THE RELEVANCE OF TOLSTOY OR EUROPE AFTER CHERNOBYL

...That is no longer just a crisis of policy...

...To his superiors at the institute, he presents his dealings with Mephisto as a strategic ruse...

...So far, so good...

...He has no soul...

...That seems to be about the only point it did make...

...Today, those two daggers look very much alike...

...It has led it to the no less audacious vision of social justice, the conviction that human poverty and drudgery, long the perennial human condition, can be eliminated by purposive effort...

...However, it is less his conclusion than his analysis of the predicament of modernity that makes the play such a powerful universal metaphor...

...That is why such glimmers of hope as there may be come today from unconventional sources, such as the visibly growing ecological consciousness among the young...

...It soon becomes obvious why Fistula shows no interest in Foustka's soul: Foustka has none worth having...

...He is quite clever, really, at manipulating the world around him yet seems to have lost any vision of what the purpose of it all might be...

...Whatever the risks of nuclear power, we are too committed to ever-growing energy consumption to do without it...

...This, finally, is a society whose vision of the good life, like the 5 American, is still defined in terms of major appliances...

...There is little ambiguity as to what is good and what evil, and little to prepare us for an age in which Prospero's art itself becomes ambiguous...

...The hope is, rather, the unspectacular recognition that humans are not the center of all meaning and the source of all value— and that material consumption is not all that being human is about...

...The "friendship cloud," as the Poles called it, did bring home both the risks and the unreality of frontiers in a nuclear age...

...We must seek peace—but of course we must build ever more powerful weapons...

...I do not know whether we are still capable of it...

...Yet both share a common conviction—that ever increasing material consumption is the ultimate goal and measure of all we do...

...That is the weakness of European socialism today—of democratic socialism no less than of the barracks counterfeit prevailing east of the Elbe...

...Yet what made political programs spectacular in the past was that they invariably offered to humans an even greater pride of place, whether individually or collectively, whether in the service of a nation or a church or, ultimately, of individual greed...

...Having carefully avoided the risk of commitment, Foustka is disowned by both sides, which prove to be the same: Mephisto is an agent provocateur...

...Gretchen, who vowed to go to destruction with him in the name of truth, goes to it alone: Foustka earns a commendation...

...Reason, after all, has been the cornerstone of European civilization through all these millennia— not reason in the trivial modern sense of dispassioned manipulation but in the profound sense of responsible choices in clear understanding...

...Havel remains an idealist, convinced that the cost of commitment can and must be borne...

...Havel's Faust—Dr...

...The ending is as effective as it is unexpected...

...In its provocative lucidity, it seemed just what was needed.—Ens...

...Blocked by protest but pressed by demand, the Austrian government agreed to finance an even more destructive project a bit downriver, on Hungarian territory, the vast loan to be repaid in electricity over the next twenty years...

...In the opening scenes of Temptation, which had its premiere at Vienna's Akademie theater a month after Chernobyl, that seems to be the theme as well...

...That recognition, to be sure, may represent no change in fact but it does represent a significant shift in perception...

...The Soviets and their central European clients are again assuring us that nuclear power plants are perfectly safe, including the one just across the border in Czechoslovakia, perhaps forty miles from Vienna as the cloud drifts...

...Havel shows him at the other end, neither captured by the Prince of Lies nor redeemed by Gretchen's love, just reduced to the banality of a survival to which he has vainly sacrificed the very distinction between a lie and a truth...

...For Havel's Faust, as for our entire civilization, the gratification of individual greed becomes the measure and justification of all his and our doings...

...Once upon a time, we were wont to consider that a hallmark of capitalism, and looked to socialism for a nobler vision...

...Ever since the trauma of the Bolshevik revolution, the socialists have cautiously offered a more equitable distribution of such golden eggs or better conditions in their production, but no grand visions...

...For, given that shared assumption, the answer is obvious: the classic liberal combination of a nonrestrictive government with unrestricted private enterprise offers by far the most effective combination for the most ruthless exploitation of natural resources and ever-mounting individual affluence...

...An agreement signed in Vienna the same weekend, providing Austrian funding for a CzechoslovakHungarian hydroelectric project at Nagymaros, brought home the futility of that earnestness...

...Goethe showed man on the threshold of the modern age, tentatively reaching out for what it seemed to offer...

...In the direct aftermath of the accident, Austria did join in the embargo on Soviet bloc produce, but that expired soon enough...

...More than anything else, that is what increasingly stands out all around us...

...Though the headlines may tell another story, to anyone living in Vienna the most remarkable thing about Europe after Chernobyl is how most remarkably like Europe before Chernobyl it is...

...That, after all, is the dilemma of Havel's Faust...

...Then come the surprises...

...Since the possibilities of protest in the Soviet bloc are somewhat limited, ecology-minded Hungarians appealed to their Austrian counterparts to protest the funding, though in vain...

