Friday, June 6, 2008
Bruce Bawer, author of the excellent While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within
...In the essay [The Power of the Powerless], Havel imagined a man who runs a fruit and vegetable stand in Communist Czechoslovakia (runs, not owns: in Communist Europe, of course, all businesses were owned by the state). The man puts in his store window a sign bearing a Communist slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why, Havel asked, does he do this? The answer: he’s afraid. He wants to live “in harmony with society,” and must prove he’s obedient. Havel noted that such a man might hesitate, out of shame, to post a sign explicitly admitting his fear; but the sign bearing the Communist slogan helps him conceal his cowardice from himself by hiding it behind the façade of ideology — an ideology that offers people “the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.” Communist ideology, Havel pointed out, obliges people to “live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” Moreover, while life in free societies “moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, and self-organization,” life under Communism “demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline.” People like Havel’s greengrocer, by going along with all this, become not only victims of the system’s oppression but also collaborators in it — for the sign in the window, in addition to testifying to the shopkeeper’s meek compliance, increases pressure on other merchants to put signs in their windows lest the authorities start asking why they haven’t. So it is that ordinary people, by kowtowing to the system, become its enforcers. (Thus are the subjects of Communism the equivalent of dhimmis under Islam.)
Havel went on to ask: what if the greengrocer takes down his sign?...
...When one examines the responses of many in the West to the challenge of Islam, it’s hard not to feel that Havel and Solzhenitsyn were absolutely right. Living a lie, once ubiquitous behind the Iron Curtain, is now widespread in the West owing to a profound fear of Islam. Every Western journalist who writes that Islam is a religion of peace, who chides terrorists for hijacking a peaceful religion, and who celebrates Muhammed as a messenger of ecumenical harmony — all the time knowing that these are lies — is doing the equivalent of the greengrocer putting a sign in his window to avoid trouble...
I think Bawer overstates it slightly here. Fear may be a major factor in Europe, and even in the US, but I would out it on par with a fear of holding non-politically correct thoughts, of having to face the fact that we, the classical liberals, have not succeeded in convincing the rest of the world of the wonders of classically liberal values. We fear facing the thought that tolerance for the other is not an end-point value, that there is a time to be intolerant and to stand up for nationalist values without compromise -- and that is in the face of intolerance itself. We fear ourselves, facing the fact that what we thought were universal solutions -- suppressing the intolerant beasts we all carry within us -- were not enough, that we were mistaken.
So yes, there is physical fear, even in America, that someday we may have to face being minorities, and hope we are treated as well as we treated our new masters when their numbers were not so great...but there is also another fear: that we were wrong in some of our most deeply held notions.
Would you consider the fact of peer pressure being forceful enough to bring about conformity?
The fear of being different; all that hogwash about wanting to be different and not conform to society while clothing oneself in the uniformity of behaviour and dress of one's peer group?
Don't forget that some of the fear is induced by acts of violence, be it physical or just verbal.
Yes, absolutely. Huge. People don't want to be shunned or thought ill of (and they end up posing and perpetuating their double-think because an insufficient number of their neighbors have adapted their thinking to take in new data). This is a big topic. I'm going to cut myself off before I start quoting Sharansky and the idea of double-thinkers and all that. To an extent, we are all "little" peer-pressure double-thinkers, but people living under Communism were BIG double-thinkers by necessity.
related: The Bradley Effect.
Havel's "The Memorandum" is hilarious when performed even reasonably well. Also, Jan Patocka mentored Havel, among other Czech dissidents, and Patocka's is is a beautifully learned and philosophical mind and spirit, a student of both Husserl and Heidegger in the late 20's, early 30's period. Both thinker and activist in the absolutely finest sense of the term, e.g., one of the primary authors of Charta 77, his death almost certainly caused by severe and sustained interrogations at the hands of the communist regime. One more salient example of the absolutely wastreling qualities of those hard Leftist regimes. Patocka's "Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History" is one of those incredibly densely woven meditations, reflective of his erudition and one that can be read many times, each time thoughtfully and with new discoveries. None of that is exaggerated, none of it.