The Anatomy of Hate

Selections from:

The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice. Vaclav Havel, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson and others. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1997.

The Oslo Conference on

“The Anatomy of Hate”

OSLO, AUGUST 28, 1990

As I look over this assembly, I don't imagine there are many of us who could contemplate our theme-hate-from the inside, as a kind of autopsy, as a state of the soul that we have personally experienced. We are, rather, uneasy observers of this phenomenon, and thus we try to reflect on it only from the outside. This applies to me as well. Among my bad qualities - and there are certainly enough of them – there is not, oddly enough, the capacity to hate. So I, too, relate to hatred only as an observer, whose understanding of it is not profound, but whose concern about it is.

When I think about the people who have hated me personally, or still do, I realize that they share several characteristics which, when you put them together and analyze them, suggest a certain general interpretation of the origin of their hatred.

They are never hollow, empty, passive, indifferent, apathetic people. Their hatred always seems to me the expression of a large and unquenchable longing, a permanently unfulfilled and unfullfilable desire, a kind of desperate ambition. In other words, it is an active inner capacity that always leads the person to fixate on something, always pushes him in a certain direction, and is in a sense stronger than he is. I certainly don't think hatred is the mere absence of love or humanity, a mere vacuum in the human spirit. On the contrary, it has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them, and, in fact, the delegation of a piece of one's own identity to them. just as a lover longs for the loved

one and cannot get along without him, the hater longs for the object of his hatred. And, like love, hatred is ultimately an expression of longing for the absolute, albeit an expression that has become tragically inverted.

People who hate, at least those I have known, harbor a permanent, ineradicable feeling of injury, a feeling that is, of course, out of all proportion to reality. It is as though these people wanted to be endlessly honored, loved, and respected, as though they suffered from the chronic and painful awareness that others are ungrateful and unforgivably unjust toward them, not only because they don't honor and love them boundlessly, as they ought, but because they even-or so it seems-ignore them.

In the subconscious of haters there slumbers a perverse feeling that they alone possess the truth, that they are some kind of superhuman or even god, and thus deserve the world's complete recognition, even its complete submissiveness and loyalty, if not its blind obedience. They want to be the center of the world and are constantly frustrated and irritated because the world does not accept and recognize them as such; indeed, it may not pay any attention to them, and perhaps it even ridicules them. They are like spoiled or badly brought-up children who think their mother exists only to worship them, and who think ill of her because she occasionally does something else, like spend time with her other children, her husband, a book, or her work. They feel all this as an injustice, an injury, a personal slight, a questioning of their own self-worth. The inner charge of energy, which might have been love, is perverted into hatred toward the imputed source of injury. In hatred-just as in unhappy love-there is a desperate kind of transcendentalism. People who hate wish to attain the unattainable and are consumed by the impossibility of attaining it. They see the cause of this in the shameful world that prevents them from attaining their object. Hatred is a diabolical attribute of the fallen angel. It is a state of the spirit that aspires to be God, that may even think it is God, and is tormented by evidence that it is not and cannot be. It is the attribute of a creature who is

jealous of God and cuts his heart out because the road to the throne of God, where he thinks he should be sitting, is blocked by an unjust world conspiring against him.

The person who hates is never able to see the cause of his metaphysical failure in himself and the way he so completely overestimates his own worth. In his eyes, it is the surrounding world that is to blame. The trouble is that this is too abstract, vague, and incomprehensible. It has to be personified, because hatred-as a very particular kind of tumescence of the soul- requires a particular object. And so the person who hates seeks out a particular offender. Of course this offender is merely a stand-in, arbitrarily chosen and therefore easily replaceable. I have observed that, for the hater, hatred is more important than its object; he can rapidly change objects without changing anything essential in the relationship. This is understandable. He does not harbor hatred toward a particular person, but toward what that person represents: a complex of obstacles to the absolute, to absolute recognition, absolute power, total identification with God, truth, and the order of the world. Hatred for one's neighbor, therefore, would seem to be only a physiological embodiment of hatred for the universe that is perceived to be the cause of one's own universal failure.

It is said that those who hate suffer from an inferiority complex. This may not be the most precise way to put it. I would, rather, say that they are people with a complex based on the fatal perception that the world does not appreciate their true worth.

Another observation seems worth making here. The man who hates does not smile, he merely smirks; he is incapable of making a joke, only of bitter ridicule; he can't be genuinely ironic because he can't be ironic about himself Only those who can laugh at themselves can laugh authentically. A serious face, quickness to take offense, strong language, shouting, the inability to step outside himself and see his own foolishness-these are typical of one who hates.

Such qualities reveal something very significant. The hater utterly lacks a sense of belonging, of taste, of shame, of

objectivity. He lacks the capacity to doubt and ask questions, the awareness of his own transience and the transience of all things; he lacks the experience of genuine absurdity, that is, the absurdity of his own existence; the feeling of his own alienation, his awkwardness, his failure, his limitations, or his guilt. The common denominator of 0 this is clearly a tragic, almost meta- physical lack of a sense of proportion. The hateful person has not grasped the measure of things, the measure of his own possibilities, the measure of his rights, the measure of his own existence, and the measure of recognition and love that he can expect. He wants the world to belong to him with no strings attached; that is, he wants the world's recognition to be limitless. He does not understand that the right to the miracle of his own existence and the recognition of that miracle are things he must earn through his actions. He sees them, on the contrary, as a right granted to him once and for all, unlimited and never called into question. In short, he believes that he has something like an unconditional free pass to anywhere, even to heaven. Anyone who dares to scrutinize his pass is an enemy who does him wrong. If this is how he understands his right to existence and recognition, then he must be constantly angry at someone for not drawing the proper conclusions.

