Tag Archives: character

An Ode to Wendell Berry (with quotations adapted mostly from “A Continuous Harmony.”), Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Aug

A person can aspire to heaven with his mind and his heart while destroying the earth, and his fellow humans, with his hands.

We are not humble enough or reverent enough.

I am ashamed and deeply distressed that American government should have become the chief cause of disillusionment with American principles.

Most of us do not know how to produce the best food in the best way.  We don’t know how to produce any kind in any way.

The person who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and industries mend their ways.

The drastic and incalculably dangerous assumption is that farming can be considered apart from farmers, that the land may be conceptually divided in its use from human need and human care.

Our society is one of undisciplined abundance, which is to say a society of waste. And waste is a hideous concept  making our entire world hideous.

We maintain the  “barbarous abstraction of nationalism” while creating institutions of suspicion.

We are being “saved” from work, then for what?  It is the discipline, not the desire, which is the common ground.

Our kingdom of abstraction, including specialists turning partners into “objects.” Seeing people as “spare parts.”

The hypocrisy of “freedom” at the hands of government which surveils us and tells us what to do.

The present problems of the world are the result not of human stupidity but of human intelligence without adequate cultural controls.

Few stick around long enough to see the effects of their work, including their bad work. What is the impact on our neighbors and on our place in the world from what we do?  The standard of land use is fertility which preserves the interests of the future.

Seeing the land as merchandise and ourselves as its traveling salesmen. For our destruction of paradise there will be hell to pay.

The only genuine morality is concern for the life and health of the world. Such morality is long-term practicality.

There is no benefit without obligation.

Dear All,

This is the latest installment in my romp back through writings which, for better or worse, had an outsized influence on my own thinking and practice, including the way I engage the policy world for better or worse.

As a reminder, the point of this exercise is not only to highlight a path that had been laid out for me and that I did not do enough to cherish, but rather to point out the ways in which our deep contemporary challenges have precedents to which we have paid insufficient attention and which have only grown more challenging as a result.

In other words, what we now experience – the conflicts, the atrocity crimes, the corruption, the environmental degradation, the indifference and misinformation of governments,  the self-deception and willful ignorance of constituents, etc. – have characterized our  collective passage for some time.  This current moment has context-specific elements  which may appear to be unique but they have been predictable, in whole or in part, by thinkers focused on misguided elements of personhood, faith, agriculture and institutional life to which we have too-often offered unreflective and undeserved allegiance and thus are often more resistant to change.

Into this matrix of misery and potential stepped the Kentucky farmer, poet, strip mining critic, and social commentator Wendell Berry, someone who I have so far failed to meet but someone who has had an outsized influence on how I write and, in many instances, how I think about how I write.

While many are attracted to his poetry, many others have been moved by his essays and, more specifically, the place-based rural perspectives he embodies in a genre increasingly dominated, in this and many other societies, by urban voices.  His perspective is about the importance of place but it is even more about belonging – belonging to a community, but also to the rhythms of the natural order beyond domicile walls.  With all due regard for the predilections of the human condition, his view of a life worth living is an important antidote to the abstract and economically-oriented modalities of much of our urban life.  He laments the all-consuming consumerist orientation of much of our societies, consuming goods we do not produce or know how to produce, food we do not grow or know how to grow, preferring to own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor, resigning ourselves to predatory economic competition rather than to communion with those of greater and lesser means.

What we know how to do even less well , as Berry laments, is confront our addiction to waste, the incessant compulsion to consume without consequence and discard without concern.  He speaks of a society which continues to, even now, denude mountain tops for coal to light our Christmas trees, a society with many who aspire to heaven while leaving a world more “hideous” in certain aspects s than when they entered, seeing the world (including the land we rely on) as “merchandise” and ourselves as one form or another as “traveling salesmen,” belonging less to a place and a people than to an economic imperative. 

Berry is clear that, in environmental terms, all have “sinned and fallen short”  We have “erred and strayed” from our responsibility to future generations,  and it will be those generation, not mine, who will surely pay for the hell we continue to inflict on our communities, our oceans, our atmosphere. We are all culpable.  I am culpable.  And my culpability is indefensible given my professional choices such that I should know better at this point in life.  And I should also know better how to incarnate what I have come to know in practices which reflect the values I too-cavalierly espouse.

What I am also at this point in life is someone who is committed to simpler living, who acknowledges the almost overwhelming magnetic pull of technology and its promises, including the promise to eventually “free” us from work, one which also implies freedom from the meaning and discipline which are, in my humble view at least, essential to a life of value and purpose. I continue, perhaps  naively, to advocate for lives committed to self-improvement as we enjoin institutions and officials to improve their own practice and encourage our fellow citizens to renounce the “barbarous abstraction of nationalism” which threatened Berry’s earlier years, and which now consumes much of our present political discourse.

It is unreasonable, as Berry himself recognizes, to merely transpose lifestyles across increasingly complex societies.  Not everyone can farm a land.  Not everyone can write for audiences in moving and compelling ways.  Not everyone can critique societies seemingly determined to make “spare parts” out of potential-bearing humans and convince at least some to rethink that depersonalized, abstracted agenda. Berry has made much of his context while encouraging others to make the most of theirs.  He knows where he belongs. He’s not sure that enough of the rest of us do.

And he knows some of what must now be done. Everyone can plant a tree.  Everyone can commit to making private and public green spaces more congenial to butterflies and bees than to litter and waste.  Everyone can make lifestyle changes which increase their connectivity to neighbors, communities and the earth.  Everyone can overcome the worst of their material addictions while calling their more aggressive ideological addictions to fuller scrutiny.  Everyone can ensure that their benefits – privileges and entitlements – are tied to obligations to neighbors, community and the planet.

