It Has to Be Everybody or Nobody--"A Perfect Metaphor for Who We Are and Should Act as Fellow Human Beings

 I posted this blog initially almost eight years ago. Sadly, we have become even more polarized, globally and nationally. Will we learn to see each other as fellow human beings pursuing in the main the same goals: peace, safety and a decent standard of living for ourselves and our families? There will always be competition and sometimes we will face existential threats. But the plague of the other, founded on a lack of understanding and empathy, threatens the well being of each and every one of us and our planet.

John Pepper==1/21/2023

“IT HAS TO BE EVERYBODY OR NOBODY” – “A PERFECT METAPHOR FOR WHO WE ARE AS HUMAN BEINGS”

I have written in several places about the “plague of the other”; how often, usually out of fear or suffering from a lack of self-confidence, we choose to see ourselves as separate from each other and as superior to “the other.”

In the book, “Everyday Bias,”* which develops the reality that we all possess implicit biases, I came across a metaphor by the author, Howard J. Ross, that I found extremely compelling in this regard. 

Here it is.

*****

Many of us have seen the magnificent forests full of aspen trees that grow in large “stands” throughout the northern areas of North America.  The trees are extraordinary, ramrod straight, and often standing nearly one hundred feet tall.  There can be thousands of them in just one stand.  Still, we look at each of these trees and see it in its solitary magnificence.

But there is something interesting under the surface of these forests.  These trees are not at all separate.  Underneath the soil, they are connected by a common root system, and that makes each of these clusters of trees among the largest organisms on Earth.  A new tree grows because the root sends out a runner that then grows into another tree.  The largest of these is called “Pando” (Latin for “I spread”), and is located in the Fishlake National Forest in south-central Utah.  Pando covers more than 106 acres and has been estimated to collectively weigh almost seven thousand tons, making it the heaviest organism in the world.  It also is thought to be more than eighty thousand years old, making it one of the world’s oldest known living organisms.

And yet we see it as a lot of single trees.

The trees brings us to a perfect metaphor for we who are as human beings.  We look at the “other” as if he or she is separate from us.  We see the other group as a threat.  And yet, we are all deeply connected.   We share a common destiny on this planet.  We all seek pleasure and do our best to avoid pain.  We want what is best for our children and grandchildren.  All of us are the products of that which we have seen before.  And we are all (for the most part) unconscious about the “programming” that runs our thoughts and our lives.

We can transcend.  We can, through discipline, practice and awareness, find a new way to relate that honors our differences, yet also build upon our similarities.  While the potential for mass destruction looms broadly in the world and our global community expands, we are more and more invited to recognize, as R. Buckminster Fuller said, that “we are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully, nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common.  It has to be everybody or nobody.” 

That is the path before us.  It is indeed the “road less traveled” when we look at our common history.  But it is a road that is worth paving clear.

What could be a greater journey?

*”Everyday Bias, Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in our Daily Lives”

Why I Love to Read

By the time one reaches my age, you have often been asked the question: "What is it that gives you the greatest joy?"  My immediate and first answer is "being wherever my wife, Francie, and my children and now grandchildren are.” But invariably following that, I call out my love of reading.

 

What accounts for this love of reading? The honest answer to that question when I was very young would have been that reading was a source of escape for me. In truth, I sought refuge in books. In words I wouldn't have chosen then but which ring true today, "Reading let me know I wasn't alone.”

 

Why was I seeking that refuge and escape? Why was I seeking the companionship which books brought me? 

 

For a couple of reasons. I wasn’t popular. I wasn’t a member of the “in” group. What’s more, my family life, as I experienced it, although lifted by the love and positive expectations of my parents, was troubled and unsettled by my father’s alcoholism.

 

So I immersed myself in books, every chance I could get. In the life of Robinson Crusoe, the adventures of the Hardy Boys or, a bit later, the story of Lincoln.  As I read, I felt a sense of peace and adventure and belonging and accomplishment. 

 

If my love of reading was initially a form of escape, before long it became a form of exploration and discovery. I found myself discovering worlds and ideas and people beyond those I knew. Even more, I found great books were teaching me about myself and shaping my vision of who I aspired to be.

 

As the years and decades have unfolded since then, reading great books has helped mold my life, shape my values and inspire me to be my best.

 

Reading has:

 

·           Illuminated for me the complex reality and tension of human motivations, fear, hopes and dreams, of frustration, hate and love.

 

·           Helped me understand the dual existence of the best and worst in human nature and has helped me strive to pursue what is best.

 

·           Afforded me the joyful experience of a writer's relentless probing for the truth through deep analysis and balanced interpretation.

