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Memory Lane: The Pretense in Our Political Leadership, Dr. Robert Zuber

The longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves. Julian Barnes

I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If you never tell anyone the truth about yourself, eventually you start to forget. The love, the heartbreak, the joy, the despair, the things I did that were good, the things I did that were shameful–if I kept them all inside, my memories of them would start to disappear. And then I would disappear. Cassandra Clare

Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. Marcel Proust

There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth. Charles Dickens

People’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel. Haruki Murakami

Scars are just another kind of memory. M.L. Stedman

Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Argue with the world. Salman Rushdie

As some of you have recognized, perhaps with a sense of relief, I haven’t been writing that much in this space over the past two months. I’ve been trying to recapture my voice, working on longer pieces, resolving endless technology challenges, helping to organize events in South Africa focused on climate change and security concerns, getting some medical issues resolved, finding summer interns, meditating on the most salient contributions to make in my remaining years, scrutinizing the UN Security Council on a daily basis for some signs that the major powers are able to adjust their political and military ambitions to current global circumstance, including from my perspective the “circumstance” of urgency for a more cooperative and effective, multilateral security framework.

In the case of the UN, what we get these days are well-intended but too-often unrequited calls for urgent, tangible responses to looming climate, food and security crises (such as in Gaza) for which our largely progressive rhetoric serves as merely the opening act for the too- many “compromised on arrival” resolutions which we collectively seem to have more interest in transcribing than in honoring. The cautious rhetoric of diplomats in multilateral spaces, caution which to an extent serves the interests of consensus resolutions and treaties, is not as well equipped to negotiate commitments that have real teeth, that commit the system of which they are a part to binding, urgent action that has, as we msut surely acknowledge, rarely enough been the outcome of our negotiations and deliberations. Binding action to provide hope and relief to those who suffer mightily and often needlessly. Binding action as well in support of younger folks who will soon inherit our generational menu punctuated by a bevy of unappetizing options.

OK. You’ve heard this from me before just like you’ve heard from me about climate and racism, weapons and biodiversity, children and water resources. At the same time, I remain more than a bit preoccupied with forms and modalities of leadership – not grounded in unaccountable power and unchallenged authority, but leadership that genuinely and practically prioritizes the well-being of those being led, leadership which is in significant measure about service and attentiveness, about directing persons and enterprises in a manner which eschews pretense, tells the truth about ourselves and the world as much as any of us are able, and which knows to hold the place for the leadership modalities and personalities soon to arrive in more youthful forms.

In the political realm such leadership is harder and harder to find, certainly in my own country where aspirants spend considerable energies undermining the success of the other, insisting that only the solutions “we” can claim for ourselves are valid for others, regardless of the levels of pain and indignity which those intended by those oft-delayed and flawed solutions are forced to further endure. Our current leadership across the political aisle has invested considerably less in effective governance than in partisan bickering and has encouraged the same in their primry constituents. “Winning” in some sophomoric manifestation of the term is apparently what truly matters. In our current “political class,” the ends do indeed justify the means. In our current political climate, “zero sum” has become the defining mantra of our national engagement.

As we acknowledge and promote the needs of next-generation political leadership we need to take stock of our current, ageing options. As someone who is close enough to transiting across his own rainbow bridge and who was reminded on Ash Wednesday of my relatively imminent return to the “dust” from which I came, I understand well the unrelenting speed at which the sand continues to pass through the hourglass. The pace of life on a daily basis no longer slows down for me but the speed at which life passes seems if anything to accelerate no matter how often I attempt to tap the brakes.

For those in other phases of life this reflection might seem self-indulgent, to which I plead some measure of guilt. But it is a useful segue to a topic which seems to be on the minds of many these days, certainly within the US but also outside as government officials and more “ordinary” residents contemplate and assess levels of US reliability and capability in a world of manifold disruptions.

The topic of course is related to the age of our two main candidates for election, old white men with what seem to be faltering memories and proclivities (as with all of us) to become more of what they always were, the “what” that for most who aspire to political leadership in our time is to a significant degree an invented narrative the details of these “things which never existed,” these bits and pieces of our inventive story telling, we tend to have a harder and harder time keeping track as we age.

These are the stories that we try to convince others ostensibly such that they will have confidence in our claims to leadership. These are the stories we have also told ourselves, stories that fudge reality in ways that somehow justify the ambition and the adulation, stories which paint a portrait more courageous, engaged, prescient and caring than was likely ever the case, indulging a “system of pretense” more akin to painting over what could well have been a masterpiece to create an image whose major benefit is its broader public appeal.

I’ve told enough of those stories myself, albeit minus the ambition and the adulation. It’s disheartening at times.

And so we in the US, surely not the most emotionally educated people on this planet, struggle to make sense of political candidates who seem to be in cognitive decline, at least relative to the burdens of the office they seek. Both struggle to distance themselves from at least part of their own pasts, including in at least one instance a past of staggering levels of narcissism which sees this presidential aspirant now constantly and defiantly tripping over guardrails of morality and legality. Becoming more of what they were. Becoming more of what they have forgotten they were.

What we have now here in the good old USA is a spectacle of dueling dysfunctions designed to pin tails of cognitive decline on the “less desirable” candidate. Every slip of the tongue, every hostile or misleading statement, every unstable physical act is seized on by much of the press and by political opponents as evidence of “unfitness.” How can we possibly justify placing our trust in a “doddering old fool” and then move on to place our trust in another doddering old fool? Back and forth it goes, one pretensious accusation after another, projecting unfitness on political opponents while attempting to deflect attention from the unfitness uncomfortably closer to our ideological homes.

If this all weren’t so dangerous, it would be comical.

But dangerous it is. Foolish as well. We need to get younger in our political leadership as we do in many areas of leadership across the social spectrum. But we also need leadership that can help to heal and angry and divided electorate, which seeks to serve the cause of reconciliaton as much as to rule. We need leadership which dismantles patriarchal constructs, not only in terms of the gender of leaders but in their focus – less on being the singular, know-it-all “decider” and more on building teams of competent, caring, thoughtful persons who are genuinely committed to carrying out more than merely politicized agendas.

Such team-building is imperative for leaders regardless of age. Teams of people who embrace their role as more than partisans. More than sycophants. More than spinners of their own personalities and successes. More than narrators of a past that largely never happened in the way it has been narrated. More than defining a present that promises in excess of what it could ever deliver to people anxious and/or aggrieved regarding past, confirmed deliveries which simply never arrived. It really does matter who we surround ourselves with, at any age. It really does matter what we expect from those we surround ourselves with, at any age. As we lose touch with those who can remind us of the half-truths embedded in our own memories, we can at least insist on colleagues who can protect ourselves and others from the potential damage caused by an eroding memory, especially important regarding the dangers of this moment and the endless campaign-related claims of what might have actually taken place and what surely did not.

This electoral cycle is for me a reminder of our sometimes confused and/or ethically compromised candidates, but also about how much the very soul of this country has suffered damage in recent times, damage from greed and grievance; damage from “values” shoved down the throats of others by people who fail to live up to those values themselves; damage from partisanship blinded to its own thoughtless limitations of policy and practice; damage from false narratives about persons – citizens and immigrants alike – about whom we know little and care to know ever less; damage from militaristic mindsets and the military spending priorities which drain the national coffers and undermine the international principles we once helped to create; damage from religious convictions which are increasingly self-selective, self-serving and which too-often seek to substitute the rhetoric of vindication and supremacy for the practice of compassion and reconciliation.

It’s not all a mess, but it’s plenty messy. And it is beyond the capacity of any go-it-alone leadeship to successfully address.

I have my own, clear favorite for this upcoming electoral cycle as anyone who reads this is likely aware, albeit with caveats beyond a mere preference for the narratives spun by one old white guy over the narratives of another. My metrics of choice go beyond those associated with who stumbles down the most stairs, who forgets the most names of close family members or allied heads of state, who gets confused most often about the city they are in or why they have come there in the first place. One party now often offends me deeply and unequivocally, but the other party inspires less and less confidence as time goes on, confidence that they can see clearly enough do what is required to lead us through the challenges that lay before us in this moment, not the ones headlined in past narratives now attempting to cover themselves in more believable garb.

