It was obvious to the signatories and friends of the Charter that the initiative was an act of courage. Courage is a key source of citizens’ power to act in the world, the necessary and indispensable propolis of citizenship, and it is therefore unsurprising — given the stresses and strains of acting under great pressure — that the meaning of courage and whether and under what conditions it could be sustained under duress quickly became a topic for debate within Chartist circles. It was the doing of one of its first signatories, the moustached, black-rim-spectacled writer Ludvík Vaculík — the author of the famous ‘2,000 Words’ manifesto that called for faster and more comprehensive de-Stalinization at the height of the Prague Spring — who used a three-page feuilleton publicly to pick a fight with the Charter’s basic principle of non-violent, open resistance against a regime that was systematically violating its own constitutional precepts.238
Vaculík began without mincing words. ‘I sometimes wonder whether I’m mature enough for prison. It frightens me,’ wrote the man who, together with Havel and others, was almost sent to prison in 1969 for writing the ‘Ten Point Manifesto’. He admitted that he may be an unusually weak and fearful character, but insisted that everybody who is confronted with possible imprisonment because of their moral commitment has the duty to reflect on whether that price to pay is too high. The presumption that prison is always worth risking is peacockery, he argued, for taking a ‘courageous’ stand against the politically powerful is not always effective, and sometimes foolish. It is very often full of contradictions. For instance, risking prison drags friends, family and other contacts into the same magnetic field of force, regardless of whether they want to take the risk. Courage is not a trusted friend of freedom; it may even be the latter’s enemy, as for example ‘when someone provokes someone else to do something which they are then unable to retract without loss of pride, prestige or authority’. Vaculík also tried gallantly to stick up for the silent majority of non-Chartists by defending their so-called apathy. He did so by highlighting the well-known problem, facing everyone who was actually or potentially in contact with Charter 77, that those who watch others take risks easily see that the whole business of activism is so physically and emotionally exhausting that they — sanely — avoid it. The so-called uncourageous individual in fact acts cautiously and prudently by shunning so-called heroism and asking: Is it worth going through with it to the death? and looks for a way to retreat. The reason is clear. ‘No psychologist or politician would expect heroism in public life from people except when the atmosphere is literally ionized by radiation from some powerful source. Heroism is alien to daily life.’ That is why most of the population ‘can less and less see anything in the even more heroic deeds of the declining number of warriors other than a personal hobby’. The encouraging fact, he warned, is that most people ‘are well aware of their own limits and only do things whose consequences they are ready to take. Anyone who urges people when times are rough to do things beyond their capacity shouldn’t be surprised if they get clobbered.’ Here, down-to-earth Vaculík began to sound like the good soldier Švejk. Normal people living in unexceptional circumstances wisely ‘stick to their good habits and virtues; they have irreducible standards and will stop them from being degraded. They don’t like it when they see someone defiantly taking great risks, but like to say that honest work in peace is best, even if it isn’t particularly well rewarded, and that decent behaviour will find a decent response’.
It also has to be said, continued Vaculík, that there are times when the sentenced are publicly forgotten before the sentence is ended, in which case taking a moral stand and flirting thereby with prison turns out to be a sad swan song. Vaculík charged the unofficial campaign, led by Jiří Müller and others, to boycott the 1972 elections with this weakness. He went on to insinuate that the Charter may well turn out to be performing a similar kind of swan song. ‘Nobody can give a convincing answer to the question of whether Charter 77 has made things better or worse or what things would look like if it had not happened. In the answers we get,’ he taunted, ‘moral impulses seem to be out of step with political opinions, and the strongest positions arise from character rather than intellectual orientation.’ And there is one final point, Vaculík wrote. Chartists should be honest enough to admit — or mature enough to recognize — that acting with ‘courage’ and ending up in prison can have long-term destructive effects upon the individual’s character. Courage, he concluded, is a term best applied to those who manage to survive prison and especially the painful period of self-destructive post-prison blues that inevitably follows.
So, people outside should be careful and not get themselves locked up. They should even be courageous enough to say no to so-called courage. They should be bold enough to ask the questions forbidden in Chartist circles: Are Chartists really heroes whose convictions have unfortunately landed them in prison? Are Chartists better described as fools who are taking risks for things that are not worth taking risks for? Or even as agents provocateurs of a regime that ‘does not want to give publicity to any heroes’ and is probably disposed to administer ‘measured doses of repression’?
