When you move from one culture to another you can't avoid being forced to consider differences between where you come from, and where you've come to. Then you can try to account for the differences you experience without necessarily arriving at an evaluating "judgement", even if it probably isn't all unavoidable.

Yugoslavia (as well as almost the rest of eastern Europe) has never experienced a renaissance as it appeared in the west during the 1400's and 1500's. In other words they have never made the conclusion that the human intellect is in the center as a prerequisite when you want to describe the world, or the cause of the world. The world is bigger than what a human can understand or explain, and the human being only partakes as a part of the mystery which the creation is, a mystery that is an object of wonder and contemplation.

That doesn't mean that the world is not explainable in part, but that there are limits as to how much is explainable. Language and the human thought has a limit which can not be stepped beyond, and when this limit is reached the beholding human must as a natural consequence let the speech and thought cease in contemplation (beholding) -- freed from speech and reasoning.

In the west it is, which we all know, a whole lot different. Here there are hardly any limits to the faith in the capacity of the human intellect, concerning the "conquering" of the world. The philosopher Descartes went as far as to say that "because I think, I am". The thought is that which constitutes the very being of the human, and before anything can be verified by the human intellect it can't be said to be with certainty at all. Of course a lot of water has run through the stream since then, and nobody would just like that adopt Decartes' claim at present, but even still you find a reflection of his thesis in the fact that at the present in the west one clings to the idea that no reality exists for the human being unless it is expressed in language. So there's a continuous reliance on the acknowledgement of the human subject, as that which is necessary in order to be able to declare something as being or not.

Here a lot is different -- also (or maybe especially) specifically regarding that. The world is, before the human being is, whether it is thought, said, or not, and the human being partakes in the world as a part of a whole, and there is no notion of conquering anything at all. Life is to be lived and the human is supposed to find "his place" -- his topos (Greek for place), or arrange his place so that life becomes good to live. This applies both to the world, in whatever way it appears here and now and how the human partakes in the world, and to the relations the human being happens to be woven into. The formula might perhaps be, as opposed to Descartes, "because I am, I think" -- the prerequisite is the things at hand. For the same reason too much speculation about how you might wish that things ought to be is considered an unproductive waste of the power of thought, which should be used to find a way to make the best of what lies at hand. Utopia (no-place) and speculative fantasizing doesn't really take root here.

So what about ideals, one might ask, since ideals are the "principals" we hold before ourselves when we try to change the world for the better. Here as well "the pipe has a somewhat different sound" if you take a closer look. Ideals aim at the perfect, but the perfect is not something you will find within the limits of the created. The perfect lies beyond. It is all things ultimate source and as such not something you can reach by your own striving, and thus it is useless to hold ideals before you as an Utopia, since ideals are insufficient projections of the human being's limited conception of the perfect. The perfect cannot, just like that, be reached at all within the limits of what is created. We might, to a bigger or smaller degree, be acquainted with the dream of the perfect life, which we make a pattern of our striving -- at least you often see it presented in different tv serials which often have the partly hidden agenda of advocating the perfect life, the perfect job, the perfect relationship (make up more yourself). Or in daily phrases we speak of fulfilling ourselves or finding our right shelf, something that makes people here with clear obviousness shake their heads a little at and ask "well can't they see that something like that can't be done at all in the world of realities?" The human being cannot within this world reach the state where it is emancipated from needs -- a mode of being which is only applicable for the divine source of being.

The fact that we don't always understand the people from the east and that they don't always understand us in the west could very well derive from this fundamental different view on whether it is ideals or the things at hand that are important. The Utopia doesn't consider the things at hand good enough, but finds that the things at hand has to be changed having the "perfect" as a model, which often generates a conflict between "east" and "west" in our mutual encounter. Furthermore the west thinks that precisely because they think Utopian they can uplift themselves to become judges over such cultures that think un-Utopian, which almost means the rest of the world, precisely because the things at hand must be thoroughly changed, which you clearly see in those situations where the west in one way or another intervenes in non-western cultures based on its own Utopian know-all attitude.

My claim is that Utopia is spirit-less. Precisely because it's about principles. Or more accurately principles that don't have the things at hand as their prerequisite. But it is exactly in the things at hand that humans (which fundamentally are spiritual) live their lives, and it is in the things at hand that humans get caught when the principles' measured stretch-march grinds along, mechanically repeating its movement with the unconscious spiritlessness of a mantra, gnawing senselessly into the flesh of traditions & cultures which don't intend to give up their lives and history just like that (which are organically connected) in change for the life- and history-less system of the ideology.

Now, it is well known that you shouldn't be led to believe that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, but at the same time it might be similarly hasty to imagine having found the "philosopher's stone" where you are now. Honestly from my heart I must say that I don't see myself commiting an offence against the first "rule", but in the same breath I, with regret, must say that a great part of the west seemingly commits an offence against the second! Without turning this into a matter of politics (which I truly don't know much about) the interferences of the west in almost all of the "conflicts" which have taken place in the last, and now this, century have been about making its own standards a measure for the area they intervened into. If a country doesn't live up to the democratic imaginaries of the west -- they sanction. If a country doesn't live up to the human-rights-imaginaries of the west -- they wage a war until it behaves. Afterwards you can, abracadabra, create a court and judge by the standards of the west, disregarding the very own law-complex of the country in question (I don't know much about law either, so I'll make it brief). I'm not saying anything here about whether democracy or human rights etc. is better or worse or not or any of both. I'm merely saying that the west is committing an offence by thinking that they believe themselves to have found the philosopher's stone -- the absolute good, which the rest of the world hasn't reached yet, which is why they consider "the others" as retarded regarding "development". Apparently we haven't come one step further since the days when the white man colonized almost anything inhabited by "primitive" and "uncivilized" people and where Africans in endless amounts were transported across the Atlantic Ocean and sold as slaves both in Europe and America. And I can't help but being tempted to ask about who fundamentally is being the most retarded regarding development. If nothing else I can't abstain from thinking that it would suit the common opinion in the west to be aware of this Utopian totalitarianism which is growing forth and maybe arm themselves with a greater measure of humility regarding some of the cultures which have roots that go far back in time and have shown themselves to be much more vital and persistent than the new (wild?)shoot of the European renaissance and modernity.

How can a westerner come to such points of view? After all I grew up in one of the home-lands of the Utopia and "obtainable" ideals. The answer might be that I remember a time where it was different and the confrontation with this culture in many ways has been like a déjà vu for me. I'm repeatedly confronted with the feeling of remembering things and places that I really have never experienced before. I sometimes think that it might have something to do with the fact that I grew up in a part of Denmark where things stood quite still and where things were approached pretty much in the order they appeared without pretending great illusions about "tomorrow everything is gonna be different". As the most natural thing in the world people frequently paid visits to drink coffee and have a chitter-chat about how the world presented itself "from here". I have a notion when I am here -- Yugoslavia, anno 2002 -- that there are many things that remind me of those times -- maybe because they still might only be in some kind of more or less voluntary transit fase to become "like us". But they probably (hopefully) never will be completely. In any case the way it is now, you can always find time for a cup of coffee, go for a walk to visit somebody, or whatever it might be, to do something together with some of the people that mean something, and then you just let the great big world be the great big world, and Utopia be Utopia -- it doesn't really mean a whole lot. So that's why I'll go and have a drink now... Maybe some coffee. And later we're possibly gonna go to some party... Those are the things that are important in life, you know!

Nicolai Gideon
Novi Sad, Friday February the 22^th, 2002