I have noticed that all haters accuse their neighbors-and through them the whole world-of being evil. The motive force behind this wrath is the feeling that these evil people and the evil world are denying them what is naturally theirs. In other words, haters project their own anger onto others. Here, too, they are like spoiled children. They don't see that they must sometimes show themselves worthy of something and that, if they don't automatically have everything they think they should, this is not because someone is being nasty to them.

In hatred there is great egocentrism and great self-love. Because they long for absolute self-confirmation and do not encounter it, hating people feel that they are the victims of an insidious evil, an omnipresent injustice that has to be eliminated to give justice its due. But in their minds, justice is turned on its

head. They see it as the duty of justice to grant them something that cannot be granted: the whole world.

The person who hates is unhappy because, whatever he does to achieve full recognition and to destroy those he thinks are responsible for his lack of recognition, he can never attain the success he longs for-that is, the success of the absolute. The full horror of his powerlessness, or, rather, his incapacity to be God, will always burst through from somewhere--perhaps from the happy, conciliatory, and forgiving smile of his victim.

There is only one hatred; there is no difference between individual hatred and group hatred. Anyone who hates an individual is almost always capable of succumbing to group hatred or even of spreading it. I would even say that group hatred-be it religious, ideological, or doctrinal, social, national, or of any other kind-is a sort of funnel that ultimately draws into itself every- one disposed toward hatred. In other words, the most proper background of all group hatred is a collection of people who are capable of hating individuals.

But more than that, collective hatred shared, spread, and deepened by people capable of hatred has a special magnetic attraction and therefore has the power to draw countless other people into its vortex, people who did not initially seem endowed with the ability to hate. They are merely small and morally weak, selfish people with lazy intellects, incapable of thinking for themselves, and therefore susceptible to the suggestive influence of those who hate.

The attraction of collective hatred-infinitely more dangerous than the hatred of individuals for other individuals-derives from several apparent advantages.

1.) Collective hatred eliminates loneliness, weakness, powerlessness, a sense of being ignored or abandoned. This, of course, helps people deal with lack of recognition, lack of success, because it offers them a sense of togetherness. It creates a strange brotherhood, founded on a simple form of mutual understanding that makes no demands whatsoever. The conditions of member- ship are easily met, and no one need fear that he will not pass

muster. What could be simpler than sharing a common object of aversion and accepting a common "ideology of injury" that justifies the aversion ex 'pressed to that object? To say, for in- stance, that Germans, Arabs, blacks, Vietnamese, Hungarians, Czechs, Gypsies, or Jews are responsible for all the misery of the world, and above all for the despair in every wronged soul, is so easy and so understandable! You can always find enough Vietnamese, Hungarians, Czechs, Gypsies, or Jews whose behavior can be made to illustrate the notion that they are responsible for

everything.

2.) The community of those who hate offers another great ad- vantage to its members. They can endlessly reassure one another of their own worth, either through exaggerated expressions of hatred for the chosen group of offenders, or through a cult of symbols and rituals that affirm the worth of the hating community. Uniforms, common dress, insignia, flags, and favorite songs bring the participants closer together, confirm their identity, in- crease, strengthen, and multiply their own value in their eyes.

3.) Whereas individual aggressiveness is always risky because it raises the specter of individual responsibility, a society of hating individuals in a sense legitimizes aggressiveness. Expressing it as a group creates the illusion of legitimacy, or at least the sense of a “common cover.” Hidden within a group, a pack, or a mob, every potentially violent person can dare to do more; each one eggs the other on, and all of them-precisely because there are more of them-justify one another.

4.) Ultimately, the principle of group hatred considerably simplifies the lives of all those who hate and all those who are incapable of independent thinking, because it offers them a very simple and immediately recognizable object of hatred. The process of focusing the general injustice of the world onto a particular person who therefore must be hated is made wonderfully easier if the "offender" is identifiable by the color of his skin, his name, his language, his religion, or where he lives.

Collective hatred has yet another insidious advantage: the modest circumstances of its birth. There are many apparently

innocent and common states of mind that create the almost unnoticeable antecedents for hatred, a wide and fertile field on which the seeds of hatred will quickly germinate and take root.

Let me at least give you- three examples.

Where can this particularizing feeling of universal injustice flourish better than where genuine injustice has been done? Feelings of not being appreciated, logically enough, grow best in a situation where someone really has been humiliated, insulted, or cheated. The best environment for a chronic feeling of injury is one of genuine injury. In short, collective hatred gains veracity and allure most easily wherever a group of people lives in genuine want, in an environment of human misery.

