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?

  

"I Never Thought of Myself That Way Until You Said It"

 

This was the mind-opening perspective offered by the pastor of my church several years ago.   

 

He offered it to recognize the impact we have on others by what we say.  Innocently, I am sure, a parishioner was recalling being characterized by someone as "poor.”   To which he replied, "I did really not feel poor until I had been characterized that way.”  

This reminded me of the power of affirming the positive qualities of another person, reinforcing their positive attributes and, on the down side, the negative impact of characterizing them in a way which creates a dark shadow.

 

It takes me back over 60 years to my math teacher in high school.  Knowing I was #1 in his class, I was dumbstruck when he came to me and said I needed to work harder.  I replied, “But I’m already #1 in your class.”  

 

“I know,” he said.  “But you can do better, a lot better.  You’re better than you think you are.”  

 

This is just one example of many other comments from people who made me think about myself differently.  There was the time, for example, when my two-up boss casually said to me, “Someday, we may all be working for you, John.”  I had only been at P&G for about a year at the time.  I could hardly believe what he said.  Some days I was wondering whether I was even going to make it.  

 

But more than a half-century later, I still remember that comment, reminding me that a kind affirming word makes all the difference in the world.

 

 

 

A Timeless And Ever-So Timely Plea from Robert F. Kennedy

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago:  To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world, let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”*

*This is a portion of the message delivered almost without notes by Robert Kennedy to a largely African-American audience at a campaign rally in Indianapolis in April, 1968. He had just learned of Martin Luther King's assassination. Little could we have imagined that only a few months later he, too, would be assassinated.

Little could we have imagined that fifty-one years later his plea for "love and wisdom" could be so relevant.

What We Most Need in Our Next President

What we most need in our next President:  Moral leadership which can unite our nation.  It has happened before. It can happen again.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s assumption of the Presidency in 1932 came amidst widespread unemployment and fear, affecting millions of people in this country.  It was also a time of great global upheaval flowing from the economic collapse around the world.  Many intellectuals of the period, witnessing the rise of communism and Nazism, thought democracy was done.  In 1931, Nicholas Murray Butler, long-time president of Columbia University and recipient of that year’s Nobel Peace Prize, told students that totalitarian regimes brought forth “men of far greater intelligence, far stronger character and far more courage than the system of elections.”

In 1932, fascism was socially acceptable and even a little trendy.  Mussolini was still hugely popular well beyond the Italian-American community, and some of the same anti-Semitism coming out of the Nazi party in Germany could be heard in the common rooms of great American universities.  The poet T.S. Eliot gave a lecture at the University of Virginia arguing that “reasons of race and religion combined to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”  Crystal clear evidence how wise and famous men can get things so very wrong.  

Incoming President Roosevelt had a different view.  In an interview with The New York Times in November 1932, he said the Presidency is “preeminently a place of moral leadership.”  He reviewed the work of great earlier presidents and concluded that each of them were “leaders of thought in times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”

We are at such a time again today.

As author Jonathan Alter wrote, “for all of his transformative influence, FDR was, at bottom, a vessel president—a carrier of all the qualities, admirable and less so, that presidents need to chart a course in choppy waters.  The vessel held not just personality traits, but the essential elements of the American character:  our faith in ourselves, our spirit of experimentation and our hope for the future.”  A list to which I would add the recognition of the need to tackle our challenges and opportunities, united, not divided—not pitted one against another, but together.

When these elements seemed nearly extinguished in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt restored them in a matter of months.  This was the work not of social forces, but of a man—a man committed to a moral purpose worthy of the beliefs and principles on which our Nation was founded. 

We need such a man—or a woman—today more than ever.

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.”