The wisdom of Vaclav Havel
It is the tenth anniversary of the death of Vaclav Havel. The gentle Czech poet-politician was one of the few leaders who seemed really to understand the way that the world has gone.
Speaking at Independence Hall, Philadelphia on Independence Day, 4th July 1994, Havel attempted to describe the contemporary worldview:
Today, this state of mind or of the human world is called postmodernism. For me, a symbol of that state is a Bedouin mounted on a camel and clad in traditional robes under which he is wearing jeans, with a transistor radio in his hands and an ad for Coca-Cola on the camel’s back.
I am not ridiculing this, nor am I shedding an intellectual tear over the commercial expansion of the West that destroys alien cultures. I see it rather as a typical expression of this multicultural era, a signal that an amalgamation of cultures is taking place. I see it as proof that something is happening, something is being born, that we are in a phase when one age is succeeding another, when everything is possible.
“Everything is possible and almost nothing is certain,” he goes on to say. Even language does not have certainty in a world where there is no consensus on meanings.
Writing on postmodernism, Italian philosopher and writer Umberto Eco said,
‘I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland.
Still there is a solution. He can say, ‘As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.’
In a world where nothing is certain and where things formerly expressible may only be articulated by reference to a former age, church leaders continue to speak as if the last fifty years of history had never taken place; as if the propositional approach, whereby things are declared to be so because the church leaders say they are so, is an adequate response to contemporary culture.
Vaclav Havel was feted by the churches as an opponent of Communism, yet they failed to engage with (or deliberately ignored) the new reality he described.
Havel saw that the end of modernism, the end of rationalism, ushered in a dangerous age:
Cultural conflicts are increasing and are understandably more dangerous today than at any other time in history.
The end of the era of rationalism has been catastrophic. Armed with the same supermodern weapons, often from the same suppliers, and followed by television cameras, the members of various tribal cults are at war with one another.
Havel believed that if those tribal conflicts were not to lead to an ultimate destruction, then there needed to be self-transcendence:
It logically follows that, in today’s multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies – it must be rooted in self-transcendence.
It is a proposal rooted in a sense of the “spiritual,” but not in any of the spiritualities offered by those selling certainties.
His voice was never going to be popular among churches that depend upon an allegiance to the notion that their propositions are the only truth.
There are now no voices to express the depth of insight shown by Vaclav Havel.
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