Havel on Authenticity, Responsibility, and Freedom

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Landry Ayres: When ideology overtakes thinking for oneself, who is to blame? Is the state solely responsible, or do many of us outsource our moral responsibility to ideology? According to Václav Havel, the line between ruler and ruled might be less apparent than we think. That and more on today’s episode of The Liberty Exchange.

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Landry Ayres: I’m Landry Ayres, Senior Producer at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. And welcome to the Liberty Exchange. To close out this week, celebrating the 10th anniversary of Havel’s Place, Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org Director, Jonathan Fortier, is joined by Flagg Taylor. Flagg is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Skidmore College. He’s been a visiting fellow at the James Madison program in American ideals and institutions at Princeton University, and has served on the Academic Council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. His teaching ranges widely in the history of political philosophy and in the American political tradition. Most of his writing and research has been focused on totalitarianism and dissident, liberalism, American constitutionalism, and executive power. In today’s episode, they discuss Havel’s varied range of influences and contemporaries, the spiritual deprivations of planned economies, and what it means to live authentically in both post-​totalitarian and liberal consumerist societies. We hope you enjoy it.

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Jonathan Fortier: So I’m here with Professor Flagg Taylor from Skidmore University. Flagg, thanks for coming on the Liberty Exchange Podcast.

Flagg Taylor: Oh, it’s great to be here. Always happy to talk about Václav Havel.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah, we decided to focus on Havel for our launch week because he represents so many of the themes, or stood for so many of the themes that we’re hoping to highlight at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org and on the podcast, in particular, his courageous opposition to totalitarian government in Czechoslovakia and his encouragement to speak across ideological lines. One of the reasons we’re launching next week is that we have the 10-​year anniversary of Havel’s Place. The first Havel’s Place was installed at Georgetown University, as you know, in October 2013. We’re celebrating the installation of that and trying to extrapolate the key themes from that monument, the two chairs and the table, with a tree growing through the table seems to suggest the importance of talking across ideological lines. What does the monument mean to you? What do you think these various Havel’s Places are meant to represent?

Flagg Taylor: I’ve actually never seen it but hearing you describe it, it sounds consistent with Havel’s life. After he became president of the Czech Republic, or Czechoslovakia and then subsequently Czech Republic, he kept his distance from formal political parties, kind of operating at a higher level, he thought. But his experience with Charter 77, an organisation that he helped found, to essentially call the Czechoslovak State to abide by its own laws and protect and announce to people when the state was violating its own laws by persecuting people, and justly, that organisation was comprised of people across the ideological spectrum. So Havel himself came from kind of the artistic intellectual part of elite class, but he worked with a conservative Catholic called Václav Benda, one of his closest allies in the charter, and he also worked with a guy named Petr Uhl, who was a Trotskyist, who didn’t write… He thought himself to be a real communist, unlike the pretenders in the Czechoslovak State. So Havel himself certainly lived the idea of working with people across different faiths and different political allegiances.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah. It seems to me that there was always a consistent appeal on Havel’s behalf, a consistent appeal to our humanity. And it seems to me that this emphasis on living authentically, living in truth was an attempt to get at that, to get at an authentic life that was somehow above, as you say, above partisan politics.

Flagg Taylor: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that’s right. That kind of undergirded his whole philosophy through his artistic period, through his dissident period and then on into his period as a president and formal politician.

Jonathan Fortier: That was a consistent theme in his life. Do you think he changed politically over the course of his career as he evolved from playwright to politician and then sort of elder statesman?

Flagg Taylor: I’m not sure. I don’t think so. To my mind, looking at his plays that he writes in the ’60s, this is during a period in Czechoslovakia when the censorship laws loosened a little bit, and so there was a period in around ’65 when he wrote plays and then they were actually performed in Prague. And the ideas he explores in those plays and the ideas in the dissident essays, and even the writings from his presidential period, all I think are pretty consistent. I don’t see any sharp disjunctures. One might point to the fact that, I think in ’85, this interesting kind of autobiography, but it was actually an extended interview that he did with one of his friends. It’s called “Disturbing the Peace.” And he calls himself a Socialist at one point during that extended interview autobiography.

