Seventy-three years have passed since the publication of Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind. The book appeared in 1953, two years after Miłosz’s defection to the West, and was received largely with enthusiasm, as a rare analysis of an East that the Iron Curtain had rendered distant and obscure.
The Captive Mind is not a history of political terror, nor does it aim to bear witness to crimes. Miłosz offers a subtle analysis of the intellectual who has learned to live with the regime, to speak its language, to become its instrument while, at the same time, refusing to regard himself as its subject.
The Captive Mind explores the place hidden behind fear, behind terror. The intellectual, still convinced that he is merely an object of the system, or entirely outside it, becomes its subject. How is this possible?
To explain this paradox, Miłosz turns to literature.
The Pill of Murti-Bing
More precisely, to Witkiewicz’s novel Insatiability. In the world of the novel, a united Mongol-Chinese empire conquers Eastern Europe, country by country.
To persuade the newly conquered peoples to accept the faith of their conquerors, they are given the Pill of Murti-Bing, a drug that frees a person from metaphysical anxiety and allows him, without anguish or doubt, to accept the new faith and, consequently, the new conqueror.
For Miłosz, the Pill of Murti-Bing is a metaphor for Marxism-Leninism, which offered a coherent view of the world, a predictable path into the future, and a clear purpose within society.
In other words, Marxism-Leninism offers the intellectual not merely a set of political convictions, but an entire system capable of restoring meaning to the world after the destruction and chaos of the Second World War. Miłosz argues that Eastern European intellectuals did not submit to the system solely out of fear or opportunism. They genuinely longed for what the “pill” had to offer.
But the pill does not work perfectly. Reality produces contradictions.
Situations arise in which doctrine negates itself. The intellectual begins to doubt, secretly, in the privacy of his own mind. It is precisely then, when dogma and reality cease to correspond, that Ketman emerges.
Miłosz borrowed the term “Ketman” from Arthur de Gobineau’s Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia. Gobineau describes Persian heretics and apostates whose beliefs were at odds with the ruling orthodoxy.
To practise heretical beliefs, to speak about them, sometimes even merely to remain silent about them, could place the heretic’s life in danger. His beliefs offer him a way out. He is permitted, even required, to deceive, publicly practising, respecting and praising the orthodoxy. This act of deception is called Ketman.
Gobineau, however, does not confine Ketman to specific Persian religious communities, but gradually expands it into a general characteristic of the Muslim East. For Muslims, Ketman is no act of cowardice and brings no shame. It is practised with pride.
It reverses the hierarchy, making the persecuted superior to the persecutor, because the persecuted possesses a hidden truth and mocks the religion of the other by practising it without any genuine belief.
Ketman is therefore a source of gnoseological superiority and an honourable act through which both the individual and the hidden truth in which he believes survive.
It is very easy to reduce Ketman to ordinary hypocrisy.
For Miłosz, however, the narrow, almost invisible space between the intellectual’s public persona and his belief in his own integrity, that locked and forgotten space inhabited by truth, becomes the foundation upon which Ketman develops under Stalinism.
Much of The Captive Mind is devoted to four intellectuals whom Miłosz identifies by the codenames Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. Through a study of their behaviour before and after the victory of communism in Poland, Miłosz demonstrates his argument.
Ketman is not imposed silence.
The intellectual does not merely avoid saying what he thinks. He actively participates in the system. He speaks according to its rules, writes according to those rules, accepts and attends all its rituals, judges as he is required to judge, condemns what must be condemned.
At the same time, his hidden doubt about the system makes his complicity more bearable.
The distinction between the intellectual’s public persona and his private doubt allows him not to experience his actions as identification with the system. That is, it allows him to believe that his integrity remains intact.
In his own eyes, he has not betrayed himself, he has not sold himself, he is not a coward. This is the most important function of Ketman, and the reason it is far more complex than ordinary hypocrisy.
It does not separate what the intellectual does from what he pretends to do. It separates what he does from the meaning he assigns to his own actions.
