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I usually spend a little time every morning listening to or reading Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" on NPR. Keillor's voice is a pleasure to hear, and somehow reminds me of the days in New England listening to Robert J.
Lurtsema's "Morning Pro Musica" on Boston's WGBH. Lurtsema even read the news of the day like no other. (Edward R. Murrow, of course, is a class unto himself, as I've written earlier here in the pages of Reckonings; but he didn't do music.)
Anyway, I was getting to Garrison Keillor's daily reminders of notable birthdays, and happened this morning on an extraordinarily diverse October 20 collection: Jelly Roll Morton, Christopher Wren, Arthur Rimbaud, John Dewey, Art Buchwald and Robert Pinsky.
These are notes for a talk, not a finished essay, nor do they satisfyingly capture the dynamic character suggested by the word legacy, the manifold ways over the course of my own lifetime that the memories, the impact of these grandparents, the weaving of memory and conversation, reading and reflection, letters, photographs and films continue to evolve and influence me. Reckonings, like this journal whose name came to me many years ago, are in constant motion.
Legacies of Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt:
my maternal grandparents
John Roosevelt Boettiger
Tuesday, 14 October 2014 – St. Stephen’s Church, Belevedere, CA [much like St. James in Hyde Park] – 3 days ago, the 130th anniversary of Eleanor Roosevelt’s birth.
Dedication to another John Boettiger, my father, a good and gifted man, a great newspaper reporter, who lost his way, too soon. When he and Anna Roosevelt, my mother, were married quietly in the Roosevelt family’s New York town house on January 21st, 1935, he married also the most prominent, powerful, scrupulously watched, and enormously admired family in America. They were deeply in love. He was also not a little anxious. The Boettigers and the Roosevelts. Commoners and royalty, working class and patricians. (Flash back to their 1932 meeting and falling in love (he 32, she 26) on FDR’s campaign train, might just have changed the course of American history, but thankfully didn’t.)
These legacies are personal and political. Legacy: impact of their lives; what they bequeath to us, gave us and continue to give us. We know those legacies anew – they change and grow - as we pass through each of our own stages of life. I knew FDR in my 1st decade as a child when my mother and I lived in the White House during WWII. I knew ER in my adolescence and early 20s, a little further toward being a grown-up, my undergraduate years at Amherst College and my early graduate study at Columbia University. “Johnny, come live with me.” That immediate offer bespoke her loving generosity, and her understanding of a promising but insecure young grandson who badly needed love and guidance.
Legacies also mean attending to the impact of freshening events, like Ken Burns’s and Geoff Ward’s great series of films on PBS last month: “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.”
(My Day column, April 1, 1939) “When you love people very much, isn't it grand to be able to join in their happiness? Like everything else in the world, however, there is a price to pay for love, for the more happiness we derive from the existence and companionship of other human beings, the more vulnerable we are when there is any cause for apprehension. It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire, which those who live generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.” [William James: the once-born and the twice-born, in The Varieties of Religious Experience: ER as twice-born, FDR as once-born? A natural healthy-mindedness, secure, self-confident, fearless, contrasted with an exquisite sensitivity to doubt, pain and suffering in the world, the human need for struggle among contradictions, for redemption, not once or twice but always; so, amazingly, a deep openness to wonder and mystery.]
Franklin Delano Roosevelt – Pa to my mother, PaPa to me
Energy, buoyancy, strength, self-possession. (A good phrase, because he was not as easily known as many believed. He was a triumphant fox. Like most of the rest of the world, I hardly knew polio had denied him the use of his legs. And like so many others, if asked, did you know him, I can respond confidently, no, but he knew me.
Playfulness [Whiffenpoof - imaginary animal – ringtailed whiffenpoof, great horned whiffenpoof - early morning play on his bed (funny papers)] and story: the Thanksgiving turkey drumstick; cocktails: his awful martinis: 2:1, and absinthe, and Oval Office desk toys; his children worshipped him, and lost him when he contracted polio; play—hare and hounds on Campobello cliffs—; reading of Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” to children and grandchildren. Play with the self-service elevator (with Winston Churchill). We swam and dunked in the WH pool.
Tom Pendergast, a Kansas City political boss, said in 1924 what the country and the world would later experience: “He has the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met.” He savored stories, probably his own more than others’. He had a wonderful grin, and he’d often throw back his head and laugh. “I love it!” was a favorite expression. [Like TR’s “Bully!”] He loved to talk, and had a natural eloquence. His fireside chats were gatherings of family. In the Oval Office, one couldn’t get a word in edgewise. (Fortunately, I was more interested in playing with the toys on his desk.) He had a more relaxed attitude towards the truth than ER; he loved to embellish stories, and sometimes bent history a bit to suit his and others’ pleasure. He was a political master, a virtuoso at his craft. His self-confidence was legendary, but more important was his capacity to restore and inspire the confidence of the American people, again and again. He led this nation through the two greatest crises its people had known since the Civil War.
