is an Individualism expressing itself through joy. This Individualism will be larger, fuller, lovelier than any Individualism has ever been. Pain is not the ultimate mode of perfection. It is merely provisional and a protest. It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings. When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will have no further place. It will have done its work. It was a great work, but it is almost over. Its sphere lessens every day. Nor will man miss it. For what man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself. Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment. The new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony. It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not, except in Thought, realise completely, because they had slaves, and fed them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realise completely except in Art, because they had slaves, and starved them. It will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection. The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.

Από τον Νικόλα Ζώη Φωτογραφίες: Βασίλης Μαθιουδάκης

Η έμπνευση του προέρχεται από έναν πίνακα του γαλλικού ρομαντισμού που πιάνει έναν ολόκληρο τοίχο στο Λούβρο, τη Σχεδία της Μέδουσας, του Ζερικό. Είναι η φρικτή απεικόνιση ενός εξίσου φρικτού γεγονότος: ναυαγοί σε μια σχεδία έφαγαν ο ένας τον άλλο για να επιβιώσουν. Τι προβολές μπορεί να κάνει κανείς με τον πίνακα του Ζερικό στη σύγχρονη εποχή; Ζητήσαμε από τον Θωμά Μοσχόπουλο τις απαντήσεις.

Πότε συναντηθήκατε για πρώτη φορά με την Σχεδία του Ζερικό;

Παιδί. Πριν πάω ακόμα σχολείο. 0 πίνα­κας υπήρχε ο’ ένα βιβλίο που ξεφύλλιζα στο σπίτι. Μου είχε κάνει πολύ μεγάλη εντύπωση, χωρίς να καταλαβαίνω ακόμα το περιεχόμενο του. Η ιτιοφή μου μαζί του συνεχίστηκε, άρχισα ν’ανακαλύπτω σιγά σιγά τι απεικονίζει και με ποιο ιστο­ρικό γεγονός συνδέεται, και η πρώτη τρο­μερή εντύπωση αυξανόταν. Πλέον, κρα­τάει σχεδόν σαράντα χρόνια η σχέση μου με τον πίνακα.

Πώς προέκυψε η απόφαση για την πα­ράσταση που θα δούμε; Είχε να κάνει με τη συγκυρία;

Η βασική συγκυρία ήταν αφενός η ανά­γκη να δουλέψω κάτι πιο πειραματικό, και αφετέρου το κατάλληλο πλαίσιο, που μου δόθηκε μέσα στο Φεστιβάλ. Η κοι­νωνική συγκυρία δεν είναι βέβαια ακρι­βώς σύμπτωση. Η επιλογή του θέματος θα μπορούσε να είχε συμβεί και πριν από δέκα χρόνια, και ενδεχομένως τώρα να βρίσκει ένα μάλλον πιο εύφορο έδαφος. Αλλά οι προβολές που θα μπορούσε να κάνει κάποιος από φιλοσοφικής, πολιτι­κής ή και προσωπικής πλευράς ο’ ένα έργο τέχνης θα μπορούσαν να είναι κάθε φορά ανάλογες με την κατάσταση στην οποία ο ίδιος βρίσκεται.

Δεν υπάρχουν περίοδοι που όλες αυ­τές οι διαφορετικές προβολές συγκλί­νουν όλο και περισσότερο σε μία κοινή;

Στην παράσταση χρησιμοποιούμε πολ­λές αναφορές στον Σοπενχάουερ. Σε μια ιστορική σύμπτωση, το έργο του Ο κόσμος σαν βούληση και σαν παράσταση εκδίδεται τη χρονιά που εμφανίζεται και ο πίνακας. Ένα από τα βασικά του θέ­ματα είναι ότι το υποκείμενο που παρα­τηρεί και το αντικείμενο που παρατη­ρείται, δύσκολα διαχωρίζονται. Αυτό που βλέπω σε κάτι, είναι ο εαυτός μου. Νομίζω λοιπόν ότι οποιαδήποτε στιγμή οι θεατές επιλέξουν να δουν κάτι, θα ταυτιστούν ή όχι, ανάλογα με το σε ποια θέση βρίσκονται. Είναι ίσως υπερβολική υπογράμμιση το να πούμε ότι η παρά­σταση έχει έναν συγκυριακό χαρακτήρα. Σαφώς όσοι ακούνε γι’ αυτήν αυτομά­τως κάνουν την αναγωγή στο σήμερα. Αυτό όμως οφείλεται στο ότι εμείς είμα­στε σε μεγαλύτερη φάση ευαισθητοποί­ησης, και όχι μόνο στο θέμα του πίνακα Είμαστε πιο έτοιμοι να διαπραγματευ­τούμε την πτώση. Σκεφτείτε, ας πούμε, να γινόταν η ίδια επιλογή την εποχή της Ολυμπιάδας. Κανένας δεν θα πρόβαλλε στον πίνακα τις εικόνες που προβάλλει σήμερα.

Είναι εύκολο να πούμε ποιο είδος πα­ράστασης υπηρετεί το συγκεκριμένο έργο, και τι εντύπωση θα αφήνει;

Σύμφωνα με τα λεξικά, παράσταση είναι η προσπάθεια έκφρασης αφηρημένων πραγμάτων με συγκεκριμένο τρόπο έτσι ώστε αυτά να γίνουν αισθητά. Εμείς προ­σπαθούμε με μια, ας την πούμε “θεατρογενής” γλώσσα να αναλογιστούμε τη σχέση του ατόμου με τη δημιουργία και την καταστροφή, με την τέχνη και με το βίωμα μ’ αυτό που λέμε πολιτισμό και ιστορία. Δημιουργούμε μια συνθήκη, όπου ο θεατής θα μπορεί να επιλέξει αυ­τός την οπτική του. Σαν να μπαίνει σε μια γκαλερί και να επιλέγει πού θα μείνει πα­ραπάνω, τι θα προσπεράσει, και ποιο θα είναι αυτό που θα του κάνει μεγαλύτερη εντύπωση. Η εμπειρία είναι τελείως δια­φορετική για τον καθένα, κι έτσι εμείς δεν θα έχουμε απόλυτη εικόνα του τι εντύπωση θα δίνουμε. Ποτέ.

