The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
H.H. Chartrand
April 2002
Václav Havel
President of the Czech and
Address to the World Economic
Forum
This unofficial translation is made available in
response to great interest from participants. An official version is in
preparation.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
For many years, decades in fact, the West was defined
against the background of the communist world. As a common enemy and a common threat, it
was this communist world that kept the West united both politically, and in
terms of security arrangements. Against its will, it also helped the West
strengthen, cultivate and develop its time-tested principles and practices, like
civil society, parliamentary democracy, the market economy, and the concept of
human and civil rights. Confronted
by the gloomy, dangerous and expansionist world of communist totalitarianism,
the West was continually required to prove its commitment to freedom, truth,
democracy, broader cooperation and growing prosperity. In other words, the communist world was
instrumental in the West’s own self-affirmation.
Yet in a way, it was a rather equivocal
self-affirmation. There was
something soothing about it. While
stimulating many good things, it also led Western politics to unwittingly
embrace certain stereotypes, that grew from a feeling that its own status was
beyond question. The “non-time” and
“non-history” of the totalitarian regimes infected the West as well. The West became too used to the bipolar
division of the world into blocs based on power and ideology. It became too used to the status quo of
the Cold War, to nuclear peace, and to things staying pretty much the way they
were.
As the Eighties became the Nineties, the whole
As far as I can tell, this explosion astonished the West
as much as it did the East. In a
way, it has put Western policy-making in a state of shock. Every day, we see evidence of how
difficult it is for the West to respond and adjust to the new reality, to break
itself of established habits. The
West feels that everything has changed, but it does not know exactly what to do
about it. We have even begun to
hear expressions of nostalgia for the days when the world was easier to
understand. How can we deal with
all these new states that have broken away from the older systems of order
forged in
Not only is the West somewhat confused by these tremors
in the East; it is beginning to shake a little itself, and the structure of its
former certainties is beginning to come loose. A broad range of geopolitical interests,
rivalries and ambitions, dormant until recently, are now coming back to life.
Alliances unquestioned until
recently are now being called in doubt, because the pressures that once made
them necessary are disappearing. Particular interests buried by history
are suddenly emerging and clashing with each other. There are even signs, here and there, of
the temptation to exploit the end of the divided world to create new
divisions.
In a word, the end of communism took us all by
surprise.
But we all know and understand this by now, at least to
a certain extent. With your
permission, I would like to talk about another aspect of these developments, one
that is less visible, yet more profound and substantial. It is an aspect of the matter that, to my
knowledge, has not yet made the front pages.
The end of communism is, first and foremost, a message
to the human race. It is a message
we have not yet fully deciphered and comprehended.
In its deepest sense, the end of communism has, I
believe, brought a major era in human history to an end. It has brought an end not just to the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but to the modern age as a
whole.
The modern era has been dominated by the culminating
belief, expressed in different forms, that the world -- and Being as such -- is
a wholly knowable system governed by a finite number of universal laws that man
can grasp and rationally direct for his own benefit. This era, beginning in the Renaissance
and developing from the Enlightenment to socialism, from positivism to
scientism, from the industrial revolution to the information revolution, was
characterized by rapid advances in rational, cognitive thinking. This, in turn, gave rise to the proud
belief that man, as the pinnacle of everything that exists, was capable of
objectively describing, explaining and controlling everything that exists, and
of possessing the one and only truth about the world. It was an era in which there was a cult
of depersonalized objectivity, an era in which objective knowledge was amassed
and technologically exploited, an era of belief in automatic progress brokered
by the scientific method. It was an
era of systems, institutions, mechanisms, and statistical averages. It was an era of freely transferable,
existentially ungrounded information. It was an era of ideologies, doctrines,
interpretations of reality, an era where the goal was to find a universal theory
of the world, and thus a universal key to unlock its
prosperity.
Communism was the perverse extreme of this trend. It was an attempt, on the basis of a few
propositions masquerading as the only scientific truth, to organize all of life
according to a single model, and to subject it to central planning and control
regardless of whether or not that was what life wanted.
The fall of communism can be regarded as a sign that
modern thought - based on the premise that the world is objectively knowable,
and that the knowledge so obtained can be absolutely generalized -- has come to
a final crisis. This era has
created the first global, or
planetary, technical civilization, but it has reached the limit of its
potential, the point beyond which the abyss begins. I think the end of communism is a serious
warning to all mankind. It is a
signal that the era of arrogant, absolutive reason is drawing to a close and
that it is high time to draw conclusions from that fact.
Communism was not defeated by military force, but by
life, by the human spirit, by conscience, by the resistance of Being and man to
manipulation. It was defeated by a
revolt of colour, authenticity, history in all its variety, and human
individuality against imprisonment within a uniform
ideology.
This powerful signal, this important message to the
human race, is coming at the eleventh hour.
We all know that our civilization is in danger. The population explosion and the
greenhouse effect, holes in the ozone and AIDS, the threat of nuclear terrorism
and the dramatically widening gap between the rich North and the poor South, the
danger of famine, the depletion of the biosphere and the mineral resources of
the planet, the expansion of commercial television culture and the growing
threat of regional wars - all this combined with thousands of other things
represent a general threat to mankind.
The large paradox at the moment is that man - a great
collector of information - is well aware of all this, yet is absolutely
incapable of dealing with the danger. Traditional science, with its usual
coolness, can describe the different ways we might destroy ourselves, but it
cannot offer us truly effective and practicable instructions on how to avert
them. There is too much to know;
the information is muddled or poorly organized; these processes can no longer be
fully grasped and understood, let alone contained or halted. Modern man, proud of having used
impersonal reason to release a giant genie from its bottle, is now impersonally
distressed to find he can’t drive it back into the bottle
again.