FDR recreated the presidency, probably to a greater degree than any before or after him. The New Deal echoes still in our memories. We remember the famous and telling words from his first Inaugural, won from his own life: “the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” And the New Deal may echo in our wishes as well. To use the image of Bob Herbert’s splendid and moving new book, Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America, in our own age of massive inequality of income, endless war, political dysfunction, great economic insecurity and poverty, and issues like climate catastrophe that demand a response hitherto unimaginable, we are indeed, and again, losing our way.
Our need for a “New New Deal, if it is even possible, might have some things in common with FDR’s, but much more in common with the great transformative grassroots movements of the last century and more, like abolition and civil rights, the labor and women’s movements, but on a scale well beyond them. There will still be a need for extraordinary political, economic and moral leadership. There won’t be another FDR, but there are remembrances of what he offered people everywhere. Winston Churchill once said that to encounter Franklin Roosevelt with all his buoyancy, his iridescent personality, and his élan was like opening your first bottle of champagne. He genuinely liked people, he enjoyed responsibility and challenge, he was a supremely confident pragmatist in governance, a humane, bottomless, bold and persistent source of experimentation, and like his cousin Theodore, he adored being president.
But there comes an end. 12 years as president. Yalta was a 14,000-mile journey. Deeply tired, and ill. To Warm Springs. Left on my 6th birthday, 3/30/45. “Give my love to Johnny”: his last words to my mother. Died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, 63 years old, a casualty of war, no less than those who died on Omaha Beach or Guadalcanal. Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Eleanor Roosevelt – Grandmère – Story of a late night in her NY study in the summer of 1958 – I was 19 – quiet, Gregorian chants – my writing and my father – (1) gifted reporter, editor and publisher and (2) his struggle w/ depression, and my hunger to remember and understand him after he took his own life 8 years before.
She wrote that same year, so characteristically: “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual persons: the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.” [Among this boy’s human rights is that he know his father as she had known and loved him.]
Courage, compassion, integrity, grace and dignity, generosity, satisfaction in
giving; to be usefulwere her watchwords. She was, in so many different ways, personal, political, worldwide. “She would rather light a candle,” said Adlai Stevenson at her memorial service, “than curse the darkness.” But she knew the darkness more intimately than her husband.
Hers was a deep sense of spiritual devotion, to give love as, too often, she did not receive love. (By her bedside after her funeral: prayer long associated with the spirit of St. Francis).
I can see her heartfelt saying of this prayer each night. Its psychic rhythm is hers. How can I be of more use to others? I know the world is so full of suffering.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is discord, harmony;
Where there is error, truth;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light.
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console,
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved, as to love…
She lived her faith.
For one so deprived of early love, so emotionally abused in childhood — a beautiful, chilly, self-absorbed mother, a father she adored but who was deeply flawed and mostly absent; both her parents died, as well as one of her two younger brothers, all before she was 10 — for all of that, she had an astonishing gift for love and friendship; and a vulnerability to depression. (Grisilda moods; St. Gaudens statue in Rock Creek Cemetery; activity as antidote. She had her uncle Ted’s energy. Travel with her was inspiring and exhausting. Berlin, Brussels and Harry Belafonte.
Consider the issues of her life, from teaching young women at the Rivington Street Settlement House to corralling the entire United Nations for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (her greatest single achievement) — poverty, children’s and women’s welfare, social and economic justice and equal opportunity.
The early New Deal, depending as it did on fragile political alliances, ignored many of the issues ER cared about most: decent and affordable housing for all Americans, universal health care, equal opportunity for education, prison reform, civil rights and racial justice, discrimination against women (especially women’s employment and equal pay for equal work). She persevered.
My grandmother spent her whole adult life working for justice and for real, functional democracy, not oligarchy or plutocracy masquerading, and never losing track of the fact that the wellbeing of individual human lives was at the heart of that work, and was always at risk, always endangered. I treasure the example and the legacy of both of these amazing grandparents. But more than any other person, my grandmother has been my mentor, my best teacher, and continues to be that 52 years after she left us.
So. For all of their differences of character and method, and the complexity of their marriage, my Roosevelt grandparents had a deep affection and high regard for each other; they enlarged each other’s gifts and served each other’s purposes; they gave each other strength, shared not the same but a complementary, resilient courage and wisdom in the face of adversity, and worked to make government a humane instrument of the growth and well being of all the people, everywhere. I draw from their outsize legacies every day. They are inescapable. I love them both.
Visionary thinkers and activists such as psychologist Mary Pipher, biologist Sandra Steingraber, author Riane Eisler, eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, poet Rachel Bagby and urban organizer Kimberly Wasserman are among the participants offering big-picture strategies and proven social-change tools for making a difference in the world.