There are, indeed, many ways that even old white guys can contribute to a political culture that can inspire confidence more than stoke grievance, that can reassure anxious populations about the fresh directions which urgently need to take place, contributions which can offer up a generous spirit in response to our hard-hearted age, that can remind the populace of the many good things in our past that we have foolishly tossed aside but might actually recover, the trust and respect we have squandered without purpose, the reckless manner in which we have plundered a planet we otherwise profess to love.

But mostly, realistic or not, I need to see evidence of maturity and wisdom from these erstwhile elderly leaders, evidence which takes the form of stepping away from the misleading narratives of a political lifetime, evidence of real commitment to the nurture of next generation leadership, evidence of an ability to breathe before speaking and to argue with the world when we are about to run ourselves off a cliff, evidence of a plan to build teams of smart, humble and committed people who can create more horizontal and generous leadership frameworks to help restore confidence in governance and solicit a wider range of contributing skills and aspirations from our increasingly anxious and aggrieved public.

It seems clear to me which of the two old guys is most capable of supplying such evidence before the ink is dry on our presidential ballots. For the sake of a country in considerable distress, for the sake of a democracy largely relegated in this moment to some metaphorical sick bay, I hope I’m right.

Tags: ageing, false narratives, leadership

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Wondrous and Mundane: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

3 Dec

Space is still filled with the noise of destruction and annihilation, the shouts of self-assurance and arrogance, the weeping of despair and helplessness. But round about the horizon the eternal realities stand silent in their age-old longing. Alfred Delp

The thing I love most about Advent is the heartbreak. The utter and complete heartbreak. Jerusalem Jackson Greer

Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called. Remy de Gourmont

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. Laurell K. Hamilton

We don’t heal in isolation, but in community. S. Kelley Harrell

We were refugees from ourselves. Chris Cleave

One should be kinder than needed. R. J. Palacio

The science behind nudging is little more than a thin set of claims about how humans are “predictably irrational,” and our policies and systems should heavily divest from its influence. Leif Weatherby

This mere snippet of our Milky Way, for me and others, serves as a daily reminder of the incomprehensible vastness of our universe as well as the extraordinary “constellation” of ingredients – including our relative planetary isolation – which has given life on this “third rock from the sun” at least a “puncher’s chance” of sustainable survival.

For me, images such as the one above courtesy of Hubble and Webb, speak to both the nature of Advent and to the complexities of our human condition. Somehow, someway, we are the beneficiaries of life-permitting distance from the black holes, massive meteor incursions, supernovas and other solar instability which punctuate our galaxy and which could easily hasten the end of life as we know it. That we have not treated our planetary abundance with the reverence that our galactic positioning warrants is yet another example of our genetic and temperamental limitations, one more reason for all of us to pay closer attention to who we are, what we long for, what we actually cherish, and who we might still become, timing, courage and intention permitting.

Little of the above, of course, would make sense to those long ago, praying under galactic illumination for something or someone to come and redirect the course of humanity, any more than would the eventual, incarnate embodiment of this redirection – a child of cosmic implications and modest means huddled in a barn.

This Advent as with others, I have tried to highlight what for me is a compelling image of a figure in “lonely exile” sitting on the edge of hill beholding the vastness of space in a world without artificial light and the conveniences and distractions which it brings to our own time. How do we make sense of the brilliance and awesomeness of the firmament juxtaposed against the drudgery of much of life then as now, drudgery punctuated by the longing that something or someone can come to us – to our families and communities – providing balm for our seasonal heartbreak while restoring our largely broken hope, a hope that many of us have almost given up believing we have what it takes to bring it home for ourselves and those we cherish.

This “lonely exile” motif highlights some of the complexities of our earthly sojourn, reaching for the stars and yet compelled to attend to some oft-mundane human needs, scanning the heavens for signs of hope while remembering to plant the crops, feed the livestock, prepare the meals, wash the utensils, and change the diapers (or whatever passed for diapers in those times). Even in Advent, for some of us especially in Advent, we are constantly being dragged back into the habits of our pragmatic busyness, our preparations for the season of the manger which are more about material satisfaction than about spiritual consumption, more about getting our worldly goods in their preferred alignment than honoring the one we had long had the temerity to anticipate, the hope for humanity born into a thinly veiled chaos of social discrimination, straw bedding and bitter cold.

There is little that would help most in times past to anticipate or even make sense of THAT child in THAT manger at the end of a sequence of longing, reflection and even heartbreak. For more than a few, it makes even less now as we have more or less resigned ourselves to our addictive and even counter-productive politics and diplomatic convenings, accepting the production of ever-new weapons that can kill ever-more antiseptically, threatening the future of the children we proclaim to love in order to satisfy current cravings, and introducing ever new technological manifestations such as “Artificial Intelligence” which among other things underscores the failures of humans to fully cultivate the full range of our indigenous capacities, the memory, reason and skill which constitute our inheritance- — genetic and divine – and which should have placed us long ago on a saner, kinder, less predatory, more just and peaceful path than the one we now routinely tread.

My personal “path” to Advent has not always been as aware nor as productive as it could have been. I often spend Sunday mornings in New York engaged in a combination of activities which help to cleanse my often-clogged, spiritual palate, and which almost always include skype calls with friends and colleagues and a visit to a nearby farmer’s market with my best neighbor. But another Sunday ritual with Advent implications involves a walk to a neighborhood park to take in the bells of Riverside Church. Sitting under a rendition of Gabriel and his trumpet, I often find myself wishing that the stone could magically turn to flesh and that the trumpet could finally sound out its urgent notes, signaling some desperately needed backup from the beyond, some fortification of our now tepid and at times even duplicitous efforts to reverse climate impacts or halt our various predations and the conflicts from which they stem. Even I who have thrown my life (alongside so many others) into an unsettled pot of policy and service can at times give in to the temptation – indeed the heartbreak – of fearing that we (and I) just don’t have what it takes to straighten out the messes we have made, that the elements of our cognitive and emotional inheritance are simply insufficiently practiced and cultivated to save us from ourselves.

But save us we must, with whatever human capacities we can bring to bear, hopefully to include the full range of skills and intelligences that we have been endowed with but have yet to fully energize. To help this process along in my own life, when I am able and when the darkness enveloping me grants opportunity, I join the “lonely exile”in peering into the vastness of space as a means of recovering my sense of place in all its blessings and limitations, perceiving light reaching the end of its unintentional sojourn to earth spanning many thousands, even millions of our earthly years, light emanating from celestial bodies which now bear only provisional resemblance in real time to what the light reveals to us in our own time, light which also suggests that maybe we are not so imposing a species after all, indeed as much of our treatment of the natural world (and of each other) would already suggest.

For me, such revelations from the great void tend to shake me to my core. For is it not the miracle of Advent that despite our “failure to launch” as a species, despite our often lazy and self-referential engagements with our otherwise formidable capacities, despite our persistent bouts of “self-assurance and arrogance” in the material plane which routinely call out the demons of greed and indifference but less often the courage or the wonder, is it not a miracle of sorts that the vastness of cosmos and divinity has been mindful of us, has bothered with us in this time and place, has perhaps even taken us to heart at times more than we seem to have taken ourselves?

Indeed, is this not also the wonder of the manger from the standpoint of faith, this incarnate blending of the divine and the mundane, the peace which passes all understanding informing a peace to which we only occasionally give expression and which we often do not know how to effect even in our most intimate spaces? We have, to quote a Christian prayer book, “erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” But even more, we have set ourselves on the path to become “refugees to ourselves,” unsure how to fuse the wonder of the heavens and the chores of our immediate circumstances; how to reach for the stars and fetch the waters essential to this life; how to integrate humility and show kindness beyond that which is immediately required; how to heal wounds — together — which are often deep but which never physically show themselves; how to incarnate, cultivate and sustain skills and capacities which our world still needs and which we still have at the ready, albeit in forms too-often reminiscent of beautiful gardens overcome with weeds or sumptuous foodstuffs contaminated with mold.

