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America’s prayer  Martin
Matuštík 3 - 6 - 2004 |
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When I first heard the Czech singer Marta Kubišová’s song Modlitba pro Martu (“Marta’s Prayer” or “Prayer Made for Marta”), it was just after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. I was almost 12 years old. I awoke from my childish dreams into the world of politics and its conscience. During the next ten years, my conscience was formed by this courageous song, which was banned and yet remained a national rallying cry. I was further impressed by two essays of Václav Havel, Politics and Conscience and The Power of the Powerless, as well as by his Open Letter to Gustav Husák (Husák was the president of “normalised” Czechoslovakia, installed after the Soviet occupation in 1968). Today, after spending half of my life in the United States, I am reminded of Marta’s prayer: “May peace remain with this land; may anger, envy and hatred, fear and strife, pass; may they soon pass, now that the lost governance of your affairs returns to you, oh people... May my prayer speak to the hearts that were not burned by the time of hatred. . . .” Today, I echo Marta’s prayer with another from the shores of North America. I pray that the one-time powerless people of eastern and central Europe wake up from their childish dreams about America, that new voices emerge to meet the needs of the times, to speak truth to arrogant power and help return the country to democratic governance. I pray that the onetime powerless find in themselves a new, cosmopolitan conscience and perhaps write an open letter about human rights to George W. Bush’s politics of the powerful. The former dissidents who challenged the Soviet empire in the name of democracy and human rights have wasted much of their moral credit in support of Donald Rumsfeld’s vision of a so-called “new Europe”. Their voices must now speak from the centre of the enlarged European Union in a new dissent. When the Statue of Liberty balances on an unstable paper box with a sack over its head and with electric wires threatening its naked body, then those who have looked to America for a protectorate of the persecuted have a duty to speak. Instead they have unwittingly lent the United States the moral shield of those who suffered under totalitarian regimes.
No human power, merely political or economic, can protect itself against its own worst impulses. The illusion that even a great democratic land cannot one day lose its heart -just as the nation of Beethoven once lost its heart - is dangerous for the world and too heavy a burden even for the US. The nation of Beethoven has found some protection against itself in the European Union. For the US, a partial transfer of state sovereignty to the democratic checks and balances of the larger human community, if not the United Nations itself, would be equally redemptive for this great modern nation. A culture in denial Greek tragedy punishes human hubris, if not by the laughter of the gods, then by the political and spiritual downfall of its human heroes. Despite the horrors of its civil war, of Hiroshima and Vietnam, the US continues to lack consciousness of its own tragedy. True, American culture evinces a tragic corrective to power among its great writers and in the poetry and music of the descendants of slaves. But the culture as a whole is unable and thus unwilling to admit its own moral, indeed, political and human, defeat.
The torture of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib is thus explained away as something “un-American” and marginal – never something that could have sprung up from the heart. In self-denial, US culture continues to careen between its fear of terror and its messianic war against terror. The difficulty with lending moral credit to buttress this naïveté is that, with this persisting blind spot, America’s democratic “mission” to the world is increasingly dangerous. But Europe’s lazy irresponsibility - in having someone else do the dirty work for it – is inexcusable and a surrender of responsibility. Perhaps all this gives free reign to the worst in unchecked power. The naive faith in the superpower, now flipping to anti-Americanism, becomes the beam in the eyes of the powerless who loaded the superpower with too godly a task. It is time to awake America’s Sleeping Beauty from her self-deception about her own immaculate conception and her providential mission to save the world.
The mask of tragedy In May, I watched the world ice hockey match between the United States and the Czechs on two giant TV screens displayed on Old Town Square in Prague. I asked myself whether the chanting - “who does not jump is not Czech!” - is the peak expression of the Czech contribution to the European Union and the world. The Czech and Slovak hockey teams, two nations joined again within the EU, played great matches against the US and Canada. I wished victory more to them than to the teams of the continent where I live. The unequal sporting encounter raised anew in me the old question: what does it mean to be a Czech? This is the question of the “powerless.” It was raised by Czech giants of humanity, from Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius) to Jan Hus, from Tomáš G. Masaryk to Jan Palach and Jan Patoćka. In their lineage we also find Havel’s power of the powerless - a power which acts as a corrective to the hubris of the powerful.
The difference between America and Europe does not consist in the goodness of the one and the evil nature of the other. We cannot measure nations or cultures by the principle of collective guilt or innocence. In this sense, populist anti-Americanism, nationalism, fundamentalism, and the idea of an “axis of evil” belong to the same species of political and moral primitivism. All narratives about national innocence are supremely dangerous. America’s prayer should be that its great democratic culture begin to examine its national conscience more deeply, rather than longing for self-justifying purity. North America’s self-torture, pivoting between the saviour complex of the first Puritans and the Vietnam trauma, is desperately willing to believe its own unsoiled whiteness (and the racial resonance is not accidental). This usurpation of innocence is dangerous because sustaining the lie takes great effort, extracts a heavy cost, and involves a tragic break in the national conscience. The fatal temptation would be to deny this current US tragedy and choose, in November, a president who will try to win by masking it with appeals to the heroism of the American people. The barbarism of innocence Whenever I teach my students the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, the freed African-American slave who later became an ambassador to Haiti, I encounter great difficulty in explaining why Christian slave-owners were the most merciless of all. The dominant tendency of American common sense is to make us think that good, moral, upright Christian whites could not commit evil. Yet we should never forget that both slavery and the gratuitous torture and lynching of slaves were once not marginal misdeeds of the few but belonged at the centre of American life.
