Lessons on living an authentic life
Irshad Manji and Vaclav Havel on personal integrity
Janet Keeping, President of the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership based in Calgary, Alberta
Troy Media – by Janet Keeping
I had the privilege recently of interviewing Irshad Manji, who was in Calgary to promote her book Allah, Liberty & Love, The courage to reconcile faith and freedom, which highlighted the importance of living an authentic life .
Of the themes explored in our conversation, it was the importance of living an authentic life – of living in a manner consistent with one’s values and thus with integrity – that resonated most strongly with me. The significance of integrity to the individual and the harm suffered by the individual who foregoes that integrity are probably more obvious than the parallel significance and harm at the societal level. But both are crucial and related.
Only one life to live
Manji quotes a religious scholar lamenting the harm to the individual of the sacrifice of self to social conformity: “Living for the sake of appearance is the ultimate loss. You had only one life to live, and you gave it away to please others”.
Lives so sacrificed are stunted, and often the people who make such sacrifices are resentful of those whose lives are fuller because lived with greater integrity.
Broader, societal losses are also incurred when people in a society shy away from living with integrity to avoid censure by others. For example, there are economic losses from stifling one’s creative talents.
More worrisome are losses to society from the failure to challenge bad public policy. One of the most powerful questions posed in Manji’s book is “How can Muslims – or any of us – fight the voracious groupthink that gobbles up individual integrity?” In reply Manji quotes Slavenka Drakulic, a writer from the former Yugoslavia:
How does a person who is a product of a totalitarian society learn responsibility, individuality, initiative?” She answers, “By saying ‘no.’ But this begins by saying ‘I’, thinking ‘I’, and doing ‘I’ – and in public as well as in private. . . . ‘I’ means giving individuality and democracy a chance.
Understanding that you are an individual is an essential step to living with integrity.
The reference to totalitarianism reminds us of other writers who have stressed the necessity of living in truth if repressive systems of whatever kind are to be resisted and their hold on people broken. One of the best such writers is Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright and essayist, who was elected President of Czechoslovakia directly after the 1989 Velvet Revolution and fall of Czech Communism.
In his famous essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel uses the example of a Communist-era store owner who put propaganda such as the slogan “Workers of the world unite!” in his shop window. Since we know he didn’t actually care whether the workers of the world united, why did he do it? Havel answers: “He put {the slogans} into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble” (emphasis added).
But if it was to avoid trouble, why didn’t the shop-owner instead put up a sign stating the truth: “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient”? Havel answers that the shop-owner “would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity.”
The pressure to live the lie not the truth is strong because it is easier, or seems so, although in doing this we lose something of ourselves:
In everyone there is some longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being.… Yet at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie…. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.
But what about those of us who are not under the thumb of an overtly repressive culture or totalitarian Communism? Does the call to live in truth apply to us? Of course it does.
Manji is careful to say, as quoted above, that we all have to struggle with “voracious groupthink” and Havel did not think that Communism was the only threat to integrity. He was, in fact, much concerned with the morally corrupting effects of consumerism and warned of its dangers too.
One of the most ominous groupthinks currently facing Canadians concerns the need to build new pipelines to ship increased volumes of oil sands oil. It seems that a full, open debate cannot be had on whether these projects should go ahead. This is largely, I believe, because a full discussion would entail consideration of whether the pace of oil sands production should be increased. The idea that it should not be increased cannot be allowed to be widely voiced because it might catch on and become the dominant view.
Vaclav Havel addresses a similar phenomenon using dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s forced exile from the USSR:
Why was Solzhenitsyn driven out of his own country? Certainly not because he represented a unit of power. . . . Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion was something else: a desperate attempt to plug up the dreadful wellspring of truth, a truth which might cause incalculable transformations in social consciousness, which in turn might one day produce political debacles unpredictable in their consequences).
Consider why such strong language has been used by government to criticize those who oppose the Gateway pipeline, for example, by labeling them “radicals” and “eco-terrorists.” Is it because those opponents have any real power?
Is truth on their side?
No: even if anti-pipeline advocates could convince the National Energy Board of their view – which is quite unlikely – the decision of the Board is only a recommendation which government can lawfully ignore. The reason for the demonization is, I venture, that pipeline proponents fear that the protestors may well have truth on their side.
We all have to marshal the courage necessary to protect integrity and live in truth. And we should be forever grateful for thinkers such as Manji and Havel whose work helps keep us on track.
Janet Keeping is a lawyer and president of the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership. Previously, she did extensive work in Russia as Director of Russia Programs for the Canadian Institute of Resources Law at the University of Calgary.
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