Don’t eulogise greatness: it is not dead yet

• Last Updated: November 18. 2009 8:38PM UAE / November 18. 2009 4:38PM GMT

Many in the Middle East are too young to remember what happened in 1989. Most would know something of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the protests in Tiananmen Square. Fewer may know about the Velvet Revolution whose 20th anniversary the Czech Republic and Slovakia celebrated this week. Fewer still would know Vaclav Havel, the man who helped make this event possible.

Poet, playwright, counter-cultural icon, and anti-communist dissident, the man who became the first president of a post-communist Czechoslovakia is one of history’s great men. In this cynical age, people such as Mr Havel are all too rare. Where is our Mahatma Gandhi, our Nelson Mandela, our Martin Luther King Jr? Certainly, injustice still exists, and needs to be fought. Where are our courageous world leaders, our Winston Churchill to urge us to “fight them on the beaches,” or a Martin Luther King Jr to tell us that “we shall overcome”? Perhaps they do exist but we just can’t see them anymore.

The world today takes more pleasure in shattering the concept of the great man than it does in admiring one. We dig through their dustbins, follow them on holiday and examine the minutest detail of their daily lives hoping to discover that, really, they’re not all that different from the rest of us. A 24-hour media and an internet that does not forget our smallest foibles helps to keep anyone from becoming “great”. Would Mir Hossein Moussavi have been an Iranian Vaclav Havel if we had less instantaneous access to his prior political track record? Would Barack Obama have struggled as much with his connections to Reverend Jeremiah Wright only a few decades ago? Or, would his message of change have been sufficient?

It would be folly to think that our heroes are as great as we imagine them to be. Indeed, in the case of many of these men, history has a way of revealing their imperfections. And what we don’t know we infer. We know something of Pericles, the man, from the account of the historian Plutarch. But it is difficult to believe that the glowing account of a master statesman and orator was completely accurate. We look around and see no modern day Pericles, and, surely, man has not degenerated so far. Is yesterday’s father of Athenian democracy, today’s populist demagogue?

Certainly, today’s Czech president, Vaclav Klaus, seems to think so. Accused by the opposition of pandering to the masses to cling to power in a bad economy, Mr Klaus seemed all-too-mortal when standing next to Mr Havel, his political rival, at the memorial service for those that died in the revolution. He seemed aware of this when he dismissed his growing unpopularity by saying that the revolution, “did not create an ideal world”. Indeed it did not, but that is no reason to believe that greatness cannot and does not exist. What divides mediocrity from greatness is not our faults, but what we do in spite of them. And that is what divides Vaclav Havel from Vaclav Klaus.