This is too much about we refugees and our limitations perhaps. But if so, Advent can serve as a reminder to ensure that our reflections on the season are also about the best of us, the best of what we can imagine, the best of what we can desire, the best of what we can accomplish. The longings and mysteries of Advent and the coming of the manger child, for me at least, bear witness to many things, perhaps the most significant of which is that our collective best of skills and capacities remain as a formidable conduit for mercy and healing, for peace and caring. And somehow, by some measure of the grace we can barely comprehend, all this lies still within our grasp.

Tags: Advent, divinity, Faith, Galaxy, leadership, manger, simplicity, Wisdom

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Mind Meld: Independent Thought in an Age of Grievance, Dr. Robert Zuber

5 Jul

fireworks

My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me. Jane Austen

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free. Ralph Ellison

Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Bertrand Russell

The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them. Joseph Heller

When we stop doing things for ourselves and expect others to dance around us, we are not achieving greatness. We have made ourselves weak. Pandora Poikilos

There are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness. Megan Turner

It’s good to have a healthy fear of horror. Anne Quirk

As most of you know, yesterday was Independence Day in the US, a day ostensibly for us to count our many blessings and remember those in our past who, despite their often considerable personal flaws, helped make at least some of those blessings possible.

At a moment defined by deep social division, grave economic uncertainty and a stealth virus, I’m not sure how many blessings were counted yesterday. And yet, in my neighborhood, our verdant parks were filled with what seemed to be happy family gatherings, some in groups as large as 50, albeit with no masks to be seen or distances kept. The otherwise majestic Hudson River at the West Harlem Pier attracted its own crowd of families, even as the waters were mysteriously punctuated with the smell of dead fish while military aircraft roared overhead, a precursor to the endless booms from fireworks, legal and otherwise, that dominated the city skies until well past midnight.

The media conferred its own messaging for the day obsessing, as it so often does, on the ways and means of the US president and his enablers, specifically their apparent willingness to fashion a re-election campaign based on some alleged “white grievance” that they feel can be successfully exploited for political purposes.

There was so much of this “Independence Day” I simply could not relate to, though not necessarily to my credit. I felt dismayed by the unwillingness of so many people to protect themselves from a virus which has given every indication of its ability to double back on victims and mutate to further complicate treatment options. I felt dismayed that as our national debt balloons to unmanageable levels and people cling to what little remains of their economic viability that we somehow still think that military fly-overs and taxpayer-funded political rallies (and golfing outings) are more important than clean rivers and health care access. I felt dismayed that it is still possible for political candidates to run for office in this world based on the idea that “white people” represent some generic category of humans who have somehow or other been screwed over in the global commons, that “we” are endlessly entitled to more than our share and that it is appropriate that others “dance around us” while we delude ourselves about the sanctity and reliability of our commitment to all that is good and right in the world.

And I felt especially dismayed that notions of freedom and independence are exploited so shamelessly by those who often haven’t given a second thought to what that means or, more pointedly, what that requires of us in return. Thus many are left to believe that we are “free” merely when we get to do what we want; and this at a time when the well-worn truism that “freedom is for persons with incomes” has perhaps never been more relevant in our recent history. While too-many of us grind our teeth and take offense at the thought of wearing a mask or keeping physical distance, more and more face economic hardship and difficult choices between home care for children and showing up at low-wage jobs that barely meet the caring threshold. At the same time, more and more of us are having our consumer and political preferences manipulated and massaged in ways we refuse to acknowledge or, at times, even gleefully accept. More and more of us have misplaced useful distinctions between the aesthetic and the ethical, presuming that “what we like” is what is good for us and others, that our “tastes” in things remain our “guidestar” regarding how we behave and what behavior we are willing to tolerate in the rest of the human race.

Ironically, COVID-19 has exposed fashions and fault-lines in my country (and beyond) that have actually been trending for some time. We cultivated wariness and suspicion towards each other long before the virus compelled most of us to “keep our distance.” Millions of people were living on the economic edge long before COVID forced (and will continue to force) a shut-down of so many local businesses and economies. Inequalities in the political and economic realms have long been grotesque and have only increased under our current viral cloud. We have long struggled to minimize the scapegoating that has accompanied our dubious claims of “exceptionalism” long before so many of our current “leaders” turned responsibility-dodging into an art form. Many have suffered from sometimes debilitating levels of loneliness and social isolation that have only been made more acute through a series of lockdowns and quarantines that, in the short-term at least, promise only episodic periods of relief.

On top of this, our almost generic lack of thoughtfulness about the urgent needs of our planet and our responsibilities towards generations to come is perhaps the most tragic of this moment’s incarnations. On the whole, where the future of our planet is concerned, we are still taking away far too much and giving too little of ourselves in return.

In this difficult present, it is apparently fine for health care workers to risk their lives to save those reckless persons for whom mask wearing has become some sort of political litmus test. It is apparently fine for some people to attribute evil intent to others who want their country to honor promises to equal opportunity and social justice. It is also apparently OK for some people of elite up-bringing and education to denigrate and exploit the alleged “unwashed masses” whose purchases line their pockets and to whose aspirations for life they couldn’t possibly give a second thought.

I’m not sure where the “freedom” is in all of this, aside from the freedom to be mean. The current moment speaks more loudly of our emotional fragility and cultural isolation, our manifest unwillingness to escape the ideas and expectations of our tribes, our inability to see beyond our personal grievances – legitimate and not — to a broader grievance to which we have contributed in our own way and which blithely places millions of God’s children on the precipice of ruin and despair each and every day.

On this US Independence Day weekend, I’ve gone back to review a few of the many seminal thinkers and writers who would never endorse my feeble attempts at policy and cultural analysis but who have influenced me nonetheless. And one of their most important influences is the fierceness with which they set out to examine and overcome the impediments to genuine freedom which we routinely place in our own way. I so admire their fortitude to gaze upon a “pit of hell” largely of our own creation; their courage to face-down attempts to intimidate and silence; their wisdom to understand the relationship between freedom and self-discovery, its healthy and the unhealthy aspects, our hidden-truths and self-deceptions; the horror in the world for which they were able to cultivate both a “healthy fear” and a determination to make the world much less horrible –much less frightening — especially for those many vulnerable persons worldwide who know deprivation more intimately than they might ever know freedom.

There are certainly levels of loneliness and isolation that can accompany such an examination, even one that is liberally coated in kindness, empathy or appreciation. We live in an age which seems to have largely solved the territorial dynamics of self-governance but not the dynamics germane to governance of the self. Ours is a time when the “freedom” to believe what you will has little reference either to evidence or to social consequences beyond our own circles; when the numerous errors and even cowardice associated with national and global policy are mostly banal but at times rather vicious; when so many people are content to celebrate platitudes of freedom and independence, but recoil from any independent assessment of social and economic trends that they dare not exercise themselves and that they certainly do not recommend for others.

Thus there is the need, perhaps more acute than has been the case for some time, for independent minds that can challenge both social order and personal hypocrisy, that can expose the dark spaces that we seem intent on proliferating but also highlight the people and settings which are, even now, paving the way for greater freedom and justice, minds reminding us of a more connected calling and helping us sift through the debris which still impedes our progress towards a world we can all be proud to celebrate.

Tags: cowardice, freedom, injustice, leadership

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Secret Service: Uncovering Commitments to Seeing and Knowing, Dr. Robert Zuber

12 Apr

How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see? Bob Dylan

She was flushed and felt intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candor. It muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom. Kate Chopin

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. George Orwell

So we explain it to ourselves, justify it enough to sleep. And then we bury it deep, so deep we can almost pretend it never happened. Jesse Kirby

Lie until even you believe it – that’s the real secret. Holly Black

How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves – our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding. Andrew Sean Greer

As much of the monotheistic world finds itself in the midst of annual devotions and preparations, we find ourselves in the throes of what the theologian Paul Tillich used to refer to as the “already and not yet,” the often bumpy road we have collectively traveled and the better-maintained stretches that potentially lie ahead, the places in which we have currently invested our hope and confidence and the changes we have yet to make to ensure our common, sustainable future.

