Tag Archives: Human Nature

The Monsters We Indulge: A Post-Electoral Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Nov

We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. Marcus Aurelius

Let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good.  Maya Angelou

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We are all mistaken sometimes; sometimes we do wrong things, things that have bad consequences. But it does not mean we are evil, or that we cannot be trusted ever afterward. Alison Croggon

The evils against which we contend are the fruits of illusions similar to our own. Reinhold Niebuhr

Do not accept an evil you can change.  E. Lockhart

Sometimes, the wicked will tell us things just to confuse us–to haunt our thoughts long after we’ve faced them.   Sarah J. Maas

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.  Terry Pratchett

And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody. And yours, he replied with a smile, is willfully to misunderstand them.  Jane Austen

I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world. Charles Dickens

Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. Dietrich Bonhoeffer

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. George Carlin

I’ve been getting a number of messages from various parts of the globe inquiring about how I was reacting to the recent US election results.  I’m sure many of you have similar stories to tell and I’m also sure that your reactions to the messages have been similarly diverse – bewilderment, outrage, fatigue, perhaps even a measure of relief in some instances.

I won’t dwell on this too much now because, for me at least, such reactions at this early stage would largely lack perspective.  The election is over.  Unless somehow the House of Representatives flips, and perhaps even if does, we are two months from the likely start of mass deportations, a reoriented economy in the form of tariffs and fresh tax breaks for the already wealthy, new challenges to women’s rights and a federal bureaucracy where the litmus test for all applicants is loyalty to a president not a founding document.

The Democrats were anything but perfect in this election cycle, are anything but perfect in any and all aspects of governance.  But it is interesting nevertheless that so many voters– including droves of Hispanic men and white women – chose to support a candidate so manifestly opposed to what might otherwise appear to be their interests. Or perhaps people in my orbit have merely failed to grasp what those interests are, how they might have been balanced for others in ways similar to how we seek to balance our own.

How to explain all of what is happening now in our world?  The short answer is, I cannot.  Many have honed in on anger around commodity prices and immigration in whatever form those are understood and, in the case of prices at least, are probably pointing fingers in the wrong directions.  But point they have – we pretty much all did – and with an outsized consciousness of the “obvious” flaws of our adversaries with little sense of how the “garbage” some of us ascribed to others might motivate hatred in return with a fervor that at least some folks have managed to sustain.

Whatever else one could say about this election season there was certainly no shortage of hateful rhetoric, no end to the recriminations leveled by many people — including in my own orbit –against folks we know only by the conspiracies and dubious theology they espouse or perhaps by their fervent rejection of the “expertise” we in our policy bubbles inflict on people we don’t know, don’t want to know, don’t care about, and don’t pay attention to. 

This has been a condition of our society for some time, the singular dismissal of the other, our growing comfort level with stereotyping devoid of real evidence, giving in to the arrogance of defining our ingroups by the best of them and our outgroups by the worst.  We increasingly live in bubbles of our own choosing, at times even our own creation, but we forget that the reality as seen from a bubble is only a caricature of reality, only a small and insular piece of a broader truth which literally defies any and all facile understandings. 

Whether we are able to sit with this or not, ours is an age of growing economic disparities, of manifestations of faiths which have little or nothing to do with their founders, of privilege magically transformed  into merit, of rights in urgent retreat, of threats ignored or addressed in a manner guaranteed to magnify misery beyond what could ever be rationalized. There is much beauty still in the world and in ourselves but we’ve concealed so much of that behind curtains we’ve forgotten we’ve woven and hung.

None of this is news, of course, we flawed humans giving in to impulses incompletely understood, we who deign to make decisions for others whose realities are willfully sealed off from our own, we who parrot and even impose values that we fail to live by ourselves.  This in itself is not newsworthy.  The wrinkle for me in this last political cycle was the persistent and generally uncritical recourse to “evil” in describing political and religious “others” and their intent. 

Evil, needless to say, is a loaded word, loaded with perverse meaning, with hostile intent, with self-righteous venom.  And this is true whether we are describing evil actions or indulging in more essentialist determinations of evil as “of the devil,” the evil that cannot be healed, cannot be redeemed, cannot be transformed into something more closely approximating “civilized” let alone Godly behavior.  This is the “evil” that ostensibly transcends individual acts towards an ontology which designates some as redeemed and others beyond redemption, the erstwhile “children of light” casting the “children of darkness” as destined for places beyond grace, beyond options, beyond reconciliation, beyond compassion.  

