On Freedom, page 10
In Moscow, the editors of a samizdat publication called the Chronicle of Current Events had since 1968 been using a language of human rights to report on conditions in the Soviet concentration camp system (the Gulag) and in Soviet psychiatric prisons. After the Helsinki Final Act, new groups were formed in Soviet Ukraine and throughout the satellite states with the purpose of recording human rights violations. After the two Covenants had been published in the official law gazette, Czechoslovak citizens formulated the Charter 77 petition to document the regime’s violations of human rights. The Czechoslovaks who signed Charter 77 were taking part in a larger movement. Brezhnev’s desire that nothing change led to a change of concepts.
This is not just irony, or what Marxists called dialectics. It is a reminder that what might seem normal, predictable, and inevitable can be resisted, and that resistance begins with a definition of what might be. Sovereign people will see chances where others might not and will help to wrench the rest of us from our most probable states.
Plastic People
There would have been no trial, and no text, without the music. Another chain of causes that brought Czech musicians and thus Havel to that courtroom leads back to American history.
Rock and roll is part of the cultural aftermath of slavery, post–Civil War Reconstruction, and industrialization. It arose from the “race music,” or rhythm and blues, of African Americans who moved to the industrializing North and met white audiences. Without that American encounter of the 1940s, rock and roll could not have been an important part of the alternative Czechoslovak culture of the 1970s.
A mediator between America and eastern Europe was a band called the Velvet Underground. Front man Lou Reed was a child of postwar American music—Little Richard, Ornette Coleman, Otis Redding, Al Green, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley. The Velvets were one of the most influential rock groups of all time—inspiring more bands than they sold records, as the saying went. One of these bands was the Plastic People of the Universe. The Plastics started covering the Velvets in 1968, the year Brezhnev ordered an invasion of Czechoslovakia, when violence begot “normalization.” At that point, the Velvet Underground had released only two albums. For a couple of years, from 1970 to 1972, the lead singer of the Plastic People was the Canadian Paul Wilson, who could sing the English vocals of the Velvets.
The Velvet Underground was as New York as New York can be—but their trajectory owed something to eastern Europe. Reed was the grandchild of a Jewish family from the Russian Empire. The Velvet Underground was “managed” and their first album was “produced” by the pop artist Andy Warhol. The Velvets were the house band for Warhol’s multimedia show The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Warhol’s parents spoke a Ruthenian (or Rusyn) dialect of Ukrainian. Like Havel’s parents, they were born subjects of the old Habsburg monarchy, the central and east European empire that collapsed in 1918. Warhol’s parents hailed from lands that became far eastern Czechoslovakia after 1918—and far western Soviet Ukraine in 1945. The recognition of the extended Soviet border was one of Brezhnev’s goals at Helsinki.
The Plastic People of the Universe took their band’s name from the song “Plastic People” written by Frank Zappa and performed by his band, the Mothers of Invention. (“I think that love will never be / a product of plasticity.”) “Plastic People” was the first cut on the A side of the album Absolute Freedom.
The Mothers of Invention played “Plastic People” to the tune of “Louie Louie,” a song made famous to the point of prom-night cliché by the Kingsmen (who were once investigated by the FBI on the suspicion that the song’s incomprehensible lyrics might be obscene). As I did not know when dancing at my own prom, “Louie Louie” was written by Richard Berry, an African American born in Louisiana who made music in Los Angeles.
Berry penned the song on toilet paper in the bathroom of a club, having just heard “El Loco Cha Cha,” by René Touzet. The unforgettable hook of “Louie Louie” is lifted directly from Touzet’s composition. Touzet, for his part, was making a career in the United States after his club in Cuba was destroyed by a hurricane.
Without this improbable panoply, beginning with a hurricane (and therefore a butterfly?), there would have been no song titled “Plastic People,” and no band called the Plastic People of the Universe. We can see all this as a causal chain that begins with African American and Cuban music and leads to Havel and his commitment to human rights and his defense of unpredictability. But some of the links in the chain, taken in hand, prove to be woven of the supple stuff of accident and choice.
Zappa’s lyrics end with an admonition: “Go home, check yourself! You think we’re singing about someone else?” It is us or no one. Freedom is not a drama we watch. It is a play that we write on a stage that we build for an audience of everyone. Responsibility, said Patočka, is something we always carry with us. Patočka did not choose the circumstances that led to communism or to rock and roll, but he chose the occasion of the Plastics’ trial to write that “the only real help and care for others comes when I step forward and do what I have to do.”
Necessity is the mother of invention; the better we understand necessity, the more inventive we are. As we choose over time, working from the law of necessity to the law of freedom, we invent ourselves. As our choices mix with the universe, they render it more unpredictable, and us more responsible.
Normal Dissidents
Havel did not like the word dissident because it suggested a separate vocation. He thought the “dissidents” were just being themselves, living their truths, sovereign and unpredictable. Dissidence was just a matter of trying to live according to virtues rather than conforming.
