Friday, November 21
Intellectuals and the Velvet Revolution
Intellectuals are a strange breed. Regardless of their actual occupation, which tends to center around academia, media and miscellaneous writing positions, they have one thing in common: an enormous belief in their own superiority, uniqueness and power to shape history. One of them is our former President Havel. Celebrated in the West as an anti-communist icon and an example of a dissident that truly made a difference, he isn't automatically praised here, in his home country. And rightfully so.
There is one more type of an intellectual, and that is a person who does not call himself an intellectual, and yet is capable of delivering enormously valuable results based solely on his or her intellect and hard work. We have one example to show you, too. His name is Vaclav Klaus, and he is the sitting President of the Czech Republic.
An important couple of antagonists who shaped the early transformation years of this country, and whose ideas and actions significantly influenced a piece of our history.
Vaclav Havel (and I am ashamed to be forced to condense his political testament into a single sentence) has been a man whose distrust for the "politics as usual" and preference for an elitist and utopian political systems that do not include voters' preference disillusioned many who thought he was a symbol of democracy. He definitely didn't call for any form of totalitarian regime, the system he'd like to have installed could be described as "expert-run monarchy". Run by expert he'd chose if he'd gotten the chance.
Vaclav Klaus is an pragmatic economist, and taught us how to build a standard parliamentary democracy, based on competition of diverse political ideas and concepts. He built our leading conservative-liberal party, ODS (Civic Democratic Party), and if you come from America and think that such a combination is impossible, "liberal" used to mean "libertarian" here. He's an over-achiever, the single most successful Czech politician of our era. His amazing victory this year when he got elected President by our bitterly divided Parliament proved he's still strong and eager to grow.
Their rivalry is well-known, and isn't as much personal as it is ideological: their world-views are simply incompatible. One is an elitist intellectual, the other a pragmatic economist who firmly believes in the values of liberty, personal responsibility and hard work.
The latest installment of their on-going conversation has been published in the leading Czech newspaper Today, and epitomizes their core beliefs and differences. The subject matter was the Velvet Revolution (1989 fall of the communist regime in Prague) and the role of intellectuals, mainly the leading opposition group Charta 77, in making it happen. The President said intellectuals didn't matter, and the Revolution could have happened only because the ordinary people were ready for it, acted and brought the communists to their knees. The ex-President said that without intellectuals, the Revolution might have been much more difficult.
It is understandable that one doesn't wish to downplay his own role in a process which brought him such an international fame and success. No one would expect him to do so. Viewed from today's perspective, however, things get clearer than they were in 1990 or 1995. The fall of the Red Dragon was inevitable, and whatever the intellectuals had done before, didn't matter at all in the process. And as it happens, when the former dissidents got suddenly popular in 89 and 90, and got their government and parliamentary seats, they didn't know how to handle it, and with the exception of Mr Havel, all of them failed sooner or later.
No wonder. It's easy to be an intellectual, to use your brainpower to talk, talk, talk and write, write, write, without actually knowing how to succeed in the real world, be it the world of politics or business. And it is bitter to find out that the market for your output simply does not exist, or is infinitely small. A real man would change himself, and learn something he can use in the marketplace. An intellectual will just go on whining.
Oh, Thomas, so you haven't had enough last time in Úžice, had you? ;-)
OK, there you go, here's my two cent's worth.
There is something common to ODS and the Catholic church: in order to get the benefits of faith (irrespective whether it is faith in God or faith in all-solving, yet invisible hand of market forces) you have to swallow a lot of intellectual garbage. All ODS followers have to believe that the left is evil, intellectuals are evil, civic society is evil. What's more, they have to believe that proponents civic society can only be lefties, and
intellectuals to boot.
No no no no, please.
To be on the left does not equal to be evil - just defending different set of values (don't get me wrong, I'm a right-winger myself).
Civic society is needed, especially here, as Klaus views politics just as a machiavellian technology of power, arena where citizens should not meddle. No, no, we have had enough of that, thank you very much.
And last but not least, intellectuals are NOT left. Alexis de Tocqueville was an intellectual. Edmund Burke was an intellectual. Michael Novak and Roger Scruton, icons of the right, are intellectuals. Presenting intellectuals as lefties (and for all purposes enemies of the mankind) is a perfect example of strawman fallacy. Beating a strawman is very easy... yet somewhat lacking in subtlety.
posted by Viktor Janis on 21.11.2003, 17:46