Tag Archives: political discourse

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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Community Chest:  Escaping our Custodial Limitations, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 Jun

Community II

Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else’s.  Jodi Picoult

The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people. Wendell Berry

I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort where we overlap. Ani DiFranco

As long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. Michael Pollan

The UN was a place of diverse and competing interests this week.   A contentious Security Council meeting with the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on Darfur and the withdraw of the United States from the Human Rights Council was balanced in part by positive news on efforts to develop a Global Compact on Refugees and regulate the ammunition indispensable to weapons-related violence. There was also the welcome sight of Yoga mats filling the UN’s North Lawn, persons sharing a collective moment of harmony within an often fragmented UN policy space now surrounded by a seemingly more politically polarized host country.

Much of our own time this week was taken up in discussions with NGOs and diplomats about our collectively shrinking space for access and dialogue, about the mean spirited-ness of so much of our political discourse, about the limited vision guiding our pursuits of international justice and communities safe from the threat of armed violence, and of course about the devastating rights and trauma implications of children separated from parents at the southern US border.

The weekend provided little relief from a week of difficult issues. Early this morning, while waiting for the start of the World Cup, I endured a series of commercials for cars, movies and more that, collectively at least, glorified materialism and crass violence, and reinforced the idea that the world is a fundamentally dangerous place full of evil villains who want to take what we have, interrupting our safe lives and traditional values with multiple iterations of threat.  Our only hope, it seems, is to buy our way out of trouble and, failing that, to support leaders or super heroes that will somehow keep these “dangers” out of our personal and family business.

These images can be relentless.  It takes considerable effort to avoid them and even greater effort to counteract their influences.   We have collectively accepted the “logic” of a world full of people trying to take what we have, trying to hurt and abuse us, trying to undermine the economic and social benefits to which we are “surely” entitled.   Some manage to scheme their way around this pervasive perception of trouble.  Others gather up “their own” in the psychological equivalent of the “circle of wagons.”  In either case, the reaction feeds the narrative rather than seeks to transform it.

The world can certainly be a dangerous place, but not mostly because of migrants crossing our borders but because of leadership that promises unity while preaching division, that promises peace while “arming to the teeth,” and that promises prosperity in the short term by choking off sustainable options for the children who will survive us.  This is not a problem that can be laid solely at the feet of any particular administration but rather at the feet of each of us, our deepening preference for abstraction and distraction over community and communion.  We prefer, as Wendell Berry used to say, to own a neighbors farm than have a neighbor, and we have all the tools and language we need to see such ownership as a savvy investment opportunity while failing to also see it as another nail in the coffin of communities who haven’t yet forgotten how to look neighbors in the eye and work out strategies together for their common prosperity.

The problems that we address through the UN will never be solved unless we change the terms of engagement.  We don’t apologize for our errors of speech or policy.  We don’t acknowledge the valid points of others.  We don’t take direct responsibility for the messes incurred on our watch.  There tends to be too much acrimony “on camera” and not enough vision off it.  One of the loveliest moments of this week at the UN, for instance, was when the Dutch Ambassador and ICC prosecutor walked through the Security Council after a difficult session on Darfur to a group sitting next to us – victims of Darfur violence that been brought into the UN from the Hague in part to assess and encourage prospects for justice.  The ambassador and prosecutor proceded to greet all the victims, thanking them for their presence and pledging that their quest for justice would not in any way be deterred by the Council rhetoric they just witnessed.

But such gestures are too few and far between.  In the US and some other states, we are now, according to some commentators at least, engaged in something akin to a “soft civil war,” a “war” where our relentless levels of criticism of people we barely know and policies we incompletely understand accomplish little other than harden positions and up the ante on hostility.  We know that when we are treated unfairly — criticism that crosses the ad hominem line — we tend to retreat rather than engage, to double-down on even our worst impulses rather than give in to our critics.  Indeed, a recent NY Times article that says support for the US president remains surprisingly stable, in part because people feel the need to defend themselves from what they see as a relentless assault on their social values and political choices. This is an entirely predictable result.  Acrimony against those who don’t “support” us only breeds more of the same.   And retreat can easily become the precursor to retribution, as we have seen over and over in this world.

There was a feed on my twitter earlier today from an otherwise “policy savvy” source claiming that anyone who supports president Trump on migration is “no longer human.”   I would urge this person to “hold that thought” when her adversaries make their own, similar, equally-abstract, human-denying accusations — which they will, which they are.  This goes beyond the often-empowering humor and fair-minded critiques directed at leadership to an ascription of “evil” that we are now much too quick to share, based on illusions we are too slow to own for ourselves.

The solution to the vast anger and mistrust building up in our “kingdoms of abstraction” will not likely be found in our consensus policy resolutions, nor in our public institutions, but in our communities.   When I asked a diverse group of young teens who gathered in the city hall of Arlington MA to meet with me early last week what things they were most concerned about, they mentioned a range of issues from climate change to gun violence.  They lamented all of the acrimony that they witness in the adult world (acrimony adults would not tolerate in children), all of the threats levied with and without weapons.  But mostly they wanted to find a voice, a chance to make the world they will soon inherit a bit healthier, more peaceful, even more predictable.

We talked together about the importance of “belonging somewhere,” of knowing a place and caring for a place, of allowing our senses and not our Instagram accounts to determine how we utilize our time, what we care about, how we protect and enhance the places we have come to love; but also how we share, resolve conflict, invest in others, promote mutual well-being.

When one of the teens asked me in return, “what keeps you up at night?” I responded that global challenges they did not create but will simply not be able to ignore keep me up at night: the plastics that fill our oceans, the mistrust that undermines our political discourse, the “remote” weapons that destroy from ever-greater distances, the “launch pads” for youth that so many of our communities have become, albeit with all the focus on the launch and virtually none on the “pads.”

This toxic brew of abstraction and suspicion that we have been so busy crafting is filled with potential peril for youth.  We are simply losing touch with each other, perhaps for a time, hopefully not for good.   Little positive can come of this distance. Future governments will inherit gridlock of our own making, and the next generation of adults will face the daunting task of opening the ears of people already pushed far into a corner in what might well, for them at least, have become a “diminished world.”

Thankfully, there are still moments of grace in our policy centers, still communities filled with young people determined to practice at local levels the skills and character we will desperately need at global ones.  We must not waste this opportunity to help them along.

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