Our Three Questions

What is our fundamental flaw: we live from day to day! Our policy does not extend further than from case to case. This is how Litomyšl’s native son Hubert Gordon Schauer opened his famous text, Our Two Questions, published in the magazine Čas almost 130 years ago, on 20 December 1886. His lines are still worth reading today.

Schauer asks: What is our national existence? “Are we actually as secure in our national abode as it might seem at a glance?  Shall we be protected in future (…) by our intelligentsia, literature and the whole national apparatus, against a future, albeit only possible, though endlessly remote and instantly improbable denationalization, or rather over-nationalization? This question is not an academic one and could become a nagging one, all of a sudden.”

The second question reads: What is the mission of our nation? Just like an individual does not exist for his own sake, but must be an enrichment of the concept of human species, so not even a nation does exist for its own sake, either. Is the Czech nation here for to sprout, blossom and wither, or for to become a mediator within its ambience, and fore example a transient link between the Romance-Germanic West and the Slavic East? Or was it called to create an indigenous new culture from within itself, a brand-new source of light and warmth?”

It seems as though we have spent long decades searching for the answer in vain, to Schauer’s questions. When it seems we are almost there, a brief euphoria always gives way to hangover. We keep living from day to day and our policy does not extend further that from one case to another. We are forging ahead… aimlessly. It is the best way how to go back without ever noticing it. We aimed for the West in the 1990s, but where are we aiming now? We made use of all possible bridges to the world, way back then, but we are more interested in fences now. We worship freedom but let ourselves become encapsulated in fear. Living in a shared house with someone else—why not if they take good care of us! But when we have to take care of the others, we start inching back, and find consolation in anything that smacks national. Schauer would be surprised to see what “over-nationalization” can look like.

Why don’t we reflect about that? We don’t, because the GDP is growing and unemployment falling. Beer flows freely. Germans are quiet and Russians are far away. Terrorists also let us breathe. What is the mission of our nation? Go to hell with such fantasies and do something practical.

Schauer’s two questions might lead to a third, quite crucial: When are we going to start tackling the first two, at long last?