Why does Douglass say that the religious slave-owners were the most cruel in lashing, beating, and killing the “subhuman” slaves? Why did Douglass himself tremble when he was sold to a Christian family? Why did he object to America’s slave-holding Christendom as forcefully as Søren Kierkegaard and Nietzsche agitated against European Christendom? A deeply religious man, Douglass was as profoundly shocked as were his European counterparts by the death of God among Christians. Douglass’s slave narrative is one explanation of today’s North American cruelty, as it describes the cruelty of a regime that traces its moral and political values to the Bible but exports an apocalyptic fire and horror. In the slave-owners’ misguided belief in their own innocence - a belief in their superior moral and political destiny - Douglass found the source of their barbarism. This belief leads colonial white America to whiten its soul with every swipe at the black skin. The need to believe in one’s own innocence and the dissociated fear that it could be otherwise can inspire both intense aesthetic enchantment with the torturing of Jesus and cruel comportment towards those we are permitted to torture in order to preserve our high civilisation. Herein lies America’s self-deception: America the Beautiful is that “innocent” religious adherent who, believing in his or her own innocence and mission, tortured in order to clean the Earth of all evil - as if to proclaim that “torture in the service of liberty is no vice”, as if with one hand to appeal to God and with the other to administer “shock and awe” bombing in a dubiously legal and almost permanent war.
Known to Douglass but lost on most contemporary Americans is the danger of an even greater evil: what Kierkegaard called the human capacity for acting “diabolically.” The “diabolical” is anyone who wills oneself to be good without having confronted one’s capacity for evil. Such a person must cling fast to false innocence because this person despairs over the question whether he or she truly is innocent. The politically “diabolical” is any regime that in despair wills its false innocence. The desire to be the innocent source of one’s power - a phenomenon we can call the despair of America - can be confronted, says Kierkegaard, by the breakdown of the false ego and its attachment to power. This is the site of a key difference between Europe and the United States – not that Europe is somehow “better”, but that it lost belief in its own innocence in Auschwitz, in the Gulags, in Rwanda. Europe knows on its own skin that it is possible to sing Schiller’s / Beethoven’s Ode to Joy on the way to the gas chamber. Europe knows that when it intones its European Union anthem in hope that it will “become” the Europe it is in that ode, it will not save itself from the possibility of committing new evil. It lacks, therefore, the dangerously naive conscience that would suspend the Geneva Conventions for captured prisoners and then protest its presumption of innocence before its people and the world community.
If there is any political parallel to Kierkegaard’s cure for the despair and hubris of the human illusion of omnipotence, then it lies in a salutary loss of state sovereignty. One such loss underwrites the European Union; the other would be a cosmopolitan law. Why, then, not venture to sing Marta Kubišová’s song as America’s prayer, so that people may find the courage to give up the grand narrative of innocence? Americans are scared. People lash out the more scared they become; they run and hide from their possible loss of innocence. America’s true prayer would petition for the courage to live in truth. This wish that America find its proper prayer should allow Europe to perceive America not as a failed saviour of democracy, but rather as its own child maturing into a due sense of tragedy. A tragic sense first grows from a post-secular meditation on one’s own capacity to commit every evil in the name of great political, moral, and religious values. Through that prayer one can win a new cosmopolitan conscience. At its summit, the cosmopolitan conscience born of the tragic sense shared by the human race could grant to the reformed Security Council of the UN a universal legitimacy – one that allows humanity then to sing Ode to Joy only while admitting its own ability to commit evil. In this meditative admission the cosmopolitan conscience is born and comes to fruition. This prayer and conscience could bind us all together in a single cosmopolitan constitutionalism across our secularisms, patriotisms, and religious visions of liberation. Therein also could lie the sole truthful apology of the United States for Abu Ghraib.
From torture
to forgiveness
We have neither a theory nor a politics for getting us from loss to the recovery of hope. It is obvious that both are too weak to deal with atrocity and its accompanying loss of a sense of humanity. We understand this loss only with the aid of poetry - such as Marta’s song, Beethoven’s symphonies, Schiller’s Ode. That is why a path from the sacrilege of torture to forgiveness must be a prayer offered by the one who admits that one’s land is guilty of something unforgivable. Perhaps a post-secular prayer and cosmopolitan conscience of this kind might guard against the fear that - by proclaiming one or other godly or godless name from a church, mosque, synagogue or political pulpit - one could affirm once again the path of power. Perhaps by so praying and thinking, one might guard against unwittingly offering a shield to those following this path, a shield itself armoured with the moral credit accrued through one’s own former suffering. Perhaps by so praying and thinking, one might guard against marching under the banner of the good for yet another holy war.
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