Αυτό δεν προϋποθέτει από τον θεατή τουλάχιστον μεγάλο βαθμό προσήλωσης;

0 καθένας από εμάς έχει με κάποιο τρόπο ευθύνη σ’ αυτό που βλέπει. Για να στηθεί αυτή η σχέση που λέγεται παρά­σταση, χρειαζόμαστε δύο και τον θε­ατή, και αυτόν που βρίσκεται πάνω στη σκηνή. Όσο πιο ειλικρινείς και καθαροί εί­μαστε ο’ αυτή τη σχέση, τόσο μεγαλύ­τερη η πιθανότητα να σχετιστούμε. Δια­φορετικά είμαστε αμέτοχοι θεατές σε κάτι το οποίο κινείται παράλληλα με εμάς· δεν έχει καμία σχέση με τη ζωή μας.

Από ποια μέρη, ποια συστατικά απο­τελείται η δομή του έργου;

Χρησιμοποιούμε τρεις διαφορετικές οπτι­κές πάνω στο ίδιο θέμα Προσπαθούμε να δώσουμε την αίσθηση μιας περιδιάβα­σης με τρία μέρη, τα οποία θα μπορεί κα­νείς να παρακολουθήσει ελεύθερα. Το πρώτο έχει τον τίτλο *Ταξίδι».Βασίζεται κυρίως στις αναμνήσεις των επιζώντων του ιστορικού γεγονότος και τις ενθυμή­σεις τους στα ημερολόγια τους. Επειδή ένα μεγάλο μέρος της παράστασης έχει αυτοσχεδιαστικό χαρακτήρα, κι επειδή πολλά ταξίδια μας οδηγούνται σε ναυάγια στη ζωή, αναλογιζόμαστε το πώς είναι να ξεκινάς προσδοκώντας, και να καταλήγει πάντα η πραγματικότητα να είναι ένα ναυάγιο. Η πραγματικότητα είναι πάντα αυτό που σου καταργεί την οποιαδήποτε ιδέα έχεις για τα πράγματα Πολλές φορές μπορεί να είναι και καλύτερη, σίγουρα πάντως όλοι μας ερχόμαστε κάποτε αντι­μέτωποι μαζί της. Το δεύτερο μέρος ονο­μάζεται “Πάθος” και αφορά στην ίδια τη Σχεδία. Είναι σαν ένα “ορατόριο”, ακρι­βώς με τη λειτουργία που είχαν τα ορα­τόρια της δυτικής μουσικής. Αφηγείται κυρίως με μουσικούς δρόμους και με τη σχέση με το λόγο, κάτι που θα μπορούσε κανείς να ονομάσει «ιερόσυλο πάθος»: αυτό που ζούνε οι εκατόν πενήντα άν­θρωποι, που στο τέλος καταλήγουν δε­καπέντε, αυτά που παθαίνουν και αυτά που έντονα θέλουν. Μέσα από την ανά­γκη της επιβίωσης φτάνουν σε ακρότη­τες που δεν μπορούμε να τις ονομάσουμε ανθρώπινες, όπως ο κανιβαλισμός. Ο οποίος είναι ένα πάθος, ανάλογο σχεδόν της σταύρωσης. Στο τρίτο μέρος επεξεργαζόμαστε το μετέπειτα, τη δημιουργία μέσα από την καταστροφή. 0 Ζερικό ασχολήθηκε με το θέμα της καταστρο­φής επειδή αντανακλούσε και δικές του μεγάλες προσωπικές καταστροφές. Κου­βαλούσε πτώματα από ένα νεκροτομείο, χρησιμοποιώντας τα για μοντέλα Ήταν βουτηγμένος μέσα στην αποσύνθεση για να συνθέσει. Με μια μορφή παιχνιδιού, στο οποίο ο θεατής δεν έχει ολόκληρη ει­κόνα του πίνακα πουθενά αλλού παρά μόνο ο’ ένα χαρτί που κρατάει στο χέρι του, ζητάμε από αυτόν την προσωπική οπτική του. Έχουμε ανάγκη τη συμμε­τοχή, όχι με τη στενή, διαδραστική έν­νοια. Δεν είναι interactive η παράσταση. Απλώς τονίζει τη συνειδητοποίηση ότι πρέπει να είμαι ενεργός για να μπορέσω να λειτουργήσω σ’ ένα πράγμα που απο­ζητά την ένωση για να λειτουργεί.

Αυτό είναι το θέατρο, ή και η ανθρώ­πινη συνύπαρξη;

Το θέατρο είναι από τα πράγματα που δεν μπορείς να κάνεις μόνος σου, ούτε ως δημιουργός ούτε ως θεατής. Πρέπει να αισθάνεσαι ότι συμμετέχεις σε μία κοι­νότητα Και αυτή είναι η μεγαλύτερη δυ­σκολία στις μέρες μας. Λειτουργούμε μέσα από τη λογική με την οποία λειτουργούν οι άνθρωποι στη Σχεδία. Είμαστε αναγκασμένοι να συνυπάρξουμε- δεν είναι επιλογή μας. Έχουμε πέσει τόσο πολύ ο ένας πάνω στον άλλον, που ο άλλος είναι η κόλαση. Το θέατρο είναι ίσως μια ουτοπική ανακούφιση, που λέει ότι ο άνθρωπος μπορεί να λειτουργήσει και συλλογικά, να έρθει σε διάλογο με τα πράγματα που τον πονάνε. Ίσως γι’ αυτές τις δύο ώρες που κρατάει μια παράσταση.

