Читать книгу Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development - Vanessa Pupavac - Страница 18

Goethe, like Shakespeare, has accumulated a vast literature around his work. Goethe has been described as having one of the most thoroughly documented lives as a writer. Concerned with preserving his own legacy, Goethe commissioned family members and employed individuals, notably Johann Eckermann, to archive his work. Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (1930 [1836]) is the best contemporary account of Goethe’s thoughts, rivalling Goethe’s own autobiographical volumes (Goethe 1974 Vol. I and II). Among the biographies of Goethe in English, G. H. Lewes’ Life and Works of Goethe (1908 [1864]) is one of the great nineteenth-century commentaries on Goethe, with important insights into his literary and theatre work. Of present studies, Nicholas Boyle’s two volumes of Goethe: The Poet and the Age are wonderfully detailed (Boyle 1991, 2000). While Andrew Piper’s Brief Lives is a compelling introduction to Goethe’s times and individual works, Goethe’s Faust has attracted considerable attention. Literary criticism historically celebrated Faust I and deplored or apologised for Faust II. Such is Lewes’ evaluation of Faust I and II. Indeed Goethe was apprehensive about the reception of his completed Faust, which was not published until after his death, imagining his Faust shipwrecked and becoming covered in sand (Piper 2010: 101). In the twentieth century, Lukacs’ Age of Goethe (1968 [1947]) marked a major intellectual re-evaluation of Faust II, followed up in Berman’s later All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1988 [1982]).

We enjoyed reading and refer to various translations of Faust, including by David Constantine (2005, 2009), David Luke (1998), and Philip Wayne (1949, 1959). We gained different insights from their distinct interpretations, alongside commentaries grappling with this ‘incommensurable work’ such as John Williams’ Goethe’s Faust (1987). W. H. Bruford’s Germany in the Eighteenth Century: The Social Background of the Literary Revival (1965) does exactly what he proclaims in the title and socially contextualises Goethe’s work. Germany: Memories of a Nation (2012) of Neil Macgregor, former director of the British Museum, provides a fascinating cultural historical survey of Germany for a global audience and epitomises Jaspers’ ideals of the Humanism of a European Museum (Jaspers 1948: 510). Obviously the legend of Faust has fostered its own field of analysis. Among these, Ian Watt’s Myths of Modern Individualism (1996) gives a useful introduction to Faust as a modern mythical figure, while detailed surveys include Osman Durrani’s Faust: Icon of Modern Culture (2004), J. M. van der Laan’s Seeking Meaning for Goethe’s Faust (2007), and J. W. Smeed’s Faust in Literature (1975). Then there are analyses of other Faust creations. Marlowe’s Dr Faustus has been gaining literary appreciation among scholars of sixteenth-century literature (Marlowe 2005), as has Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita among scholars of twentieth-century literature. Mann’s Dr Faustus has its own vast commentary (Allen 1985; Ball 1986). The fascination with Faust, Dr Faustus, and his various guises continues, and continues to express our anxieties about our humanity since the rise of modernity.

The book traces the rise and fall of European humanist modernism, and modern development and disaster eradication through the following chapters:

Chapter 2, ‘The Disastrous Birth of Modernity in Europe’, discusses the changing European cultural understandings of disasters from acts of god to acts of nature and the seismic cultural importance of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake during Goethe’s lifetime. Historically belief in disasters as acts of God did not preclude belief in secondary causes and the need for official responses. Not least disasters were seen as portends of dynastic changes, and therefore important to rulers concerned to pacify their subjects. Early modern Europe pioneered scientific breakthroughs, but panics about witches and demonic spirits heightened during the devastating religious-political wars. The longer-term impact of these conflicts was to encourage the idea of religion being conventional and facilitated the reception of new scientific theories, notably Isaac Newton’s laws of physics in the late seventeenth century, whose great work of the 1680s coincided with the years settling the modern British constitution. Writing in Newton’s wake, the English writer Daniel Defoe encapsulated the transition period from pre-modern to modern understandings of disasters, where scientific explanations for natural disasters were gaining ground amid religious frameworks. He wrote pioneering accounts of disasters at the beginning of the eighteenth century and was scathing about accusations of witchcraft and the claims of quack medicine, while continuing to believe in disasters as acts of God and the importance of the devil and supernatural forces. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake precipitated a decisive shift towards secular scientific understandings of natural disasters, propelling Enlightenment hopes for the future of humanity and the eradication of disasters. Immanuel Kant’s scientific account of the Lisbon earthquake influenced his philosophical thinking on the realms of necessity and freedom and the scope of human agency in the world. The Lisbon earthquake took on a different political meaning for Goethe, writing six decades later. He saw the disaster as prefiguring the subsequent political revolutions and revolutionary armies overturning the old social order. Instead of political vulcanism, Goethe sought elite-led material development to found social stability and meet the needs of the population. However, Britain as the first industrialising country indicated that the Industrial Revolution was not conflict-free. Byron, as Faust’s rebellious child of Goethe’s poem, spoke up for the Luddites, the Nottinghamshire handloom weavers who smashed the new machinery in defence of their livelihoods. Yet neither he nor they were opposed to the new technological innovations per se. Their objections concerned political determination of economic developments.

