Love Trumps Hate--In Fact Love Is What It Is All About

We should act on this from President Obama:

 "We have to take these same values that are encouraged within our families--of looking out for one another, of sharing, of sacrificing for each other--and apply them to a larger society."

That is the only way I believe we will thwart the stern warning confronting our nation today -a warning which was issued by Reinhold Niebuhr sixty-six years ago in his book, "The Irony of American History". 

"If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would only be the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all of the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory."

We Are Not Alone--My Classmate, Bart Giamatti

We Are Not Alone  -- Independence is Achieved through Broadening our Connections: Intellectual, Spiritual and Human

Bart Giamatti was a classmate of mine.  He served as President of Yale from 1977-86.  His convictions and eloquently expressed beliefs mirror my own.

This is an extract from his address to the entering class at Yale thirty years ago, in fall 1988:

At the heart of the American belief in individual initiatives, in solitary striving and common responsibility, in sacred individual and shared freedoms, in consent leading to liberty leading to a civil order that guarantees liberty build on consent, is the covenant of the family.  And while the idea and the reality of family may be exploited or made banal, while there is always a gap between the ideal of family and anyone’s actual familiar circumstances, nothing can finally lessen the power of the idea of the family or indeed lessen the sum of humanity’s wisdom that tells us the family provides an irreducible and yet splendidly elastic model for the coherence of freedom and order.

And thus by a circuit roundabout but relevant we come back to today.  You have—perhaps for the first time—now removed yourself from family at the beginning of your journey toward what I called at the outset a state of independence.  The University cannot and should not, and will not, displace your family.  Your family, in whatever shape it takes, is and always will be yours, the first seminary of values and affection and connection. But as you grow, the University will provide other versions of family, connections of intellect in common academic pursuits, connections of shared striving in athletic and artistic and social activities, connections of shared and pleasurable daily life in the manageable, intelligible life of a dormitory or residential college.  You will find, to say it all, that a state of independence is achieved by broadening your connections and affiliations, intellectual, spiritual, human.

The paradox into which one gradually grows, through education and throughout one’s life, is that independence is achieved through consenting to interdependence.  I believe we grow in individual liberty in this country when we recognize the human needs and rights of others.  I believe a state of independence comes when we decide through our intellect and spirit to forge human connections.  Without connections, there is no individual coherence. There is no independence to uprootedness, there is only drift and decay; there is no growth of the moral and mental powers of the self if the self alone is the ultimate goal of learning. Independence of an enduring kind, noble and practical, arrives only when one realizes what it means, in all its glory and responsibility, that one is not alone.  

In all I have said of family and a state of independence, I urge you to engage the paradox.  I believe we all come to live, that the individual begins to fulfill his or her potential and power through a deepening awareness of and contact with the differing needs and rights of other people.  I am urging you not to resolve that paradox but to use your opportunity for education fully to fulfill that paradox.  It takes work.  The human race or America or Yale or you in your relationships are not a family because someone says so.  The encouragement to individual strivings and the shared guardianship of freedoms does not occur because someone declares that the family lives. Labels do not make life no matter how assiduously or skillfully applied.  It takes work.

As we all have, you too may find difficult moments here as you grapple with how best to fit together individual initiative and community custom, how best to maintain tolerance while pressing disagreement, how to remember that the freedoms you assume must be maintained for everyone else too, or yours disappear.  Do not doubt for a moment, my friends, your capacities for living fully the paradox of independence and interdependence.  

Empathy: The Golden Coin

Our progress in understanding one another will only go so far as empathy takes us.

 

We can only have empathy if we walk in humility.

 

That can only happen through relationships.  We can fuel our anger and sense of righteousness by e-mails.  We often do.  But we don’t build relationships that way.  

 

Empathy requires presence, proximity, touch, sacrifice, “staying.”

 

To enter into the hurt and sorrow of another person guarantees that you’ll lose something, but you will come out more human on the other end.

  I believe it all has to start by recognizing that we are all created in the image of God.  Equal in dignity, value and worth. I believe it will be fueled by recognizing that we are all on the journey of life, of unknown but relatively short length, and if we are able to help one another along the way, that is a good thing. Empathy allows us do this. 

 

The Role Teachers Play in Building Our Expectations and Helping Us Become Who We Are

Almost thirty years ago, in May, 1989, I addressed a group of award winning K-12 teachers. 

I concluded my remarks saying that there is only one thing that I wouldn’t dream of leaving here without talking with you.  It is something that I have seen played out in my life and in other peoples’ lives again and again. 

I’m talking about the role of expectations and values…and the incredible role that teachers have played for me and my family in building our expectations and values—and hence our future.

My deep, deep conviction in the role teachers play in creating our future goes back to my earliest years.

While I was blessed with a good home and wonderful parents who were ready to make any sacrifice to help me get a good education—still I know I would not be the person I am today if it were not for a handful of teachers that I can vividly remember to this very day.  They influenced my life in a variety of ways.  The inculcated a love of learning and the thrill of discovering new concepts. And they provided a good dose of plain faith and discipline.