In discerning this unusual time, it is reassuring that so many voices in diverse settings are now questioning the virtue of a “return to normal,” recognizing the restoration of nature and community which, in many instances, has been a welcome by-product of human quarantine. Many of us questioned the viability of the path that we have fallen upon, the ride that we have been on for such a long time, in part because we claimed to have forgotten how to disembark. It seems that it took a virus, and the utterly reckless deaths and disruptions –so often to persons living in poverty– that have occurred in its wake to pierce through at least some of our stubborn allegiance to structures of economy and society that have literally been killing us for some time.

And yet as we exit the seasons of Lent and Passover and enter the season of Ramadan, it is not clear that we have yet pinpointed the specific changes that we collectively need to make, changes that are being undermined by much of our leadership as much as encouraged. We focus now on things like fabric for masks, as well we should, but still too many heroic health workers remain without their full protection. And, in a paradoxical sense, we have yet to take down the metaphorical masks that we wear each and every day, the masks made of flesh that fail to keep out the virus but which keep our lies and secrets deeply buried, so deep that they act like the earth’s molten core, affecting most every aspect of our lives from a depth that is largely beyond our reach.

And so before we completely shake off the beneficial effects of our holy seasons, before we book our return trip to the familiarity of gross inequalities, clogged arteries (streets and veins), polluted cities and waterways, weapons (forever it seems) on the march, and resolutions and legislation focused on the health and security of “horses that have already left the barn,” let’s take a moment for an “unaccustomed taste of candor,” a look at tasks that we can undertake from the relative (for some) comfort and connectivity of the places where we are waiting out the viral storm.

One suggestion is that we examine our collective proclivity to highly selective perception, the skill we have honed to acknowledge only the information that suits our purposes or that helps us cover mistakes that we make but refuse to own.

Our virus-affected politics are now drowning in such selectivity. “Nobody could have seen this coming,” one after another leader maintains. “Nobody knew the extent of the threat,” insist others. In instance after instance, those who should know better (and in fact did know better) employ the “plausible deniability” card, the notion that “information never reached my desk,” “I never saw the memo,” and so forth. And this is generally linked to the altogether suspect claim by that very same leadership that “once they knew” they “did the right thing” with determination and resolve.

Many people want to be convinced by this, so much so that once these lies are exposed, once it becomes clear from media reports and leaks by people close to power that our leadership turned its collective head and pretended not to see, the focus has already shifted from the pandemic we could have done more to prevent to the pandemic which we are anxious to move past – to bury the dead, take in the vaccine once its ready, and get those shopping malls, lending institutions and cruise ships back on line.

There are two points to make here in this context. The first is that it is not only leadership that turns its head when it is convenient to do so. To some degree we are all “jellyfish” on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding, adjusting our metaphorical shape to fit the times rather than insisting that our longstanding self-deceptions escape their prisons and share the disinfecting light. We choose to turn our own heads more than we acknowledge; turn away from persons in need or from the internal rubble of disappointments and deceptions that impacts so many of our movements and reactions. And we pretty much all employ a now-familiar brand of deniability, a narrative about “missing emails and phone calls” that we simply don’t want to deal with, of sharing the half of the truth that puts us in a more favorable light, of acting as though we don’t see and hear what we clearly see and hear.

This is what we do. It may not cost lives but it makes the lives we live less authentic and less connected; in some sense making them less of a life.

The second point pertains to the implications of our increasingly securitized societies. I often find it painfully amusing that in an age of drones and spy satellites that can determine what people are reading from a distance of hundreds of miles; of increasingly sophisticated forms of espionage, ubiquitous surveillance and cell phone cameras, and websites that relentlessly track our personal preferences and drag intimate details of our personal lives out from the dark for inspection and (often) ridicule; that leadership with regular access to updated intelligence and expertise from all corners of the earth can so often get away with “not knowing.”

Most often, they only pretend not to know. They only pretend not to see.

These willful deficits of knowledge and perception have become the cardinal tools with which our leadership too often justifies a failure to act, or more precisely, a failure to act in a manner that is both timely and sufficiently robust. These are the tools that allow leadership to sleep at night while so many others remain sleepless, wondering how their families are going to manage another crisis not of their making, survive another opportunity for our “not knowing” leadership to consolidate their political and economic power at the expense of the many who were barely holding on before this virus cut through their remaining options like a hot knife.

As we emerge from the worst of this current viral iteration as well as our own special seasons of faith, we must do better than run towards a now-romanticized version of normalcy and the muddled “truths” that underlie its attractions. We must do better than to allow the falsehoods that have enabled so much of our broken politics and economics — as well as those that exert so much power over our individual lives from their deep and hidden places — to resume their perches of illegitimate authority.

Many of us have more time on our hands now than we ever thought we would. Let’s use some of that to insist that our leadership — and we ourselves — examine and expose the places of secrecy and willful ignorance that run contrary to the core of our faith traditions and that are, even now, paving fresh pathways of misery and deceit.

Our “not yet” can truly be brighter than our “already,” but only as we admit to knowing and seeing what we actually know and see, and to insist that our leadership does likewise.

Tags: Faith, Knowledge, leadership

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Tuesday’s Child: Leadership to Inspire Next Generations, Dr. Robert Zuber

20 Jan

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon. E.M. Forster

We must desire to see people rising in life, rather than looking for ways to contribute to their fall. Bamigboye Olurotimi

Youth and elder meet where the pressure of the future meets the presence of the past. Michael Meade

He had a courtly way of exclaiming over whatever was exclaimable in people – especially kids. Susan Cain

The UN sprang back to life this week with several key events and with the faces of diplomats and secretariat staff looking fresher and more eager than they did a few short weeks ago.

Our own interns, with one notable exception, have largely scattered, soon to be replaced by others. Some of what took place this week would have been really good for all of them to experience, the enthusiasm of a system that has taken some lumps over the past years, led by people who are determined to make that system not only work more effectively, but work for all.

One of the things that we ask of the young people who pass through our program is that they give a good-faith effort to understand the UN in all its policy facets – from the Security Council and the work of the GA committees to specialized bodies focused on the rights of women, the care of children, the health of oceans and agriculture, the sustainability of cities, and much more. At the same time, we ask them to evaluate (not judge) the personalities sitting at conference room podiums, to interrogate which UN leadership is most believable, which is keeping his/her eyes focused on the issues of greatest significance for the planet, but also has a plan for how to enable and promote meaningful and sustainable change among the UN’s diverse constituencies.

The rationale for these requests is twofold. First, we want interns and fellows to, in essence, rub the interests and priorities that they come to us with up against the priorities and interests of a system that is now weighing in at so many significant policy levels. While the UN is still some ways from being a viable learning community, learning opportunities abound, both diverse and of high quality. Indeed, in much of the 20 years of Global Action’s existence, we have “mined” the many nuggets of learning available throughout UN system – its security crises and cutting-edge side events, its pandemic responses and gender justice sessions, as the best means available for keeping our minds focused and our vision sharp.

Some of the most interesting events have also been a bit of a welcome surprise – the Arria Formula meetings organized by Security Council members outside the Council’s formal structure, the impact-filled side events such as a fall briefing on the crisis of the Aral Sea region presided over by the president of Uzbekistan, or this past Monday’s multi-stakeholder discussion on finance for development presided over by the highly-regarded and able-listening president of the Economic and Social Council, Ambassador Rhonda King.

Given the vast and high level learning opportunities that abound in UN conference rooms and to which they have access, many of our interns leave the UN with a different passion than they entered with. They take advantage of the “front row seat” provided for them to review their potential contributions over the frustrations and opportunities that punctuate virtually every UN policy discussion. Do I want to contribute to policy or to direct humanitarian response? Do I want to assist with development finance, with humanitarian risk assessment, with efforts to control our hunger for new and improved weapons?

