It’s one of those sublime coincidences that happen from time to time that the death of one famous ideas man and orator — Christopher Hitchens — has been closely followed by that of another. Vaclav Havel was someone who did not have the notoriety of Hitchens but whose thinking and works will probably outlast him. Havel was also, in many ways, an anti-Hitchens.
Hitchens was justly famous for his hatred of all things totalitarian, but through his later publications such as “God is Not Great” also became a champion of the rationalist approach embedded in the modern scientific method. His well-publicized atheism made him a champion for many of the unreligious and earned him the condemnation of much of the religious world.
Havel was also a fervent warrior against totalitarianism. His plays and writings from the 1960s and 1970s, which were banned in his homeland of Soviet-bloc Czechoslovakia and for which he was imprisoned a number of times, became must read items in their smuggled versions in the West. Through them, and through his consistent resistance to Soviet rule, Havel was one of the leading instruments in the demise of communism. That he later became president of the free Czech homeland, and an honored and influential statesman, was a just affirmation for the man who led the Velvet Revolution in eastern Europe.
Outside of that, however, he and Hitchens had little in common. Havel was very much a person who believed in the broader mystery of the universe, and he came to see modern science as a progenitor of sorts for the kinds of problems that beset the world today. He made his points in a famous speech he gave at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on “The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World” in a 1994 visit to the US:
At the same time, however, the relationship to the world that the 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.
He wasn’t against rationalism, but he believed the world hungered for more than that, for something that connected humans to a broader universe that embraced the “mystery” of the cosmos and which he believed science alone couldn’t do. He used the Anthropic Principle to back that claim and, even though current theories of the multiverse can explain why our universe is the way it is, I doubt he would be convinced. In the end, he was a believer in an indefinable something that gives life meaning beyond that which science can deliver:
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, in 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 respects 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.
I’d like to have seen Havel and Hitchens square up in a debate. I would have backed Hitchens in the rightness of his approach to things, but there’s always the sneaky part of me that wanted to believe something of what Havel said. It doesn’t need to involve mythical gods, but his ideal of transcendence certainly speak to the romantic in me. And he was certainly right about the division between science and society that exists today, though my guess is that much of his attitude comes from the Soviet oppression he suffered under.
Havel was a great man. I only wish he had been able to write more of those witty and perceptive plays of his. But this world would certainly have been different, and probably a whole lot worse, without him in it.
I’m very thankful for Stephen Hawking, not just for the insights he’s brought to science, but also for the fact he even got this far and let me live during a time of real genius.