But above all,  they conveyed to me the belief that I could do well.  That was so important.  It is one thing—and a very important thing—to have your mother or father express confidence in you, but it is also an enormously important thing to have that confidence expressed by a teacher, particularly one you respect.

In preparing for this talk, I went back to my report cards which, believe it or not, I still have from high school—1952-56.

Some of them brought tears to my eyes as I more than ever recognized the influence of a particular teacher.  I would just like to read you a couple of excerpts from these report cards. While they may not be totally clear in their meaning, they will give you a sense of what this teacher did for me.

His name was Andrew Jenks. He was my homeroom teacher and my math teacher.  Here was his report after he had known me for about six months in my first year:

“John is a very able and likeable boy.  His overall record is a good one for his first term in the regular session—though I am sure it could be improved and I hope he will strive for such improvement.  Just as he is prone to a certain messiness and disorder about his desk, so I suspect he may often be rather distracting from the full excellence he might achieve.  He is quite quick and his thoughts may often get ahead of his writing with this effect.

Perhaps a little greater care would make the difference.  Both Mathematics and French would probably benefit from a more careful approach.  I trust he will work hard to make good his recent gains in Latin without letting any other subjects suffer.  For surely he is well able to do so.”

I think I’d better stop there. He got a little more critical after that.

That report was the tip of the iceberg.  Andrew Jenks talked to me daily.  He didn’t book any compromise.  He could be gruff. But I knew he respected me, I knew he cared for me and I knew he wanted the best for me.

Some years later in my final report, here’s what he said:  “John has an excellent record which he has built up steadily since he came—nor do I feel he has reached the peak of his performance.  I greatly appreciate his good influence in the school, not to mention his bearing with me even when that may have been trying. Frankly, I take this as a great compliment because John knows how important this was to me.”  Indeed I did.  Thirty-three years ago I did.  Today, I do even more.

This teacher was just one of several who gave me a positive understanding of myself…an understanding of what I might become.  He left me with the conviction that I ought to be a top achiever…indeed that I should settle for no less…that I had that responsibility.

And Andrew Jenks conveyed to me what in my life—in school and in all my years with Procter & Gamble, I have come to regard as the single most important principle of human development.  I call it the self-fulfilling prophesy…or the Pygmalion Theory.  It is something that I believe in so deeply and it is something your profession…the teaching profession influences more than any other.  

What I experienced in school has remained true in business.  Neither I nor anyone I know would be where he or she is at Procter & Gamble today if it were not for the confidence and values that associates or teachers brought to us over the years.

And that I have found comes out of only one thing—relationships…personal relationships of trust, of caring, and of high expectations.

Young people do not assimilate values by learning words or concepts of truth and justice and their definitions.  No—they learn attitudes and habits from intensely personal relationships with their families, their teachers and their close friends.  Young people don’t learn ethical principles so much as they learn to emulate ethical or unethical people.  And they learn from role models.

And teachers like you are often the most important role model for them.

Thank you for all you do.

Some Things Aren't As New As We Think: The Partisanship of the Press

In her magnificent new history of the United States, “These Truths,” Jill Lepore recounts the thinking of James Madison in 1791.  In an essay called “Public Opinion,” Madison identified a source of instability which he believed to be particular to a large Republic:  The people might be deceived.  “The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained,” he explained.  That is, factions might not, in the end, be consistent, wise, knowledgeable, and reasonable men.  They might consist of passionate, ignorant, and irrational men, who had been led to hold ‘counterfeit’ opinions by persuasive men.”  (Madison was thinking of Hamilton and his ability to gain public support for his financial plan. We have our own individuals to think of today.)

Madison went on, “A circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits.”  The way out of the political maze which Madison had cited was, in his opinion, the newspaper.

It was an ingenious idea, Lepore writes.  It would be revisited by each passing generation of exasperated advocates of Republicanism. The newspaper would hold the Republic together; the telegraph would hold the Republic together; the radio would hold the Republic together; and the internet would hold the Republic together.  Each time, this assertion would be both rightand terribly wrong.

Lepore goes on to cite the evidence:  Newspapers in the early Republic weren’t incidentally or inadvertently partisan; they were entirely and enthusiastically partisan. They weren’t especially interested in establishing facts; they were interested in staging a battle of opinions.  “Professions of impartiality I shall make none” wrote a Federalist writer.  “They are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense.”  Does that sound familiar?

Maligned by the early founders of our nation as destructive of public life, parties, driven by newspapers (as is the case today with cable TV and social media) became its machinery. “The engine,” said Jefferson, “is the press.”

So what we see today on MSNBC and Fox News and the plethora of partisan social media isn’t really as new as we think.

As always, we need to work very hard to sort fact from partisan misrepresentation. Seeking truth as best we can. Our responsibility.