Chapter 3, ‘Faustian Work and “The Hope of the Poor”’, considers the Dutch struggles against sea and empire, which so inspired Goethe and other Europeans. The dual struggles caught the imagination of Europeans politically and culturally, including Goethe, whose drama Egmont dramatised the Dutch revolt, and whose poem Faust celebrated hydro-engineering in Faust’s great reclamation project. The sixteenth-century Dutch engineer Andries Vierlingh described his building of sea defences and land reclamation as the ‘The Hope of the Poor’. Dutch hydro-engineering has inspired international thinking on dam building and flood prevention. The first part of the chapter discusses European cultural recognition of Dutch hydro-engineering and how pioneering Dutch engineering was matched by the Dutch political struggle against the Habsburg empire in the early modern period, and their pioneering philosophical and republican ideas. Goethe’s drama Egmont was written in the 1780s at a time when Dutch radicals were seeking national republican renewal against oligarchical rule and a sense of national decline. The second part of the chapter discusses the Zuyder Zee project completed in 1932, hailed as one of the wonders of the modern industrial work. The Zuyder Zee, and related post-war Delta works completed in the wake of the 1953 North Sea floods, represented the culmination of the Dutch Faustian struggle with the sea and modern hopes for disaster eradication, anticipated in Goethe’s ‘incommensurate’ Faust.

Chapter 4, on Faust the Developer, discusses the rise and fall of international development ideals through the iconic post-war development texts, Walt Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth and E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful. The Stages of Economic Growth proposed full industrial development would enhance people’s lives and freedom, while Small Is Beautiful argued large-scale industrial development was incompatible with an economics where people mattered (Schumacher 1974). The chapter then discusses the philosopher Marshall Berman’s exploration of Faust’s failings as the Developer, and the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s warnings against taking natural disasters or natural processes as the model for politics. Critically the suppression of political freedom distorted national development and led industrialisation to sacrifice many citizens as epitomised in the Soviet Union. Such historical experiences encouraged influential European intellectual strands to reject industrial modernity as creating a disastrous world. Humanity increasingly came to be seen as the cause of disasters, and reining in human activity was considered to be the solution. Abandoning industrialisation in European international development models had important international political implications for economically weaker states and regions. Adopting non-industrial sustainable development strategies implied perpetuating north-south and east-west inequalities between states and within states. The crises of international development, humanitarianism, and statebuilding are leading to migration replacing other strategies as people abandon hope of changing their country and international policy-making is redefining migration as a form of sustainable development.

Chapter 5, ‘Nikola Tesla’s Faustian Dream’, discusses the rise and fall of the industrial development of twentieth-century Yugoslavia and twenty-first-century Croatia, and how their development path parallels the rise and fall of dam building in European and international development. Its starting point is the American inventor Nikola Tesla, who was born in the military frontier of Habsburg empire in what is now Croatia. Goethe inspired Tesla’s engineering and design of one of the first hydroelectric power plants in the world. The industrial development of post-war federal socialist Yugoslavia linked national self-determination and industrial development, including ambitious hydroelectric engineering inspired by Tesla. Its workers’ self-management system managed to avoid some of the worst problems of industrialisation experienced in either the Western or the Soviet blocs, and Yugoslavia became the only European country in the Non-Aligned Movement. NAM ties encouraged Yugoslav engineering work abroad, including Kariba dam in Zambia. However, its democratic weaknesses eroded its capacity to reform in the more adverse international political and economic conditions of the 1980s. Its legitimacy as a state disintegrated, and conflict broke out. Secession of its republics gained international support with the ending of the Cold War settlement. The statehood of the republics was recognised, but their national development has been circumscribed by the lack of industrial development strategies, which reflects a European-wide outlook. European turning away from Faustian industrial development is captured in its transnational environmental advocacy condemning large dam building. The World Commission on Dams in its 2000 report confirmed the shift of international development goals away from big dam building and large-scale hydro-engineering as sea defences for flood prevention or as energy provision. The demise of its old industries and slowdown of new industrial projects in Croatia illustrates Europe’s rejection of Tesla’s Faustian engineering dreams.

