On Humility and Activism: Havel Remembered
On Humility and Activism: Havel Remembered
Gregory Sumner: On Humility and Activism – Havel Remembered
The Czech writer Vaclav Havel (1936-2011) was an indispensable dissident voice in the long, hard, ultimately successful struggle against tyranny in Cold War Eastern Europe. Havel?s courageous resistance to the thought police of his country, and to the general moral corruption and cynicism fostered by the regime it represented, made him a cause celebre, a people?s hero on both sides of the Iron Curtain, from the period of the aborted ?Prague Spring? of 1968 to the ?Velvet Revolution? that coalesced overnight after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His unlikely journey from jail cell to the presidency??Havel to the Castle!? went the joyous cry in Wenceslaus Square in those intoxicating days and nights of suddenly opened windows, fresh air, and broad horizons in late 1989?echoes the trajectory of other long-distance warriors of the twentieth century, among them Gandhi, King, Lech Walesa, and of course Nelson Mandela. ?He injected light into places of deepest darkness,? former U.S. Secretary of State Madelyn Albright declared at Havel?s funeral. His ethic of resolutely ?living in truth,? in ways large and small, public and private, even in a system built on debased language and oppressive power, is relevant to all of us in 2012.
I thought of Havel often during the past tumultuous twelve months, throughout what Time magazine recently designated ?The Year of the Protester.? The martyrdom of a fruit vendor in Tunis triggered the so-called ?Arab Spring,? with all of its perils and promise. The contagion of defiance to ossified structures, led by the young, facilitated by digital communications unavailable in Havel?s revolutionary moment, spread to cities and countries under very different circumstances?London and Barcelona, Tel Aviv and Rome, and in time to the United States. As Havel insisted, ferment always takes place hidden from view. Even in times of stasis, history is full of surprises, and the expression of a longing for something more democratic, more responsive to human needs, can erupt in the most unlikely places. ?Society is a very mysterious creature,? the new president observed in a speech to his newly liberated people on New Year?s Day 1990. ?It is not wise to trust only the face it presents to you.? Who knows how these movements, in all their contradiction and variety, will play out? Havel would urge all of us, through word and example, to do what we can to give shape to their unruly energy, to direct them toward nonviolent, constructive, bridge-building channels, faithful to certain core principles.
Since his passing in December I have revisited texts I had not looked at for twenty years?Letters to Olga, Disturbing the Peace, Open Letters?and am pleased to find them undiminished in their honesty, subtlety, and ironic humor. Havel?s optimistic but doggedly anti-utopian spirit lives on, beyond the absurd stage-set in which the playwright found himself during the grayness of ?post-totalitarian? Communist rule. He understood that the pathologies and inertia besetting the world around him in the 1970s and 80s were but an extreme case of a more widespread cultural crisis: the alienation of people from their work; the estrangement so many feel from their communities, their friends and families, their highest aspirations?in short, the things that make life worth living. His commentary from more than three decades ago applies to our slick, hyper-technological consumer society today:
It is as though after the shocks of recent history?people had lost all faith in the future, in the possibility of setting public affairs right, in the meaning of a struggle for truth and justice. They shrug off everything that goes beyond their everyday, routine concern for their own livelihood; they seek ways of escape; they succumb to apathy, to indifference toward suprapersonal values and their fellow men, to spiritual passivity and depression.
What is potentially so exciting about the insurgencies of the past year is their challenge to this apathy, the way they have forced the problems of inequality and abuse of power to the surface. The people taking to the streets, and the millions more who agree with the critique if not always the style of their fellow citizen-activists, are united in grasping that the bargain as it has evolved is unsustainable, that political and economic elites, aloof from the sources of their often lavish perquisites, have to be held to account. Greed and selfishness in all their forms must be exposed, condemned, curtailed, in the name of the common good. ?It really is not all that important,? Havel wrote in 1984, ?whether, by accident of domicile, we confront a Western manager or an Eastern bureaucrat in this very modest and yet globally crucial struggle against the momentum of impersonal power.?
As we act, each in our own ways, for a better world, it is important to maintain our balance and our bearings, to be mindful of the shortcomings of those whom we would challenge–to keep an eye out for our own ideological posturing, self-satisfaction, and hubris. To Vaclav Havel, a humane response to ?impersonal power? involved not only militancy but an attitude of openness and questioning, humility, and a sense of the limitations of our vision. ?Anyone who takes himself too seriously soon becomes ridiculous,? he reminds us, ?while anyone who always manages to laugh at himself cannot be truly ridiculous.? As we move into new phases, new fronts in the fight for social justice, we should avoid black?and-white, reflexive thinking. As Havel said in early 1989:
It is not hard to demonstrate that all the main threats confronting the world today, from atomic war and ecological disaster to a catastrophic collapse of society and civilization?by which I mean the widening gulf between rich and poor individuals and nations?have hidden deep within them a single root cause: the imperceptible transformation of what was originally a humble message into an arrogant one.
Photo by Henryk Prykiel, via Wikimedia Commons
