Navalny’s Value

 

What is the exact length of an inch, or the weight of an ounce? In this world of relativity, how do we gauge absolute standards? Nations employ whole bureaus with sophisticated methods of calibrating the measurement of a meter, or the weight of some discrete quantity of atomic particles, as we raid the relative in our attempts to define and quantify the absolute.

 

In the realm of the moral, we continue to toss on a sea of relativity. We cringe at Hamas’s violence of October 7, at what the Israeli government has done to Gazan civilians in reaction, and at the reality that some fraction of the taxes we pay supports Netanyahu’s unhinged campaign of vengeance.

 

Aleksei Navalny, to all effects murdered by Putin, represented by contrast about as absolute a standard of what might constitute a morally honest life as humanly possible. He was not perfect; nobody is. In his early political life he dallied with racist forms of nationalism, which he outgrew.

 

Navalny didn’t have to make the final trip back to Russia in 2021 that led three years later to his death in an Arctic prison, but any other course seemed to him like ducking the issue. His laughter, right up to the end, in the face of grossly unjust treatment gives an intimation of what the immense charisma of someone like Jesus must have been like.

 

Evil may or may not be banal, but Navalny took the measure of the petty, mean-spirited banality of Putin, and decided he didn’t need to let it loom over the narrowed scope of his possibilities. He not only stood up to a murderous autocrat but reveled in his own wit and strength while doing it. How many can say they were still smiling and still in good spirits at the very hour of their death? Such an example cannot be so easily dissolved out of history. Navalny will haunt the hapless Putin to his own grave.

 

The critic R.P. Blackmur said that great poetry “adds to the stock of available reality.” Likewise the arc of Navalny’s life and death adds to the stock of moral reality. It leaks the air out of Putin’s callous hubris—and Trump’s for that matter. Our own moral courage is put in the dock, and almost all of us, by the Navalny standard, are whited sepulchers, including so many spineless officials in Russia and the U.S. and elsewhere who demonstrate what passes for service and justice in today’s transactional political culture.

 

Different contexts bring forth different varieties of moral courage. For John Kennedy it was relying on diplomacy and resisting the warmongers during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Martin Luther King Jr. called out American materialism, militarism and racism. Daniel Ellsberg exposed intolerable government lies about the Vietnam war and the terrifying immorality of nuclear weapons. Mandela magnanimously forgave his captors for the sake of building a new country. Navalny tirelessly critiqued corruption in high places in the Russian government.

 

Navalny never had the opportunity to become immersed in the inevitable compromises of actual governing, and so his life may more easily lend itself to facile myth-making. But his courage and wit are clearly recorded, including in the documentary about him, which no one should miss.

 

If there is helplessness, demoralization and despair in the Russian opposition at the moment, they can take heart from the words of historian Howard Zinn:

 

“ . . . the most striking fact about these superpowers [the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.] was that, despite their size, their wealth, their overwhelming accumulation of nuclear weapons, they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence . . . Apparent power has again and again proved vulnerable to those human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience . . . Political power, however formidable, is more fragile than we think (Note how nervous are those who hold it.)”

 

We are herding animals, so outliers like Navalny will always remain rare. But we all have that awareness of a gold standard in us, often deeply buried but still there, something that tells us where we may be falling short.

 

Even should Putin “win” the war with Ukraine, day by day his emasculation of his people has taken them ever further from Navalny’s expansive vision of a democratic Russia. But his martyrdom has already planted the seeds of the inevitable counter-revolution. His example will energize that creative response in followers old and new.

 

As Secretary of War Stanton said right after Abraham Lincoln succumbed to an assassin’s bullet, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

 

 

Beyond Delusion

In memory of Aleksei Navalny 

Putin demonstrated in his “interview” with Tucker Carlson the delusional version of Russian history that rationalizes his brutality. Hamas and Netanyahu continue to demonstrate Auden’s classic line: “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” It often seems as if vast swaths of the Middle East operate under the collective delusion that the various parties, state or non-state, can kill their way out of insecurity and injustice.

