Vaclav Havel’s Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World

In 1994, shortly after becoming President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel travelled to the USA and delivered an address in Philadelphia called “The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World”. The USSR had recently collapsed and a new form of capitalism was spreading its influence over the world, connecting disparate cultures via fractal conduits of trade and migration. Havel worried that without some new narrative to paper over their differences, this abrupt connection of cultures would lead to conflict. Wars were already sparking in the Middle East and Europe and international diplomacy was difficult. Cooperation required governments to look past their own interests in favour of a more general conception of progress. People needed a unifying ideal to cleave to, which would encourage them to move with one purpose against international problems. It had to be new, because the 20th Century was an age of emancipation where people had begun to recognize the richness of different perspectives; there were protections for indigenous cultures and no single ideology of the time was strong enough to overpower all the others. Organized religion was also declining in the West, where science had replaced metaphysical explanations of natural phenomena and damaged the credibility of the religious enterprise. Havel therefore looked for inspiration in two ideas drawn directly from modern science. He called them “transcendent” in the hope they might provide us with a sense of rootedness in the cosmos and encourage us to see things from a superhuman vantage. Contemplating them would be like turning over a precious jewel in your hand, as facets become alternately reflective and transparent and expose, by turns, the dark interior of the mineral or the refulgent world around it.

The Ideas

“…Because it’s not enough to just live. You have to have something to live for. Let it be Earth.”

Admiral William “Bill” Adama – Battlestar Galactica.

The first of Havel’s transcendent ideas is the Anthropic principle, which was developed originally to help explain a puzzle in cosmology. By the mid-twentieth century, astronomers had discovered that space was accelerating – the universe did not appear to be in a steady state – and they knew that the heavy elements essential to life had been created gradually in stars through a process of nuclear fusion. They also knew that stars have finite lives – that they burn up and out, cooling over time – and their propensity to harbour life in rocky planetary systems diminishes as the universe ages. It follows that carbon-based life forms like humans could not evolve if the universe were significantly older or younger than its present age. Moreover, it suggests that we find ourselves looking out on a cosmos at an auspicious moment¹, a kind of island of habitability where conditions are conducive to life.

The Anthropic principle – or the observation selection argument – says it is natural the universe should be the age it is, since if the universe were significantly older or younger there would be no sentient life around to notice. The same argument can be used to explain why the universe’s physical laws appear to be fine-tuned for life. The various forces and species of matter are related in a very particular way. Were the relative strengths of the fundamental forces slightly different, not only would life be prevented from evolving, but there would be myriad other effects: heavy elements would not be able to fuse in the furnaces of the stars, the structure of atoms would dissolve and the universe might expand too fast or collapse too early to allow life to develop.

In summary, the Anthropic principle says that it is necessary that life forms should observe a universe which operates in a state and at a time propitious for life. Havel felt this tautology might accord humanity a special place in the universe. He observed in his Philadelphia address that:

“…from the countless possible courses of its evolution the universe took the only one that enabled life to emerge.”

In other words: since we are here, privileged to be able to look out at an otherwise sterile cosmos, one might conclude that the purpose of the universe was to produce life on Earth – perhaps, even, to produce humankind².

It is an arresting thought and like many others I find Havel’s formulation of the Anthropic principle attractive. But there are also some important philosophical objections. By suggesting that the universe was meant to produce human life, Havel follows in a long line of philosophers who try to lend humans a noble position in the hierarchy of things. Strictly speaking, however, one might follow the same line of argument and infer that the purpose of the universe was to create rocks – or puddles. In The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams joked that a puddle might look up at the clouds which disburse rain, then at the numerous puddle-shaped depressions in the ground and equally conclude that the benevolent purpose of the universe was to produce puddles.

I can think of a further, more fundamental objection, which is that it makes no sense to define the purpose of everything there is. Teleology makes no sense with respect to everything – only between two or more things. That is why humans invent Gods to lend meaning to everything they can see – but the logic is faulty, for in positing a God, we have ignored the original problem, which was to explain everything instead of just a part of everything. Asking what is the purpose of everything is therefore meaningless. If modern scientific theories are correct, and humans developed naturally out of the interstellar medium, then human purpose can only be understood in terms of the rules that brought them into being and which govern their development. Purpose only makes sense without a maker if you have a mechanism like evolution, where the rules of the biological system determine how the system will play out.

