On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

Havel strained toward that world of values, that fifth dimension, which he called “moral standards.” Yet he also had in mind the physical world, the first four dimensions, the restraints we need for creativity. Havel was preoccupied with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, according to which disorder, quantified by entropy, grows over time. “Moral standards” meant a limitation of chaos by ethics. “Just as the constant increase in entropy is the basic law of the universe,” he wrote to Husák, “so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.” Normalization, by contrast, was a politics of entropy, a decomposition. Life was pre-death. The freedom that Havel had in mind was a “life principle,” resistance to a deadening politics of predictability. When we have access to ideas of the good, of virtue, we bring something fresh to the universe: “Life rebels against all uniformity and leveling; its aim is not sameness, but variety, the restlessness of transcendence, the adventure of novelty and rebellion against the status quo.” A single improbable act “illuminates its surroundings” and makes possible other such acts.