Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
In times of social upheaval, rapid change and seemingly immovable tribal differences, history suggests a lesson to seek out the transcendent. Often, poets point the way, reminding us that our reality isn’t so different from what came before and directing our imaginations to something beyond what we can see today.
Perhaps, no one personified this truth more than Vaclav Havel. Havel was a playwright and poet, and as a dissident in Soviet Czechoslovakia, became a political prisoner for his views. As the Iron Curtain began to fall under the weight of its own oppression, Havel helped lead the Velvet Revolution and became the first democratically elected president of the Czech Republic.
On July 4, 1994, Havel delivered a speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia entitled, “The Need for Transcendence in the Post Modern World.” As is axiomatic with messages of transcendence, it’s as poignant today as it was 30 years ago.
“Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly not unprecedented. … 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,” he said.
Our cultural moment comes in the direct wake of the post-modern era and is largely shaped by it (to the extent a de-shaping era can create shape). Post-modernism, first in art and architecture, then in culture broadly, was marked by a deconstruction of modernism. Modernism, focused on ideas like “design, hierarchy, mastery … depth and metaphysics,” according to Edward Docx, a prominent British writer. Post-modernism, then, focused on “collage, chance, anarchy, repetition … interested in deconstructing.”
Part of understanding the potency of shifting our gaze to the transcendent is understanding the disruptive influence of the temporal. Our cultural moment is one of perpetual now, screaming BREAKING NEWS, implicitly casting aside what came before.
While there are claims that the post-modern period is over, it seems the digital revolution has merely ushered in an age of industrialized post-modernism—where we open an app and have a daily dose of deconstruction. What was true yesterday is no longer valid. This post-truth, habit-forming vortex is corrosive—like metal left outside rusting away—and has an inevitable nihilistic end.
However, according to Docx, “If we de-privilege all positions, we can assert no position, we cannot, therefore, participate in society or the collective and so, in effect, an aggressive postmodernism becomes, in the real world, indistinguishable from an odd species of inert conservatism.”
Beyond a diatribe encouraging disconnection from digital media, I hope to underscore a testimony of reconnection.
Havel concluded, “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, in the cosmos. This awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence. … 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.”•
__________
Schutt is co-founder of Homesense Heating & Cooling and Refinery46 and an American Enterprise Institute civic renewal fellow. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.
Click here for more Forefront columns.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.