James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Boston Globe.
By JAMES CARROLL
New York Times News Service
Acceding to any power — whether a political party, a multinational alliance, or an entire social system — means swallowing a certain number of lies. No one understood that better than Vaclav Havel, whose ashes were laid to rest in Prague last week.
The anti-Soviet dissident, who went from prison to the presidential palace, made truth his theme. He boldly condemned Moscow’s tyranny as “a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality … Human beings are compelled to live within a lie.”
The citizen was forced to accept falsehood as the ground of existence. And beyond denouncing the regime, Havel showed, without being judgmental, how the inertia of citizens was essential to Soviet dominance.
When Havel was inaugurated as president of Czechoslovakia in 1990, he said, “I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.”
Yet a certain dissembling is built into the human condition, and leaders everywhere — including Havel — have always maneuvered in the uncertain space between appearances and reality. Though an exemplary president, he too was inevitably drawn into the compromises and calculations that define politics (supporting George W. Bush’s deceitful invasion of Iraq, for example, at a time when the Czech Republic had to prove itself in NATO).
Grave social dysfunction follows when “ritual signs” take on more importance than hard facts, and “pseudo-reality” begins to rule. It’s an intriguing coincidence that the Czech truth-teller’s funeral occurred on the day Republicans voted in Iowa. Lies are at issue as the GOP contest moves to New Hampshire tomorrow, with Newt Gingrich openly calling Mitt Romney a liar.
But the entire Republican campaign gyres around ritual signs that are at odds with reality. Marginal extremists have forced the Republican mainstream to live within lies (blatant climate denial, the baseless assertions that the budget can be balanced without taxes, blind hatred of government, and so on). This represents a new low standard for political pseudo-reality. If Newt Gingrich is the guardian of truth, the nation is in real trouble.
But a liberal Democrat must admit that President Obama invokes ritual signs at odds with reality, too. His allies cut him a succession of breaks, most notably on his misbegotten Afghan war; the pretense that conditions are improving there is the tribute reality pays to realpolitik.
Yet the main question is not whether one political party is more out of touch with reality than the other, but whether political leaders seek narrow advantage by exploiting a problem that belongs to everyone.
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot wrote. Every group has its ritual signs, and the necessary disconnect they imply. Every person copes with the tension between substance and appearance, and integrity involves an endless struggle to reconcile them.
The public problem comes when arrogant self-seekers mount the moral high-horse to denounce in others the same inconsistencies they themselves exemplify.
American politics seems newly energized by such judgmentalism, and, yes, the Republicans have that high-horse saddle to themselves this week. The memory of Vaclav Havel points us in a different direction, however — toward the recognition that in the human condition lies and truth are always intermingled.
To be moral is to acknowledge that complexity and struggle with it. Our elections put our imperfections on full display because, finally, that is what it means to live within the truth.
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Boston Globe.