Document: Vaclav Havel - Ethics - June 1990 - Interview

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 2001 by Michael Bongiovanni

What we want, here and now, are simple, elementary things. Without reference to any ideological framework, beyond all ideology. We aspire to a share in the basic values of life, those which simple common sense and elementary human dignity demand we should be entitled to. Yet what have we actually experienced? An attempt to subjugate the world to ideology. And what a failure! Perhaps it will make the intellectuals realize that it is not enough to construct a theory and then twist reality to fit in with it. Alive and mysterious, reality transcends all imaginable theories, plans, concepts. To order and organize it calls for humility and respect for the richness, the diversity, all the colourful variety of life. It is impossible to stretch it out on the Procrustean bed of a utopia created by the cold mind of an ideologist. But in our part of the world, this is what has been done. It's a total failure. Hence the mistrust of plans and theories on the part of the intellectuals in Eastern Europe. Hence our desire to stick to analysing the present, which is the best way of planning the future.

Do you see any difference between the respective roles of intellectuals in the East and in the West?

-- The first difference is that, in most of the communist bloc countries, even recently, politics, the political debate, seemed to have vanished. Totalitarianism banishes politics. Deprived of all political culture, society cannot build its natural defences, public opinion cannot be born. Politics does not even have any professional ground where it can be practised. But a strange thing happened. Politics, chased out of the door, came back in through the window. It suddenly invaded the whole spectrum of social life. Secretly, everything took on political significance: a concert, a mass, a fair.... In such circumstances, the writer's word acquires an extraordinary aura. Especially if he strives to tell the truth, without fear of the problems he is bringing down on his own head, if he ceases to be the docile interpreter of authority. Why is the writer so important? Because the tool with which he works is language, which calls a spade a spade, which asks questions. It is the quintessential tool of culture. In our country, the writer's cultural audience is on a par with the level of political expectation--immense. Many people from the West are struck by this. People are desperately eager to hear what is going to be said, expressed. It is their own hopes, their freedom, which thus seem to take shape. It is as though society, through the medium of this cultural ferment, becomes varied, structured. Writers, upon whose shoulders there weighs a growing political responsibility, have to be correspondingly more demanding.

Does this desire for change in Eastern Europe and in other parts of the world mark the advent of a new era?

-- I'm not a futurologist, nor am I a seer. I do not know where the world community is heading. Everywhere, I observe the economic, political, ecological signs of a deep-seated crisis. In my view, this crisis is an existential crisis, a crisis of identity: man has lost the sense of responsibility he had previously felt towards something higher than him, something which transcended him. There are many men and women in the world who have felt it, understood it and who are seeking a way out.