Tarkovsky On Good Friday

And: Why Is Liberalism Dying? Because We Have Become 'A Gathering Of Animals'

Andrei Tarkovsky (d. 1986)

A blessed Good Friday to our Western Christian friends who observe. It is a strange thing to stand outside where you all gather on this grim and sacred day. The Orthodox calendar has our Good Friday landing in early May this year, so this is just another Friday in Lent for us. I guess I’m feeling what non-Christians do on Christian holy days: nothing, aside from good will for Christians who are in church praying. Yet it’s hard to get one’s imagination into that same headspace (you non-Orthodox will experience the same thing on Orthodox Good Friday). Anyway, this is just to say that I wish you well this Easter weekend.

I’ll start this morning with some profound material I’ve seen in the 2019 documentary Andrei Tarkovsky: A Cinema Prayer. It’s a collection of images and interview clips from the great Russian filmmaker, compiled by his son, Andrei Andreyich Tarkovsky, who lives in Florence. You can see the film on the Criterion Channel in the US, but that service is not available in Hungary. Because I’m going to be going to Florence next month to visit Tarkovsky figlio, and roadtrip with him to Montesiepi, to pray at St. Galgano’s sword embedded in the stone, and to visit the nearby ruined Abbey of St. Galgano, which figures so powerfully in his father’s Nostalghia, the younger Tarkovsky sent me a link that allowed me to watch it on Vimeo. That’s what I did yesterday, and took notes.

The debate over whether or not Tarkovsky was religious is settled definitively by this film. We hear the director’s voice saying that he can’t remember when he changed, and began to believe. What we don’t know, though, is to what extent he was Orthodox. First coming to Tarkovsky as an Orthodox Christian, I was startled by how religious his work was, even in the years when he definitely wasn’t religious. I found the answer in this interview with his son:

My father was of a later generation, but he had very strong spiritual connections to Dostoyevsky. You see, in Russia, philosophy was always—how can I put it?—impregnated by religion and spirituality. You didn’t have explicitly secular philosophy like in the West. That’s how you can read my father’s work: he never questioned the “given” fact that every art had to be founded in spirituality. [Emphasis mine — RD] My father believed in tradition. He always told me: “You have to learn everything and then you have to forget.” But you have to always keep yourself connected to your culture. That’s why he was trying to give his films their depth and why he was using, for example, music by Bach or images by Brueghel—it was all about providing a historical background to define a solid foundation. A foundation he believed that cinema just was about to lose.

In the documentary, we hear Tarkovsky saying that culture cannot exist without religion, nor can religion exist without culture. (The word “need” in the translation seems to be used in the sense of “feels the need to drawn on”.):

In a certain sense, religion is sublimated in culture and culture in religion. It’s a process of interdependence. If a society needs spirituality, it starts to produce artwork and to generate artists. If it does not need spirituality, a society will make do without art, but the number of unhappy people will grow, and spiritually dissatisfied people will increase. Humans will lose their purpose, and no longer understand why they exist. … So, with regard to religion, it’s not a personal matter to me. It concerns the fate of a culture, of our civilization.

Tarkovsky speaks of the sacramental character of the image. A truly artistic image serves as a bridge between heaven and earth, between the Eternal and the Temporal, between the Abstract and the Concrete. It contains within it something of the concrete world, but it ultimately has to retain some mystery. The true artistic symbol is not a puzzle to be solved, but a doorway through which one can access eternal truths that cannot be reached otherwise.

Tarkovsky says that you cannot make real art without God. “When you get on your knees and turn all your feelings to God, you find words, true words. In the same way, true images are born.” He goes on to say that whatever your profession, you should think of it like a prayer addressed to the Creator.

“The meaning of art is prayer,” he says. “It is my prayer. And if my prayer were to become a prayer to others, in that case my art would become intimately the art of others.”

Communion, then. He continues, saying that it is the duty of all men to be of service to others. “Because there is only one principle of interaction in this world, thank God, and that is to serve — and nothing else.”

