Quote of the Day (Vaclav Havel, on ‘The Moment of Most Profound Doubt’)

“Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourished human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.”— Czech President, dramatist and dissident Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), Speech at the Salzburg Festival, July 26, 1990 

Quote of the Day (Vaclav Havel, on ‘A New Moral Effort’ vs. ‘The Dictatorship of Money’)

“The dictatorship of money, of profit, of constant economic growth, and the necessity, flowing from all that, of plundering the earth without regard for what will be left in a few decades, along with everything else related to the materialistic obsessions of this world, from the flourishing of selfishness to the need to evade personal responsibility by becoming part of the herd, and the general inability of human conscience to keep pace with the inventions of reason, right up to the alienation created by the sheer size of modern institutions—all of these are phenomena that cannot effectively be confronted except through a new moral effort, that is, through a transformation of the spirit and the human relationship to life and the world.” — Playwright, essayist, dissident, and first President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), “Paying Back the West,” The New York Review of Books, Sept. 23, 1999

Quote of the Day (Vaclav Havel, on ‘The Tragedy of Modern Man’)

“The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”— Playwright, essayist, dissident, and first President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), Letters to Olga: June 1979-September 1982 (1988)

Quote of the Day (Vaclav Havel, on the ‘Contaminated Moral Environment’ of Communism)

“We live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships. Only a few of us were able to cry out loudly that the powers that be should not be all-powerful and that the special farms, which produced ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them, should send their produce to schools, children's homes and hospitals if our agriculture was unable to offer them to all.”— Vaclav Havel, “New Year’s Address to the Nation” after his election as President of Czechoslavakia, January 1, 1990

The life and career of playwright-dissident-statesman Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), who died over the weekend, was a standing rebuke not just to totalitarianism but also to the habits of mind to which even politicians in a democracy can slip when spin becomes, by ever-so-artful degrees, lying. He showed that, while words alone might not be sufficient in political discourse, they are an indispensable starting point in framing arguments and, as he put it, "living within the truth."

We are about to find out not only if that example will not only prove an enduring object lesson to the countries involved in the "Arab Spring," but whether the parties that followed his path toward freedom behind the Iron Curtain will have the backbone to tell their constituents the hard choices that await them in the worst economic crisis since the end of the Cold  War.

Vaclav's crucial recognition--that in politics (especially in politics) moral considerations still need to be brought to bear--is analyzed in a fine post by the blogger “Archbishop Cranmer.” (No, not the archbishop executed in the 16^th century, but the contemporary British blogger using the name as a pseudonym.)