Flagg Taylor: But he certainly didn’t behave like the socialist as president. And so if he maintained the sense of himself as partly socialist into the ’90s, early 2000s, you’d have to think about, “Well, what did he actually do to make good on that description?” And I’m not sure he did anything that would sort of put him in that basket. But there are other similar thinkers one could discuss. Orwell, same thing, self-​described socialist, but his socialism is emphatically non-​revolutionary. And so there’s some peculiar dimensions to some of the self-​described socialists of the 20th century who otherwise escaped, I would say, the ideological deformations of other socialists and communists.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah, it’s ironic that some of the most withering critiques of socialism come from so-​called self-​identified socialists, like Orwell and Havel. And I think we should be very reluctant to misinterpret the ideological commitments of figures like Orwell and Havel. From our current perspective, it’s easy to overlook the ideological milieu that they worked in and the power of the ideas, the pressures of the ideas to be compelling. I wonder if part of this could be explained by the fact that figures like Orwell and Havel would have had relatively little exposure to sophisticated free market theory, and so they might have had free market classically liberal or even libertarian sympathies. They didn’t have necessarily the theoretical framework to articulate those or develop theories to advance them.

Flagg Taylor: Right. Yeah, I think that’s probably right. Although Havel did know some people who would have read. Someone like Hayek, one of the people that he knew well and worked with in the charter years, in the ’70s and ’80s, a guy named Pavel Bratinka. And he became quite familiar with Hayek. So he would have known people who had read those books and seen those arguments, I’m not so sure how. Maybe they read, they dipped into some of that stuff during their reading groups and other kind of private educational enterprises, but I’m not really sure how well-​versed Havel was and all of that literature.

Jonathan Fortier: There are parts of Havel’s work, and I’m thinking in particular of The Power of the Powerless, that have passages that seem to suggest that he is thinking very much along the lines of Hayek or other figures in the tradition, in the Austrian tradition. A few days ago, I was looking at The Power of the Powerless again and came across a passage late in the essay that I’ll just quickly read here, because it strikes me as being extremely sympathetic to classical liberal or libertarian approaches to spontaneous order. He writes, “Every society, of course, requires some degree of organisation, yet if that organisation is to serve people and not the other way around, then people will have to be liberated and space created so that they may organise themselves in meaningful ways. The depravity of the opposite approach in which people are first organised in one way or another by someone who always knows best what the people need so they may then allegedly be liberated is something we have known on our own skins only too well.”

Flagg Taylor: Right. Yeah, yeah. He felt the deformity of the planned economy very obviously and deeply. And I think he understood perfectly well the deformity in terms of the economic deprivations. But I would say probably even more important to him was just the deprivations in terms of the crushing of the human spirit of creativity and enterprise. He always talked about the importance of people’s independence and capacity to live their lives in accordance with their wishes and to try to have a sense of their responsibility and form their creative enterprising initiatives. And anything that kind of suffocated that human spirit, he didn’t like.

Flagg Taylor: So I’m certainly sure that he was well aware of the economic deprivations, but I think even more important was the spiritual deprivations of the planned economy. I would also add to that, I was looking at some of the other Havel literature last night in preparation, and I stumbled across a passage in Summer Meditations. This is the little series of essays he wrote, I think right before he became president, after he’s elected, but I don’t think he had occupied the office officially. And in that essay, he calls the market economy as natural and matter of fact as air. And he says, “It’s a system of human economic activity that’s been tried and found to work over centuries.” And then in parentheses, open bracket Centuries? Millennia! Close bracket.