The Congress, following up on a successful 2012 event, was conceived by Carolyn Raffensperger, who is interviewed below. “This is not the equal rights of the emerging, early feminism,” she explains. “This is the next stage of claiming responsibility.”
Ann Manning, Initiative Director of Future First, the organization sponsoring the Congress, notes, “One of the key goals of the 2014 Women’s Congress is to see how the constellation of environmental problems is connected to our current economic structures. We can change this by making those connections more visible to people.”
This fits squarely with the work of the commons, says OTC co-director Julie Ristau, one of the Congress organizers and a member of the leadership team. “Looking out for future generations is the core of a commons way of life, and our best, most practical hope.”
Indeed, the “Centrality of the Commons” is one of six key principles to be embraced guiding the Congress: “We recognize that we owe--and future generations deserve--a healthy commons, passed down from each generation to the next. We must take care of the things we share, and we share a lot.”
One of the unique characteristics of our age is that we are suffering Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome-- we know what’s coming. We are witnessing the destruction of the environment for our grandchildren.
“We are all members of a great human orchestra and now it is time to play the Save the World Symphony. You do not have to play a solo, but you do have to know what instrument you hold and find your place in the score.”
- Sandra Steingraber, biologist, author, and cancer survivor.
“We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it.”
- Paul Hawken
Carolyn Raffensperger, an environmental lawyer and public health advocate,
is one of the America’s leading proponents of the Precautionary Principle. This common sense idea states that when an action is suspected of causing harm to people or the environment, the burden of proof is to demonstrate the action is not harmful before moving forward. The European Union has adopted the Precautionary Principle as a statutory requirement in some areas of law.
Raffensperger, executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN), coined the phrase “ecological medicine” to describe the large role that the natural world plays in health and healing. The focus of her work now is developing new models for governance based on the principles of precaution, the commons and ecological integrity.
These goals spurred her to initiate The Women’s Congress for Future Generations in 2012, which is followed the 2014 Women’s Congress to be held in Minneapolis November 6-9. It is sponsored by Future First, which invites both men and women to stand together to ensure a clean and healthy world for future generations.
On the Commons: What is the purpose of the 2014 Women’s Congress, and why are you holding it at this particular time?
Carolyn Raffensperger: Women’s voices are relatively absent in the political arena, especially in the realms of climate change, sustainability and agriculture. Many women are doing wonderful work yet they have not been the major spokespeople. But today women are rising up to take leadership. Women bring life into the world, and we have a responsibility to make sure the environment is healthy and whole.
The Congress is a place for women to talk about that responsibility and to articulate new places for women’s voices in politics. We invite men to participate too, and we invite them to share the unique responsibilities of this work. This is not meant to leave men out-- but to shift the traditional roles.
In thinking about the kind of world we want to live in, we are summoning our wild and woolly imaginations about governance in our society. Crowdsourcing social innovation is part of what the Congress is about. And one of our examples here is a man-- Benjamin Franklin. He introduced the first public library and created the first fire department. No one had ever heard of such things at that time. Somebody had to have the idea and know how to do it.
We are asking people to bring their full selves to the Congress, not to hide away their hearts and act only out of their brains. This is a place to be happy, full of grief and pissed off as we choose wise ways forward.
One of the unique characteristics of our age is that we are suffering Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome-- we know what’s coming. We are witnessing the destruction of the environment for our grandchildren. Some of us wake up at 3 in the morning and wonder what will become of this world. If we are all alone in our fear and our anxiety, we are in deep trouble.
There’s a real need for people to come together and choose the future we want for ourselves and future generations. There are solutions we can reach toward: social shifts, cultural shifts, working together. But the message we hear most places is that it’s all up to us individually-- go change the lightbulbs you are using.
On the Commons: How does the Congress fit in with work of the climate justice movement, the feminist movement and the commons movement?
Carolyn Raffensperger: The political realm is often so different from how people live their lives. I live in Iowa, and grew up in the Midwest, where people often help out their neighbors by shoveling each other’s walks. On a practical level, social capital is built out of that kind of sharing. That’s one basis to think about a different future.
This can lead to a rising up of women, who often are in charge of the everyday matters in the household, to challenge the structural injustice in society-- including the absence of women’s voices in political decisionmaking, which means we have fewer solutions available.
Look at what people are dealing with in their personal lives. The increase of autism and breast cancer, as just two examples. Women do the majority of the caregiving on these and other diseases caused by a declining environment, but they have no seat at the table where solutions are being decided. And that’s one reason why for so long the focus the economy and jobs are seen as what matters. Conversation about everything else is pushed away.
On the Commons: What are your hopes for what comes out of the Women’s Congress?
Carolyn Raffensperger: Women around the world are saying enough is enough. We need to discuss the health of our children. We care about clean water, and what’s in the air our kid’s breath. We’ve lost sight of what the economy is really about. We’re told money is security. But the commons is the real foundation of our economy and our security.