Vaculík is not a writer of common sense and conventional taste, a man without originality and political courage. He acts the part of a curmudgeon and in fact later willingly confessed his awareness that his own argument was intentionally trapped in a literary contradiction.239 His ‘Notes on Courage’ was a courageous warning about the potential folly of courage but, like Goedel’s maxim that not even mathematics can save itself from the quagmire of inconsistency, Vaculík’s inconsistent argument had a stimulating effect upon its readers. Written in spare, angular prose, it was driven by the conviction that its tongue-in-cheek claims would shock and outrage quite a few Chartists, who understood him to be saying, or implying, that Charter 77 ought to cease all its activities forthwith — that it was time to quit the make-believe game of constructing what Václav Benda, a fellow Chartist, called a parallel polis. ‘Notes on Courage’ was vintage Vaculík: an overstated act of lyric Verfremdung from an old cuss intent on prodding and poking and rolling over on to its back the taken-for-granted principle of courage, for the ultimate purpose of highlighting the need to make judgements about the meaning and utility — and limits — of courage. The emphasis on judgement explains why Vaculík never assumed that his was the last word on the subject of courage, and why, under trying circumstances, he was calling in effect for more reflection and discussion of the topic. And doing so in the manner of a writer who assigns a special role to irony in an age inclined to over-seriousness.
There was certainly plenty of room for contesting Vaculík’s unfashionable claims, as many Charter supporters and signatories, including Havel himself, saw quickly. Vaculík reported that ‘Remarks on Courage’ caused a stir. At first, he told others that ‘everyone agreed with my piece and some even congratulated me on it’, but his tune changed when the first criticisms reached his ears. Many others followed. Someone said that Vaculík had become demoralized. Others said that his piece relied upon the same base journalistic techniques used by Rudé právo against the Charter. A friend took a copy away to read, fell silent, then one day said: ‘Listen, chum, some people have got serious reservations about it and quite rightly, too!’ Others reported that the StB was probably monitoring the quarrels — and rubbing their hands together as they waited for the spoils. Vaculík was unrepentant. He made it known that since Chartists had defined themselves as free people by signing the Charter they should act freely — which included freely expressing their views, regardless of whether or not that pleased the secret police. As for the insinuation that he was acting as an unpaid agent of the secret police, that was worthy only of satire. ‘Apparently I should not have spoken about heroes,’ he said, ‘but gone right ahead and said “a handful of self-appointed has-beens”, and the sensible, normal people I spoke of are no more than the “honest working people led by the Party”. And when I advocate “courageous honest work”, what is it but the “honest co-operation” required by the state and the police... ?’
Others were unsatisfied, and some took umbrage. Havel was among the irritated. He wasted no time drafting a reply to Vaculík’s leading question: Is anything the Charter has embarked upon worth going to prison for, perhaps for several years or more? The tone of his answers was impatient, and tough. He began by attacking Vaculík’s suggestion that so-called dissidents are out to get something by cunning, as if they were potential shoplifters in an Eastern supermarket, rationally weighing up their chances of getting caught, of being punished, or of being left alone.
According to Havel, the luxury of calculating whether being arrested and punished is worth the risk was denied to Chartists. True, they could legitimately minimize such risk by dropping out of the parallel polis, although even then they would not necessarily be rescued from the ‘silent and unspectacular degradation’ inflicted by the post-totalitarian regime upon ‘thousands of anonymous people’. True, the act of signing the Charter was dangerous, inasmuch as it brought the individual into the front line of police activity against all ‘enemies’ of ‘socialism’. From that moment on, there was a marked increase in the chances of that individual being followed, threatened, beaten, imprisoned, or forced into exile with nightmares in their head. But Vaculík’s call for individual dissenters to weigh up their acts in terms of their consequences, especially the probability of imprisonment, was utterly misleading, Havel insisted. It amounted to the view that ‘nothing is worth it’.
Chartists who chose to remain Chartists indeed put themselves on the path leading toward confrontation with the regime. But as the fate of the Plastic People of the Universe revealed, whether or not they were arrested or punished was not necessarily correlated directly with their intended doings. ‘The people whom you call heroes, and suggest are eccentric,’ wrote Havel, ‘did not go to prison out of a desire to become martyrs but because of the “indecency” of those who go around imprisoning people for writing novels or playing tapes of unofficial songs.’ The indecency of the political authorities had something of a random — terroristic — quality to it, Havel went on to argue. ‘People who are decent and do not go to jail are lucky.’ Consider the different fates of Vaculík’s The Guinea Pigs (1970), which landed the author in no immediate trouble, and the award of a handsome prison sentence to Jiří Gruša for writing The Questionnaire (1975). ‘You know as well as anyone,’ Havel said, ‘that the decision as to whether to imprison Gruša or Vaculík has nothing to do with who weighed up the risks most accurately, but is the result of cold and cynical calculation. At one time it might be better tactics to imprison Gruša and attempt in this way to intimidate Vaculík, at another it might be cleverer to imprison Vaculík and try in this way to intimidate Gruša.’
