New Europe College Regional Program Yearbook 2001-2002

N.E.C. Yearbook 2001-2002
What is dignity? In Taylor’s opinion, the notion of dignity was developed
in modern, equal direct-access societies. Although Kant supposes that
dignity is the appanage of all rational beings, “philosophically we can
attribute this status to all, but politically, the sense of equal dignity is
really shared by people who belong to a functioning direct-access
society”. 98
Recognition by the metropolitan culture did not count for Moldova’s
intellectuals. On the contrary, the Soviet Empire was perceived as an
impediment that blocked entry to the “civilized world”. Perception of
the West did not immediately lead to a feeling of superiority and inferiority.
The West was perceived through the “mother-country” which the
intellectuals had rediscovered. Nonetheless, the need for dignity and
“call for difference” soon appeared and followed a strange trajectory.
Once the difficulties of communication with the Romanians “from beyond”
had been overcome, along with the matters of approaching, which had
been forbidden for decades, and knowing each other mutually, there
followed “the sharpening of the difference that had not been clearly seen
till then, because real contacts had not existed”. 99 In the late 1980s,
identification with Romanians “from beyond” was effected by means of
borrowed representations acquired illegally, albeit indirectly. 100 The
cultural discrepancy, clear and difficult to surpass, then brought on a
rudimentary complex among the Basarabian intellectuals. Their works
belonged to trends that had disappeared from Romanian culture at the
beginning of the twentieth century. The time of a contemporary cultural
processes is beginning only now with the works of the new generation.
Admission of this discrepancy by the intellectuals educated in the old
system seems impossible because it makes them feel psychologically
uncomfortable; it gives them a feeling of failure.
The acceptance of cultural discrepancy gave birth to two or even
three different attitudes. The first is identical to that of the Ruritanian
intellectuals from the imaginary experiment invented by Gellner in Nation
and Nationalism, who discover that in Ruritania they could have roles
which they would not have if they had been citizens of Megalomania,
roles that allow the Basarabian intellectuals to compensate for their
inferiority: do they not share the same social positions as the intellectuals
of the “mother-country”? 101 Another attitude attempts to hide the difference
in perspective and acceptance of the perspective of the other over their
own identity, an acceptance that leads to shame, humility, and selfhate.
Michael Ignatieff calls these feelings “the Cain and Abel syndrome”
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