On New Years 1990, Vaclav Havel, then president of the newly free Czechoslovakia, said the following in his address to the nation:
The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.
I was a young man then. Idealistic. In my early 20’s, experimenting with my own life. Finding a spirituality, healing myself of abuses and excesses, learning to love and have a voice. His words stunned me, as they touched so deeply. Captured how I felt about my experience of the world around me. How my heart and spirit felt so assaulted by what seemed like madness around me.
What I learned was the importance of heroes. In particular people who could be examples that standing against the moral corruption of the times was not only impossible, but a great work. That really one’s whole life as a path of just that. Giving love, friendship, compassion, humility, and forgiveness meaning again. To make them the most important things. The year before, the former Soviet Union dissolved and the eastern bloc states were free.
One of the people I have great respect for in this regard was Cesar Chavez (first picture). I was one years old when the United Farm Workers, with him as a leader, went on strike over the conditions in the grape fields. The strike got violent, as strikes do. Chavez went on a hunger strike. In part to bring attention to the grape fields, to prevent further violence. But also as a personal moral penance. A penance for violence occurring under his leadership, a recommitment to non-violence. After 25 days he was too weak to speak. Bobby Kennedy came to break the fast with him. The photo is of Chavez handing him the first piece of bread.
Another is Martin Luther King Jr. In the second photo he sits at home with Correta Scott King. It is one of my favorites, from a set of intimate home candids. He is tense, she is looking away. The back story is that the night before, King had been attacked on the streets. By a white supremacist hoping to intimidate him. In his commitment to non-violence, King had refused to use force to defend himself. And thus the beautifully conflicted scene at the table. I remember King saying that everything he did with civil rights was really, just his ministry. No more, no less.
And as I started, Vaclav Havel. I watched the Velvet Revolution with great intensity as it unfolded in the media. The third picture shows Havel with the former communist party leader Alexander Dubček on the evening of 24 November 1989. Dubček had been a lifetime proponent of communism “with a human face”., though he was later expelled from the party. But that night, the entirety of the party resigned, making Czechoslovakia a free nation. The photo shows Havel embracing his former political adversary, Dubček, in that moment.
I guess as I get longer in tooth, I see that I have always looked for these types of examples in my social and political world. Who has shared public penance for wrongs committed during their leadership? Who has served the public as clear expression of their highest philosophical or spiritual values, taking on any hardships for consistency? Who has embraced their social and political enemies?
There are many. They just don’t seem to be in the spotlight. Ever. Nearly invisible. But we need these examples of resistance against the momentum of the “contaminated moral environment” that we face. Functional examples in our communities. Really be those examples ourselves, to the best of our ability. I think that is one of the curses of social media. The loud shrill divisive voice gets amplified, the voice of moral exemplars muffled, detuned. Cancelled.
Do some of our heroes have another, darker side, and how does it affect our attitudes towards them. Do we ignore, excuse, rationalize or what? Did their ends justify their means? How about Mandela's terrorist past, maybe JFK's - and MLK Jr's alleged - womanizing?. Or if you're British, what about Churchill's many errors of judgement and perhaps morally indefensible 'blind eye' to the consequences of his decisions? What about cruelty & deaths condoned & maybe instigated by Ghandi?
These days if we say we admire a person, the next conversation will be how we must embrace that person's faults, or some other views that one really isn't interested in.
Maybe we err in expressing admiration for the persons rather than their actions; lauding/naming them as heroes instead of simply highlighting their admirable actions.
Oh, I'm tying myself in knots trying to say what I think I mean .........
@CopperCicada An after thought about 'flaws' in our heroes: It could well be argued that marital infidelity or general promiscuity is not immoral in any absolute sense, but merely a failure to comply with a society's (futile) ambition to control the sexual behavior of its members.
@Really I think an undue adoration of humans has its pitfalls. We worship humans, not their ideals. At the same time, we are social beings, and everything about us exists through relationships to beings and things outside of us. I think we can only find light where we find it. No need to duck. The hard questions are the most important ones…
