Wisdom from 80 Years Ago—Wisdom for Our Moment

 Walter Lipmann, the nation's most esteemed columnist at the time,  wrote:  “Those in high places are more than the administrators of government bureaus.  They are more than the writers of laws.  They are the custodians of the nation’s ideals, of its permanent hopes, of the faith that makes a nation out of the mere aggregation of individuals.”  

 

It is this pointed perspective that has made the Trump presidency so invidious. It is what makes me so grateful and hopeful for the Biden administration which lies ahead.

 

In a separate passage, Lipmann wrote::  “Our civilization can be maintained and restored only by remembering and rediscovering the truths, and by reestablishing the virtuous habits on which it was founded.  There is no use looking into the blank future for some new and fancy revelation of what man needs in order to live.”

 

“The revelation has been made.  By it man conquered the jungle about him and the barbarian within him.  The elemental principles of work and sacrifice and duty—and the transcendent criteria of truth, justice, and righteousness—and the grace of love and charity are the things which have made men free…only in this profound, this stern, in this tested wisdom shall we find once more the light and the courage we need.” 

 

That is as well as it could be said.

 

I believe this timeless  quotation from Joseph Conrad captures the essence of our ambitions:  “What one lives for may be uncertain; how one lives is not.  Man should live nobly, though he does not see any practical reason for it, simply because in the mysterious, inexplicable mixture of beauty and ugliness…in which he finds himself, he must be on the side of the virtuous and the beautiful.”

"A Decent America Will Be a Force to Celebrate"

 “When World War II Ended, Nearly Everyone on Earth, Including Americans Themselves, Admired America; So Did the Japanese”

 

So writes the Japanese contemporary novelist, Minae Mizumura, in the recent issue of The New York Review of Books.  

 

Mizumura goes on to write that, in hindsight, we know that the allied occupation forces meticulously controlled the media so that no Japanese criticism saw the light of day.  The nation was to repent and welcome its defeat.  “Cynics say the population was brainwashed, and I find myself often agreeing with that assessment.  After all, America dropped the A bomb…ultimately, however, I have always concluded—if somewhat grudgingly—that the nation’s admiration was justified.  America showed generosity toward the defeated; its people wanted a better world for everyone.”

 

Mizumura went to live in the United States when she was 12 and ended up staying in the U.S. for 20 years, from 1963 to 1983.  She acknowledged that she refused to adapt to her new environment and “turned into an antisocial little Japanese patriot.”  But even during those years of rebellion, at a time when American soldiers were fighting a war in a far-away land, Vietnam, and society was in turmoil, “I never doubted that the U.S. as a whole was fundamentally a moral nation.”  

 

Moving on, Mizumura reflects on how she reacted to the news of Trump’s election.  As she held the newspaper reporting this in her hand, "My mind went numb.  Noises around me ceased to exist.  For the next four years, I felt I was on a rollercoaster, a rollercoaster that just kept plunging lower and lower.  Trump seemed to revel in his amorality.  The more he assaulted the human decency that had created America’s praiseworthy institutions and ideals, the more his orange face glowed.”  The MAGA rallies she observed on the streets and the “idiotic, hateful obsequious” support for Trump in Congress has “betrayed the image long ingrained in me of America as a nation of big-hearted, fair-minded people.”  

 

Mizumura concludes, “The world has become so intertwined that we simply cannot afford another four years of Trump wrecking our future, especially now when that future is imperiled by the threat of a renewed arms race and the ever-accelerating warming of our planet—our only planet.  I will gladly adore America once again if the country makes a decisive turnabout in November.  America doesn’t have to be ‘great again.’  A decent America will be a force to celebrate.”  

 

My friends from around the world, many of them retired from Procter& Gamble, echo the same sentiment that Mizumura expresses poignantly, almost word for word. 

 

And so do I.

 

PLEASE VOTE AND TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS TO DO THE SAME. 