This is really about a new set of essential rights--including the idea that future generations have rights. Today the rights of private property largely define our laws and our culture. The commons changes this picture from the rights of individuals to the rights of a group of people-- the rights of a community. A new goal would be to develop basic rights around sharing. This would mean the purpose of government is to protect commonwealth and common health for present and future generations.
The Women’s Congress is predicated on women’s recognition of the dangers to future generations. And we are withdrawing our consent from this situation. We are serious about that--consent is the basis of governance.
So what do we do? We’d like to see all 50 states to enact constitutional amendments to their constitutions that recognize the rights of future generations. That’s the kind of ideas that will come out of the Women’s Congress. I think we’ll all be surprised by the great ideas that have not been thought of until now.
KEY CONCEPTS
These are the principles on which we stand.
1. GUARDIANSHIP OF FUTURE GENERATIONS
Future generations have the right to an ecologically healthy environment, a habitable earth where they can thrive. We recognize our responsibility to tend and nurture that healthy environment. We can all become guardians and participate in decisions that impact future generations. We can designate legal guardians to review regulations for their impact on the future, and to audit the commons under our jurisdiction.
2. CENTRALITY OF THE COMMONS
The commons are the environment we all share: air, water, soil, climate, animals, insects, and human culture of music, art, language, dance, and more. We recognize that we owe—and future generations deserve—a healthy commons, passed down from each generation to the next. We must take care of the things we share, and we share a lot. A key role of government is to serve as the trustee or guardian of the common wealth and common health.
3. THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE
Our planet’s future is uncertain. We recognize our responsibility to prevent harm, if possible–to heed early warnings; this is a statement of ethics. As we identify practices that are harmful to our planet, endangering our future, we must hold everyone accountable for their actions today: governments, businesses, communities, and individuals.
4. SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIES
Our planet is a self-sustaining ecosystem and we are part of it. We recognize that we must not take more from the Earth than it can regenerate, or put more into it than it can restore.
5. FREE, PRIOR, AND INFORMED CONSENT
Communities, like individuals, have the right to autonomy and self-determination, especially concerning decisions and actions affecting our commons: i.e., our air, water, soil, and other natural resources. We recognize that communities have the right and responsibility to refuse actions that may damage their environment. We recognize that we can, and must, insist that informed consent of everyone affected is obtained before any action is taken.
6. WITHDRAWING CONSENT
We can withdraw our consent from decisions and actions that threaten and damage the future of our planet. We recognize our responsibility to withdraw our consent from a way of life that endangers our planet’s future. We recognize that when we—the affected, the governed—join together and withdraw our consent from corporate or government actions and practices, those who govern and conduct business have an obligation to respond.
See the Declaration of the Rights Held by Future Generations.
The Blue
You can have Egypt and Nantucket.
The only place I want to visit is The Blue,
not the Wild Blue Yonder that seduces pilots,
but that zone where the unexpected dwells,
waiting to come out of it in the shape of bolts.
I want to walk its azure perimeter
where the unanticipated is coiled, on the mark,
ready to spring into the predictable homes of earth.
I want to stroll through the pale indigo light
examining all the accidents about to rocket into time,
all the forgotten names about to fly from tongues.
I will scrutinize all the surprises of the future
and watch the brainstorms gathering darkly,
ready to hit the heads of inventors
laboring in their crackpot shacks.
A jaded traveler with an invisible passport,
I am at home with this heaven of the unforeseen,
waiting for the next whoosh of sudden departure
when, with no advance warning, to tiny augury,
the unpredictable plummets into our lives
from somewhere that looks like sky.
~ Billy Collins ~
Isaiah Berlin spent most of the years of World War II in Washington, DC, at the British Embassy, writing perceptive, incisive accounts of the war and its major figures on all sides, as well as gathering friends among Washington's young and liberal elite.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. remembered him many years later, after Berlin's death in 1997: "I first encountered Isaiah in the winter of 1942–3. He was then only thirty-three years old. One was startled from the beginning by the glittering rush of words and wit, the dazzling command of ideas, the graceful and unforced erudition, the penetrating assessments of personalities, the passion for music, the talent for merriment and, most remarkable of all, the generosity of spirit that led him to treat all of us as his intellectual equals. He had the exciting quality of intensifying life so that one perceived more and thought more and understood more."
Schlesinger continued,
"His years in Washington confirmed him in his view of the benefits of pragmatism in political affairs. He was delighted by the young men and women of the New Deal and exhilarated by the spirit and effectiveness of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s humane experimentalism. The New Deal, he later said, was ‘the most constructive compromise between individual liberty and economic security which our own time has witnessed’. He regarded FDR as ‘the most genuine and unswerving spokesman of democracy of his time, the most contemporary, the most outward-looking, the boldest, most imaginative, most large-spirited, free from the obsessions of an inner life, with an unparalleled capacity for creating confidence in the power of his insight, his foresight, and his capacity genuinely to identify himself with the ideals of humble people’. As Roger Hausheer writes in the introduction to the recently published Berlin anthology The Proper Study of Mankind, ‘Berlin has always been an enthusiastic New Dealer – a natural allegiance, surely, for an objective pluralist.’ His love and hope for America survived even the vicissitudes of the post-war years.
