Tag Archives: cruelty

Cruel and Incessantly Usual: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

30 Nov

Cruelty has a human heart
And jealousy a human face,
Terror the human form divine,
And secrecy the human dress. William Blake

I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.  Albert Camus

If God is keeping out of sight, it’s because he’s ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they’re responsible for promoting in his name. Philip Pullman

We can never be gods, after all–but we can become something less than human with frightening ease. N.K. Jemisin

You cannot use cruelty against yourself to justify cruelty to others. Marie Lu

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness. Tennessee Williams

Cruelty is easy, cheap and rampant.  Brene Brown

It seems to me that liberal and humane people, of whom there are many among us, would, if they were asked to rank the vices, put cruelty first, intuitively they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do. Judith Shklar

Those of you who have endured many years of these annual messages know of my personal fondness for the image of the Jewish man or woman sitting on the end of a remote cliff, staring into the vastness of space, wondering if there is any relief for the suffering borne of an enveloping cruelty  part personal and part embedded in the institutions of the day, sadly including that embedded in  religious institutions.  

It is hard for some of us to imagine that moment of being seemingly rebuffed by such a vastness and then having to return to domiciles and communities under oppressive occupation complete with religious leaders who have turned their backs on the needy and dispossessed, people longing for relief who will accept even its faintest hope, a  veritable whiff of a world that is kinder and more just than the one which defines most all of their daily business.

We moderns who like to imagine the superior manner in which we conduct our earthly affairs are more than occasionally guilty of scoffing at the cruelty of those earlier times and the misery they inflicted, scoffing as though we have somehow graduated from the lusts of degrading and subjugating other human beings, graduated from muck to which too many of our ancestors were consigned and about which they felt they could do little.  Look at how far we’ve come.  Look at our “mixed blessing” achievements and successes. Look at our evermore fancy gadgets and the clever economic predations they enable. Look at our decision making which consistently magnifies current interest to the detriment of future interest. Look at the overly confident, divisive, self-satisfied proclamations that our modernity privileges some of us to spout. 

Maybe this isn’t the Advent to look too closely at ourselves.  Or maybe it is precisely the moment to do so.

For the sojourn at the edge of the cliff is not only about the longing for a redeemer.  It is also about the discomfort – at times severe – during those all-too-rare moments when there is nothing but vastness and quiet to distract us from ourselves, to remind us of our relative impotence, the many things we have done and especially left undone, the potential once identified and then summarily squandered, the love and care we failed to provide in sufficient measure or rebuffed as others tried to provide for us.

And the cruelty.  Always the cruelty, perhaps the most shocking feature of our current, collective incarnation, cruelty disturbingly linked to those long-ago days of occupation and crucifixion, those days which relegated sickness to the demonic and branded as unclean anyone who broke any of the complex regulations brandished by religious elites, regulations which such elites often felt entitled to ignore themselves, regulations sold as revelations of a God who ostensibly prioritized honor and deference over compassion and reconciliation.

As many of “God’s people” try to sell in our own time. Psychologists such as Erich Fromm had long identified the “death wish” that can consume people defined by grievance, some of whom are people of faith, a wish that manifests itself in decisions which are short-sighted and anger-fueled, decisions neither in our best interest nor in the interest of generations to come who may well face formidable trouble coping with the massive damage we now eagerly inflict with full impunity. 

Let’s be honest with ourselves.  Cruelty has always been our species companion, the demon that literally consumes much of our life energy and conspires to make a mockery of our values once we stop identifying and wrestling with its threats and allures.  There are certainly many moments when kindness, compassion, fairness and other, deeper and more “horizontal” virtues seem to have pride of place, when we seem to “have it in us” to rise to a higher, more attentive and more responsive standard.

But then we too often allow ourselves to get complacent, or self-satisfied, or we give in to multiple impulses which should have been thoroughly examined and then placed under wraps. In all of this we tend to neglect the uncomfortable spaces which remind us of uncomfortable truths.  And at such times, cruelty is poised to make a comeback, returning to a stage complete with autonomous weapons and violent rhetoric, with ethnic cleansing and partisan hatred, with all of the self-serving justifications one could possibly invoke including willful, decontextualized misinterpretations of religious texts which are at times astounding in their arrogance.

