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              THE FUTURIST July-August 1995

    THE NEED FOR TRANSCENDENCE IN THE POSTMODERN WORLD

  In this postmodern world, cultural conflicts are becoming
  more dangerous than at any time in history.  A new model of
  coexistence is needed, based on man's transcending himself.

                     By Vaclav Havel

There are thinkers who claim that, if the modern age began with
the discovery of America, it also ended in America.  This is
said to have occurred in the year 1969, when America sent the
first men to the moon.  From this historical moment, they say,
a new age in the life of humanity can be dated.

I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern
age has ended.  Today, many things indicate that we are going
through a transitional period, when it seems that something is
on the way out and something else is painfully being born.  It
is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting
itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising
from the rubble.

Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are
certainly not unprecedented.  This happened in the Hellenistic
period, when from the ruins of the classical world the Middle
Ages were gradually born.  It happened during the Renaissance,
which opened the way to the modern era.  The distinguishing
features of such transitional periods are a mixing and blending
of cultures and a plurality or parallelism of intellectual and
spiritual worlds.  These are periods when all consistent value
systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are
discovered or rediscovered.  They are periods when there is a
tendency to quote, to imitate, and to amplify, rather than to
state with authority or integrate.  New meaning is gradually
born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different
elements.

Today, this state of mind or of the human world is called
postmodernism.  For me, a symbol of that state is a Bedouin
mounted on a camel and clad in traditional robes under which he
is wearing jeans, with a transistor radio in his hands and an ad
for Coca-Cola on the camel's back.  I am not ridiculing this,
nor am I shedding an intellectual tear over the commercial
expansion of the West that destroys alien cultures.  I see it
rather as a typical expression of this multicultural era, a
signal that an amalgamation of cultures is taking place.  I see
it as proof that something is happening, something is being
born, that we are in a phase when one age is succeeding another,
when everything is possible.  Yes, everything is possible,
because our civilization does not have its own unified style,
its own spirit, it's own aesthetic.

Science and Modern Civilization

This is related to the crisis, or to the transformation, of
science as the basis of the modern conception of the world.

The dizzying development of this science, with its unconditional
faith in objective reality and its complete dependency on
general and rationally knowable laws, led to the birth of modern
technological civilization.  It is the first civilization in the
history of the human race that spans the entire globe and firmly
binds together all human societies, submitting them to a common
global destiny.  It was this science that enabled man, for the
first time, to see Earth from space with his own eyes; that is,
to see it as another star in the sky.

At the same time, however, the relationship to the world that
modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted
its potential.  It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the
relationship is missing something.  It fails to connect with the
most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human
experience.  It is now more of a source of disintegration and
doubt than a source of integration and meaning.  It produces
what amounts to a state of schizophrenia:  Man as an observer is
becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.

Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a
single dimension of reality.  And the more dogmatically science
treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of
reality, the more misleading it became.  Today, for instance, we
may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors
did, and yet, it increasingly seems they knew something more
essential about it than we do, something that escapes us.  The
same thing is true of nature and of ourselves.  The more
thoroughly all our organs and their functions, their internal
structure, and the biochemical reactions that take place within
them are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the
spirit, purpose, and meaning of the system that they create
together and that we experience as our unique "self."

And thus today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation.  We
enjoy all the achievements of modern civilization that have made
our physical existence on this earth easier in so many important
ways.  Yet we do not know exactly what to do with ourselves,
where to turn.  The world of our experiences seems chaotic,
disconnected, confusing.  There appear to be no integrating
forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of
phenomena in our experience of the world.  Experts can explain
anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own
lives less and less.  In short, we live in the postmodern world,
where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.

When Nothing Is Certain

This state of affairs has its social and political consequences.
The single planetary civilization to which we all belong
confronts us with global challenges.  We stand helpless before
them because our civilization has essentially globalized only
the surface of our lives.  But our inner self continues to have a
life of its own.  And the fewer answers the era of rational
knowledge provides to the basic questions of human Being, the
more deeply it would seem that people, behind its back as it
were, cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe.  Because
of this, individual cultures, increasingly lumped together by
contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency their
own inner autonomy and the inner differences of others.

Cultural conflicts are increasing and are understandably more
dangerous today than at any other time in history.  The end of
the era of rationalism has been catastrophic: Armed with the
same supermodern weapons, often from the same suppliers, and
followed by television cameras, the members of various tribal
cults are at war with one another.  By day, we work with
statistics; in the evening, we consult astrologers and frighten
ourselves with thrillers about vampires.  The abyss between
rational and the spiritual, the external and the internal, the
objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the
universal and the unique, constantly grows deeper.

Politicians are rightly worried by the problem of finding the
key to ensure the survival of a civilization that is global and
at the same time clearly multicultural.  How can generally
respected mechanisms of peaceful coexistence be set up, and on
what set of principles are they to be established?

These questions have been highlighted with particular urgency by
the two most important political events in the second half of
the twentieth century: the collapse of colonial hegemony and the
fall of communism.  The artificial world order of the past
decades has collapsed, and a new, more-just order has not yet
emerged.  The central political task of the final years of this
century, then, is the creation of a new model of coexistence
among the various cultures, peoples, races, and religious
spheres within a single interconnected civilization.  This task
is all the more urgent because other threats to contemporary
humanity brought about by one-dimensional development of
civilization are growing more serious all the time.

Many believe this task can be accomplished through technical
means.  That is, they believe it can be accomplished through the
invention of new organizational, political, and diplomatic
instruments.  Yes, it is clearly necessary to invent
organizational structures appropriate to the present
multicultural age.  But such efforts are doomed to failure if
they do not grow out of something deeper, out of generally held
values.

