| marek strandberg & peeter laurits |
| interview |
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Marek Strandberg: Peeter, do you think we actually could say a few words about how the identity of Estonians has changed over the past ten-fifteen years? After all, the shifts have been considerable, and really difficult to tackle. Probably what people talk about most is how all the values are associated with monetary relations. The best example here is education where everything has become a product. In the current situation all truths are determined at the market; whether something is true is no longer so important as whether it follows the rules of the market. Is the multiplication table true because it enables to calculate correctly, or because it enables to calculate the profit? In that sense the change is remarkable. I have an interesting question that comes with the said change: does the fact that people conceal the essence of truth behind profit make them stupid, and can their talents be eliminated because, in the truth of economy and money, they become virtual beings?  marek strandberg Peeter Laurits: I think that this is indeed so to a certain extent, but it is preceded by a relatively long phase where people pretend and try to play along, until they finally manage to be included in the game where everything is calculated in terms of profit. MS: When they finally manage there will hardly be any time for other things. PL: It is easier to find a living person in banking with its elaborate operations than among shopkeepers or poachers. MS: The end result of the profit-truth or market-truth is: things that were just things before, have now become special forms of trade. Twenty years ago a school was still a school, but today it has turned into a shop or a currency exchange where students are customers and teachers are customer service employees who have to deal with totally different things. Everything has been renamed. It could perhaps be said that the limp hand renaming things has definitely changed the identity of Estonians. To me it seems like limp (slack?)-mindedness that did not exist before... or has an Estonian always been moderately limp-minded? Agreed with everything that has turned up? Yes, perhaps that's how it is. Hence the next question: on what meta-level are we looking at this identity change? On a level that once the ideals were different? Or that our identity is limp-mindedness and this in fact constitutes the strength of our existence? Somebody comes and says that a dog is a dog and we say that a dog is a dog, but then someone else turns up and says that a seagull is a giraffe and we say that yes, giraffe it is, and carry on being limp-minded. Maybe this isn't limp-mindedness at all, but linguistic adaptation skills? After all, our ancestors must have had some adaptation skills, at first physical, as they ended up in this quite weird place.  Peeter Laurits PL: Trying to find the roots of Estonian limp-mindedness, it is perhaps most clearly visible in written sources at the time when Protestantism arrived. What you called 'limp-mindedness' probably already existed in the Moravian Brotherhood where Estonians themselves actually cut down their sacred groves so carefully preserved for hundreds of years. We can find examples in not so distant past as well: during the last collective farm period, half of the sacred IlmamŠe grove was removed for gravel road filling. This kind of pragmatism, turning some values and truths into goods and profit was in full swing during the time when the peasants bought freeholds. Therefore today's phenomenon is really nothing new; what is new is perhaps its extent and intensity. AH: In the words of Karl Ristikivi: Estonians like to march separately and hit together. On the one hand, limp-mindedness thus contains syncretism, but on the other, the syncretism is not too passionate - if we have to pray differently, we do so, but we don't take this very passionately. MS: What can we deduce from this about our language and culture? We can deduce that language and culture are dispassionate. What other dispassionate languages do we know? I know one language group, programming languages that have no passion whatsoever. No passion in algorithms. Is the language of Estonians also a dull programming language that can programme all the persons who use this language? And has this language survived precisely because it is so good for programming. Perhaps this is our unchanging part and our identity is programme - some use us for writing a virus, some for other things. Our flexibility derives from the basis of our culture, constructed as a programming language. We think we are prepared to adapt anything. PL: We shouldn't forget a significant aspect here: it's stubbornness that characterises us just as much as our limp-mindedness. MS: Just like the programming language - it is not possible to write anything that the language logic excludes. PL: In my opinion languages change quite a lot, it is difficult to understand the one hundred years old Estonian, and the share of neologisms today is huge.
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