Glue of Society

Several evenings ago I sat in company where the famous issue of every Serbian get-together was raised: can anything be done to improve our situation?  Breach of conventions, which assume good will for seeing some better possibility, occurred once one of the people present asserted that no better possibility exists.  Pessimism is not the reason why I am bringing this up, but the argument which followed this assertion.  Briefly summed up it goes thus: if society is defined as a consensus on a minimum of common values and rights, then we do not have a society here.  How can it be seen that we do not have it?  It is visible in the fact that every form of decency has been annulled.

At that moment someone remembered the practical, American definition which is approximately this: decency is the glue of society.

Has this ultimate bastion of a community really fallen?  If some rights which could be defined as common social interests and values — like the right to life, to work, to bringing up, to education, to medical care — have been rudely trampled and annulled... and if such rights have become privileges and not the common property of a society, has decency then been annulled as the basic foundation on which a building could be erected, which would clearly point to the fact that what we are dealing with is a society, a community of humans, and not a makeshift structure made up of individuals “consisting of mountains of flesh with built-in chips which prevent them from shitting in the yard” (Svetislav Basara: description of R. Marojevic, newly appointed dean of the Faculty of Philology, in Dnevni telegraf).

All discussion of decency ought to be taken in the broadest possible sense.  Elementary level: do not spit in the street!  Intermediate level: say “Hello!” to you neighbor.  Advanced level: studying and honoring at least three of God’s Ten Commandments: do not kill, do not steel, do not lie...  University level: do not judge others and do not speak with malice.  (After the university level, academic certificates would be given out.)

However, I am interested in decency here as a phenomenon on the basis of which we can judge the scenario of the development of the Yugoslav, and in a narrower sense, the Serbian social and state crisis.  I remembered recently the words of a relative of mine, a before-the-war (the one before, that is) Belgrade loafer who explained to me that during the occupation of Belgrade he was a mac because he had three “bombing-suits”.  Those were suits he looted from a shop while the Germans were bombing Belgrade, while others looted for sugar and flower.  I am not trying to suggest with this that Belgrade will be bombed — on the contrary, I think that it won’t be bombed; but I am trying to draw attention to the possibility that even without “bombing” this society and this state could be canceled once and for all with the looting of state warehouses, stores, and barracks... something like what happened in Albania, which was only more or less glued together after considerable foreign intervention.

But if decency no longer exists as the “glue of society”, then the force which now holds it together and prevents its members from “shitting in the yard” is also not a permanent and reliable guarantee that mass unrest won’t occur.

A forthright approach requires us to say that on the political scene, and I would say more and more in everyday communication, decency is considered a characteristic of indecisiveness, and in accordance with this, killing in the dark is considered political skill.  A typical example of a politician, devoid even of Basara’s chip, is Vojislav Seselj, whose functional flaw was discovered by Slobodan Milosevic some time ago, so that now they are again on friendly terms in an image that comes to mind, and image that was recently described by Professor Ratko Bozovic in an interview for the Danas daily, where he described what is happening with the universities.  This is the image: the yard of an industrious farmer has a foul smell.  He keeps brooming it.  But his broom is full of shit.

How is it possible to fight against indecency as a dominant political style?  Seselj, who is here taken only as a metaphor, has not been beaten yet in public arguments, because decency in argumentation is not advisable from the perspective of the final outcome of an argument, while it is difficult to compete in indecency with his Dukeship.  I imagine that those same pensioners who once used to applaud him, are now writing to him thus: “Good breeding and personal decency prevent us from telling Mr. Seselj that he is a crook, a thief, a two-faced liar, a war profiteer, an Islamist fundamentalist sycophant, a war criminal, a war monger...” (according to Nasa borba, July 15, 1998).  If it thus appears that any resistence against indecency is fruitless, then conditions have been created for the dissolution of the network of political and every kind of human communication.  And a society in which it is not possible to communicate decently, it is also not possible to live in decently.  Let us understand each other: this is not a natural social flaw, but the result of ten years of concerted effort in proclaiming brutality, haughtiness, and lawlessness for virtues.  Perhaps the question is arguable, the question to which we will one day get an answer, no doubt — who is holding the broom, and who is the broom.  However, it is unarguable that the smell in the yard is foul.