The darker and more difficult life becomes for all of us, the more important it is to create art, he says. Art is a manifestation of hope. Any art that does not offer hope, in Tarkovsky’s view, is not true art, because it has been unfaithful to ultimate reality. Here is the director on the set of his final film, The Sacrifice:

This was a great film, this documentary. It’s worth joining the Criterion Collection, if only for one month, to watch. Several times during my viewing, tears welled up in my eyes, for reasons I both understood and for reasons I did not. Tarkovsky is deep.

Why Is Liberalism Dying? Well, Isn’t It Obvious?

David Brooks has a column today about the dying of liberalism, why that’s a bad thing, and why people ought to fight for it. As y’all know, David and I are friends. I genuinely like and respect him. He is a surpassingly kind man. I always defend him when people criticize him — though I don’t usually defend his opinions. Today’s column is a big reason why. He writes:

Trust is the faith that other people will do what they ought to do. When there are no shared moral values and norms, then social trust plummets. People feel alienated and under siege, and, as Hannah Arendt observed, lonely societies turn to authoritarianism. People eagerly follow the great leader and protector, the one who will lead the us/them struggle that seems to give life meaning.

During our current moment of global populism, the liberal tradition is under threat. Many people have gone economically nationalist and culturally traditionalist. Around the world, authoritarian moralists promise to restore the old ways, the old religion, national greatness. “There are certain things which are more important than ‘me,’ than my ego — family, nation, God,” Viktor Orban declared. Such men promise to restore the anchors of cultural, moral and civic stability, but they use brutal and bigoted strongman methods to get there.

President Biden tried to win over the disaffected by showering them with jobs and economic benefits. It doesn’t seem to have worked politically because the real absence people are feeling is an absence of meaning, belonging and recognition.

You could have predicted that I would respond to the criticism of Orban. Brooks is quoting from the national day speech Orban gave a couple of weeks back. I invite you to read the speech. In it, Orban posits the things he believes in, and that he says Hungarians believe in, against what decadent Western liberalism has become. It is a speech designed to remind Hungarians that what they value is not valued in most Western countries, and that they had better be willing to fight to preserve these things. Look at these new data from the Wall Street Journal:

To be fair, Hungary is suffering from the same trends. But it’s not as far gone as much of the West is, and at least the Hungarians have elected a government that is trying its hardest to push back — and is an outcast in the West for that fact.

I don’t think Brooks opposes “family, nation, God,” certainly not when opposed rhetorically to “I, me, mine”. It’s just that he finds Viktor Orban distasteful. People like Brooks insist on creating this straw-man villain, and utterly miss the overwhelming facts about the liberal societies they valorize. I wrote about this phenomenon in the European Conservative this week. I start by talking about how, driving into Budapest from the airport, you see several billboards erected by the political Left here, denouncing Orban as adjacent to pedophilia (this refers to a scandal in which the Hungarian president, who was of his party, was forced to resign after pardoning a man convicted of covering up a pedophile’s crimes). I write:

Still, bearing in mind how the U.S. president recently denounced Orban as a “dictator”—a slur widely repeated in Western media and public discourse—you have to wonder what kind of strongman would allow himself to be publicly criticized as a promoter of pedophilia. If Orban really were a dictator, wouldn’t these billboards have been banned? Wouldn’t those who paid for them be eating goulash in a gulag now? 

It hasn’t happened, because Hungary is vastly more respectful of free speech than many of the liberal democracies whose authoritarianism draws no condemnation, or even notice. 

In Finland, for example, the state is planning to put on trial for a third time Païvi Räsänen, a Finnish parliamentarian and former state minister, who was twice acquitted on the same hate crimes charges. What did she do wrong? In 2019, Räsänen, a Protestant grandmother, tweeted out a Bible verse critical of homosexuality. Plus, state prosecutors are going after her for a 2004 pamphlet she authored with a Finnish Lutheran bishop, explaining the Christian view of sexuality (that is, why homosexuality is considered sinful). 

Think about it: Finland, a liberal democracy, is putting a petite grandmother on trial for quoting the Bible on Twitter, and for writing a pamphlet with a bishop twenty years ago explaining traditional Christian sexual morals. 