I don’t entirely know what is gained from such designations, that “evil” which transcends the specific violations which we who hurl invectives have largely not done enough to prevent or transform.  Moreover, such designations fail to honor the testimony of philosophers, literary authors, sages, psychologists and others, testimony which makes clear that the lines which separate good and evil in we humans are often thin, indeed.  We forget that we must within our religious traditions constantly elevate the status of forgiveness not out of piety but out of necessity.  For if it is not available to others neither will it likely be available to ourselves. And needless to say, given the metaphorical wolves we all struggle to keep at bay, forgiveness is needed at some point by each and every one of us..

And let’s be honest.  To move as we now do in my country, as we did so often during the political campaign just past, move towards the positing of those we oppose as devils incarnate is to set in motion something we remain unlikely to control. We need to remind ourselves and be reminded by others that the essentialist “evil” we are too quick to ascribe is evil allegedly baked into the genetic makeup of our adversaries which cannot be negotiated so much as exterminated.  We have seen this ugly (and in my view unjustified) conclusion incarnate at times in our own political and religious history – “God” or circumstance justifying mass carnage against others treated more as “things” than as humans deserving of dignity (as is now happening in Gaza and other zones of global aggression).

We are no stranger to this ugliness but the stakes are surely higher now, stakes which our current dispositions might well predict our collective ruin just as surely as climate change or nuclear weapons.

One of the things that we have repeatedly warned diplomats about over many years is their readiness to embrace “condemnation” as a response to the evils against which they ostensibly contend. In psychological terms, the more an individual or government is “condemned” the less impact condemnation actually has.  To oppose is noteworthy, even heroic, when circumstances call for it. To condemn is largely an indulgence, an act which creates artificial distance and shortcuts the courage and mindfulness necessary to call out policy and practice which diminishes all of our better selves. It is simply too easy for we humans to transition from abusive acts which we believe warrant robust rejection to broader ascriptions of evil which deny all of the relevant connections between what we condemn in others and what needs fixing in our more immediate contexts.

Long ago, Socrates proclaimed the relative equivalence between evil and ignorance. We have, in this political season, demonstrated willful ignorance of our political adversaries. Sadly enough we have also demonstrated willful ignorance of ourselves, specifically the ties that continue to bind us, like it or not, to even the most vocal of those adversaries. These next years will likely be much as the prior years have been, a test of our basic humanity, of our willingness to confront and transition away from our own illusions with the same fervor that we attack or otherwise seek to diminish the illusions of others.

I think we can manage to do this, albeit with fingers and toes crossed and, for me at least, eyes scanning the heavens for guidance.

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Mess Hall: Fixing the World We Share with Birds, Dr. Robert Zuber

28 Feb
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The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.  John Steinbeck

If you consider yourself a credible person, when a lie reaches you, that’s where the fallacy should end. Carlos Wallace

He munches a sandwich so messily that you can’t help wondering if he’s actually misunderstood the whole concept of eating.  Fredrik Backman

He never dreamed. Dreams were too messy. Peggy Webb

One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.  Edward Humes

Are not half our lives spent in reproaches for foregone actions, of the true nature and consequences of which we were wholly ignorant at the time?  Herman Melville

Being alive is a monumental undertaking.  Richard Smyth

I’m sitting in my apartment on a gloomy Sunday late-February morning waiting (likely in vain) for the heat to come on, waiting also (hopefully not in vain) for someone to come repair my broken internet.

This temperature and connection-challenged weekend has given me the chance to finish a slender but soul-opening book, “An Indifference of Birds,” by Richard Smyth.  The book is branded as “human history from a bird’s eye view,” but it is really about how our self-referential and predatory species creates space – often inadvertently and outside our purview of consequence – for birds to nest and feed, to exploit the openings we create while keeping their distance as best they can from our guns, our cars, our pets, our poisons.  They watch us from a distance, indifferent to our presumptions of species superiority, immune to the near-religious fervor which justifies our “slash and burn” mentality, our predisposition to subdue nature rather than partner with it. 

