The Buddhas of Bamyan

I remember when the Buddhas of Bamyan were destroyed. The news struck me in a way that I didn't expect. There was plenty to be upset about in the world, but I ended up being most disturbed by this. It occupied my mind then, and long afterward.

The wanton destruction seemed to me at the time, and it still does, to represent the deepest kind of intolerance: an intolerance that wants (futilely) to erase memory. An intolerance that will destroy wonders, things of beauty, because they offend ideology. An intolerance that will destroy something big, something that grasps at the transcendent, to defend something small and narrow and petty. An intolerance that wants to control not just how people behave, but how they think.

In Vaclav Havel's famous essay about the greengrocer in the Soviet Union, he talks about how ideology leads people to do things they might not otherwise do. The essay is, I think, ultimately about human nature, about the hubris, the vanity, of those who know they are Right and attempt to enforce their way of thinking on others. But it is also about those who acquiesce to them, simply as a way of getting through the day, a way of staying out of trouble. I have much more understanding for the latter than I do for the former. But how many beautiful and wonderful things are destroyed because of this? At what cost do we deceive ourselves, and hide our motivations? I wonder.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe. -- Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless"

On Finding an Old Matchbook

I don’t know where those things go. We think they are lost, but then we find them on a sunny summer day, or a gray February dark with clouds and sleet. They’re in a musty old box in some forgotten corner of the house. We come upon them by mistake, unpack and handle them with the greatest care. (But why so careful? They are not fragile). They are reminders of things loved, or won, or lost. They are sorrow or joy, and sometimes both at once. They are material or immaterial. They could be keychains or matchbooks or photographs or old love notes. Then again, since they are tricky, they could be just a sound or a smell or a word or a dream. Their peculiar magic is that in them, the past for a moment is no longer the past. Or, sometimes, they make dream and reality collide. And why does this not inspire us to ask: what sort of world is this where such things can happen? Why do such things not make us more charitable, more humble? Where is our wonderment, our sense of humility that the veil into another world can so easily and suddenly be lifted? Do we forget about these things, or do we bury them in that musty old box in a forgotten corner of the house on purpose because we cannot bear them? I don’t know where these things go, but if we are trying to lose them we are doing a poor job of it, because we think they are lost, but they will be found.