Flagg Taylor: And so one of the things that he notices about the market is that it wasn’t designed in the same way socialism was designed. At least the Marxist version was designed. And so it’s the system of economic organisations that’s evolved slowly over the centuries. It doesn’t really have a single author, different customs and institutions have been layered and cast off. And that’s the kind of thing that Havel says that’s the way human beings try to improve their life, is through that mechanism of slow reform and adaptation. And so that’s very much in keeping with his overall philosophy.

Flagg Taylor: He didn’t like, I don’t think, and he had some political competitors, this guy, Václav Klaus, who he thought was a kind of market fundamentalist. Maybe he would say that, that he raised certain principles of the market and try to instantiate them in a fanatical way that didn’t allow other goods and human goods and political goods and concerns to be woven into the fabric of political life. And so I think he struggled against some of the people in his own country that wanted to raise this mantle of the market maybe higher than Havel thought it deserved to be raised.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah, that’s very interesting. Do you think this informs his occasional critique of consumerist society? I know that in The Power of the Powerless, he makes these somewhat enigmatic comments about how consumerism, how the practices of the West have infiltrated Czech society, totalitarian society, which doesn’t, at first glance, seem to be, even on sustained reflection, doesn’t seem to be a characteristic of totalitarian societies that people are consumerist. What do you think he had in mind there? Was it sort of a base materialism that people succumb to, or what in particular?

Flagg Taylor: Yeah. So this is a very interesting and complicated question. So I’ll try to give you some very brief, as brief as possible answers, and then come back to me and elaborate on this and that, and we can dig into some other aspects. So one aspect of what he’s talking about in The Power of the Powerless essay is the consumerism that existed in what he would call post-​totalitarian Czechoslovakia. And he would say the result… That kind of consumerism results from the pervasiveness of the ideology which deprive people of the aspiration for moral responsibility. In other words, ideology is what, it replaces, you could say, the human propensity to have to face and make moral choices every day. You could say they outsource their moral responsibility to the ideology because the ideology answers all these questions and supposedly tells people how to behave.

Flagg Taylor: And so Havel wants to argue, I think, that in that circumstance, people retreat to being satisfied by material things. If they can’t satisfy their longing for decency through genuine moral choice, they will replace that by a kind of happiness that’s only rooted in material well-​being. And it doesn’t matter that material well-​being was hard to come by, whatever material satisfaction you can gain, that’s what you gain. So other thinkers, like this guy, Zinoviev in Russia, talks about, in the late Soviet Union, what do people cling to as a way to happiness? Vodka, alcohol, rampant dysfunction. And so that’s one aspect of the consumerism. And he writes a very funny play about this called The Unveiling in 1975.

Flagg Taylor: And it’s this portrait of this well-​to-​do couple, and the guy has some job where he has some connection to the party, so he’s able to travel abroad, and he brings home all these interesting trinkets from other countries, Western records, and this couple invite this character called Vaněk over to their house… Over to their flat and they unveil all the stuff that they’ve acquired, and he shows you how this apparent consumerist satisfaction with all this material stuff conceals a deep spiritual emptiness that slowly emerges over the course of the play. So that’s one aspect of what he means by the critique of consumerism. But I also think he has a critique of consumerism in the West, which is kind of a separate deal.

Jonathan Fortier: Right. No, that’s fascinating. Yeah, it gets at this, again, it intersects importantly with this whole notion of living authentically, I think, and as you say, taking moral responsibility for one’s actions and not offloading that to a regime or an ideology. This is a theme that recurs frequently in Havel’s work, as I understand it. Normally, we think of people living under the Soviet Union, under Soviet totalitarian oppression as victims, and of course, they were in many profound ways. But Havel frames it with a twist, and that is that people are also, in some sense, willing participants in the ongoing oppression, that they, in a sense, are in refusing to live authentically or live truthfully or call out the lies. They sustain the system.