The birds have inspired our wonder but also felt our wrath.  While we consult our birding check-lists and set up our outdoor feeders, elsewhere birds are being shot out of the air just for the fun of it.  Those birds fortunate enough not to be living in factory farms have nevertheless had their habits drained, their flight patterns diverted, their biological rhythms upset as the insects they depend on during long and arduous migrations now operate on climate-altered timetables.  In order to survive, in order to avoid the extinction we humans at times seem hell-bent to impose on the natural order up and down the food chain, the birds have been forced to “learn” things about us that we have largely forgotten about ourselves.

Two of these learnings seem pertinent to our policy community, a community which seems stuck in its nomenclature and methods of work, one which could use infusions of fresh perspectives, fresh dreams, fresh lenses on problems that we have domesticated, but not resolved, and that our preferred policy formulas seem more appropriate to “sanitizing” than confessing and fixing the deeply human roots of our gravest current challenges.

One of the insights from our indifferent aviary partners is that we are primarily a species “that’s always figuring out how to be bigger, to extend our arm-span, to lengthen our reach.”  The same species that places space craft on other planets “because we can” is also the species that kills and conquers for no apparent reason, a species which insists on colonizing most everything, going where we don’t actually need to go, disturbing what could be left undisturbed, satisfying our need to explore but in a way that often leaves behind a deep human footprint, a souvenir of sorts that ostensibly proves our mettle, our willingness to climb the highest peaks but in a manner that leaves behind gobs of trash, of human waste, even of human corpses to tarnish the experience of the next explorer.  We don’t clean up our messes so much as march forward into what remains of our wilderness, in part to note its beauty but also to leave our next mark, to replicate in a new setting the messes for which our reputation well proceeds us in the bird world.   

From a bird’s eye perspective, there is one iteration of human mess which has actually proven to be somewhat bird-friendly, at least in the short term. As Smyth puts it, “Waste is fundamental to what we are: Messy Eaters.”  And so we are.  While our indigenous brethren try and try again to wean us off our “developed” world wastefulness, we insist on staying our desecrating and self-deceiving course. Despite the cries of those many millions facing food insecurity and even famine in our pandemic-stricken world, we remain addicted to wasteful patterns.  Our agriculture is needlessly inefficient.  We routinely leave crops in the field that could save lives elsewhere.  We continue to pursue monoculture farming that requires more and more toxic fertilizer and, even then, is more accommodating of locusts than bees.  Our factory farms are hotbeds of human indifference to both animals and workers which results in antibiotics-filled livestock waiting to be made into Happy Meals and virus-threatened (often immigrant) employees who don’t make nearly enough in salary to take care of themselves, let alone their families and communities.  

On the “consumer” side of things, the story is equally grim including staggering proportions of edible food shoved down kitchen disposals or sent away to rot in landfills.  While persons displaced or stuck in conflict zones scavenge for a meal, we in our centers of affluence almost seem to relish in our wanton wastefulness, not only carelessly disposing of uneaten food itself, but insisting on packaging that prolongs the wasteful life-span, the potato chip bag that will far outlive our food scraps and crops rotting in our fields; indeed at the rate we are going that may survive human civilization itself.

The birds see all this; they sense the opportunities that our wastefulness creates.  They feast on the scraps of our own messy indifference while preserving (in most instances) the distance that keeps them safe from the worse of our dispositions, including to control and subjugate.  As we continue to turn green fields into brownfields, the birds find nesting niches in the abandoned buildings and insects in the toxic landscapes.  They have learned to create temporary havens amidst the environmental carnage that, unless urgently corrected, threatens to leave us all with barely a habitable planet.

The policy community of which we are a part recognizes some of what the birds see and much of what they don’t.  We understand the ravages of armed conflict even if we often seem ineffective in preventing or resolving it.  We know that a future is rushing towards us that is likely to be warmer, species-deprived and less green, a future that will test our commitment to cooperation, justice and care even more than our uncertain present.  And we have some idea about the “hail Mary” technologies that we might be able to develop and that will, if we are clever enough, save us from ourselves, if only for a season.

I also suspect that many recognize, even if we can’t say so openly, that our current system of global governance with all of its state-centered prerogatives, is insufficient in and of itself to fix what needs fixing in our world and within ourselves, the parts of us that insist on going where we don’t need to go, that attempt to subdue what would better be left alone, that resist both creating fewer messes and embracing more opportunities for sharing and solidarity.  When we at UN, which we did in a General Assembly event this week, discuss how to better brand our often-hopeful work with global constituencies, we tend to forget that such branding also exposes the parts we have fumbled, the parts buried under protocol and bureaucracy, the parts that the birds seem to see more clearly than we do, the parts of us stubbornly determined to remain on dangerous paths that our lofty resolution language is unable, in and of itself, to amend.