But the second aspect of this UN journey is equally important, the assessment of the many “players” in the UN system who set agendas and guide negotiations, whose voices have an outsized importance in terms of how the UN directs its internal energies and engages external audiences.

Our interns, with few exceptions, have not been successful in cultivating relationships with diplomats and UN officials that go beyond the merely “professional.” Thus, there have been few opportunities for them to experience what we would consider to be “mentoring” in UN contexts beyond commitments to their growth and well-being available through our own office and “community of peers.” The balances that constitute mentoring in the best sense – a combination of character and skills development made possible through an invitation to explore the struggles and successes of life “up close,” is elusive for many in this policy space.

And yet there are occasions when bits of personality leak through the formalities of UN protocol, giving all of us – but especially young people – glimpses of human agency and possibility in these challenging times. The interns might not know in any detail what makes UN leaders tick, or more importantly, the stories that lies behind their commitments, the life circumstances that gave rise to a career of service in multilateral settings. But despite these personal limitations, they can make observations of value in a time of great uncertainty. After all, young people are gazing towards a future that can spin in a variety of directions, some of them quite discouraging. Does UN leadership grasp this discouragement or even share it? And beyond discouragement itself, which figures at the front of the room truly inspire? Who is really listening to others? Who respects contributions beyond the status limitations of diplomatic protocol? Who are the leaders grasping the momentousness of the times, calling us to cooperatively focus our intellectual, moral, diplomatic and technical energies on the problems that threaten our existence?

This past Tuesday, two events sought to affirm the values of multilateralism, inspire stakeholders to higher levels of collaborative engagement, and focus energies on the problems of our own making that threaten to grind human progress to a halt. The first of these was a handover of leadership of the Group of 77 (G-77) and China from Egypt to Palestine. President Abbas made the trip to New York to appear on the dais with senior UN officials and the Egyptian Foreign Minister to affirm the importance of the G-77 to the fair and able functioning of the UN development system, integrating what is promoted here as “south-south” cooperation. Both President Abbas and the president of the UN General Assembly, María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés of Ecuador, underscored the importance of the G-77 to creating conditions of greater “global solidarity” from which we can tackle poverty and inequalities, climate change and “decent work,” these and other problems critical to a healthier and more just world.

In the afternoon president Espinosa Garcés herself took center stage, outlining priorities for her term in a voice that was both resolute and thoughtful. She cited the current “turbulent” challenges that require all member states “to reaffirm their fidelity to the values of the Charter and the enduring value of multilateralism.” She was gracious in thanking states and stakeholders for the many contributions they are already making to a more just and sustainable world. And she put forth an appropriately ambitious agenda for change – from “fact-based” migration governance and eliminating ocean plastics, to the full inclusion of persons with disabilities and the “common cause” of ending poverty and gross inequalities — that communicated both the scope of her concern for the planet and her willingness to use every “soft power” tool at her disposal (including the convening of a breathtaking range of high-level events) to leverage additional collaborative change.

It fell to President Abbas, earlier on this Tuesday, to remind the large diplomatic audience that “people are the real treasure of nations.” Our people (especially young people) need to be inspired to “rise in life” by leaders who demonstrate both vision and compassion, who understand the challenges of the times and more specifically that such challenges are unlikely to be resolved successfully without the urgent and respectful engagement of all of us. On this Tuesday, the UN demonstrated to all its stakeholders, young and old alike, that it is getting that message.

Tags: General Assembly, leadership, youth

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Land of Promise: The UN Takes Stock of an Underestimated Continent, Dr. Robert Zuber

22 Oct

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Where a woman rules, streams run uphill. Ethiopian proverb

Do not let what you cannot do tear from your hands what you can. Ashanti proverb

I dream of an Africa which is in peace with itself. Nelson Mandela

There is always something new out of Africa. Pliny the Elder

This was “Africa Week” at the UN, a time for this entire community to stake stock of our debts to African peoples but also to celebrate the many ways in which Africans are truly developing and then implementing home-grown solutions to their own problems.

Despite the many responsibilities associated with the six General Assembly Committees that meet all this month, most all UN hands were “on deck” for all or part of this week long assessment of the roads that African states have tread and what they might still become. This included as well the UN Security Council, which bears the brunt of responsibility for resolving conflicts from South Sudan (on which it met this past week) and Mali to Nigeria and now Cameroon. The Council is currently in the Sahel region (today in Mali) on mission to assess the status of the P-5 Sahel Force which it authorized and which is intended to bring stability to a region threatened by a “cocktail” whose ingredients include insurgency, climate stresses and food insecurity.

The stated goals for Africa week, “an integrated, prosperous, people-centered and peaceful Africa” draws heavily on the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda as well as Africa’s own Agenda 2063. These goals were articulated in a thoughtful manner throughout the week, avoiding clichés and “quick wins” in favor of clear sighted examinations of what African states and their peoples need and what stands in the way of their progress. Part of that discussion is related to finance, not only to the preservation of essential remittances, but to the ways in which states can better protect their own natural resources from exploitation and increase sources of domestic revenue, including through reducing “tax avoidance and profit shifting.”

Beyond finance, the week highlighted a variety of challenges, including forced migration patterns exacerbated by climate-related drought and multiple iterations of armed violence. There were also important discussions on creating more opportunities for affordable credit and “decent work” — in many instances highlighting the degree to which the African labor force is now both robust and youthful — as well as on the challenges in harnessing Africa’s unprecedented “demographic dividend.”

The implications of this “dividend” go well beyond employment. Over the years at Global Action, I have been blessed to visit and work in most every region on the continent, including Egypt in the north, South Africa in the south, Senegal in the west, Kenya in the east, Cameroon in the center. And while all of these countries have much cultural and ecological diversity to commend, one of the things they seem to have in common is young people who are anxiously and even impatiently prepared to assume mantles of economic and political leadership. There is a “leadership dividend” across Africa as well, people who hope to soon turn their aspirations into higher offices, people who refuse to choose between integration and sovereignty, between economic development and environmental protection, between reliable governance and local participation. These are people with the fresh ideas about how Africa might be and are prepared to make the changes needed to ensure that the goals enumerated in the UN’s Africa Week are more than just another set of multilateral promises.

The Concept Note for this Africa Week highlighted two particular challenges for this new generation of African leader. The first of these is “integration” of a continent divided by deserts and jungles, but also by culture and language, even at times by levels of openness to continent-wide initiatives focused on security, trade and other matters essential to sustainable development. Despite positive efforts by the African Union on security and sub-regional entities such as the Southern African Development Community on African trade, optimal levels of integration remain impeded by a series of issues that have long resisted resolution, including providing dependable access by land-locked countries to seaports in neighboring states and creating a more reliable transportation network linking those states. In this regard, the ambitious (and costly) proposal floated this week for an Integrated High Speed Train Network is welcome, especially by persons who have long struggled to move themselves (and their agricultural products and other commodities) around Africa’s vast spaces.

And then there is the security (threatened by both insugencies and excessive state responses) on which all intra-and inter-state development depends. On numerous occasions, reference was made this week to the African Union initiative Silencing the Guns by 2020, with outcomes considered by many (rightly in our view) as essential to a sustainable future. Many African states are now awash in weapons both licit and illicit. And as the AU’s “Silencing” report notes, “the continent has hosted, and continues to be home to, a number of deadly conflicts that jeopardize human, national and international security and defy efforts to resolve them.” Such conflicts involve state and non-state actors, and often draw on sources of weapons located far from the scenes of the violence. The “fuel” for these conflicts often takes the form of governance that is unfair or even unjust; food, water and health insecurities that force families into heartbreaking choices; exploitative employment in sectors such as extraction that provide little economic relief and poison local ecosystems; and rights violations that keep so many women, youth and indigenous persons locked into senseless, disempowering social roles.