Οι έννοιες της ομάδας, της κοινότητας ή της συλλογικότητας είναι στον βασικό πυρήνα της δουλειάς σας. Ποιους όρους όμως προϋποθέτουν;

Νομίζω ότι απαιτούν τεράστια αυτοσυνείδηση. Μεγάλη αίσθηση αυτάρκειας και επίγνωση της μη παντοδυναμίας του καθενός. Μεγαλώνουμε μ’ ένα τρόπο που μας ωθεί στο να γίνουμε όλοι άλογα κούρσας. Ο καθένας μας πρέπει να είναι ο καλύτερος ο δυνατότερος, ο εξυπνότερος. Θυμάμαι τα συνθήματα της Ολυμπιάδας, που ζητούσαν να πάμε πιο ψηλά, πιο δυνατά, πιο γρήγορα. Το πιο «φιλικά», δεν υπήρξε ποτέ. Το πιο «ήπια», το πιο «άκουσε λίγο και τον άλλον», επίσης. Για να μπορέσεις ν’ ακούσεις βέβαια, και να συνεννοηθείς πρέπει να είσαι αυτάρκης. Και για να είσαι αυτάρκης πρέπει να χαμηλώσεις λίγο τον πήχη για το τι ζητάς από τον εαυτό σου. Αν εγώ ήθελα να είμαι ο μεγαλύτερος σκηνοθέτης όλων των εποχών -και ας πούμε ότι μπορούσα- δεν θα γινόταν να βαδίζω μαζί με άλλους ανθρώπους γιατί θα έπρεπε να τρέχω μόνος μου. Το ίδιο θα συνέβαινε και στους συνεργάτες μου. Αν ο καθένας ήταν ένας ηθοποιός-σταρ και ασχολιόταν μόνο με την προσωπική του προβολή, θα έτρεχε μόνος του.
Το «διασωστικό» πλοίο «Άργος» φαίνεται απειροελάχιστα στον πίνακα.

Από τους εναπομείναντες ναυαγούς, άλλοι πιστεύουν ότι θα σωθούν με τη βοήθεια του, και άλλοι είναι απελπισμένοι. Υπάρχουν οδηγίες χρήσης της σωτηρίας τελικά;

Πότε υπήρξαν; Όλη η ιστορία της ζωής του καθενός είναι σαν ένα μπαλάκι ανάμεσα στην προσδοκία και την απόγνωση. Αν είσαι μονίμως απελπισμένος, κάποια στιγμή είτε αυτοκτονείς είτε γλιτώνεις -κάτι γίνεται τέλος πάντων. Αν είσαι μονίμως γεμάτος ελπίδα, είσαι ανερμάτιστος, περιμένεις ότι θα τα κάνουν άλλοι για σένα, άλλοι θα αναλάβουν την ευθύνη. Νομίζω ότι δεν υπάρχει συνταγή. Κι ο πίνακας δεν έχει διδακτικό χαρακτήρα. Η τέχνη μού είναι αηδιαστική όταν έχει διδακτικό χαρακτήρα. Ο Ζερικό απεικονίζει μια αγωνία γνώριμη σε όλους, και αυτό μας ανακουφίζει ad se, και μόνο δηλαδή που υπάρχει. Το ότι μπορείς να μιλήσεις για τα πράγματα που σε πονάνε, και σε πονάνε με τον ίδιο τρόπο που πονάνε και τον διπλανό σου, αυτομάτως δημιουργεί μια αίσθηση, αν όχι αισιοδοξίας, αλλά ανακούφισης.

Το ελληνικό θέατρο από τι φουρτούνες κινδυνεύει και από τι πρέπει να σωθεί;

Το ζήτημα της αυτοσυνείδησης είναι και εδώ πολύ σοβαρό. Θέλουμε να είμαστε τα πάντα. Είναι πολύ μικρή χώρα η Ελλάδα, έχουμε μια επαρχιώτικη λειτουργία, και δεν νομίζω ότι μπορούμε να τα υποστηρίξουμε όλα. Κι εγώ ο ίδιος φυσικά. Δεν θα μπορούσα να πιστεύω ότι η συγκεκριμένη δουλειά, αν δεν ήταν στα πλαίσια του Φεστιβάλ, θα είχε μεγάλη ανταπόκριση. Ποιον ενδιαφέρει αυτός ο διανοητικός μου πειραματισμός Βέβαια, το μεγάλο σοκ που έχει δεχτεί το ελληνικό θέατρο προέρχεται αφενός από μια μερίδα του που στηρίχτηκε στην κρατική επιχορήγηση και κλειδώθηκε στη σκέψη ότι θα υπάρχει επιχορηγούμενη για πάντα, και αφετέρου από την απόλυτη κατάργηση, το μεγάλο κενό στο θέμα των επιχορηγήσεων. Κανείς δεν παίρνει την ευθύνη και να πει αν υπάρχουν ή όχι χρήματα, αν κάτι είναι εύκολο να γίνει ή όχι. Είναι επίσης πολύ κλειστή η αγορά, και όταν αρχίσεις να σκέφτεσαι με τους όρους της, αναγκαστικά θα εκπέσεις· κάτι που μπερδεύει τον κόσμο. Είναι τεράστιο λάθος να πιστεύουμε ότι ο κόσμος μας καθοδηγεί. Εμείς πρέπει να τον οδηγήσουμε. Απλώς περνάμε πάρα πολύ εύκολα από το ένα στο άλλο. Έχω σοκαριστεί τα τελευταία χρόνια βλέποντας επιλογές και στάσεις ανθρώπων που λένε «μα τι να κάνουμε, πρέπει να δουλέψουμε». Και δεν εννοώ μόνο ηθοποιών, αλλά και σκηνοθετών, καλλιτεχνικών διευθυντών. Έχουμε χάσει, ή κινδυνεύουμε όλοι να χάσουμε τον προσανατολισμό.

Μπορεί να φταίει σε κάτι το κοινό, ειδικά εν μέσω κρίσης;

Ωραία, ας πούμε ότι το κοινό είναι επιπόλαιο. Θα έχουμε κάνει όμως το ίδιο με τον εκπαιδευτικό που τα βάζει με τα παιδιά επειδή δεν είναι καλά και διαβασμένα. Εμείς οφείλουμε να κρατήσουμε τον παιδευτικό μας ρόλο. Το να οδηγη­θούμε σε πολύ ακραίες «σνομπίστικες» τάσεις οι οποίες δεν θα επικοινωνήσουν με το κοινό είναι πρόβλημα το να λαϊκί­σουμε είναι επίσης τεράστιο πρόβλημα. Χρειάζεται να δουλεύουμε μεθοδικό. Να μυήσουμε τον θεατή σ’ αυτό που κά­νουμε, και να τον πάμε ένα βήμα παρα­πέρα.