It is a truism of sorts to insist that we are responsible both for what we do and what we enable, that which our own actions inadvertently grant permission for others to do.  A bit like children in a kindergarten class, we defend our own behavior by pointing fingers at those who not only behave contrary to our own interests but who we might feel get away with it, serving personal preferences petty and more profound with what appears to be full impunity. In a similar vein, we trend towards laser focus on behavior we find offensive in others and then too often try to attribute the offense to an entire class of human beings defined by race or ethnicity or gender or religion, all while doing what we can to ensure that the laser never turns back on us.

Amidst all of these manifestations of self-deception is a pervasive cruelty.  While recognizing the degree to which social media skews judgments on this matter – providing compelling visuals on incidents individual and collective which would have remained hidden in previous times – it is nevertheless the case that our human compassion has taken a serious hit.  At levels both official and community, a generic indifference serves to  endorse and justify the most obvious instances of cruelty, those which have dented our rational and moral capacities – rapes in El-Fasher and Goma, target practice and food insecurity against Palestinian children in Gaza, brown-skinned people brutalized by aggrieved and poorly trained ICE agents in US cities, religious bias, domestic violence, racial discrimination and killing largely without remorse, without accountability, without any sense of the implications of such brutality for a world which must sooner or later be passed on to children in whatever shape we leave it.  And beyond active cruelty, we move with lightning speed from individual instances of abuse to more categorical denunciations of “other” humans which ultimately encourage more abuse than they identify.

I certainly do not believe that cruelty constitutions our entire genetic and social footprint, not by any means, but from my UN policy vantage point it seems to occupy more of our current frame than most of us would have deemed possible, certainly more than our civilizations can likely survive over the long term.

Returning to the lonely figure at the edge of a cliff, it is also important to acknowledge the degree to which making time and space for self-reflection is also to make time and space which can be filled by anxiety, by self-doubt, by disappointment.  The space of Advent is a moment for reminding me of how far I’ve come but how very much is left undone, the self-honesty and amendment of life which remains an insufficient portion of my seasonal preparation, the  vestiges my own “sweet dreams of oppression” which have led over the years to trespasses which are to be forgiven only in the same measure that I forgive the trespasses of others. 

Collectively, our demons are now well out of the places where they had been at least partially confined, tricking us into renewing cycles of distrust and outright violence that compromise our politics, our faith and possibly our future.  It remains alarming at how quickly we can sacrifice our compassion and dignity at the altar of anger and grievance.  It is equally discouraging (if numerous films are any indication) how easily we can become addicted to dystopian worldviews that, beyond entertainment, reinforce the belief that the world is in its essence a harsh, violent, deceitful and fearful place in which values such as cooperation, discernment, kindness and compassion are naïve if not outright dangerous. 

It may be, as Judith Shklar maintains, that cruelty is the behavior which represents the very worst of ourselves.  But what we fail to recognize as often is how this “worst thing we do” lurks just below the surface of civility, just out of sight and reach until it bursts forth like a plague of long-dormant insects which we then choose to feed and otherwise encourage until the outburst has run its course, leaving in its wake a veritable wasteland of disinformation, intolerance and cynicism. This cycle is compounded by the widespread and insufficiently countered belief that cruelty is an inevitable manifestation of our genetic makeup. Cruelty may represent a pervasive factor in human history, but “inevitable” it is not.  

The reason I particularly honor Advent, year after year, is that it represents yet another opportunity for people of much faith and little faith to confront and overcome what Dostoyevsky termed the “artful” cruelty which dominates far too much of our current human landscape. In our words, in our actions and reactions, we very much have it in us to set a tone that can serve to counter the worst of current influences and thereby ensure places where children can live and thrive when we have finally left this world to their loving care. But this “tone” requires more of us, replacing grievance with thanksgiving, swapping out indifference with caring, renouncing in words and deeds what Fromm worried was “our craving for evil,” pledging to take more risks and give in less to cynicism and fearfulness. 

If the opportunities of Advent seem more dauting this year it is because the “syndrome of decay” which we have over-indulged like Thanksgiving leftovers has been allowed to consume larger and larger swaths of our human condition.  But we can roll it back.  We can recover our shattered faith, our lagging courage, our indifferent stewardship of a world which will eventually no longer be ours to pillage.  For me, Advent represents the latest, best opportunity to restore our collective dignity, prepare to better incarnate my understanding of the divine promise, and “save what’s left” of our ailing planet.  This year, let’s agree to honor that potential.