It separates action from moral self-perception.
Ketman also produces pleasure.
In his definition, Miłosz retains Gobineau’s idea of the pride produced by Ketman. For the intellectual under Stalinism, Miłosz argues, deceiving power becomes a source of enormous satisfaction.
The daily navigation between word, gesture, grimace, letter, praise, criticism and condemnation makes him proud of his own resourcefulness. The better he becomes at this game of pretence, the greater his pride.
Ketman becomes a source of dignity when all other forms of dignity have been taken away.
But, Miłosz says, the practice of Ketman contains dangers and traps. The mask becomes a habit. One’s own face slowly disappears. Private speech becomes pamphleteering. The personality changes. The boundary between actor and role grows increasingly unclear.
Ketman begins as a technique for protecting the self from power. In time, it becomes a technique through which power creates a new, adapted self.
Ketman is an exhausting practice.
Its destructiveness is not even its most tragic feature. More devastating is its futility.
However hard the intellectual tries, through Ketman, to preserve his integrity unsullied in his own eyes, in reality his actions are indistinguishable from those of any obedient servant or apparatchik of the system. He is its instrument, whatever he may think of himself.
Miłosz’s verdict is compassionate and merciless at once. In the end, Ketman will irreversibly transform the personality into the role.
The Captive Mind is a surprisingly binary book. It divides the world in Manichaean fashion into the prosperous, free West and the primitive, communist East, drowning in poverty, repression and propaganda.
In his analysis of the East, Miłosz’s analytical blade is precise and ruthless. In his cursory analysis of the West, it is blunt and indulgent.
Ketman, naturally, is practised only by Eastern European intellectuals. After all, what need could there be for Ketman in the Free World?
It has already been said that Miłosz found the term “Ketman” in Gobineau’s book. But who was Arthur de Gobineau?
Gobineau’s Lens
A French count and diplomat, a royalist and passionate defender of aristocratic Europe, and one of the architects of nineteenth-century racial theory, a precursor to the far more notorious theory of Aryan racial supremacy. He used his long diplomatic posting in Persia to write several profoundly flawed books on Persian history and the history of religions.
For Gobineau, Ketman served to confirm his racial theory. In Persian culture, deception was not merely permitted but socially accepted, in contrast to the European, white, aristocratic culture of chivalry and sincerity.
During his diplomatic mission, Gobineau was appalled by the Persian disregard for racial distinctions. Persians and Black people lived together quite normally.
He extended his observations about Persia to the entire Orient. He presented Ketman as a common practice and one of the defining phenomena of the Muslim East.
In reality, Ketman is not some general characteristic of the Middle East, but a practice associated with particular religious communities and specific historical circumstances, above all with the lives of minority communities facing threats and persecution.
It was practised by Ismailis, the Moriscos after the Reconquista, Shiites during periods of Sunni dominance in Persia, Alevis and Ibadi Muslims.
Gobineau would be remembered for his infamous Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Miłosz immortalised him through Ketman.
European political thought has a centuries-old tradition of constructing the “East”, both Near and Far, through characteristics that, to put it in Freudian terms, reflect its own sins: despotism, irrationality, fanaticism, sexual perversity, hypocrisy, religious devotion, moral corruption.
Throughout history, Europe has contrasted these characteristics with an image of itself as rational, moderate, politically free, restrained and sincere in its intentions.
There is no indication in The Captive Mind, or in Miłosz’s other writings, that he was a racist. Quite the contrary. His poetry and prose breathe with genuine humanism, occasionally coloured by religious centrism.
Why, then, does Gobineau appear in a work of such profound sensitivity to repression as The Captive Mind?
It is blindness. A typically European blindness.
“[…] one cannot deny his gift for keen observation, even though we need not necessarily agree with the conclusions of this rather dangerous writer,” Miłosz says of Gobineau in the third chapter of The Captive Mind.
