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.”

 

 

 

The Movie "Casablanca" As A Work of Art

Why write a blog about a movie?  Because I believe there are aspects of this movie—what it is, how it came to be, what its impact has been—that merit notice.

 

I had seen Casablanca many times, but this last viewing, for a number of reasons, brought me to appreciate it as a work of art.  There aren’t many movies I’d describe as a work of art.  Schindler’s List is one.  Shawshank Redemption another.  Mrs. Miniver yet another.   And, in its own way, North by Northwest.  

 

What makes it a work of art for me?  The story is galvanizing and memorable, for sure, combining romance, mystery, suspense and a generous dose of humor.  But it is much more than that:  its way of telling that story in simplest terms, betrays not one false note.  In the script, in the acting, in the directing, in the production.  It all came together.  

 

I suppose everyone would have expected Casablanca to be a popular movie.  It had to be with a cast of Bogart and Bergman and Peter Lorre and Claude Raines.  But no one expected it to be a talked-about movie 70 years later.  

 

In fact, it wasn’t all that big a deal in the beginning.  Warner Brothers (and other studios) were producing 25-30 movies per year then. Everyone was going to the movies; it was the war years.  Casablanca was only the fourth or fifth most popular film that year.  There were 3-4 other Warner Brothers films that cost more to make.  The play from which it was based was turned down for movie adaptation several times.  Several esteemed screenwriters turned down the project, not feeling it was worthy of their effort.

 

Remarkably, the film was completed in only three months, from May to August 1942.  The director, Michael Curtiz, couldn’t get all the actors in one place at the beginning; some were finishing up other movies, sweeping from one soundstage to another.  That’s the way it was done.  

 

Forget the details.  You simply have to observe this movie carefully and watch every scene, the lighting, the interaction of the characters, to appreciate its art and its finesse.  

 

It captured the right spirit there in 1942.  If it had been made a few years earlier, it probably wouldn’t have been possible to show the Nazis in such a bad light.  If it had been done two years later, it probably would have been showing the Nazis in a much more brutal light.  

 

Every actor is key to the movie, but Bogart is the central key.  He brings to life a character marked by skepticism and cynicism but at heart he is a sentimentalist, believing in values.  That reality emerges slowly and totally authentically.

 

Casablanca won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1944.  A surprise.  It was starting to catch on, but it really caught on 15 years later when it became the introductory film for a theatre at Harvard dedicated to showing “cult” films, which Casablanca became.  

 

There were attempts to extend its life, but none of them worked; sequels, plays, even a television show.  

 

So it remains.  One of the world’s great movies, qualifying, I believe, as a work of art.

 

 

Dealing with the Root Cause of Our Immigration Crisis--It's Staring Us in The Face

An editorial in the Toronto Globe & Mail on July 3rd captured the root cause of the immigration crisis on our southern border and what to do about it. It was brought to light by the words of Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, one of the three Central American countries from which the immigrants are fleeing. 

Earlier in the week,  President Bukele was asked about the reason for the tragedy.

“People don’t flee their homes because they want to,” he said in English. “People flee their homes because they feel they have to. Why? Because they don’t have a job, because they are being threatened by gangs, because they don’t have basic things like water, education, health.

"We can spit blame to any other country but what about our blame? I mean, what country did they flee? Did they flee the United States? They fled El Salvador. They fled our country. It is our fault.”

And also: “If people have an opportunity of a decent job, a decent education, a decent health-care system and security, I know forced migration will be reduced to zero.”

That’s the issue, in a nutshell. Problem and solution.

If President Donald Trump was serious about fixing the crisis on his country’s southern border, instead of playing it for political advantage, he’d be listening to Mr. Bukele.

The people of El Salvador are hardly to blame for what has happened to their homeland. The Central American country and neighbouring Honduras and Guatemala are corrupt, economically depressed and violent. In 2016, El Salvador had the world’s highest murder rate. Honduras was second. It’s why so many feel they have no choice but to leave.

The flow of migrants entering the United States in May was roughly three times as high as it was during the Obama administration. The surge is driven by people from the so-called Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. As Mr. Bukele correctly described it, misery spurs migration.

But El Salvador is not doomed to forever be a land of misery. Consider that nearby Costa Rica has long been peaceful, democratic and relatively prosperous. And Panama, a dictatorship just a generation ago, has made big strides and is now level with Costa Rica. The United Nations Human Development Index ranks both countries ahead of Brazil, Mexico, China and nearly all of Latin America and the Caribbean. El Salvador is far behind. But change is always possible.

In 2018, Mr. Trump famously said he wanted fewer immigrants from “shithole countries.” To put it in words Mr. Trump can understand, the way to stop people from fleeing crappy countries is to make them less, you know, crappy.

Mr. Bukele, the son of Palestinian immigrants, has a dream of turning El Salvador into a place that draws investment and people, rather than chasing them away. It’s part of the reason why he said what he said about his country’s responsibility for migration. He wants and needs Washington’s help.