Αν έπρεπε οπωσδήποτε να καταλογί­σετε και στον εαυτό σας κάτι, μια απο­τυχία, μια παράβλεψη, τι θα ήταν αυτό;

Μια υπερβολική εσωστρέφεια κάποια στιγμή. Ότι θεώρησα δεδομένα κάποια πράγματα και γα αρκετά μεγάλο χρο­νικό διάστημα η ζωή περνούσε δίπλα μου χωρίς να την παίρνω και πολύ χα­μπάρι. Νόμιζα ότι για πάντα θα είμαι σε ένα ασφαλές κουκούλι, όπου εγώ θα τη βολεύω. Και έρχεται κάποτε η ώρα της λήψης ευθυνών. Εκεί είναι δύσκολα αν δεν έχεις μάθει να είσαι μόνος Γι αυτό το­νίζω ότι η αυτοτέλεια είναι εντελώς απα­ραίτητη προϋπόθεση της συλλογικότητας. Η ομάδα που αποτελείται από ανθρώπους που από μόνοι τους δεν μπο­ρούν να υπάρξουν και δεν μπορούν να πάρουν ένα ρίσκο δεν είναι ομάδα.

Τα μελλοντικά σας σχέδια έχουν επηρεαστεί από αυτή τη συνειδητοποίηση; Τι να περιμένουμε μετά το Φεστιβάλ;

Είμαι ήδη σε μια διαδικασία που προ­σπαθώ να ορίσω τον εαυτό μου, απο­κλείοντας κάποιες επιλογές συζητώντας κάποιες άλλες Αυτό που προσπαθώ να κάνω, επειδή δεν είμαι αποκομμένος από τους ανθρώπους με τους οποίους δου­λεύω, είναι να θέσω τους νέους όρους που ισχύουν και νια μένα σεβόμενος και τις ανάγκες και τις προτεραιότητες των άλλων Δεν αισθάνομαι ότι μπορώ να αλ­λάξω τον κόσμο, ίσως όμως μπορώ ν’ αλλάξω λίγο τον εαυτό μου. Στην ερώτηση σας πάντως αυτό που σχεδιάζω δεν εί­ναι ανακοινώσιμο Ασχολούμαι μ’ ένα κλασικό έργα μεγάλο, αλλά προτεραιό­τητα έχει μια δουλειά που θα κάνω στο εξωτερικό, στον Καναδά.

Έχετε ασχοληθεί και με θέατρο για παι­διά, και με όπερα, και με κινηματο­γράφο. Να περιμένουμε να σας ξανα­δούμε σε κάτι από αυτά;

Οι συνθήκες είναι λίγο περίεργες, παρ’ όλα αυτά το να επανέλθω στην αυτοσυ­γκέντρωση που μπορεί να έχει ο κινημα­τογράφος ναι, είναι μια ανάγκη.

Και τι θα συμβουλεύατε έναν νέο θεα­τρικό σκηνοθέτη που τώρα κάνει τα πρώτα σχέδια για το δικό του μέλλον;

Να μην περιμένει ένα πλαίσιο για να ανθί­σει μέσο σε αυτό. Να δημιουργήσει ο ίδιος το πλαίσιο του εαυτού του και των γύρω του. Να είναι μαζί τολμηρός, αλλά και διαλεκτικός και διαλλακτικός. Να παρα­τηρεί επίσης. Και να έχει κατά νου ότι οι απόψεις μας είναι καλύτερα να εμφανί­ζονται στη δουλειά μας παρά στο modus Vivendi μας.

– Οταν σταματήσουμε, αναγκαστικά, να καταναλώνουμε, τι θα κάνουμε;

– Ας κάνουμε μιαν ευχή. Να γίνουμε πιο δημιουργικοί, να βρίσκουμε λύσεις μόνοι μας, να μην τις παίρνουμε έτοιμες, ας αποκτήσουμε ενδιαφέρον για το πώς συνδεόμαστε με τους ανθρώπους γύρω μας. Αν καλλιεργήσουμε ένα λουλούδι αντί να το αγοράσουμε, μπαίνουμε σε μια διαδικασία που γιορτάζει την ίδια τη ζωή. Φυσικός χρόνος: σκέψης, κατανόησης, επικοινωνίας. Βέβαια, όταν η πραγματική φτώχεια σού χτυπάει την πόρτα, όλα αυτά που λέω είναι κουραφέξαλα. Ξέρω. Τα περισσότερα χρόνια της ζωής μου τα πέρασα πάρα πολύ φτωχός. Απλώς, τώρα, εδώ που είμαστε, κάνω μιαν ευχή, σαν μια σκέψη που πιθανόν να γονιμοποιήσει την επόμενη πραγματικότητα. Από πολλούς ανθρώπους θα γίνει.

– Φοβάστε και ελπίζετε;

– Αναρωτήθηκα μήπως φέτος έπρεπε απλώς να σταματήσω. «Ποιος νοιάζεται για οποιονδήποτε πειραματισμό αυτή τη στιγμή. Who gives a shit…», σκέφτηκα. Κάτι άλλο που με προβληματίζει είναι αυτή η αναγκαστική αναθεώρηση του υλισμού. Αν μπορεί η δυσκολία να κάνει το καλό, να μας αφαιρέσει, δηλαδή, τη ματαιότητα της υλιστικής αντιμετώπισης της ζωής. Οπως είπε ο Ράμφος, το να αντικαθιστάς το είναι με το έχω είναι αποτέλεσμα μιας υλιστικά προσανατολισμένης ζωής. Αποφάσισα να παραμείνω σε μια δράση. Να κάνω τη δουλειά μου, δηλαδή. Αν το σκεφτώ λίγο παραπάνω, μπορεί και να παραλύσω.

– Θα μπορούσατε να εγκατασταθείτε και να δουλέψετε στο εξωτερικό;

– Οχι στ’ αλήθεια. Εχω τη δυνατότητα να πάω και να ζήσω σε μιαν άλλη πόλη και να αρχίσω από την αρχή. Δεν μιλάτε με κάποιον που του ανοίγεται μια διεθνής καριέρα και επιλέγει να είναι στην Αθήνα. Μπορώ όμως να μαζέψω τα πράγματά μου και να πάω να ζήσω σε μιαν άλλη πόλη για ένα χρονικό διάστημα.

