Wow, now I remember ... it's coming out of the fog ... I actually got to see Havel in 1994 in Palo Alto.
He said some amazing things about Western Democracy (that may be satisfying to all points of view expressed on this thread so far). The speech, fortunately, has been archived:
Havel's address ... emphasized his belief that individual rights must be anchored in moral values that transcend the individual.
... he criticized the present Western form of democracy as a "half-baked recipe" that will continue to arouse skepticism, mistrust and lip service in many parts of the world, until its Western advocates stop viewing it as "something given, finished and complete as is, something that can be exported like cars or television sets, something that the more enlightened purchase and the less enlightened do not."
The missing part of the democratic solution, he suggested, may lie in the "forgotten dimension" of its transcendental origins.
"The relativization of all moral norms, the crisis of authority, reduction of life to the pursuit of immediate material gain without regard for its general consequences - the very things Western democracy is most criticized for - does not originate in democracy but in that which modern man has lost: his transcendental anchor, and along with it the only genuine source of his responsibility and self-respect. It is because of this loss that democracy is losing much of its credibility," Havel said.
Transcendence, which he defined broadly as "the respect of man for that which transcends him," is what all human religions and cultures have in common and "have known intuitively since the dawn of time," until the rise of scientific knowledge began treating it as "no more than a set of illusions or mere metaphors."
Science, he said, may have stripped away this spiritual side, but now, "it often happens that the leading discoveries of contemporary science themselves provide confirmation" of humankind's pre-scientific understanding of transcendence.
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A crowd of 5,000 greeted Havel with a standing ovation. He was accompanied on stage by folk singer and human rights advocate Joan Baez.
Baez, a long-standing acquaintance of Havel's, sang Swing Low, Sweet Chariot before the speech and Forever Young when Havel had concluded. The singer had been invited partly because she had brought Havel and other critics of the Communist government to join her on stage during a 1989 concert in Bratislava. Havel sneaked into that concert by posing as a technician carrying Baez's guitar, he told reporters following the speech. In tribute to her, Havel carried her guitar offstage in this latest joint engagement.
