‘The Power of the Powerless’: A World of Appearances
A review of ‘The Power of the Powerless’, by Vaclav Havel’; Routledge, 1985.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry Wotton notes as if in passing that ‘only shallow people do not judge by appearances’. Like many of Wilde’s sayings, the phrase only seems paradoxical. If Lord Henry is ventriloquising Wilde, and I think we can assume he is, then Wilde is saying that to be concerned with the surface of things is literally, but not figuratively superficial. For if we look behind the veil of the world, searching for what it ‘really’ is, we will find nothing at all. There is no essence to things, but only atoms, or perhaps quantum events. So we end up back where we started: with appearances. That is where the mystery lies.
Sir Roger Scruton, whose stated goal in life was to ‘re-enchant the world’, liked from time to time to quote Lord Henry’s remark. Like Charles Taylor, Scruton saw that a world stripped of its sheen—the world of the reductionist—was not just partial, but in fact opposed to the human being. The song you danced to at your wedding; the drawing by your son you have stuck to your fridge; the feeling you get when you see your loved ones—these are not ‘just’ a series of sounds, crayon on paper, brain-chemistry. Caravaggio’s The Conversion of Saint Paul is not ‘just’ paint on canvas. Science and technology have done much for us. But that is why it is a shame to hear some say, in the name of those great fields, that the world is ‘nothing but’ its smallest parts, ‘nothing but’ that which is open to analysis.
Caravaggio’s The Conversion of Saint Paul is not ‘just’ paint on canvas.
Marxism, as well as Marxist-Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and its sundry other offshoots, was a ‘scientific’ system, or claimed to be. Marx and Engels thought they had come upon the laws of history, grounded in the theory of historical materialism. On this view, the economic structure of society (the ‘base’) determines the political and cultural ‘superstructure’. By laws as objective as those of physics, societies move inexorably through stages: from feudalism to capitalism, capitalism to socialism, socialism to communism. The theory is so neat and tidy that it was and remains highly attractive to intellectuals. Surveying the grim reality of applied Marxism, Czesław Miłosz, in his essay collection The Captive Mind, questions whether such internal coherence, such ‘cast-iron consistency’ really is the greatest of human virtues.
Václav Havel also lived under the boot of applied Marxism. His The Power of the Powerless is a terse, dense commentary on life in Soviet Czechoslovakia. Written in 1978 as a kind of samizdat witness-bearing, a memorandum for dissidents, it has since acquired the character of prophecy. But in truth, it is an example of keen-eyed observation and careful induction. Havel’s subject is ideology, and in particular totalitarian ideology: what it is, how it works, why it works. From a particular case—a greengrocer’s putting a slogan in his shop window—he is able to infer a whole raft of things that together amount to an anatomy of the totalitarian state. Ideology works not for the most part because it elicits belief. It works because it demands ritual obedience, and people go along with it.
Written in 1978 as a kind of samizdat witness-bearing, a memorandum for dissidents, it has since acquired the character of prophecy.
Havel, over 20 chapters or so, circles his prey like a wary dog. But at the heart of it is the greengrocer, and what his collusion makes plain. The greengrocer hangs his sign in his shop window not because he believes in the régime or even just the slogan on the sign. He does it because that is what other people do. The price, or likely price, of abstention is too great. There is no point resisting when he could just hang the sign and go about his day. One could argue that if there is such a thing as the ‘banality of evil’—the commission of crimes out of habit and a thoughtless faith in procedure—then perhaps there is also a banality of compliance, where the individual goes along with what he knows to be wrong because it is part of his routine. And yet his humdrum act of compliance helps to bring about a climate of terror that stops any would-be troublemakers from questioning the state.
The greengrocer lives ‘within the lie’. But others ‘live in truth’. These dissidents speak and act as the slogan is not real, and as if that to which it points is not real either. The dissident will not just go along with it all. Thus he breaks the spell that binds the system. He reveals what everyone else suspects, and many know, which is that the emperor has no clothes. The whole mythology of the state—the flags and signs, the rituals and anthems, the gestures and icons, the grand historical narratives—is exposed as a mere ‘world of appearances’, a façade, pointing to nothing and concealing everything. Havel dispels the notion that the dissident is an activist type, a gung-ho revolutionary or idealist. He is more like 1984’s Winston Smith: an ordinary person who, for reasons that may seem mysterious to others, cannot bear to live within the lie any longer. The dissident may be harassed or thrown in jail. He will find it difficult to secure employment. But his understated act of rebellion—to live the truth—punctures the illusion on which the whole system rests. The powerless have power.
