Florence Gaub

 That 'Liberal, Post-Modern' Life

April 19, 2022 | By Amb. Alberto M. Fernandez*

Florence Gaub

政治学家弗洛伦斯·高布

https://www.memri.org/reports/liberal-post-modern-life

它旨在解释--并侮辱--俄罗斯人，但它最终照亮了俄罗斯之外的很多东西。在4月12日德国电视台的采访中，德国研究员Florence Gaub（德国和法国的公民）说了以下的话。

"我们不应该忘记，即使俄罗斯人看起来是欧洲人，他们也不是欧洲人。在文化意义上，他们对暴力或死亡有不同的想法。他们没有自由的、后现代的生活概念。一个比每个人都可以选择的生活概念。相反，生命可以随着死亡提前结束。俄罗斯人的预期寿命相当低，你知道，男性为70岁。这就是为什么他们以不同的方式对待死亡，人们只是简单的死亡"[1]。

Gaub的评论引起了一阵骚动，尤其是在社交媒体上。她的评论听起来有点太像德国过去关于俄罗斯人是残暴的亚洲人的言论，她在推特上遭到了无情的抨击，被欧洲殖民主义和纳粹死亡集中营的照片轰炸着。高布本人并不是纳粹，而是几乎是欧洲大陆的欧洲官僚精英的一个海报儿童。欧盟安全研究所（EUISS）副所长，世界经济论坛（WEF）全球前沿风险未来委员会成员，曾在北约国防学院工作，在索邦大学学习，并在柏林洪堡大学获得博士学位。[2]高布远不是什么右派，过去曾为社民党（德国社会民主党）议员工作。如果有的话，这就是那种与达沃斯和欧盟精英们的时代精神非常一致的人。

面对网上对她的言论的批评，高布加倍努力，指出俄罗斯对普京在乌克兰的战争的广泛支持，更有说服力的是，她在推特上发了一份2020年的英格哈特-韦尔策世界文化地图，指出 "如果我们认为'欧洲'是一套价值观，让我们看看世界价值观调查，它把世界分成不同的文化中心。"[3] 。

这张地图一出来，我就被它吸引住了，但原因可能与高布非常不同。首先，这是为她的言论辩解的一种非常奇怪的方式，因为这的确会表明俄罗斯与特别是新教的北欧有不同的价值观，但乌克兰也是如此。毫不奇怪，在俄乌战争中作战的两个民族的心态都非常相似。事实上，如果按照她的逻辑，无论是俄罗斯、乌克兰还是北约和欧盟成员国罗马尼亚、保加利亚和希腊，都没有那些大肆吹嘘的 "欧洲价值观"。

用这样的图表来强调哪些国家拥有这些 "自由的、后现代的 "欧洲价值观，还有一个巨大的讽刺是，如果俄罗斯和乌克兰没有这些价值观，那么从非洲和中东寻求闯入欧洲的移民潮也没有。他们甚至比那些东正教的东欧国家 "走得更远"--更注重生存的传统社会。恰恰是德国人口中最年轻和最有生育能力的这部分人[4]。

世界价值观调查的图表和研究试图表明的是，除其他外，"在一个自由的后工业经济中，越来越多的人口在成长过程中认为生存和思想自由是理所当然的，结果是自我表达受到高度重视。"[5] 其想法是，随着这些国家的 "进步"，它们将变得不再传统，不再注重生存，而是更加自由和宽容，也可能更加富裕。这项研究被指责为过于 "欧洲中心主义、简单化和文化本质主义"，可能是正确的。

但我发现这张图的价值，与其说是对自由主义未来的指导，不如说是对传统的指导。几年前我第一次看到这张图时，我被左下方的国家所吸引，其中许多是伊斯兰国家，但不是全部，属于 "非洲-伊斯兰 "文化子集团。这让我想起了2015年的一件事，当时与德国超级进步的天主教会有关的一份出版物嘲笑非洲天主教徒是 "简单 "的人，"除了信仰什么都没有。"[7]当年德国人对非洲人的软性种族主义在今天像高布这样的德国人的软性种族主义中得到了回应。

要想对世界有更细致的了解，也许英格尔哈特-韦尔策的地图最好倒过来读，倒过来读。在我看来，恰恰是那些熟悉死亡、熟悉生活的社会，在拥有孩子和家庭的意义上，更有可能生存下去，而且，坚持传统和拥有强烈的文化生存意识，与其说是一种错误，不如说是所有社会的宝贵文化财富，本身就是如此。高布的 "自由的、后现代的生活 "是一个优先考虑安乐死和堕胎的社会（两个非常 "欧洲 "的价值观）和一个几乎不生产孩子的社会。欧洲实际上正在死亡（在这个意义上，俄罗斯和乌克兰都非常 "欧洲"，其出生率与西欧相似，都低于替代率）。所有28个欧盟国家的出生率都低于更替水平，本土人口正在下降。有的增长往往来自于有传统背景的家庭，要么是移民，要么是本地人。西半球的情况只比欧洲好一点，而一些东亚国家如日本、中国和台湾则更差，出生率甚至比欧洲人还低。到目前为止，经合组织（富裕先进国家的 "俱乐部"）成员中出生率最高的是以色列。[8]不知何故，晚期现代性、后现代社会的决定性特征之一是无力或不愿生育。人们也许可以预测一个遥远的未来世界场景，即一个讲西班牙语的混血儿帝国与欧亚大陆的伊斯兰酋长国对峙，前提是世界上其他地方没有停止着眼于后代的生活。

