Vaclav Havel on the Emerging Global "Atheist Civilisation".

At Forum 2000 in Prague the ex-President of the Czech republic and leading dissident under Communism, Vaclav Havel, has criticised what he terms the world's first atheistic civilisation. Havel stated in a speech,

"Years ago when I used to drive by car from Prague to our country cottage in Eastern Bohemia, the journey from the city centre to the signboard that marked the city limits took about fifteen minutes. Then came meadows, forests, fields and villages. These days the selfsame journey takes a good forty minutes or more, and it is impossible to know whether I have left the city or not.

What was until recently clearly recognisable as the city is now losing its boundaries and with them its identity. It has become a huge overgrown ring of something I can’t find a word for. It is not a city as I understand the term, nor suburbs, let alone a village. Apart from anything else it lacks streets or squares. There is just a random scattering of enormous single-storey warehouses, supermarkets, hypermarkets, car and furniture marts, petrol stations, eateries, gigantic car parks, isolated high-rise blocks to be let as offices, depots of every kind, and collections of family homes that are admittedly close together but are otherwise desperately remote.

And in between all that – and this is something that bothers me most of all – are large tracts of land that aren’t anything, by which I mean that they’re not meadows, fields, woods, jungle or meaningful human settlement. Here and there, in a space that is so hard to define, one can find an architecturally beautiful or original building, but it is as solitary as the proverbial tomb – it is unconnected with anything else; it is not adjacent to anything or even remote from anything; it simply stands there.

In other words all the time our cities are being permitted without control to destroy the surrounding landscape with its nature, traditional pathways, avenues of trees, villages, mills and meandering streams, and build in their place some sort of gigantic agglomeration that renders life nondescript, disrupts the network of natural human communities, and under the banner of international uniformity it attacks all individuality, identity or heterogeneity. And on the occasions it tries to imitate something local or original, it looks altogether suspect, because it is obviously a purpose-built fake. There is emerging a new type of a previously described existential phenomenon: unbounded consumer collectivity engenders a new type of solitude.

There is more to this than merely a dislike of the aesthetic blight that has overtaken the suburbs of Prague no less than other beautiful central European cities being mindlessly blighted by moronic starchitects, tacky new buildings that might as well just exist anywhere and create a sense of disenchantment and alienation.

The same story is as true in Krakow in Poland where rapacious property developers have been throwing up junkish "class" A office blocks in elegant Austro-Hungarian period streets and repellent hotels rammed as close as possible to the Wisla in the vicinity of the Wawel castle such as the trashy and glittering metallic Park Inn.

That in Prague and Krakow such architectural junk has been mercilessly plonked down in such a way as to destroy the deep sense of home is no doubt part of what Roger Scruton calls a "culture of repudiation", a belief in globalised styles that could just as well be anywhere other than where they are and induce a feeling of living in a ubiquitous nowhere land.

Havel has suggested that a sterile materialism which puts the egotistical all consuming self at the centre of things will end up eating away at civilisation from within, to literally consume up and devour Nature, a mere site for the satisfaction of immediate wants and immediate gratification.

This is one consequence of what he calls "the first atheist civilisation" in the sense not that absence of belief in God creates a consumerism as a palliative-the USA remains religious and grossly materialistic-but that the destruction of transcendental values is the result of the collapse of faith.

Havel's ethics comes from Kant and the notion that even if the existence of God cannot be assumed, people should live "as if" there is some higher power within man to choose to do good as opposed to that which despairs of anything beyond the claims of the self to "feel good" by consuming.

To only hold to that view of life is one that both neoliberal consumer capitalism and communism have in common: a crude utilitarian cult of use value that confuses people with things and holds to deterministic economic theories that material reality only determines consciousness.

Havel has some substantial points here. Within Europe the consequences of "me first" mentality has fashioned consumerism almost into the status of a religion. The USA has gone further and commodified religion through mega churches merged into shopping malls.

Faith implies the idea of trust as opposed to mere belief which clings to dogma through fear, something that Havel would see as common to both militant religious sectarianism and totalitarianism. The problem is that Havel's astute vision of consumer society contradict his support for US power and hegemony.

At this level Havel's support for neoconservative foreign policies such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003 effectively support the spread of the cult of consumerism and utility all the more as it was essentially an oil grab designed to keep the US "way of life"-i.e. high octane consumerism-going.

Havel has proved unable to connect the propagation of shock therapy and the moral corruption caused by the IMF's neoliberal creed to the extension and propagation of US power globally. To pretend that the USA was idealistic in recent foreign policy ventures is itself a form of religious belief.

In some ways thinking George Bush II was interested in promoting an ethical foreign policy has something in common with those inter war intellectuals who projected their hopes and ideals on to the USSR under Stalin, a belief that a large power block was bringing Utopia and a desire to be onside with it.

Such neurosis in a time of imminent catastrophe and moral blindness is part of a quest for certainty just as it was after the two world wars in Europe. The oceanic feeling Freud described, the hunger for dissolving the individual self in an irresistible collective wave is as strong today than ever.

If Central European intellectuals such as Havel could see the disturbing continuities between Europe's dark past and the disintegration of civil society under neoliberal capitalism and energy hungry authoritarian power states, then his critique of an "atheist civilisation" would carry more weight.

For in an atomised society "Amusing Itself to Death" through trashy and voyeuristic TV, sado-masochistic talent shows and human rights as materialistic claim to satisfaction and pleasure, there is less and less scepticism of unjustified authority, propaganda soundbites and more desensitisation.

In this way consumerism and a crude cult of utility in which people are seen as mere instrumental means to an end ( e.g the human resources of sinister neoliberal marketspeak ) a new form of totalitarianism could emerge where people rush towards their own servitude when living standards dip.

For without any values other than "me first" and in a world beset by dangers of Islamism, there will be terrifying resource wars in which its either "us" or "them", one which has already started to emerge. Havel has diagnosed symptoms but has not looked too much at causes. This is a great missed opportunity.

Even so Havel was on the right track to assert in the wake of the economic crash of 2008 onwards, one that could still lead on to a double dip recession, that it was the result of material self gratification and greed. Even if economically it has had effects larger than he seems to think.

"I regard the recent crisis as a very small and very inconspicuous call to humility. A small and inconspicuous challenge for us not to take everything automatically for granted. Strange things are happening and will happen. Not to bring oneself to admit it is the path to hell.