NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
December 21, 2011
Living in truth
Vaclav Havel: "The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else but in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness, and human responsibility.""The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less." "We are an integral part of a higher order, and mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme. This forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions." "The truth is not simply what you think it is. It is also the situation in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said." "Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that things will turn out well, but the conviction that something makes sense, and is good, regardless how it turns out." "Man is in fact nailed down, like Christ on the Cross, to a grid of paradoxes. He balances between the torment of not knowing his mission, and the joy of carrying it out. He is victorious by consequence of his failures." As these quotes, from the Czech Republic's late president demonstrate, he was not a conventional politician. He was an honest, thoughtful, and very courageous man - not a saint - whose personal stand against Communist tyranny played a huge part in its overthrow. His terms as president of Czechoslovakia, then the Czech Republic, were vexed as are all terms in political office. By his own admission, he lacked the political experience and skill to translate insights into practical policies, and find the practical means to advance them. Yet he did accomplish much, often simply by being present, in a largely ceremonial office. The vacuous and typical statements of world leaders - conventional politicians - at his death, pass over the inconvenient fact that he was their antithesis. That he was a champion of freedom, democracy, human rights, and what have you, could have gone without saying. Yet that is all they say. Havel was by no means an orthodox Catholic, or even Christian. He was however formed in a deeply Catholic tradition, and both the categories in which he thought, and the substance of his thinking, were suspiciously Catholic. This is a moral and intellectual tradition of 2,000 years; and it should be said expressly that it stands against the secular, "Enlightenment" tradition of the last 300 or so. Reading and re-reading Havel, since his death, I am struck by his acute grasp of the emptiness and capitulation of that Enlightenment. Soviet Communism embodied it in perhaps its most extreme form, but as Havel realized, western "capitalism" and "libertarianism" are also premised on Enlightenment tenets: that man constructs meaning for himself, and is answerable to himself, only; that what cannot be precisely defined, quantified, and legislated is "irrational," and "irrelevant" to public life. We share this ideological materialism with the totalitarian dictators: a public default atheism. And it was against this public atheism that Havel was most eloquent, attacking it from many angles, and adumbrating spiritual realities, in his public role as Czech president. This is what world leaders, in their clichéd eulogies, overlook. In effect, they deem the very qualities that made Havel a historical fulcrum to be "irrational" and "irrelevant." He was among the greatest of Cold Warriors, and the most effective exponents of "freedom and democracy," because he spoke to men where they actually live. He reminded people that they are not ciphers, that they must take responsibility not only for their own acts, but for the condition of their world. And at the price of self-sacrifice. His phrase, "living in truth" has communicated this, to such a distance that today even dissidents in China persistently invoke him. That phrase, along with such as the late Pope John-Paul II's "culture of life," and "culture of death," cuts through the tedium of lies, damned lies, and statistics. One of his last addresses, to a "Forum 2000" series last year, touches on city planning and urbanism. It considers the environment from a frankly aesthetic perspective. Havel describes the vicious ugliness of contemporary suburban Prague, sprawling over a landscape where he could personally remember villages, fields, woods, meadows, churches. He fixes on, for instance, land-wasting single-storey warehouses and vast parking lots. All of this built by cost-benefit analysis, by men whose outlook is "rational," and who do not waste time on "irrelevant" things, such as what the world they are building will look like. This isn't a question of writing new regulations, although they might be required. It is more fundamentally about "humankind coming to its senses, grappling with its short-sightedness, its stupid conviction of its omniscience and its swollen pride." Nothing is "self-evident," he often said. For truth, we cannot look to ourselves, but must look higher. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top