 

Let's Turn the Table on the Demise of Vision, Purpose and Hope

We are a sick nation in many ways, and I am not just referring to COVID-19.  There is a cloud over America.  It has gotten darker during the four years of the Trump administration, but it was there before.

 

It is a cloud growing from a decline in trust, in civility, and in a sense of vision of what our nation can be, what we can be.  A decline in a sense of purpose and hope.  To be sure, there are bright and inspiring sources of light:  healthcare workers risking their lives in hospitals, men and women in food banks and food stores, teachers coping with challenging and risky circumstances, millions seeking jobs, valiantly, while taking care of their needy families.  

 

“Make America Great Again” has become a hollow slogan.  Yes, there have been a few statistically valid accomplishments over the past four years which the Trump administration can claim.  Low unemployment numbers, though we have to acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of people are dropping out of work, and many new jobs come with compensation levels well below what people had before.  

 

However, for many if not most, the quality of life is far from what they would choose.  And, their hope for the future is low.  

 

Our nation has always thrived on an uplifting vision, a big dose of ambition and a sense of purpose.  We haven’t always fulfilled it, not by a long shot, but we have had a star to which we strove and our leaders have called us to reach for it together.

 

This erosion of vision, of ambition and of purpose has reached a peak level today with the simultaneous challenges presented by the pandemic, the resulting severe economic downturn and the moral turpitude and erosion of the very concept of truth embodied by the current President of the United States.  

 

We should recognize that this cloud of pessimism and of doubt, represents an enormous change over the last 60 years.  In 1958, the renowned historian C. Vann Woodward recalled Professor Arthur Schlesinger’s then-recent attempt to define the American character as being “bottomed upon the profound conviction that nothing in the world is beyond its power to accomplish.”  In this, Woodward writes, Schlesinger “gave expression to one of the great American legends, the legend of success and invincibility.  Almost every major collective effort, even those thwarted temporarily, succeeded in the end.  American history is a success story.  Why should such a nation not have a profound conviction that nothing in the world is beyond its power to accomplish?  The American people have never known the chastening experience of being on the losing side of a war.  Success and victory are national habits of mind.”  

 

In 1960, Vann Woodward called on historians to “penetrate the legend without destroying the ideal, who can dispel the illusion of pretended virtue without denying the genuine virtues.  Such historians must have learned that virtue has never been defined by national or regional boundaries, and that morality and rectitude are not the monopolies of factions or parties.  Their studies would show the futility of erecting intellectual barricades against unpopular ideas, of employing censorship and repression against social criticism, and of imposing the ideas of the conqueror upon defeated people by force of arms.  The history they write would also constitute a warning that an overwhelming conviction in the righteousness of a cause is no guarantee of its ultimate triumph, and that the policy which takes into account the possibility of defeat is more realistic than one that assumes the inevitability of victory.”  

 

Yes, this erosion of trust and confidence and hope has been a long time coming.   It has developed over the course of more than 50 years. Over this half-century, our nation has witnessed a profound loss of innocence as we have discovered that all wars are not winnable (witness Vietnam), others are misbegotten (witness Iraq) and some never end (witness Afghanistan). 

 

We’ve lost a sense of invulnerability as we’ve felt the devastating impact of the pandemic and seen terrorists attack our own country and others.  Vulnerable, too, as we watch China grow to become the largest economy in the world, with strong autocratic leadership, and we face a greater number of what we are defining as “enemies” than ever before. 

 

The period has been marked by a sharp erosion of trust in our institutions, including religion, business and government, starting with Nixon’s Watergate, Clinton’s lying and exploitation of a young intern, and now Donald Trump. 

 

It has been abetted by the increasing polarization of politics, even impacting people’s families, enabled by gerrymandering and the far greater impact of big money in influencing the leadership of the country.  

 

It has been fueled by increasing income inequality and by a sense that the world is not as fair as it used to be and that the opportunity for the next generation to do better than the current one has become small.  Media has become increasingly fractionated, enabling all of us to hear what we want to hear, almost always in stark opposition to, often demonizing, the other side.

