The Tragic Mind in Washington, Athens, and the Tragedy of Central Europe
In his 2021 Templeton Lecture on Religion and Global Affairs “Geopolitics and Religion in the 21st Century,” Robert Kaplan notes how technology, rather counterintuitively, leads to alienation, which he feels reinforces the need for religion in much of the world. Naturally this trend is complex and has many expressions in different societies. One of the more evocative examples that illustrated this thesis in his talk came from an earlier visit to Turkey where he saw many signs of the intense religiosity of the residents, among them burkas frequently worn by Muslim women, while virtually everyone was glued to their smart phones. In his book The Tragic Mind he likewise finds radical effects of the spread of technology such as social media on Washington, which results in the fraying of the national fabric that had existed after World War II, and now bringing about “the rank partisanship in Washington” in a “messy, dangerous world, both foreign and domestic.” He argues the tragic mind is a major resource for such turbulent times, providing insight to possibly prevent true tragedy. He finds substantive support for his intuition in ancient Greek authors and their works, together with the Bard from Stratford, which help him to understand and illuminate much of what he has witnessed in his long career as a journalist.
True to what is to be expected from such a topic, Kaplan’s book largely deals with worst case scenarios, albeit presented in a creative fashion. To get a broader context to some aspects of his timely book it is worth turning to Thomas Sowell’s insightful A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles of 1987. In this book Sowell introduces his concept of the broadly termed constrained and unconstrained visions underpinning numerous political ideologies and programs. The unconstrained vision focuses on human intentions and ideals and how far these can be taken. What is disconcerting is how this vision can be pushed to the ends justifying the means of attaining them. Sowell gives the example of the French Revolution, which gave “the power of life and death to those who spoke in the name of the people.” Sounds rather familiar, does it not? In contrast, the American Revolution provided a constitution that realized these tendencies within us and established necessary constraints with its system of checks and balances.
Unsurprisingly, Kaplan’s The Tragic Mind is in line with the constrained view of politics. The constrained view is potentially broader than a tragic view of politics, but it can be said to include its perspective within it. The same is true with the intuition the author gained in his earlier work, where as a journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent in many troubled and conflicted areas for four decades he gained insight into the difficulties of leadership, and observed that many journalists and intellectuals seem too eager to pass judgment upon those who bear the burden of power. Through these travels he also has noted the constraints geography places on political developments. For instance, in one of the discussions he engaged in after the publication of his earlier The Revenge of Geography in 2012 he astutely observed that with its history and position both within the EU and so close to Russia Poland’s outlook on many matters is affected in a particular manner. In this example he hinted at the truth he now expresses that goes beyond maps: “The truths of greater interest always involve the province of the heart, in which we drill downward from the map, to culture and accumulated historical experience, to finally the individual.”
The broad concept at the base of his current book naturally lends itself to political philosophy. And there is a philosophical resonance to Kaplan’s approach, but of a particular kind. Within Aristotle’s fundamental division of philosophy into theoretical and practical—that is, phronēsis—it might be claimed political philosophy is to a large degree practical. Whatever notions they are based on—ideologies in the more practical worldview sense rather than as doctrines—when they meet up with the realities of the day there is a measure of give and take. At least we can say this in terms of the political philosophy that emerges from Kaplan’s reflections. As he puts it, “Tragedy begins with the searing awareness of the narrow choices we face, however vast the landscape: the knowledge that not everything is possible, regardless of the conditions.” But what about Kaplan’s reliance on Greek authors? What is interesting here is that he largely draws upon the playwrights, that is those thinkers—and thinkers they were—who tried to find concrete illustrations to their ideas. For instance, Sophocles provocatively gives us Antigone and her conflict between the laws of the state and her duty to her family. As Kaplan puts it, “The heroine is caught between family custom and political decree.” And how does this pertain to more current political problems he brings up in his book? He continues: “For Hegel, such choices can be ‘turning points’ between one kind of order and another. This is where the personal, family drama intersects the destinies of city-states and empires.”
This conclusion is an example of the reflections of the Kaplan of the think tanks that he graced when he limited his travels somewhat to reflect more deeply upon what he had learned. And his book is certainly enriched by his own experiences and observations from these journeys that echo the Greek playwrights together with Shakespeare and several likeminded contemporary authors. One of those more formative experiences inspired him to write The Tragic Mind. In the preface he writes: “My interest in the ancient Greeks and their influence on Shakespeare was kindled in Athens, from where I travelled constantly to see the very things Greeks feared: chaos and forms of order so extreme that they were, in fact, a species of chaos.” What immediately follows is his description of two intimately connected experiences which were to transform how he ended up viewing tragedy and he claims led him to finally write the book. In 1986 he spent time in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq where he felt matters could not be worse. Even embassies warned their citizens that they could not be protected by them once they left their confines. Kaplan writes that the frightening experience led him to support the war the Americans conducted to remove the dictator. But when he returned in 2004 during that war the bloody anarchy he encountered was so intense that it led him to suffer clinical depression. He concludes: “What would henceforth ring in my ears was the observation of the medieval Persian philosopher Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali that one year of anarchy is worse than a hundred years of tyranny.”
