Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

On February 22, 1990, Vaclav Havel spoke to a joint session of the United States Congress as the newly elected president of a free Czechoslovakia. Just a few months earlier, he had been detained (the last in a long line of arrests) by the StB, his country’s infamous secret police; he said he didn’t know whether he would be going to jail “for two days or two years.” But a mere three weeks later, as the satellites of the Soviet Union began to topple, overwhelming demonstrations throughout the country forced the Communist Party to agree to the first genuine elections since the Soviet-backed coup in 1948. Nearly two months to the day of his last arrest, Havel emerged as the only viable candidate for the presidency, and was rhapsodically elected on December 29, 1989, with a level of consensus unseen since Washington. As a playwright, a philosopher, an essayist, and one of the eminent adversaries of his country’s regime, Havel initially regarded his election as “an absurd joke.” (Philip Roth privately described it as Josef K. making it to the Castle.) And Havel was not the only one: Michael Žantovský (known for his translations of James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Joseph Heller) was elected to the Senate; Eda Kriseová (a journalist and short story writer) became one of Havel’s key advisors; and Jaroslav Kořán (who helped introduce the works of Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski into the Czech language) was elected the mayor of Prague. Never before or since had so many literary intellectuals found themselves in the house of power. Indeed, at the time of Havel’s address in 1990, the reality of Czech politics seemed to be almost the stuff of satire, befitting the sense of irony that had proved such an effective weapon against totalitarianism for nearly half a century. This showed itself in the language that Havel used in his speech to Congress, in which he spoke in terms that were utterly foreign to American politics and its everlasting anti-intellectualism. He stood before the assembled politicians and declared that “consciousness precedes being” — a line that weirdly received enthusiastic applause. It was classic Havel: the Goethe of government, the Metaphysician-in-Chief, addressing not just the state of the nation, but the state of the soul. I am reminded of the title character in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, who riffs on the candidacy of Adlai Stevenson (an image of Aristotle’s “great-souled man”), hoping that he will bring about an administration in which poets will be consulted for foreign policy and cabinet members will cite Joyce in their deliberations. Havel was frequently referred to as a “Philosopher King,” though almost never with the acknowledgement that this is, in fact, a smirking term, an oxymoron that denotes one of the oldest problems in Western thought: the inherent conflict between truth and power. Plato concocted a utopian and essentially satirical (which is not to say unserious) exercise to try to deal with this problem. The conclusion of this exercise was that philosophers were ultimately unfit for power, because the pursuit of truth — which is all too easily corrupted — is imperiled by politics, with its deceptions and duplicities. The joke that closes The Republic is that we should sooner expect kings to become philosophers than philosophers to become kings. And this “joke” was precisely the moral and philosophical challenge that confronted Havel the moment he went from being a dissident whose mantra was that one should always strive to “live in truth” to being the first democratically elected president of his country in over four decades.  Before 1989, Havel had lived his life in opposition, in what Hegel called “the labor of the negative.” But when this labor suddenly finds itself in the positive — becoming constructive rather than deconstructive — what is the dissident to do? Havel’s trajectory broaches the most fundamental questions about morality and power. Is morality enough for governance? Is compromise, which is the heart of democratic politics, an ethical defeat? How much realism can the moral man stomach? Do high ends require equally high means? Were Vaclav Havel’s ideas, which he forged as a rebel, compatible with the responsibilities of power? Did they prepare him adequately