Pulling Ourselves Away from Moral Catastrophe—Marilynne Robinson—Syria

It would be challenging to identify the single act which most exposes President Trump's moral corruption, but if I had to choose one today it would be the decision to pull our approximately thousand troops out of Syria. 

I cannot recall a decision made by a President that is at once so diabolical in abandoning an ally, doing something so counter to our own Nation's interest (i.e. fighting ISIS) and forcing an ally to join up with an adversary. All of this being done by a President not consulting with the State Department of military or his most important supporters. 

And then, witnessing the killing of thousands and displacement of many more people, the President cruelly dismisses our former allies, the Kurds, thousands of whom died in the fight ISIS,  as not being "angels" 

This horrific turn of events reminded me of a passage in Marilynne Robinsons book of essays, "The Givenness of Things."

" I had always thought that the one thing I could assume about my country was that it was generous.  Instinctively and reflexively generous.  In our history, we have demonstrated fallibilities that are highly recognizable as human sin and error, sometimes colossal in scale, magnified by our relative size and strength.  But our saving grace was always generosity, material and, often, intellectual and spiritual.  To the extent that we have realized or even aspire to democracy, we have made a generous estimate of the integrity and good will of people in general and a generous reckoning of their just deserts.  I do believe we stand at a threshold that obliges me to speak about the gravity of our historical moment as I see it, in the knowledge that no society is at any time immune to moral catastrophe". 

At this late stage of my life, I hope and pray the American people will have the wisdom to pull our Nation away from the moral catastrophe which Trump's presidency represents in the election of 2020 if not before.   

 

Insights and Encouragement for Our Tumultuous Moment

I’m reading a splendid little book, on democracy by E.B. White.  I’ve read his essays collected in The Points of My Compass decades ago.  I’ve always appreciated his fresh thinking—and did again here.  

Writing this before entry into World War II, as Hitler’s reign creeped across Europe, he wrote:  “I just want to tell you, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with Freedom and that it is an affair of longstanding and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war.  From such adaptable natures, a smell rises.  I pinch my nose.”

  

What an apt description of how I feel about the Trump presidency and much that surrounds it.  

Writing in 1943, advocating the world coming together in a government, White writes:  “Were we ever to get one (a world government), it would impose on the individual the curious burden of taking the entire globe to his bosom—although not in any sense depriving him of the love of his front yard.”

“A world made one by the political union of its parts, would not only require of its citizen a shift of allegiance, but it would also deprive him of an enormous personal satisfaction of distrusting what he doesn’t know and despising what he hasn’t seen.  This would be a severe depravation, perhaps an intolerable one.  The awful truth is, a world government would lack an enemy and that is a deficiency not to be lightly dismissed.  It will take a yet undiscovered vitamin to supply the blood of man with a substitute for national ambition and racial antipathy; but (White optimistically concludes) we are discovering new vitamins all the time, and I am aware of that, too.” 

 (Unfortunately, his optimism on this point has so far proved to only be a dream. But we must never give up on this dream. The future of our planet depends on realizing it, I believe)

Eerily anticipating our own time, and commenting on the FCC’s regulation of radio, White writes, “This country is on the verge of getting news-drunk; the democracy cannot survive merely by being well informed, it must also be contemplative, and wise.” 

In October 1952, White writes, “We doubt that there ever was a time in this country when so many people tried to discredit so many other people.” 

Well, he ought to be around today. 

“About a year ago, we started to compile a handbook of defamation, but the list got too big for us and we abandoned the project as both unwieldy and unlovely.  Discreditation has become a national sickness for which no cure has so far been found, and there is a strong likelihood that we will all wake up some morning to learn that, in the whole land, there is not one decent man.  Vilification, condemnation, revelation—these supply a huge part of the columns of the papers, and the story of life in the United States dissolves into a novel of perfidy, rascality, iniquity and misbehavior.  The writing of this lurid tale commands more and more of the time of the citizens.”

