Havel, Vaclav.
Post-modernism: The search for universal laws.
Vital Speeches of the Day. 60(20):613-615. 1994 Aug 1
Abstract
The modern age has ended, and the world is going through a period of
transition. Future cooperation and peace in the multicultural world are
rooted in self-transcendence.
Ladies and Gentlemen: I take this occasion--in front of this historic
building, where you have paid me the high honor of awarding me the
Philadelphia Liberty Medal--as an invitation to set my own sights equally
high. I would like, therefore, to turn my thoughts today to the state of
the world and the prospects that lie before it. I also have decided to do
something that personally I find just as demanding: I will attempt to
address you in English. I hope you will understand me.
There are thinkers who claim that if the modern age began with the
discovery of America, it also ended in America. This is said to have
occurred in the year 1969, when America sent the first men to the moon.
From this historical moment, they say, a new age in the life of humanity
can be dated.
I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has
ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going through a
transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and
something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were
crumbling, decaying and exhausting itself, while something else, still
indistinct, were arising from the rubble.
Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly
not unprecedented. This happened in the Hellenistic period, when from the
ruins of the classical world the Middle Ages were gradually born. It
happened during the Renaissance, which opened the way to the modern era.
The distinguishing features of such transitional periods are a mixing and
blending of cultures, and a plurality or parallelism of intellectual and
spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems
collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or
rediscovered. They are periods when there is a tendency to quote, to
imitate and to amplify, rather than to state with authority or integrate.
New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of
many different elements.
Today, this state of mind of the human world is called post-modernism. For
me, a symbol of that state is a Bedouin mounted on a camel and clad in
traditional robes under which he is wearing jeans, with a transistor radio
in his hands and an ad for Coca-Cola on the camel's back. I am not
ridiculing this, nor am I shedding an intellectual tear over the
commercial expansion of the West that destroys alien cultures. I see it
rather as a typical expression of this multicultural era, a signal that an
amalgamation of cultures is taking place. I see it as proof that something
is happening, something is being born, that we are in a phase when one age
is succeeding another, when everything is possible. Yes, everything is
possible because our civilization does not have its own unified style, its
own spirit, its own aesthetic.
This is related to the crisis, or to the transformation, of science as the
basis of the modern conception of the world. The dizzying development of
this science, with its unconditional faith in objective reality and its
complete dependency on general and rationally knowable laws, led to the
birth of modern technological civilization. It is the first civilization
in the history of the human race that spans the entire globe and firmly
binds together all human societies, submitting them to a common global
destiny. It was this science that enabled man, for the first time, to see
Earth from space with his own eyes, that is, to see it as another star in
the sky.
At the same time, however, the relationship to the world that modern
science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential.
It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing
something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality,
and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of
disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It
produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia: Man as an observer is
becoming completely alienated from himself as a being. Classical modern
science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of
reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only
dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became.
Today, for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than
our ancestors did, and yet, it increasingly seems they knew something more
essential about it than we do, something that escapes us. The same thing
is true of nature and of ourselves. The more thoroughly all our organs and
their functions, their internal structure and the biochemical reactions
that take place within them are described, the more we seem to fail to
grasp the spirit, purpose and meaning of the system that they create
together and that we experience as our unique "self."
And thus today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. We enjoy all
the achievements of modern civilization that have made our physical
existence on this earth easier in so many important ways. Yet we do not
know exactly what to do with ourselves, where to turn. The world of our
experiences seems chaotic, disconnected, confusing. There appear to be no
integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of
phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in
the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less.
In short, we live in the post-modern world, where everything is possible
and almost nothing is certain.
This state of affairs has its social and political consequences. The
single planetary civilization to which we all belong confronts us with
global challenges. We stand helpless before them because our civilization
has essentially globalized only the surface of our lives. But our inner
self continues to have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the era of
rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of human Being, the
more deeply it would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling
to the ancient certainties of their tribe. Because of this, individual
cultures, increasingly lumped together by contemporary civilization, are
realizing with new urgency their own inner autonomy and the inner
differences of others. Cultural conflicts are increasing and are
understandably more dangerous today than at any other time in history. The
end of the era of rationalism has been catastrophic: Armed with the same
supermodern weapons, often from the same suppliers, and followed by
television cameras, the members of various tribal cults are at war with
one another. By day, we work with statistics; in the evening, we consult
astrologers and frighten ourselves with thrillers about vampires. The
abyss between the rational and the spiritual, the external and the
internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral,
the universal and the unique constantly grows deeper.
Politicians are rightly worried by the problem of finding the key to
ensure the survival of a civilization that is global and at the same time
clearly multicultural; how generally respected mechanisms of peaceful
coexistence can be set up, and on what set of principles they are to be
established. These questions have been highlighted with particular urgency
by the two most important political events in the second half of the
twentieth century: the collapse of colonial hegemony and the fall of
communism. The artificial world order of the past decades has collapsed
and a new, more just order has not yet emerged. The central political task
of the final years of this century, then, is the creation of a new model
of coexistence among the various cultures, peoples, races and religious
spheres within a single interconnected civilization. This task is all the
more urgent because other threats to contemporary humanity brought about
by one-dimensional development of civilization are growing more serious
all the time.
