TRAC
Interview Transcript

Joseph V. Montville   (cont)

We haven't made any kind of announcement of this, but Alexander Tsipko and I and Sergei [Kapitsa] drove down from San Francisco to Carmel together, and we have a relationship that goes back to my meeting him, discovering him at Esalen several years ago, and I remember it was an evening session like all evening sessions; a certain amount of stupor on the part of the group stretched out on the floor and the poor person who has been invited to present an after dinner.  But all the sudden, I started hearing some gems of analytical brilliance and insight, and I raised my head, and there was this round face, full of passion and enthusiasm and what I thought was a highly internalized political, psychological sense of analysis.  And it's been a great glory to discover Sasha and to work with him over the years, as he agreed to become a senior associate in my program in Washington.  He'll be resident in Moscow.  There's no salary, per se, but he becomes affiliated with the program and a resource, and his picture will be in a directory with a small biography, along with Henry Kissinger and Zbigniev Brzezhinsky (and me) and about 120 other people.

But one of the things I want to do, and I will try very hard to do, is Sasha has a very important book on how to build democracy in Russia the real way, from the bottom up, starting with Russians in the provinces and rooted in the culture, in the tradition, in the values of the Russian people.  I happen to agree with him that there was enormous conceit of imposing revolutionary market economics from the top by a lot of highly conceited supereconomists from universities around the country.  Economists have to be watched with great care.  His book is going to be very important.  I think he brings an integrity and knowledge of his people and the love of his people that's very unfashionable, but that is critical to understanding how a society can transform itself and build institutions that work.  So we're going to make this work, and we will find the funding so that he can devote all the time to produce the book, we'll get funding to make sure it's translated, and that will be again, one more of these organic outgrowths of this Esalen initiative that started so long--a long time ago.  He's already been a fellow, a senior fellow, at the Woodrow Wilson center in Washington, so it's not as though he hasn't been discovered.

Some other tasks that are a little bit more exotic: One of the projects in my program I've been doing for about four years now is called the Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism.  It's a response to my perspective as a political psychologist of a great value gap between Islam and the West, which has been very pathological.  And it's basically a project done by an Islamic scholar who was a pious Muslim, but a very embracing, all embracing person of spirit, and he's done research on the Koran and the early constitutional period of Islam and discovered a key concept into Islam.  In Arabic and simply means the innate disposition of the individual, or, basically, that every individual has freedom of conscience and is personally responsible for good behavior.  The state is not responsible, moral police are not responsible.  In fact, it's a version of the highest level of moral development, the sixth level, the internalized sense of right and wrong and the responsibility of every individual, Muslim or non-Muslin, to act in accordance to that.  That's a very liberating discovery.  It's always been there, but Islam is complex because there's no central authority.  There's no pope that can tell the Talaban, you can oppress seven-year-old girls, but you're not Muslims; this is nothing Islamic about that.  Or tell the Algerians who are killing women and children in a politicial revolution that you are not Muslim, this is not Islamic.  And there's no really powerful authority.

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