In an essay titled on democracy, written in June 1960 in the midst of that presidential campaign, White writes that he has read the books and published speeches of many of the candidates for president, including Kennedy, Chester Bowles, Nixon, Stevenson and Rockefeller.  He observes something that I’ve felt for at least the last eight years.  “They speak of new principles for a new age, but for the most part, I find old principles for a time that has passed.  Most of the special matters they discuss are pressing, but taken singly or added together, they do not point in a steady direction, they do not name a destination that gets me up in the morning to pull on my marching boots.  Once in a while, I try a little march on my own, stepping out briskly toward a reputable hill, but when I do I feel that I am alone, and that I am on a treadmill.”

For my money, President Obama described a vision worthy of “pulling on my marching boots.”  It was a vision of inclusiveness, of living our nation’s highest values embedded in living to a fuller degree our nation’s founding principles embedded in the Declaration of Independence.  But sadly his administration, impeded by Republican opposition aimed at making him a one-term president, didn’t in the end fulfill that vision.  We were not united as a country.  And President Trump has divided this nation more than ever.  

Therein lies the greatest need for our next president.  We can’t just be driven by what we’re against even though the commitment to ensure that Trump doesn’t have another four years is correct.  We must anchor our vision and the plans to carry it out on the future, together united. 

Where Did My Republican Party Go?

I grew up a Republican. My parents were dyed- in- the- wool Republicans. They voted for Dewey over Truman. My Mother wrote the campaign song ("Get Out And Fight for Ike)" for Dwight Eisenhower in his 1952 Election.

Over time I have probably voted for as many Republican as Democratic Senators and Governors from my State of Ohio. I voted with enthusiasm for George H.W, Bush in his two Presidential campaigns and his son, George W. Bush in 2000.

George H.W. Bush, especially, was and will forever remain a personal hero of mine. I admired most of his policies. I admired how he worked with Gorbachev to help the peaceful transition of the Soviet Union.

 However, above all I admired President Bush's courage, his fundamental decency, his character, and his care for his fellow man.

These are the qualities we seek in all our leaders, above all the President of the United States.

Sadly, worryingly, we do not find them in President Trump.

When will, I ask, responsible Republicans return to the principles that marked the Republicans I respected?  When will they stop standing aside to let the meanness and cruelty and lying and rumor mongering of Donal Trump go unchallenged? When will they again insist that their candidates, especially for the Presidency, embody the highest values of our nation. starting with integrity and respecting the dignity of everyone.

Hearken to these words of then President Eisenhower: "The Republican Party must be known as a progressive organization or it is sunk. I believe that so emphatically that I think far from appeasing or reasoning with the dyed-in-the-wool reactionary fringe, we should completely ignore it and when necessary repudiate it."

The Power of Engaging With History

 

The power of engaging with history does note rest merely in the knowing and remembering of it; though, in any society, remembering is vital.

 

Nor is the power solely in the learning and applying of history’s lessons today; though, in the face of any injustice or challenge, doing so is imperative.

 

No, I believe perhaps the most powerful impact of engaging with history is also the most personal:  that to engage with history, is to know you are not alone.

 

The great American writer James Baldwin said this better than I or just about anyone else could:

 

“You think your pains and your heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.  It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.”

 

Baldwin was writing, in part, about the strength he drew from history when confronting the racism and anti-gay discrimination he faced in mid-20^th century America.

 

But in his eloquent description of personal inspiration, he captures the deep, profound, and universal impact that history can have on the individual standing up for change or facing a major challenge.  It has had that impact on me.  

When facing a challenge or addressing an opportunity like Procter & Gamble's entering a new country, I inevitably came back to recognize I was standing on the shoulders of giants, famous and unknown, who had taken on these challenges and opportunities before me.

 

This is one of the reasons I suppose that I’ve had  pictures of  my two most esteemed previous CEO's--William Cooper Procter and John Smale--on the wall of my office for years. When facing a tough decision, I have asked myself-- what would they have done.  In other words, what action will be in accord with the Purpose and Values of this great Company of ours?

  

The Pursuit of Truth

 

One of the handful of mandates which I have tried to keep front and center in my mind—and in my actions—is the pursuit of truth.

 

When asked what I most took away from my education at Yale, it was the respect for the pursuit of truth.  When asked what I discovered at Procter & Gamble which most surprised me in the beginning and which was most foundational to my decision to stay with P&G for a career, I cite my recognition of the ever-present commitment to pursue truth no matter where it led and no matter how inconvenient the finding.