– Εχετε το κουράγιο;

– Δεν ξέρω. Εκανα ένα «δειγματισμό» με τη Ν. Υόρκη, θα κάνω και με άλλες πόλεις και θα δούμε. Ολα είναι ανοιχτά. Το μόνο που πανικοβάλλει είναι να σκεφτούμε ότι δεν υπάρχει άλλη προοπτική εκτός από αυτήν που ζούμε. Το αγώνισμα της ζωής είναι δύσκολο. Καμιά φορά τρέχεις επί τόπου.

Ημουν ευπρόσδεκτος σε ένα πάρτι που δεν πήγα

– Επιδιώξατε χρήματα και κοινωνικό στάτους;

– Επιασα τον εαυτό μου να κολακεύεται που έρχεται το χρήμα και η καταξίωση. Να χαίρεται που ένας ιδεατός γονιός θα αισθανόταν περήφανος για τον γιο του. Να χαίρεται που και με τα πιο main stream στάνταρντ θα μπορούσε να πει κανείς ότι τα κατάφερα. Επιασα τον εαυτό μου να κολυμπάει λίγο σε αυτήν τη λάσπη…

– Και μετά τι κάνατε;

– Εκανα τα καλλιτεχνικά βήματα που μ’ ενδιαφέρει να κάνω χωρίς καμία επιρροή από πουθενά. Επίσης, ο κύκλος ο κοινωνικός και των φίλων μου έμεινε στις διαστάσεις που εμένα μ’ ενδιαφέρει. Η μόνη αντίδρασή μου είναι ότι κρύφτηκα κοινωνικά. Απέφυγα τις κοινωνικές συναναστροφές – στάτους. Ημουν ευπρόσδεκτος σε ένα πάρτι που δεν πήγα.

Ο Δημήτρης Παπαϊωάννου αποφοίτησε από το Αμερικανικό Κολλέγιο. Δεν ανήκει στον κόσμο του. «Αυτό είναι το πάρτι στο οποίο δεν πήγα», διευκρινίζει. «Δεν έχετε φίλους από τότε;», επιμένω. «Κανέναν. Ο μόνος φίλος που είχα δεν ζει πια. Ηταν ο Αλέξης Μπίστικας. Φίλος και συνεργάτης. Ηταν ο αδελφικός φίλος, ο κολλητός μου. Τον έχασα νωρίς…».

Ο κόσμος γύρω μας ρίχνει κλεφτές ματιές στον Δ. Παπαϊωάννου, γυρνάει και σχολιάζει χαμηλόφωνα. Μια κυρία σηκώνεται και πλησιάζει για να του ευχηθεί: «να ’στε γερός και πάντα καλά». «Ευχαριστώ πολύ», απαντά ευγενικά.

– 2004 – 2011. Πολλά πράγματα πήγαν λάθος. Μεγάλη δαπάνη, μεγάλη σπατάλη. Δεν άντεχε, δεν άντεξε αυτή η χώρα τα ποσά που ξοδεύτηκαν για τους Ολυμπιακούς. Η τελετή έναρξης είναι μέρος της σπατάλης;

– Σαφέστατα. Η τελετή έναρξης ήταν μια πολύ ακριβή τελετή, αλλά εξυπηρετούσε την εικόνα μιας ολόκληρης χώρας που ανέλαβε μια τόσο ακριβή διοργάνωση. Επρεπε να είναι αντίστοιχη. Ηταν ανάλογη της υπέρογκης οικονομικής φιλοδοξίας που είχε αυτό το εγχείρημα, ως όφειλε. Κοιτώντας πίσω μπορούμε να πούμε «τι τα θέλαμε όλα αυτά;». Τότε λέγαμε «τι ωραία ανάσα αισιοδοξίας!». Λειτούργησε στο θυμικό μας, ως μεγάλη τόνωση της αυτοπεποίθησής μας. Και αυτό είναι ένα κεφάλαιο. Και τα δύο, το τότε και το τώρα, είναι αλήθεια.

– Κεφαλαιοποιήθηκε η επιτυχία των Ολυμπιακών;

– Κάθετα, όχι. Το κακό after management είναι εμφανές παντού.

Το εξάωρο έργο «Μέσα» δεν είναι παράσταση, είναι κατάσταση

Οταν είχαμε διασταυρωθεί με τον Δημήτρη Παπαϊωάννου τυχαία στη Ν. Υόρκη, πέρυσι την άνοιξη (απίστευτο σε μια πόλη εκατομμυρίων), μου είπε κάτι που θυμάμαι ακόμη: «Εδώ είσαι ο κανένας». Εμεινε τρεις μήνες με υποτροφία Φουλμπράιτ. «Είναι το φυσικό», εξηγεί αναδρομικά. «Η φυσική συνθήκη ενός ανθρώπου σε μια πόλη. Ετσι έχω ζήσει πάντα. Αυτό που συμβαίνει τα τελευταία χρόνια στην Αθήνα είναι μια διαστροφή».