A second example: The miracle of human thought and human reason is bound up with the capacity to generalize. It is hard to imagine the history of the human spirit without this great power. In a sense, anyone who thinks generalizes. On the other hand, the ability to generalize is a fragile gift that has to be handled with great care. It is all too easy to overlook the hidden seeds of injustice that may lie in the act of generalization. We have all made observations or expressed opinions of one kind or another about various peoples. We may say that the French, the English, or the Prussians are like this or that. We don't mean in by it; we are only trying, through our generalizations, to see reality better. But there is a grave danger hidden in this kind of generalization. A group of people defined in a certain way – in this case ethnically – is, in a sense, subtly deprived of its individual spirits and individual responsibilities and endowed with an abstract, collective sense of responsibility. Clearly, this is a wonderful starting point for collective hatred. Individuals become a priori bad or evil simply because of their origin. The evil of racism, one of the worst evils in the world today, depends among other things directly on this type of careless generalization.

Finally, the third antecedent of collective hatred I want to mention here is something I would call collective "otherness." One aspect of the immense and wonderful color and mystery of life is not only that each person is different and that no one can

perfectly understand anyone else, but also that groups of people differ from one another as groups: in the customs, their traditions, their temperaments, t 'heir ways of life and thinking, their hierarchies of values, and of course in their faiths, the colors of their skin, their ways of dressing, and so on. This "otherness" is truly collective. And it is quite understandable that the "other- ness" of one group can make it seem, to the group we belong to, surprising, alien, and even ridiculous. And just as we are surprised at how different others are, so others are surprised by how different we are from them.

This "otherness" of different communities can of course be accepted with understanding and tolerance as something that enriches life; it can be honored and respected, even enjoyed. But by the same token, it can be a source of misunderstanding and aversion toward others. And therefore – once again – it is fertile ground for future hatred.

Few of those who move on the thin, ambiguous, and dangerous terrain created by the knowledge of a genuine wrong, the ability to generalize, and that negative awareness of "otherness" can from the outset detect the presence of the cuckoo's eggs of collective hatred that can be laid in this terrain, or that have already been laid there.

Some observers describe Central and Eastern Europe today as a powder keg, an area of growing nationalism, ethnic intolerance, and expressions of collective hatred. This area is often described even as a possible source of future European instability and as a serious threat to peace. In the subtext of such pessimistic reflections, one can sense, here and there, a kind of nostalgia for the good old days of the Cold War, when the two halves of Europe kept each other in check and produced a kind of peace.

I don't share the pessimism of such observers. Even so, I admit that the comer of the world I come from could become-if we do not maintain vigilance and common sense-fertile soil in which collective hatred could grow. This is so for many more or less understandable reasons.

In the first place, you have to realize that living in Central and Eastern Europe are many nations and ethnic groups that have blended together in various ways. It is almost impossible to imagine ideal borders that 'could separate these nations and ethnic groups into territories of their own. Thus, there are many minorities, and minorities within minorities, within existing borders that are sometimes rather artificial, so that in fact the area is a kind of international melting pot. At the same time, these nations have had very few historic opportunities to seek their own political identity and their own statehood. For centuries they lived under the shelter of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and after a brief pause between the wars they were, in one way or another, subjugated by Hitler and then immediately, or shortly thereafter, by Stalin. The nations of Western Europe have had decades and centuries to develop to where they are now; the nations of Central Europe have had only a few years between the two world wars.

Understandably, then, they carry within their collective sub- conscious a feeling that history has done them wrong. An exaggerated feeling of injustices condition for hatred-could quite logically find fertile ground for its birth and growth here.

The totalitarian system that held sway for so long in most of these countries was outstanding, among other things, for its tendency to make everything the same, to control and coordinate things, to make them uniform. For decades it harshly suppressed whatever authenticity-or, if you like, "otherness"-the subjected nations had. From the structure of the state administrations to the red stars on the rooftops, everything was the same-that is, imported from the Soviet Union. Is it any wonder, then, that, the moment these countries rid themselves of the totalitarian system, they suddenly perceived, with unusual clarity, their mutual and suddenly liberated "otherness"? And would it be any wonder if this long-invisible, and therefore necessarily untested and intellectually undigested, "otherness" did not cause surprise? Rid of the uniforms and the masks that were imposed on us, we are looking for the first time into one

another's real faces. Something has come about that might be called the "shock of otherness." And this has given rise to another favorable condition for collective aversion, which in the proper circumstances could grow into collective hatred.

The simple fact is not only that the nations of this area have not had enough time to mature as states, but also that they have not had enough time to get used to one another's politically defining otherness.

Here we may once more invoke a comparison with children. In many regards, these nations have simply not had enough time to become political adults.

After all they have gone through, they feel a natural need to make their existence quickly visible and to achieve swift recognition and acknowledgment. They simply wish to be known, to be consulted along with the rest of the world. They want their special "otherness" to be acknowledged. And at the same time, still full of inner uncertainty about themselves and the degree of recognition they enjoy, they look at one another somewhat nervously and ask whether those other nations-which, moreover, have suddenly become as different as themselves-are not stealing some of the attention that is rightfully theirs.

For years the totalitarian system in this part of Europe sup- pressed civic autonomy and the rights of individuals, whom it tried to turn into pliant cogs in its machine. The lack of civic culture, which the system destroyed, and the general demoralizing pressure may ultimately have encouraged the careless generalizing that always goes along with national intolerance. Respect for human rights, which rejects the principle of collective responsibility, is always the result of a minimal level of civic culture.