He then quotes him extensively, including generalisations that are, at the very least, Orientalist and, at their worst, factually false and chauvinistic. Gobineau’s sweeping, racist interpretation of Ketman becomes the model for understanding Stalinist Ketman.
Where is Stalinism? In the East.
The concept of Ketman travels from Persia to Eastern Europe, carrying with it the “keen observation” of the nineteenth century and centuries of cultural prejudice Europe had accumulated toward every East.
Miłosz believes that he can separate the observation from the lens. Gobineau’s conclusions may be dangerous, but his, Miłosz’s, are not.
Miłosz’s Ketman is certainly not racist, but a fragment of Gobineau’s lens remains lodged within it, a lens in which centuries of European prejudice have accumulated, from the Greco-Persian Wars, through the Crusades, to General Gouraud standing before Saladin’s tomb.
Like the shard of glass from Andersen’s fairy tale, that fragment infected Miłosz’s vision as well.
Ketman does not travel West
The Captive Mind was published in 1953. Why does a conceptual instrument designed to expose the contradiction between professed belief, political practice and moral self-perception stop at a geographical border?
Because that border is not merely geographical. It is political as well.
While Miłosz is writing The Captive Mind as a political exile in Paris, Europe’s colonial empires are still in full swing. The French are fighting a war in Indochina, the British in Kenya.
Algeria is under French occupation, with Algerians second-class citizens compared with the pied-noir population. The Korean War has only just ended.
Four years after the Nakba, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are still living as refugees, Palestinians in Israel are under military rule, and that same year the Israeli army attacks the Palestinian village of Qibya in the West Bank.
Mosaddegh falls in Iran with American and British intervention. In Guatemala, preparations begin for the operation that will overthrow Árbenz in 1954.
In the United States, McCarthyism is raging: hearings, pressure, wiretapping, surveillance, dismissals and the blacklisting of leftists.
Miłosz is silent.
His vision is clouded by Gobineau’s shard of glass.
From Tehran, Hanoi, Nairobi or Qibya, the Manichaean division of the world into the free West and the totalitarian East does not exist. Things become less black and white.
If only all those people in Hanoi, Nairobi, Qibya and Tehran were worthy of attention.
Changing the observer’s location destabilises Miłosz’s moral geography.
Why should Ketman, as a means of reconciling political reality with the image a person has of himself, be an exclusively Eastern European phenomenon?
More precisely, why should it be exclusively a phenomenon of Stalinism?
Seventy-three years have passed since the publication of The Captive Mind. The world Miłosz described no longer exists.
Stalinism is dead. So is the Soviet Union. The Iron Curtain is a historical fact, an image, sometimes a metaphor.
Has Ketman disappeared with it?
Western Ketman
After the fall of communism, capitalism lost its rival. Countries that had politically resisted the liberal West became integrated into global capitalist markets.
Liberal democracy and its universal principles became the normative language of the new American international order. In the eyes of the West, the entire world had embraced its values. In reality, the entire world, willingly or not, had accepted its power.
Evil had been defeated.
The working class was gradually becoming a consumer class. Corporations grew more complex and their political influence increased. With the collapse of communism as a political system and social order, social pressure on capitalist countries began to ease.
The victorious post-Cold War West ceased to present itself as ideological.
There is no ideology anymore. There is no order anymore. There is only the world as it ought to be.
Every country in the world is, more or less, on its way toward universal values. And if some are not, they need help.
Capitalism and liberalism have no alternative. They are part of human nature.
Everything else, every other order, ideology or system, is an act of violence against human nature. Just as the Devil convinced humanity that he did not exist, capitalism, together with liberalism, convinced the world that they were not an economic system and a political ideology, but the natural condition of humankind.
The Pill of Murti-Bing is no longer swallowed, but inhaled, unconsciously, like healing mountain air.
But the pill does not work perfectly. Reality produces contradictions.
The West established an international order based on universal principles: democracy, sovereignty, international law, self-determination, human freedoms.
These principles, like capitalism, are part of the natural condition of humankind. Freedoms are inalienable human rights, acquired at birth. All Western intellectuals, the entire establishment, take pride in these principles.
