Aporia

My friend Stuart Carlton —who writes here and at Wings of Reason— took the time to clean up and post a copy of Vaclav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless,” which is otherwise a bit hard to track down online.

Havel, who died on Sunday, was a surprisingly human figure for a man so heroic and transformative; he seemed, despite suffering imprisonment and terror after the attempted cultural annihilation of his country by the Soviet Union, never to lose the spark of humor and felicity that made him an artist. He witnessed real horror, fought against real evil at a time when the odds were long, yet retained the charming and creative attitude of the optimist, as a child of the Enlightenment should.

Though he started as a playwright and rebellious intellectual and became, after decades of uncertainty, the president of a reborn Czechoslovakia, his was not a transformation in the traditional sense; he never stopped being an Enlightenment thinker, an artist, an heir to what his friend Milan Kundera called the culture of the novel: that world which sees the highest morality in resisting reductive moral judgment in favor of comprehension.

It is perhaps hard for people to believe today the incredible, total faith humans had until recently in political solutions to human problems, or perhaps it isn’t; it is impossible to imagine, however, a man of Havel’s unconventional and literary bent becoming the leader of a country. But countries in East Central Europe, Kundera has argued, are more aware of the value of Western humanism because they’ve been recently deprived of it by both Germany and the Soviet Union. They value the artist, in other words, because they have seen how essential art, and the liberal arts in general, are to a civilization, how bleak a society without them is. (The rest of us will learn someday).

In any event: while parts of the essay have aged, much of it remains bracingly clear, profound, enduring:

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something ‘supra-personal’ and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic, but at the same time an apparently dignified, way of legitimising what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed towards people and towards God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own ‘fallen existence’, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.

There are excellent obituaries in both The New York Times and The Economist.