The virtues themselves need not be exalted ones. Havel’s two examples of dissidence in “The Power of the Powerless” were speaking up in your brewery about the quality of beer and taking down a propaganda sign from the window of your shop. Although Havel was a formidable dramatist writing in extreme conditions, the examples are human and accessible. The typical American of the 1980s knew nothing but bad beer. By the time I read the essay, I had worked cleanup on construction sites, in telemarketing, and in restaurants. The conformism of the workplace was easy to grasp.
Normal can mean what everyone does, as in normalization. But it can also mean what everyone should do. In his book on Poland’s Solidarity movement, Timothy Garton Ash gives the word to a Polish peasant who says normalnie! in the sense of “great!” Mariia of Posad Pokrovs’ke, when she asked me how I liked her little hut, actually said vse normalno? (“everything normal?”) in the sense of “as it should be.” She meant by normal not the routine of rubble around us but the virtuous order that a home represents. Human rights restored to the word normal its ethical direction: what one should be doing. Although the punishment for trying to live normally in this sense could be drastic, the self-presentation was modest.
The appeal of human rights throughout the communist bloc was this everyday humanity, the banality of good. Myroslav Marynovych, a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, wrote of a normal Ukrainian life, where normal meant pursuing the activities that seemed normal to him, such as speaking or singing in his own language. Writing to his mother and sister from the Gulag in 1984, he spoke of “an embargo on normal human aspirations.” There is something fresh in the way that each of us combines values, and it was this freshness that was to be defended, not any sort of exalted abstraction.
Another human rights group, the Workers’ Defense Committee, was established in Poland in 1976. Polish workers striking against rising prices had been humiliated and imprisoned by the communist regime. The Workers’ Defense Committee found it abnormal that workers were beaten and fired by a regime that claimed to rule in their name, and normal that such workers would receive a legal defense and financial support. Human rights meant a handful of people trying to tell the truth about elemental matters, behave decently, and demonstrate solidarity. These realizations of human rights might seem prosaic: a defense of prisoners in Russia, of culture in Ukraine, of music in Czechoslovakia, of labor in Poland.
The everyday quality of human rights was the point. It was not one ideology against another. The dissidents made no grand claims and advanced no grand worldviews but rather tried to tell everyday truths, advance everyday causes, realize everyday virtues. Human rights did not mean the self-contradictory determinist “freedom” in the communist (or capitalist) sense: it was not what happened automatically when private property was taken away (or restored). The notion of human rights did not defer or delegate freedom. It opened up the space for the human exploration of virtues. It stood for all the values that actual individuals living in an actual historical moment might choose to hold and to try to realize. People earned respect, not for making an argument against communism in favor of some alternative, but for “living in truth” (Havel) or for living “as if they were free” (Michnik).
If the cause was so humble, why did people go to prison (Havel, Michnik) or the Gulag (Marynovych) or even die (Patočka) for it? From the outside, sovereignty and unpredictability can look strange; someone is standing up or standing out for reasons that are not immediately clear. From the inside, they can feel like a need to act consistently with value choices made over the course of a life. As in Havel’s case, an unexpected decision that attracts public attention can be preceded by years when nothing striking takes place. This was the point Zelens’kyi was trying to make to me in September 2022, when we spoke about dissidence, resistance, and his choice to remain in Kyiv at the beginning of the war. You feel free when your prior choices make sense of a moment. Your actions are then predictable to you, though unpredictable to the world.
An action that seems odd or risky from an external perspective can seem normal and necessary to the person concerned. The Welsh theologian Rowan Williams contended that “spiritual maturity” means that “there isn’t very much choice.” For him, “that’s not a diminution but an expansion of the personal because here is someone who by a long and hard route has become someone whose seeing and responding is instinctively truthful. You don’t have to think about it.” Writing in prison, Havel put it this way: “By the fact that today I vouch for what I did yesterday, that I vouch here for what I did elsewhere, I acquire not only my identity but through it I am also located in space and time; if on the contrary I lose my identity, space and time must perforce also collapse around me.”
When members of the Workers’ Defense Committee, or Charter 77, or the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, were sentenced to prison in the 1970s and 1980s, they tended to say that they were only doing what they felt they had to do.
Emancipation
The unrest in eastern Europe in 1968 was not limited to the Czechs and Slovaks of the Prague Spring. In Warsaw, Polish students took to the streets that March to defend freedom of speech. And, of course, 1968 was a time of youthful revolution not only in eastern Europe but around the world. Events in Paris, Berlin, and Berkeley were no doubt more important for the dominant understanding of freedom.
The American, German, or French claim for emancipation from prior sexual and gender norms seemed radical and was significant. It, too, was a more than plausible understanding of the message of, say, the Velvet Underground. Yet emancipation is a negative notion of freedom: it is always “emancipation from” something. It does not call into question the whole structure; it asks instead for inclusion within it. It need not mean freedom for all; it tends to mean, rather, joining a set of emancipated groups. In 1968 it often meant “emancipation from the older generation.”