This is the kind of thing that happens in dictatorships. Has President Biden spoken out in defense of Païvi Räsänen? Have any European government leaders? Has the media called Finland an illiberal autocracy? Of course not. Authoritarianism, even dictatorial moves, are fine when carried out in service of left-wing policy goals.

In the column, I bring up several more glaring examples from Britain and Ireland, of free speech being harshly quashed in ways that simply don’t happen in Hungary. I didn’t even get into the inconvenient truth that Budapest is one of the safest cities in Europe for Jews today. Why? Because Hungary has very low migration rates from the Islamic world. Western liberals love to criticize Hungary for being relatively closed to migrants, but they would all love to have the low crime rates Hungary has, and cities where Jews are safe from raging anti-Semites.

Hungary certainly has anti-Semitic white supremacists in the country, but they are (thank God) a fairly small group, and they don’t manifest with anything remotely like the show of force of Muslims and their left-wing allies in other European capitals. In fact, in the last election, the political party that had been most friendly to anti-Semites, Jobbik, allied with the Left coalition against Viktor Orban. Did you ever see that reported in the Western media? Did David Brooks notice this complication?

The “bigoted and brutal strongman methods” Brooks laments are largely a fiction. But it is true that Orban is a fighter. In this he stands out by comparison to mainstream conservative leaders throughout the West, who typically acquiesce to whatever the Left wants, if only passively, by failing to resist it out of fear of being called bigots.

You might recall the story I tell from 2015, after Obergefell, when I visited Capitol Hill to give a speech to Christian staffers in Congress, and met afterward with top staffers from the House and Senate GOP. I asked them what legislative plans they had to defend religious liberty post-Obergefell. The answer: none. Their Senators and Representatives hadn’t even thought about it. These staffers worked for men and women that conservative voters, many of them Christians, sent to Washington to protect their interests, and they were all going to take a pass. That was a massive red pill moment for me, one when I realized that we orthodox Christians and other social conservatives are all alone. Later, I spoke to a veteran religious liberty lobbyist in Washington, who told me that Republicans are scared to death of being called bigots in the media.

If any of them had taken a meaningful stand for religious liberty, the pundits of the world would have denounced them for using “bigoted and brutal strongman methods,” I’m certain. Again, in the United States, and the rest of the Western world, liberals and progressives, especially within institutions, are shutting down free speech, and advancing programs that affirmatively discriminate against whites and Asians, as well as marginalize people who dissent from left-wing ideology. It’s happening all over, in ways that never occur in Hungary. Yet because these things are being done by polite, clubbable liberals, the kinds of people who look and sound like David Brooks, the David Brookses of the world don’t notice. They denounce right-wing politicians like Viktor Orban as thugs, while the evisceration of liberal democracy goes on at the hands of respectable butchers in legislatures, think tanks, banks, newsrooms, corporations, and institutions.

Look at El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. He’s unquestionably an autocrat and a strongman — yet he is overwhelmingly supported by his people. Why? Because he ended the tyranny of the gangs, who had made El Salvador the most murderous country on earth. He did it by throwing them all in prison, and not apologizing for it. Now decent society can thrive there. Ordinary people are grateful. But the human rights people in America tut-tut Bukele for being illiberal. So what! What did El Salvadoran liberal democracy do for the people of that country? It made them slaves of the barbarian criminals.

Liberal democracy is not an end in itself, but rather a means to the end that is a good society. I started to write that Brooks must not have read Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, but googled and discovered that he had — and had written a 2018 column about it. Excerpt:

Deneen’s book is valuable because it focuses on today’s central issue. The important debates now are not about policy. They are about the basic values and structures of our social order. Nonetheless, he is wrong. Liberal democracy has had a pretty good run for 300 years. If the problem were really in the roots, wouldn’t it have shown up before now?

The difficulties stem not from anything inherent in liberalism but from the fact that we have neglected the moral order and the vision of human dignity embedded within liberalism itself.