时间可能会到来，比我们想象的要快，届时我们将以恐怖而不是羡慕的眼光来看待这些富有的、后现代的、不育的、自我封闭的社会，把他们看作是衰老的食莲者，看作是成熟的畸形的埃洛伊人。 [9] 有时倒着拿地图会给你指明通往未来的道路。

*阿尔贝托-M-费尔南德斯是MEMRI的副主席。

It was aimed at explaining – and insulting – Russians but it wound up illuminating a lot more beyond Russia. In an April 12 interview on German television, German researcher Florence Gaub (a citizen of both Germany and France) said the following:

"We should not forget that, even if Russians look European, they are not European. In a cultural sense, they think differently about violence or death. They have no concept of a liberal, post-modern life. A concept of life than each individual can choose. Instead, life can end early with death. Russian life expectancy is quite low, you know, 70 years for men. That is why they treat death differently, that people simply die."[1]

Gaub's comments caught a bit of a stir, especially on social media. Her comments sounded a bit too redolent of past German rhetoric about Russians as brutal Asiatic hordes and she was mercilessly pilloried on Twitter, bombarded with photos of European colonialism and Nazi death camps. Gaub herself is no Nazi but rather almost a poster-child for the continent's Eurocratic elite: Deputy Director of the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), a member of the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Future Council on Frontier Risks, formerly worked at the NATO Defense College, study at the Sorbonne and a doctorate from Berlin's Humboldt University.[2] Far from being some sort of rightist, Glaub worked in the past for SPD (Germany's Social Democrats) parliamentarians. If anything, this is the type of person that is very much in sync with the Davos and EU elite's zeitgeist.

Facing online criticism for her remarks, Gaub doubled down, pointing to broad Russian support for Putin's war in Ukraine and even more tellingly she tweeted out a copy of the Ingelhart-Welzel World Cultural Map from 2020 noting that "if we consider 'European' to be a set of values, let's take a look at the World Values Survey which clusters the world into different cultural hubs."[3]

I have been fascinated by this map since it came out but for perhaps very different reasons than Gaub. First of all, it is a very strange way of justifying her remarks since it would indeed show that Russia has different values than particularly Protestant Northern Europe, but so does Ukraine. The mindset of both peoples fighting in the Russia-Ukraine War is, not surprisingly, very similar. Indeed, if one follows her logic neither Russia nor Ukraine nor NATO and EU-members Romania, Bulgaria and Greece have those much vaunted "European values."

The other great irony of using such a diagram to underscore what countries have those "liberal, post-modern" European values is that if Russia and Ukraine do not have them, neither do the waves of migrants seeking to break into Europe from Africa and the Middle East. They are even "farther down" – more traditional societies focused on survival – than those of Orthodox Eastern Europe. It is precisely that part of Germany's population that is youngest and most fertile.[4]

What the diagram and the research of the World Values Survey sought to show was, among other things, that "in a liberal post-industrial economy, an increasing share of the population has grown up taking survival and freedom of thought for granted, resulting in that self-expression is highly valued."[5] The idea was that as such countries "progress," they will become less traditional, less focused on survival and more liberal and tolerant and likely richer too. This research has been, probably rightly, decried as too "Eurocentric, simplistic and culturally essentialist."[6]

But I find value in the diagram, less as a guide toward a liberal future than toward a traditional one. When I first saw it a few years ago, I was fascinated by the countries at the left-hand bottom, many of them Islamic but not all, in the "African-Islamic" cultural sub-group. It reminded me of an incident back in 2015 when a publication associated with Germany's uber-progressive Catholic Church mocked African Catholics as "simple" people who have "nothing but their faith."[7] The soft racism of the Germans toward Africans back then echoes in the soft racism of Germans like Gaub today.

For a more nuanced understanding of the world, perhaps the Ingelhart-Welzel map is best read upside down and backwards. It seems to me that it is precisely those societies that are familiar with death, and familiar with life, in the sense of having children and families that are more likely to survive and that, rather than a fault, holding on to tradition and having a strong sense of cultural survival are actually valuable cultural goods, in and of themselves, for all societies. Gaub's "liberal, post-modern life" is a society that prioritizes euthanasia and abortion (two very "European" values) and one that produces almost no children. Europe is literally dying (in this sense Russia and Ukraine are both very "European," with birthrates similar to those of Western Europe, all of them below the replacement rate). The birthrate in all 28 EU countries is below replacement level and the indigenous population is in decline. What growth there is often comes from families with a traditional background, either immigrants or locals. The Western Hemisphere is only slightly better off than Europe while some East Asian countries like Japan, China, and Taiwan are even worse, with even lower birth rates than the Europeans. The OECD (the "club" of rich, advanced nations) member with the highest birth rate, by far, is Israel.[8] Somehow among the defining characteristics of late modernity, of post-modern societies, is an inability or an unwillingness to reproduce. One can perhaps forecast a distant future world scenario when a Mestizo Spanglish-speaking American Empire faces off against the Islamic Emirate of Eurasia, assuming the rest of the world does not stop living with an eye toward posterity.

The time may come, sooner than we think, when we will look at these rich, post-modern, sterile, self-involved societies with horror rather than with envy, seeing them as aging lotus-eaters, as freakish Eloi ripe for the plucking.[9] Sometimes holding a map upside down shows you the path to the future.

*Alberto M. Fernandez is Vice President of MEMRI.