I was on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1990 when the late president of Czechoslovakia gave one of the best speeches I ever heard from a head of state. His recent passing prompted me to look back in the journal I kept when I was Historian of the House, where I recorded my impressions of what I saw as a close-up observer of Congress. Havel was an intellectual, a playwright and poet, who challenged the evils of totalitarian communism and was thrown in jail for it. But as the Soviet empire crumbled Havel emerged as a symbol of opposition to communist rule and was elected president of Czechoslovakia in 1989, and a few years later in what was called the “Velvet Revolution” he became president of the Czech Republic when it peacefully separated from Slovakia.
Havel’s speech before Congress deserves another look. It was, and remains, one of the best critiques I have ever heard on what was lacking in political discourse. Havel said politics must be based on an understanding of morality and human responsibility. Everything else flows from these things. He spoke as an intellectual and was not ashamed to call himself one. He said too many intellectuals abandoned politics and this has been a great mistake. He reminded his American audience that the United States was founded by intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson. His message was not entirely new or original but the historical context in which he delivered the speech it made it a powerful statement. Just four months earlier he had been in jail. He chose not to attack his jailers but to deliver a higher message.
It has been almost twenty-two years since Havel delivered this speech. I read it again recently after learning that he had died on December 18, 2011. My reading of his 1990 speech had a completely different context this time around. As the 2012 opens the United States begins its year-long presidential campaign that will fill us all with a frenzy of issues and the usual crazy circus that we use to elect presidents. Our troops have come home from the long war in Iraq. We are still fighting in Afghanistan. The United States is suffering from its inability to pay for these wars and deal with monumental effects of a collapsed financial system and chronic unemployment. American politics is polarized. Far too many politicians are fitted with ideological blinders that offer no practical way to find compromises that could help solve the problems before us.
Our politics focuses on specific problems that are the trees in the forest. But we seldom raise our sites to look at the whole forest. Havel’s speech contained that elevated vision. It is why it still resonates. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could conduct a presidential campaign that focused on morality and human responsibility as the highest goals of any political system? Here is the part of Havel’s speech that I found most compelling.
The specific experience I’m talking about has given me one great certainty: Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim.
For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility.
Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our Being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war, or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitively won. We are in fact far from the final victory.
We are still a long way from that `family of man’; in fact, we seem to be receding from the ideal rather than drawing closer to it. Interests of all kinds: personal, selfish, state, national, group and, if you like, company interests still considerably outweigh genuinely common and global interests. We are still under the sway of the destructive and vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation, and not just a part of it, and that therefore everything is permitted. There are still many who say they are concerned not for themselves, but for the cause, while they are demonstrably out for themselves and not for the cause at all. We are still destroying the planet that was entrusted to us, and its environment. We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic and cultural conflicts in the world. From time to time we say that the anonymous megamachinery we have created for ourselves no longer serves us, but rather has enslaved us, yet we still fail to do anything about it.
In other words, we still don’t know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions–if they are to be moral–is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged.
What follows my journal entry for the day Havel spoke to Congress. It is my first impression of his remarks as I stood along the rail in the House chamber, near the large portrait of George Washington that hangs there. It is from this vantage point that I witnessed many addresses of world leaders and a number of joint sessions of Congress, when presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton addressed the nation. None impressed me more that the words of President Havel.
From Ray Smock’s House Journal
February 21, 1990
Today I was on the floor of the House to hear an address by the President of Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel. Of all the speeches of foreign dignitaries I have had the pleasure of hearing since I have been working for the House, this one, I believe, is the best. The reasons I liked it are many, but if I had to pick one fundamental factor it is that he spoke from the heart and the mind, not from the gut or the wallet. Maybe he is too new at the game of politics to be covered with layers of constraints to plain speaking. I hope for his sake and the world’s that he never does feel constrained from speaking as honestly as he did today.
He said he was new to the role of president, having only recently been freed from prison. He said he had not been to any school for presidents. He candidly admitted that he couldn’t believe that he was in the United States speaking before Congress, when so short a time ago he was incarcerated and his country was under a totalitarian regime.
Except for a few opening and closing sentences, which he spoke in good English, the speech was delivered in Czech. He would read a paragraph and then an English translator would repeat what he said. The speech took an hour and fifteen minutes to deliver this way. Everyone in the chamber had a typescript of the speech they could follow. The members and gathered dignitaries were slow to get into the speech but it was not long before they were applauding regularly and on two occasions he received standing ovations. His calculated return to English at the end of his remarks, when he spoke of Thomas Jefferson and the revolutionary founders of this country was an emotional high point. The playwright-president had dramatically concluded his speech; and as I looked around the chamber I could see a number of people with tears in their eyes, especially some of the Czechs who were guests in the chamber.
The part of the speech that impressed me the most was near the end when he shifted from a list of particular topics to a broad philosophical approach. He spoke eloquently about the need for a moral regeneration to politics and to our responsibility to one another. He unabashedly spoke as an intellectual and said that more intellectuals must get directly involved in politics. He criticized the intelligentsia for believing that they had to stay out of politics to stay independent. When intellectuals stay out of politics that is the quickest way to lose independence, he said. He also made a case for the protection of the planet from our greed. He said we think of mankind as the culmination of nature, not a part of it. We think everything on the planet is for our benefit and we plunder the planet with such selfish thoughts
He spoke of a higher order to which we are all responsible, above family, above country, above our businesses, and instead of calling it God he called it human consciousness. We must elevate human consciousness to a high moral plain, we must, and he quoted Lincoln, serve the family of man. We must put morality above all else in human affairs. We must be responsible to our fellow man and to the planet of which we are a part. Politicians seldom talk this way, and when they do it often drips of hypocrisy. Such was not the case today. This speech has an intense universal message. It will stand as an important document of the incredible changes that are sweeping Europe and the Soviet Union. History is accelerating, he said. His life is the personification of that change. Whatever happens in the future, this speech will be a touchstone of the best aspirations of the Czechs and Slovaks, and the best aspirations of us all. He cut through all the mundane issues that need the attention of governments in every country and pointed to the higher calling of government and the governed, to act in a moral and ethical manner toward one another and the planet we inhabit. If we cannot do this, nothing else is likely to improve the world we live in.