 

·           Built my appreciation of the wonder and beauty of the perfectly chosen word, the eloquently turned phrase and the perfectly constructed sentence.

 

·           Treated me to an author's fresh and penetrating analysis of various factors—economic, political, social and individual—that have helped me understand certain outcomes in major events or trends.

 

·           Introduced me to a piece of writing that impacts me with such force that I think: "How could the writer ever say it that clearly or that beautifully?”  It’s akin to my reaction to a great painting or sculpture or film.

 

·           Helped me understand the root causes of events and the relative role of context, circumstance, sheer luck and individual agency.

 

·           Taught me that personal leadership makes things happen. That while there are trends that are inexorable, the difference that the individual makes in shaping these trends can be and often is decisive.

 

·           Has given me inspiration from the lives and character of great leaders and the recognition that it takes wisdom, courage and persistence to make a change in anything that is important. That has had everything to do with how I’ve tried to lead and encourage others to lead.

 

·           Has shaped my recognition that there is great goodness in the world, but also evil and that if good people don’t stand up courageously and persistently for the good, we’re going to suffer more evil.

 

·           Has fueled my deep respect and appreciation for different societies and cultures as I learned about their unique histories and belief systems, their unique features and accomplishments and the challenges they have and continue to face. This recognition has fired my determination at Procter & Gamble and later at The Walt Disney Company to respect national and regional identities as we operate globally.

 

·           Has made it crystal-clear that great achievements and change are never achieved without setbacks and the wisdom and courage to make course corrections to one’s original strategy. This has been of enormous help to me as I thought about how to pursue some of the biggest challenges of my career.

 

·           Has cemented my belief that in order for any institution to survive and grow--a matter that is in no way foreordained--its leaders must achieve that fine balance of preserving the most important core values fundamental to success while being prepared to take action to change everything else.

 

Summing it all up, reading has fired my love of learning, my curiosity, my desire to understand cause and effect, to seek truth, to understand the difference an individual can make, and that "everyone counts.”  Above all, it has helped me see and appreciate the importance of family and love and the beauty in people, in nature and in the world around us. This has inspired and challenged me to try to do my best in contributing to their betterment. 

                                                                                                           

Turning to God At a Time of Tragedy

The newspapers over the weekend very rightly featured photographs of the Buffalo Bills players, and the Bengals players, too, assembling in a circle, many with their hands on each other’s shoulders, all in prayer for their teammate Damar Hamlin, who had been carried off the field close to death.  Fortunately, he is recovering. 

 

This outpouring of faith across the nation in the face of this event is not unusual.  Some writers have attributed it especially to football’s close alliance with Christianity, particularly in part due to its popularity in the Bible belt.  I don’t know about that.  I think this tendency to reach out with prayer to God, as inchoate as our understanding of who or what God is, is a human instinct.  We search for faith, we search for hope, we search for support at a time when we need it.

 

I vividly recall praying on the occasions where I faced my greatest worry and challenge. The birth of each of our children, my cancer, now my wife, Francie’s cancer.  The birth of each of our children’s children. 

 

I pray in church each Sunday for peace in the world, for leaders who will be able to bridge animosity with understanding and love. 

 

My belief that there is a God personally intervening in our individual lives has waxed and waned over the years.  Today, I have to say I doubt whether God would intervene in each individual’s life in the manner in which I pray that He will.  But I don’t discount the possibility.  And whether he does or not, I know this.   Praying helps me cope with the fears and challenges I am facing.

I identify with Konstantin Levin, the protagonist in Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina". 

 

I was moved by Levin’s groping for a clear articulation of his faith in God and by his doubts about many portions of revelation. Yet I join him in his ultimately embracing Christ’s teachings and life as a code to live by.  Levin’s groping mirrors my groping, with all its doubts, questions and uncertainties. Yet,  ultimately I reach the same place Levin does with my belief in  a moral code which is reinforced by my belief in God. I know that whatever success I have had  in adhering to that code has been strengthened by my belief in the preaching of Jesus Christ.

 

“The question for him (Levin) consisted in the following:  ‘If I do not accept the answers that Christianity gives to the questions of my life, then which answers do I accept?’  And nowhere in the whole arsenal of his convictions was he able to find, not only any answers, but anything resembling an answer.”

 

Like me, Levin recognized  that while his wife was giving birth, an extraordinary thing had happened to him.  He, the unbeliever, had begun to pray, and in the moment of praying, he had believed.