This grossly misses the point of Deneen’s book. Deneen argues that liberalism has failed because it succeeded brilliantly in elevating the choosing individual. The problem, though, is that liberalism only works within a pre-political moral framework that sets the boundaries on what can be chosen, and instructs those within the liberal system on both their rights and their duties. This was the political role played by Christianity within Western liberal democracies. As Alasdair MacIntyre was one of the first to see, without a binding source of moral value shared by most within a society, the society begins to fall apart. We cast aside Christianity, but have not been able to come up with a replacement that serves the same political role.

This is why the problem Deneen identifies did not show up before: because, as John Adams observed in the 18th century, the public goods produced by liberalism depend on the private convictions of Christianity in the hearts and minds of the people. This is not to say that liberalism only works in a political communion of saints, which doesn’t exist and can’t exist this side of paradise. It is simply to say that we have to have a broadly shared sense of right and wrong, of limits, and of moral authority. Without them, you get what we have today, and the even worse things we will have tomorrow.

From the 30,000 foot view, the Brookses don’t see things like this:

A trans woman has been helped to breastfeed her grandchild, in what is thought to be a world first.

The unidentified 50-year-old was helped to express up to 30ml of milk at a time, after a four week course of hormone treatment.

Researchers from Duke University reported the woman ‘lactated for a total of two weeks’ and was able to feed the four-month-old baby.

The motivation for inducing lactation was to create a ‘bond from breastfeeding that she had not been able to experience with her own five children’.

She was moved to tears by the experience, which she said had the added benefit of affirming her female gender and making her breasts larger.

Nor do they see things like the Texas gay couple, a pair of hairdressers, who got an egg from a female friend, had it artificially inseminated with a mixture of their semen, and then implanted in the sister of one of the men. This is nothing but a business transaction, so these men can have a baby as a lifestyle accessory. Watch the bizarro story here, and listen to the men denounce the haters who say there’s something very wrong with this.

I’m not just pointing this out for its freakshow qualities. These four demented people are where liberalism severed from an anchoring in transcendence has taken us. Family doesn’t matter. Life is not sacred — it’s a commodity. The only thing that matters is choice, not what is chosen. Those four people are emblematic of what liberalism is today. Let me be clear: we have always had freaks among us, but these particular freaks are now held up as pioneers of choice and individuality. Neither law, custom, religion, or nature should stand in the way of them getting whatever they want, and can afford. This is the kind of social order liberalism has built. A social order that not only permits this, but cheers for it as a blessing of liberty, is not a social order that can sustain itself. Nor is it one that deserves to survive.

Also emblematic of today’s liberalism are all these poor teenagers destroying their bodies seeking happiness and stability as transgenders. Here in Hungary, the “brutal and bigoted” government decided to try to protect Hungarian kids from this transgender cult by banning LGBT lessons in schools, and propaganda in the media. The Hungarians can see what is happening in the West, and don’t want it here. If the price of protecting their kids, and their society, is to be sneered at as bigoted and brutal by Western liberals who haven’t protected a thing, then that’s one they are prepared to pay.

The bizarre thing about that column is that Brooks correctly diagnoses the crisis of liberalism today as a crisis of meaning. If you are a reader of Brooks, you know that he thinks a lot about this. And yet, he cannot seem to make the connection that liberalism unbound from the restraining force of religion, or some other binding transcendent source of value and identity, results in anarchy. Tarkovsky grew up in the Soviet Union, and knew this. Brooks grew up in America, and does not … or maybe he does, but for some reason can’t make the connection between liberalism and its own demise.

Why are the weirdos of Texas a symbol of the decline of liberalism in America? Why is the breastfeeding tranny granny? Once again: because a country in which that kind of bizarre behavior, radically contrary to nature, is permitted and indeed encouraged, is a country that has severed itself from any shared and binding source of meaning. It’s radical individualism, all the way down. It cannot possibly hold together. Liberalism grounded in Christianity produced perhaps the most free and thriving societies that ever existed. Post-Christian liberalism is becoming degenerate. If we will not have God, then He will not force himself on us. But, to paraphrase Eliot, if you will not have God, then you had better prepare to pay your respects to Tranny Granny and George Soros.