The “leadership dividend” which we have seen first-hand in many African regions seems capable of both drying up access to weapons and healing many of the social and economic causes that cause people to reach for weapons in the first instance. This “dividend” must remain at the center of any UN discussions on African issues and capacities going forward.

The World Economic Forum noted this week the strong possibility that by the year 2100 one third of all people on earth will reside in Africa. Assuming that we don’t bomb or melt ourselves into extinction before then, this is a staggering statistic, one that will impact every aspect of African governance, security, economy and ecology. The “strongly intertwined challenges” that currently characterize areas such as the Lake Chad Basin, the Horn of Africa, and the Central African states will evolve in unforeseen ways across the continent, calling for gender and culture-balanced leadership that can inspire hands and hearts that “know what they can do” and commit to doing it.

For the rest of us — during Africa Week and every other week – we must do what we can and all that we can to ensure that Africa has every opportunity to be at peace and, as Mandela noted, to be at peace with itself.

Tags: Africa, leadership, peace, security

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Ode to Inspiration: The Challenges of UN Leadership on the Run, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Sep

Leadership is not about a title or a designation. It’s about impact, influence and inspiration. Robin S. Sharma

A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Leadership is not about the next election, it’s about the next generation. Simon Sinek

One of the trickiest aspects of our (mostly self-authorizing) mandate is the assessment of the contributions of outgoing presidents of the UN‘s General Assembly. Part of this is a function of timing – with three months to prepare and only one year to implement, the gap separating the end of the institutional honeymoon and the crossing of the institutional finish line is thin indeed.

The accelerated pace at which this office must attempt to make its mark is made more complex by the sheer volume of policy activity for which the office of the president is responsible. On more and more matters of global governance, including at times matters directly affecting international peace and security, the full General Assembly membership is demanding a voice and expecting the president to enable and magnify that voice.

And finally there is the nature of leadership itself. More and more, it seems, everyone in our overly-schooled cultures is now presumed to be a “leader” in some fashion or other. This leadership “saturation” has many implications, not all of them problematic, but one troubling implication is the reticence of erstwhile “leaders” to agree to be led by others. The “herding cats” analogy is probably overused, but the “forging of consensus” which is such an important component of modern leadership is made more complex in a setting where so many of us “know differently” and so often claim to “know better.”

Into this cauldron of expectation and impediment stepped Fiji’s Peter Thomson, elected president of the UN General Assembly on June 13, 2016 in the closest of votes over Cyprus Ambassador Mavroyiannis. In his acceptance speech, and with the personal humility and Hollywood-quality voice to which we have all become accustomed, he cited this “great moment” for the Pacific Small Islands Developing States (SIDS), pledging to keep their voices and their issues –especially ocean health and climate impacts – at the top of his agenda. He also pointed to the critical need to ratchet up our engagement with all Sustainable Development Goals – perhaps the most important promise that the UN has ever made to its global constituents. He subsequently pushed to ensure that all aspects (even the controversial ones) of what is now known as the 2030 Development Agenda – national ownership, inclusive participation, reliable (real-time) data, predictable finance – received urgent and adequate consideration.

His catholic vision was embraced by many of the top diplomats in the UN system who lent their own expertise and leadership to a range of issue critical to the future of the planet, from climate impacts and migration governance to human trafficking and improving modes of participation for women, youth, indigenous people and other persons whose skills and aspirations have spent far too much time already isolated on our global margins.

All the while, a core focus was maintained on the alleviation of global poverty as well as on the implementing health of the UN system itself. In the latter instance, Thomson and colleagues understood that as the demands on the UN grow and resources remain problematic, it is essential that key UN bodies encourage clear, efficient and scandal-free expectations. Though it is fair to quibble (as we have done ourselves) over priority reforms for the UN system, the attention of the PGA and other top diplomats to how the General Assembly does its business – and how the office of the president enables and facilitates that business – has been most appreciated.

The abiding question for us here, beyond the specifics of policy investments, is what lessons of leadership can be gleaned from the Thomson presidency? We would like to suggest the following.

Keep focus on the most urgent crises: While there has been over the past year a bit grousing from the disarmament community about Thomson’s level of commitment in this area, for the most part he has invested the energies of his office on the crises that are most likely to undermine human dignity and threaten our common future. He has recognized, as we all should, that it is important to keep the kitchen clean but less so when the house is burning.
Keep relevant issues and issue stakeholders connected: While there is much talk at the UN about “eliminating silos,” we continue to allow bureaucracy and politics to stifle broader policy responsibilities. Connecting the policy dots has been a hallmark of our office’s work for over a decade. Having a president who has been so visibly committed to full spectrum policy engagements, including and beyond SDG goals and targets, has been highly encouraging, both for the UN and the world surrounding it.
Be present: This president brought exceptional personal energy to the UN system. With help from his policy advisers and speech writers, he was seemingly everywhere in and out of headquarters. My interns often found it remarkable that he could make his presence felt in so many diverse policy settings, sharing relevant remarks both humble and impacting, but also lending credibility to UN discussions that might otherwise have remained in the policy shadows.
Promote hope and agency in others: In many ways, Thomson’s signature achievements were a function of his devotion and loyalty to the people and leaders of the small island developing states. Their voices have rarely enjoyed the volume and resonance that they have over this past year. But beyond the SIDS, welcoming and growing participation by women and indigenous peoples was high on the president’s agenda. And our young people – the largest generation in human history — were consistently invited to the UN by this president in a manner that was inclusive without being patronizing. He was able as few are to recognize the skills and energy of youth and endorse their urgency and even skepticism; all while reminding them that they still have much to learn and that there are generations behind their own for whom we will also need to find productive and participatory spaces.

In remarks shared at one of the many high level events he has sponsored over the past year, Thomson concluded this week’s Culture of Peace dialogue with the following: “Let us work to build bridges of understanding amongst our people; to create environments that foster inclusion and mutual respect; to develop education systems that teach harmony; and to raise children and grandchildren who will safeguard a global culture of peace. “

Amen, Mr. President. During one short and frenetic year, you and your office have set a high bar for Slovakian Foreign Minister Lajcak who is set to take over your duties. Indeed you have raised the bar for all UN leadership as they seek to rally the skills and energies of this system needed to clean up our messes, eliminate our habituated discrimination, armed conflict and wastefulness, and fulfill our urgent policy promises to those next generations now looking anxiously over our shoulders.

Tags: General Assembly, Global Governance, leadership, sustainable development

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Ballot Stuffing: The UN Confronts State Claims of Indispensability, Dr. Robert Zuber

27 Mar

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I’m sitting in my office on an Easter morning having just walked through a park filled with Narcissus (Daffodils) – bright yellow and white flowers that bear within themselves the promise of their own regeneration.

In the northern countries, budding flowers have long served as visual confirmation of at least part of the Easter message – that death is not the final word, that renewal is possible and that the keys to renewal reside partially within us.

Some states on and off the UN Security Council claim such a power for elections as well, seeing them as an “elixir” of national stability, an integral step towards any prospects for national regeneration. In many parts of the UN system, including the Security Council, elections are widely encouraged as an antidote to political stalemate, to insurgent violence, to restorations of both the rule of law and the good graces of the international community.

Nonetheless, as we look around the world on this Easter morning, this ascription of “elixir” would appear to be a hard sell. High levels of “negatives” for US presidential candidates, confidence in leadership undermined in Brazil, concerns about Turkey and the political collapse of the European community, economic woes in Burundi, the DRC and elsewhere spiking public anxieties and threatening transitions, spoilers within too many states (and not all of them insurgents) stoking violence and unrest that undermines reasonable prospects for the maintenance of some semblance of normalcy.

And then there are those leaders who simply refuse to leave, those who imagine themselves to be “indispensable” to the maintenance of whatever prospects for national stability and prosperity might exist. Some of these leaders have thumbed their noses at their own constitutions. Others have committed grave abuses against their own people and then manipulated electoral processes in order to shield themselves from post-office litigation. Too many lay claim a “mandate” that is neither constitutional nor performance-based, a mandate that serves only to further widen the distrust of citizens towards a state fully convinced that its continued presence in office is beyond reproach.

