Vaclav Havel & a Politics of Doubt

I’ve been away and then laid low by some bug, so am late to writing anything about the sad news of Vaclav Havel’s death. Pete has already noted his 1990 New Year speech, but I’d also recommend reading David Remnick’s profile of Havel, published by the New Yorker in 2003. There’s plenty of good stuff there, including this:

Havel allowed that he felt “strangely paralyzed, empty inside,” fearful that dissent and governing were hardly the same. “At the very deepest core of this feeling there was, ultimately, a sensation of the absurd: what Sisyphus might have felt if one fine day his boulder stopped, rested on the hilltop, and failed to roll back down,” he told an audience in Salzburg. “It was the sensation of a Sisyphus mentally unprepared for the possibility that his efforts might succeed, a Sisyphus whose life had lost its old purpose and hadn’t yet developed a new one.”

[…] A familiar Prague voice, the voice of Kafka, told him what anyone who has grown up in a police state knows instinctually—that it could all end as easily as it started.

“I am the kind of person who would not be in the least surprised if, in the very middle of my Presidency, I were to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy tribunal, or taken straight to a quarry to break rocks,” he told a startled audience at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, less than six months after taking office. “Nor would I be surprised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, proceed to tell my fellow-prisoners everything that had happened to me in the past six months. The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake.”

In Havel’s thirteen years as President—first of Czechoslovakia and then, after the Slovaks and the Czechs divided into two states, in 1993, of the Czech Republic—many of his advisers repeatedly begged him to delete, or at least soften, these public moments of self-doubt. What effect would they have on an exhausted people waiting for the radical transformation of their country? (Imagine Chirac or Blair, Bush or Schröder beginning a national address with an ode to his midnight dread!) Havel, however, would not be edited. 

Not you usual politician, then. And of course Havel’s Czechoslovakia was not your usual country and it may well be that the specific factors – of history, culture and personality – that permitted Havel to be a success in Prague could not apply in Britain. That is, our system does not allow for the expression of doubt and anything hinting at this is taken as evidence of weakness. (Something similar might be said of the American way of politics).

We force certainty onto politicians, only to complain of being short-changed when these iron-clad promises are sunk by events. Worse still, there’s an insistence on a foolish consistency that views all changes of view – whatever their provenance or circumstance – as yet more weakness.

This isn’t to say that we should all wish that more of our politicians were like Havel. Their stations are scarcely comparable and nor are their histories. But a little more doubt, a little less certainty, a touch more charity and the occasional concession that the other party might have a point of view worth appreciating might do wonders for our politics.

There was, I think, something conservative – albeit a something touched with whimsy – in Havel’s politics of doubt. Perhaps there’s no space in our politics for such a thing – certainly not if George Osborne and Ed Balls are taken as exemplary evidence – and perhaps that should be regretted. But think how refreshing it would be to hear a politician answer a question with one simple, brave litte phrase: “I don’t know.” Not always, since this cannot become their stock response, but just from time to time.