.......
"Isaiah was above all a most civilised man in this horribly uncivilised century – the ‘most terrible century in Western history’, he called it. Wise, brave, kind, unaffected, an exemplar of moral courage, unalterably committed to the politics of decency, he was himself a stirring prediction of what a truly civilised world might be."
___________________
Though in the course of his war years in Washington, improbably, Berlin never saw FDR and heard him only on the radio, he later wrote of him with extraordinary insight. "He was seeking to establish new rules of social justice," and to do that "without forcing his country into some doctrinaire strait-jacket, whether of socialism or State capitalism, or the kind of new social organization which the Fascist regimes flaunted as the New Order." Roosevelt, for Berlin, was a supreme example, of "political skill - indeed virtuosity - which no American before him had ever possessed." He was, preeminently, a fox, "a magnificient virtuoso of this type, and he was the most benevolent as well as the greatest master of his craft in modern times.... He became a legendary hero - they themselves did not know quite why - to the indigent and the oppressed, far beyond the confines of the English-speaking world."
"Roosevelt's example strengthened democracy everywhere, that is to say the view that the promotion of social justice and individual liberty does not necessarily mean the end of all efficient government; that power and order are not identical with a strait-jacket of doctrine, whether economic or political; that it is possible to reconcile individual liberty - a loose texture of society - with the indispensible minimum of organizing and authority; and in this belief lies what Roosevelt's greatest predecessor once described as 'the last best hope of earth.'"*
*Berlin was referring to Abraham Lincoln's message to Congress on December 1, 1862.
A paternal editor's note: It was the year I graduated from high school, Josh, and to be perfectly truthful I don't remember the Yankees game, my attention being focused more on local fields of play: girls, cars, and the newfound joy of finding myself a reputable soccer fullback. Ten years before Adam was born, and another seven before you emerged, a little the worse for wear, in Ellsworth, Maine. So courtesy of Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac, this one's for you, who remain loyal to the Yankees through thick and thin.
On this day in 1956, Yankees pitcher Don Larsen pitched a perfect game. He faced 27 batters and not a single one made it to base. It remains the only perfect World Series game — indeed, the only perfect post-season game — and one of only 20 perfect games in baseball history.
For the fourth time in five years, the Yankees were playing the Brooklyn Dodgers; it was Game Five and the series was tied two games to two. According to Larsen, he didn't even know he would be pitching until he got to the ballpark. He'd had a disastrous Game Two, lasting only two innings and allowing four runs on four walks. The Yankees had been up 6-0 when he took the mound, and they ended up losing, with a score of 13-8. Larsen was as stunned as anyone when he reported to the park for Game Five to find that manager Casey Stengel had tucked a baseball in his spikes. In the locker room after the game, Larsen said, "When it was over, I was so happy, I felt like crying. I wanted to win this one for Casey. After what I did in Brooklyn, he could have forgotten about me and who would blame him? But he gave me another chance and I'm grateful."
Editor's comment —
The following brief and characteristically eloquent essay by Isaiah Berlin appears in The New York Review of Books in its issue of October 23, 2014, with this introductory note:
Twenty years ago—on November 25, 1994—Isaiah Berlin accepted the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto. He prepared the following “short credo” (as he called it in a letter to a friend) for the ceremony, at which it was read on his behalf.
Marking Berlin's death three years later, on 5 November 1997, The Independent wrote:
Isaiah Berlin was one of the most remarkable men of his time, and one of the leading liberal thinkers of the century. Philosopher, political theorist, historian of ideas; Russian, Englishman, Jew; essayist, critic, teacher; he was a man of formidable intellectual power with a rare gift for understanding a wide range of human motives, hopes and fears, and a prodigiously energetic capacity for enjoyment of life, of people in all their variety, of their ideas and idiosyncrasies, of literature, of music, of art.
Fortunately, his legacy is generously gathered online in The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, in which it is well worth spending many hours, and then returning, exploring afield, and returning again.
I particularly recommend his essay on Tolstoy's view of history, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," and the excellent anthology of Berlin's essays, The Proper Study of Mankind, published the year he died. Then there are his remarkable letters, the fourth and final volume of which will be published in 2015.
"The fox knows many things," goes the old Greek adage, "but the hedgehog knows one big thing"; so too, Berlin writes, writers and thinkers may be divided into two categories, those who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things (foxes) and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system (hedgehogs). Berlin's examples of hedgehogs include Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Proust. The foxes, those who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be reduced to a single idea, include Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac and Joyce).
