December 1998
To those who have, in some measure, touched me as a fellow traveller, however brief may have been the time we have had together, I am writing a New Year’s letter. The letters I have written these last nine years, since I “retired” from the legal profession, have been few. These have been all-consuming years, in the midst of which, and about which, I have hardly known how to speak. For better or worse, I seem to be finding my voice, and I am tempted beyond restraint to share it.
I would share with you something of the flavour of those years, eight of which I have lived in Prague. You may be disappointed, however, in that the story I will tell will be rather more my own story than that of the post-communist transformation in this country. I can only hope that there will be enough of the latter to make the former sufficiently interesting.
To the two questions which I most often receive (What are you doing in the Czech Republic? And, will you ever return to Canada?), it is hard to respond without some reference to the decisions made nine years ago — not to practice law, and to set out on an exploratory quest.
“ The decision would not come for another nine months, with what I call the ‘Four Fateful Nights of August’! ”
One November morning in 1989, sitting in my living room in Toronto, reading the newspaper, I learned of The Fall of the Berlin Wall. No other political event has shaken me so. I wept, off and on, in convulsions, for half an hour, my body trembling as the news settled on me, the realisation that so many millions of people could now be free, a generation we had never dared hope would be.
I remembered watching Winston Churchill’s funeral, it was a couple of months before my fourth birthday. The coverage of the event was overwhelming. Through his death, his life took hold of my imagination and my dreams. Churchill, although not a theoretically refined man, recognised evil, and committed his life to confronting it, as have few others in our century. From his example I acquired, rather early on, a life-shaping conviction that politics is a deeply purposeful undertaking, that if not done well, the blood of millions, and freedom of hundreds of millions, can be all too easily lost. To tremble with joy, in 1989, at the fall of Churchill’s so-called “Iron Curtain”, was to remember afresh the real business of life.
Well, it would be nice to say that I decided, that very same Toronto morning, to clear out bag and baggage and head off to Prague; but, that just didn’t happen. The decision would not come for another nine months, with what I call the “Four Fateful Nights of August”! I ought not to jump ahead in the story, however, for en route there was a “process” that I had to work through. I approached it all very rationally.
“To varying degrees, all of us have trouble living with uncertainty, and we close ourselves off to it. We tend to fasten on to concrete things, to invest them with more reality than they can bear, making idols of them.”
I had known for some time that I was at a crossroads. Having early in life demonstrated a lack of interest in medicine, other than when I scraped my knees, I had been raised to be a lawyer. In November 1989, as a student in the Bar Admission Course, I was only months away from being called to the bar. Yet, I had long suspected that I would find little fulfilment in legal practice. But what else to do? And how to discover it?
That December, I was helped by reading the novel, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” by Milan Kundera, a Czech exile. At the back of the book was transcribed a conversation between Kundera and the author Philip Roth. From that conversation, and the preceding novel, I took this: If there is to be civilisation, there must be civic memory and civic laughter. That laughter might be of two kinds: one, the stinging, deflating, lampooning wit, which typifies editorial cartoons, and which lays low the great; and another, the quietly self-deprecating, humbling, and yet elevating laughter that comes with learning and letting go. We need both, but the more important, the more foundational for civilisation, is clearly the latter. As these authors would have it, we in the technological and ideological age have taken ourselves too seriously, and we have neglected to take seriously enough those who have come before us. Without civic memory, we have lost important references which would make it easier for us to laugh at ourselves. The result has been a terribly bloody century.
How best to cultivate memory and engender the better form of laughter? I suspected that being a lawyer might not suffice. There is no question that the law, and especially the common law, bears within it civic memory, in fact, marvellously so! Nevertheless, I found something essential missing when I looked at the realm of constitutional law, wherein we seek to enshrine those things about which we care most, through devices such as human rights. To only a very limited extent may we stand up in court and argue about life’s fundamentals. Courts must, for the sake of action, and in fact very serious action, pretend that those fundamentals are rather unquestionable, and undebatable; but, outside the courtroom, we know otherwise.
I reflected upon a conversation which I had had, in 1987, with my oldest nephew when he was six. It was a three-hour conversation that began with a simple question: “What is that man wearing on his head?” A crown. “Why is he wearing it?” He is the King. “How does one get to be King?” It’s like this….. “How did we get the first King?” Well, that’s a bit more difficult to answer; but….. We proceeded to work through many of the basic concepts and historical developments of our Anglo-American political tradition. I answered Jonathan’s questions, he paraphrased the answer, and he then asked a question arising from that answer. In the end, Jonathan fell asleep, probably having retained nothing. For me, however, the experience was a great gift.