It may be clear, from this rather brief and thus necessarily simplified account, that in our part of Europe conditions are relatively favorable for the rise of national intolerance or even hatred.

There is one more important factor here. After the initial joy about our own liberation comes the inevitable phase of

disillusionment and depression. It is only now, when we can describe and name everything truthfully, that we see the full extent of the awful legacy left to us by the totalitarian system, and realize how long and difficult will be the task of repairing all the damage.

This state of general frustration may provoke some to vent their anger on substitute victims, who will stand as proxies for the main and now liquidated offender, the totalitarian system. Helpless rage seeks its lightning rod.

I repeat that, if I speak of the nationalistic hatred in Central and Eastern Europe, I'm talking about it not as our certain future but as a potential threat.

We must understand this threat in order to confront it effectively. It is a task that faces all of us who live in the former Soviet bloc.

We must struggle energetically against all the incipient forms of collective hatred, not only on principle, because evil must always be confronted, but in our own interests.

The Hindus have a legend concerning a mythical bird called Bherunda. The bird had a single body but two necks, two heads, and two separate consciousnesses. After an eternity together, these two heads began to hate each other and decided to harm each other. Both of them swallowed pebbles and poison, and the result was predictable: the whole Bherunda bird went into spasms and died, with loud cries of pain. It was brought back to life by the infinite mercy of Krishna, to remind people forever how all hatred ends up.

We who live in the newly created democracies of Europe should remind ourselves of this legend each day. As soon as one of us succumbs to the temptation to hate another, we will all end up like the Bherunda bird.

With this difference: there will be no earthly Krishna around to liberate us from our new misfortune.

The Indira Gandhi Prize

NEW DELHI, FEBRUARY 8, 1994

One evening years ago, I was listening to the radio and heard the news that Mrs. Indira Gandhi had been assassinated. I was so upset that sleep was out of the question, and there was only one way to calm myself. I sat down and wrote a short essay on the state of the world. It was called "Thriller."

The news of the assassination of her son Pajiv found me, as president of my country, on a visit to Oslo-the city where the Nobel Peace Prize is presented-in the company of Mrs. Gro Harlem Brundtland, a laureate of the prize I am being honored with today. We shared our regret and our outrage, and we honored the memory of the murdered man with a moment of silence.

Twice in the recent history of India - which has contributed so much to the spiritual richness of the world, especially the idea of tolerance and nonviolent opposition to tyranny-violence and hatred triumphed. In both cases, however, it was a two-edged victory, for the death of the victims, mother and son, challenged the world's conscience. Paradoxically, the impact of their deaths brought their life's work, in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, to fulfillment.

I am moved and deeply honored to be receiving the Indira Gandhi Prize today. To me, it is a way of honoring all the citizens of my country who for years engaged in nonviolent opposition to the totalitarian regime. It is also an honor to everyone who ultimately helped overthrow that regime without the spilling of a single drop of blood. It was because of this that our antitotalitarian revolution was dubbed "gentle" and "velvet" by the world press. In the name of all those fellow citizens of mine

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I would like to thank India for the recognition they are receiving today.

With your permission, I would like to use this occasion to make some observations on the state of the world today. That is, I would like to respond to this great honor somewhat in the way I responded years ago to the news of Indira Gandhi's death.

Let me begin with a memory from long ago. In the 1960s, when I was traveling in the Central Asian republics of what was then the Soviet Union, I had the powerful feeling that I was passing through the world's last great colonial empire. It was obvious to me that the process of liberation going on in the rest of the world must one day assert itself in this empire, too. My guess then was that it would take about fifty years. It happened in twenty-five. I mention this to emphasize the connection between the two most important events of the second half of the twentieth century: decolonization and the fall of communism. From the world's point of view, of course, the fall of communism has many dimensions of meaning. One of them is that the fall of communism was the final stage in the process of decolonization.

This is not the only connection between those two world-shaking events. Another follows from the first, or is related to it: like the fall of communism, decolonization has made our world a multipolar one. If decolonization brought an end to the long European domination of the planet, then the fall of communism brought an end to the injustice into which that earlier injustice colonialism-became transformed in the twentieth century, a bipolar division of the world. Thus, both events – decolonization and the fall of communism – can be understood as great, interrelated steps toward genuine cultural and political plurality in the world. And thus it can be said without much exaggeration that it is only now, at the end of the twentieth century, that a genuinely new era of modern human history is beginning -- an era during which a single culture, or the two great

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powers that emerged from it, no longer dominate everyone, making room for real multiplicity. What specific shapes and forms this new epoch will assume over time, and what system of world organization will gradually be created, we of course do not know at this moment. Our progeny, those who will live in the next century, will know more about it.

Multiculturalism and multipolarity are nothing new in history. On the contrary, for thousands of years different cultures and civilizations have lived parallel lives on our planet. Some of them knew almost nothing about anyone else; some simply took no notice of others; some waged war with one another; some influenced one another. But none of them could, in and of themselves, determine or influence the fate of our planet as a whole.

The multicultural era on whose threshold we find ourselves today will differ radically from all eras preceding it. It comes to life within the framework of a single global civilization. Whether the expression of it is good or bad, it can fundamentally affect the state of the world. In this lies its absolute historical originality, making it a watershed not only in modern history, but in the history of the entire human race.