Clearly, as noted by Paul Collier, “elections determine who is in power, but they do not determine how power is used.” Nor, apparently, do they always determine when and how such power is to be transitioned.

In preparing to write this piece, I searched for quotations on elections that I thought might be uplifting. What I mostly found were quotations both humorous and skeptical. Among them:

The Portuguese writer José Maria de Eça de Queiroz alleged that “Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently and both for the same reason. “ The US humorist Will Rogers noted that, “If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn’t be any inducement to go to heaven.” Also from the US, Mark Twain noted that “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”

There were many more in this vein – grateful for the existence of elections and their own ability to participate in them, but skeptical of the motives of those running for office and mostly despairing of the accountability of the winners after all the votes have been counted. Many are skeptical as well of the disproportionate influence of those holding large fortunes on the political “fortunes” of others, of the ability of leaders to resist the allures of power and redirect that power to public benefit, of the willingness of leaders to battle the demon of “indispensability” through which so much violence, discrimination and political inertia flows.

Clearly, as many within and outside the UN recognize, elections cannot be abstracted from the societies in which they occur. Moreover, the holding of elections, while useful in helping to “settle” and legitimize the political order, is hardly a panacea for what ails people. Indeed, much of the violence which occupies the UN Security Council and security establishments in national capitals relates to the inability – or unwillingness – of ostensibly “elected” governments to offer protection, legal integrity, political freedom and development-without-discrimination to their populations.

As the US noted rightly this week in the Security Council, if leaders are “indispensable,” then clearly they have failed at nation building. Clearly they have too often failed to uphold the rule of law on which most national constitutions are based. Clearly they have also failed to guarantee an end to impunity for violations of public trust committed by any officials of the state. Clearly they have failed — as suggested by UN SRSG Sidikou during that same Security Council meeting — to create and maintain vigorous public spaces for journalists, civil society and even dissenting policy voices, helping to ensure that official promises are addressed in good faith and any abuses of power are not repeated. Clearly, they have failed to heed Spain’s recent Council urging for electoral processes that do their part to help turn citizens into “protagonists for their own future.”

In other words, “indispensable” leaders who lack the commmitment to enabling rather than obstructing citizens as they seek to express and enact the powers of social regeneration that lie within them.

More and more, elections themselves seem to be more of a “fingers crossed” moment than any guarantee of future inclusiveness – fingers crossed that “changing the diapers” willl result in happier outcomes than another round of diaper burn. States worldwide are under assault from terrorists and climate-induced drought, from criminal networks and economic predation. Even the most accountable of states are now staring down multiple traumatic circumstances. All states now need help in one form or another, from the UN and other mutilateral institutions, of course, but also from their own citizens.

At the UN this past week, Special Envoy Djinnit noted that, in the African region for which he is responsible, successful elections are now the occasion for mostly “fragile achievements.” Even in these treacherous times, we know some of what it takes to remove the “fragile” tag; replacing repression with open political space, discrimination with fairness, and manipulations of the law with accountability to its cherished provisions. We must also do better at ensuring vital and thoughtful linkages between national governance and the three, public commitment pillars of the UN system – to security, human rights and development. “Fragile” is still within our power to change.

And of course we must find ways to do better about selecting people to lead us who have the humility and wisdom to pass the torch when it is time for them to go.

Elections are one significant piece of a larger puzzle towards ensuring peaceful relations, participation and fairness, both elections within member states and even elections within the UN itself: A puzzle incorporating balloting that underscores – rather than undermines – commitments to political and social inclusiveness, while cultivating a “verifiable trust” in government by citizens that is – more than any political leaders themselves – indispensable to a just and effective political order.

Tags: elections, leadership, Security Council

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Taking Turns: Promoting Elder Rights and Enhancing Inter-Generational Connection, Dr. Robert Zuber

18 Jul

While much of the UN community this past week was riveted on discussions on development financing taking place in Ethiopia, some highly suggestive events were taking place in New York. Among the most significant of these was the Open Ended Working Group on Ageing, kindly and capably chaired by Argentina’s Mateo Estrémé.

Having been raised largely by elders (Aunts and grandparents) and having served in church communities thankfully punctuated by elders’ helpful presence, it is always heartwarming to see the UN place elder care near the core of their policy interests, whether it is this working group, the permanent forum on indigenous peoples, or in other venues. In all of these settings there is much to lament regarding how too many elders are faring in this world, but also much to celebrate – so many lives with collected wisdom and skills, lives that remain more vital to community well-being than its younger residents often recognize.

As many readers are already aware, the world is currently grappling with ironic demographic twists – the dramatic “greying” of cultures such as Japan and many parts of Europe coupled with an explosion of young people in the “developing” world, allegedly the largest generation of youth in human history. Added to this are elders whose life (and work) spans are on the rise as more and more youth worldwide grapple with uncertain economic options and uneven messaging from older leadership. Apparently, youth participation in social and political life is essential to solving a range of global crises, and yet we elders (or soon to be) refuse to ease our grip on the levers of political and economic control or create viable spaces where the participation of others has real meaning.

That these inconsistencies create distance and even tensions between generations on a regular basis is not surprising. That we are moving in a direction to create more inter-generational understanding and harmony is an assumption requiring some deeper reflection.

The Open Ended Working Group rarely engaged these inter-generational issues directly. While rightly calling attention to some serious problems affecting older persons – increasing incidences of “elder abuse,” discrimination in housing and employment, a crumbling of social safety networks – the key issue impacting the Working Group was a debate on the necessity of creating a stand-alone convention to fully address the rights of older persons.

As anyone who follows UN affairs knows, this desire for a convention is hardly precedent setting. To help focus policy concern on many themes and constituencies, and to establish a framework of binding attention and mandated response, the UN has adopted many “conventions” or “treaties.”

Do we need such a framework with respect to the elderly? The Working Group chair, supported by Brazil, other states and most of the participating NGOs, maintained that a convention was needed to address a litany of legitimate “rights gaps.” Others, especially states of the European Union (perhaps out of fear that they would be asked to pay for convention-related costs) preferred to modify existing human rights arrangements to more adequately accommodate the needs and interests of elders.

We eventually came down on the side of those favoring a convention, but not without caveats.

Certainly we recognize the following: that conventions do focus policy attention, existing human rights instruments have not been adequately modified, and instances of elder abuse and other violations occur with alarming frequency. But there remains some unease about all of this. A rights based approach is rightfully core to the mission of the UN, but such an approach sometimes comes with a cost – the danger of isolation of rights holders from one another’s legitimate interests, as well as the increased competition for attention that is often felt in its wake.

The specter of elders becoming a rights-based “interest group” alongside other competing rights-based interests is not a place where most elders I have known from many cultures would wish to stand. Perhaps I have unusual experiences with elderly persons. Perhaps some of my assumptions here are simply unreasonable, though they seem quite consistent with many elders I have known – those whose primary interest is in maintaining value and connection with younger persons from which the caregiving that so many of them have lavishly bestowed could be returned in kind. Mostly, the elders I know want dignified lives to the end while urging dignity for others. There is no desire to engage in any contest yielding winners and losers.

From this standpoint, it is legitimate to wonder to what degree a convention of the sort broadly advocated during the Working Group can adequately address what the Holy See and others referred to as our “throw away” culture with its tendency to denigrate the value of its “unproductive” members. Will a convention address the grave loss to our societies once our elderly become truly “invisible,” locked away in apartments or nursing homes, isolated from meaningful social contact, exploited or ignored by all but the rapidly diminishing number of persons worldwide who see elder care as part of their familial and community responsibility?

At the same time, this calls into question what younger generations seek most from their elders? Surely not another set of economic competitors! Surely more than bank accounts filled to overflow with their inheritance. Surely not relationships predicated on keeping youth dependent or forcing them to accept self-interested interpretations of elders’ lives rather than setting them loose to grow and to heal accompanied by all the honesty – about ourselves and the world we have been privileged to manage – that we can share.