Jonathan Fortier: And this recalls other figures that have written on related themes. I’m thinking of Étienne de La Boétie who wrote on voluntary servitude, that the powers of kings and queens exist because individuals continue to see them as legitimate. Do you think this informs part of this notion of making moral choices as opposed to living in a world of consumption or a world that neglects that aspect of our lives?

Flagg Taylor: Yeah. So I love to raise this question with my students when we read Power The Powerless because there’s this remarkable point in that essay where he calls this post-​totalitarian system, “mass record of individual failure” He elaborates and he says in kind of conventional thinking about politics. The first thing you do is figure out. Okay, who are the rulers and who are the ruled? And you make some judgments about whether this particular group whether it’s the one, the many or the few. You use Aristotle’s formulation, are they ruling in the common good? Are they ruling in their own interest? But there’s always this important distinction. Who are the rulers and who are the ruled? And Havel says that distinction really doesn’t matter as much in a post of totalitarian society or even a totalitarian society. Now one reaction to that I think should be to any sensible person, that’s crazy.

Flagg Taylor: That’s a crazy thing to say because if there’s ever been a harder… Has there ever been a harder distinction between rulers and ruled than the one that exists in a totalitarian regime? That just seems obvious, but what he goes on to say is that it doesn’t because of the presence and pervasiveness of ideology, everyone serves the ideology. From the rulers to the smallest person. So you know the example in the parallel palace of the greengrocer, he puts up the sign in the window that says workers of the world unite. He does it every day. And so Havel’s argument is that everyone from the highest general secretary of the party to the lowliest person who might just be putting up a sign or who might be voting a certain way at their weekly union meeting or using the correct phrases that they’re supposed to use a certain meeting, everyone does these things and they’re keeping this system going by their participation in the lie.

Flagg Taylor: And so I think he means that quite seriously that at some level, no political regime in history has demanded more participation… Guess participation might not be the right word, but demanded more kind of daily conformity and signaling than any other regime and to the extent that that’s true. His real hope is that if someone doesn’t put the sign up that can lead, he calls it a potential bacteriological weapon. That once the sign is removed from one shop then that opens the door. Well, the guy down the street might say well, if he can do it, I’ll try.

Jonathan Fortier: Yeah, I’m glad you raised that example. He says in the initial discussion of the greengrocer that really what the greengrocer is saying is that, “I’m obedient please leave me alone.” And I wonder to what extent a lot of the, what we call virtue signaling today of putting up signs someone’s lawn and so forth declaring one’s political allegiances is in part the same sort of thing.

Flagg Taylor: Right. And Havel, the point that he makes in the context of talking about this greengrocer, this shopkeeper. He says if the sign said explicitly, “I’m obedient leave me alone,” he would be less inclined to put up the sign because he wouldn’t want to announce his cowardice. And so this is another thing that he, and I think another interesting point he makes about ideology is that it hides from you… It enables you to hide from yourself the low foundations of your obedience and also hide it from others, that you can hide behind this seemingly principled selfless slogan, but it just, it conceals the reality of your cowardice and in obedience.

Jonathan Fortier: Another thing he meditates on at some length in Power the Powerless is the ritualistic nature of totalitarian control and the anonymity of the various forces that subjugate us. There’s a passage about a quarter of the way through in which he says people in the post-​totalitarian system feel that they are oppressed or pushed aside by faceless people, puppets, those uniformed flunkies of the rituals and routines of power. And I’m wondering to what extent this is also applicable to other kinds of political regimes, large centralized bureaucracies that we deal with in the West as well that we feel the administrative state is in some sense guilty of violating our freedoms or constricting us or reducing the free flow of goods and services and ideas and so forth? Not as, of course in as explicit or as oppressively as it did in totalitarian societies, but still you get the sense that some of these observations apply to different sorts of political regimes.

