Tag Archives: Wisdom

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.

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Grasping the Proverbial Straw: A Policy Nod to Customary Wisdom, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Aug

Do not call the forest that shelters you a jungle.   Ghana

There is no medicine to cure hatred.  Ghana

The teeth are smiling but is the heart?   DR Congo

A fool looks for dung where the cow never browsed.  Ethiopia

One who conceals their disease cannot expect to be cured.   Ethiopia

One who continually laments is not heeded.  Cote d’Ivoire

Seeing is different from being told.   Cote d’Ivoire

Evil knows where evil sleeps.  Niger

Fine words do not produce food.   Nigeria

The heart is not a knee that can be bent.   Senegal

One who upsets a thing should know how to rearrange it.   Sierra Leone

A roaring lion kills no game.   Uganda

Those of you who continue to read these missives know that the quotations at the head of the posts are often as impactful as the prose which follows.  These quotations mean much to me and often to the readers as well.  The ability to capture important human lessons in a sentence or two, to be suggestive without taking on the burden of being  definitive, to leave people with things to ponder as well as ways to grow, this is to my mind a considerable gift.

We who ply our wares in the halls of policy, with few exceptions, do not search hard enough for the images that can stimulate thought and growth beyond their initial utterance.  We use so many words – so many — words which are too-often redundant, repetitive and entirely metaphor-phobic, words often spoken as though we were merely reciting lessons handed down to us in some secondary school, words which may fulfill the “assignment” given to us by our superiors but offer little in the way of inspiration or takeaways, conveying little reason for others to hope or care.  Indeed, inside the UN as with other large institutions, there is little reason to believe that any of our “fine words” will survive the end of the meetings in which they are uttered, if indeed anyone much was listening in the first instance.

We are all constrained by our habits of thought and communication, it seems, and this surely applies to the language of diplomats and those of us on their margins who have internalized the culture of the UN and perhaps misplaced the reality that too many of our alleged constituents have largely tuned us out.  The world remains conceptually-speaking largely absent from our policy bubbles, not because there is an absence of truth in those bubbles but because the conveying of that truth is so often deficient in urgency, in potency, indeed in poetry.  Even during what could be construed as potentially profound UN events – last week’s successful General Assembly discussion and resolution on the “right to a healthy environment” and this week’s NPT Review Conference (nuclear weapons) the language used to convey concern is overly constrained by time in part but also by temperament.  We rush through presentations on important issues as though we have a train to catch.  We speak in the tones to which we are authorized, tones which rarely convey or capture the deep anxieties and misgivings of diplomats, but also of a global public now attempting to cope with a wider range of emergencies than they ever would have imagined.

Thus the decision was made some time ago to balance our own narrative of global events with some profound utterances from other times and through other mediums. So far as I can tell, the only downside of this decision has to do with their sources, likely from too many men and too often emanating only from western cultural contexts as well.  That the quotations in the posts are still more likely to motivate and inspire than any of the “clever by half” prose that generally follows is, to my mind at least, an indication of how much we long for rhetoric which is more compelling than hard concepts gleaned from hard data, more than recitations about the “importance” of institutions and their policy products which have not done nearly enough to inspire our trust or confidence, more than concepts that pull us out of the contexts which still have much to teach if we would only pay more attention to sources of local wisdom and just a bit less to its relentless alternatives courtesy of major policy centers, corporate media outlets, university-based think tanks and published reports emanating from our global institutions.

Such alternatives have literally conquered the conceptual landscape in all but the most remote communities while demonstrating a limited ability (as have we all) to solve problems which now threaten our future as a species.  And thus we’re trying something different today, quotations not from literature and philosophy, not from the recognizable figures in our own fractured western history, but from proverbs; stories and images which people in diverse cultures have long used to communicate truths that, given the difficult and/or complex logistics which define so many of our lives, we have overlooked or forgotten altogether.  The underlying lesson of all these proverbs is that clues to a better life, to better communities, are at least as much in the seeing as in the telling.  The best proverbs take their material from the life around them, life that is available to all if not availed by all, life that has its own lessons to convey beyond rhetoric and textbooks, life calling on us to pay more attention to the insights knocking at our doors, to use all of our senses, to look for and share gifts of insight which can help us exercise caution where such is the more sensible path, and take a deep breath and push forward when more courageous action is warranted.