 

To be sure, there have been events and leaders that have provided hope and evidence that, halting as it is, progress is possible.  The fall of the Berlin Wall and the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union (even though it led to what proved to be a far too self-congratulatory conclusion that the West had won and that democracy and capitalism would prevail across the world).  

 

We’ve been lifted by the greatly increased and long overdue acceptance of the LGBTQ community, offering legitimate hope that positive change can happen.   Many of us were lifted by Obama’s being elected President, feeling this was an indication that opportunity was available to people regardless of their race.  

 

At this moment, there is a greater sense of realism and more honest confrontation of the facts than I have ever before experienced. This is a good thing for facing the reality of where we stand is the starting point to make things better. 

 

We know we continue to face the challenge of racism which we thought had been largely disposed of.  We know we’re vulnerable to disease which, before now, we’ve talked about only as historical incidents (e.g., the Spanish Flu of 1918) as if they were just things of the past.  We—at least most of us—recognize the threat of climate change which has contributed to this year’s wildfires in the western United States, hurricanes in the Gulf and flooding in Iowa. We know, at least we should know, that we face an overhanging threat of nuclear annihilation.  We must work imaginatively and with determination to reach agreement among all nations to control this means of wiping out life on earth as we know it.  

 

Yes, events over the past 60 years have, for almost all of us, removed any aura of innocence.  Indeed, I would say our task now is to recognize the rightness of our founding ideals without indulging in hubris or allowing it to manifest itself in trying to impose our way of life on other nations.  We’ve seen the price to be paid of pursuing a moral crusade on a worldwide scale.  We must have the wisdom to chart a course of foreign policy between the perilous extremes of isolationism and world crusade.  Both extreme courses will always have powerful advocates; neither can be regarded as a dead issue.  

 

Yes, a cloud covers our nation today and indeed the world; a cloud of uncertainty, cynicism and hopelessness.  We need not, we must not, allow ourselves to wallow in this.  We need a new realistic vision, a new ambition to achieve our noblest ideals.  We need leaders who will carry this mission forward with conviction, with courage and with belief in their fellow citizens—all of them.

 

We have had this sense of vision and purpose in our nation before, a vision brought to life by concrete decisions, actions and achievement.  We need such a vision and sense of purpose and actions to realize it in the next administration.  Actions such as infrastructure improvements providing millions of new jobs, quality health care and educational opportunity available to all, regardless of income working together with other nations to attack climate change, seeking resolution of disagreements with adversaries and working with them where we need to—for example, on nuclear proliferation. We must mend our relationships with allies to achieve common purposes. Perhaps above all, in our relationships and dialogue with one another, we must be civil and display common decency. That's the only way we can come together to accomplish what we need to. 

 

We need to look at one another as fellow travelers in the pursuit of a better country devoted to fulfilling the ideals embedded in the founding of our nation.

 

We can do better, much better.  I for one am optimistic that we can and will begin to turn the table on the erosion of Vision, Purpose and Hope under a new Biden administration. It will not be easy and it will not happen overnight but we must and can begin and I think we will. 

 

 

Diverging Perspectives on Racism as It Exists Today—Continuing to Learn, Personally

 It would be hard to imagine two books, sharing similar titles, that differ more in their thesis than two I’ve recently read—White Fragility:  Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin Diangelo; White Guilt:  How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele.

 

There is one belief that the books share in common which is a rightly cautionary one.  This is the risk of how a feeling of moral superiority, drawn from one’s opposition to racism, can become a badge of honor.  

In the case of Whites, it can dilute the need for one to take concrete actions to attack systemic racism.

 

For Blacks, per Shelby Steele, being conscious of racism, leads to “White Guilt,” which he asserts reduces their sense of individual responsibility. 