Here in Europe, there will be continent-wide European parliament elections this year. If the so-called “far right” (as it will inevitably be described by the media) make gains, it will be because liberalism, through the mass migration policies that have been supported by governments both Left and Right since the 1960s, has brought to Europe the threat of the dissolution of nations and peoples. The Left has welcomed the glorious diversity of the migrants, seeing in them a solution for the unbearable heaviness of being white and of Christian descent. The Right has welcomed the cheap labor. The result has been catastrophic.

Germany is now dealing with the rise of a hard-right party, which would not have gotten off the ground if the mainstream German parties of both Left and Right had not opened the migration floodgates. Regarding Hungary, European and American liberals seize up over the hardball that the Orban government has played with progressive billionaire George Soros. It’s illiberal! It’s anti-Semitic! In fact, Orban recognized from the beginning that Soros is a progressive billionaire oligarch who devoted considerable energy and money to bringing his native country, Hungary, into the club of nations where borders don’t exist, where migrants replace the natives, where the traditional family is just one option among many, where prostitution is legal and protected, and all the rest.

The point is this: from a certain point of view, Soros is a bigot against traditionalists and conservatives, who cloaks his brutal methods with the silken veils of elite respectability. Orban, born and raised a clever country boy, had his number from the word go. The David Brookses of the world will never grasp that to many people, Soros and his kind — they are all over the think tanks of Washington and Brussels — are bigoted brutes who will stop at nothing to impose their morality on unwilling populations. They just smell nicer.

If the “far right” makes a good showing in European elections in June, the very last people in America who will understand it will be the pundit class. They will rub their hands, shake their heads, and lament the sad death of liberal democracy. They won’t even see the blood on their own hands.

Anyway, go to church today, if you are a believer. Even if you aren’t a believer, still go to church, and see what you can find there. In marking the death of the Son of Man, and then, late tomorrow night, His return to life, you too will find a reason to live, even amidst the dying of this once-great civilization.

Tarkovsky said: “You must feel your dependence on the Creator. If you don’t, you become an animal.” That is what has happened to the West, and is happening to the West. We have forgotten God. I know David Brooks believes in God, but what I don’t get is why he doesn’t understand that liberal democracy was born out of a civilization that believed in God — and not just God, but the God of the Bible — but cannot long survive the death of that God in the hearts and minds of its people.

Those who have not forgotten God must in some active sense come out of this doomed ship, find each other, and take to the lifeboats so that our children may live. Tarkovsky says in the documentary that civilization could end without nuclear apocalypse. It will end when the last man who believes in the Creator dies. A civilization without belief in God, a belief in immortality, is not a civilization at all, but just “a gathering of animals,” he says.

I’ll leave you with an image from Tarkovsky’s last movie, The Sacrifice. In this scene, the father plants a dead tree with his young son, and tells him this legend:

“Once upon a time, long ago, an old monk lived in an Orthodox monastery. His name was Pamve. And once he planted a barren tree on a mountainside, just like this. Then he told his young pupil, a monk named Ioann Kolov, that he should water the tree each day until it came to life. Anyway, early every morning Ioann filled a dipper with water and went out. He climbed up the mountain and watered the withered tree, and in the evening when darkness had fallen he returned to the monastery. He did this for three years. And one fine day he climbed up the mountain and saw that the whole tree was covered with blossoms! Say what you will, but a method, a system, has its virtues. You know, sometimes I say to myself, if every single day, at exactly the stroke of the clock, one were to perform the same act, like a ritual, unchanging, systematic, every day, at the same time, the world would be changed… Yes, something would change… It would have to… Beautiful, eh?”

The idea is to make a sacrifice, no matter how seemingly meaningless, and perhaps you will change the world. The followers of Jesus on this day nearly 2,000 years ago thought their Lord was dead. They were wrong. We Christians, we are given the task of watering the dead tree of our civilization with our active faith, even in the face of despair. It may be resurrected, as He was, or that may not be in the will of God. Nevertheless, this is our calling. This is how we express hope. This is how we live hope. This is how we pass hope on, like the preservation of fire.