This originality of the coming epoch naturally places - and will continue to place entirely new and as-yet-unknown demands on humanity and on each individual. It is a historically unprecedented challenge to the human race. Faced with this challenge, we have a chance to pass our greatest test so far. I surely do not need to paint in lurid colors the apocalyptic consequences that failure to pass this test could bring. I shall merely try to outline briefly the situation in which we find ourselves on the threshold of this new era.

Today's global civilization undoubtedly began with the European modern age, with its reliance on rational cognition, the idea of progress, and the development of science and technology. This modern European age grew rapidly to become a phenomenon that we might call Euro-American civilization.

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Through its influence, and its often predatory expansion (which, however, is a product of its spirit), it came to encompass the whole world. Thanks to television and other communications systems, far-flung individuals - today are better linked informationally than, until recently, a small country used to be. The whole world is crisscrossed with thousands of networks of commercial and currency relationships that form the basis of a single integrated economic system. Whatever happens in an important bank or an important stock market anywhere in the world has instant repercussions everywhere else. Identical or similar manufactured goods, industrial technologies, means of transportation, and infrastructure systems now cover practically the entire planet. Not only that: this informational and economic globalization necessarily leads to standardization of social behavior, of habits and life-styles, and of environments. In the big cities of the world, similar skyscrapers have sprung up. Advertising is similar. People from the most diverse corners of the earth long for the same standard of living. Precisely because of this globalization, our planet is in graver danger today than ever before. For just as the benefits of civilization are global today, so are all the dangers of that civilization, be they economic, social, demographic, ecological, or any other. In short, all of humanity is in the same boat, and almost everything that happens anywhere directly or indirectly touches everyone. This completely new circumstance makes new demands on the human spirit. It requires something that has never in history been required of it with such urgency, and that, moreover, goes quite beyond the spiritual framework of the very civilization that has created these requirements. It demands a completely new type of responsibility. It is not my intention today to explain why this demand goes beyond the standard horizon of our present rationalistic and- as many would say-materialistic civilization, nor to analyze this demand or speculate on ways to satisfy it. It is enough, in the context of what I want to say today, merely to state that it exists. My concern today is with a single aspect of the present

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situation, one I already mentioned: the question of multipolarity and multiculturalism within the context of a single global civilization.

One of the serious threats to the world today is the increasing number of conflicts among nations, ethnic groups, cultures, and religions. These conflicts are especially dangerous now because of their great potential to spread. Many quarrelsome factions would have no problem acquiring an atomic weapon, and any local conflict can, thanks to television, instantaneously mobilize a million more people who in another era would probably never have heard of the conflict. There are, of course, many different reasons, from social to historical, for these conflicts. I would like to mention just two.

The first is more or less external: the order in the world created by colonialism and the hegemony of Europe. It was, of course, an unnatural order, often enforced by violence on whole continents, an order that suppressed the autonomy of many parts of the world and forced an entirely different culture on them. Still, it was an order of sorts and as such it tended to limit the possibility of conflict. The sole latent conflict-that is, the conflict between the ruling power and the suppressed-in fact pushed almost all other conflicts into the background.

The same thing was true of the era of the bipolar division of the world. This division, too, was a kind of order (or, to put it more precisely, a pseudo-order) imposed upon the world, and it necessarily muted a variety of conflicts that-had the world not been divided in this bipolar way-might have exploded with far more force.

Thus, decolonization and the fall of communism also meant the end of an artificial world order. That order, however, has not yet been replaced by another, more natural order. It could be said that at this point the world is going through a transitional phase that allows all latent conflicts to come out in the open.

The upsurge in these conflicts, however, has in my opinion another, far deeper cause; somewhat paradoxically, it is the

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circumstance that our world is now enveloped by what is essentially a single civilization. Not only does this civilization bring everyone closer together, it-if I may put it this way-pushes everyone almost too close together. A logical result of this is the growth of intolerance. Compare two people in a hotel room and two people in a prison cell. In the hotel room, they would certainly not get on each other's nerves as much as they would in a cell, where they might have to spend months in close physical proximity with no chance to escape, even for a moment, into solitude. This homogenization and "enforced proximity" brought about by the integrating nature of the civilization in which we all-whether we wish it or not-find ourselves, and from which there is practically no escape, clearly induces a higher awareness of mutual "difference." If the autonomy and identity of various cultural spheres are smothered, if these spheres are pushed together, as it were, by thousands of civilizational pressures and forced to behave in a more or less uniform way, then an understandable response to this pressure is an increased emphasis in these communities on what is proper to them and what makes them different from others.

As a result, their antipathy to other communities grows stronger as well. The more the diverse, autonomous cultures are drawn into the single vortex of contemporary civilization, the more vigorous is their need to defend their original autonomy, their otherness, their authenticity. But against whom are they to defend it?. Against civilization as such? That is truly difficult to do and would scarcely make any sense. So they defend their authenticity against a substitute enemy-against the authenticity of another. Again, I would compare it to conditions inside a prison. When I was there, I often observed that the prisoners took their hatred of prison or their jailers out on one another.