 

I am personally very conscious of the risk that my concern about racism, sharper today than it has ever been, can elevate itself to a feeling of moral righteousness.  My being conscious of racism can lead me to feel I’m doing something good and meaningful simply by recognizing racism. Just as invidiously, I can come to view Blacks as a class rather than penetrating to understand each individual’s circumstances through genuine conversations and by understanding each other stories.  

 

Shelby Steele’s book suffers from several errors in fact, as I see the situation.  Specifically:

 

• His belief that African-Americans are motivated much more by White Guilt than by key principles founded on personal responsibility;
• His view that racism and White Supremacy are now recognized as real and seen by almost all people as morally wrong. If only that were true; 
• His failure to recognize that there are indeed systemic racial barriers that still exist in educational preparedness, job interviews, criminal justice and  healthcare;
• His belief that the pursuit of diversity is simply an expression of a way to suppress the feeling of White Guilt rather than a recognition of the benefits which diversity offers;
• His belief that the pursuit of diversity requires a diminution of quality and excellence.  I say this, knowing that this is indeed possible but in no way inevitable or necessary;
• His assertion that White Guilt, following what Steele feels was closing the curtain on racism in the mid-60s, has created a moral vacuum which has played a major responsibility in the reduction of moral standards in general.  He asserts that White Guilt has been the principal, if not only, factor reducing moral authority in our world today.  He goes so far as to express the belief that it was responsible for the broad acceptance of Clinton’s taking advantage of Monica Lewinsky.  There has indeed been a general deterioration of moral standards in many areas.  The causes of this have been multiple.  While White Guilt is a reality, Steele badly overstates its influence.  

 

Robin Diangelo in White Fragility includes many thoughts which strike home for me:

 

• Viewing privilege as something that White people are just handed obscures the systematic dimensions of racism that are actively and passively, consciously and unconsciously, maintained by all White people;
• There is a network of systematically related racial barriers. Taken individually, none of these barriers might be that difficult for an individual to get around but, because they interlock with each other, they have a very telling effect.  These barriers relate to housing, neighborhood, education, employment, health and wealth and income;
• “We Whites who position ourselves as liberal often opt to protect what we perceive as our moral reputations, rather than recognize, challenge and seek to change our participation in systems of inequity and domination.  What is particularly problematic is that White people’s moral objection to racism increases their resistance to acknowledging their complicity with it.” 

Inspiration from Michele Obama's "Becoming"

“Becoming” by Michelle Obama

 

One of the finest memoirs I have ever read.  And already reputed to be the #1 bestseller of all memoirs ever.

 

I relished it for its candor, intimacy and plain-spokenness.

 

In its own way, it is the kind of memoir my wife, Francie could write.

 

Here are a few of the insights Michelle offered which I found memorable.

 

Referring to her mother she writes “she loved us consistently but we were not over-managed.  Her goal was to push us into the world.  ‘I’m not raising babies, I’m raising adults.’  She and my dad offered guidelines rather than rules.  It meant that as teenagers we would never have a curfew.”  Just like Francie with our children.

 

There is this luminous description of the challenges minority students face.  “Minority and under-privileged students rise to the challenge all the time but it takes energy.  It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of the few non-white people trying out for a play or joining an intramural team.  It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room.”  This is why, Michelle writes, that she and other black young people relish the opportunity to be with other black people.  They felt comfortable, safe.

 

I admire the openness with which Michelle reveals her relationship and marriage to Barack.

 

At one point she wrote in her journal “I am so angry at Barack.  I don’t think we have anything in common.” 

 

She writes that they had to pursue marriage counseling, and it helped!  “Like any newish couple, we were learning how to fight.  We didn’t fight often, and when we did, it was typically over petty things..but we did fight.  And for better or worse, I tend to yell when I’m angry.”

 

Like Francie, Michelle was very confident, conscious of the stereotyped role of being a “wife.”  She writes, “wife” can feel like a loaded word.  It carries a history.  If you grew up in the 60s and the 70s, as I did, wives seemed to be a genus of white women who lived inside television sitcoms—cheery, coiffed, corseted.  They stayed at home, fussed over the children, and had dinner ready on the stove.”