Even during what was likely the signature event of the UN’s week – a minister-level, Security Council discussion on the climate-conflict nexus, speakers struggled to look beyond what the UN and its member states can see routinely, to get past “our way of doing things” to the deeper issue of how we as humans can learn the traits and tactics that might ultimately ensure the survival of all of us, including the birds. In fairness, we did note with appreciation the insistence by Secretary-General Guterres of a right to a clean and healthy environment as well as the call by the Prime Minster of Antigua and Barbuda for prompt and determined action to address “the barrage of unrelenting threats which undermine development and even governance.” We were also pleased by the appropriately humble and urgent stance taken by US Climate Envoy John Kerry who pleaded with delegations to heed the science which is now “screaming at us,” in order to avoid what he called a “mutual suicide pact,” one which, as he knows, the US has contributed to writing more than most. 

But the highlight of the event for me was clearly the statement made by Sir David Attenborough who has done as much as anyone to prick our collective consciousness on matters of species extinction and the climate crisis.  As he somberly intoned, we have only “a few short years” to fix our broken economics and recover our better selves, our higher human values and best human practices, while reminding us all that “money is not the measure of things.”  Sharing is.   Balance is.

As he knows, we have largely talked a better game than we have played, still too content to wait for some miracle transformation of our natures or that “hail Mary” technology that will give us another chance we barely deserve, another chance to reset our habits, to acknowledge the responsibility attached to the “monumental undertaking” which constitutes our lives, and to finally, once and for all, “make peace” with the natural world. 

During this same Security Council meeting, the Minister from India kindly offered a prayer, the first of its kind in that chamber in my years of monitoring, for an environment “which belongs to all living beings.”  Of these, there is none which creates the messes that we humans create; there is none which generates the vastness of waste that soils our own bed and complicates survival for so many other life forms.   The birds know what we’re about.  It’s high time to be about something better.

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Fort Worth:  The UN Presents Diverse Lenses on Human Potential, Dr. Robert Zuber

3 Feb

Mother Earth

Most of us must learn to love people and use things rather than loving things and using people. Roy Bennett

We know that we are the ones who are divided; and we are the ones who must come back together, to walk in the Sacred Way.  Ojibway Prayer

Isn’t it sad that you can tell people that the ozone layer is being depleted, the forests are being cut down, the deserts are advancing steadily, that the greenhouse effect will raise the sea level 200 feet, that overpopulation is choking us, that pollution is killing us, that nuclear war may destroy us – and they yawn and settle back for a comfortable nap. But tell them that the Martians are landing, and they scream and run.  Isaac Asimov

Cover my Earth Mother four times with many flowers.  Zuni Prayer

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.  George Eliot

Teach us to walk the soft earth as relatives to all that live.   Sioux Prayer

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. Michael Crichton

In beauty it is finished.    Navajo Chant

As many of you have gathered from even occasional readings of these Sunday missives, the UN offers what at time represent an equally dazzling and frustrating lens on global policy but also on the people who, among other things, establish its norms and responses.  This week alone, saw government experts convene to establish the basis for a framework to address the growing threat posed by the militarization of outer space, a well-organized briefing on Yemen to “hold the fort” on humanitarian response until a viable political process to end the conflict can be established, and a joint presentation by the presidents of the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council respectively in an attempt to ratchet up both funding pathways and diplomatic urgency to keep our collective commitments to the 2030 Development Agenda at least somewhat on track.

We do lots of “holding the fort” at the UN, trying to maintain global attention on the difficult (non-Martian) issues that cause many constituents to turn their gaze away or “settle back for a comfortable nap,” but also to gather resources within the UN and in member states to support “good faith” responses to what are at times ugly manifestations of the human condition. The UN does what it can, in many instances keeping the focus on often-ignored matters of planetary urgency while organizing competent and strategic responses in the hope that various forms of “reinforcements” — of funding, capacity support and political will — do not lag too far behind.

Of all the “ugly manifestations” of human conduct that the UN highlighted this week, perhaps the most discouraging was an event on human trafficking organized by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime.  The event itself was very well done, focusing on the launch of two related reports, UNODC’s full assessment of global trafficking and a second report covering much of the same ground but focused specifically on trafficking in the context of armed conflict.