We cannot do it because we cannot step beyond our own
shadow. We are trying to deal with
what we have unleashed by employing the same means we used to unleash it in the
first place. We are looking for new
scientific recipes, new ideologies, new control systems, new institutions, new
instruments to eliminate the dreadful consequences of our previous recipes,
ideologies, control systems, institutions and instruments. We treat the fatal consequences of
technology as though they were a technical defect that could be remedied by
technology alone. We are looking
for an objective way out of the crisis of objectivism.
Everything would seem to suggest that this is not the
way to go. We cannot devise, within
the traditional modern attitude to reality, a system that will eliminate all the
disastrous consequences of previous systems. We cannot discover a law or theory whose
technical application will eliminate all the disastrous consequences of the
technical application of earlier laws and technologies.
What is needed is something different, something larger.
Man’s attitude to the world must be
radically changed. We have to
abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a
machine with instructions for use waiting to be discovered, a body of
information to be fed into a computer in the hope that, sooner or later, it will
spit out a universal solution.
It is my profound conviction that we have to release
from the sphere of private whim such forces as a natural, unique and
unrepeatable experience of the world, an elementary sense of justice, the
ability to see things as others do, a sense of transcendental responsibility,
archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage, compassion, and faith in the importance
of particular measures that do not aspire to be a universal key to salvation.
Such forces must be rehabilitated.
Things must once more be given a
chance to present themselves as they are, to be perceived in their
individuality. We must see the
pluralism of the world, and not bind it by seeking common denominators or
reducing everything to a single common equation. We must try harder to understand than to
explain. The way forward is not in
the mere construction of universal systemic solutions, to be applied to reality
from the outside; it is
also in seeking to get to the heart of reality through personal experience.
Such an approach promotes an
atmosphere of tolerant solidarity and unity in diversity based on mutual
respect, genuine pluralism and parallelism. In a word, human uniqueness, human action
and the human spirit must be rehabilitated.
The world, too, has something like a spirit or soul.
That, however, is something more
than a mere body of information that can be externally grasped and objectified
and mechanically assembled. Yet
this does not mean that we have no access to it. Figuratively speaking, the human spirit
is made from the same material as the spirit of the world. Man is not just an observer, a spectator,
an analyst or a manager of the world.
Man is a part of the world and his spirit is part of the spirit of the
world. We are merely a peculiar
node of Being, a living atom within it, or rather a cell that, if sufficiently
open to itself and its own mystery, can also experience the mystery, the will,
the pain, and the hope of the world.
The world today is a world in which generality,
objectivity and universality are in crisis. This world presents a great challenge to
the practice of politics which, it seems to me, still has a technocratic,
utilitarian approach to Being, and therefore to political power as well. Original ideas and actions, unique and
therefore always risky, often lose their human ethos and therefore, de facto, their spirit after they have
gone through the mill of objective analysis and prognoses. Many of the traditional mechanisms of
democracy created and developed and conserved in the modern era are so linked to
the cult of objectivity and statistical average that they can annul human
individuality. We can see this in
political language, where cliché often squeezes out a personal tone. And when a personal tone does crop up, it
is usually calculated, not an outburst of personal
authenticity.
It is my impression that sooner or later politics will
be faced with the task of finding a new, post-modern face. A politician must become a person again,
someone who trusts not only a scientific representation and analysis of the
world, but also the world itself. He must believe not only in sociological
statistics, but in real people. He must trust not only an objective
interpretation of reality, but also his own soul, not only an adopted ideology,
but also his own thoughts; not only the summary reports he receives each
morning, but also his own feeling. Soul, individual spirituality, first-hand
personal insight into things, the courage to be himself and go the way his
conscience points, humility in the face of the mysterious order of Being,
confidence in its natural direction and, above all, trust in his own
subjectivity as his principle link with the subjectivity of the world - these,
in my view, are the qualities that politicians of the future should
cultivate.
Looking at politics “from the inside”, as it were, has
if anything confirmed my belief that the world of today - with the dramatic
changes it is going through and in its determination not to destroy itself --
presents a great challenge to politicians. It is not that we should simply seek new
and better ways of managing society, the economy, and the world as such. The point is that we should fundamentally
change how we behave. And who but
politicians should lead the way? Their changed attitude toward the world,
themselves, and their responsibility can, in turn, give rise to truly effective
systemic and institutional changes.
You have certainly heard of the “butterfly effect”.
It is a belief that everything in
the world is so mysteriously and comprehensively interconnected that a slight,
seemingly insignificant wave of a butterfly’s wing in a single spot on this
planet can unleash a typhoon thousands of miles away.
I think we must believe in this effect in politics.
We cannot assume that our
microscopic, yet truly unique everyday actions are of no consequence simply
because they apparently cannot resolve the immense problems of
today.
This is an a
priori nihilistic assertion, and it is an expression of the arrogant, modern
rationality that believes it knows how the world works.
But what do we really know about
it?
Can we say that a casual conversation between two
bankers and the Prince of Wales over dinner tonight will not sow a seed from
which a wonderful flower will one day grow for the whole world to
admire?
In a world of global civilization, only those who are
looking for a technical trick to save that civilization need feel despair. But those who believe, in all modesty, in
the mysterious power of their own human Being, which mediates between them and
the mysterious power of the world’s Being, have no reason to despair at
all.
Thank you for your kind attention.