In the absence of such sharing and connection-building, I don’t see how this ends well for elders, convention or no. More elderly claiming rights but not necessarily promoting the rights of others; more elderly pushing aside the responsibility to mentor next generations; more young people unfairly tuning out elders while accusing them of hoarding too much and sharing too little; more older persons scolding youth to take risks that these same persons weren’t willing to take themselves when they were younger. These are thorny issues of trust and connection facing too many of our cultures that the structure of a rights-based convention might help us locate the motivation to address, but is unlikely to resolve.

Thankfully, there were several examples that came across our office this week attesting to the enduring value of older persons who are comfortable in their skin and are able with kindness and attentiveness to help us all chart the best way forward. For instance, two colleagues of ours have launched a website, http://doinggoodsayswho.com devoted to stories of persons (mostly indigenous in Guatemala) who have been on the receiving end of what is often well-intended but inattentive caregiving. Connie Newton and Fran Early conducted hundreds of interviews with Guatemalans, NGOs and others on the often ignored cultural implications of humanitarian response, but it is their modest reflections on their own lifetimes of advocacy and service that are of the most enduring value. They understand and communicate that what we “know” is less important to others than what we have learned, including about how to co-create contexts of dignified assistance to others.

Back at the UN this past week, Guatemala’s Amb. Rosenthal presided over discussions regarding a Secretary-General mandated review of peacebuilding that was noteworthy for its honest and even courageous assessments. Rosenthal used the report as backdrop to help “shake up” the peacebuilding establishment, urging more focus on conflict prevention than on rebuilding after conflict has run its course, closer connections to the development community and the Security Council, peace processes that are “enabling rather than imposed.” It was in some ways the epitome of what younger persons should expect from elder statesmen and women – institutional memory deployed in the service of institutional reform, couched in an invitation to the assembled group to make peacebuilding into something more robust, reliable and attentive to what is to come rather than what has been.

Of course, we elders should confess the truth about ourselves as well as our institutions, including the truth that we have not always been the best of global stewards. Our actions have at times belied our articulated values. Our need to maintain control has sometimes undermined the sincerity of our invitations to youth participation. We have tabled too many hopeful suggestions for healing our planet and then walked away from some of them when their degrees of difficulty became apparent. We have largely forgotten, as Deputy Secretary General Eliasson noted at a recent “global governance” event, that being a “catalyst” for others to lead is a most valuable contribution once our own ‘turn’ at leadership begins to draw to a close.

At the closing session of the Open Ended Working Group on Ageing, Argentina’s Estrémé underscored “the heart and the will” of many to support elder rights. But to truly promote reliable, enduring contexts for elder care, we also need “heart and will” for a significant reboot in cultures that are slowly losing their inter-generational connectivity. The legitimate rights of older persons can only be enhanced through elderly expressions of kindness, perspective and courage, as well as by a demonstrated commitment to serve as guide and catalyst for youthful aspiration as we enlarge spaces for their participation and eventual leadership.

Tags: elder care, human rights, leadership, youth

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A Field Worth Playing On: The UN recalibrates its laws and its leadership, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 Jun

Last Friday at the UN, as the Security Council held another unsettling briefing on Ukraine and as a Meeting of Government Experts sought common ground on technical aspects related to the elimination of illicit flows of small arms and light weapons, a rule-of-law lecture took place that highlighted the increasing value and robustness of leadership emanating from smaller states.

On the occasion of the 25^th anniversary of the UN membership of the Principality of Liechtenstein, HSH Hereditary Prince Alois made a presentation at UN headquarters that did what we would urge many states to do under similar circumstances – share why the decision to commit to multi-lateral engagement through the UN was a sound one. The Prince cited difficulties in getting traction in the UN as a small state but also highlighted their national interest in the strong, accountable rule-of-law which the Prince rightly noted “is a prerequisite for a level playing field and the sovereign equality of all states.”

While the Prince did note some distinct national interests in matters such as the International Criminal Court and in reform of the UN Security Council, he avoided mention of other policy interests including in Women, Peace and Security activities at UN headquarters, areas where his government has displayed visible and welcome leadership.

Indeed, the key to any successful meeting or process at the UN is quality leadership – the kind that both takes risk and builds consensus, that highlights needs in the international community for which it is then willing to take some significant responsibility – convening and prodding rather than pointing figures and expecting solutions to come from elsewhere.

This kind of leadership has recently been in evidence in many UN forums – especially in the post-2015 sustainable development (SDG) negotiations where Kenya’s Kamau and Ireland’s Donoghue (and Hungary’s Kőrösi previously) navigated a challenging process that has produced an historic ‘zero draft.’ That draft has elicited some criticism but also represents a significant improvement over the prior MDGs and has a good chance of passing muster with Heads of State at the UN in September. The draft also incorporates noteworthy interventions from many small states, including the Small Island Developing States, which will ensure among other things that climate health has a prominent place in SDG implementation.

Beyond the SDGs, this past couple of days alone has seen an important initiative by Lithuania and Malaysia pushing for Security Council responses to challenging cease fire violations in Ukraine, a site of dismay and sadness for the entire UN system. At the same time, we note Moldova’s successful stewardship of the Meeting of Government Experts, a technical process related to ending the trafficking in small arms which took place amidst significant leadership changes in UN Disarmament Affairs and followed two frustrating and time consuming events related to armaments: the UN Disarmament Commission and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review.

What all of this leadership has in common is that it emanated from what at another time in the UN’s history might be considered ‘unlikely sources.’ Smaller states have always attempted to champion issues of global importance, but for most of the UN’s history these states have operated in the background as big power interests dominated the stage. Now these smaller states not only sit often in the chair’s seat, but do much inside and outside the Security Council to establish a fully functional global agenda in each of the UN’s core policy pillars.

Some of this agenda is related less to issues and more to structures and working methods. Currently there are serious (and not so serious) proposals cascading through the halls and conference rooms of the UN to change the way the Security Council does its business, the UN system chooses its leadership, and more. Part of what underlies these concerns is the quite sensible need to find ways to get permanent Council members to play by the same rules that they insist on for other states. In these efforts, small and medium sized states are playing a growing, welcome role.

We believe completely that one path to UN reform is lies in the vigorous leadership of major UN processes by officials from smaller states. This includes non-permanent Security Council members who are slowly eroding the assumptions and prerogatives of the veto-wielding states, not through their military or economic power but through their wise, vocal and even courage engagement with the opportunities provided by Council working methods and the UN charter. The more good sense the non-permanent members communicate, the more resolve they show on policy, indeed even the more enthusiasm they show for the value and future expansion of multi-lateral contexts, the better our planet will be. As we are seeing, commitment, wisdom and tenacity from smaller states can begin to wear down power imbalances in the UN system perhaps even more successfully in the long run than attempted charter revisions or the formation of new blocks of states at times as intransigent in their interests as the ‘privileged’ states they seek to counter.

This leveling is critical to the health of the UN system. But it must be attained less by attempting to drag down the larger powers and more by smaller states stepping up and allowing their leadership and (to the extent they are available) commitment of resources to serve as their “balancing card. “ It also means promoting rule-of-law as the essential leveler, rules and standards that can coax more transparency and accountability from large states –including permanent Council members – than any single option currently available to us.

The “inequalities” that formed the basis for much discussion of post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals have their echo in other parts of the system as well. Not only inequalities within states but also between states. But it is never enough to lament the imbalances. We all must — NGOs as well — be willing to pay our “dues” by increasing our practical interest in a UN system that is still desperately needed and still not fulfilling expectations.

Liechtenstein is one of the small states that have, individually and collectively, made positive contributions to multilateralism in large measure through its interest in rule-of-law. If this system is ever going to truly balance — and it may not survive unless that happens – more states need to join efforts at rule-of-law based institutional reform. Such states must also be willing to take leadership in areas of their greatest interests while affirming publicly the benefits to governments and peoples of UN-based multilateral arrangements.

Tags: leadership, Rule of law, SecurityCouncil, sustainable development

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