In metaphorical terms he leaves Athens in the course of the succinct chapters of his book, starting in each from a discussion of at least one ancient author, that concludes with contemporary parallels that either he witnessed as a journalist or is familiar with through various accounts, together with astute commentary. He passes through various stages of tragedy these authors describe in a logical sequence, concluding that fear is conducive to developing a sense of humility on account of which the tragic mind does not simply choose between good and evil, a fairly obvious matter, but must decide which is the lesser evil in order to reduce “the risk of catastrophes.” Following these chapters, he comes at last to the relationship between tragedy and religion, and the birth of conscience. As he puts it, “Guilt and conscience, which play a large part in the modern Christian West, are central to the realm of tragedy. And because there is such a thing as a guilty conscience, there is also evil, which requires one to overcome one’s conscience.” Here Kaplan turns to Shakespeare’s Iago, whom he regards as more diabolical than the Biblical Satan. In modern times an Iago-like character is Vladimir Putin. Here one must commend the author for not falling for the common error of realism that accuses the West of motivating the new demonic invasion: that case is refuted in Mark Galeotti’s Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (2022), where the author demonstrates the continuity in the imperialist’s actions. But in his tragic realism Kaplan warns: “Fighting evil is a good, but it is also a good not to overextend your political and military capacities in fighting it.” He gives the example of Franklin Roosevelt forming an alliance with the satanic Stalin to defeat the even greater evil of Hitler.
Kaplan’s reflection on the tragic mind is quite powerful and timely. He persuasively makes the case that: “Tragedy is . . . comprehension. By thinking tragically, one is aware of all one’s limitations, and thus can act with more effectiveness.” This is the burden of power that the author notes has been inadequately understood in recent years. The topic of tragedy, however, as the author presents it, is like a Pandora’s box the attentive reader feels stirred to penetrate further.
When Kaplan claims Putin has not reached the evil of his Georgian hero, that may be true; but he has nevertheless made further strides in Stalin’s direction since The Tragic Mind was published toward the end of 2022. Moreover, he certainly outdoes the evil of Leonid Brezhnev, who invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 and whose eponymous doctrine, by which he retroactively sanctioned the act, stressing the duty of all fraternal communist parties to come to the aid of any country where “the gains of socialism” have been threatened, seems ominously close to Putin’s justification of his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But the earlier invasion also had a role in inspiring a profound response to the problem of tragedy.
In 1975 Czech author Milan Kundera emigrated to France where among other things he wrote the seminal essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe” in French, which was translated into English shortly afterwards and published in The New York Review of Books in 1985. In the essay Kundera wrote poignantly about small nations as those “whose very existence could be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear and it knows it.” What Kaplan points out in his epilogue, is that in the speech that George H.W. Bush delivered in Kiev in 1991 when Ukraine declared its independence, he effectively conveyed that Ukraine was a small nation in the above sense. Kundera starts his essay with the report the director of the Hungarian news agency sent by telex to the world at the onset of the Soviet invasion of his country, which ended with the words: “We are going to die for Hungary and for Europe.” Now Ukrainians are dying for their own country and Europe.
Besides Hungary, Kundera was primarily referring to his own Czechoslovakia, with regards to its invasion by the Soviets, and Poland, with its struggles with the Communist regime. In another of his earlier essays Kundera had no doubt about the threat that Russia continually posed, for which the Soviet state was merely a historical mantle, and he also worried about the indifference of the West. Stefan Auer, who reviewed the book that has fortuitously reprinted both of his essays referred to here,[1] poses the question: “Where is Central Europe now? That uncertain region between the West and the East moved to Ukraine, just as Russia remains as far from Europe as it ever was.” Auer points out Kundera’s fears concerning Russia were confirmed, and that the West had changed, but “the true tragedy of Ukraine would be if the West has not changed sufficiently.” And with the somewhat utopian unconstrained ideology of the European Union together with the double standards it not infrequently exhibits toward former “small nations” that are now within its ranks, that is indeed a serious question. As Kundera himself put it, “all European nations run the risk of becoming small nations and of sharing their fate.” And now that the so called “peace dividend” on which Western European countries coasted for so long has come to an end, that insight must be taken seriously by them as well.
The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate and the Burden of Power
By Robert D. Kaplan,
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023; pp. 135
NOTE:
[1] The book is Milan Kundera, A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe (Faber & Faber 2023). Auer’s review was published by Chatham House.
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