Never to forget; always to honor these words of Henri Amiel:
"Life is short, and we do not have much time
to gladden the hearts of those who make the journey with us.
So, be swift to love, and make haste to be kind.
And may the blessing of God who made us,
who loves us and travels with us
be with me and with you now and forever"
We hear its all importance celebrated simply and singularly from two different eras:
"Love, and do as you will"--Saint Augustine.
"All you need is love"--John Lennon and Paul McCartney
This from Tolstoy's "War and Peace"
That proverbial cliche comes to mind as I read the deluge of over-the top criticism of so called "elite universities" following the misbegotten testimony before congress by three presidents of Ivy League schools.
Yes, it is true that the faculty of most of these schools follows a liberal political bent.
Yes, it is true, that many students and faculty members holding "conservative" views may feel uncomfortable in expressing them.
Yes, it is true that group identify has taken on a greater significance than individual identity in recent years, in some cases excessively so in my opinion.
Yes, there are always reasons to ask if we have the balance right between seeking truth and respecting our most important personal convictions born of learning and one's life experiences.
But lets please keep this in perspective.
Peggy Noonan in her WSJ column of 12/16-17 captures the shrieking exaggeration we are seeing all too broadly. Universities "have gone from being centers of excellence to institutions pushing political agendas".
Noonan writes that the idea of a historian attempting to "find the honest truth seems inapplicable to the current moment". She asserts, with absolutely no evidence, that "the good faith of the scholar is sacrificed to political fashion".
Tell that to the Professor of History I have known at Yale for decades. Neither he nor I will know what you are talking about. He is seeking truth with all its complexity. So will the many other historian I have known.
The same drive to find the truth, mine new knowledge, motivates every professor I have known no matter what their field. I have agreed with some of them; I have disagreed with others. But I do not see their orientation to continue to learn in the search for truth to have changed.
Let's calm down. Improve where we should, keep an open mind, listen to and respect different points of view. But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
For a couple of months now, it has become clear to me that unless President Biden is willing and able to change the way he is communicating with the American public and what he is actually proposing and accomplishing, he’s going to lose big-time to Donald Trump or to whomever takes his place in the unlikely event that the criminal cases become so appropriately overpowering someone else does take his place.
The latest poll numbers this morning shout even louder that this is the truth. He’s down in all the key states versus Trump; and if Haley would displace Trump (and she is the most likely candidate to do so) the gaps would be even higher.
It is clear that the 91 indictments against Trump and his outrageous self-revealing assertion that he’ll be a “dictator on Day One” aren’t moving the needle. They will to some degree when voters are confronted with this reality in the voting booth, but not enough.
Biden’s challenges are two-fold as I see it: 1) Personal. He is not seen as sharp enough; he is “too old for the job.” 2) There are the policy issues, above all immigration; he and the administration have to take a decisive stand on this now. The feeling that the economy is not going well is out there, too. Time is going to have to take care of that. I think the message that the economy is better will come through over the next year.
However, the age and policy issues, particularly around immigration, won’t go away unless Biden does something differently.
I don’t know if he’s up to it, but he has to change the way he presents himself to and communicates with the American public. I believe he needs to adopt informal fireside chats. Perhaps with an interviewer; perhaps with a small group. I’m not talking about town halls.
He needs to address head-on the issues that are on voters’ minds: his age, his quickness, why he feels he is uniquely able to carry out the role of the presidency at this point in time.
I for one believe he is, above all because of the global challenges we face in Israel and Palestine, in Ukraine and Russia and in many other places, too. We must hold NATO together. We must have good relationships with our allies. We must seek a relationship with China that doesn’t blink at the reality of competition but sees the opportunity and the need for collaboration.
Joe Biden is far more equipped by experience and temperament to carry out this critical function at this moment in history than any other candidate, Democrat or Republican.
He needs to make that clear. Concretely.
I wish I knew how to share this message with someone who might be able to make a difference in how Biden approaches this. In fact, I don’t think what I’m saying here would be new to the inner circles of the White House or the Democratic Party. What I don’t understand is why it’s not getting through. Or, perhaps if it is, why Biden isn’t acting on it. I just hope he is up to it. I truly believe the country’s future depends on it. We are at a perilous moment. Liz Cheney understands this. Not enough other leaders do. The time to act differently is now. We can't just pretend that it will all work out. Life does not work that way.
