Great Piece by John Kay

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

  • 8/12/2019 Great Piece by John Kay

    1/2

    December 20, 2011 7:54 pm

    Spontaneity or slogans:

    the lessons of VclavHavels greengrocer

    By John Kay

    Vclav Havel, the first and only president of post-communist Czechoslovakia, died last

    week. The central figure of his famous dissident essay, The Power of the Powerless,

    was a greengrocer with a placard in his window saying: Workers of the World Unite!

    Havel asked an apparently simple question: what is the purpose of this display?

    The shopkeeper is not motivated by an intention to communicate his enthusiasm for

    unity of the workers of the world. Nor was his superior seized by such desire. And the

    leaders of the authoritarian system in which the sign is displayed know that their

    power would not long survive unity of the workers of the world. In fact, it is unlikely

    that anyone who sees the sign gives attention to its substantive content.

    The real meaning is not conveyed by the printed words. The greengrocers intention is

    to signal conformity and avoid trouble. Havel translates the slogan as: I am afraid and

    therefore unquestioningly obedient. That is what the mourners of Kim Jong-il are

    saying today. But, Havel observes, there would be much more resistance to a sign that

    made such a statement explicit. Even in a totalitarian state, people seek some dignity.

    We might console ourselves that this sloganising is characteristic of their totalitarian

    societies, not our liberal democracies. But are we sure? Are corporate mission

    statements, or motivational displays in offices and factories, really spontaneous

    demonstrations of sincerely felt sentiments? Or do people say these things or hang

    them on the walls with the same indifferent resignation as the greengrocer? Is there

    much distinction between official exhortations to drive well, recycle conscientiously

    and to celebrate diversity, and official exhortations to redouble efforts to build aworkers paradise? Would a visitor from Mars find it easy to distinguish commercial

    advertisements from political slogans? Is the capitalist assertion that the client always

    comes first more honest, or more informative, than the socialist proclamation of the

    unity of the workers of the world?

    Thirty years before Havel, George Orwell identified the corrupting influence of

    discourse based on the repetition of pre-packaged phrases. A corrupting influence not

    Page 1 of 2Spontaneity or slogans: the lessons of Vclav Havels greengrocer - FT.com

    12/21/2011http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/04d440d8-2a7e-11e1-8f04-00144feabdc0.html

  • 8/12/2019 Great Piece by John Kay

    2/2

    Printed from: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/04d440d8-2a7e-11e1-8f04-00144feabdc0.html

    Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.

    THE FINANCIAL TIMES LTD 2011FT and Financial Times are trademarks of The Financial Times Ltd.

    just on language but on society itself. He described the speaker who has gone some

    distance towards turning himself into a machine, observing: The appropriate noises

    are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were

    choosing his words for himself. We often hear such speakers at business conferences

    and on political platforms.

    Havel also emphasised the mechanical nature of the process of effusion. Part of the

    essence of the post-totalitarian system, he said, is that it draws everyone into its

    sphere of power, not so they may realise themselves as human beings, but so they may

    surrender their human identity in favour of the system. The empty exhortation of

    workers of the world unite! conceals the reality of the power structure that lies

    behind it. But the vacuous rhetoric traps the speaker as well as the hearer, the leaders

    as well as the led. Both are objects in a system of control, but at the same time they are

    its subjects, wrote Havel. They are inhabitants of a world whose assumptions are

    false, and self-descriptions fraudulent.

    Havel in the 1970s, like Orwell in the 1940s, denounced the debasement of political

    language. But the cancer spread. The private sector mastered the art of speech without

    thought through management jargon. These techniques were then reimported into

    politics. The interval in which Clement Attlee and Dwight Eisenhower made speeches

    in the conversational language of ordinary intelligent people proved brief. Political

    discourse has reverted to strings of sound bites, the process Orwell described as

    gumming together long strips of words, which have already been set in order by

    someone else. Vacuous slogans are today found as often on the walls of public sector

    offices as in the business sector.

    Orwell insisted that the meaning should choose the word, and not the other way about.

    For Havel, in the more desperate environment of communist Czechoslovakia, the issue

    was the rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love.

    We miss the unflinching intellectual integrity of these great writers.

    Page 2 of 2Spontaneity or slogans: the lessons of Vclav Havels greengrocer - FT.com

    12/21/2011http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/04d440d8-2a7e-11e1-8f04-00144feabdc0.html