Havel - On Evasive Thinking

It's an election year in the United States, and a particularly bizarre and discouraging one.  I'm looking forward to reading Havel again if only to clarify my own muddled thinking about politics.  My first encounter with the writings of Havel the dissident fell into my life like a lightning bolt.  I'm looking back now across the chasm of a decade and a half and wondering to myself what I found so relevant in the writings of a man fighting totalitarianism.  Who was that man who embraced Havel so enthusiastically and what do I still have in common with him?

The speech, On Evasive Thinking, was given in 1965 and published in 1968 during the short lived Prague Spring, when Alexander Dubcek attempted a liberalization of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia.  Think of it as an early attempt at "glasnost."

I find in this speech a certain mistrust of political rhetoric and labels that resonates with my own distrusts.  We label a thing - socialist, conservative, reactionary, progressive, we throw it onto a particular spectrum of interpretations and lump it together with a lot of other things with which it may or may not have much in common and we feel we have now somehow "dealt with it."  The problem with political rhetoric is it deals with broad generalities and ignores the very specific incidents and situations we confront.  In Havel's words-

"The praiseworthy attempt to see things in their broader context becomes so formalized that instead of applying that technique in particular, unique ways, appropriate to a given reality, it becomes a single and widely used model of thinking with a special capacity to dissolve - in the vagueness of all the possible wider contexts - everything particular in that reality.  Thus what looks like an attempt to see something in a complex way in fact results in a complex form of blindness.  For if we can't see individual specific things, we can't see anything at all.  And the more we know only what is apparent about reality, the less we know about reality in fact."

I find myself squirming at the ideology of both left and right in politics.  Both are working with a preconceived set of interpretations, a collection of emotionally charged stock phrases and a set of ready made caricatures of their opponents that prevent their holders from actually perceiving concrete problems in their full complexity.