In 2014 the world finally spun off its axis into a suffocating vortex of incomprehension (just like the last half of Interstellar). Yet consolation was always available in the form of culture, which continued despite the progressing apocalypse. The next few posts will include some of this year's cultural consolers and a few of its challengers too - from Chekhov to Aphex Twin, the Oxford historian Selina Todd to the posthumous Vaclav Havel, Gang of Four to Gyorgy Lucacs, Nietzsche to the economist Thomas Piketty and many more.
3. Havel by
Michael Zantovsky
This star-studded - and to some extent star struck - biography of the
late Czech president and national playwright Vaclav Havel befits its author's CV: Michael Zantovsky is a
former Ambassador to the United States and now Ambassador to the UK. In diplomacy more
than other political dark arts, the face-to-face manoeuvres of the
individual outweigh the grand symbolic gesture. To paraphrase
Clausewitz, in the sodden turf of political warfare diplomacy is the
clash of foot soldiers: charm works here like gunpowder. Zantovsky is
most at home in the dazzling world of official state visits. However his subject clearly was not; hence, perhaps,
Havel's need to keep people like Zantovsky close to him.
In
one encounter with a surly, post-Berlin Wall Gorbachev, the naif
Havel hands the General Secretary a short, plain-spoken note
demanding equality between the superpower and the smaller nation,
much against the advice of Zantovsky and others. Later Havel offers
Gorbachev a "peace pipe" (though not of the jazz variety).
Gorbachev is startled by both gestures; though, however
idiosyncratically, they work. Havel, Zantovsky tells us on presumably
intimate grounds, liked Gorbachev much more than Yeltsin, despite or
perhaps because of Yeltsin's ebullience and fondness for a good Czech dinner. If
there is a political - as opposed to purely personal - element to
this we might assume it is that Gorbachev was closer to Havel in the global
scope of his vision. Yeltsin exuded too much of the dirty odour of
daily democratic doings; of the schemes and conspiracies that were,
as the dissidents of Eastern Europe now realised, hardly the sole
preserve of the ex-Soviet bloc. Zantovsky does little to explore the
political dimensions of these preferences - again he is more
comfortable psychologising than politicising his subject (he is a
trained psychologist). He may also take Havel too much at his own
"post-democratic" word. Havel's stated disinterest in
politics - and his often metaphysical public ponderings - hardly
mean his thought was apolitical. He was a president, after all.
Zantovsky's weaknesses are few: the prose is mostly eloquent and his
satire of Communist officialdom effective, if familiar (Timothy
Garton Ash would nod in approval). Still, his near perfect grasp of
Anglo-American style is only slightly upset by niggling convention. The occasional definite article crops up where it
shouldn't (not much of a failing for one whose first language does
not use grammatical articles but perhaps some closer proofing could
have been done for such a high-profile publication?)
The problem for this reader is in his strengths. With over two
hundred pages devoted to Havel's post-revolutionary years, the flashy
diplomacy tends to dominate the nitty-gritty. The fundamental limits
of democratisation in the context of deep economic liberalisation and
the creation of extraordinary social inequalities, are not addressed
by the book or the cadre of globetrotters who are its subject. For
the real, unacknowledged subject of the book is in fact a political
ideology which emerged as a kind of dissident orthodoxy to compliment
the vanquished Communist one: "liberal-conservatism", which
took power in all the new Central European democracies, though
exceedingly narrow in its intellectual horizons, was the privileged
partner of US power-play throughout the 1990s.
In most cases the
liberal-conservatives formed a kind of fringe within the broader,
reformist and dissident movements. Most had begun life as scions of disinherited bourgeois dynasties (Havel himself was heir to the Lucerna
and Barandov fortunes of his father) or more rarely as "papist" devotees (as with Lech Walesa in Poland). Zantovsky, integral to the
movement, is dismissive of the suppressed Trotskyists and reform
Communists within Eastern Europe, as well as left social democrats
and Eurocommunists beyond it. The real energy, he claims, came from
the small band of conspiratorial liberals hustled together in the
Balustrade Theatre, just off Smetanov Embankment in Prague's Old
Town. Never mind that Havel started out as something of a left social
democrat himself, the practical limitations of dissidence, which
meant Marxism-Leninism could only be publicly opposed from within,
pass Zantovsky by.
Whether
they knew it or not, Zantovsky believes, the dissidents of 1968 - of
so-called "socialism with a human face" - were liberals in
nuce.
This is not only revisionism; it is selective distortion of the real
patterns of oppositional thought and its ideological weaponry. It
risks reducing the long evolution of anti-Communist movements - both
within and outside of the Soviet bloc - to a kind of "pre-history"
of liberalism, which led in a deterministic fashion to the type of
society born in the post-1989 world. This is a shame, as an
opportunity is missed to write - from the perspective of Havel's own
intellectual development - a history of dissidence true to its real
manifestations. Despite his insistence on "living in truth"
Havel's own truth was hardly static. It developed in the midst of a
changing concrete situation, embracing the extreme social scepticism which inspired
Central and Eastern European free-market fundamentalism only ever
incompletely.