The latter report was directly requested by the UN Security Council and is perhaps more germane to Global Action’s organizational priorities; but both “booklets” paint a sordid picture of the willingness of human beings in diverse circumstances to contribute to brutality, abuse and “exploitation” that contexts of armed violence merely magnify.  Highlighted within booklet 2 is the recruitment of children into armed groups to serve as everything from porters to suicide bombers, and victims trafficked for purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation.  In addition to copious statistics on trafficking demographics, law enforcement responses and conviction rates, mention was made often of the particular vulnerabilities of displaced persons — including those many thousands displaced by armed violence — and the often-desperate people, mostly women and children, who sign on to what are certain to become exploitative arrangements in the complete absence of viable options, arrangements perpetrated by those who, at the very least, “love things and use persons.”

One can (and we often do) laud the efforts of law enforcement, peacekeepers and UN officials to provide urgent perspectives and high-quality data on this soul-crushing issue. At the same time we also lament the “blows” inflicted by traffickers to any sense of optimism about the ability of human beings to do any better than to “hold down the fort” as our norms of international order prove themselves “thinner” than we imagined and predation in many forms continues to flourish; traffickers, yes, but also an economic system that allows some to build massive wealth casting dismissive shadows on the many millions resigned to running (if they can) from people and institutions content to treat them mostly as “things” to be used, rather than beings to be cherished.

For many younger people, even those around Global Action’s orbit contemplating careers in international affairs, one can perceive a pervasive sense of cynicism about the human condition, a sense that self-interest is fully entrenched as our collective guide-star, that narcissism has become a social expectation and, moreover, that there is really not much that people can do – UN resolve notwithstanding — to “turn this tide” characterized by too much ugliness, too many people content to sleep through crises or turn a blind eye to the inequities that are actually within their power to change.

This assessment of “human nature” – less a science-based lens for exploration of both our warts and potential, and more an excuse for not changing what we are able to change – must also be countered.   After all, the forts we “hold” will not stay held forever.  We see evidence throughout that the walls are cracking, that provisions are scarce and unequally distributed, that communications are increasingly vexing, that promises of reinforced capacity are too-often unreliable. We simply cannot go on the way we are, cannot reverse our current slide while simultaneously enabling (often unintentionally) the forces committed to an unequal and rapacious exploitation of what little is left to exploit.

As the gorgeous group of quotations above makes plain, there is another path that integrates honor and gratitude, that upholds the dignity of human beings while rejecting indignities directed towards our natural home. The UN also knows this other path.  On Friday in the General Assembly Hall, the UN launched the International Year of Indigenous Languages, an event that included powerful statements from President Morales of Bolivia and the President of the General Assembly Maria Fernandez. The event also highlighted indigenous representatives who spoke directly to the multiple benefits of indigenous language preservation – not only the safeguarding of indigenous culture itself but the life given to forms and depths of expression to which indigenous languages are particularly well suited – expression that links people to each other and to the many blessings of creation, that reminds us of the power of beauty to inspire our better selves, that urges us to cover our “mother” with flowers of her own making rather than with bulldozers and space weapons of our own.  As Ecuador’s minister affirmed, the words of indigenous languages “have a soul, a memory, a heart.” They tie together those who live where their sounds are uttered, binding the human and non-human, ties of gratitude and what the PGA called “symbols of belonging,” all held together with pledges to walk more “softly” on a planet that too many of us have conspired to treat much too roughly for much too long.

This event was not designed to romanticize indigenous culture, to promote the soul-energy embedded in indigenous languages as the singular antidote to modernism’s excesses. Indigenous leaders are all-too-aware of the “divisions” that need to be reunited in their own communities, the many sources of pain (including the self-inflicted variety) that require a more robust healing response.  And yet there is so much richness embedded in these language forms, so much beauty, connection and “will to cherish” that culturally-homogenous modern societies — too comfortable in what they “know” and too resolved to “have their own way” — need much more of.

An aboriginal woman from Australia told the diplomats in the GA Hall of the joy it brings her to “whisper into the ears of her grandchildren words from my ancestral language.”  We owe our children and grandchildren more than smart phones and foolish owners, more than forts buckling under the strain of assaults coming from predatory humans in many forms.  We owe them, as one indigenous speaker on Friday noted, the chance “to sing the songs of the earth,” songs that in too many corners of this planet “have simply grown silent.”

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