This, too, is well known.  And in searching for the most natural
source for the creation of a new world order, we usually look to
an area that is the traditional foundation of modern justice and
a great achievement of the modern age: to a set of values that
-- among other things -- were first declared in this building
(Independence Hall).  I am referring to respect for the unique
human being and his or her liberties and inalienable rights and
to the principle that all power derives from the people.  I am,
in short, referring to the fundamental ideas of modern
democracy.

What I am about to say may sound provocative, but I feel more
and more strongly that even these ideas are not enough, that we
must go farther and deeper.  The point is that the solution they
offer is still, as it were, modern, derived from the climate of
the Enlightenment and from a view of man and his relation to the
world that has been characteristic of the Euro-American sphere
for the last two centuries.  Today, however, we are in a
different place and facing a different situation, one to which
classically modern solutions in themselves do not give a
satisfactory response.  After all, the very principle of
inalienable human rights, conferred on man by the Creator, grew
out of the typically modern notion that man -- as a being
capable of knowing nature and the world -- was the pinnacle of
creation and lord of the world.

This modern anthropocentrism inevitably meant that He who
allegedly endowed man with his inalienable rights began to
disappear from the world: He was so far beyond the grasp of
modern science that he was gradually pushed into a sphere of
privacy of sorts, if not directly into a sphere of private fancy
-- that is, to a place where public obligations no longer apply.
The existence of a higher authority than man himself simply
began to get in the way of human aspirations.

Two Transcendent Ideas

The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part
of any meaningful world order.  Yet, I think it must be anchored
in a different place, and in a different way, than has been the
case so far.  If it is to be more than just a slogan mocked by
half the world, it cannot be expressed in the language of a
departing era, and it must not be mere froth floating on the
subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to
the world.

Paradoxically, inspiration for the renewal of this lost
integrity can once again be found in science, in a science that
is new -- let us say postmodern -- a science producing ideas
that in a certain sense allow it to transcend its own limits.  I
will give two examples:

The first is the Anthropic Cosmological Principle.  Its authors
and adherents have pointed out that from the countless possible
courses of its evolution the universe took the only one that
enabled life to emerge.  This is not yet proof that the aim of
the universe has always been that it should one day see itself
through our eyes.  But how else can this matter be explained?

I think the Anthropic Cosmological Principle brings us to an
idea perhaps as old as humanity itself: that we are not at all
just an accidental anomaly, the microscopic caprice of a tiny
particle whirling in the endless depths of the universe.
Instead, we are mysteriously connected to the entire universe,
we are mirrored in it, just as the entire evolution of the
universe is mirrored in us.

Until recently, it might have seemed that we were an unhappy
bit of mildew on a heavenly body whirling in space among many
that have no mildew on them at all. This was something that
classical science could explain.  Yet, the moment it begins to
appear that we are deeply connected to the entire universe,
science reaches the outer limits of its powers.  Because it is
founded on the search for universal laws, it cannot deal with
singularity, that is, with uniqueness.  The universe is a unique
event and a unique story, and so far we are the unique point of
that story.  But unique events and stories are the domain of
poetry, not science.  With the formulation of the Anthropic
Cosmological Principle, science has found itself on the border
between formula and story, between science and myth.  In that,
however, science has paradoxically returned, in roundabout way,
to man, and offers him -- in new clothing -- his lost integrity.
It does so by anchoring him once more in the cosmos.

The second example is the Gaia Hypothesis.  This theory brings
together proof that the dense network of mutual interactions
between the organic and inorganic portions of the earth's
surface form a single system, a kind of mega-organism, a living
planet -- Gaia -- named after an ancient goddess who is
recognizable as an archetype of the Earth Mother in perhaps all
religions.  According to the Gaia Hypothesis, we are parts of a
greater whole.  Our destiny is not dependent merely on what we
do for ourselves but also on what we do for Gaia as a whole.  If
we endanger her, she will dispense with us in the interests of
a higher value -- that is, life itself.

Toward Self-Transcendence

What makes the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis so
inspiring?  One simple thing: Both remind us, in modern
language, of what we have long suspected, of what we have long
projected into our forgotten myths and what perhaps has always
lain dormant within us as archetypes.  That is, the awareness of
our being anchored in the earth and the universe, the awareness
that we are not here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we
are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom
it is not advisable to blaspheme.  This forgotten awareness is
encoded in all religions.  All cultures anticipate it in various
forms.  It is one of the things that form the basis of man's
understanding of himself, of his place in the world, and
ultimately of the world as such.

A modern philosopher once said: "Only a God can save us now."

Yes, the only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of
our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and, at the same
time, the cosmos.  This awareness endows us with the capacity for
self-transcendence.  Politicians at international forums may
reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order
must be universal respect for human rights, but it will mean
nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the
respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe,
the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence.  Only
someone who submits to the authority of the universal order and
of creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a
participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his
neighbors, and thus honor their rights as well.

It logically follows that, in today's multicultural world, the
truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and
creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all
cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and
minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or
sympathies -- it must be rooted in self-transcendence:

* Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to
  foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures,
  to nature, to the universe.

* Transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be
  in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not
  understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but
  with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because,
  together with us, all this constitutes a single world.  

* Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction.  

The Declaration of Independence states that the Creator gave man
the right to liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only
if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it.

About the Author

Vaclav Havel is president of the Czech Republic.
The text of his speech was provided by the
Czech Embassy in Washington, D.C. The speech was made in  
Independence Hall, Philadelphia, July 4, 1994.  

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