Quote of note:

We, the Europeans, have one specific task. Industrial civilization, which now spans the whole world, originated in Europe. All of its miracles, as well as its terrifying contradictions, can be explained as consequences of an ethos that is initially European.

The European Experiment
Vaclav Havel
November 15, 2004
With the Bush administration leaving the reality-based world for pursuit of a greed-based domestic agenda and an imperial foreign policy, the newly unified Europe is positioned to lead. Here, Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, calls upon Europeans to stop blaming the Americans and confront the horrors and injustices of industrial globalization. It looks like the American Experiment may be about to emigrate...back to Europe.

…During the communist era, most people believed that individual efforts to effect change did not make sense. Communist leaders insisted that the system was the result of history's objective laws, which could not be challenged, and those who refused this logic were punished—just in case.

Unfortunately, the way of thinking that supported communist dictatorships has not disappeared entirely. Some politicians and pundits maintain that communism merely collapsed under its own weight—again, owing to "objective laws" of history. Again, individual responsibility and individual actions are belittled. Communism, we are told, was only one of the dead ends of Western rationalism; therefore, it was sufficient to wait passively for it to fail.

The very same people often believe in other manifestations of inevitability, such as various supposed laws of the market and other "invisible hands" that direct our lives. As there is not much space in such thinking for individual moral action, social critics are often ridiculed as naive moralists or elitists.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why 15 years after the fall of communism, we again witness political apathy. Democracy is increasingly seen as a mere ritual. In general, Western societies, it seems, are experiencing a certain crisis of the democratic ethos and active citizenship.