The
backbone of Havel's thought was pristinely assembled during his
decades of enforced inaction during "normalisation". Reference to Vladimir
Lenin - about as significant in building the world Havel opposed as
Havel was in breaking it up - is revealing: whereas Lenin's
philosophy is in every sense one of action (indeed, the culmination
of a legacy of thought-as-action inherited in part from Machiavelli
and in part from Hegel), Havel's philosophy reflected his own
material circumstances: physical inaction coupled with a profound
commitment to the morality of the intellect. This was, to put it bluntly, a
weakness. Havel's transcendental ontology - a "great chain of
Being" in which all our actions are "inscribed" -
knits all thought and action into a single, neat bundle through which
each can be categorically judged irrespective of time and place. A
sense of the "infinite judgement of being" hangs over his
tortured self-recriminations following his arrest and the concessions
extracted from him by the secret police in the 1970s. Havel realized
at this time the non-correspondence of "the moral significance
of an act and its practical consequences." (191) Although his
friends saw no wrong in what he had done, Havel continued to reflect
on the betrayal he had committed throughout his life. "Living in
truth" was thus not a series of reconciliations made with the
ontic,
historical world as one found it; but rather morality was guaranteed
by reference to the transcendentally ontological.
For
Havel political morality was an immediate extension into the
practical realm of this transcendental ontology. It is true, as
Zantovsky argues, that the method and outlook of Havel's politics
bore little relation to the workmanlike conservatism of Vaclav Klaus
and his party the ODS (Obcanska
democraticka strana
or Civic Democratic Party). Due to ructions within the dissident
elite it was not long after Havel's invitation to Klaus to join Civic
Forum in 1989 that Klaus quit and formed ODS. Klaus's bullish style
as prime minister inevitably jarred with Havel's aloof unworldliness.
Yet on fundamental "democratising" processes - including
membership of NATO, the European Union, and economic liberalisation -
they would fall into line, even if for Klaus these were phrased
pragmatically and for Havel as deep commitments.
It had not always been thus. In the first years of Czechoslovak
democracy Havel, following his Foreign Minister Jiri Dienstbier, had
toyed with the notion of a "universalist, collective security
concept" (437) which would displace both the Warsaw Pact and
NATO, tackling the geopolitical asymmetries in the European state
system, and developing transparent channels of diplomatic and economic
collaboration between East and West. Instead, by 1993, Havel became
the world's most determined lobbyist for Central European membership
of NATO and the European Union, both of which would isolate Russia
and render non-members like Ukraine and Belarus deeply vulnerable to
any shift in the balance of regional power. The Soviet bloc's
foremost "peacenik" was soon keenly supporting US
interventions in Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the disastrous 2003 invasion of
Iraq. These were not, as Zantovsky rightly argues, simply manifestations of political expedience. As Havel put it, it was only
a small step from the recognition of one's responsibility to "live
in truth" to entering an international struggle in which others
would be made to live in truth too: "We [Czechs] must accept our
share of responsibility for peace and freedom in Europe." (434)
At root Havel's transcendental guarantee of morality was blind to its
own presuppositions. The abstraction "civic democracy"
became a powerful and enduring justification for liberalisation,
privatisation and inequality once re-contextualised by historical forces. In this the rigour of Havel's
moral thought - standing in such sharp contrast to the free market
conventionality of his peers - merely gave deeper, albeit eccentric,
thrust to Czech capitalist development. In his reconstruction of the
"aura" of existentialism - or what Theodor Adorno called
the "jargon of authenticity" - Havel was very close to a
kind of philosophical common sense of the age. Although he critiqued
the "divesting" of people "of their innermost
identities" by the domination of cynical thought systems, he
failed to account for that identity's formation in historical time. He reified the subject as the spiritual monad of resistance
to the domination of the objective world. By the hypothetical
designation "post-democracy" Havel meant an age of
spiritually empowered individuals which would supersede the crass
sectional interests characteristic of both the Soviet bloc and
liberal democracy. Yet this fantasy of freely self-empowering
individuals ignores the part played by the structures of power in
constituting those very individuals.
Havel
is
ultimately a tribute to the naivety and idealism
of the first postcommunist governments and their "pre-history"
in the twilight years of the one-party state. For all the
achievements - artistic, intellectual, and political - of that
generation, not even a mind as supple and probing as Havel's could
prevent the atrophy of that movement under the pressure of strict
alignment with the United States and the verve with which the
marketisation of daily life was to be pursued.
I wrote a long comment, but it was lost. In a nutshell - like the article
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