Jan 6, 2012

Remarks by Jean Bethke Elshtain

at the Vaclav Havel Memorial Tribute
Jan. 6, 2012
Washington, D.C.

It is altogether meet and right that we gather on this, the Feast of Epiphany for Christians the world over, to remember the man who was for many in this room a friend, a teacher, and a hero, Vaclav Havel. How so? Please recall the story: three wise men from the East follow an unusual star to its resting place over a small village in Palestine. What they find is not a potentate in a grand castle but, rather, a newborn baby in humble circumstances, sharing his abode with the barnyard creatures. They do not turn around and march off in a high dudgeon; rather, they offer him their elaborate gifts, they recognize in him the possibility of new beginnings.

It is this possibility of new beginnings—natality—that one associates with Havel, an improbable revolutionary in so many respects. Yet there he was at the birth of a vulnerable, fledgling democracy that he had done so much to bring about. This rather shy man, who often spoke with his eyes cast downward as he was lost in thought, was the man those who yearned for new beginnings, for a way of life consistent with the dignity of the human person, turned to to lead them out of the darkness and into the light.

I don’t mean to overdramatize here and, no doubt, Havel himself would rather slyly subvert what I have already said through some ironic interplay between characters in one of his plays. Rather, I want to remind us that miracles can yet happen; that what was thought impossible can give way before the power of ‘something new’ that comes to us, not in the form of tanks and guns and fighting in the streets, but with humor, determination, courage, and imagination. It comes about because some chose to ‘live in truth’, to live ‘as if’, as Havel put it.

We do not have a free, functioning civil society, he wrote. But let’s live ‘as if’ we did. We are not free citizens, but let’s act as if we are. Of course, we will run afoul of the corrupt powers-that-be. Some of us will pay a heavy price. But we will leave living exemplars that remind everyone that even the powerless have power of a sort that is often untapped because it isn’t imagined and acted upon. Resistance in face of the radical absence of choice.

How can this be? It can be because there is something about life that “moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution and self-organization” whereas the “post-talitarian system…is utterly obsessed with the need to bind everything into a single order,” a homogenized identity, a system that depends on demoralization and cannot survive without it. After a time the architects of such a regime and its enthusiasts come to believe that all is secure, that they have forged everything into a monolithic, monochrome one-ness. They do not realize that beneath the frozen surface of things there is stirring and restlessneas and that, one day, a single brave act or the sacrifice of innocent souls or the performance of a forbidden play or the playing of outlawed music or gathering to listen to a prohibited speech—something happens and the frozen surface cracks and life will never be the same again.

Havel was no naïve idealist: he understood the often severe human costs of bearing responsibility for one’s society. Had he grown up in a different time and place, he would have been content, quite happpy, in fact, to write his plays and to see them performed. He could have reveled in peace and quiet and in the camaraderie of friends and compatriots. But that was not given to him. His time and place taught him terrible lessons in human venality, duplicity, brutality. It showed him how dark everything becomes when we close the curtains to the morning sun, when nothing is permitted to permeate the gloom of the socialist republic or people’s republic or whatever euphemism is deployed to cover up the reality of systemic corruption, a world that thrives on the depletion of the human spirit.

One way the human spirit is depleted is through the corruption of language made possible by the triumph of ideology. In his essay, “On Evasive Thinking,” Havel gives us an example. A stone ledge has come loose, fallen from a building, and killed a woman. The response of the regime is, first, to assure everyone that window ledges “ought not to fall” but look, after all, at what wonderful progress we have made in so many areas and what is more, we must always think about mankind itself and “our prospects for the future”.

A second window ledge falls and kills someone else. There is another flurry of reports about the overall prospects for mankind—rosy, as it turns out, as socialism spreads and workers’ states proliferate! In the meantime, ledges fall and particular people in real places are killed. The prospects of mankind are, Havel warns, “nothing but an empty platitude if they distract us from our particular worry about who might be killed by a third window ledge, and what will happen should it fall on a group of nursery-school children out for a walk.”

Language and not only language is degraded if hollow euphemisms deflect our attention from concrete worries and dangers—and that is one of the many horrors of ideological thinking: it generates a false reality because it falsifies the only reality we have—the one before us at this moment, a place where a real, irreplaceable human being can be killed by a falling window ledge.

We are keenly aware that we honor today a very particular real man—no carboard cut-out saint but a unique human being whose name evokes the prospect of living in truth, of new possibilities, of drawing upon and drawing out the better angels of our nature.I will close with words from Havel’s extraordinary inaugural address on becoming president of Czechslovakia in January, 1990, a time of jubilation and, no doubt, very high and often unrealistic hopes.

Havel brought things down to earth, reminding people of the long, long road ahead if they would have a decent, well-functioning democracy. “We have,” he said, “ entered the long tunnel at the end of the light.” There is the moment of epiphany and then there is hard work without surcease. It takes an extraordinary man to come up with such words and to utter them in all their brilliance and simplicity. Havel was such a man. How lucky we were—we, all of us—that he was there.