 

Michelle pushed back against that.

 

Michelle is honest in saying how as a Senator’s wife she began to feel sublimated “at the heart of my confusion (in Washington) was a kind of fear, because as much as I hadn’t chosen to be involved, I was getting sucked in.  I had been Mrs. Obama for the last 12 years, but it was starting to mean something different.  At least in some spheres, I was now Mrs. Obama in a way that could feel diminishing, a Mrs. defined by her Mr.”

 

Michelle had a revealing and in many ways chilling experience during the campaign when she was asked to look at the talks she was giving without any sound, just the visual.  What she saw was that she was “too serious, too severe.”  She needed to lighten up.  Examining how we look without the sound can be very instructive.

 

As First Lady, Michelle knew she would be measured by a different yardstick.  She found herself, as she had before, “suddenly tripped by doubt.  Confidence, I learned then, sometimes needs to be called from within.  I have said the same words to myself many times now, through many climbs.  Am I good enough?  Yes I am.”

 

Toward the end of her memoir, Michelle writes in a way that articulates my own experience:  “The important parts of my story lay less in the surface value of my accomplishments and more in what undergirded them—the many small ways I had been buttressed over the years, and the people who helped build my confidence over time.  I remembered them all, every person who had ever waved me forward.” 

 

For me, there have been so many.  I recorded many of them in my paper, “If It Weren’t For Them,” and there are many more I have met since writing that paper.

 

Michelle goes on:  “My early successes in life were, I knew, a product of the consistent love and high expectations with which I was surrounded as a child, both at home and at school.  I had been lucky to have parents, teachers and mentors, who had fed me with a consistent simple message:  you matter.”

Yes, that message—"you matter"—changes lives for a lifetime. 

"Grapes of Wrath" byJohn Steinbeck—Personal Reflections on Its Meaning for Today

This novel takes its place among the five finest novels I have ever read: the others being Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow.  

Of all these novels, however, "Grapes of Wrath"  has most deeply penetrated my life. For many reasons,  above all because I came to know and feel the characters more intimately and viscerally and emotionally than in any other book I have ever read.

 

 I understand what Norman Mailer meant in writing of "Steinbeck's marvelous and ironic sense of compassion…daring all the time to go up to the very abyss of offering more feeling than the reader can accept."

 

Again and again, that is how I felt, hanging on every word and phrase, wondering, worrying about what comes next. 

 

It did not happen by accident. Steinbeck records this in the midst of writing the book: "Yesterday it seemed to me that the people were coming to life. I hope so. These people must be intensely alive the whole time".

 

The whole time. Exactly. No false notes.  Through detailed depiction of the environment, layer upon layer, in cinema-like detail, through the development of the looks, gestures and clothes of every character and through dialogue, authentic and colloquial, matched to the individual, I am PRESENT. I am THERE.

 

Steinbeck greatly respects his theme, the magnitude of the undertaking: "I went over the whole of the book in my head—fixed on the last scene, huge and symbolic (and I would add brave and unexpected), toward which the whole story moves. And that was a good thing, for it was a re-understanding of the dignity of the effort and mightiness of the theme. I feel very small and inadequate and incapable but I grew again to love the story which is so much greater than I am. To love and admire the people who are so much stronger and purer and braver than I am." 

 

Such humility combined with reverence and ambition and incredibly hard work—the sources of greatness. 

 

Like many, I resonate to this story today because it presents vividly what immigrants fleeing violence and life-threatening poverty face today. And the homeless too. It dramatizes how many will take advantage of them, some will castigate them as being dirty and threatening and dangerous, and a few generous souls will step forward as Good Saviors to try to help them on their journey.

 

For me, this story cries out for individual and collective action today.

We need the equivalent of "Grapes of Wrath" today to reveal viscerally and authentically the challenge that hundreds of thousands of threatened women, men and children face today as they seek safety and freedom for their families. 