As many have observed, Berlin himself, as will be clear from reading the short credo below, is decidedly in the second category.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” With these words Dickens began his famous novel A Tale of Two Cities. But this cannot, alas, be said about our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—these are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters, but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted.
I speak with particular feeling, for I am a very old man, and I have lived through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and secure, and I feel almost ashamed of this in view of what has happened to so many other human beings. I am not a historian, and so I cannot speak with authority on the causes of these horrors. Yet perhaps I can try.
They were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments, as Spinoza called them—fear, greed, tribal hatreds, jealousy, love of power—though of course these have played their wicked part. They have been caused, in our time, by ideas; or rather, by one particular idea. It is paradoxical that Karl Marx, who played down the importance of ideas in comparison with impersonal social and economic forces, should, by his writings, have caused the transformation of the twentieth century, both in the direction of what he wanted and, by reaction, against it. The German poet Heine, in one of his famous writings, told us not to underestimate the quiet philosopher sitting in his study; if Kant had not undone theology, he declared, Robespierre might not have cut off the head of the King of France.
He predicted that the armed disciples of the German philosophers—Fichte, Schelling, and the other fathers of German nationalism—would one day destroy the great monuments of Western Europe in a wave of fanatical destruction before which the French Revolution would seem child’s play. This may have been unfair to the German metaphysicians, yet Heine’s central idea seems to me valid: in a debased form, the Nazi ideology did have roots in German anti-Enlightenment thought. There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under the influence of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that they know perfection can be reached.
Let me explain. If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any.
The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word is law. The idea that to all genuine questions there can be only one true answer is a very old philosophical notion. The great Athenian philosophers, Jews and Christians, the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Paris of Louis XIV, the French radical reformers of the eighteenth century, the revolutionaries of the nineteenth—however much they differed about what the answer was or how to discover it (and bloody wars were fought over this)—were all convinced that they knew the answer, and that only human vice and stupidity could obstruct its realization.
This is the idea of which I spoke, and what I wish to tell you is that it is false. Not only because the solutions given by different schools of social thought differ, and none can be demonstrated by rational methods—but for an even deeper reason. The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not. Men have always craved for liberty, security, equality, happiness, justice, knowledge, and so on. But complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality—if men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to eat the sheep. Perfect equality means that human liberties must be restrained so that the ablest and the most gifted are not permitted to advance beyond those who would inevitably lose if there were competition. Security, and indeed freedoms, cannot be preserved if freedom to subvert them is permitted. Indeed, not everyone seeks security or peace, otherwise some would not have sought glory in battle or in dangerous sports.
Justice has always been a human ideal, but it is not fully compatible with mercy. Creative imagination and spontaneity, splendid in themselves, cannot be fully reconciled with the need for planning, organization, careful and responsible calculation. Knowledge, the pursuit of truth—the noblest of aims—cannot be fully reconciled with the happiness or the freedom that men desire, for even if I know that I have some incurable disease this will not make me happier or freer. I must always choose: between peace and excitement, or knowledge and blissful ignorance. And so on.
So what is to be done to restrain the champions, sometimes very fanatical, of one or other of these values, each of whom tends to trample upon the rest, as the great tyrants of the twentieth century have trampled on the life, liberty, and human rights of millions because their eyes were fixed upon some ultimate golden future?
I am afraid I have no dramatic answer to offer: only that if these ultimate human values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises, trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen. So much liberty for so much equality, so much individual self-expression for so much security, so much justice for so much compassion. My point is that some values clash: the ends pursued by human beings are all generated by our common nature, but their pursuit has to be to some degree controlled—liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I repeat, may not be fully compatible with each other, nor are liberty, equality, and fraternity.
So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals. I know only too well that this is not a flag under which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may wish to march—it seems too tame, too reasonable, too bourgeois, it does not engage the generous emotions. But you must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants—not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelette is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget the omelette, and just go on breaking eggs.
I am glad to note that toward the end of my long life some realization of this is beginning to dawn. Rationality, tolerance, rare enough in human history, are not despised. Liberal democracy, despite everything, despite the greatest modern scourge of fanatical, fundamentalist nationalism, is spreading. Great tyrannies are in ruins, or will be—even in China the day is not too distant. I am glad that you to whom I speak will see the twenty-first century, which I feel sure can be only a better time for mankind than my terrible century has been. I congratulate you on your good fortune; I regret that I shall not see this brighter future, which I am convinced is coming. With all the gloom that I have been spreading, I am glad to end on an optimistic note. There really are good reasons to think that it is justified.
© The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2014
Editor's note: The essay below is adapted from Atul Gawande's just-published book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (2014, Metropolitan Books; also available as an e-book).