Για να συμπληρώσει αμέσως: «Ηθελα να επιστρέψω πολύ στην Αθήνα. Σπίτι μου και στους φίλους μου. Ο χρόνος που πέρασα στη Ν. Υόρκη βομβαρδίζοντας τον εαυτό μου με τέχνη και μελετώντας λειτούργησε σαν χρόνος αποθηκευτικός και όχι σαν χρόνος καλής ζωής. Εκτός από τη συναρπαστική υπόσταση της μεγάλης μητρόπολης, η φάση στην οποία βρίσκομαι δεν με οδήγησε να ζήσω μια ωραία ζωή. Ηταν περισσότερο περίοδος μελέτης και περισυλλογής για μένα κι αυτό το κατάλαβα όταν γύρισα και συνειδητοποίησα ότι υπάρχει πολύ κέφι για δημιουργία». Είχε ξαναζήσει ένα χρονικό διάστημα στη Ν. Υόρκη όταν ήταν under construction και ομολογεί ότι «είναι πράγματι συγκλονιστικό να ζει κανείς εκεί αυτήν την περίοδο της ζωής του. Εκεί πρωτοήρθα σε επαφή με τη δουλειά της Λόρι Αντερσον, της Μέρεντιθ Μονκ, του Μπομπ Γουίλσον… Δεν είναι η ίδια πόλη πια, με εκείνη της δεκαετίας του ’80, και δεν είμαι ο ίδιος άνθρωπος. Δεν είναι το κέντρο της δημιουργίας στη σκηνική τέχνη και εγώ είμαι ένας μεγάλος άνθρωπος. Επέστρεψα για να ξεφύγω από αυτό που έχω κάνει και να το γονιμοποιήσω μέσα στην ανωνυμία. Δεν είμαι επίσης ένας άνθρωπος που ζητάω την ευκαιρία. Και η Ν. Υόρκη είναι μια πολύ ωραία πόλη όταν ζητάς την ευκαιρία… Τότε με είχε καλέσει η Ελεν Στιούαρτ που πέθανε πρόσφατα».

Μεσολαβεί μικρή παύση. «Και η Λα Μάμα πέθανε και my mama is dying… Αστείο δεν είναι;», αναρωτιέται με ένα μάλλον βραχνό γέλιο. Η Ελεν Στιούαρτ, ιδρύτρια του θεάτρου Λα Μάμα, στην κορυφή της θεατρικής πρωτοπορίας στην Αμερική της δεκαετίας του ’60. Η Μερόπη Παπά, μητέρα του Δημήτρη, κομμώτρια το επάγγελμα, κλείνει τον κύκλο της ζωής της, ύστερα από εξάχρονη περιπέτεια υγείας. «Η μητέρα σας είναι στην έξοδο… Είπατε κάτι προηγουμένως για τους γονείς. Νιώθετε ότι έχετε κάνει υπερήφανη τη μητέρα σας;». «Ναι. Την έχω κάνει υπερήφανη. Μόνο που δεν της έχω προσφέρει την παρουσία μου όσο θα ήθελα». «Ερχόταν στις πρεμιέρες; Της άρεσε αυτό που κάνατε;», συνεχίζω, αφού διευκρινίζει ότι δεν τον ενοχλεί η συζήτηση και αν αισθανθεί να πιέζεται θα μου το πει. «Ερχόταν. Δεν νομίζω ότι της άρεσε, μα ήταν ευχαριστημένη που άρεσε στον κόσμο».

– «Μέσα» ο τίτλος της νέας δουλειάς σας. Μέσα σε τι, μέσα πού, μέσα πώς;

– Μέσα στη φωλιά μας. Είναι σαν να βλέπεις από τον ακάλυπτο στο απέναντι διαμέρισμα, από το οποίο έχει γκρεμιστεί ένας τοίχος, τον ένοικο την ώρα που επιστρέφει σπίτι του. Οποιαδήποτε ώρα της ημέρας και κάνει αυτά που είναι κοινά σε όλους μας: βγάζει τα ρούχα του, κάνει μπάνιο, τρώει, χαζεύει έξω από το παράθυρο, κοιμάται. Κάτι πολύ απλό και αναγνωρίσιμο. Αυτό λειτουργεί σε δύο επίπεδα: καλούμαστε να δούμε αυτό που αναγνωρίζουμε άμεσα ως δικό μας, αλλά καλούμαστε επίσης να παρακολουθήσουμε αυτήν τη φόρμα να επαναλαμβάνεται από πολλούς ανθρώπους (30 ερμηνευτές) ακριβώς η ίδια, ξεκινώντας χρονικά μετατοπισμένη από τον προηγούμενο άνθρωπο. Ο τρόπος που η χορευτική αυτή φράση επαναλαμβάνεται είναι το συνθετικό στοίχημα. Οι πόρτες του θεάτρου θα ανοίγουν για έξι ώρες καθημερινά. Οι άνθρωποι δεν βλέπουν ποτέ την αρχή αλλά ούτε και το τέλος της παράστασης. Δεν έχει αρχή, μέση και τέλος. Ανακυκλώνεται μέσα στον ίδιο της τον εαυτό και οι θεατές μπορούν να επιλέξουν ελεύθερα αυτό που θα δουν, αγοράζοντας ένα ημερήσιο εισιτήριο. Μπορούν να μπουν, να βγουν όσες φορές θέλουν και να καθήσουν όπου θέλουν. Το «Μέσα» δεν είναι ακριβώς μια παράσταση, είναι μια κατάσταση. Ο θεατής διαλέγει από ποια γωνία, ποιες ώρες και πόσες φορές θέλει να πάρει την εμπειρία αυτού του έργου.

– Στο κέντρο της πόλης, λοιπόν, έρχονται να παρακολουθήσουν ανθρώπους της πόλης που παρακολουθούν την πόλη από το παράθυρο… Πολλαπλασιάζετε την καθημερινότητα;

– Οχι. Περιγράφω ένα σκηνικό παιχνίδι με αμέτρητες δυνατότητες σύνθεσης. Σκηνικό πείραμα το ονομάζω. Είναι ένα έργο που συμπεριφέρεται στο θέατρο σαν εκθεσιακό χώρο, στην παράσταση σαν έκθεμα και στους θεατές σαν επισκέπτες (η μουσική είναι του Κωνσταντίνου Βήτα).

– Τι ενδιαφέρον έχει αυτή η καθημερινότητα στα πρόσωπα, στις κινήσεις;

– Κάτι μας κάνει να κολλάμε όταν παρακολουθούμε τη ζωή μέσα από τα παράθυρα. Οχι όταν συμβαίνει κάτι εξαιρετικό. Η γοητεία έχει να κάνει με τον φυσικό χρόνο και με τη μη ερμηνεία. Γι’ αυτό και απλώνεται στον χρόνο. Η πόρτα θα ανοίγει στις 5.30 και θα κλείνει στις 11.30.