Free is a great memoir. It takes its place for me next to those of my other two favorites: James Reston's "Deadline" and Katherine Graham's "Personal History". Each of these memoirs tells a unique human story in unforgettable, candid prose. But each does something else: they cause me to reflect on aspects of my own life.
Lea Ypi's horrific portrayal of the civil war going on in Albania in 1997 feeds in a macabre horrific all -too human way to the humanitarian disaster going on now in Ukraine, the cataclysmic turn to the past in Russia, and the infernal continuing deadly repression of the Palestinians quest for independence by Israel.
The author writes: “Nobody understands anything. It’s like a whole country committing suicide. Just when it looked like things were getting better, it all went downhill. Now that we are all falling from a precipice, there is no way back. It’s so much worse than 1990. At least there was hope and democracy then. Now there is nothing, just a curse.”
Yet Ypi does not leave us off the hook. She goes on to recall what she tells her students teaching Marxism at the London School of Economics. It is, she describes, “a theory of human freedom, of how to think about progress and history, of how we adapt to circumstances but also try to rise above them. Freedom is not sacrificed only when others tell us what to say, where to go, how to behave. A society that claims to enable people to realize their potential but fails to change the structures that prevent everyone from flourishing is also oppressive. And yet, despite all the constraints, we never lose our inner freedom: the freedom to do what is right.”A call to the ultimate duty: trying to do what is right. Giving all people the opportunity to succeed as best we can.She talks to friends at school about her growing up in Albania, first a communist, then a socialist country. They reject the socialism which she had. It wasn’t real. “There was only one thing to do,” they said. “Forget it.” She was reluctant to forget it, not out of nostalgia, not because the concepts she had grown up with were so deeply rooted that it was impossible to disentangle herself but because, “If there was one history, if there was one lesson to be taken from the history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose. It is easy to say ‘what you had was not the real thing,’ applying that to both socialism and liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases us from the burden of responsibility. We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies created in the name of great ideas, and we don’t have to reflect, apologize and learn.”
So it is with the circumstances in which I have lived we all live. Life is not perfect; it’s never been perfect; it never will be perfect. We just have to make the most out of it that we can. I return as I often have to what I hope my grandchildren will be able to say about me and my wife, Francie. “They did the best they could under the circumstances.” To be clear, I’m not sure we always do; sometimes we’re too ready to give up, feel sorry for ourselves, retreat into gloom. But usually we do pull back, try to see our better selves and follow our better instincts.
In the book’s Epilogue, the author turns very personal. She reveals that her mother wondered, even if silently, how she (Lea) could be teaching socialism and Marxism. Only once did she draw attention to a cousin’s remark that my grandfather did not spend 15 years locked up in prison so that I would leave Albania to defend socialism. “I knew this is what she thought. I always wanted to clarify, didn’t know where to start. I thought it would take a book to answer. This is that book.
At first, it was going to be a philosophical book about the overlapping ideas of freedom and the Liberal and Socialist traditions, but when I started writing, ideas turned into people—the people who made me who I am. They loved and fought each other; they had different conceptions of themselves, and of their obligations. They were, as Marx writes, the product of social relations for which they were not responsible. Still, they tried to rise above them. They thought they had succeeded, but when their aspirations became reality, their dreams turned into my disillusionment.”
“My family equated socialism with denial: the denial of who they wanted to be, the right to make mistakes and learn from them, to explore the world on one’s own terms. I equated liberalism with broken promises, the destruction of solidarity, the right to inherit privilege, selfish enrichment, cultivating illusions or turning a blind eye toward justice. In some ways, I have gone full circle. When you see a system change once, you start believing that it can change again. Fighting cynicism and political apathy turns into what some might call a moral duty; to me it is more of a debt that I feel I owe to all people of the past who sacrificed everything because they were not apathetic, they were not cynical, they did not believe that things fall into place if you just let them take their course. If I do nothing, their efforts will have been wasted, their lives will have been meaningless.”
Lea writes with deep feeling. “My world is as far from freedom as the one my parents tried to escape. Both fall short of that ideal. But their failures took distinctive forms, and without being able to understand them, we will remain divided. I wrote my story to explain, to reconcile and to continue the struggle.”Yes, continue the struggle. That is our responsibility. That is our opportunity.
I would conclude these excerpts and perspectives with a short endorsement for this luminous memoir another writer offered and which I echo: “A lyrical memoir of deep and affecting power, the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood and hope.”
