A few days ago I ran into a former squash colleague of mine, Herr Doktor A_W_, a small-animal veterinarian and a German, now, happily expatriated. Neither of us having been active on the courts for a couple of years, he asked what I was up to. “Polish,” I said and provided a bit of background on this less strenuous pastime in response to his interrogation. A euroskeptic smile underlined his curiosity as he related his most recent experience with members of the Polish national persuasion. In the not too distant past, a veterinary colleague of his had arranged for a professional vet student exchange with some institution in Poland; and my countrymen-to-be, it seems, comported themselves with less than perfect civility. The good doctor recalled the group as a male-dominated, sexist pecking order whose primary objective was getting laid. We did not have time to suss the unsavory details, but in going our separate ways, he granted that they might not be representative of Polish society as a whole. Or they may well have been, just as they might represent patriarchy and western civilization generally, and quite possibly the veterinary profession. To my mind, a preoccupation with sex and the social order would seem as natural to Polish primates as to German and American primates, as well as to the smaller mammals that A_W_, V.M.D. would treat regularly.
I was more interested in his use of the word “hierarchy,” as if even in informal social settings in a completely different country, a clear, conscious regimentation applied in Polish groups. In demotic America, “hierarchy” is something of a dirty word, but I have noticed the concept and the word used much more comfortably in a Polish cultural context. The Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote that “in the life of the mind a strict hierarchy is mandatory.” Rank matters, even among peers. Poland’s most recent poet of Nobel stature, Wislawa Szymborska, we learn, falls visibly short of Milosz’s achievement, though she’s “very good.” Some are more equal than others. (I like her better, at least in translation.) In the life of the body and the body politic, a similar traditional attitude seems to persist. The spirit of the szlachta, the old Polish nobility, a class more or less exterminated by the Nazis and the Soviets, could well continue to stickle in Polish social life. The Church, the military, and the university, all visibly stratified orders, remain important social institutions. So it doesn’t come as a surprise to me that Poles might favor “hierarchy,” though it might to Herr W_ that I, an American, acknowledge its attraction. Not averse to hierarchies myself, I prefer them loose and voluntary.