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The Humpty Effect:  Finding an Antidote to Brokenness, Dr. Robert Zuber

17 Aug

Take these broken wings and learn to fly. Paul McCartney

I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.  Mary Oliver

He ruins things. That’s what he likes. To ruin things. Holly Black

Pick up your pieces. Then, help me gather mine.  Vera Nazarian

There was no part of him that was not broken, that had not healed wrong, and there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken.  Leigh Bardugo

This planet is a broken bone that didn’t set right, a hundred pieces of crystal glued together. Tahereh Mafi

We are all wonderful, beautiful wrecks. That’s what connects us. Emilio Estevez

Genius is brokenness harnessed. Abhijit Naskar

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life’s little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together. Anne Lamott

The storm is out there and every one of us must eventually face the storm. Bryant McGill

One small crack does not mean that you are broken, it means that you were put to the test and you didn’t fall apart. Linda Poindexter

Everything had become works.  Like trees these works were tainted by diseased growths, were often hypocrisy, imaginary merit, idleness. Soren Kierkegaard

One of the benefits for me of being away from New York is the ease of exercise.  Not easy exercise but being able to go for runs, even in the early morning, without dodging dogs and people scurrying around inattentively on sidewalks which have long needed a facelift.

But in some places, including Los Angeles, the streets are occupied by the unhoused, people (mostly men) huddled each morning around public bathrooms at the end of municipal parking facilities.

They never bother me.  They often say good morning.  They are equally, quite often and quite clearly at the edge of being broken. Some are food insecure.  Multiply displaced on a weekly basis.  Searching trash cans and alleyways for something to sell or add to their collection of worldly goods crammed into appropriated shopping carts, men waking up to the same reality as yesterday and the day before, hands over their eyes much like the man in the Van Gogh painting, trying to keep from recognizing an immediate environment where so much of what they experience is just plain wrong.

There was a time in my life here in the US, or perhaps I simply conjured it up, when this level of brokenness was the exception more than the rule, a time when institutions of all stripes seemed to be trying to be responsive, when neighbors seemed to be trying to be good neighbors, when people were willing to feel at least a tinge of shame when discriminatory thoughts and the actions which followed crossed into consciousness.

Of course, we have often been some version of broken, often been willing to take our foot off the accelerator of equity and kindness, often  been willing to duck the impending storm rather than face its threats head on.  We have often been insufficiently conscious of an inconvenient human truth, that our propensity for creating and building mirrors at best our propensity for destruction and brokenness. We have experienced as parents and teachers how much easier it can be to destroy than to build as we watch small, angry children knock down Lego structures in a nano-second that it took other children hours to construct. 

But even knowing these uncomfortable truths about ourselves, even knowing of people close to and far from us who simply like “ruining things,” there is something about this moment that feels different, the small armies of ruiners delighting in identifying those people and structures that can be thoughtlessly pushed off the wall towards certain destruction.  A seeming delight in the cruelty of so many Humptys lying in pieces, mindfully shattered almost beyond any hope of repair, one example after another of how much easier it is to ruin lives than to set the many broken bones of traumatized humans to their best healing positions. 

In my own country as in too many other places, we are being “led” by people whose singular skill is breaking things – breaking convention, breaking trust, but also breaking wills.  Breaking them not through the force of argument but through force itself.  If you pay any attention at all to the cruelty which we have a society has unleashed on each other, cruelty which has a good bit of its precedents in many US government administrations prior to this one, it is easy to understand why so many are losing sleep over the destruction of things we have claimed to long cherish, even if we didn’t always act like we did.

This current US administration, like others in various global regions, has learned its “Lego-lesson” well.  Take a wrecking ball to families and programs rather than fixing them.  Push Humpty off the wall with such force and perhaps even righteous delight that it explodes into a thousand pieces, too many for others to gather up let alone reassemble.  This is at the heart of the Project 2025 agenda – too much cruelty to effectively counter, too much destruction to fully repair.  The combination of trauma and uncertainty, as well as once-reliable institutions gutted of functionality and presided over by people for whom ascriptions of “merit” too-often seem as one more figment of their ideology-saturated imaginations, this surely defines a formidable agenda for all of us going forward.  