 

Little would I have imagined that now in my 80^th year I would have felt the concept of truth being so challenged or feel so compelled to reignite my commitment to taking the time to dig deep enough to try to find it.

 

Undoubtedly, the presidency of Donald Trump has driven much of this animus.  My appreciation of the challenge we face has also been deepened by my re-reading George Orwell’s novel 1984.  Now,  a few weeks after doing that, I have been further motivated by reading the “biography” of 1984, called The Ministry of Truth, written by Dorian Lynskey, This book describes Orwell’s life experience which led to his authoring 1984 shortly before his death in 1949.  It also illuminates the many writers whom Orwell had come to know who influenced his thinking.  Still, with all those influences, there is no doubting the originality of Orwell’s work.

 

The most influential chapter of Orwell's experience came from his participation in the Spanish Civil War.  He went to Spain to support Communists who formed part of the coalition fighting Franco’s Nationalist, Nazi-supported opposition.  His experience in Spain was sobering and disillusioning.  He came to see the cynicism, cruelty and dishonesty of the Communists.  He left this experience feeling there was really no difference between the debilitating totalitarian control of Communism and Nazism.

 

It is mind-opening, though probably not surprising, to see how 1984 has been viewed differently depending on the bias of the beholder.  Liberals viewed it as an indictment of Russia, which it surely was in part.  The right viewed it as an indictment of the liberal left, including the Labor Party in the UK.  The ambiguity in 1984 was part of Orwell’s design, but there was one constant overarching caution in his message, that being the recognition of the challenge we face in pursuing truth.  And how different forms of fanaticism and totalitarianism, enabled more than ever today by technology, can challenge the very existence of the possibility of truth.

 

Orwell’s pronouncement on the importance of the moral value of truth is registered again and again.  Without a consensus reality, Orwell argued, “there can be no argument; the necessary minimum of agreement cannot be reached.”  As Lynskey writes, Orwell was clear-eyed enough to know that one can’t always get to the objective truth but if one doesn’t at least accept that such a thing exists, then all bets are off.

 

 

The dangers of group think are also highlighted again and again.  As Franz Borkenau, an Austrian writer, scribed:  “Civilization is bound to perish not simply by the existence of certain restrictions on the expression or thought...but by the wholesale submission of thinking to orders from a party’s center.”

 

Orwell worried about fanaticism of any type.  In 1940, he wrote, “The future, at any rate the immediate future, is not with the ‘sensible’ men.  The future is with the fanatics.”  How right he was—and still is.

 

Orwell draws the “connection between personal happiness and readiness to believe the incredible.”  It is this “frame of mind” that has induced whole nations to fling themselves into the arms of a Savior.”

 

In 1984, Orwell describes a picture “in the earliest 20^th century” that could well describe today.

 

In an essay called “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” written seven years before 1984, Orwell understood better what he had seen unfolding in Spain:  “For the first time I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship was implied by an ordinary lie. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’”

 

This was new, he thought.  Totalitarian regimes were aligned on such a grand scale that Orwell felt that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”  Orwell continued, “If the leader says of such and such an event, ‘it never happened’—well it never happened.  If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five.  This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.”  Orwell wrote. And well it should.  

 

Here is the moral and intellectual foundation of 1984.

 

Orwell’s generation experienced the consequences of Big Lies so absurd that they could only be sustained by the extreme control of totalitarianism, the kind depicted in 1984.  As Lynskey points out, and I agree, 21^st century authoritarians don’t need to go that far.  “They don’t require belief in a full-blown ideology, and thus they don’t require violence of terror police,” writes the historian Ann Applebaum, in a 2018 essay for The Atlantic.   “They don’t force people to believe that black is white, war is peace, and state farms have achieved 1000% of their planned production.”  Instead, they rely on “medium-sized lies:  all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality.”