Many believe this task can be accomplished through technical means. That
is, they believe it can be accomplished through the invention of new
organizational, political and diplomatic instruments. Yes, it is clearly
necessary to invent organizational structures appropriate to the present
multicultural age. But such efforts are doomed to failure if they do not
grow out of something deeper, out of generally held values.
This, too, is well-known. And in searching for the most natural source for
the creation of a new world order, we usually look to an area that is the
traditional foundation of modern justice and a great achievement of the
modern age: to a set of values that--among other things--were first
declared in this building. I am referring to respect for the unique human
being and his or her liberties and inalienable rights, and the principle
that all power derives from the people. I am, in short, referring to the
fundamental ideas of modern democracy.
What I am about to say may sound provocative, but I feel more and more
strongly that even these ideas are not enough, that we must go farther and
deeper. The point is that the solution they offer is still, as it were,
modern, derived fromthe climate of the Enlightenment and from a view of
man and his relation to the world that has been characteristic of the
Euro-American sphere for the last two centuries. Today, however, we are in
a different place and facing a different situation, one to which
classically modern solutions in themselves do not give a satisfactory
response. After all, the very principle of inalienable human rights,
conferred on man by the Creator, grew out of the typically modern notion
that man--as a being capable of knowing nature and the world--was the
pinnacle of creation and lord of the world. This modern anthropocentrism
inevitably meant that He who allegedly endowed man with his inalienable
rights began to disappear from the world. He was so far beyond the grasp
of modern science that he was gradually pushed into a sphere of privacy of
sorts, if not directly into
sphere of private fancy--that is, to a place where public obligations no
longer apply. The existence of a higher authority than man himself simply
began to get in the way of human aspirations.
The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part of any
meaningful world order. Yet I think it must be anchored in a different
place, and in a different way, than has been the case so far. If it is to
be more than just a slogan mocked by half the world, it cannot be
expressed in the language of a departing era, and it must not be mere
froth floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific
relationship to the world.
Paradoxically, inspiration for the renewal of this lost integrity can once
again be found in science. In a science that is new--let us say
post-modern--a science producing ideas that in a certain sense allow it to
transcend its own limits. I will give two examples.
The first is the Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Its authors and
adherents have pointed out that from the countless possible courses of its
evolution, the universe took the only one that enabled life to emerge.
This is not yet proof that the aim of the universe has always been that it
should one day see itself through our eyes. But how else can this matter
be explained?
I think the Anthropic Cosmological Principle brings us to an idea perhaps
as old as humanity itself: that we are not at all just an accidental
anomaly, the microscopic caprice of a tiny particle whirling in the
endless depths of the universe. Instead, we are mysteriously connected to
the entire universe, we are mirrored in it, just as the entire evolution
of the universe is mirrored in us. Until recently it might have seemed
that we were an unhappy bit of mildew on a heavenly body whirling in space
among many that have no mildew on them at all. This was something that
classical science could explain. Yet the moment it begins to appear that
we are deeply connected to the entire universe, science reaches the outer
limits of its powers. Because it is founded on the search for universal
laws, it cannot deal with singularity, that is, with uniqueness. The
universe is a unique event and a unique story, and so far we are the
unique point of that story. But unique events and stories are the domain
of poetry, not science. With the formulation of the Anthropic Cosmological
Principle, science has found itself on the border between formula and
story, between science and myth. In that, however, science has
paradoxically returned, in a roundabout way, to man, and offers him--in
new clothing--his lost integrity. It does so by anchoring him once more in
the cosmos.
The second example is the Gaia Hypothesis. This theory brings together
proof that the dense network of mutual interactions between the organic
and inorganic portions of the Earth's surface form a single system, a kind
of megaorganism, a living planet--Gaia--named after an ancient goddess who
is recognizable as an archetype of the Earth Mother in perhaps all
religions. According to the Gaia Hypothesis we are parts of a greater
whole. Our destiny is not dependent merely on what we do for ourselves but
also on what we do for Gaia as a whole. If we endanger her, she will
dispense with us in the interests of a higher value that is, life itself.
What makes the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis so inspiring?
One simple thing: Both remind us, in modern language, of what we have long
suspected, of what we have long projected into our forgotten myths and
what perhaps has always lain dormant within us as archetypes. That is, the
awareness of our being anchored in the Earth and the universe, the
awareness that we are not here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we
are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not
advisable to blaspheme. This forgotten awareness is encoded in all
religions. All cultures anticipate it in various forms. It is one of the
things that form the basis of man's understanding of himself, of his place
in the world, and ultimately of the world as such.
A modern philosopher once said:
"Only a God can save us now."
Yes, the only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our
certainty that we are rooted in the Earth and, at the same time, the
cosmos. This awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence.
Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that
the basis of the new world order must be universal respect for human
rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not
derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the
universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence. Only
someone who submits to the authority of the universal order and of
creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a participant in it,
can genuinely value himself and his neighbors, and thus honor their rights
as well.
It logically follows that, in today's multicultural world, the truly
reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative
cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what
lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion,
convictions, antipathies or sympathies: it must be rooted in
self-transcendence. Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to
us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to
nature, to the universe; transcendence as a deeply and joyously
experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not,
what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and space,
but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together
with us, all this constitutes a single world. Transcendence as the only
real alternative to extinction.
The Declaration of Independence, adopted two hundred and eighteen years
ago in this building, states that the Creator gave man the right to
liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget
the One who endowed him with it.
Thank you for your attention.