– Οποιος μείνει όλες τις ώρες;

– Θα πάρει βραβείο!

http://news.kathimerini.gr/4Dcgi/4Dcgi/_w_articles_civ_11_06/02/2011_431370

Για όποιον- οικονομολόγο ή μη- θέλει να έχει μια εικόνα για την τρέχουσα (μεσομακροπρόθεσμη και, βεβαίως, βραχυπρόθεσμη) ανάλυση του κυρίαρχου ρεύματος των οικονομικών (κυρίως), αλλά και πολιτικών εξελίξεων, το εβδομαδιαίο βρετανικό περιοδικό Economist είναι σίγουρα μια από τις βασικές πηγές. Η χρονολογία της πρώτης του έκδοσης (1843), η εντυπωσιακή ποσοτική (αν μη τι άλλο) διείσδυσή του (1.6 εκατομμύρια αντίτυπα ανά τεύχος) και η περιγραφή του βασικού σκοπού του («Να συμμετάσχει στο σκληρό ανταγωνισμό ανάμεσα στην ευφυία, που μας ωθεί να πάμε μπροστά, και την ευτελή άγνοια, που εμποδίζει την πρόοδό μας»), εξασφαλίζουν στον αναγνώστη ότι το εκάστοτε εβδομαδιαίο ανάγνωσμα προερχόμενο από τη συγκεκριμένη πηγή, εντάσσεται σε μια ταυτότητα, στη βάση της οποίας ο αναγνώστης «ξέρει τι να περιμένει».

Υπ’ αυτή την έννοια, η απεικόνιση ενός λιωμένου εγχειριδίου σύγχρονης οικονομικής θεωρίας, με τη συνοδεία του τίτλου «Πού έκανε λάθος και πώς αλλάζει λόγω της κρίσης» στο εξώφυλλο της 18-24 Ιουλίου 2009, ήταν μια μάλλον αναπάντεχη εκτροπή. Η «εκτροπή» αυτή, ωστόσο, έμοιαζε να συνάδει με το σοκ της συγχρονικής αποτυχίας ενός οικονομικού συστήματος, του οποίου η περιγραφή ήταν επί δεκαετίες αποτυπωμένη στο λιωμένο βιβλίο του εξωφύλλου του Economist. Ήταν η φάση της κρίσης κατά την οποία ένας διάχυτος προβληματισμός για το «πόσο μεγάλη ζημιά έχει γίνει επιτέλους», διέτρεχε τα κείμενα όχι μόνο των αρθρογράφων του Economist, αλλά και πολλών θεωρητικών των ορθόδοξων οικονομικών, πολιτικών ηγετών κ.ο.κ. Στην περίπτωση του συγκεκριμένου τεύχους του περιοδικού είναι, νομίζω, χαρακτηριστικές δηλώσεις όπως «…τα τελευταία 30 χρόνια μακροοικονομικής εκπαίδευσης στα μεγαλύτερη Αμερικάνικα και Βρετανικά Πανεπιστήμια ήταν μια πολυδάπανη σπατάλη χρόνου» (The Economist, 18-24 Ιουλίου 2009, σελ. 68) ή ο χαρακτηρισμός κορυφαίων οικονομολόγων του ορθόδοξου ρεύματος (ο.π., σελ. 11) ως «ορθολογικών ηλίθιων»  (‘rational fools’-μια έκφραση που χρησιμοποίησε ο Αμάρτια Σεν για να επικρίνει την υπόθεση του ορθολογικού οικονομικού δρώντος (agent) στο βιβλίο του «Κριτική στα συμπεριφοριακά θεμέλια της Οικονομικής Θεωρίας»).

Ήταν η φάση κατά την οποία, η εντυπωσιακή διάσταση της κρίσης και η ανάγκη κατανόησης και αντιμετώπισής της, συνετέλεσαν ώστε να ανασυρθούν (σε αναλυτικό επίπεδο, αλλά ως έναν βαθμό και σε επίπεδο οικονομικής πολιτικής) ερμηνευτικές θεωρίες χρόνια «ηττημένες» στο ιδεολογικό και πολιτικό πεδίο. Οι αναφορές στο Μαρξ και τον Κέυνς πλήθυναν, οι πωλήσεις του Κεφαλαίου και της Γενικής Θεωρίας εκτοξεύτηκαν, ενώ η επαναφορά της έννοιας της ενεργού ζήτησης και της τόνωσής της μέσω της κρατικής παρέμβασης, μετουσιώθηκαν σε πολιτική πρακτική (παρότι για σύντομο διάστημα, και με τρόπο στρεβλό και αποσπασματικό). Με άλλα λόγια, αυτό που φαινόταν να συμβαίνει εκείνη την περίοδο ήταν η άρρητη παραδοχή ότι η κριτική στην κυρίαρχη οικονομική θεωρία και πρακτική ήταν βάσιμη, ότι οι λόγοι δημιουργίας της κρίσης αφορούσαν το ίδιο το σύστημα και ότι έπρεπε να αντιμετωπιστούν με αντίστοιχο τρόπο.

Τι μεσολάβησε αντί αυτής της αναγκαίας μεταστροφής είναι γνωστό: περικοπές κοινωνικών παροχών, μειώσεις μισθών και επιδομάτων, αύξηση της άδικης φορολογίας και ελάχιστη πρόοδος στο –προφανές- ζήτημα ρύθμισης της κορυφής του παγόβουνου, δηλαδή του χρηματοπιστωτικού τομέα.

Τρία σχεδόν χρόνια μετά το ξέσπασμά της, η παγκόσμια οικονομική κρίση δεν μοιάζει να κοπάζει. Η ανεργία και η φτώχεια αυξάνονται, τα κοινωνικά και πολιτικά προβλήματα περιπλέκονται. Τι πήγε, λοιπόν, στραβά και αυτή τη φορά; Μήπως πρόλαβε κάποια από τις εναλλακτικές οικονομικές θεωρίες να εφαρμοστεί μέσα σε ένα χρόνο και απέτυχε να οδηγήσει σε διέξοδο από την κρίση; Ουδόλως. Τον τελευταίο χρόνο, το σύνολο της ρητορικής και των πρακτικών της κυρίαρχης οικονομικής θεωρίας, αυτής της «πολυδάπανης σπατάλης χρόνου» είναι πιο κραταιό από ποτέ. Ο Economist αυτής της εβδομάδας έχει ήδη αλλάξει «πεδίο μάχης». Ο κεντρικός τίτλος του περιοδικού είναι σαφής: “The battle ahead: Confronting the public sector unions” («Η μάχη ενάντια στα συνδικάτα του δημόσιου τομέα», The Economist, 8-14 Ιανουαρίου 2011).