One of the limitations in the deployment of the proverbs above is my own inability to designate authorship beyond the nation-state.  The best proverbs, of course, have impact across cultural and even national borders.  But we also know that, in African and other global contexts, such borders are functions more of colonial convenience than local assent.   That the proverbs listed here mostly do not have a more specific cultural reference point underscores my own limitations.  Thankfully the lessons embodied in these and other kernels of insight have relevance across cultural divides as they have relevance beyond the limitations of the English in which they are here communicated.

But despite this, it is also the case that we now live in a world dominated far more by fact-checkers than storytellers, a world in which the data sets of our times are as  likely to drive us to despair as to trust and confidence, drive us towards indifference rather than engagement, drive us to see if we can “wait this one out” rather than participate in remediation with the energy and wisdom still at our disposal.   

On top of this, we also inhabit a time where many are championing their own truths in response to what has become a veritable sea of disinformation undermining confidence in any and all institutions and individuals who seek to do their homework and “play it straight” with what they know. We forget that while truth is not subjective as so many now seem to claim, it is always partial, valuable in the contexts in which it appears but not in all contexts, not in all circumstances, at least not in the same manner. 

I would suggest that our erstwhile preoccupation with “truth” grounded in an endless series of verifiable “facts” has not reduced lying – to ourselves and others – even while the cameras are rolling.  We have cultivated an extraordinary ability to accumulate masses of “facts” assembled to create arguments to justify ideas and behaviors which are barely, if at all, justifiable.  Even in global institutions such as the UN, complex arguments leading to one-sided critiques or inflexible assertions of “national interest” have become more and more the coin of the realm.  Acknowledgements of wrongdoing are almost non-existent.  Direct apologies are even rarer.  Clarifications of position are occasionally offered, but little is conveyed indicating that positions have been significantly rethought or revised based on fresh experiences or circumstances. We give lip service to the wonders of science as well as to the need to reach constituents “where they are.”  But the language of bureaucracy is rarely the language of community or culture, and our dominant syntax remains generally too conceptually complex, too “flat” in its application, too-often lacking in thought-provoking affect to inspire the local consent and revitalized initiative upon which the successful pursuit of something truly important like a “right to a healthy environment” ultimately rests.

We need softer landing spots for the accumulation and transmission of human wisdom.  The proverbs listed above and innumerable others of their kind from all corners of the world offer (at least to my mind) a more straightforward, if also incomplete, path to wisdom from a range of sources and from which the rest of us have become too-often detached.  Indeed, a “roaring lion kills no game.” Indeed, “one who conceals a disease cannot expect to be cured.”  Indeed, “one who continually laments is not heeded.”  Indeed, “fine words do not produce food.”  Indeed, “there is no medicine to cure hatred.” On and on, kernels of truth which instruct and provoke, which take what has been seen and convert it into words and images that can connect and inspire. 

Whether in this form or other, we in policy-land need to find more of those simpler and wiser forms of discourse which can stretch our experience, which can make our hearts smile as well as our teeth, and which can forge stronger and more urgent links between the world we are trying to build, the constituents we are trying to reach, and the people we need to become. 

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Words of Wisdom: Raising the Bar on Council Culture, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 Jan

Wise

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. Immanuel Kant

It’s easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. Leonardo da Vinci

The less you talk, the more you’re listened to. Pauline Phillips

Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn’t be done. Amelia Earhart

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. Abraham Maslow

It’s early on a frigid Sunday in New York, the sort of morning that gives one a new appreciation for hibernation – slowing down the collective metabolism for a season to refresh and restore beyond the bitter elements; but in our case also to reflect on how we ourselves and the institutions we interact with can better fulfill our collective responsibilities.

The UN has been quiet this week, not quite hibernating, but certainly rebooting what had become by mid-December some badly frayed circuits.  The one significant exception was Friday’s “emergency” meeting in the Security Council called for by the US.   The meeting seemed less about how Iran is treating its demonstrators (the alleged and controversial topic of this first session under Kazakhstan’s presidency) and more about undermining confidence in the JCPOA – the Security Council endorsed agreement to restrict Iran’s development of its own nuclear weapons program.