 

Then along comes Trump with his loose talk about allied obligations to NATO, provoking outrage across Western capitals. He leaves us feeling as if Biden, elderly or not, is one of the few adults in the room, and U.S. power remains the ultimate backstop for the maintenance of democratic ideals against waves of authoritarianism in Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Hungary and elsewhere.

 

Ukraine’s agony, with its echoes of Hitlerian aggression, calls into question the deepest convictions of those of us who are convinced there must a more robust way to constrain, or at least disincentivize, the Putins of this world.

 

Still, the context of unfolding time casts a shadow over even the most well-intentioned attempts at a viable international security system built upon superiority of arms. The arms race, further extending into space as we have recently seen with the alarm in the U.S. Congress over a Russian satellite killer weapons, moves ever more in one direction: toward greater complexity, computerization, and speed of decision. Now A.I. is ominously entering the mix.

 

Meanwhile more and more citizens from chaotic parts of the world, under pressure from both dysfunctional governance and the droughts and floods of climate instability, are forced into the desperate flight to nowhere of the refugee.

 

The foreign policy establishment in the Western nations is in its own way just as deluded as Putin or Trump or Netanyahu in their over-reliance on the unworkable paradigm of deterrence by force of arms, especially weapons of mass-murder. 70 nations have acknowledged the reality that the arms race is a cure worse than the disease by ratifying the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

 

To once again indulge Thomas Kuhn’s over-used characterization of fundamental shifts in world-view, what is required is a paradigm shift. Only a less delusional motivation, a larger conception of self-interest, can move the world in a less delusional direction. The shift is from seeing security as a function of competition to seeing it as a function of interdependence.

 

Endangered planetary ecosystems become the ultimate reason nations need to not only cease to fight each other but cooperate on a new level. To indulge in an unnecessary war of choice, as Putin has and as most agree the U.S. did in the Second Gulf War, is to plunge the whole world into taking sides where obsolete “us and them” thinking is reinforced. More Russian citizens know this than we think. An antiwar candidate named Boris Nadezhdin has been kicked off the ballot in their presidential “election” because Russian officials noted with alarm that he was polling in the double digits.

 

Planetary interdependence, with its inevitable implication that what I do affects everybody else and vice versa, is an idea that shakes the foundations of the status quo in a positive way, including shaking the establishment delusion that, by tragic necessity, war will always be with us, when in fact war will sooner or later do us in.

 

Where there is no vision, as the prophet said, the people perish. As average citizens realize that wars and arms races are a con and nothing good will come of them, but environmental cooperation is very much in everyone’s mutual interest, the paradigm will begin to change. When this shift seeps into political discourse and ultimately even into the well-fortified sanctuaries of the dictators, a new world might emerge. It will give renewed life to already significant initiatives like Rotary International and the moribund United Nations itself.

 

One feels as if elements of the diplomatic world already are trying to operate out of this new paradigm—we see it in Anthony Blinken’s tireless efforts, with the help of his counterparts in places like Qatar, to bring about a cease-fire in Gaza and begin to lay the conditions at last for a Palestinian state. At the same time there are regressive forces, such as U.S. Senators who shout loudly about “avenging” the deaths of our soldiers at the hands of Iranian-built drones. Vengeance, leading nowhere, does not a foreign policy make.

 

There are scientific resources available to reinforce the hard new truths of our interdependence, but it feels as if military thinking and ecological thinking are siloed from each other just when these distinct realms need to be in conversation. What are the biggest threats facing this planet? Militarism itself, with its vast sucking away of resources and equally vast environmental footprint. Degradation of air, water and soil. Food insufficiency. Refugees by the millions.

 

When ordinary people see beyond the delusions of the war paradigm, they will begin to think and act together in their own true self interest. While there are mighty forces arrayed in favor of the status quo, we have to ask ourselves, if we don’t begin to push such a change of thinking into our politics, how else will it happen?