One should try to be honest with oneself almost as a daily devotion. Ian Brady
Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed. Bertrand Russell
The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine. Mary Shelly
It is an illusion of idealistic children of light to imagine that we can destroy evil merely by avowing ideals. Reinhold Niebuhr
An hour of innocence builds more trust than years of diplomacy. Abhijit Naskar
History does not care about intention. It records outcomes. Leo Croft
When a philosopher happens to read some of his older texts, and most of the time he shakes his head in disapproval, he can be sure that he is on the right path. For this is an infallible sign that his thought has evolved and that he possesses the capacity to learn, to unlearn, to adapt. Giannis Delimitsos
Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths? Edith Wharton
I have been writing and advocating in the peace and security space for many long years, trying to maintain poise and principle amidst updrafts of needless violence and now the crumbling of an international order that, though far from perfect, has helped hold together some semblance of security and dignity amidst the oppression and greed to which too many of us succumb.
Relative to many people I am privileged to know in this world, I have had a relatively drama-free life. But I must acknowledge, albeit with some hesitation, that my engagement with an increasingly unruly world, and even with some of the people and organizations with whom we ostensibly share goals and principles, have taken an increasingly heavy toll.
I have attempted over many years to keep my own counsel in part as a service to those with whom I interact, especially the younger people for whom bursts of cynicism or other careless emotional reactions only serve to push them away from the very work I would wish for them to undertake. And though I’m clearly losing more and more miles off my proverbial fast ball as time progresses, I do my best to maintain a posture of hopefulness and competence amidst the current chaos.
After all, in a world of sometimes grave suffering, my own drama has been, and remains, more self-inflicted than due to any objective influence.
All this said, I’m not going to keep my own counsel here, which means that some of you who still read these posts might wish to close this file and move on to more productive endeavors. For those who remain, which likely includes several folks also struggling with the current weight of bewildering, unwelcome change, perhaps they and others will relate to what is coming below and, if only for a short while, swap out their own masks of rationality and competency for a few additional moments of honesty.
As some of you know, I’ve been re-reading some of my graduate school texts and my earlier writings. In both of these instances, my main take-away has been some iteration of “what were you thinking?” Why did you underline that paragraph while missing the more salient insights down the same page? Why did you allow yourself to think that articles of yours which were for some unknown reason accepted into journals or magazines might actually be breaking some new ground? And why did you not run more confidently with insights that you knew to be true but which lacked the courage to pursue? And, finally, why have you been so slow to unlearn and adapt?
These questions seemed especially pertinent as I re-read “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness” by Reinhold Niebuhr, a book now 80 + years old which had a stunning impact on me at the time of first reading even if its influence on my subsequent writing and activities would remain uneven.
Niebuhr’s Christian realism (not nationalism) spoke to me as one who took the violence and discrimination of the world seriously but felt that many of the responses to such ills were more sentimental than impactful. By “sentimental” I mean (and Niebuhr mostly meant) the largely unexamined belief that the breakthroughs of history are inevitable; that institutions in which we have spent years such as the UN are grounded in fundamental principles which ensure their survival and even their prosperity; that the hard-won achievements of humanity are assured to persist even absent the hard work, dedication and self-analysis required to weed out the hypocrisies that make most of us unworthy stewards of our most profound ideas and values; that we can confront and nullify threats and evils merely by spouting rhetorical condemnations and avowing abstract ideals.
For Niebuhr, history is creative but not redemptive. This is how I had come to see it also. A space where we can participate in and offer correctives as needed regarding the complexities of the world and ourselves, the successes and inadequacies of our policies, practices and aspirations. To the extent that we can escape our own limitations, our knee-jerk forgiveness of mixed motives and unimplemented ideals, our “rooting interests” which cause pain to those who “root” differently, then history holds possibilities for maximizing dignity, empathy and care.
Possibilities not inevitabilities.