Contrary to appearances, this notion of liberation lets the old off the hook. Because sovereignty and unpredictability require work over generations, freedom for each coming one will always depend (in part) on the actions of older people. If the older generation is just a barrier to be set aside, what comes next? The young who grow old consider that they have done their work of freedom when they, in their turn, get out of the way.
Many people formed by 1968 easily moved, in the 1970s and 1980s, from the idea of emancipation from the elders to the notion of emancipation from the government. This is the dead end of negative freedom, the notion that we are free if the government is small and weak. It delegitimates the assistance to families that children will need to have a chance at sovereignty and unpredictability. This move by the generation of 1968 made it harder for their own children and grandchildren to grow up free.
To be sure, many east European rebels also liked the idea that freedom was sexual and that sex brought emancipation from the stuffy older people. In Warsaw, the students beaten by batons looked different from the policemen doing the beating. One of the striking features of the Prague Spring was the long hair and the short skirts. Beautiful youth irked Brezhnev, whose notion of communism was paternalistic and sexually repressive.
Young people in Prague got normalization, a consumerism without politics. This led some of them to creative thinking about freedom. In Warsaw, protesters were sent to prison, publicly shamed as Jews (“Zionists”), and told to leave the country. As in Czechoslovakia, the Polish communist authorities of the 1970s offered consumer goods in exchange for mindlessness. This led certain Poles, such as the dissident Adam Michnik, to argue that freedom resides in both rebellion and responsibility. That discussion about freedom crossed generations. Throughout eastern Europe, younger rebels looked for older mentors and found them.
Glass Cane
Individuality has to come from somewhere. The dissidents might have been sovereign and unpredictable, but they did not achieve this on their own. They were in milieus with recognized moral authorities, such as Jan Patočka for Havel or the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski for Michnik. Kołakowski was Poland’s outstanding philosopher before being forced into exile after the events of 1968.
The “world of values,” Kołakowski had written, is composed of “antagonistic elements which cannot all be recognized simultaneously, and each of which demands full recognition.” Any single virtue has an absolute claim on us, but we can never realize it absolutely, not least because it clashes with other virtues. It is good to be consistent and good to be merciful, but nonsense to be consistently merciful, since to be merciful is to make an exception. It is good to be honest and good to be loyal, but over the course of a long friendship the statement “You’re looking good” shifts from exemplifying the first virtue to exemplifying the second.
Totalitarianism offers an appealingly simple resolution: all the apparent diversity can be reduced to a single good. But this solution, said Kołakowski, is simply not true. The “world of values” is not a puzzle in which every piece has its proper place. There is no greater whole. Negative freedom also offers an easy dodge: once the barriers go down, all is permitted, and somehow all will be well. But this approach provides no definition of freedom and gives no sense of how a free person behaves. The story of freedom cannot be told without virtue, since freedom is the state in which we can affirm what we think is good and bring it into the world.
Aristotle was a value pluralist—like Kołakowski, he believed that there were many good things, not one or zero. When we are exercising judgment about which virtue applies in which situation, said Aristotle, we are doing right. This is true, but not quite all the truth. More than one virtue applies to almost any situation, so we have to choose. Since there are many good things, as Kołakowski argued, we must do some wrong even as we do right. The world of values is simply structured in this fashion. Since we are always deferring some virtue when we are affirming others, freedom assumes, in Kołakowski’s words, “the reality of evil.”
As we gather from his use of the word evil, Kołakowski’s value pluralism means not relativism but a commitment to creative courage amid the clash of absolutes. We do right when we combine values and compromise with others, and when we accept that the concomitant evil leaves us responsible. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel concludes, “There can be good judgement without total justification.” A graduate of my high school, Hannah Beachler, put it this way when she accepted an Oscar: “Do your best, and your best is good enough.”
The possible combinations of virtues are infinite, and so our actions as free people are not predictable. Kołakowski also thought that we could invent new virtues, and that they were the most important ones. They emerge when we do things that no one has the right to expect of us. His value pluralism was an adventure directed toward the future. We believe in the possibility of new values because we believe that there is new good to be discovered in the world. This adds still another layer of unpredictability.
Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) was formed as a young man by the German occupation of Poland, and he married a Holocaust survivor. He met his future wife, Tamara, in 1948 when, as a student, she sought him out in a café in Warsaw to ask his advice about an exchange program.
Tamara was from Łódź, only about a hundred miles from Warsaw, but she had already journeyed thousands of miles before enrolling as a student. She was alive because her family had fled Łódź all the way to Uzbekistan. Before the Holocaust, Łódź had been one of the great Jewish cities of Europe, home to about as many Jews as Palestine. When she returned after the war, she found that “all of our Łódź family had perished. Three girls from my class at school survived.” She married Leszek in 1949, left Poland with him in 1968, and remained with him to the end of his life. In her memoir, Tamara entitled the chapter in which she met her future husband “Accident,” but it was accident followed by commitment.