 

Like Levin, I discovered, probably when I was in my late ‘20s or ‘30s, that my belief in some Catholic theologies had outlived their stay and no longer existed.   I had come to doubt (and I still doubt) many of the precepts with which I grew up:  the Virgin birth, even the bodily resurrection of Jesus. 

 

However, I come back to the most fundamental beliefs, that there is a superior power that calls on us to follow our best instincts to do what is right and to respect the dignity of every other human being. 

 

I recall the counsel of one of the priests at my prep school, Portsmouth Priory.  He warned me not be distracted from my basic faith in God by quibbling with individual church beliefs which I found contradicted reason.  It took me a long time to understand what he was saying and follow that counsel.  I’ve come to see, as Levin expresses in Anna Karenina, that there is “not a single belief of the Church that annihilated the main thing—faith in God, in good, as the sole purpose of man.  In place of each of the Church’s tenets, there could be put the belief in serving the good instead of one’s needs.  Each of them…was indispensable for the accomplishment of that chief miracle, constantly manifested on Earth, which consists in its being possible for each person, along with millions of the most diverse people, to understand one and the same thing with certainty and to compose that life of the soul which alone makes life worth living, and alone is what we value.”

"Reason and Faith--Only Together Will They Save Man"--Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

 

I read two opinion-pieces in the Wall Street Journal this weelk that came together for me in a surprising, sobering and meaningful way; likely in a way that the authors would not have expected.

 

The first opinion-piece, “America is a Sick Society—Literally” by William A. Galston lays out in graphic and sobering detail how sick the society in our country really is.  

 In life expectancy, we rank 29^th among the 38 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.  We trail Germany by 2.5 years; Canada by 3.2 years; and France by 4 years. 

 

The pandemic made things worse.  The U.S. suffered 332 deaths per 100,000 population, compared with 240 in France; 194 in Germany; and 128 in Canada.

 

Over the last 20 years, deaths from overdoses of drugs rose from about 17,000 Americans in the year 2000 to 92,000 by 2020.  Here again, we lead all other high-income countries.  In 2020, our death rates from overdoses of 277 per million compared with Canada at 171 per million; Germany only 19 per million; and France even lower at 7 per million.

 

The invidious comparisons continue.  On obesity.  On gun violence.  We lead the world on both. On the latter, the rate of firearm homicides per million adults in the U.S. stands at 41, compared with only 5 in Canada, 3 in France, 2 in Australia and 1 in Germany.

 

Experts, divided among many lines including political party, argue about the causes of these invidious comparisons.  For my money, they have not been adequately studied or, if they have, I haven’t seen that study.  But it shouts out for comprehensive, data based answers.

 

The second column, this one written by Daniel Henninger, is about the legacy of Pope Benedict, who passed away this past week at the age of 95.  Henninger talks about Benedict's beliefs in the context of the conflict of values between President Xi and Putin in China and Russia and the West.  

Putin is arguing, disingenuously to be sure, that Russia stands for “moral historical truth…there is no higher power than love for one’s family and friends, loyalty to friends and comrades in arms”, he says.  This, coming from the man who cruelly invaded Ukraine.  Yet, this is the argument he is making and, yes, persuading many that he is right.  Xi talks about China creating a new choice for achieving “modernization.”

 

Here is where Pope Benedict steps in with the conviction which I have shared for most of my adult life.  And that is the role of religion and faith.  Pope Benedict summarized his views as Pope in his 2009 Encyclical Letter, “Caritas In Veritate” (Love and Truth) in which he argues that secularism will fall without the ballast of religion or faith.

 

“Reason and faith can come to each other’s assistance", he wrote.   "Only together will they save man. Entranced by an exclusive reliance on technology, reason without faith is doomed to flounder in an illusion of its own omnipotence.  Faith without reason risks being cut off from everyday life.”

 

For me, and I know this is a personal matter, this sums it up. 

 

Henninger writes that his personal solution to reducing the country’s problems is “go to church on the weekend.  To learn that, in fact, you’re not #1.  And not alone.” That captures what I feel in going to church.

 

I embrace Henninger’s closing thought.   “Perhaps the moment is right to revive Benedict’s argument for religion’s proper role in organizing a coherent, self-confident society, or nation.”

 

Yet, I have to confess that I am not optimistic of this actually happening in the near- or medium-term future.  The incidence of church-going, especially among the young, has been declining for years.  In a way I can’t define, I think religion needs to bring a new message to the public, with new messengers.  I have benefitted personally from having had close contact with a minister, Rev. Paula Jackson, for 30 years. She brought me, through her words and through her service, the recognition that my belief in God, as vague and changing as it has often been, and the teachings of Jesus Christ have been very important to my living the life I sought to live.