I've never experienced someone standing up while seated until today. Perhaps I should have expected it from the number of cognitive dissonances that led up to it. I arrived in Berlin yesterday to attend the Moscow School of Civic Education's seminar on The Idea of Europe - The Search for Identity between Liberalism and Conservatism, organised in partnership with the German-Russian Forum, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Robert Bosch Foundation.
Berlin - a city many of whose inhabitants are still coming to terms with the cognitive dissonance of having been a unity divided into eastern and western parts by the Berlin wall. The wall may have fallen, but the memories of life on either side of it haven't faded. Over lunch on the first day, I talked to one of the simultaneous translators who reminisced about having worked as a simultaneous translator for a West German politician whose views on life in East Germany bore absolutely no relation to the reality of her day-to-day life as an East German.
Walls aren't always made of concrete, bricks, or stone. There are stronger, more ephemeral walls that partition periods in history - walls between the communist era and the Glasnost/Perestroika era; walls between Hitler's Germany and a Germany recovering from the effects of WWII; walls erected by the reaction to Luther's Theses ...
Luther's theses came up in the opening presentation by Tim Arnold, Senior Consultant for Public Affairs at Vodafone Deutschland, whose presentation was selective in relation to Luther - focusing more on his wish to bring about reform in the Catholic Church, not break away from it than focusing on Luther's increasingly dictatorial behaviour towards the end of his life, and completely ignoring the vital educational role played by Melanchthon in the process of bringing about reformational change. The talk inspired an intelligent debate between Russian Orthodox delegates, the Catholic chair, and the Lutheran speaker, and yet ... the walls between them remained, the walls erected by faith the strongest of all.
My perspective on the experience is that of a communications consultant - I'm more interested in observing the patterns and structures that people are using at the conference to frame and express their thoughts than in the content. I'm interested in the logical flow behind the stories they tell, and what gives rise to them. I listen to subtext as much as to text.
And the subtext of the communication on the first day was full of walls - walls that separate people from their humanity. Historical walls that separated people then; mental walls that separate them now. Their presence was palpable, as were the signs of stress and psychic pressure - high breathing, caught breaths, fast speech, and a marked
increase in creaky voice quality among Russian delegates by comparison with other seminars I've attended in the past.
In a session provocatively entitled 'Russia, get out of Europe!', Dr H C Friedrich Schorlemmer, a dissident theologian who spoke out against communism in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, provoked not so much disagreement or debate as misunderstanding - 'I am neither a Russophobe nor a Russophile,' he said. What he was seemed to remain unclear to the audience, adding yet one more brick of cognitive dissonance to the wall.
Cognitive dissonance is in no way limited to Russian or German cultures. The British mindset is full of cognitive dissonances. Questions of Scottish independence arose in debate in relation to Kosovo and Ukraine. No mention was made of the controversial record of religious intolerance that plagues British history, the painful path to creating a viable multi-cultural society, or the important positive contributions and opportunities created by the Commonwealth of
Nations. It is important, perhaps, to note that Prince Charles once said in the context of a discussion about his views on becoming a monarch, that he wished not to be Defender Of The Faith, Defender Of All Faiths. It's regrettably probably one of the reasons he is unlikely to succeed his mother. More's the pity. At the heart or ruling is the concept of order. Monastic orders live according to a set of rules. They seek to bring perception and conception into harmony, just as giving or taking an order should. A unit can only be divided proportionally into two halves in two ways: into halves (a
rational division in 1:1 proportion) or in the golden ratio (an irrational division where a:b::b:a+b). It was not clear what sense of order participants were seeking - an equal voice, and equal recognition, or a sense of order in which proportionally different parts could combine to make a harmonious whole.
It was a theme which reverberated in Yura Senokossov's words when he said that Russians needed to find a new means of measuring tolerance, to bring European and Russian uses of the word, their understanding of the terms it describes and their realisation of it in action more into harmony. It's a theme that inevitably creates dissonance when juxtaposed with questions of security and terrorism, as delegates were quick to point out. Emil Pain, one of the School's speakers, used humour and irony as powerful tools to point out the pervasive notion of Russians as 'a non-European other' in European consciousness, despite the fact that many - though not all - Russians present thought of Russia as being part of Europe. The shifts in points of view which resulted were tangible in some of the discussions which ensued.
Cognitive dissonance is hard to deal with, but it's a key component of two distinct narrative forms - Zen Koans, which seek to resolve the cognitive dissonances by dissolving the mental wall between our sense perceptions and our ideas; and African Dilemma Tales, which seek to build a set of common values by setting up cognitive dissonances which
spark debates that seek - if not to resolve the dissonances, then at least to build consensus as to how to live with them.
I suspect it would come as a shock to participants and organisers that in a seminar which seeks to encourage open, constructive dialogue and critical debate about Russia and Europe and seek to find a middle ground between Liberalism and Conservatism, aspects of African and Zen Buddhist cultures could provide ways to successfully negotiate the
impasse, allowing people to step forward from their oppositional positions on their respective grounds, and stand together on the boundary line which divides them, turning 45 degrees to take in the view from either side at once. While there were shifts in thought from 'either/or' to 'both/and', there was a distinct lack of people's ability to embrace global, or universal frameworks and transcend dualistic thinking to find common ground in common human experience
and shared values.
It's not impossible, where walls exist, to climb on top of them, straddle them, and look as far as one can at the landscape in all directions. The danger in doing this is to adopt a Janus-like outlook, looking simultaneously back at the past and into the future. How do we dissolve the internal walls that evoke that cognitive dissonance?
It was not on a wall, but in her chair, that Lena Nemirovskaya stood up for what she believed in, when she berated her German hosts for supporting the decision to bring sanctions against Russia. 'The German economy and German industries are major players in the global market today, but that position would not be possible without the support of the democratic institutions that underpin them. Germany would not be in this position today had a decision not been made to support the reconstruction of Germany after WWII. It was here, in Germany, that Germany was offered support for its regeneration plan on the condition that the regeneration was founded on democratic principles and involved setting up democratic institutions. You have an opportunity to take the same position now - don't stand against us. Help us build a society founded on democratic institutions. Don't build a higher wall. Open a door.'
Doors aren't the only option. Transcendence is one way, dialogue is another and it was through dialogue that the German President for the German Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde, Ruprecht Polenz, arrived at a point where he thanked the delegates at the seminar, saying, 'You've changed the way I think about [relations between Europe and Russia].'
The dialogue continues.
P.S.: Photos
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