The benefits to me of this piece is that they are tied to an obligation to confess what I have learned from my long-term engagements with the work of Wendell Berry.  Learning about the importance of considering the consequences of my actions, especially to future generations.  Learning about the importance of incarnating the values and practices in my own life that I look to inspire in other persons and institutions.  Learning that care for the land is a common obligation to our future, one which we can discharge in our own neighborhoods as well as better support in larger contexts for those who care for the land that supplies our food and those who seek to improve what is left of the health of oceans and forests. Learning how to modulate our economic preoccupations in part by refusing to see others as “spare parts” to a larger project to which they are often not invited. Learning that a full life requires discipline as well as leisure, discipline as well as desire.  Learning that humility and reverence are not quaint relics of a bygone time but traits of character which can enrich our own life and all the lives we touch.

These can be hard things, harder than some of us imagine.  But if we don’t make good faith efforts in the direction of the changes we need to make, the messaging and behaviors we need to discard, there will indeed be “hell to pay,” if not by ourselves than by those younger folks who still believe we have their best interests at heart.

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A Papal Pilgrimage:  Ramping up Hope at the Center of Global Governance, Dr. Robert Zuber

27 Sep

As the Pope’s FIAT pulled up to UN Headquarters last Friday, it slowed just a bit so that Francis could wave at a group of children dressed in white and sitting on the stairs of (ironically perhaps) the Trump Building.  This was only the beginning of an outpouring of attention, enthusiasm and even yearning, the likes of which most of us have never seen at UN Headquarters.

Many have written about the Papal visit to the UN.  Twitter literally exploded with comments of all sorts, almost all of the ones I saw falling anywhere from cautiously positive to positively gushing.  The newspapers proclaimed that “hope had come to New York.”  (God knows we need it.) These reactions cannot be attributed to our embrace of celebrity or fame; neither are they a function of the rarity of papal visits.

This outpouring of positive energy was more likely related to a long-suppressed search for meaning as well as for the encouragement to abandon cynicism and despair, to recalibrate our emotional depth, to provide a genuinely viable future for our children, not merely an education, an IPad, and an allowance.

The Pope said some very helpful things from the podium in the UN General Assembly.   He took up the challenges of healing our climate and eliminating our weapons of mass destruction.   He spoke about us as biological beings that need to stop soiling the beds that we still need to lie on.   He reminded us that no policy, regardless of its textual nobility or comprehensiveness, is likely to succeed unless we recover the practices of listening and caregiving, while committing in policy and practice to the pursuit of fairness and an end to inequalities.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Francis on the substance of issues, it was clear from his speech that he sees in those many souls clamoring to hear his words what most of the rest of us at the UN cannot.   Francis was not trying to be clever or even strategic.  He was not “purchasing the surfaces” of things nor was he caving in to political expediency.   His words were largely measured, urgent, kind.   But most important, it was clear that he is looking at the world and its people differently.  His vision seems to penetrate deeper – deeper than our pretense and personal branding, deeper than our compromises and our rationales for each, deeper than our professional titles, entitlements and immunities.

This ability to see differently is extraordinary and most worthy of emulation. And to my own eyes, the speech was not the only extraordinary aspect of the Papal visit. Watching Francis move from one responsibility to another inside the UN, navigating the crush of well-wishers including political dignitaries seeking a momentary ‘audience’: the press of flesh and the multiple distractions of noise and perpetual movement seemed overwhelming.

And yet the Pope maintained his attentive gaze.  He didn’t look as tired as he must have been.  If he has any vestiges of claustrophobia, he found the grace to overcome them.   If he found all of the noise and crowding annoying, he never let on. Perhaps Francis throws things around his prayer room to re-establish his emotional equilibrium and vent his frustrations.  His time at the UN gave no evidence that he has this urge.  (His visits to both Harlem and Philadelphia have seemed downright joyful.)

Amidst the diplomatic chaos, Francis even made time to thank UN staff for their dedication and service, paying special attention to peacekeepers and members of UN country teams who lost their lives in the service of the institution, its values and constituents.

In some important ways, this demeanor of Francis was even more telling than his words.   If anything, the latter made the former more believable, more compelling.  There is a lesson here for all of us.   As our colleague Annie Herro reminds GAPW often, all of us at the UN are in one way or another “norm entrepreneurs.”   As such the success of our work, perhaps ironically, has less to do about money and status and more to do with trust building and other character concerns – the ability to be where we say we’ll be, to resist unthoughtful policy solutions that are destined to unravel, to practice courage and kindness so that we can get better at both, to be willing to give to others what we expect from them in return, to communicate hope to persons and communities in ways that do not excessively raise expectations to levels that we know are unlikely to be fulfilled.

Character issues are largely out of fashion, but they are not beyond relevance for good policy. At the UNGA on Friday, we had an example of someone whose demeanor prior to his UN speech – as well as the “depth” at which he routinely casts his gaze – gave added power to the words that eventually came out of his mouth.   The “social fragmentation” to which Francis pointed with alarm is closely related to a fragmentation of personal character that manifests itself as a proclivity to “dispose” of things and people, as well as to horde what we should share and destroy what we cannot easily replace.  These are some of the implications of our current policy and personal choices that Francis, by virtue of the quality of his living and his seeing, was particularly well placed to highlight.

The hope displayed by Francis at the General Assembly podium is imperfect. It does not by itself resolve political differences and logistical challenges, nor does it guarantee that we will find the courage to turn away from our predatory and self-interested actions to save this planet – and ourselves along with it.

But the thousands waiting for hours for a glimpse of the Pope in the Fiat, not to mention the many diplomats who rose to their feet to celebrate a man who presides over a faith often not their own, if these are any indication, then the hope of Francis is truly a hope we can believe in.

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