 

All this brings Lynskey, at the end of his book, to Donald Trump.  “Donald Trump is no Big Brother,” he writes.   Nor is he simply a throwback to the 1930s.  “He has the cruelty and power hunger of a dictator but not the discipline, intellect or ideology.”  Lynskey depicts a more apt comparison being Joe McCarthy, “a demagogue who displayed comparable levels of narcissism, dishonesty, resentment and crude ambition and a similarly uncanny ability to make journalists dance to his tune even as they loathed him.”

 

 Lynskey cites chilling precedents in Orwell’s 1984.  For example, referring to Hillary Clinton, Trump’s call to his supporters to “lock her up.”  Trump meets most of the criteria Orwell used to define fascism:  “Sometimes cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist and anti-liberal.”

 

Capturing our own moment I believe, Orwell contended that such men could only rise to the top when the status quo has failed to satisfy people’s need for justice, security and self-worth.

 

Social media has undoubtedly made the process of disseminating “fake news” (ironically being used to attack “real news”) far easier as it has become the primary news source for millions of Americans without meaningful editorial oversight.

 

In conclusion, Orwell feared that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”  As Lynskey writes, perhaps Life magazine’s original review of 1984 identified the essence of Orwell’s message best:  “If men continue to believe in such facts as can be tested and to reverence the spirit of truth and seeking greater knowledge, they can never be fully enslaved.”

 

That outcome can never be taken for granted—not today, not ever. 

 

 

                                                  

Give President Trump His Due--But Don't Let Him Off the Hook For His Character

Message to Democrats (and Republicans and Independents, too) – Don’t fall into the error of not giving President Trump his due.

Face it:  The economy is strong.  Stronger than it’s been in a long time.  Sure, part of that strength flows over from the Obama administration.  Sure, presidents take credit for a strong economy more than they are entitled to.  They always have.  Sure, we still have rampant inequality.

However, the de-regulation steps taken by the Trump administration (albeit some of them flawed) and the tax cut (albeit leading to a massive increase in debt and disproportionately skewed to higher incomes) have played a role in the economic recovery—and it is an undeniable fact that the rate of joblessness is at a long-term low and average hourly wages have finally started to edge up.

Also, let’s give credit to the tough steps the Trump administration is taking to claw back some of China’s illegitimate trade practices, practices that have been going on for a long time.  To be clear, I worry we’re risking categorizing China as an existential geo-political threat when, in fact, it’s an economic competitor.  But the card on China’s illegitimate trade practices had to be called by someone and the Trump administration is doing it.  

There are other policies which the Trump administration has pursued which I vigorously opposed:  for example, on immigration (where we need wise bi-partisan legislation) and on the treatment of our closest allies.  

Giving Trump his due where it is justified is not only intellectually correct, it is politically smart.   If people assert that everything he does is bad, nothing would be credible and the spotlight on what I believe matters most—his deeply flawed character—will be diminished.

I won’t belabor here the characteristics of Trump’s character which utterly disqualify him for a position of leadership in any organization with which I’ve been associated.  I will only cite his utter and repeated disregard for the truth, his disrespect for and denigration of others and, for these reasons, his inability to unite the people of our nation around the values on which we were formed.

A final word of caution.  While presidential candidates cannot and should not fail to zero in on Trump’s flawed character, they must be able to also authentically present themselves and a set of economic and social policies which offer the promise of helping to bridge the poisoned atmosphere which separates the country today.

"Don't Let it Happen. It Depends on You"

The Ministry of Truth:  The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 by Dorian Lynskey

 

I’ve separately written an essay based importantly on this book, summarizing its fundamental message of the need for each of us to stand watch over truth.  I wanted to write further here in order to excerpt some of the most salient messages and quotations from the book and take another crack at summarizing its important message as I receive it.

 

On the fleeting nature of fame, Orwell’s concise review of literature that preceded Orwell’s book in both the late 19^th and 20^thcenturies vividly documents the fleeting nature of fame.  He reviews book after book, popular at the time, that have faded in memory.  None more significant than Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000—1887.  Published in 1888, it became the most widely read novel in the United States since Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the most imitated since Jane Eyre.  The book reframed the turbulence of Bellamy’s time as the painful but necessary precursor to a peaceful, socialist utopia.  “Bellamy is the Moses of today,” wrote one commentator.  President Roosevelt read and discussed Bellamy.  The Atlantic Monthly named Looking Backward the second most important book of the past 50 years.  The president of the Book of the Month Club described 1984 as “Bellamy looking backward in reverse.” 