It is a challenge to help a child see the mystery and magic of human relationships. It is one thing to be enchanted by physical phenomena, such as lightning and stars, but it is something else to see the mystery of 300 people coming together in one room in Ottawa, to negotiate how thirty million people will share their toys. I discovered that, in every attempt to explain, I was not only drawn to the level of concrete example, but also to an awareness of a kind of mystical reality underlying the words we use as symbols to organise our world. In speaking of ideas such as justice and love we always come up short; and yet, these ideas do have a reality to them that we experience. I became aware, for the first time, that our great challenge is to maintain in our daily life, and forms of social organisation, an awareness of the tension between the spiritual experiences which we have, which make everything meaningful, and the ways that we try to talk about, and act upon, those experiences. I became aware, as well, that I needed to study the writings of Eric Voegelin, whom I knew had wrestled with this. I spent my last year of law school doing little more than reading and writing about his work.
Voegelin helped me to penetrate ideas. For the first time, I examined structures in thought by looking carefully at their boundary definitions, assumptions, and symbolic creations to see what spiritual experience might have motivated their creation. Why were they using these particular devices to foreclose questioning? I began to see that when we look at ideas as spiritual creations, we can begin to speak about politics meaningfully. I believe that there are at root two spiritual dispositions — openness or closedness, towards an ultimately unfathomable transcendent reality. Openness, meaning full acceptance of the mystery, and the radical otherness of transcendence, is something that no human being can maintain at all times. To varying degrees, all of us have trouble living with uncertainty, and we close ourselves off to it. We tend to fasten on to concrete things, to invest them with more reality than they can bear, making idols of them. Voegelin called this ever-present human tendency “the flight from uncertain reality to certain unreality.” I call it exchanging mystery for mastery. The job of a political thinker, in this light, is to catalogue political phenomena according to the objects of our attachment, such as individual liberty, social equality, the human will, or custom and convention. Words such as liberalism, socialism, fascism and conservatism can thus be used somewhat reliably, across history, to identify particular manifestations of spiritual illness. If not this, then we are left to call Ronald Regan and Leonid Brezhnev conservatives, which strains common sense.
“Eight months later came the ‘Four Fateful Nights of August’.”
With this in mind, I decided that my turn away from the practice of law would have to be toward forms of service based on something other than argumentation, something (although I knew not what) which would allow me to learn about, and work towards, political change at a spiritual level; and I also adopted two other criteria to govern my search. First, I would live abroad, in one location, probably in Europe, for at least five years. I wanted to see Canada, and myself as a Canadian, more clearly, from a distance. I also did not want to be a voyeur, merely hopping from one place to another, not immersing myself in the difficulties of living in an alien culture. Second, I would develop a greater facility with languages, including English. My writing had plateaued. To go further, I would finally have to learn something about English grammar, and no better way to do that than to learn another language, as I was finding in the Russian class which I was auditing.
“How can life-long habits and dispositions be formed that will enable people to become ever-questioning, ever-contributing members of a vital community?”
Eight months later came the “Four Fateful Nights of August”. I had been doing freelance legal research to pay the bills, and I had begun thinking about the non-profit sector as a place for service, but I still did not know what to do, where to go, or which language to learn. The choices were infinite! Then, for four nights in a row, surfacing from restless sleep, in a semi-conscious state, it was powerfully clear to me: I had to go to Prague. I can see now that a lot of small things in life had led me to consider Prague as the answer; although, in the light of day, the thought had never entered my head. And, when the answer came, at night, I resisted it with everything I had. The problem was that I was afraid of going. I had never been to Europe (England does not count!), and I had never seen so much as a picture of Prague. I had no idea that it is a strikingly beautiful city: I only knew that I had to go there, for a minimum of five years. I was afraid of the isolation I would experience there, and of the isolation I would experience upon my return — that I would somehow fall off of life’s prescribed path, never to get back on. On the fourth night, the confrontation became clear: it was not so much a choice between Prague or Toronto, as between following my dreams or living in fear. I understood that if I did not start to live out my dreams now, then I would hate myself when I would be older, and the face which I would see in the mirror, when I would be sixty, would be a hateful face. From the deepest level of my consciousness came a cry, asking to be cleansed of my fears, and to be enabled to simply follow; and from that level came a surrender, deeper than rational assent can bring. I would go. Whether I would keep going would be decided on other days; but, at least, I would start then and there. A seemingly physical transformation came over me, a kind of surge of energy moving from my head, down through my body, and I seemed to virtually float off of the bed. I dropped into a sleep unlike any other that I can remember, a sleep of absolute peace. The next morning I awoke and said to myself: “So, I am going to Prague for five years; I wonder what I will do.”