...He is easy to criticize—the count toiling alongside his peasants but making no attempt to improve their lot, preaching poverty on a fabulous unearned income and nonviolence from the safety of privilege sustained by one of history's more violent regimes...

...It is, rather, a philosophical or perhaps a prephilosophical one, having to do with the way we prereflectively perceive our world and our place in it...

...To the indignant Mephisto, he presents his ploy at the institute as a ruse...

...In Part II, having mastered the forces of science and technology, Goethe's Faust becomes a Prospero, transforming rude nature in the image of reason...

...The Austrians love their woods and Alpine streams, but, like the Americans, they love their energy-guzzling gewgaws no less...

...Given a limitless consumption, there is no alternative to nuclear energy—and given nuclear energy, there is no alternative to disaster...

...Yes, we must save our environment—but of course we must also consume ever more energy...

...So, for all the crucial differences, do the societies that describe themselves as "capitalist" and as "real socialist...

...Lacking that, he falls back on his own well-being as the one measure of success and failure, acting out the modern corruption of the sophist claim adopted by the Renaissance, that "man is the measure of all things...

...The heirs of the Bolsheviks who, a generation ago, paid at least lip service to an alternative vision, have swung into line as well...

...Damned by his contradictory lies that were not even lies, just statements appropriate to this or that situation, Foustka goes up in flames...

...Yet that assumption has led us to a dead end...

...That is the predicament...

...We live in an anthropocentric universe in which not love or justice but individual well-being, reduced to ever increasing material consumption, has become the sole justification for all we do...

...Over it all lies the blanket of consensus: consumerism, ever greater, ever more wasteful, ever more ostentatious individual consumption, is what life is all about...

...Last June, Austrian antinuclear activists carried their protest not only to West Germany, where demonstrations are fun and reasonably free of risk, but to Hungary and even to Czechoslovakia, currently central Europe's most stringently policed state...

...Originally, the Austrians had planned to build their own hydroelectric facility at Hainburg, to make up for the nuclear reactor at Zwettendorf shut down by a popular referendum before it ever produced a single kilowatt...

...We have had our foretaste of the apocalypse and, unless Viennese vegetarians are laying in a stock of dried vegetables, have decided to do nothing about it...

...The prereflective image of reality at the back of our minds, after all, has not been shaped by Shakespeare's bucolic vision of an Elizabethan England but by Goethe's Faust, the product of a much later age when the forces shaping modernity already loomed on the horizon...

...No, THAT IS NOT CYNICISM...

...Though the ecological movement would like to present it as such, the issue is no longer one of a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil...

...In our ambiguous commitment to both ecology and consumerism, we have not sold our soul to the devil...

...It has led it to such audacious visions as that of equality, rejecting slavery, perhaps the most universal of human institutions...

...THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT VACLAV HAVEL, the Czech dissident playwright who has already served over four years in jail for his views, offers us in his retelling of the Faustian legend...

...In recent centuries, though, that reason seems to have done rather better at teaching us how to accomplish our ends than what those ends should be...

...Instead, he offers Foustka his services on the condition that, should it be needed, Foustka would testify that even Mephisto had secretly served the cause of science all along...

...And, for anyone harboring residual illusions, so is Prague: all that remains of the old rhetoric is massive repression...

...So, no less vocally, do the French—and while the Germans are rather less vocal about it, they did dismiss out of hand Austrian protests against the nuclear facility they are building just across the border near Salzburg...

...The Hainburg project would have been such an ecological disaster that, in a spontaneous upheaval rare in this well-disciplined country, thousands of protesters descended on Hainburg and placed their bodies between the bulldozers and the threatened wetlands...

...Foustka is not a man seeking to defend his soul against a deforming lie...

...Faust I presents a vision of modern man on the threshold of modernity, tempted by the forces about to transform the world but, in the best romantic tradition, redeemed by the love of a maiden fair...

...I would only note that Havel's latter-day Faust, incapable of hearing those other voices, goes up in flames...

...Perhaps we need to listen to a different America, that of Thoreau and Emerson, and to a different Russia, that of Tolstoy...

...Though Gorbachev has not revived Khrushchev's slogan about "catching up to and surpassing" the capitalists, his policy is clearly aimed at building not socialism but an authoritarian consumerism...

...Central Europeans have always had a passion for seeing the world in well-defined blacks and whites...

...Mephisto, in Havel's version a limping pensioner named Fistula, shows no interest in Foustka's soul...

...Perhaps the schoolchildren acquiring a new ecological consciousness will some day be capable of what their elders can hardly imagine— substituting, for the vision of man the master, a vision of the peaceable kingdom, a world in which all creation living together in peace and respect constitutes a higher norm and a nobler goal than the gratification of individual greed...

...We need a Faust, Part III, that would present an image of modern man on the far side of modernity...