 

 In the broadest sense, this novel presents the urgent need for social justice, understanding and compassion so needed in our world today. As one commentator observed, it is also at once an elegy and a challenge to live in harmony with the earth. 

 

Hope and valor present themselves repeatedly in this magnificent novel, but never, ever at the expense of recognizing the raw often brutal challenge of life. The ex-preacher Casy captures this combination of challenge and hope as he describes how a friend looks back on being violently jailed by vigilantes because he had tried to setup a union among exploited workers.  

 

"Anyways, you do what you can. The only thing you got to look at is that every time there is a little step forward, she may slip back a little, but she never slips clear back. You can prove that and that makes the whole thing right. And that means there wasn't no waste even it seemed like there was."

 

No matter what, we must continue on. Recalling one of my favorite texts the Talmud: "You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it."

 

Steinbeck honors the uniqueness and complexity of every individual's life but also the strength to be drawn in being part of something bigger than oneself, ones family above all and the whole of humanity beyond. It is a noble calling. One worthy of our best effort. 

James Baldwin's Mind-Opening, Mind-Challenging "The Fire Next Time"

 I recently finished reading the mind-opening, mind-challenging book, James Baldwin’s "The Fire Next Time"

As The Atlantic wrote in its review:  “So eloquent in his passion, so scorching in his candor, it is bound to unsettle any reader.  As a novelist and writer of uncommon talent, James Baldwin plunges to the human heart of the matter.”  And the Christian Science Monitor:  “Anguished, stabbing, a final plea and warning to end racial nightmare.”

 

I can’t imagine a book more prescient in illuminating the moment we find ourselves in, over 50 years after the book was published.  

 

The challenge Baldwin offers cut deep:  “Today, 100 years after his technical emancipation, he (the Negro) remains, with the possible exception of the American Indian, the most despised creature in his country.  Now, there is simply no possibility of a real change in the Negro’s situation without the most radical and far-reaching changes in the American political and social structure.  And it is clear that White Americans are not simply unwilling to affect these changes; they are, in the main, so slothful that they have become unable even to envisage them.”

 

Today, to a degree I don’t believe even Baldwin could have envisaged, eyes are open.  The question is, will they lead to radical action?

 

Baldwin comments:  “The sloppy, infatuous nature of American good will can never be relied upon to deal with hard problems.  These have been dealt with, when they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity—and in political terms anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top.  I think this is a fact, which it gives no purpose to deny, but whether it is a fact or not, this what the Black population of the world, including Black Americans, really believes.”

 

Baldwin offers this stunning insight:  “There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves.  People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior and this human truth has an especially grinding force here, where identity is almost impossible to achieve.  And people are perpetually attempting to find their feet on the shifting sands of status.”

 

And then, with this sequence of convictions and hopes, Baldwin concludes:  “Perhaps people being the conundrums that they are, and having so little desire to show the burden of their lives, this is what will always happen.  But, at the bottom of my heart, I do not believe this.  I think people can be better than that, and I know that people can be better than they are.  We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”  

 

This eloquent thought captures what I have seen be the best of life.  I’ve seen it happen many times in P&G’s history as we have overcome challenges by facing reality and living our Purpose and Values.  It has happened for a time, not as long as I would wish, in the history of our country.  However, such moments of progress can never be taken as the new norm or something that will proceed on automatic pilot.  They are subject to all of the “push and pull” of history and leadership.

 

At the conclusion of his book, Baldwin writes:  “A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay.”  He is referring to the problem and vestiges of slavery:  “A fearful and delicate problem which compromises when it does not corrupt all the American efforts to build a better world—here, there or anywhere.  It is for this reason that everything White Americans think they believe in must now be re-examined.  What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color but, as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible for the great unwashed to consolidate themselves according to any other principle.  Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”

 

“If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious Whites and the relatively conscious Blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country and change the history of the world.  If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of the prophecy, recreated from the Bible and sold by a slave, is upon us:  ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water.  The fire next time!’”