Silence and The Captive Mind

Czeslaw Milosz introduced the Western world to ketman, or the practice of concealing ones true motives or beliefs to give the outward appearance of conforming to authority. A Polish poet, novelist and diplomat who survived Nazi, and later Soviet occupied, Poland during Stalinist rule, Milosz knew more than most about the practice of ketman. After defecting to France in 1951, he wrote The Captive Mind in 1953 to popular and critical acclaim. In 1980, Milosz would earn a Nobel Prize in literature.

Ketman has a long historical lineage in Middle Eastern culture which was first observed and documented by a Westerner in the 1850s.[1] Originally a Persian concept, ‘ketman is a word for the dissimulations of heretics in Persian Islam, who take great pleasure in pretending to be what they are not in order to avoid censure or punishment.’[2] Milosz observed a likeness of the Persian conception of ketman to his own experiences in Central and Eastern Europe. For Milosz, he was like an actor in a dangerous play where:

One does not perform on a theater stage but in the street, office, factory, meeting hall, or even the room one lives in. Such acting is a highly developed craft that places a premium upon mental alertness. Before it leaves the lips, every word must be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be can occasion dangerous suspicions and accusations.[3]

The cost of failing to conceal one’s true convictions could be high. For Milosz, like great swathes of other Nazi and Soviet occupied people, to show dissent against the political status quo allowed the possibility for a late night visitation from Gestapo or KGB agents. The only option for most people living under such conditions of fear and paranoia, was to retreat from harsh and often deadly realities of everyday life into the inner sanctuary of the mind. What cannot be said in the face of tyranny, must therefore pass over in silence. The mental fatigue of holding such personal convictions under omnipresent regimes is hard to imagine in a free society. Echoing Milosz’s own words, the suggestion has been made that ‘Ketman takes much time, energy, and vigilance.’[4]

The private world of the oppressed is guarded at all costs. The smallest and most feeble acts of protest were done behind closed doors with pen, pencil or typewriter, but the manuscripts could never see light outside an open desk draw. Over time, the individual excels at deception and conformity. When there is no escape from an all-seeing and all-knowing regime and where informing on friends and family was a show of loyalty to the state, ketman offered protection for oneself and those around him or her.

Under these circumstances, it was often the intellectual and artistic that suffered the most. After Milosz introduces the reader to ketman, the following chapters within The Captive Mind are dedicated to the inner turmoils of artists and intellectuals whom Milosz either personally knew, or was acquainted with whilst living in occupied Poland. There is Alpha, the moralist; Beta, the disappointed lover; Gamma, the slave of history and Delta, the troubadour. Like Milosz, each artist and intellectual suffered silently in their own way. As Milosz was able to successfully convey with each character study, ketman had a strange effect on those who manoeuvred throughout the regime. This effect was described by Milosz as something that Westerners cannot understand; ‘unless one has lived there one cannot know how many titanic battles are being fought, how the heroes of Ketman are falling, what this warfare is being waged over…’[5]

An inner strength emerges in the person who must practice ketman while simultaneously ‘sharpening the intellect.’[6] In a society of censorship and speaking in party slogans, the grey, dull cityscapes become representative of the people who inhabit them. For creative minds, ‘Hungry for strangeness, idiosyncrasy, and the sights, sounds, and textures of beautiful things, totalitarian subjects seek escape from the uniform terminal drabness of the regime.’[7] The artist or intellectual had a tendency to delve deeper into their own professional or personal projects, in an effort to mentally escape from their physical reality.

Do people today silently protest within the recesses of the mind? Do we practice ketman? Perhaps not to the depths that Milosz describes, and certainly not under the same societal conditions, but I suspect so. There are various forms of ketman. I imagine our collective experience to be similar to Aesthetic ketman, which Milosz describes as being:

Expressed not only in that unconscious longing for strangeness which is channelled towards controlled amusements like theatre, film, and folk festivals, but also into various forms of escapism. Writers burrow into ancient texts, comment upon and reedit ancient authors … many choose university careers because research into literary history offers a safe pretext for plunging into the past and for converse with works of great aesthetic value.[8]

Our silence is different from the kind of silent contempt against oppression that Milosz and other Europeans experienced in the 20^th century. We silently escape our own individual experiences of reality by retreating into the inner sanctuary of our minds. This is achieved by pursuing personal interests and engaging in introverted pastimes like reading, writing and studying. Like Milosz, we are actors in a play – outwardly conforming to societal norms and expectations whilst concealing silent thoughts and convictions. Sometimes we do this to protest, but always as a means to escape.