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HAVEL’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: MELDING THEORY AND PRACTICE
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- THE NATURE OF POLITICAL POWER IN POST-TOTALITARIAN SYSTEMS
HAVEL’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: MELDING THEORY AND PRACTICEHavel’s political philosophy is exemplified by his phrase “Living in Truth.” To gain an understanding of this phrase, the 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” published in the book Living in Truth, is a good place to start. In “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel analyzes the functioning of totalitarian power and the way it creates a society of complacent individuals. He offers the alternative of a life in truth as a way to resist the bureaucratic mechanisms of repression. The essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” begins by asking questions about what power and resistance are. Havel mentions the term “dissident,” a word often used to describe him. Havel claims that when a political system becomes so “ossified” or hardened that there is no room for individuals who live in the system to express nonconformity. Dissidents are the people who choose not to conform anyway. They belong to “a category of sub-citizen outside the power establishment.” Havel wonders how these people, the powerless, can have any influence on the government and society. He asks, “Can they actually change anything?” His essay is “an examination of the potential of the ‘powerless’” that must begin with “an examination of the nature of power in the circumstances in which these powerless people operate.” THE NATURE OF POLITICAL POWER IN POST-TOTALITARIAN SYSTEMSIn order to examine the nature of the sort of political power that renders many powerless, Havel discusses the communist Czechoslovakian government at the time. Havel argues that under a dictatorship, one small group wields power temporarily and sustains power through armed might. However, the Czechoslovakia of the Cold War was not a dictatorship. During the cold war, the power of the Soviet Union expanded beyond the territory named for it on the map. The Soviet Union had influence over a number of states described as “satellites,” including Czechoslovakia. The political world was effectively divided into two power blocks, led by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The power of the Soviet Union was not geographically limited as power in a traditional dictatorship had been. The Soviet bloc of nations had one single, unifying philosophical framework that it insisted on in all the areas under its control. A network of manipulatory instruments were used to transmit its power and suppress local resistance. Havel describes the “hypnotic charm” of this unifying framework that was akin to a religion in that it “offer[ed] a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it [could] scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it [had] profound implications for human life.” In an era in which people were losing their certainty in the meaning of the world, easy answers were offered to make everything clear and simple. However, Havel warned that people paid dearly for this certainty: “the price is abdication of one’s reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority.” This type of government required abdication of one’s own reason because it made power synonymous with truth. In this new type of government, the center of power delivered the truth for the people; the people did not seek their own truth or question the government’s information. The power of the system was compounded by the communist doctrine that the state own and direct all the means of production. With the state in control of the economy, including industry, buying, selling, and employment, it had unparalleled power to control people’s day to day lives. In order to describe this system of government, Havel uses the term “post-totalitarian.” He uses the pre-fix “post” not to say that the form of government is something other than totalitarian. He merely wants to distinguish it from the dictatorships of the past and indicate that it is totalitarian in a new way. To describe how life under a totalitarian regime works, Havel uses the story of the greengrocer. A greengrocer is a common vender of fruits and vegetables. At the time Havel lived under the communist government of Czechoslovakia, it was common for greengrocers to put up signs in their windows such as the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” This slogan is a famous refrain from the end of the classic Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. Havel asks why a greengrocer would put up a sign such as this. Havel wonders, “Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur or what it would mean?” Havel’s questions point to the fact that the greengrocer most likely put up the sign without thinking or questioning its meaning. The poster was probably given to the greengrocer by government officials along with the daily shipment of food. Havel says, “He put them up into the window simply because it had been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that it is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble.” This is how totalitarian government works. The greengrocer’s sign is “one of the thousands of details” that guarantee the smooth functioning of the communist system and the greengrocer’s harmony with it. When the greengrocer puts up the sign, he is not actually inviting the workers of the world to unite, he is declaring that he is obedient to the communist government and wishes to be left alone. Havel uses the example of the greengrocer to describe the meaning of the term ideology. Havel asks what it would have meant for the greengrocer to display a sign that said “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.” Surely the greengrocer would be too ashamed to put up a sign like this that declares his own degradation. In order to suppress this feeling of shame, the sign must wear the mask of ideology. On its surface, the greengrocer’s sign only seems to ask the workers of the world to unite. The greengrocer can say to himself, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” But the deeper message of the sign, that the greengrocer is in submission to the power of totalitarian government, is covered up under the high-minded ideals of communism. The greengrocer’s relation to the ideology of communism is “disinterested conviction.” He outwardly displays his loyalty through the ritualistic display of the sign without any genuine belief. Havel explains the dangers of ideology: “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.” Ideology allows people to believe that they have dignity and respect when they are fully controlled by the power of the government. In this way, ideology legitimizes totalitarian governments. Havel describes it as a “bridge” between the regime and the people. He writes, “that complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts, and indirect instruments of manipulation which ensure in countless ways the integrity of the regime, leaving nothing to chance, would be quite simply unthinkable without ideology acting as its all-embracing excuse and as the excuse for each of its parts.” Havel often writes about how dense and theoretical language can obscure clear thinking. For example, in his play The Memorandum he describes a government that creates an artificial language that is supposed to make all communications more efficient. The most commonly used word in this language is “whatever,” and it is spelled with two letters to improve speed. The result of this language is the absurd destruction of human relationships. Bureaucratic languages and the desire to do everything efficiently and in the same way are instruments of manipulation that ensure the functioning of the regime. Under totalitarianism, there is no possibility of debate over the meanings of ideology. The regime is enabled to become totally removed from reality. Soon, it is able to create its own reality, and no one can challenge it. Havel describes how the totalitarian system is driven by automatism. Automatism is a sort of automatic functioning. No one person or group of people is behind the machine, pulling the levers. Totalitarian government works on its own strange and diffuse energy. Even the apparent rulers are made into automatons, or automatically functioning and replaceable parts, like cogs in a machine. Havel says, “No matter what position individuals hold in the hierarchy of power, they are not considered by the system to be worth anything in themselves, but only as things intended to fuel and serve this automatism.” The system’s logic is utilitarian: people are only useful for the greater good of the system. People do not have any intrinsic values or worth. Havel explains how the totalitarian system degrades human life: “Between the aims of the post-totalitarian system and the aims of life there is a yawning abyss: while life, in its essence, moves towards plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution and self-organization, in short, towards the fulfillment of its own freedom, the post-totalitarian system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline.” People are made to serve the system. Because of the uncrossable gulf between life, with its diversity and freedom, and totalitarian government, with its demands for sameness and comformity, ideology is needed as the bridge to keep the totalitarian system legitimate. But the bridge is built over a fundamental lie, and individuals in the system must act as though the lie were true for the system to continue to function. Havel uses the fairy tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes to describe how this type of lie can come to achieve social acceptance. He says that people in the system, like those who knew the emperor was naked, can know that totalitarian government is a lie. However, they must behave as if it were the truth. In doing so, they “are the system.” Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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