We are doing our business on a planet akin to a “broken bone that didn’t set right,” a world of grave issues still within our capacity to resolve but with too much stubborn, self-interested, even cruel officialdom reacting to the coming storms by wildly casting blame on predecessors or simply by denying they exist at all.

Most of you who still read these posts are fully aware of what I have laid out here.  You have witnessed the will to destroy and subjugate. You have perhaps even benefited materially from a world tilted in favor of the well-educated and comfortable, tilted to such a degree and for such a long time that our society has taken on the metaphorical shape of a certain tower in Pisa, a shape that has also and perpetually resisted returning to the straight and narrow.

In this context, I recall recently reading a letter to the Washington Post from a self-described “liberal” who apparently is quite pleased with the current White House occupant because her 401K is doing great and she isn’t seeing so many immigrants in her neighborhood.  Clearly, the abject cruelty of some has given license to others to release their very own self-interested genies out of their respective bottles.

So what do we do?  How do we resist this ruinous trend at a time when the odds seem heavily stacked against our better selves, when our societal “arc” is now directed less towards justice and more towards inequity  and lawlessness?   I think there are two lanes that we must pursue together.

The first is the citizenship lane.  Write letters.  Post to blogs.  Join demonstrations.  Organize people around common aspirations.  Learn as much as you can about the origins and history of our now-floundering democratic institutions.  It is important for all of us, but certainly for our erstwhile political leadership, to be reminded that not everyone agrees with them, believes them, supports their agendas, accepts their hypocrisies and dubious ascriptions of  merit.  Not by a longshot.  But it is also important for us to recognize that there are priorities for opposition – that not everything proposed by our political adversaries is adversarial or destructive.  And that a good chunk of our own political supporters have indulged in dubious policies and practices as well.

But beyond civics, we have a responsibility to respond more resolutely to our current climate of violence and brokenness, to ensure that the shards of what has to this point been a formidable eruption of destructiveness do not, to the best of our ability, impact people and places closer to us, leak any closer to our circles of meaning.

We must, in effect, declare and maintain zones less affected by ruin, zones which can demonstrate and reinforce more of the best of which we are capable.  Zones where children are safe, zones where people look after each other, zones where our brokenness can be a source of strength and learning so that we might soar beyond current and inherited limitations. Zones which communicate to those whose business is ruin that ruin shall not be allowed to take root everywhere.  

And this is some of how we might communicate such messaging.  Be better neighbors.  Plant more trees.  Support the people who harvest our crops, heal our wounds and respond to our emergencies.  Volunteer with children.  Extend yourself to strangers.  Dare to inspire others.  Pick up the pieces of your own brokenness and then help others to pick up theirs so that you and they might fly once again.

What I’m sure appears at one level to be pious indulgence must now become an integral part of our struggle with the world and with ourselves.  Don’t let the ruin extend any further.  Let it end with the people and places dear to you, but also with those people and places less known to you, those on whom you still depend and who still remain dependable. Our circles of concern, our circles in defiance of ruin, must continue to expand beyond the confines of domiciles and neighborhoods.

I firmly believe that Humpty can eventually be put back together again, can regain at least some semblance of a dignified place on that proverbial wall.  So too can the unhoused men at the edge of a Los Angeles parking lot.  We are breaking for sure, most all of us in our various contexts, but we are not irreparably broken. Not yet.

If we haven’t already done so, this might be the perfect time for us to get over ourselves, to widen the circles of our interest and our practical concern.  This is our test, the questions are still coming, and we must not permit ourselves to fall apart until all are effectively answered.  

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The Madness of Merit, Dr. Robert Zuber   

23 Feb

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. Mark Twain

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity. Thomas Carlyle

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit and lost without deserving. William Shakespeare

It seems to never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman. George Santayana

The sufficiency of merit is to know that my merit is not sufficient. Francis Quarles

Not too long ago, I get an interesting email from a longstanding African colleague complaining about the decline in performance in both public and private sectors in his country.  His concern was with a growing number of people who want a job, but don’t particularly want to do a job.  The frustration at this state of affairs  is understandable but, like most of our frustrations, this one also has a context.