Στο άρθρο περιγράφονται δύο δίπολα: αφ΄ενός τα οπισθοδρομικά και αντιπαραγωγικά συνδικάτα όλων των χωρών ενάντια στις αντίστοιχες υπερχρεωμένες κυβερνήσεις, που για χρόνια «ενδίδουν» στις «υπερβολικές» διεκδικήσεις τους υπό το φόβο του πολιτικού κόστους, αφ΄ετέρου οι παράλογες απαιτήσεις των ευνοημένων δημόσιων υπαλλήλων ενάντια στον ορθολογικό ιδιωτικό τομέα.

Ας αντιπαρέλθουμε την ένσταση περί της αποτελεσματικότητας και της δυνατότητας αυτορρύθμισης του ιδιωτικού τομέα, η αποτυχία των οποίων (θα έπρεπε να) είναι, σύμφωνα τον Economist του 2009, παραπάνω από προφανής. Ποιές είναι αυτές οι απαιτήσεις που παρεμποδίζουν την ανάκαμψη των οικονομιών και σχετίζονται (σύμφωνα τον Economist του 2011) με τα αίτια της κρίσης, άρα είναι αυτές που επείγει να αντιμετωπίσουμε; Αντιγράφω: «Η μάχη με τα συνδικάτα του δημόσιου τομέα είναι κρίσιμο να κερδηθεί, διότι μέσα από αυτή προβάλλει μια μοναδική ευκαιρία: η μεταρρύθμιση του κράτους… Η μάχη αυτή πρέπει να αφορά τις παροχές… Οι άδειες είναι συχνά παράλογα γενναιόδωρες, αλλά το πραγματικό πρόβλημα είναι οι συντάξεις… Ένα άλλο πεδίο μάχης πρέπει να είναι τα νομικά προνόμια των συνδικάτων. Η άμεση κατάργηση των συνδικάτων του δημόσιου τομέα, σε μια περίοδο κατά την οποία οι κυβερνήσεις προσπαθούν να αναμορφώσουν το δημόσιο τομέα κατά το πρότυπο του ιδιωτικού, είναι βέβαια υπερβολική. Αλλά το δικαίωμά τους στην απεργία πρέπει να περιοριστεί και οι κανόνες σχετικά με τις πολιτικές δωρεές, ακόμα και τη συμμετοχή στα συνδικάτα πρέπει να αλλάξουν έτσι ώστε κάθε εργαζόμενος να μπορεί να αποφασίζει αν θα συμμετάσχει» (The Economist, 8-14 Ιανουαρίου 2011).

Πέραν του ότι η εμπειρική διερεύνηση του ρόλου των συνδικάτων σε σχέση με την οικονομική ανάπτυξη δεν αποδεικνύει ότι τα πρώτα εμποδίζουν τη δεύτερη, το σύνολο του επιχειρήματος της σχολής του εκσυγχρονισμού όσον αφορά τη μεταρρύθμιση και τους θεσμούς είναι προβληματικό. Όπως αναφέρει ο Ε. Τσακαλώτος «στην εκσυγχρονιστική σκέψη οι θεσμοί παρουσιάζονται ως εξωγενείς: εξετάζεται η ευνοϊκή ή δυσμενής επίδρασή τους στην οικονομία, αλλά δεν ξοδεύεται πολύς κόπος και χρόνος για ‘το πώς και γιατί’ συγκεκριμένοι θεσμοί βρέθηκαν σε μια συγκεκριμένη χώρα. Δεν εξηγούνται δηλαδή οι θεσμοί, αλλά χρησιμοποιούνται για να εξηγήσουν επιτυχημένες και αποτυχημένες περιπτώσεις οικονομικής αποτελεσματικότητας. Και τα δύο σκέλη, έτσι, είναι άκρως προβληματικά: από τη μια η υποτίμηση της ιστορικής διαμόρφωσης των θεσμών, και από την άλλη η ιδέα ότι οι θεσμοί είναι βασικά εκεί για να εξυπηρετήσουν μια συγκεκριμένη αντίληψη περί ανταγωνιστικής οικονομίας» («Θεσμοί, Οικονομία, Εκσυγχρονισμός», http://rnbnet.gr/details.php?id=1268).

Όλα αυτά όμως είναι λεπτομέρειες για την κυρίαρχη αντίληψη περί εξόδου από την κρίση. Το συμπέρασμα του περιοδικού προβάλλει αναντίρρητο: «η θεωρία μας είναι καλή, άλλα πράγματα είναι που φταίνε». Η θεωρία καλή, η πραγματικότητα (που δε συμφωνεί μαζί της) προβληματική και η ελαφρότητα του έγκυρου Εconomist αβάσταχτη….

“7ος Πυλώνας: Αποτελεσματικότητα στην αγορά εργασίας

Η αποτελεσματικότητα και η ευελιξία της αγοράς εργασίας εξασφαλίζουν ότι οι εργαζόμενοι θα διατίθενται στις αποτελεσματικότερες χρήσεις στην οικονομία και θα τους δίνονται κίνητρα να αποδίδουν τα μέγιστα στην εργασία τους. Γι’ αυτό, οι αγορές εργασίας πρέπει να έχουν την ευελιξία να μετακινούν τους εργαζόμενους από τη μία οικονομική δραστηριότητα στην άλλη γρήγορα και με χαμηλό κόστος και να επιτρέπουν μεταβολές στους μισθούς χωρίς κοινωνικές παρεμβολές. Η σημασία του τελευταίου έγινε προφανής με δραματικό τρόπο στις δυσκολίες που συνάντησαν χώρες με άκαμπτες αγορές εργασίας- όπως η Ισπανία- να συνέλθουν από την πρόσφατη οικονομική ύφεση…”.

Κοινωνική “παρεμβολή”!! ΤΩΡΑ!!!!