We now find ourselves at a particularly discouraging moment not only because institutions are crumbling and violence and cynicism are wildly on the loose, but because we humans have not proven ourselves up to current challenges. Indeed, this current, oppressive moment seems utterly beyond our remit. Too many people in shoes similar to mine have allowed ourselves to be blinded by a light of virtuous aspiration which is largely self-manufactured. Such light remains possible in our age as it was in others, and yet our sentimental attachments to what is good, but not yet good enough, have resulted in more fog than illumination, more abstracted diagnoses about the status of institutions and fewer concrete diagnoses about the status of ourselves and our promises to others..
For me, this has long been a double discouragement; in the outsized malevolence of riches and power politics, to be sure, but also in our failure to seize the creative opportunities of the present without turning what works for us into what works for all. We know we can do better, but too many people like me who should also know better as we choose to push our chips into the center of an unstable table that we forget we must vigorously maintain if the table itself is to remain functional.
I am blessed with places to go and friends and loved ones in many of them. I am also someone who has tamed his wants such that he infrequently wants for more of anything. But as with other friends and colleagues I know, I am veering too close to a tipping point of emotional insolvency. I have become the person who watches sports instead of movies and documentaries because sports don’t break any of my emotional bubbles. I have become the person who can’t even sing Christmas songs in private without shedding tears. I have become the person who bonds with cats more easily than with many humans, someone whose faith tradition is now in the hands of largely unfathomable forces whose theology offers no truth or comfort, someone who harbors too many secrets even from himself.
I am not alone in any of this even if the peculiar sources of my discouragement are not always in alignment with others. Many rightly wonder, even despair over what might still be salvageable in our world, wonder how we can best save what is left of structures that promised much of value but also promised considerably more than they have delivered. Such persons wonder how to adjust to the dismantling of rights and institutions that we have dedicated our lives to improve but too often have also idealized and even taken for granted.
Niebuhr spent much of his writing highlighting the power of self-interest not only in those promoting the darkness of tyranny and injustice, but in the rest of us as well. Our serial inability to remove the logs in our own eyes such that we can better see the specks in the eyes of others was a cardinal sin of my early years and a deep sadness of my later ones. As I have come to learn, the moment we disregard our own willful blindness, the moment that we replace honest critique of personal motives with behavior now known as “virtue signaling,” we open the door to violence and worse by those content to heap scorn on our self-congratulatory claims of virtue as they seek to consign such virtue to the scrap heap of history.
When you sit in UN conference rooms day after day over many years as we have done, it is easy to point out the cynicism which infects the practices of many nations, especially but not exclusively the large and powerful ones. Nations which come to places like the UN to put their best faces on often abusive policies. Nations which turn their backs on treaties and international law obligations whenever such suits their interests. Nations which create convoluted rationalizations for behaviors which are clearly contrary to the commitments which led them into the UN in the first instance.
But I have also fudged things when it served some need of mine. I have also indulged rationalizations for choices that clearly should have taken a different direction. I have also created invitations to cynicism by not saying what needed to be said, by not betting sufficiently on the value of our own critical lens, by not insisting firmly enough that the institutions we say we care about are ultimately not going to improve in any sustainable way until we improve ourselves as well.
Niebuhr understood well this dilemma of how to confront cynicism in the powerful and malevolent without becoming cynical ourselves. He maintained, rightly I think, that “the children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice.” This is a high bar, even for folks in my circles of commitment, as we are persons battered in ways that we can only begin to understand, persons in diverse global settings whose emotional bank accounts have suffered from too many withdrawals and too few deposits.
Of course these wounds are all relative in volume and impact, but all offer important lessons. For instance, I have long maintained the view that there is sanity in agency, that the ability to address and resolve (or at least attempt to do so) personal and even global crises is ultimately less taxing on the emotions than feeling trapped in impotence and its oft-accompanying despair. But agency for myself and others is, indeed must be, more than defending values and ideals, more than rhetorical arguments and clarifications, more than sentimental attachments to institutions and their rules which have proven less effective than advertised and which we have ultimately done too little to energize. My own life used to be more practical, more personal, more about enabling the agency of others than about brandishing a second-tier policy lens. For the sake of our still-numerous, still-inspirational global connections and my own, now-teetering emotional health, I need to find that missing piece of agency once again.
May you who have read this to the end find it also.
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