What happens when those who insist upon these principles begin violating them themselves? What if they have always violated them?
The contradictions between universal principles and political practice are countless.
For the sake of partnership, sovereignty, stability, counterterrorism and the protection of civilians, France has intervened in Chad, Gabon, the Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso and Libya, maintaining a high degree of political, economic and military influence in its former African colonies.
For the sake of democratisation, civilian protection, human rights, counterterrorism, the prevention of atrocities and the enforcement of international law, the Americans and the British, together with their allies, intervened in Libya and Syria and invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.
All these countries were left with devastated infrastructure, religious sectarianism, decimated populations and economic dependence on the West.
For the sake of counterterrorism and the protection of the Western way of life, the United States has maintained the prison at Guantánamo for twenty-five years. Its prisoners do not fall under the principles of the Geneva Conventions.
The so-called “War on Terror” stripped people suspected of terrorism of fundamental rights.
The war in Iran, which is still ongoing, was launched over the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon, an issue that had already been regulated by an agreement from which the United States withdrew.
Human rights are under threat in Iran. Israel is under threat. Iranian religious fanaticism is a destabilising force in the region.
The religious fanaticism of Saudi Arabia, however, is not a destabilising force.
Western countries regard this despotic, theocratic and ultraconservative state, whose values stand in opposition to every universal principle of the international order, as a close partner and ally.
More than seventy years have passed since the Nakba in Palestine. All the discrimination, segregation, massacres, and economic and demographic warfare against Palestinian Arabs are deemed necessary for Israeli security.
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Although America has “democratised” almost every country in Israel’s neighbourhood, Israel somehow remains the only true democracy.
Although that support costs Palestinian children their lives, support for Israel is support for the universal principles of the international order.
What if those principles, noble and humanistic as they are, are merely the face of an ideology whose reverse side is imperialism?
What then?
Ketman emerges at the moment of discrepancy between belief and reality.
Western, liberal Ketman.
As with Miłosz’s Stalinist Ketman, this Ketman has a clearly defined function. It does not necessarily arise from fear, especially not fear for one’s life or family.
Miłosz’s Ketman is an instrument for protecting the individual from power. Liberal Ketman is an instrument for protecting the individual from reality.
At the moment of contradiction between belief in universal principles and a reality that contradicts that belief, the liberal intellectual’s moral self-perception is endangered.
Believing in the moral justification of aggression against Iran is one thing, but continuing to believe after the mass killing of schoolgirls in Minab is something else entirely.
The intellectual or member of the establishment is faced with a choice: change the original belief, accept that his moral judgement was wrong, acknowledge a deeper contradiction within the system with which he identifies, or find a way to interpret the contradiction while leaving his moral image of himself intact.
That is Ketman.
Contradictions accumulate, and the intellectual or member of the establishment requires a mechanism that will prevent him from questioning his beliefs at all, regardless of how many contradictions he encounters.
A mechanism operating almost unconsciously, because his beliefs constitute the natural condition of humankind.
Just as Miłosz distinguished seven varieties of Stalinist Ketman, we will distinguish two liberal varieties here: Conformist Ketman and the Ketman of a Clear Conscience.
Conformist Ketman
The practitioner of Conformist Ketman sees the contradiction. He understands the system’s inconsistency. He understands that the same standards do not apply to everyone.
He sees through the rhetoric. He experiences the contradiction in its entirety.
He does not face the Gulag.
He faces career stagnation, unemployment, lack of project funding, the loss of professional networks, an inability to publish or advance, ostracism from political or intellectual circles. In some contexts, protest or speech carries legal consequences.
The intellectual or member of the establishment wants to avoid all of this.
He is not merely an opportunist. Certainly, he does not think of himself as one. He retains the conviction that he is independent.
He does not think himself a coward. Instead, he tells himself that this is not the right moment, that the issue is too complicated, that he does not want to contribute to extremism, that there are more important things, that he does not have enough information, that his intervention would change nothing.
