If I had to put my finger on when I started waking up to the complexity and nuance of international affairs, it would probably be around the time that I cut this cartoon out from The Age in the midst of the “War on Terror”. The quote is taken from The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s journalistic and first-hand account of the Soviet labour camps where he was imprisoned for 8 years, despite being a decorated World War II commander, for having privately criticised Joseph Stalin.
This plastic-covered newspaper cutting has travelled around the world with me ever since, intended as a constant visual reminder but often left forgotten in a drawer or a box. The widespread demonstrations this past week though compelled me to drag it out again, to take the time to read it, to allow the words to sink in.
Solzhenitsyn’s profound insight born of his suffering and intense self-reflection was that each of us carries both good and evil within us. Both self-interest and altruism. Both openness and protectiveness.
This take on what it means to be human is being increasingly backed up by research in social psychology. But it begs the question: what to do with this information?
Václav Havel, another exceptional dissident turned statesman and one of the great moral leaders in our recent history, wrote in his essay Politics, Morality and Civility while serving as president of Czechoslovakia (and just before he was reelected as president of the Czech Republic):
I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence. […] Goodwill longs to be recognized and cultivated. For it to develop and have an impact it must hear that the world does not ridicule it.
In other words, just as we can change our behaviour by choosing to appeal to the goodwill within ourselves, so can we change how someone else, or even a whole society, behaves by what we choose to appeal to in them, be it their positive intent, their solidarity, their decency. As Havel writes:
If there is to be any chance at all of success, there is only one way to strive for decency, reason, responsibility, sincerity, civility and tolerance, and that is decently, reasonably, responsibly, sincerely, civilly and tolerantly.
He goes on to dispel any criticisms of being a utopian thinker:
Evil will remain with us, no one will ever eliminate human suffering, the political arena will always attract irresponsible and ambitious adventurers and charlatans. And man will not stop destroying the world. […] Neither I nor anyone else will ever win this war once and for all. […] It is an eternal, never-ending struggle [that] takes place inside everyone. It is what makes a person a person, and life, life.
But he affirms resolutely the meaning in the direction in which he has oriented his life’s work:
I have few illusions. But I feel a responsibility to work toward the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.
What are you choosing to appeal to in others?