Inspiration from Vaclav Havel

Readers who have been with me for a while will know that I have taken great inspration from Vaclav Havel over the years.   An artist, playwright, dissident and peaceful democrat, his writing on totalitarianism and post-totalitarian ways of being have influenced much of my work and thinking on working towards post-colonial First Nations communities and organizations.

Yesterday in the Globe and Mail there was a great interview with Havel and it was rich with quotes about what it takes to move from the idealistic state of a dissident to the hard work of institutionalizing large scale social change.   Because the Globe suffers from link rot, I’ll print the best ones here:

“We had no precedent for this experience,” he says in a slow Czech monotone. “There was nowhere to learn, nowhere to take lessons from, in a situation where everything was state-owned and in state hands.”

His dissident movement is often caricatured as a group of hard-partying slackers who suddenly found themselves with the keys to the palace. He isn’t entirely eager to demolish this image.

“We were a group of friends from various branches of the arts who had suddenly found ourselves in a world we had known only from a distance, and which up till then had been merely a target of our criticism and ridicule, and who had to decide very quickly what we were going to do with this world.”

It soon became apparent that a revolution, however bloodless, quickly turns into horrendous work.

“We had a clear idea about our ideas, about our visions, but the technicalities of the actual execution, that was a different matter. I mean, there was a lot of improvisation involved. And that’s my advice that I give to foreign dissidents; it is a lesson that they can learn from us so that they can avoid our mistakes, ” The ideas are important, but it is equally important how you implement these ideas, and to make sure that they correspond to reality.”

This was a hard lesson for anyone who had spent a lifetime in the idealistic world of resistance, and he is certainly not the last to experience it. The authoritarian governments of Europe disappeared almost overnight, but after a year of shocked celebration, what was left was hardly a paradise. Here was the question that the world has still not been able to answer: How do you move from a regime-controlled society and economy to a free, liberal democracy without damaging lives, casting millions of people into peril, giving birth to vast private-sector tyrannies of mafia capitalism? In Iraq, Afghanistan, China and Russia, this remains the central question. Even in Prague Castle, it wasn’t quite answered.

“The most unpleasant experience was how difficult and what a long time it took for the political culture to renew itself, to regenerate itself, to get rid of all the deformations coming from the totalitarian regime, how long a time it takes for a society to change, not externally but from within, because of course not everybody can be an entrepreneur.”

All of what he is saying here applies to First Nations communities as well, from the point that it is impossible to have a grand plan for how it will all work out to the need for internal decolonizationas well.   He elaborates on the idea that all of the change can be known:

“Somebody who is completely prepared for the course of history is a little bit suspicious,” he says slowly, raising his eyebrow in a faint smile. “Sure, you can ask yourself, ‘Why didn’t you have the whole democratic constitution written in advance.’ Or, ‘Why didn’t we have a complete set of laws ready in our hands?’ “You can’t just outline history in advance – I mean, this is something that the Communists and the Marxists always wanted to do. That was, of course, wrong, and it then ended up creating a prison situation, a gulag-type scenario, because they thought that the world could be designed in advance, and then whatever doesn’t fit into the framework they’ve designed should be chopped off.”

In the end though, the kind of change Havel began – and the kind many of us are engaged in across Canada – will be completed in generations.

“I don’t think that one generation is better than another generation – the ratio of good and bad character features are much the same in any generation,” he says. “But the specific type of damage that was caused by communism, the damage to human souls, of course it is something that this new generation of young people won’t be tainted with.

In our case, it seems to me that there is a need to create momentum that will undo the damages wrought especially by residential school, and I think this means one or two more generations during which it is important that First Nations communities retain their essence, build forward from their deep strengths and survive a couple of more economic cycles that may well result in more focus on local economies.   If we can do that without succumbing to the toxic forms of authoritarian leadership that sometimes arise as the shadows of this kind of change, then I think we are well placed for First Nations communities to survive and thrive in place.   It may be a dream, but so was Havel’s and this is why he stands in a central place in my pantheon of inspiration as the artist who clung to a vision that translated into a bloodless transition.   There is much to learn from his path.

[tags]vaclav havel[/tags]