Whatever I was to do in Prague, I assumed it would take time and experimentation to discover, and it certainly has. Today, I am leading an effort of my own devising, known as the Phronesis Applied Ethics Centre, a Czech non-profit organisation, which has been eight years in the making. It is not my purpose to say very much about it, only to introduce it. With the Centre, I am attempting to wrestle with the age-old question of how a society inculcates virtue in its citizens, or of how they acquire “practical wisdom”, which the Classical Greeks knew by the term phronesis. How can educators touch the inner core, or the spiritual level, of students? How can life-long habits and dispositions be formed that will enable people to become ever-questioning, ever-contributing members of a vital community?
The Centre’s response to this challenge is to introduce the “great books” approach to learning to this country, in partnership with accomplished non-profit organisations in the United States. This approach involves two things: the reading of artfully written texts, dealing with matters of enduring importance; and the discussion of those texts, among small groups of people, led only by questions focussed on interpretation. Participants may be small children learning to read with folk tales, or college students, or adults continuing their education with great works of literature, science, theology or philosophy. Regardless of age and level, the processes and the goals are the same — that people should be given the opportunity to engage in life’s great discussion, and to grow, throughout life, in so doing.
“... the wine is pretty good here. I hope that I will have the pleasure of sharing some with you, sometime, in Prague.”
In 1998, the President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, pledged his support in principle to the Centre’s plan, that it would, together with its partner organisations, make Prague Castle into a learning centre for people of all ages. Prague Castle, as it now stands, is the seat of the Presidency, and a major tourist destination. Our appeal to the President was that his quasi-monarchical office, in the context of the Westminster-based parliamentary model which the Czechs have adopted, is somewhat above politics. An essential aspect of the office, in the Czech context, is to ask questions that others in politics are not in a position to ask, or are simply not comfortable asking. As such, promoting, and giving a home to, the great books form of education, would be an efficacious means of fulfilling one of his most important roles, as President. It would enable him to put a questioning, participative approach to education at the heart of the Czech State. My work now is to bring all the organisations, including the President’s Office, together in negotiations, which would determine exactly what is concretely possible, and how and when it will be achieved.
I would like to be able to say that in this work I have found fulfilment, and to some extent I have; but, the political aspect of me strains to be let loose, to enjoin in actual battle, and not to sit quietly by awaiting a day that a more inquisitive, more responsible generation might take the field. There is so much that is rotten in this post-communist country, more corruption than a North American can even imagine, that it is terribly difficult to stand by, silent. Quite mercifully, for my mental health, I have found some comfort in behind-the-scenes political work. I act as an occasional speech writer and advisor to one of the Centre’s Board Members, who is a politician. Nevertheless, I would love to be writing in the papers, at a minimum; but, the roles of reformer and critic are not easily reconciled. To speak forcefully, publicly, could jeopardise the Centre.
Well, you might ask: Have I learned anything about being Canadian, while living abroad? Being Canadian is a state of mind. It is, above all, an attitude toward existence. Europeans, in creating the “New Europe” might speak similarly; but, whatever else there may be to being European, it is at a certain level a matter of bloodlines. One is either born with Czech blood, or one is not. No matter how long I live in this country, I will never be Czech, never belong, and never be truly effective. A Czech, by contrast, might share the state of mind of Canadians, and might lead a very effective life in Canada. But, how can we speak about or describe this state of mind? Being American is also a state of mind. I suppose that we could make some advance in understanding by contrasting ourselves with the Americans. But, I do not believe that we need to, or ought to, see it thus. There is more to being a Canadian than not being like someone else. We ought, rather, to talk about ourselves with reference to the eternal, inexplicable things. It is possible, I believe, to speak about being Canadian as a particular kind of spiritual illness; although, decidedly, the best kind! It follows that we ought to care for our country, or for its state of mind, by looking at it as a spiritual concern, above all else.
It would also be helpful, I believe, to examine very carefully the cultural origins of the peoples who came to Canada in its early years, and of the institutions which they brought with them, and re-shaped, on Canadian soil. To that end, in addition to studying about the western tradition in general, I am doing what I can to acquire an intimate feel for the histories and lands of the peoples living alongside the English Channel. All of my travel within Europe, in recent years, has been directed toward that purpose.
Will I ever return to Canada to live? I believe that it is inevitable. I have already been living for a long time at too low a level of effectiveness. One ought not to spend one’s whole life in such a way. Some people, such as exiles, are forced to do so, and they manage; but, I am no exile. My real work in life, and in fact my greatest passion, touches upon Canadian political culture, and I cannot stand outside of that forever. I do not know when I will go home, but I imagine that the decision will be of the same nature as the one that brought me here. In the meantime, there is much to do and even more to study.
And, besides, the wine is pretty good here. I hope that I will have the pleasure of sharing some with you, sometime, in Prague.