What is the way out of this vicious circle? if the world today is not to become hopelessly enmeshed in increasingly horrifying conflicts, it has, I think, only one possible course of action. It must deliberately breathe the spirit of

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multicultural coexistence into the civilization that surrounds it. There. is no need at all for different peoples, religions, and cultures to adapt or conform to one another. It is enough if they accept one another as legitimate and equal. partners. If they respect one another and respect and honor one another's differences, they need not even understand one another. In any case, if mutual understanding is ever to come about anywhere, it can happen only on the terrain of mutual respect.

Many Europeans and Americans today are painfully aware that Euro-American civilization has undermined and destroyed the autonomy of non-European cultures. They feel it was their fault, and thus feel they must make amends through a kind of emotional identification with others, by accommodating them, by trying to ingratiate themselves, through a longing to "help" these others in one way or another. To my mind, this is a false solution, which can lead only to further unhappiness. It contains - albeit in a hidden and somewhat negative fashion - the same familiar feeling of superiority, paternalism, and a fateful sense of mission to help the "rest of the world." It is, again, that feeling of being "the chosen." It is, in fact, the flip side of colonialism. It is an intellectual dead end. I think we will all help one another best if we make no pretenses, remain ourselves, and simply respect and honor one another, just as we are.

The salvation of the world cannot begin with the invention of mechanisms for coexistence, that is, through the technology of world order. The only way to begin is by seeking a new spirit and a new ethos of coexistence. It is only from this that the techniques and mechanisms can gradually emerge, by which I mean the appropriate international organizations and negotiating systems. Only on the basis of respect for one another can we seek what will unite all of us, a kind of common, worldwide mini- mum whose binding nature will make it possible for mankind to coexist on a single planet. This will work only if the commitment grows out of a climate of equality and a common quest. It is no longer possible for one group to impose it upon others. The only kind of imposition that makes sense is when the

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reasonable and more responsible majority of humanity demands those standards from the unreasonable and less responsible minority, something that happens within every nation and in every culture.

It seems to me that we are already seeing the first signs of the multicultural climate I am talking about. I have observed more than once, in various parts of the world, that the dramatic and terrifying conflict between the original culture and the universal civilization suddenly begins to transcend itself and grow into what I would call an amalgamation of cultures. Things originally quite heterogeneous seem suddenly to be able to coexist side by side and radiate a new and unusual quality, a kind of postmodern culture of coexistence. This coexistence derives its meaning and its order precisely from the fact that no individual, no enlightened spirit, has attempted to give it a unifying meaning and order. Such indications, I feel, are the signs of a new world spirit, a spirit of peaceful coexistence of cultures in a single global civilization. The spirit of a multicultural and truly multipolar world. The spirit from which a new world order should gradually emerge, in which there will still be the large and the small, but in which no one will interfere with anyone else, let alone stifle others simply because they are different.

As I have already said, if our world is to face up to the great threat looming over it, we must find within ourselves the strength for a new type of global responsibility. The climate of multicultural coexistence, if it can be created, could be the first expression of this new responsibility, and could at the same time provide a proper environment for its development.

I am one of Mahatma Gandhi's admirers and, if I may be so bold, I believe that a reflection of his life's work might even be seen in the attempt my friends and I made, in Charter 77, to create a nonviolent opposition to the totalitarian regime in our country. This aspect of our activity later had a positive influence on the course of our antitotalitarian revolution in 1989.

If I were to say what fascinated me most about Gandhi's life, I

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would have to mention his stance immediately after your country gained independence, when, entirely alone, he placed himself in the path of the bloody battles between the Hindus and the Moslems and was able-in Calcutta, for example, but later here in Delhi as well-to end those merciless conflicts and compel the warring factions to shake hands.

I do not believe that man is by nature evil, or that violence and evil are a necessary part of human history. The human spirit is a mixture of all kinds of qualities and potential dispositions, from the worst to the best, and it is immensely, important which of those qualities the world gives rein to, which of them political leaders inspire, and which of them they rely on in their work. Gandhi, face to face with an incredible explosion of violence and cruelty, was able to speak to the best in his fellow citizens. He was able to awaken their better qualities and let the good in them triumph over the bad. It was a great victory of the spirit over raw power - which, by the way, is a slogan that twice in recent history could be read on the walls of Czech cities - in 1968, after the Soviet occupation, and again in 1989. Gandhi's act was a triumph of human charisma over mob passions. It was a great victory for the ideas of nonviolence, tolerance, coexistence, and understanding. It was a great victory for what I would call the moral minimum, which links people of all cultures, over the mutual antipathy that can spring from differences of faith and cultural traditions.

The spiritual ethos that came to fruition in the work of Gandhi was a thousand years in the making on the great Indian subcontinent. This work is one of the major contributions of your country to modern history. It is an inspiring contribution, the impact of which can be observed again and again in all corners of the globe. I am convinced that the creation of the multicultural civilization I have talked about, the creation of conditions based on mutual respect and tolerance of different cultures, as well as the creation of a new human responsibility that alone can save this threatened and sorely tried planet, will

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always find one of the most important sources of its vitality in Gandhi's work.

Without the heritage of Gandhi and his Indian precursors and followers, there would be considerably less hope in the world than there is today.

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The Future of Hope Conference

HIROSHIMA, DECEMBER 5, 1995

The theme of this conference is hope. It is taking place in Hiroshima, a city where we cannot help thinking about death. Allow me therefore a few observations on the subject of "hope and death."

