Playwright. Prisoner. Politician. And hero.

A year ago the Library of Congress' magazine, Civilization, called Vaclav Havel "perhaps the most important citizen of the last half of the 20th century." The most popular playwright of his country, in the 1970's his work became a cry in the dark against the horrors of Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia, so much so that he had to leave the capital city of Prague and retreat to the countryside. The persistence of his protest eventually led him to prison, and fifteen years later, when Communism "imploded" in 1989 he was asked to become his people's president.

In a speech at the George Washington University in 1993, he remembered a time twenty years earlier "when some of my friends and acquaintances used to go out of their way to avoid meeting me in the street." He was a political dissident; politically incorrect in a most profound way. Because of the public nature of his opposition to the terrors of totalitarianism he was shunned by people who saw him as a voice of their conscience. "They knew that if they stopped and talked with me they would feel compelled to apologize for not openly defying the regime, too, or to explain to me why they could not do it, or to defend themselves by claiming that dissent was pointless anyway."

Havel continues his story, summing up his experience in this way: "In short, I was, for those friends, an inconvenience. And inconveniences are best avoided." In the next paragraphs he "ratchets up" the meaning of this phenomena, seeing it to have implications far beyond his own life, understanding the interrelationships between belief and behavior, both individually and institutionally. Simply said, he sees that ideas have legs.

Most telling for us, as we think about our own moment, politically and culturally, in the aftermath of a year of debate over our president's personal and public flaws, and the recent vote in the Senate to dismiss the charges of impeachment against him, are these words by Havel: "Anyone who understands a given historical phenomenon merely as an inconvenience will ultimately see many other things the same way: the warnings of ecologists, public opinion, the vagaries of voters, public morality. It is an easy and therefore seductive way of seeing the world and history. But it is extremely dangerous, because we tend to remain aloof from things that inconvenience us and get in our way, just as some of my acquaintances avoided me during the communist era.... The consequences of such a position may be suicidal."

The chickens do come home to roost. In God's world, that is the way it is. Not because God is vindictive; but because His Word shapes His world. From the Garden on, human happiness has been absolutely dependent on obedience to his law. In every century and among every people, the truest and deepest freedom is found in walking in the ways of the Lord. And so to be human is to be holy. As the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve, all over the earth in every generation, we either hold humanness and holiness together, or not — for blessing and for curse.

But what does Havel mean, "the consequences will be suicidal"? Where? When? How?

As I have pondered his thesis — that failure to address important but difficult issues will have debilitating consequences for nations and her citizens — I have been brought back again and again to the "inconvenience" of the impeachment proceedings that have so soured our culture these last weeks and months.

Not so long ago I was on a plane coming back across the country. I almost always have enough to read and reflect upon that I am not looking for another conversation. Typically I have been in settings where I have been talking and talking and talking, so the few hours of quiet travel is its own gift. But there was something about the traveler two seats away that caught my eye. With a seat between us, we were not forced into each other's lives by mere physical proximity. And yet, his eyes and his face seemed to communicate a thoughtful open-heartedness that made me willing to give up my books and articles for the possibility, of all things, of another conversation. And so I smiled and asked, "Where are you going?" We passed introductory questions back-and-forth for a while, and then the inevitable subject of "What's it like to live in Washington?" came my way. Pretty quickly we moved into a discussion of the impeachment trial, with its related themes of character, Clinton, and the Congress.

"Don't you think we should move beyond this?" The question seemed to hang in midair. I knew that sentiment was widespread across the country, but among my family and friends I had simply never heard it before. No one whose political judgment I knew well enough to trust, thought that; at least as straightforwardly and without nuance as this traveler seemed to imply with his question. I looked back across the seat between us, and after a few seconds asked him in return: "To what?" It was a real question wanting a real answer. I tried to probe his presuppositions, asking him to consider the meaning of cultural well-being as a whole. What is good, and a good society, anyway? I wondered aloud whether economic "health" was a sufficient and sustainable indicator of a society's strength.

I did not hear a very satisfying answer. In the end I think it boiled down to the fact that he was "doing well" in business, as were all his friends — and he thought any more attention given to Clinton would upset the economy. The heart of his contention was that we ought to leave this trouble behind and "move on."

One of my favorite poets, Steve Turner, puts it like this in "History Lesson." It is simple and succinct, and so you have to listen carefully. "History repeats itself. Has to. Nobody listens."

I have read enough of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his eloquent, search-the-societal soul accounts of the failed Soviet experiment in materialism, to think that there is any good end for a society that makes money matter most; for a people which gives itself to the pursuit of a collective dream in which nothing matters more than economics. The most important things in life are not things.

At the end of the century it is clear to all but the most insular and ideological that there were fundamental flaws in the Marxist-Leninist understanding of what economic life could and should be. This is no argument for moral (and economic) equivalence. I deeply appreciate the differences, and the differences they make, between the cultural roots of the USSR and the U.S. (as the lead western nation during the cold war, and now the lead nation on earth). But at the same time I believe theologian Thomas Oden is right in seeing us as different sides of the Enlightenment vision of life lived in a world without God (Two Worlds: Notes on the Death of Modernity in America and Russia). Theirs was an effort to do so shaped by an ideology of collective autonomy; ours is guided by a near-absolute commitment to individual autonomy.