The US has in the recent past used the Security Council as a platform to undercut the credibility of Iran – not only as an alleged sponsor of regional terror but as a state thus incapable of fulfilling agreements such as those embodied in the JCPOA.   The rationale appears to be that if Iran cannot be trusted in all things, it cannot be trusted in this thing either; in this instance despite the firm conviction of the IAEA that Iran is in compliance with its JCPOA obligations, a conviction which is accepted by most Council members including US “allies” France and the United Kingdom.

Meetings of this type are particularly frustrating for us; not only because of their “politicized” implications, but also because of the many conflicts that remain unresolved (such as in Yemen and Myanmar) or that, in instances such as Venezuela and Cameroon, barely seem to register on the Council’s scale of concern.  There is little doubt, as noted on Friday by ASG Zerihoun, that some official reactions to the protests in Iran were excessively violent, a matter of serious interest for Council members beyond the US, which itself had been accused of “grotesque intervention” by Iranian authorities.  But “serious interest” does not in itself justify an “emergency meeting” of the Council, nor does the hostile rhetoric focused on Iran’s at-times misguided policy decisions and human rights performance justify stubborn skepticism regarding Iran’s JCPOA-related compliance.  And it certainly does not justify time taken from interrogating and addressing other looming sites of violent conflict.

Honestly, it felt a bit jarring to emerge from a brief time of winter reflection into the midst of a Council discussion that frankly appeared more than anything else to be lacking in basic wisdom.  Jarring, but not a huge surprise. Council discussions are often more about scoring political points and feeling out the political limitations of national preferences than about full disclosures of national interest, placing policy preferences in their proper context, or the “clear-headed analysis” urged by new Security Council member Peru.

Indeed, wisdom seems to have become a largely discredited phenomenon in policy, in part because more claim it for themselves than exhibit its fruits and in part because of our tendency to keep things discrete – our personal lives from our professional lives, our politics from their personal and real-world implications.  Wisdom is born of experience but is not hostage to experience.   As implied by the quotations above, wisdom is about holding relevant things together, cultivating a long and engaged attention span, exercising self-restraint during times of stress or temptation,  seeing a bigger and richer picture, keeping our bearings when so many around us are losing their own.  It is about describing the (sometimes grave) obstacles in front of us and persistently calling attention to our collective responsibilities, especially to those who are distracted by less urgent matters.  It means talking less and listening more while ensuring that the words we employ have impact beyond their ability to brand preferences and manipulate outcomes.  Especially in the Council’s context, wisdom is about taking preventive measures to resist the outbreak of conflict which can minimize the need for remedial measures in conflict’s aftermath. It implies refraining from a preoccupation with one grievance such that our duty to identify and address grievances of equal or greater significance is compromised.

As some of the greatest minds in our collective history have noted, this wisdom business represents quite a high bar.  Fortunately for us, it is a “bar” that is reached every day by women and men in diverse cultural circumstances, persons with generally limited notoriety but with a demonstrated ability to “organize life,” to step back from the fray in a manner that clarifies options and implications going forward without haughty or self-important aloofness. For us, this “organizing” includes an all-important reminder that most problems needing to be addressed in the world are not akin to an exposed nail in search of some metaphorical hammer.

As France sensibly explained on Friday, it is possible and advisable for the Council to both address “flash points” in the Middle East and honor its JCPOA and related agreements.   Yes it is possible; but what we witnessed Friday was, from the standpoint of wisdom, a clear regression – the JCPOA under senseless threat while “flash points” in Gaza, Yemen, Eastern Ghouta (Syria) and elsewhere within and outside the Middle East region remain stubbornly resistant to Council-initiated resolutions.  As regional and even existential threats to planetary well-being loom large, wiser engagements emanating from this Council would certainly be reassuring.

As we have noted with other issue contexts, Friday’s discussion on Iran summed up many of the problems with the Council’s prevalent “culture” – too many statements, too little listening, too many conflicts ignored, too much political manipulation of those conflicts which are addressed.  The new elected Council members for which Friday was their debut moment – Côte d’Ivoire, Kuwait, Peru, Netherlands, Poland and Equatorial Guinea – have no doubt already experienced several elements of what can be an overly political, wisdom-challenged policy space.   We hope that these elected members will do whatever they can – individually and collectively — to more effectively “organize the life” of the Council.  We promise to support  — certainly not to interrupt — their progress.

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