Havel’s second transcendent idea is the Gaia hypothesis. Introduced in the 1970s by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, Gaia theory says that the Earth is maintained in a state favourable to life by a series of negative feedback loops. The whole of the Earth – atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere – can be viewed as a single, self-regulating system that holds the temperature and chemical composition of the Earth’s surface within limited bounds. The idea was prompted by several observations³: for example, that the biosphere is able to withstand tremendous shocks from volcanic eruption or asteroid impact, that the temperature of the Earth’s surface has been largely constant for billions of years despite increasing solar luminosity and that the atmosphere is maintained within a state of high thermodynamic “disequilibrium”⁴ (i.e. reactive gases like oxygen and methane are constantly replenished⁵).

Lovelock illustrated his idea with the Daisyworld model, where a planet is inhabited by two different species of daisy – one white and the other black. Daisyworld is experiencing a period of global warming, caused by the brightening of its parent sun. The white daisies reflect sunlight, cooling the planet, while the black ones absorb sunlight and heat the planet up. Their growth rates are assumed to depend solely on temperature and neither daisy can survive in excessive heat or cold, so the populations reorganize themselves, as the sunlight intensifies, so that the temperature remains comfortable. The daisies are therefore able to stabilize their environment without conscious intention. Lovelock proposed that similar (though much more complex) feedback mechanisms of biology and chemistry have been active on the Earth throughout its history. If there is a significant perturbation in living conditions, then the balance of biological populations will adjust to compensate. Havel put it like this:

“[Gaia] 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. If we endanger her, she will dispense with us in the interest of a higher value – that is, life itself.”

The Point

In his capacity as playwright and politician, Havel was trying to generate a narrative anchor that would inspire people to work for the general good of the planet. In a way, his argument is a humanist response to nihilism. Like Nietzsche, he is striving to impose meaning on a meaningless world. This may sound absurd (it is absurd) but there is nothing strange or laughable about it. Humans are compelled to weave their own struggles into stories so that they can make decisions about the future. We can understand this with an analogy:

Imagine you have designed a species of biological robot whose sole purpose is to pass on its genetic programming to future generations. The robot lives as part of a group in order to increase its chances of survival and procreation and therefore needs to consider its own needs and to weigh them against those of other individuals in the group. Since there is no absolute purpose to their lives beyond the continuation of their genes – and because you cannot hard-code a response to every imaginable crisis – you program the robots to make decisions based on the problems they can see around them. They build these problems into abstract narratives, which place the robots in the context of the problem and shut out all the extraneous noise of the universe. In this way, the tremendous complexity of a real-life problem is reduced to a simple, idealized case. The process is similar to building theoretical models in the sciences.

It seems to me that humans have developed like this and we use narratives like this. When faced with global problems, we invent stories which involve all of humanity in a struggle against those problems. Difficulties arise when other humans (most of us who do not work in international relations) have their own troubles that resonate louder than the global narrative. These might be because day-to-day survival is more important, or simply because an individual cannot picture themselves in a global context and chooses to pursue personal goals instead. Looking at recent progress in tackling climate change, it is clear that we cannot easily make a global narrative more urgent in the mind than a narrative of nationhood, race, or personal gain⁶. Inventing an inter-planetary or inter-species war would probably be the most expedient way to overcome our differences – something akin to the plot of the Battlestar Galactica television series, Watchmen or The Three Body Problem. The tragedy – if one can call it that – of our isolation is that the only enemies we can find, now, are other humans.

Notes and Further Reading

1. In this context, “moment” refers to a span of several billion years…! ↩︎
2. Although the non-avian dinosaurs – whose own evolutionary aspirations were so rudely curtailed at the end of the Cretaceous period – might have something to say about Havel’s anthropocentric philosophy. ↩︎
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/gaia-hypothesis ↩︎
4. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01969-y ↩︎
5. This can be contrasted with the atmosphere of a dead planet like Mars, which is static and composed almost exclusively of inert carbon dioxide. ↩︎
6. J. Diamond, Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change, Penguin Books, 2020. ↩︎