the facts answer

The Free King and the Prince of Positivism
Havel and Hitchens: The death and life of two protagonists of our time who are still talking

by JOHN WATERS

Two men died in mid-December whose lives and respective contributions suggest a comparison. One was Vaclav Havel, playwright and philosopher, one-time Czechoslovakian dissident and more recently President of that country and subsequently of the Czech Republic. The other was Christopher Hitchens, journalist and author, most notorious for his trenchant atheistic diatribes and in particular for his 2007 book, God Is Not Great.
I met each of them briefly when they visited Ireland: Havel in 1996, when he came on an official visit as Czech President, and Hitchens in 2007 when he and I debated his book at the 2007 Dublin Writers’ Festival.
For me, Vaclav Havel was the greatest European of our time, a thinker and a doer who combined these functions in a way that makes him almost unique in literary history–indeed, in history... period.Havel was an extreme rarity in the public life of our modern world: a dissident and philosopher who was himself called to assume office, a fierce and fearless opponent of Communism who declared, “My heart is on the left,” but who devoted his life to the defeat of Socialist ideology and, even more determinedly, to promoting awareness of the absurdity of utopianism. In essays that became more celebrated than the books of other writers–like “The Power of the Powerless” and “Politics and Conscience,” both written several years before Prague’s 1989 Velvet Revolution–he identified a need in modern society for what he termed “post-political politics,” defined as politics not as technology-of-power but as a means of enabling meaningful human lives.
This, he proposed, would require an “existential revolution,” engaging mankind in the totality of being. He identified this as being almost as urgent in the free democracies of the West as in the Communist zone, which he wrote once was not the opposite of Western civilization but its “convex mirror image,” a distortion that enabled similar anti-human conditions to be observed more clearly. Above all, Havel sought to present man in his total situation: not just a citizen/consumer/worker, but a being animated with questions and desires, his gaze raised expectantly to the horizon. The German writer Heinrich Boll once noted that Havel avoided using the word “God,” and proposed that this arose from Havel’s “courtesy towards God,” whose name he felt had for too long been “trampled underfoot by politicians.” But, Boll perceptively added, Christ was visible in Havel’s writings.
Christopher Hitchens was a different matter, perhaps in a sense no less brilliant, and in some ways just as celebrated–but also profoundly different.
Two nights before our 2007 encounter, we attended a dinner thrown by the festival organizers. I had expected that there would be a lot of people present, but it turned out to be quite a small party, and Hitchens and I ended up seated directly across from one another.
Throughout the dinner, he declined to look at me or speak to me directly, perhaps for fear of diluting the “rumble in the jungle” element that tends to go with these encounters.  I can’t say I liked him much, but in spite of myself I was enthralled by his virtually seamless monologue and moved by his flawless by-heart renditions of several poems by the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats.
In the debate the following Sunday, we were somewhat at cross purposes. Hitchens spent most of his time lambasting organized religions, while I tried to get a word in edgewise about the fundamental impulses and desires that lead human beings to intuit that what we see is not the end of everything. At one point, he said to me, “I dunno what religion you’re supposed to belong to, but it’s not one I recognize.” I retorted that it was unfortunate that he had spent so long cloistered in his rooms writing about fundamentalists and fanatics and now he’d come out and couldn’t find any.
Last week, I read an account of our encounter, written by our moderator that day, which implied that my argument had been “emotional” while Hitchens’ had been “logical.” Perhaps it may have seemed like this, but only to the extent that both quantities are misunderstood in our culture. “Emotion” is part of what I call reason, whereas Christopher’s idea of reason embraced only a three-dimensional logic while carefully sidestepping the deeper apprehensions and understandings that propel human beings far more than our positivist culture allows. Christopher Hitchens supplied a need in modern society for affirmation of its positivistic conclusions. He was good at this: at ridiculing the evidence of a prior reduction of faith that, really, had in many instances probably been as harmful as he suggested. He was a Prince of Positivism, someone who excelled in a way of thinking that elevates the demonstrable over the desired, the knowable over the intuited, and the clever trick of “logic” over the nature of man’s desire.