Flagg Taylor: Yeah, and this is one, people have remarked too, this is one of the reasons why his plays have continued to find audiences and readers because they do apply to not just totalitarian regimes but bureaucracy, more generally large corporate bureaucracies, and the sense that you can’t find… It’s very hard to pinpoint responsibility, and this is what is dehumanizing about these institutions. There’s a very funny play called the Memorandum, which I would recommend to your listeners which is kind of a wonderful illustration of anonymity and bureaucracy and how crazy it makes people. And then yeah, in the Power of the Powerless he does a wonderful job to of talking about, I think he’s in part right that essay is not only… He writes to the I think, for a domestic audience.

Flagg Taylor: The checks and the polls are trying to clarify the ground of their descent and their understanding of ideology. But he’s also writing it for a Western audience and that one point when he’s talking about the theme that you’re pointing to Jonathan he says, he’d sort of laughs at all these Western Sovietologists who are trying to look behind the curtain and see, “Oh is it Brezhnev or Andropov or Chen Yanko?” And they think somehow it matters which of these faceless guys is behind the curtain and Havel and Benda writes about this too, they’re all just in agreement that stop with the Sovietology Personality analysis, none of it matters. It’s the ideological system that drives people to behave the way they do and Havel wants to say that this is really, you could say this is the thing that he finds most dehumanizing about the whole system. He has this word that the translator of the essay, Paul Wilson. I don’t know what the Czech word is, but he translated as automatism or something like this. And so it’s just the sense that things are on autopilot.

Flagg Taylor: There’s no way for a human being to have any effect. There’s no way for human will and responsibility to insert itself and therefore Havel has this wonderful phrase where he says, “In such a system it is ideology or theory that starts to shape reality, not the reverse.” And so in a healthy political regime there might be certain principles, guiding principles that you could call the theoretical principles but those principles when they come into contact with reality, you can adjust them and think about what principles need to be maintained or how they need to be adjusted but in the totalitarian system, Havel’s point is people rayify the principles and the ideology to such an extent that reality starts to have to adapt itself to the ideology and that’s what leads to this crazy inhuman anonymity and in the sense that things are just moving and no one is in charge.

Jonathan Fortier: Do you think that we are at risk of forgetting those lessons, forgetting the grim lessons of totalitarianism from the 20th century?

Flagg Taylor: Yeah. You pointed to the problem of virtue signaling. People have, you could say the ideological temptation is still around. There might not be ideologies in the sense of a comprehensive purely intrinsically logical ideology in the sense of Marxist Leninism that is on offer, though there’s still Cuba and China and there’s that threat, but I think ideological thinking is still around and it certainly offers a temptation. The other way I would answer that question is to go back to your question a few minutes ago about consumerism. So Havel talks about consumerism in the context as it existed in these totalitarian societies, but his point about consumerism in the West, you could say there are two temptations in the modern world for Havel. And this is from Letters to Olga, he considers there’s kind of fundamental state of human beings to be a state of separation where human beings are always… Once they recognize themselves as subjects, we long for meaning, we long for responsibility. Those are kind of the two words that come up again in Lenin letters is meaning and responsibility.

Flagg Taylor: But there’s two ways of, you could say, of avoiding meaning and responsibility. One is to grab an ideology and Havel calls this fanaticism or utopianism. You try to hold being in place and you outsource your moral responsibility to this system or to this thing. And that leads to the consequences that he had to live unfortunately. But then he also says the other way to avoid meaning or responsibility is to retreat to what he calls existence in the world. And existence in the world means avoiding any aspiration to meaning, avoiding responsibility, being satisfied purely by material things and so you could say it’s almost the exact inverse of the ideological temptation. And his worry is that while the totalitarian East is defined by the ideological temptation, the industrial capitalist West is defined by this retreat. This existence in the world temptation where people turn away from community and responsibility and politics and they don’t try to find an ideology. They just kind of opt out of their humanity completely.

Jonathan Fortier: Right. So it’s not a retreat to the mountain to meditate. It’s a retreat from moral responsibility and an obsession or a preoccupation with just material existence.