Havel’s point was double-barrelled. Under post-totalitarian conditions, the question of whether or not to act with courage as a citizen could and should never be decided by calculations about the risks of imprisonment. Some things, as Jan Patočka had said repeatedly, were worth struggling and suffering for. But more importantly: courage itself is not subject to calculation. If the courage to act against unfreedom is boiled down to mere calculations of risk, then courage ceases to be courage. In effect, Havel charged Vaculík with misrepresenting courage — and, inadvertently, of calling upon citizens to lay down their arms, not to behave heroically, and to stay out of jail. ‘To be a hero is to be unsociable,’ wrote Havel in unusually sarcastic sentences: ‘It is something other than that good honest work which decent people like so much and which keeps society going; it repels and appals people. In any case, heroes are dangerous because they make things worse. It is true that the people up there are well behaved when one treats them decently. Why provoke them with novels, music, or sending books abroad? Such things force these nice people to beat up women and drag our comrades into dark woods and kick them in the stomach. We must respect their prestige and not go around provocatively waving a wad of International Agreements or even insolently making copies of various writings by Černý, Vaculík, Havel, etc’
Havel’s mood was defiant. It was as if he had decided that the act of writing about courage needed to display courage, beginning with the elementary point that courage (from the Latin, cor, heart) is always ultimately a matter of a prior felt commitment to embark upon a certain course of action within a field of power. ‘We never decided that we would go to jail,’ he wrote. ‘In fact, we never decided to become dissidents. We have been transformed into them, without quite knowing how, and sometimes we have ended up in prison without precisely knowing how. We simply went ahead and did certain things that we felt we ought to do, and that seemed to us decent to do, nothing more nor less.’ Havel in effect insisted that, especially under difficult circumstances — war, repression, unemployment, murder, theft — this feeling of courage is a basic precondition of the individual’s ability to act upon the world. Courage is the felt will not to be afraid of acting against considerable odds. Fear is its key enemy. Fear eats up the souls of citizens. It destroys courage by corrupting and weakening those who try to act upon the world, turning them into faint-hearted subjects. Havel grasped the converse of this rule: since fearlessness is not a naturally occurring substance, a personal effort must be made to shake it off. Fearlessness is the special ingredient of courage. It is the will to act gracefully under pressure that develops wherever victims of manipulation, lying and bullying make a personal effort to throw off the habit of letting fear dictate their actions as citizens.
Havel’s tactic involved turning Vaculík against Vaculík. The agreed point that nobody wants to go to jail because imprisonment is frightening implied the need of citizens to demonstrate their fearlessness by exercising their courage against those who jail others illegally, against their will. Havel openly acknowledged that he could well understand the flagging enthusiasm of Chartist advocates of human and civil rights. ‘Everyone has the right, when they have had enough, to retreat into the background, to stop doing certain things, to take a rest or even emigrate. This is entirely understandable, normal and human, and I would be the last to resent it,’ he wrote. But to understand why activists withdraw from the parallel polis, to appreciate why they use their legs instead of courage, must not slide into sordid broadsides against the principle of courage. Figures such as Vaculík actually know better than to do that. ‘I do resent it,’ he said, sharply, ‘when such people do not tell the truth, and on this occasion — don’t get angry — you are not telling the truth.’
The sentiments Havel expressed sounded almost classical. After the high Roman fashion, perhaps without knowing it, he was repeating the maxims that the philosophers, playwrights and poets of ancient Greece and Rome had long ago insisted were vital preconditions of citizenship.240 Under entirely different political circumstances, and using different words, Havel was saying to Vaculík that courage is generosity of the highest order, for the brave are prodigal of the most precious things. Courage is to be preferred to grovelling, love of riches, greed, violence, or selfish calculation. Courage shuns baseness. It avoids stupidity and irrationality. It is unselfish and unheroic. True courage does not require witnesses, even when it leavens actions destined for the public or world stage. Courage never leaves the world untouched. It transforms the individual citizen. Courage scorns death by reaching for the stars. It can even break the grip of bad luck. Courage takes the knocks, buoys the spirits, puts a new face on everything, and even gives physical strength to the body. Courage in distress can stop armies from marching to success. Courage is that virtue which champions the cause of right. It loves mercy. It delights in rescuing others. It encourages others. Courage breeds courage. But courage is also modest. Courage in conflict is half the battle, but only half. It senses the dangers of pig-headedness and knows that victory is never guaranteed, that defeat is a companion of courage. The greatest test of courage is to suffer defeat without giving up. ‘Some of us have passed the last two years, others ten years, and still others their whole life in a tough and depressing confrontation with the secret police,’ confessed Havel. ‘Nobody enjoys it. None of us know how long we can keep it up.’ He took it as read that courageous are those who neither seek popular applause nor under pressure desert their cause. The remaining question for him personally was whether or not he could screw his courage to the sticking-place — without buckling under the weight of suspicion, surveillance, and further threats of arrest and imprisonment.