He reveals what everyone else suspects, and many know, which is that the emperor has no clothes.
Havel, a playwright who later became President of the Czech Republic, is a lucid writer. He uses simple words, tells vivid stories, and gives off the impression of one who has not entirely lost his sense of humour. It is hard not to have a sense of the absurd when one lives in such a place, and Havel’s eye for absurdity is keen. The greengrocer, the sign, the sundry rituals of popular hypocrisy—these are, if you like, stage props in a morality play. The simplicity of Havel’s style suggests he has no time for tricks. He is not trying to impress us. In fact, faced with the elaborate propaganda of the Soviet state, he has, like Orwell, perhaps come to see the cleanness and honesty of plain prose.
The non-violent transition of power in what was then Czechoslovakia, known as the Velvet Revolution, entailed popular demonstrations against the Communist government that went on more or less without ceasing from 17th November to 28th November 1989. Students and older dissidents took to the streets to call for an end to 41 years of one-party rule. In early December, Gustáv Husák appointed the first largely non-communist government; in late December, Alexander Dubček became speaker of the federal parliament. A day later, Václav Havel was named president. For this reason, it is easy to read The Power of the Powerless as a kind of understated manifesto, or a declaration of intent. It is neither. Havel never calls for overthrow. He is describing a social disease, and he is under no illusions as to how difficult it would be to topple the régime. Havel never promises victory. What he aims at is honesty: he seems to say that this is a lie, and I will call it a lie, and lying is wrong.
It is easy to read The Power of the Powerless as a kind of understated manifesto, or a declaration of intent. It is neither.
I suspect that as you have been reading this, certain more contemporary expressions of the kind of propaganda Havel describes have floated into your mind. There is advertising, of course. But I think it important to note that symbols and symbolism—what I have called elsewhere mythology—is part and parcel of any political order. Symbols are metaphors, carrying across (from metaphorá = ‘carrying across’) disembodied ideas into lived reality. One does not relate to justice or freedom or equality, for in the real world we do not encounter abstraction: we encounter things. Values are made tangible through story, song, gesture, ritual, clothing: the judge’s wig, the national anthem. One is not a very good tyrant if one does not recognise this. Fascism tried to flood the public realm with symbol so as to overwhelm critical thought with feeling. Benjamin called it the ‘aestheticisation of politics’, which finds its highest expression in the work of Riefenstahl, Goebbels and Speer. But propaganda is mythology wielded for instrumental ends; that is: symbols used to control. Pure political mythology, in contrast, can arise organically and be true to its content, as well as the values of society. When some mythical form—a narrative, say, or an anthem—does not seem to speak to reality, people disobey. Hence the taking of the knee by Colin Kaepernick or, on the other hand, the removal of rainbow and Progress Pride symbols.
Havel’s essay travels so well through time because of the ineradicability of propaganda, the use of propaganda by those who seek to control, and the reality of conformity. In my country, poll after poll—The British Social Attitudes survey, YouGov research, More in Common canvassing—shows that the vast bulk of us, regardless of our political beliefs, feel unable to say what we think about immigration, gender, race, or national identity. This is what Havel grasped. There may not be a uniform ‘silent majority’, as the politician likes to claim, but plainly there are a large number of people who stay quiet, regardless of their beliefs, because even broaching certain subjects has come to be seen as taboo. I would gently suggest this is not a good state of affairs for anyone, and not a good basis for democracy. There is a good little book by Sam Harris called Lying, in which he sets out a rationalist, utilitarian case for telling the truth at all times. Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church (and hence someone with whom Harris would find little agreement) says—and I paraphrase—that truth orders the mind to reality. It is surely a common-sense notion that to cleave closely to reality, to try, as Orwell put it, to ‘see things as they are’ is a better strategy for life than ‘living within the lie’.
