I mention this by way of conceding that the odds on keeping resolutions are slim. Nobody keeps them. The record is terrible. But even so, I am going to urge that we try to make a national resolution this year. It is once and for all to stop looking at the world around us as the sum total of its governments, to stop looking at whole countries and the vast populations within them as if they were nothing more than their political leaders or even official buildings: the White House feels … the Kremlin believes … Downing Street knows … and so forth.
This slovenly mental habit contributed mightily to our slowness to perceive and credit what was going on in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It accounts for much of the embarrassment of a press that prides itself on knowing things first but has too often been seen coming in last. Countries, peoples, are not their governments. Governments do not begin to encompass or embody the totality of human beings-the culture, the social structure, the daily life, the affections and hostilities and ambitions and relationships of millions of individuals. And yet a couple of nasty geezers in, say, East Berlin would issue some edict and we would say: “East Germany said yesterday…”
The very notion of government–its power and its importance–has been inflated beyond recognition in our perception of the world around us and our own country as well. Yes, it is true that there are functions from the economic to the custodial to the military that only governments can perform. But government and its works account for only a fraction of the actual vitality and activity of a country, and thinking otherwise is an invitation to further misunderstanding. We overestimate what governments can do: we read their press releases and believe we have seen the truth.
Consider how much we bought into the idea over the years that people are susceptible to brainwashing, collective behavior modification, indoctrination from above as administered by government officials. Yet everything that has happened in the last five years in the newly liberated parts of Europe and Eurasia demonstrates how much stronger and more durable the impulses of religion, kinship and group loyalty (and, alas, group hatred) were than the unnatural decrees issued by government officials attempting to displace or destroy them. Consider how we saw the most armed and tightly controlled and unsentimental governments in the world collapse at precisely the point the mob in the street took on frightening mass. Look what craven, whimpering plea bargainers most of these once iron-fisted rulers instantly became. Look how astonished we were to discover that there was a whole teeming life behind those indistinguishable pictures, night after night, of officials getting in and out of big black cars and saying they were hopeful but had no comment. Why do we think such tableaux, whether here or in Europe or anyplace else in the world, represent somehow the story of what happened, what mattered in that place that day?
People everywhere, as it seems, are sick of old governments, sick of their pretensions. New forms, new leaders keep emerging. I do not put our own democratic government in the same category with the repressor states being upended, or our own dissatisfactions in a class with theirs. While we, in our advanced condition, fiddle with the idea of fixed-term limits, many of them explore for the first time the concept of having fixed terms at all. And yet, even without final constitutions, an idea of popular legitimacy has emerged from the totalitarian wasteland we knew as the Soviet empire. The entire thing occupied provinces, party apparatus and union itself-dissolved and miraculously did so (so far) peacefully. Its reconfiguration is only beginning. But however it turns out, we will be faced with an entirely different, an entirely new set of nations and international relationships.
It is for this reason-we are not at the end or beginning of a single year so much as we are at the end and beginning of eras-that I feel so strongly about trying to do it better this time, about, yes, resolving to try anyhow to see other countries plain and straight. The other day I heard some of my friends sardonically wondering what the zealous anti-communist right would do without Soviet communism as a foil. I wondered what they would do without the zealous anticommunist right as a foil. I also wonder about the insufferable countries that played both cold-war sides against each other for advantage, all the while. claiming some superior moral status to both.
Only a fool would believe that all such people who had found a comfy intellectual-political niche in the old dispensation, a warm, well-lighted perch from which to heckle and argue and tend to their self-satisfaction, would be willing or eager now to consider where they may have been wrong or how to improve their powers of observation. But there must be some. My guess is that the coming age will be one in which the status of government, its presumed right to continuous growth, its assumed capacity to accomplish gigantic feats and its confusion with the much larger entity it represents-i.e., the people, the country-will all be cut back to size. Proper governments protect; they adjudicate; they provide service, enforce rules, try to neutralize disadvantage, penalize bullying and greed and maintain order and fairness. These obligations should stand and in some instances be expanded. But people all over the world in their different ways are demonstrating that their lives are neither contained in nor defined by the stone edifices from which their leaders speak. In the coming age let us all resolve to be, if not thinner and more considerate of others, at least reasonably attentive to the reality of the world around us.