If the United States were serious about stemming the flow of migrants, it would be crafting a Marshall Plan for Central America. It would be helping the Northern Triangle achieve better government and more development and investment.

Instead, Mr. Trump earlier this year announced that, as punishment for sending so many migrants, he would cut aid to the Northern Triangle. His administration quietly backed away from the pledge, but the message has been sent. Enlightened self-interest is not on this President’s menu, the Editorial concluded--and I agree.

Thinking what a "Marshall Plan for Central America" might require in terms of resources, I examined how much aid El Salvador is getting today from the United States compared to other countries. It is some, but far less than other countries and far less than the solution to the immigrant challenge appears to call for and justify.

 For perspective, annual aid to El Salvador is a little more than $100 million per year. The aid to Honduras and Guatamala is in the same range. That compares to aid of almost $6 billion to Afghanistan and almost $4 billion to Iraq and over $3 billion to Israel. It is less than a third of the aid for Egypt,  half of the aid for Mali, and a seventh of that for Nigeria. 

Obviously a successful "Marshall Plan" requires more than U.S. money; it requires commitment, investment  and strategic planning anchored in the host countries. And it will require patience and collaboration. But there is no doubt that dealing with the root cause of the immigration challenge does not rest with walls, or more guards. It deals with improving conditions in other countries and overhauling our own immigration policy which has been far too long deferred by political gridlock. 

Chilling Perspective on Today--George Orwell's "1984"

Almost 70 years after he wrote it in 1950, I finally got around to reading George Orwell’s acclaimed 1984.  I’ve read about how the story mirrors what we have seen happen in totalitarian regimes throughout history, including today, enabled as it is by enhanced forms of technology and social media.  

 

The story presents the specter of a totalitarian state being able to control the recording of history and individual thought and, from this, gain control. 

 

It introduces the concept of double-think, described as the “power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.”  It equates to truth becoming what you choose to make it.

 

All past oligarchies have fallen from power, Orwell writes, “either because they ossified or because they grew soft.  Either they became stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, they were overthrown or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force and, once again, were overthrown.  If one is to rule, and continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality, for the secret of ruler-ship is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.”

 

“The mutability of the past is the central tenet” of the state.  Why?  For one thing, it is vital that everyone be cut off from the past so there is no risk of comparing current-day conditions to those that have come before.

 

Orwell describes a world made up of three opposing regions, one seemingly liberal (but not really), another called Neo-Bolshevism (clearly mirroring Orwell’s disaffection which grew over time for Communism) and a region comprised mainly of China, which Orwell describes as best “rendered as Obliteration of the Self.”  In their essence, they are the same.

 

It’s eerie to recognize that today, through technology, everyone is being watched in a way that Orwell in 1950 previewed.  It’s also eerie to see from all reports that China is doing with the Muslims exactly what the state was doing in this book:  indoctrinating people to the point where they no longer feel under pressure but rather willingly accept the tenets of the state.

 

There are other elements of the book which eerily pre-date what has happened in history.  It describes each state through a combination of “fighting, bargaining and well-timed strokes of treachery, acquiring a ring of bases completely encircling one or another of the rival states.”   Doesn’t that sound like what Russia feels may feel with the expansion of NATO to its borders?  Or as we see China doing now in Asia and Africa, not through military war but through expanding economic influence.

 

Orwell describes a long-standing tendency to build up the military, using the threat of war as a way to generate patriotism.  “The search for new weapons continues unceasingly and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet.”  That, happily, does not describe fully the far broader focus on innovation today.  But the search for new weapons certainly continues, citing the threat of an other country as the rationale. 

 

It was in this book that the catch-phrase “Big Brother is watching you” was spawned.  Technology has certainly enabled that reality today in a way not possible 70 years ago.  

 

The end of the book offers no hope.  Winston, the protagonist, eventually succumbs to the indoctrination of the Party, under excruciating torture, to finally say, without a hint of dissemblance, that he loves Big Brother.  The book carries a stark warning.  We must resist like the plague anything that prevents individual thought and that denies the foundational importance of the search for the truth and the recognition that there is indeed a truth.  

 

The book reminds us that, throughout history, there have been totalitarian rulers (though few would have described themselves as such) who felt it vital that there be uniformity of thought among its people and were prepared to wreak great harm on those that didn’t fall in line.  It further reminds us that there are human instincts, above all the search for security and belongingness, that can lead a people to accept this control.  To a degree that I would not want to suggest is equivalent to what is described in 1984, that is going on in China today.

 

At the same time, I take hope and heart from the giant protests occurring in Hong Kong as I write this to thwart the government from changing its policy to prevent extradition to Mainland China for trial.  I also take heart from the brave protests also underway in Sudan to remove military rule.  People are dying as I write this. 

 The flame of freedom lives on, as challenged as it is, thanks to heroic individual effort.