Flagg Taylor: Yeah, and I would say too, Havel didn’t, I don’t know if he ever commented on the growing cell phone technology. But just, I think he would see young people just staring at their phone all day looking at silly videos, as a kind of distracting yourself to death, distracting yourself from the presence of other human beings, genuine connection to other human beings and I suspect he wouldn’t be surprised by the technological aspects that would enable one to retreat from humanity towards this kind of existence in the world.

Jonathan Fortier: It seems to me that the totalitarian impulse has been reanimated in the West in the last few years. I think we saw it very explicitly during the COVID years. There was a very obvious temptation on behalf of political leaders in the West to centralize power and decision making to stifle dissent, to censor voices that opposed the dominant narratives. Do you see similar sorts of things happening? And if so, do you see a solution to this?

Flagg Taylor: Yeah, I would certainly agree with your characterization of the response of many governments during the COVID crisis. I’m not sure that there is a solution. So Havel would say that the… Havel was wary of always trying to find a technological solution to non-​technological problems. And so I suspect he would say that what COVID demonstrates is that this aspiration to kind of conquer death fits with the modern technological project. This is where he has some significant agreements with someone like Solzhenitsyn, to the extent that we think human beings are the center of existence. Solzhenitsyn has this phrase, he calls it anthropocentrism. And therefore, essentially the modern project is this conquest of death and making us perfectly at home in the world.

Flagg Taylor: I think Havel would share Solzhenitsyn discomfort with the scope of that aspiration, not that we shouldn’t find vaccines and do things to avoid human misery as much as possible. But the idea that you could make us kind of perfectly safe and no one’s gonna ever get the disease and no one’s gonna ever get infected, and we should do whatever it takes. I think Havel would say, no, there’s some real trade-​offs that we need to keep in mind, and keep in mind how a government behaves during a so-​called crisis is gonna give it certain inclinations and habits for how it’s gonna wanna behave in 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years.

Flagg Taylor: And so he was… One of his consistent themes in political writings, I think was always think about, and this actually is a nice connection to the American founders. Havel was always very concerned to think about what scale of government is appropriate to what solution. So is this a local thing? Is this a regional thing? Is this a countrywide thing? And in that sense I think he was very attuned to, this is always an important political question in the modern world, where should this political problem attempt to be solved, and by whom? Maybe we need to do something about it, but it matters who does it, and it matters where in the political system the problem is addressed.

Jonathan Fortier: Flagg, we really appreciate your perspectives on Havel. Is there anything you’d like to say before we wrap up the conversation today?

Flagg Taylor: It’s been a pleasure. I just say that Havel’s worth reading all of his writings. I think people will enjoy if some of your audience, I would imagine they’re probably most familiar with Power of the Powerless, but they should dip into the rest of his essays. They’re always wonderful. I think the most, maybe the most important thing you can say about Havel is just what a wonderful writer he was. You’d find your way to the essays. Then I would recommend the plays, like the Memorandum and the play that I mentioned actually is very, there’s a trilogy of One Act plays that are partly autobiographical, and they’re based on this character called Ferdinand Vaněk. And the trilogy, they’re just called the Vaněk Plays, and the first one’s called Audience, the next one is called Unveiling, and the third one is called Protest. And those are very easy to read, they’re great fun. It’s just straight dialogue. And then if you’re interested in the more philosophical Havel where he uses these Heideggerian concepts and investigates being, and all these deep metaphysical questions, you should dip into Letters from Olga. So Havel offers, I would say, something for everyone.

Jonathan Fortier: Great. Well, we’ll link both to your website and to some of these works in the show notes. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

Flagg Taylor: You bet.

Landry Ayres: Thank you for listening to the Liberty Exchange, a project of Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. This episode was hosted by Jonathan Fortier and produced by Landry Ayres. Special thanks to Flagg Taylor and the rest of the Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org team, including Pericles Niarchos, Alyson Yaffe, Paul Meany and Grant Babcock. If you liked this and want more, visit us online @libertarianism.org.