...Critical reason, willing to challenge both nature and tradition in the name of a moral vision, has been the basis of Europe's greatness...

...7 Today, that distinction has faded...

...A month later, the markets in Vienna overflowed once more with Polish hams, Hungarian poultry and, best of all, those fabulous Bulgarian vegetables...

...We have no soul to sell, having lost it, without even noticing it, in one compromise after another...

...Chernobyl certainly made the point that vegetarianism in Vienna is almost totally dependent on Bulgarian exports...

...Budapest today is little different from Vienna, only a bit shabbier...

...Far more, it is one of the ambiguity of our commitments...

...Since Austria is also a consensus society, the government backed down...

...Yet Tolstoy has something more basic to offer—a vision that displaces humans from the place of privilege they have arrogated ever since 8 God was said to have vacated it...

...Unfortunately, the protest did not change the realities of energy consumption...

...Though his particular images may be as dated and as local as Havel's, his vision is not...

...Granted, that is hardly a spectacular political program...

...As long as we remain convinced, at the deepest level of our minds, that we, individual consumers, are the center and the measure of all that is, and that the world, including our fellow creatures and possibly our fellow humans of certain creeds or races, is no more than a store of raw materials for gratifying our whims, there is no solution...

...If socialism has no nobler vision to offer, only a problematic alternative strategy in the service of the same shabby goal, it can arouse little enthusiasm...

...Some two dozen of them crossed the border with briefcases full of leaflets and, at an appointed hour, began to hand them out in several major cities, as if this were the West...

...He is truly a postmodern man, an upwardly mobile, perennial survivor who sidles up eagerly to anyone who seems to offer an advantage while committing himself to nothing...

...Foustka, an academician employed in a prestigious institute charged with safeguarding the objective purity of the "scientific world view"—secretly dabbles in the occult and turns Gretchen's head with an impassioned confession of a religious perspective...

...yet their gesture, however futile, gave proof of their earnestness...

...It is a truly Faustian crisis, a crisis of reason...

...The differences are tremendous, to be sure: one, committed to individual freedom, preserves the hope of change, the other, committed to regimentation, makes change most unlikely...

...They were, of course, promptly detained and shipped back to Austria...

...Perhaps what we need today is precisely an unspectacular program, one that could help us retreat from the untenable arrogance of anthropocentrism...

...On a flea-market table in Vienna, I saw two military daggers, one inscribed "Meine Ehre heisst Treue," the other "Arbeit adelt," recalling the warring factions, fascist and socialist, of half a century ago...

...Havel has already written a number of successful plays dealing with the dilemma of a person seeking to preserve personal integrity—to "live in truth"—in face of the demands of conformity...

...In that respect, their sole disagreement is whether a market economy or a plan-directed one is likely to produce greater individual consumption...

...Europe and the world after Chernobyl will remain most remarkably like Europe and the world before Chernobyl as long as the assumption that consumption is central to being human remains unchallenged...

...THAT, FINALLY, IS THE RELEVANCE OF TOLSTOY...

...That assumption is deeply rooted in all of us, in those who possess affluence as well as those who merely envy it from afar, and it is reinforced daily by what the Americans boast about and the Soviets wish for...

...The problem is not political or even economic in any conventional sense...

...Accused of religious sympathies at the institute, Foustka denies them vehemently...

...We need to hear a different drummer...

...Havel's imagery is often distinctively central European—an English translator might well want 6 to transform the "scientific institute" into a business corporation—yet the metaphor is universal...

...GIVEN ITS EXPERIENCE WITH COMMUNISM, the European socialist movement has reason to be extremely wary of grand visions...

...Hence the Faustian dilemma—for it is precisely this anthropocentric vision of the universe, combined with a materialist conception of humanity, that has set us on the road to Chernobyl, a road on which only an ecological catastrophe might forestall a nuclear one...

...Socialist and social democratic leaders are anxious to reassure the voters that they do not intend to threaten the industrial goose that lays such gratifying golden eggs as washing machines, automobiles, and color televisions with videocassette recorders...

...In turn, Mephisto/Fistula offers to testify, should that be needed, that Foustka had secretly worked with the forces of the occult all along...

...It was Europe's decision to stand out of the unreflecting lockstep of nature and tradition and to chart a course in the light of reason that has made its cultural tradition distinctive...

...They fully intend to press on with their nuclear power program...

...No, not from Germany's notorious "Greens"—they have become far too politicized and shrill to recognize that the problem is not capitalism or America but rather the materialist anthropocentrism which they, no less than the Soviet Union, act out...

...It is the vision of humans not as conquering masters but as stewards, living in peace and respect with all of the creation...

...Like Goethe's before him, it speaks not just of individuals but of the condition of a civilization that has lost a clear vision of good and evil and, lacking a standard for choosing, seeks to please all sides...