Let me begin on a personal note.

Many times in my life – and not just when I was in prison – I found myself in a situation in which everything seemed to con- spire against me, when nothing I had wished for or worked for seemed likely to succeed, when I had no visible evidence that anything I was doing had any meaning whatsoever. This is a situation we all know well, a situation that appears to promise nothing good, either for ourselves or for the world. It is a situation we describe as hopeless.

Whenever I found myself immersed in such melancholy

thoughts, I would ask a very simple question over and over again: why don't you just give up on everything? Or, more radically, why do you endure, when your life is so clearly pointless? What use is a life in which you must look at the suffering of others as well as your own, helpless to prevent either?

Each time, I would eventually realize that hope, in the deepest sense of the word, does not come from the outside, that hope is not something to be found in external indications simply when a course of action may turn out well, nor is it something I have no reason to feel when it is obvious that nothing will turn out well. Again and again, I would realize that hope is above all a state of mind, and that as such either we have it or we don't,

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quite independently of the state of affairs immediately around us. Hope is simply an existential phenomenon which has nothing to do with predicting the future. Everything may appear to us in its darkest colors, and yet-for some mysterious reason-we do not lose hope. On the other hand, everything may be turning out just as we would like, and yet-for no less mysterious a reason- hope may suddenly desert us. Clearly, this type of hope is related to the very feeling that life has meaning, and as long as we feel that it does, we have a reason to live. If we lose this feeling, we have only two alternatives: either we take our own life, or we choose the more usual way, that of merely surviving, vegetating, remaining in this world only because we happen to be there already.

True, hope is usually hope in something or for something. Thus, it is linked with something specific: as a prisoner, for example, I may hope that one day someone will see the meaning of my imprisonment, and that all the deprivations I underwent in prison can eventually be turned into some good, perhaps as a reinforcement of certain values. Or, as president, I can hope that a complicated set of political negotiations will succeed and that I shall be able to look back with gratification at a job well done. Yet the fact that hope may be hope for something specific does nothing to alter what I said earlier: that hope in its deepest essence does not come from the world around us. Its real source is not the object that has apparently inspired it, just as the loss of hope is. not ultimately caused by the external circumstance that appears to be withdrawing it irrevocably from us. This may be the case somewhere on the surface, at the level of psychological disposition: when things go well, we feel satisfied; when they go wrong, our mood worsens. Yet, in the existential sense of the word, hope does not draw its life-giving sap from its specific object. It works the other way around: hope enlivens its object, infuses it with life, illuminates it.

If, however, hope is not merely a derivative of the outside world, where do we get it from?

I have thought about this and examined myself a thousand

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times, and eventually – to the delight of some and the astonishment of others – I have always come to the conclusion that the primary origin of hope is, to put it simply, metaphysical. By that I mean to say that hope is more, and goes deeper, than a mere optimistic inclination or disposition of the human mind, determined genetically, biologically, chemically, culturally, or other- wise. Of course, all of these factors – from our education and cultural background to the presence of certain compounds in our body – do influence our attitude toward the world and our behavior. But they do not explain them entirely. Somewhere behind all that, acknowledged or unacknowledged, and articulated in different ways, but always most profound, is humanity's experience with its own Being and with the Being of the world.

This brings me to the subject of death.

Man appears to be the only known creature about whom we can say with certainty that he knows he will die. Death is to us not merely some strange occurrence we see in television reports on war or terrorism or road accidents. On the contrary, it is with us every step of our way. Our loved ones die; we are reminded of death with every illness we go through, every airplane flight and fast car ride we take. Death is present in our everyday behavior: even when we wait for a green light to cross the road, we do so to avoid death. It is true that all living creatures share the instinct for self-preservation. But human beings are probably the only ones who are fully aware of that instinct. And only a human being knows that all his maneuvering and scrupulous waiting for the green light will be to no avail in the end, because he will die anyway.

If we know that we shall die and that any effort to prevent death is doomed, why, then, do we go on living? Why do we try to achieve anything? Or, more important, why do nearly all the essential things we strive for, through which we give our life meaning, so clearly transcend the horizon of our own lives? The feeling of well-being I enjoy because I am in good health at the moment, or because I am looking forward to meeting some

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interesting people, or because you take an interest in my observations, can be explained in part because I do not see death as an immediate prospect, because I have forgotten about it, or have simply put it out of my mind. But hope in the radical and profound sense I'm talking about here cannot be understood against this background. This profound hope, in its very essence, reaches beyond our death. Even more, this hope would be quite incomprehensible and absurd in the context of our knowledge that we shall die. We cannot believe in the meaning of our own lives and cherish hope as a permanent state of mind if we are certain that our death means the end of everything.

The only thing that can explain the existence of genuine hope is humanity's profound and essentially archetypal certainty – though denied or unrecognized a hundred times over-that our life on this earth is not just a random event among billions of other random cosmic events that will pass away without a trace, but that it is an integral component or link, however minuscule, in the great and mysterious order of Being, an order in which everything has a place of its own, in which nothing that has once been done can be undone, in which everything is recorded in some unfathomable way and given its proper and permanent value. Indeed, only the infinite and the eternal, recognized or surmised, can explain the no less mysterious phenomenon of hope.