Autonomy. It is a word which grows out of two words: auto which is self, and nomos which is law. And so autonomy is to make one's own laws. Always and everywhere, it is done with a fist to heaven, stubbornly believing that God is not there and He has not spoken; that human happiness is founded upon the possibility of "doing it my way." Or in the story of Soviet autonomy, do it "our" way.

Havel is one of the true heroes to emerge out of the dark years of Soviet tyranny; proving that suffering can produce character, if one has ears to hear and eyes to see. His years of patient protest, marked as they have been by his unusual understanding of a responsible hope, have earned him a moral authority to speak about God, human nature and history. As a playwright his stories were always about "the crisis in human identity." He explained to an interviewer in 1975: "I believe that with the loss of God, man lost a kind of absolute and universal system of coordinates, to which he could always relate anything, chiefly himself." More than twenty years later, now as president of the Czech Republic, he is saying aloud all over the world, "If God is not there, then we can no longer speak of meaning, of purpose, of accountability, of responsibility."

Try it this way. In a world where civic discussions about politics and economics assume the irrelevance of God and his Word, where the false dualism of facts/values seems to rule the day, human beings have lost the coordinates for life. We're finding it increasingly difficult to speak of the possibility of meaning and responsibility. (That is, if we are honest about what is required philosophically for words as weighty as meaning and responsibility to be used genuinely.)

Havel argues that there is a line in the sand, and where one stands in relation to it has momentous implications, personally and publicly. As he has taken this message to parliaments and universities from east to west, north to south, he keeps driving home this point: what we believe about the world has consequences for how we live in the world.

A year ago he gave his annual "state of the union" address to the Parliament and Senate of the Czech Republic, in the aftermath of the resignation of the prime minister following the discovery that he had, among many other things, access to a slush fund held in an unauthorized Swiss bank account. After a thoughtful account of the present moment in Czech life, he set forth two causes for national discontent. One was "historical" and has to do with the post-Communist troubles still besetting his society.

The other, he argued, was "vanity," primarily evidenced by a singular preoccupation with the forces of economic production — a lust for the material. "We were hypnotized by our own macroeconomic indicators.... There are factors whose weight or significance no accountant can calculate, but which nevertheless create the only thinkable environment for any economic development — I mean the rules of the game, the rule of law, the moral order from which every system of governance derives and without which it cannot function...."

How do you respond to Havel's words, in the context of your citizenship, of your academic and disciplinary questions and of your vocational and cultural concerns? As you have listened in to the national debate about Clinton, character and consequences, what "rules of the game" have ordered your thinking? Are the questions you raise in classroom discussions and in papers rooted in "factors whose weight or significance no accountant can calculate"? As you dream and hope for the future beyond college, what place does "the moral order" have in giving shape and substance to your visions of what you will do and why you will do it? How does what you believe affect how you live, and want to live? Havel's insights in these matters are true to the way the world really is, anywhere and everywhere.

In an almost eerie way they are not so different from words I heard last week as I drove to Pennsylvania with my ten-year old twins. They were joining me for a visit to a college where I was to give a convocation address. On our way we listened to the closing comments from the House managers of the impeachment trial on the floor of the Senate. As Congressman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) finished, my son Jonathan — completely unprompted — said, "I respect that man." We are a non-partisan home, where we are not "always Republican" and instead have tried to bring deeper criteria to bear on our citizenship and its responsibilities, than anyone's party-line allows for. And so I was pleased and surprised at my son, as he seemed to recognize "the ring of truth" in the congressman's words. Graham was speaking about the world we really do live in, one in which "the rules of the game, the rule of law, the moral order" are in the very deepest way written into the universe" for blessing and for curse, for Democrats and for Republicans.

"Don't you think we should move beyond this?" Though I heard these words from a lone Dallas businessman, as a nation we have lived with this question, and its assumed answer, for months and years. It was not so long ago that Bill Clinton ran against George Bush with these cynical words dripping from his campaign headquarters: "It's the economy, stupid!"

Though it is easy to fix blame on Clinton and his character, the more telling tale is the one about a nation, any nation, that truly believes "it's the economy, stupid." Twice in the last six years the most sizeable block of voters in our elections have chosen a man which, by polls (you can prove anything by statistics, right?) have shown that though we do not believe him to be trustworthy, we want him as our president. And we still do. As his offenses grow, so do his poll numbers. Recently the British news weekly, The Economist, had as its cover story a picture of young, affluent Americans longingly looking for Clinton, his campaign poster in hand. Two words headlined the piece, offering a sober "over the ocean" perspective on our national foibles: Foolish Love.

At heart, it is that. Before the last election cycle, early in the fall of 1996, Michael Kinsley, former editor of The New Republic, now of the online magazine Slate, and one of the most consistently left-of-center political commentators, wrote a perceptive piece in Time, in which he wondered more about the character of the American people than about our president-elects' character. Why would we want a person as president that we already believe to be untrustworthy, he asked? Perhaps we consider everything else an "inconvenience."

Havel is right. As is Solzhenitsyn. And Turner, too. You see, history repeats itself ... has to ... nobody listens.