The Church and the Left

"Michnik is of a much younger generation than Milosz. Milosz was informed by the interwar years, and then defected to the West in 1951. Michnik was of the golden youth of communist Poland. He grew up in Soviet Poland, and even as a teenager was regarded as the brightest person of his generation. Along with people like [political scientist] Aleksander Smolar and [philosopher] Leszek Kolakowski, professor of the revolting students, his formative experience was the student revolt in Warsaw in the spring of 1968, which led to his imprisonment. The question he posed after that was: How could we have a polar society which was integrated and opposed to the communist regime? Because his experience as a left-leaning student was very different to the experience of most of society. His first major shock was going to prison after resisting the system. The regime worked very hard to tell the working class of Poland that the resisters were all Jews, paid agents of the CIA or outsiders in some way. So the question in the seventies was how might there be a Poland that isn’t just intellectuals or workers. In The Church and the Left Michnik argues for an untraditional alliance. He says that the left has to talk to the Polish Catholic Church, especially after the Vatican’s internal reform [in 1965]. What I find interesting here is the recognition of unpredictability. On the left you tend to think your allies will be the world left, the working class or the welfare state. But Michnik says you have to be observant about what history offers up for you, such as a Church which is reforming itself, which is sympathetic to many of their goals, and might be a bastion of human rights. The main thing that I find attractive in the book is its acceptance of pluralism. If there’s going to be an alternative Poland, it’s not going to be built because a lot of intelligent people have smart ideas about it. It’s going to be built because of these odd coalitions, for example a secular and to some extent Jewish left coming to terms with collaboration with the traditional Polish Catholic Church. That is plurality: Rather than encountering one totality with another totality, accepting that resistance is going to be hodge-podge and we should take advantage of every possibility. I think the two things that came out of 1989, which are so fundamental that they’ve almost become the default option in much of the world, are: Be non-violent if you can, and counter dictatorship through democracy. Movements today are not generally about overturning one system with another highly defined system, while political movements in the 1950s and 60s were about overthrowing dictatorships in the name of the organised chaos of civil society."