Some may find these thoughts rather far-fetched. But I cannot help believing them. I do not know of a single case in which there is genuine acceptance of some bitter, personal fate, or in which air act of courage is undertaken without regard for any immediate possibility of success, that can be explained by any- thing other than humankind's sense of something that transcends earthly gratifications belief that such a fate, or such an apparently hopeless act of courage, whose significance is not easily understood, is recorded in some way and adds to the memory of Being.

With a little exaggeration we might say that death, or the

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awareness of death-this most extraordinary dimension of man's stay on this earth, inspiring dread, fear, and awe-is at the same time a key to the fulfillment of human life in the best sense of the word. It is an obstacle put in the way of the human mind to test it, to challenge it to be truly the miracle of creation it considers itself to be. Death gives us a chance to overcome it-not by refusing to recognize its existence, but through our ability to look beyond it, or to defy it by purposeful action.

Without the experience of the transcendental, neither hope nor human responsibility has any meaning.

We live on a planet that is now – for the first time in its history – embraced by a single human civilization. Within this global civilization, the destinies of billions of people and hundreds of nations are so interknit that they merge together in a single destiny. This has a thousand advantages and a thousand disadvantages. The main disadvantage is that any threat facing the world today becomes a global threat. There is certainly no need for me to remind you, in particular, of the multitude of threats confronting today's civilization, threats that the world has so far been rather inept at handling. I shall therefore mention just one such threat, which used to be called "the conflict of civilizations."

Convinced that we now live in a single civilization, I call this, rather, a conflict between different spheres of civilization, culture, or religion. Undeniably, there is a danger that such a conflict might actually break out in the future. The more closely we are all linked together within a single civilization, and the more we have to accept its accomplishments - whether joyfully or out of necessity, regardless of how much they homogenize our lives - the more noticeably our varied cultural and religious traditions come to life again, and the more energetically the different spheres of civilization defend their individuality. Thus, the growing uniformity within this single civilization is accompanied by its opposite an increasingly vigorous self-defense of diverse cultural identities.

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How should we counter this threat? What kind of world order, what system of global cooperation should we build to avert the danger that our grandchildren may experience horrors far more dreadful than the Second World War, whose end we are now commemorating after fifty years? How can we avoid new Hiroshimas?

Without belittling everything currently being done to this end by many wise people, and all the projects and visions aimed at eliminating this and other threats looming over humankind, I should like to stress one element that I consider especially important. This element is directly related to what I have said here on the subject of hope and death.

When we examine man's archetypal experiences with himself and with the world he is thrown into-the experiences that allow him to know he will die and yet allow him as well to act as though he never will-we find that, in one way or another, such experiences are present in the primeval foundations of all religions. For aren't all religions marked by a belief in a higher authority than human authority, in the existence of a higher order than the one that we have created on this earth? Don't they all embrace the notion of a justice higher than earthly justice? Aren't they all based, expressly or by implication, on hope, in that metaphysical meaning of the word I have reflected on here? Don't they all, in some form or another, take the infinite and the eternal as the ultimate measures of human affairs? Don't they all turn our attention to what is beyond our death? And do they not also remain humble before that which transcends us, and from that, derive moral imperatives which they offer us as guidelines to living meaningful lives?

It is my firm belief that, if there is a bond uniting the diverse religious and cultural worlds that make up our civilization today, it can only be their unwavering certainty that the key to solid human coexistence, and to a life that does not become a hell on earth, lies in respect for what infinitely transcends us, for what I call the miracle of Being. True goodness, true responsibility, true justice, a true sense of things-all these grow from roots that go

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much deeper than the world of our transitory earthly schemes. This is a message that speaks to us from the very heart of human religiosity.

Why, then should different forms of religiosity so fatefully divide humanity? Are not the spiritual roots of the different religions, emanating from certain archetypal experiences of the human species as a conscious one, precisely what is common to humankind, and therefore what could unite it?

I do not believe in any global religion. I am not even sure whether the salvation of humanity and the restoration of its sense of responsibility for itself and for the world lies solely in a renaissance of religiosity or even of piety. I am speaking of something slightly different: the need to grasp and articulate anew humanity's essential, fundamental spiritual experience and to infuse the spirit of this experience into the creation of a new world order, one that would allow us all to live and work together in peace without forcing anyone to give up his cultural autonomy. I am speaking of the necessity to proceed much more forcefully than before to reveal and identify that which unites us rather than that which divides us. It is in this that I see the principal challenge for the coming century and the coming millennium.

Not only is this probably the best way to avert the threat of a "conflict of civilizations." It is also perhaps the only way of awakening or reviving a sense of responsibility that transcends the personal, the kind of responsibility that could avert as well the other threats humanity will have to deal with in the future, such as the impact of the population explosion, environ- mental degradation, and the deepening gulf between the rich and the poor.

To sum up: if humanity has any hope of a decent future, it lies in the awakening of a universal sense of responsibility, the kind of responsibility unrepresented in the world of transient and temporary earthly interests.

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As you can see, I, too, have pinned my hope on something specific-the undeniable, and undeniably universal, roots of humanity's awareness of itself. I do not know whether or not the world will take the path which that reality offers.

But I will not lose hope.

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