“We have come to medicalize aging, frailty, and death, treating them as if they were just one more clinical problem to overcome. However it is not only medicine that is needed in one’s declining years but life—a life with meaning, a life as rich and full as possible under the circumstances. Being Mortal is not only wise and deeply moving, it is an essential and insightful book for our times, as one would expect from Atul Gawande, one of our finest physician writers.”
—Oliver Sacks
Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and a staff writer for The New Yorker.
The Best Possible Day
by Atul Gawande
A couple of years ago, I got a call from the husband of Peg Bachelder, my daughter Hunter’s piano teacher. “Peg’s in the hospital,” Martin said.
She’d been treated in 2010 for a rare pelvic cancer requiring chemotherapy, radiation and radical surgery.
She returned to teaching and refilled her student roster in no time. She was in her early 60s, tall, with a lovely, gentle way that made her immensely popular. Two years later, however, she developed a leukemia-like malignancy caused by her treatment. She went back on chemotherapy but somehow kept teaching. Then for two straight weeks, Peg postponed Hunter’s lessons. That was when I got Martin’s call from the hospital.
He put his cell on speaker for Peg. She sounded weak and spoke in long pauses. She said the leukemia treatment was not working. It had impaired her immune system, however, making her sick with fevers and an infection. Imaging also showed that her original cancer had come back in her hip and liver. The recurrent disease caused immobilizing hip pain and made her incontinent. That was when she checked into the hospital. She didn’t know what to do.
What had the doctors said they could do? I asked.
“Not much,” she said. She sounded utterly hopeless. They were giving her blood transfusions, pain medications and steroids for the fevers caused by her tumor. They’d stopped giving her chemotherapy.
This is the moment we continue to debate in our country. What is it we think should happen now? Her condition was incurable by established means. So should she press the doctors for other treatments, experimental therapies, anything with even a remote chance of keeping her going, no matter what? Or should she “give up”?
Neither seemed right. But for more than a decade in medical practice, I had not really understood what other choices might exist. I wasn’t effective in these situations. And it bothered me — as a surgeon caring for patients with problems I often could not fix and then as a son with a father in his 70s experiencing mounting difficulties in his life. So for three years, I researched a book on what has gone wrong with the way we manage mortality and how we could do better.
I spoke with more than 200 people about their experiences with aging or serious illness, or dealing with a family member’s — many of them my own patients, some in my own family. I interviewed and shadowed front-line staff members in old age homes, palliative- care specialists, hospice workers, geriatricians, nursing home reformers, pioneers, and contrarians. And among the many things I learned, here are the two most fundamental.
First, in medicine and society, we have failed to recognize that people have priorities that they need us to serve besides just living longer. Second, the best way to learn those priorities is to ask about them. Hence the wide expert agreement that payment systems should enable health professionals to take sufficient time to have such discussions and tune care accordingly.
I also discovered that the discussions most successful clinicians had with patients involved just a few important questions that often unlocked transformative possibilities: (1) What is their understanding of their health or condition? (2) What are their goals if their health worsens? (3) What are their fears? and (4) What are the trade-offs they are willing to make and not willing to make? These discussions must be repeated over time, because people’s answers change. But people can and should insist that others know and respect their priorities.
Not everyone will feel ready to discuss such subjects, to be sure. But I decided to try the questions with Peg. I asked her what her understanding of her condition was. She said flat out that she knew she was going to die. There’s nothing more they can do, she said, an edge of anger in her voice.
I asked what her goals were. She didn’t have any that she could see were possible. Then I asked what her fears for the future were, and she named a litany: facing more pain, suffering the humiliation of losing more of her bodily control, being unable to leave the hospital. She choked up as she spoke. She’d been there for days just getting worse, and she feared she didn’t have many more. They’d talked to her about stopping life-prolonging therapy and going on hospice, but she didn’t see how that could help her.
Someone in her position who was offered “death with dignity” — assisted death — might have taken it as the only chance for control in the absence of other options. But hearing her fears, I suggested that Peg try hospice. It’d at least let her get home, I said, and might help her more than she knew. Hospice’s aim, at least in theory, I explained, is to give people their best possible day, however they might define it under the circumstances. It seemed as if it had been a while since she’d had a good day.
“Yes, it has — a long while,” she said.
That seemed worth hoping for, I said. Just one good day.
With her husband’s encouragement, she went home on hospice less than 48 hours later. We broke the news to Hunter, then just 13 years old, that Peg could not teach her anymore, that she was dying. Hunter was struck low. She asked if she could see Peg one more time. We didn’t think so, we said.
A few days later, however, we got a surprising call from Peg. She wanted to resume teaching. She’d understand if Hunter didn’t want to come. She didn’t know how many more lessons she could manage, but she wanted to try.
That hospice could make teaching possible for her again was more than I’d imagined. But when her hospice nurse arrived, she asked Peg what she cared most about in her life, what having the best day possible meant to her. Then they worked together to make it happen.