In my country at the moment, one of our challenges is actually related to people wanting to do a job, trained to do a job, but who are prohibited by their own government from doing a job. One of the many unilateral Trump policies and related orders that I have deep problems with is the notion of “merit” thrown around mostly in the context of dismantling Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs. Such programs have been under attack in favor of a definition of “merit” which is ascribed mostly to white people – indeed white men – based on the “insufficient” and largely misguided assumption that the problems we face as a country are due to a bending the rules for “not-white men” who then transfer their erstwhile “incompetence” into the public domain.

There is so much wrong with this notion, one for which there is no viable metric and which seeks to pin the blame for our numerous social ills on some alleged retreat from those who can meet the standard (select white men) and those who must be accommodated to standard (pretty much everyone else). 

When I spell this out in black and white (which I have had trouble doing of late) the absurdity of it becomes unmistakable. For one thing, it presumes that “merit” can be divorced from privilege and the role of “good fortune” in preserving and even expanding access to opportunity only for some and not for others.  Moreover, it assumes that (in the case of the US) agencies responsible for training air traffic controllers or marines or surgeons or agricultural inspectors would make the conscious choice to deviate from their training standards to fulfill some unspecified DEI agenda, thus contributing to those quite happy to conflate admissions access and standards compliance. 

Finally, it presumes that many of us are not looking askance at the inadequate “merit” of our erstwhile political leadership, people often without backbone, without principle, and without a lively sense of how their lofty positions are themselves the result of the privilege they are hell-bent on denying to others. From my vantage point, attacks on the competency of mostly women and minority interests have actually served to expose the fallacy of white male “merit” based on  some alleged “right” to be the decisionmakers regardless of how cruel and incompetent such decisions turn out to be. We are seeing yet again the challenges associated with merit based solely on genetics and their social determinants rather than on hard evidence related to performance in the public interest.

Those of you who read these posts know where I am likely to stand on this.  I have seen over the years people of diverse backgrounds who possess far more potential than opportunity, who must too-often wait in a long line behind those who continue to claim without shame “merit” based in large measure on some combination of family riches and connections, or even on race-based entitlements.  I have long believed that we create the “merit” we need and desire for our societies to be prosperous and resilient, and that such creation fundamentally requires inclusion of access.  Entrance doors to opportunity must remain open, and that can be (and largely has been) ensured without compromising the training, standards and capacities needed for exit.

The “equal opportunity” and “upward mobility” which constitute an integral part of our national mythology is being compromised at so many levels as ethnic and ideological conformity – and the grievances which now proliferate – “trumps” time after time, the need to ensure the full development and utilization of all our skills and capacities in whatever human package life has situated them. And that of course includes the “white male package.”

But how to move in that direction in these ethno- and gender-repressive times? There is a commercial I have seen once or twice and  which I particularly appreciate, the tag line for which is “the key to riches is knowing what counts.”  Knowing what counts.  In my experience I don’t think that most people pay enough attention to this, pay enough attention to the specifics of how they define success, how they define riches, indeed how they define a life worth living for themselves and others. If they did so, maybe they would be more respectful of the “knowing” of other people, recognizing that there are many paths to living a successful life.

But even beyond this, we are not paying enough attention to the ways in which privilege bends the arc of access in the favor of ourselves and our circles, allowing us to indulge the fantasy of pursuing what counts based solely on merit utterly divorced from social and political context.  Playing the game, if you will, without understanding the degree to which whatever success we have attained has been to one degree or another “gamed” in the direction of the interests of people like me and so many others.

With regard to the prescient Mark Twain, I’m not sure any longer that I can count on some notion of “heaven” to rescue me from the pretenses of my own life, including inadequate assessments and applications related to “what counts.”  But I know that if there is such a reality, the thought that pets might deserve to enter before me and other humans is certainly a wakeup call. For me, this represents a call for greater inclusion, a call for eliminating ideology-based entitlements to practice division and cruelty, a call to make this plane of existence more like the vision of heaven which so many are seeking in another life.  

Moreover, I remain convinced that our now highly-skewed notions of merit have no value in eyes of the creator who, if our religious traditions are to be believed, sees clearly the motives and intentions we largely hide from the world, putting forth instead the face that seeks to convince others that we have sufficient merit relative to our chosen tasks in the world and that, moreover, we sincerely intend  the best for other people.  Despite the ideology-based madness which characterize this moment, we can do better at ensuring that both our public and private “faces” convey merit which faithfully attends to task and which serves a larger public interest. The rest, at least in my view, is mere distraction.

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