Even if every one of these statements were true, within Ketman they perform the function of transforming conformity into a principled choice.
The practitioner of Conformist Ketman learns the boundaries very quickly, without anyone ever explicitly drawing them for him.
By observing which formulations are rewarded, which are tolerated, and which produce discomfort or punishment, he constructs his own map and, before long, navigates it instinctively.
He answers without hesitation the questions that the system establishes as moral litmus tests.
Does Israel have the right to exist? Yes.
Does Israel have the right to defend itself? Yes.
Is Hamas a terrorist organisation? Yes.
Should Iran be allowed to possess nuclear weapons? No.
In Conformist Ketman, as in Stalinist Ketman, the mask becomes a habit. The practitioner becomes increasingly insensitive to contradictions.
Even if he does not, the conclusion remains the same. He is an instrument of the system, whatever he may think of himself, just like his Stalinist counterpart.
Conformist Ketman is Miłosz’s classical Ketman transposed into the ideology of liberalism, with one difference. It is practised out of conformity rather than terror and fear.
Ketman of a Clear Conscience
Unlike Conformist Ketman, through which its practitioner conceals his doubt from the system at the moment of contradiction, the practitioner of the Ketman of a Clear Conscience conceals the contradiction from himself.
“Conceals” is too strong a word, because it implies awareness of the act of concealment.
It is not that the practitioner of the Ketman of a Clear Conscience sees the contradiction and then consciously hides it from himself. He possesses an interpretative mechanism that neutralises the contradiction before it can threaten his worldview.
Take the example already mentioned, the killing of schoolgirls in Iran. The practitioner of the Ketman of a Clear Conscience will call it horrifying, tragic, unacceptable, even criminal.
He will not be insincere in his condemnation.
Nevertheless, his worldview, his faith in the universal principles of liberal ideology, will remain intact.
He denies contradictions their consequences.
Ketman prevents him from seeing the accumulating contradictions as a whole.
For him, there is no connection between the genocide in Gaza and the aggression against Iran. For him, there is no genocide in Gaza, only retaliation that has spiralled out of control.
A war begun on the basis of false reports? A terrible mistake, but an exception, because the adversary was supposed to be democratised.
The torture of prisoners? Abuse, but an exception, because the security of the Western way of life is at stake.
The killing of civilians? A tragedy, but merely a mistaken military judgement in an otherwise just war.
Support for an authoritarian regime? An exception dictated by geopolitical necessity.
A double standard for two countries under aggression? The situation is complicated, and comparisons should not be made.
The Ketman of a Clear Conscience creates a conceptual quarantine around every contradiction.
Each may be criticised individually, but the system that produces them must not be called into question.
This Ketman does not deny the crime. It denies the crime the ability to bear witness against the system that produced it.
The practitioner of this Ketman proves his own moral independence to himself by condemning contradictions while refusing to allow them to alter his overall judgement of the system.
It is easy to dismiss this Ketman as a simple double standard. It is far more than that.
It retains the Miłoszian pleasure of Ketman, this time in the condemnation and criticism of the contradiction itself, that is, in the practitioner’s apparent independence.
In this form of Ketman, the mask and the self are one and the same.
Unfortunately, no number of contradictions quarantined as “exceptions” will cause the belief to collapse.
Thus the practitioner of the Ketman of a Clear Conscience is also an instrument of the system, because the illusion of independence is stronger than any actual chain.
Today, Miłosz’s Ketman is generally regarded as a relic of the past: a psychological mechanism, an artefact of Stalinism, inseparable from the Party, censorship, ideological discipline and the Iron Curtain.
Miłosz, however, discovered something greater than he himself was prepared to see.
Ketman is not a feature of the East. It is a feature of an ideological system.
Probably every ideology carries its own Ketman.
In this case, Ketman did not have to travel West.
It had been there all along.
More from Notebook: The Reading Chain (I), The Reading Chain (II), The Reading Chain (III)
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