About a month from now (17th November) will be the 30th anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution - the most creative and artist-driven of the Communist collapses of the era, and a name that still holds out the attraction that bad regimes can be toppled with passion, irony, humour and genuine eloquence. (Our inspirers, Denmark’s Alternativet, speak of a “friendly revolution”).

The undoubted hero of the Velvet Revolution was Vaclav Havel - poet, playwright, and in the early years of the Czech Republic, President. A man of huge erudition and eloquence, it might be worthwhile going back to see if Havel’s ideas and insights bring new metaphors and moods to our current challenge - which is as much to refresh the dead languages and vocabularies of contemporary politics as anything else.

To help us with that, we are indebted to Maria Popova’s generally brilliant Brain Matters blog. Maria recently unearthed a 1995 Havel lecture to Harvard students, unpromisingly titled “"Radical Renewal of Human Responsibility" (original text here) - and found it to be shimmeringly prophetic of our present everyday experience - where raw emotions course through powerful networks, shaped by all manner of discourse merchants and framers.

As Popova says:

A decade before the social web subverted geography to common interests, values, and sensibilities as the centripetal force of community formation, Havel writes:

The world is now enmeshed in webs of telecommunication networks consisting of millions of tiny threads, or capillaries, that not only transmit information of all kinds at lightning speed, but also convey integrated models of social, political and economic behavior.
They are conduits for legal norms, as well as for billions and billions of dollars crisscrossing the world while remaining invisible even to those who deal directly with them….
The capillaries that have so radically integrated this civilization also convey information about certain modes of human co-existence that have proven their worth, like democracy, respect for human rights, the rule of law, the laws of the marketplace. Such information flows around the world and, in varying degrees, takes root in different places.

And yet, with prescience painfully evident two decades later, Havel cautions that there is a dark side to this undamming of information and ideas:

Many of the great problems we face today, as far as I understand them, have their origin in the fact that this global civilization, though in evidence everywhere, is no more than a thin veneer over the sum total of human awareness…
This civilization is immensely fresh, young, new, and fragile, and the human spirit has accepted it with dizzying alacrity, without itself changing in any essential way. Humanity has gradually, and in very diverse ways, shaped our habits of mind, our relationship to the world, our models of behavior and the values we accept and recognize.
In essence, this new, single epidermis of world civilization merely covers or conceals the immense variety of cultures, of peoples, of religious worlds, of historical traditions and historically formed attitudes, all of which in a sense lie “beneath” it.
At the same time, even as the veneer of world civilization expands, this “underside” of humanity, this hidden dimension of it, demands more and more clearly to be heard and to be granted a right to life.
And thus, while the world as a whole increasingly accepts the new habits of global civilization, another contradictory process is taking place: ancient traditions are reviving, different religions and cultures are awakening to new ways of being, seeking new room to exist, and struggling with growing fervor to realize what is unique to them and what makes them different from others.
Ultimately they seek to give their individuality a political expression.

With an eye to the dangerously disproportionate dominance of Euro-American values in this global marketplace of values and ideas, Havel writes:

It is a challenge to this civilization to start understanding itself as a multicultural and a multipolar civilization, whose meaning lies not in undermining the individuality of different spheres of culture and civilization but in allowing them to be more completely themselves.
This will only be possible, even conceivable, if we all accept a basic code of mutual coexistence, a kind of common minimum we can all share, one that will enable us to go on living side by side.
Yet such a code won’t stand a chance if it is merely the product of a few who then proceed to force it on the rest. It must be an expression of the authentic will of everyone, growing out of the genuine spiritual roots hidden beneath the skin of our common, global civilization.
If it is merely disseminated through the capillaries of the skin, the way Coca-Cola ads are – as a commodity offered by some to others – such a code can hardly be expected to take hold in any profound or universal way.

Students surround a tram covered with posters of Vaclav Havel for presidency during a protest rally in Prague on 17 November 1989 (BBC)

Popova picks out further gems from Havel’s speech, particularly his conception of hope:

I have not lost hope because I am persuaded again and again that, lying dormant in the deepest roots of most, if not all, cultures there is an essential similarity, something that could be made if the will to do so existed – a genuinely unifying starting point for that new code of human co existence that would be firmly anchored in the great diversity of human traditions.
…Only a dreamer can believe that the solution lies in curtailing the progress of civilization in some way or other. The main task in the coming era is something else: a radical renewal of our sense of responsibility. Our conscience must catch up to our reason, otherwise we are lost.
It is my profound belief that there is only one way to achieve this: we must divest ourselves of our egotistical anthropocentrism, our habit of seeing ourselves as masters of the universe who can do whatever occurs to us. We must discover a new respect for what transcends us: for the universe, for the earth, for nature, for life, and for reality.
Our respect for other people, for other nations and for other cultures, can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are a part of it, that we share in it and that nothing of what we do is lost, but rather becomes part of the eternal memory of being, where it is judged.

[Continues Popova]: Havel calls for “the search for a new humility” — a search that politicians have an especial responsibility to enact:

Even in the most democratic of conditions, politicians have immense influence, perhaps more than they themselves realize. This influence does not lie in their actual mandates, which in any case are considerably limited. It lies in something else: in the spontaneous impact their charisma has on the public.
…The main task of the present generation of politicians is not, I think, to ingratiate themselves with the public through the decisions they take or their smiles on television. It is not to go on winning elections and ensuring themselves a place in the sun till the end of their days.
Their role is something quite different: to assume their share of responsibility for the long-range prospects of our world and thus to set an example for the public in whose sight they work.
Their responsibility is to think ahead boldly, not to fear the disfavor of the crowd, to imbue their actions with a spiritual dimension (which of course is not the same thing as ostentatious attendance at religious services), to explain again and again both to the public and to their colleagues – that politics must do far more than reflect the interests of particular groups or lobbies.
After all, politics is a matter of servicing the community, which means that it is morality in practice, and how better to serve the community and practice morality than by seeking in the midst of the global (and globally threatened) civilization their own global political responsibility: that is, their responsibility for the very survival of the human race?

Are we finally coming upon this model of politician, in the era of Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg - and whatever new and unusual charismatic is called forth by these phase-shifting and climatic times? As Havel’s unlikely and gentle heroism was exactly what a populace (whose energy and imagination lurked under the surface) required, so we’re looking - and finding - those velvet revolutionaries. When we need them most.

“The main task in the coming era is a radical renewal of our sense of responsibility”. How Havel + the Velvet Revolution echoes our present