Chapter 6, ‘The Metamorphosis of Risk Cosmopolitanism’, discusses political catastrophism and the anti-Faustian ideas underlying European governance which believes that national self-determination and industrial development are no longer tenable. Instead its resilience models converge environmental and liberal thinking on complexity and complex adaptive systems, managing how populations function in insecure changing environments. This convergence is evident in the writings of the sociologist Ulrich Beck and the economist Friedrich Hayek. Beck’s risk cosmopolitanism was shaped by environmental concerns and advocated the precautionary principle being adopted in European decision-making to prevent environmental harm. He was critical of industrial growth strategies and utilitarian economic models. Ideologically his risk cosmopolitanism opposed Hayek’s free market economics. Nevertheless, both were sceptical of collective human agency embodied in the nation state and adopted ecological systems thinking. Thus ecologism may reconcile the neoliberal shift from national industrial strategies, leaving national infrastructure to market forces. Collective retreat is manifest in the move away from large-scale sea defences to eradicate floods to non-structural flood management and the return of reclaimed land to the sea. Resilience governance deserts the Faustian dream of political and material freedom. Instead malicious demons dictate a misanthropic outlook seeking to circumscribe human activity and secure nature against humanity. We are left with what the academic and former aid worker Mark Duffield has termed ‘post-humanitarianism’, a vision where populations find themselves living in the ruins of modern hopes and expected to live with disasters (Duffield 2018).

Chapter 7, ‘Submerging Humanity and Rewilding Tesla’s Homeland’, concerns scientism, and the demise of European humanism, and its influence on ecological rewilding models in Croatia. The twentieth-century Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža saw the experience of Dutch nation building as prefiguring the challenges faced by the Balkan nations in the twentieth century. The modern nation builders of his generation did not share the same antipathy towards modern industrialisation or romantic view of living in pre-modern conditions displayed by many western European intellectuals. These national leaders believed in harnessing nature to humanity’s needs. They were inspired by Tesla’s Faustian dreams of engineering the future. For they loathed their country’s marginal existence. They wanted to escape the condition of being European borderlands and become free peoples and countries. Yet what was the direction of modern politics, science, and development? Goethe’s Faust loomed over the physicists developing atomic science, even before the dropping of the atomic bomb. Tesla sought solutions in science against politics but was wary of the new physics because of its potential to shatter the world. Conversely the Yugoslav political leader-turned-dissident Milovan Djilas supported industrial development and was open to the new physics but opposed scientism or scientific dogmatism as undermining both political freedom and scientific endeavour. Djilas’ concerns over scientism did not lead him to reject modern scientific and industrial development, not least because he came from a family whose historical fate was the insecure subsistence farming and banditry of the European borderlands. Djilas’ concerns over scientism are relevant to European governance, which affirms science in ways elevating nature over humanity. Europe’s rejection of a humanist Faustian spirit is epitomised by its rewilding movement wanting to create new wildernesses free from humans. Rewilding experiments in the Dutch polderlands and other European programmes to breed back wild bulls akin to the extinct aurochs have inspired projects in the Croatian Velebit Mountains in the region of Tesla’s birth. However, their implementation involves important questions over the continent’s political and economic settlement and its unequal north-south relations. In essence European rewilding projects are legitimising the economic collapse and demise of communities in southern Europe, and Croatia is among the countries finding themselves becoming borderlands again.

The Epilogue, ‘The New European Wilderness’, concludes on the contemporary European rejection of Faust’s salvation and today’s interpretation of the Faust myth to indict humanity. The Faust myth speaks to human estrangement from nature and aspirations to forge a different world. Herman Hesse’s 1927 novel Steppenwolf was in this tradition. His protagonist found succour from Goethe’s promise of redemption and beliefs in a higher truth. The humanitarian cosmopolitanism after the Second World War was more hopeful of new beginnings even under the shadow of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Conversely contemporary risk cosmopolitanism struggles to forgive the deeds of the past and sees the necessity of curbing human agency and action in the world. Engineering Faust’s vision of land free from the threat of floods is more technically possible today but is culturally alien. Large-scale Faustian infrastructure building to protect human settlements is being rejected and replaced with digital governance of vulnerable critical infrastructure, threatened ecosystems, predatory zones, and populations at risk. Faust’s fall is characterised by the return of the wilderness to parts of Europe. It is tempting to romanticise the wild wolfish conditions of New Europe’s borderlands. However they represent the demise of European humanist aspirations and the expansion of inhospitable spaces without living communities. Arendt’s warning over the desertification of politics and political sandstorms in desert conditions is relevant to a Europe where market and natural forces prevail over collective self-determination. The Faust myth recognises our restless nature as imperfect crooked timber with a spark of the divine that is not content with a passive existence but searches for a more meaningful existence. The Faustian spirit wants to venture on ships into dangerous waters but to return to the sheltered harbours of home. Our anti-Faustian spirit is jeopardising both venture and home. Goethe’s Faust recognises it is impossible to act without erring, and if we are not forgiven when we err, then we are inhibited from acting. In affirming human deeds, Goethe’s work contends our very redemption lies in our Faustian striving and our Gretchen forgiving.