 

*****

 

As a self-critic in the months leading up to the publication of 1984, Orwell talked down the novel, calling it “a beastly book, an awful book really, a good idea ruined.”

 

As one commentator offered on Orwell’s life:  “Nobody considered (him) a failure except for the voice in his head, without which perhaps he wouldn’t have achieved what he did.” 

 Isn’t that true of all of us to one degree or another.  I think so.

 

*****

 

Orwell writing on Gandhi.  Orwell admired Gandhi’s courage and intellectual honesty but recoiled from his abstinence and religiosity.  Who would want to be a saint?  “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”

 

Thankfully, while I have encountered disappointments with people, it has been by far the exception.

 

*****

 

It’s helpful to recognize that, at a time of the kind of troubles which we have now, including Brexit, we have been there before and we overcame them.  It’s striking to read that, contrary to what I would have expected, the jubilation in Britain following the end of World War II was “short lived.”  Rationing, acute housing shortages and the sudden cessation of lend-lease money from the U.S. fostered a widespread sense of anti-climax and gloom.  One study showed that only one in seven Londoners was “happy or elated by the year’s end; 40% were worried or depressed.”

 

Already for some, including Orwell, the challenge of a divided world loomed large in the mid-1940's.  In a prescient newspaper column called “You and the Atom Bomb,” Orwell suggested that this weapon might lock the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (which had not even developed its own bomb yet) into a long and paranoid stalemate.  He pictured a state of “permanent Cold War.”

 

*****

 Orwell's Animal Farm, Lynskey writes, is a scrupulous allegory of Russian history from the Revolution to the Teheran Conference.  Each animal represents an individual:  Napoleon is Stalin, Snowball is Trotsky, Mr. Frederick is Hitler and so on.  The book can be read as a thematic prequel to 1984.  First the revolution betrayed (Animal Farm), then tyranny triumphant (1984).  The commandments of the revolution are reduced to one famous oxymoron:  “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

 

*****

 

Blackballing socialism.  The word socialism is being used today by Trump and other Republicans to instantly denigrate the views of several Democratic candidates.  Interestingly, no one did the blackballing better than Winston Churchill in 1945 as he sought to retain his premiership versus Clement Attlee in the Labor Party.  “There can be no doubt that socialism isn’t separately interwoven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the state,” Churchill railed.  “No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could allow a free, sharp or violently worded expression of public discontent.  They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.”

 

Could you imagine anyone saying that today?  Hyperbolic expression is not something we’ve invented today!

 

*****

 

On the need to feverishly hold on to reality.  Hannah Irendt said it succinctly in 1951:  “The stubbornness of reality is relative.  Reality needs us to protect it.”

 

One of the challenges in holding on to reality, more present today than ever, is the ever-present nature of social media.  Here is an uncannily prescient excerpt from 1984:  “The people are not going to revolt.  They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what’s really happening.”  

 

It gets harder and harder to really know what’s happening when there is such an abundance of exaggerated statements and outright lying before us.  It is truly Orwellian, Lynskey writes, that the phrase “fake news,” created by Orwell, has been turned on its head by Trump to describe real news that is not to his liking, while flagrant lies become “alternative news.”  

 

*****

 

In conclusion, Lynskey observed that the 70^th anniversary of 1984 falls at a dark time for liberal democracy.  Yet, he writes, “There is hope to be taken from the reality that millions of people in the ‘reality-based community’ push back against the ‘medium-sized lie’ to reaffirm that facts do matter, to fight for the preservation of honesty and integrity, and to insist that two and two really do make four.” 

 

For folks like me, 1984, and this biography of it by Lenskey, have a lot to offer.  As Orwell wrote in his preface to Animal Farm, liberal values “are not indestructible and they have to be kept alive by conscious effort.”

 

1984 was Orwell’s final, essential contribution to that collective effort.  In this statement he dictated from bed during his final months, he emphasized the fundamental reason why he wrote it:  not to bind our wills but to strengthen them.  “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one.  Don’t let it happen.  It depends on you.”