The New York Times, Sunday, March 1^st, 1992

 

                                                                         THE END OF THE MODERN ERA

                                                                                         By Vaclav Havel

 

The end of Communism is, first and foremost, a message to the human race. It is a message we have not yet fully deciphered and comprehended. In its deepest sense, the end of Communism has brought a major era in human history to an end. It has brought an end not just to the 19th and 20th centuries, but to the modern age as a whole.

 

The modern era has been dominated by the culminating belief, expressed in different forms, that the world - and Being as such - is a wholly knowable system governed by a finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rational­ly direct for his own benefit. This era, beginning in the Renaissance and developing from the Enlightenment to socialism. from positivism to scientism, from the Industrial Revolution to the information revolution, was characterized by rapid advances in rational. cognitive thinking.

 

This, in turn, gave rise to the proud belief that man, as the pinnacle of everything that exists, was capable of objectively describing, explain­ing and controlling everything that exists, and of possessing the one and only truth about the world. It was an era in which there was a cult of depersonalized objectivity, an era in which objective knowledge was amassed and technologi­cally exploited, an era of belief in automatic progress brokered by the scientific method. It was an era of systems. institutions, mechanisms and statistical averages. It was an era of ideologies, doctrines, interpretations of reality, an era in which the goal was to find a universal theory of the world, and thus a universal key to unlock its prosperity.

 

Communism was the perverse extreme of this trend. It was an attempt, on the basis of a few proposilions masquerading as the only scientific truth, to organize all of life according to a single model, and to subject it to central planning and control regardless of whether or not that was what life wanted.

 

The fall of Communism can be regarded as a sign that modern thought - based on the prem­ise that the world is objectively knowable, and that the knowledge so obtained can be absolutely generalized - has come to a final crisis. This era has created the first global, or planetary. techni­cal civilization, but it has reached the limit of its potential, the point beyond which the abyss begins. The end of Communism is a serious warning to all mankind. It is a signal that the era of arrogant, absolutist reason is drawing to a close and that it is high time to draw conclusions from that fact.

 

Communism was not defeated by military force, but by life, by the human spirit, by con­science, by the resistance of Being and man to manipulation. It was defeated by a revolt of color, authenticity, history  all its variety and human individuality against imprisonment within a uniform ideology.

 

This powerful signal is coming at the 11th hour. We all know civilization is in danger. The population explosion and the greenhouse effect, holes in the ozone and AIDS, the threat of nuclear terrorism and the dramatically widen­mg gap between the rich north and the poor south, the danger of famine, the depletion of the biosphere and the mineral resources of the plan­et, the expansion of commercial television cul­ture and the growing threat of regional wars -all these, combined with thousands of other factors, represent a general threat to mankind.

 

The large paradox at the moment is that man - a great collector of uiformation - is well aware of all this, yet is absolutely incapable of dealing with the danger. Traditional science, with its usual coolness, can describe the different ways  we might destroy ourselves, but it cannot offer us truly effective and practicable instructions on how to avert them. There is too much to know; the information is muddled or poorly organized: these processes can no longer be fully grasped and understood, let alone con­tained or halted.

 

We are looking for new scientific recipes, new ideologies, new control systems. new institu­tiOnS, new instruments to eliminate the dreadful consequences of our previous recipes, ideologies, control systems, institutions and instruments. We treat the fatal consequences of technology as though they were a technical defect that could be remedied by technology alone. We are looking for an objective way out of the crisis of objectiv­ism.

Everything would seem to suggest that this is not the way to go. We cannot devise, within the traditional modern attitude to reality, a system that will eliminate all the disastrous conse­quences of previous systems We cannot discov. er a law or theory Whose technical application will eliminate all the disastrous consequences of the technical application of earlier laws and technologies.

 

What is needed is something different, some-thing larger. Man's attitude to the world must be radically change. We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be fed into a computer in the hope that, sooner or later, it will spit out a universal solution.

 

It is my profound conviction that we have to release from the sphere of private whim such forces as a natural, unique and unrepeatable experience of the world, an elementary sense of justice, the ability to see things as others do, a sense of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage, compassion and. faith in the Importance of particular measures that do not aspire to be a universal key to salvation. Such forces must be rehabilitated.

 

Things must once mote be given a chance to present themselves as they are. to be perceived in their individuality. We must see the pluralism of the world, and not bind it by seeking common denominators or reducing everything to a single common equation.

 

We must try harder to understand than to explain. The way forward is not in the mere construction of universal systemic solutions. to be applied to reality from the outside; it is also in seeking to get to the heart of reality through personal experience. Such an approach pro­motes an atmosphere of tolerant solidarity and unity in diversity based on mutual respect, genu­ine pluralism and parallelism. In a word, human uniqueness, human action and the human spirit must be rehabilitated.

 

The world today is a world in which general­ity, objectivity and universality are in crisis. This world presents a great challenge io the practice of politics, which, it seems to me, still has a technocratic, utilitarian approach to Being, and therefore to political power as well. Many of the traditional mechanisms of democ­racy created and developed and conserved in the modern era are so linked to the cult of objectiv­ity and statistical average that they can annul human individuality. We can see this in political language, where cliche often squeezes out a personal tone. And when a personal tone does crop up, it is usually calculated, not an outburst of personal authenticity.

 

Sooner or later politics will be faced with the task of finding a new, postmodern face. A politi­cian must become a person again, someone who trusts not only a scientific representation and' analysis of the world, but also the world itself. Ho must believe not only in sociological statistics, but also in real people. He must trust not only an objective interpretation of reality, but also his own soul; not only an adopted ideology, but also his own thoughts; not only the summary reports he receives each morning. but also his own feeling.

 

Soul  individual spirituality. first-hand personal insight into things; the courage to be himself and go the way his conscience points, humility in the face of the mysterious order of Being. c₉nfidence in its natural direction and, above all, trust in his own subjectivity as his principal link with the subjec­tivity of the world - these are the qualities that politicians of the future should cultivate.

 

Looking at politics "from the inside," as it were, has if anything confirmed my belief that the world of today - with the dramatic changes it is going through and in its determination not to destroy itself - presents a great challenge to politicians.

 

It is not that we should simply seek new and better ways of managing society, the economy and the world. The point is that we should fundamentally change how we behave And who but politicians should lead the way? Their changed attitude toward the world, themselves and their responsibility can give rise to truly effective systemic and institutional changes.