Her first goal was just managing her daily difficulties. The hospice team put a hospital bed on the first floor so she wouldn’t have to navigate the stairs, organized a plan for bathing and dressing, adjusted her pain medications until they were right. Her anxieties plummeted as the challenges came under control. She raised her sights.
“She was focused on the main chance,” Martin later said. “She came to a clear view of how she wanted to live the rest of her days. She was going to be home, and she was going to teach.”
It took planning and great expertise to make each lesson possible. The nurse helped her learn how to calibrate her medications. “Before she would teach, she would take some additional morphine. The trick was to give her enough to be comfortable to teach and not so much that she would be groggy,” Martin recalled.
Nonetheless, he said, “She was more alive running up to a lesson and for the days after.” She’d had no children; her students filled that place for her. And she still had some things she wanted them to know before she went. “It was important to her to be able to say her goodbyes to her dear friends, to give her parting advice to her students.”
Medicine has forgotten how vital such matters are to people as they approach life’s end. People want to share memories, pass on wisdoms and keepsakes, connect with loved ones, and to make some last contributions to the world. These moments are among life’s most important, for both the dying and those left behind. And the way we in medicine deny people these moments, out of obtuseness and neglect, should be cause for our unending shame.
Peg, however, got to fulfill her final role. She lived six weeks after going on hospice. Hunter had lessons for four of those weeks, and two final concerts were played. One featured Peg’s current students, all younger children; the other, her former students from around the country. Gathered in her living room, they played Brahms, Chopin and Beethoven for their adored teacher. A week later, she fell into delirium and, a short time after that, died peacefully in her bed.
My final remembrance of Peg is from the end of her last recital with the children. She’d taken each student away from the crowd to give a personal gift and say a few words. When it was Hunter’s turn, Peg gave her a book of music. Then she put her arm around her.
“You’re special,” she whispered to her. It was something she never wanted her students to forget.
New York Times, October 5, 2014
Editor’s note: it isn’t often that we are fortunate to receive data about economic inequality in as hospitable and clear a form as the following brief essay. The dismal science shines for us laypeople, and offers us an appalling and vividly clear picture of the dramatic and ongoing growth of inequality in post-World War II America.
Smart Charts: An Economic Recovery for the 1%
Since 1980, an ever greater share of our economic recoveries has gone to those at the top of the pile.
September 29, 2014
by Joshua Holland
Matthew Yglesias calls this chart, from Pavlina Tcherneva, an economist at the Levy Economic Institute at Bard College, “the most important chart about the American economy you’ll see this year.” It illustrates how much income gains those at the top have enjoyed during each of our post-war expansions.
Average income growth in US recoveries: top 10% versus the bottom 90%. (Graph: Pavlina Tcherneva)
Through the 1975-1979 expansion, more income gains went to the vast majority of the public than to the top 10 percent of households, but the opposite has been true since then. Inequality has grown with each subsequent expansion.
In the current recovery, at least through 2012, the bottom 90 percent actually lost ground, with all of the income gains being grabbed by the wealthiest 10 percent of American households. (Tcherneva relied on the oft-cited income shares database developed by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Picketty.)
Tcherneva ran the numbers for the top one percent and the bottom 99 percent as well…
Average income growth in US recoveries: top 10% versus the bottom 90%. (Data: Pavlina Tcherneva; Graphic: New York Times)
In the paper which the top chart appears in, Tcherneva argues that policymakers have increasingly approached recessions by stabilizing corporations and the broader financial system, and argues that this approach has failed to “trickle down” to the majority of working people. “Conventional fiscal fine-tuning measures ensure that when government increases its total demand for goods and services, it first improves the conditions of the skilled, employable, highly educated, and relatively highly-paid wage and salary workers,” she writes. But “this trickle-down mechanism never quite trickles down far enough to create job opportunities for all individuals willing and able to work, irrespective of their skill and education level.”
One could make a broader structural argument as well: The shift Tcherneva identifies correlates with the end of the post-World War II period of “liberal consensus,” Ronald Reagan’s election and the rise of trickle-down economics. It also correlates with corporate America’s war on organized labor; workers saw a sharp decline in clout during this period. In 1979, the year before Reagan’s election, 21.2 percent of private sector workers belonged to a union; when he left office in 1989, that number had dropped to just 12.3 percent. By the time the 2009 expansion begins, private sector union membership had fallen to 7.2 percent. Policy-making doesn’t occur in a vacuum.
Tcherneva argues for more precisely targeted, bottom-up stimulus policies that would encourage full employment, instead of merely addressing gaps in consumer demand.
(For more on that, see Dean Baker’s piece, “The Full Employment Route to Poverty Reduction.”)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Joshua Holland is a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com. He’s the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) (Wiley: 2010), and host of Politics and Reality Radio. Follow him on Twitter or drop him an email at [email protected].