Havel and the automatism of technological civilization
(Why is every book I read lately making this point?)
I just finished reading Václav Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless (link goes to full text online). Havel was a poet, playwright, and dissident in Czechoslovakia under communism (the essay was written in 1978), and he later became president of Czechoslovakia. The essay is probably most known for the “parable of the greengrocer”, and also as the single work that most inspired Rod Dreher’s Live Not by Lies.
Havel repeatedly comments about the automatism of living under what he calls a post-totalitarian system… indeed that automatism is one of the chief characteristics of that system. A couple ways to say it, that don’t quite do his concern justice, would be “the bureaucracy perpetuates the bureaucracy” or “our rules have created a fictitious reality but everyone, to live in our nation now, must participate in that fiction”. Everyone participating in the system (which is almost everyone) is both a victim of the system and its preserver. (And my, we have plenty of that going on in the United States today.) The system serves the system and everyone else serves the system too. Even people in leadership are, to a significant degree, borne along by forces outside of their control. (You read all that and you can understand why Havel, and later Dreher, thought confrontation with that system had to begin by personally refusing to take part in the lie.)
To my surprise (and remember this was written in 1978), toward the end of the book he relates this to technological civilization and says technological civilization is also a case of humans coming to serve the system instead of the other way around.
Technology - that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of metaphysics - is out of humanity’s control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction.
Now it is difficult to know exactly what Havel has in mind. He drops some hints that he might have ecological concerns. In 1978, in the Soviet bloc, you can well imagine that the possibility of a planet-wide nuclear war was also on his mind. But I think you can affirm his general concern even if nuclear war is not top-most in your thinking. In the 2021 United States one place my mind went was to vaccine passports and digital-identification-required-to-exist generally. Is the system serving us or are we serving the system? There is more than one factor influencing our response to COVID, but many times I have felt we are on a treadmill and no one knows how to turn it off. To some extent we are talking about vaccine passports and digital ID just because there is a general sense that they are what is “supposed” to come next. Wait a minute… who decided upon “supposed”? Who is in charge here? Technological civilization (the abstractified combination of the corporate, political, and personal forces that make up technological civilization, you might say) is in charge, at least somewhat.
Later, in quite a profound sentence (again, written in 1978!), he writes,
We look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we have created inevitably engulfs us, tearing us away from our natural affiliations (for instance from our habitat in the widest sense of that word, including our habitat in the biosphere) just as it removes us from the experience of ‘being’ and casts us into the world of ‘existences’.
Golly. You could even use this as a launching point to talk about the changes that result when humans no longer see or notice the stars at night (the technology even of plain electric lighting removing us from our habitat in the biosphere). I’ve remarked before that one way to understand why many of our fellows have gone mad is because they’ve been disconnected from the land and had their brains plugged into CNN instead. That isn’t an improvement. And the whole idea of technology removing us from a world of “being” and putting us instead into the world of “existences”… that is our curated social media and media world today. Your world is whatever existence you and, incidentally, the giant corporations controlling the platforms you use, decide to create.
(OK, I do obviously think it is possible to use technology well… but you have to be intentional about it if you don’t want to end up serving it.)
Later he emphasized that his situation in Eastern Europe and our own in the West is not so different.
The post-totalitarian system is only one aspect - a particularly drastic aspect and thus all the more revealing of its true origins - of this general inability of modern humanity to be the master of its own situation. The automatism of the post-totalitarian system is merely an extreme version of the global automatism of technological civilization.
And later,
It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it.
He goes on to talk about how the ways people are manipulated in the West are more sophisticated than the raw brutality of communism, which if anything means we are less aware that we are not in control.
What do we do about this? You will want a quick and easy answer, but of course Havel doesn’t have one to give you. Given all this, in his own situation he is not going to say “eastern Europe just needs to become democratic!”, for democracies face many of the same problems, just in a more subtle way. He writes,
I see a renewed focus of politics on real people as something far more profound than merely returning to the everyday mechanisms of western… democracy.
This is another emphasis you get repeatedly from Havel. He has little hope for what we might call “ideology”. We do not need yet another grand utopian plan that will save humanity, he has seen too much harm come from grand utopian plans. Instead, although he doesn’t elaborate here, we need a renewed focus on people. Our thinking should consciously move away from abstract thoughts about what the system needs, and toward thoughts of what will help our neighbor, as they exist in reality, right now. In the United States today, where so many people find themselves doing crazy things just because “well that’s what the rule says” (a situation Havel would have recognized immediately), there is a lesson for us there.
It's become somewhat commonplace to say that lockdowns couldn't have happened 15 years ago because of smart phones, videoconferencing, the multiplication of e-commerce options, etc. But the mirror of that is to say that 15 years ago, no one primarily looked to their phones for entertainment. In 2005, people hadn't been psychically primed by the mental diversions available via technology to accept staying in their apartments for week after week due to a virus that was causing no visible suffering in their lives.