Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Martin Luther King: Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence

I am posting below the text of a speech Martin Luther King gave at Riverside Church in New York City, on April 4, 1967, a speech that became famous at the time but is largely forgotten now, 55 years later. He called it "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence." I was there on that occasion, and its text sends shivers down my spine as it did then.

As you read, note especially the enlargement of his focus halfway through, in the paragraph beginning "The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit." His values and the issues he addressed on that occasion are as important now as they were then. On the holiday next Monday, we legitimately celebrate Martin Luther King as a civil rights leader. He was that, of course, and his message — "beyond Vietnam" — as this talk makes clear, reveals a man who addresses us today as deeply as it did 55 years ago. 

The US had joined the Vietnam War, bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail and North Vietnam, sending troops who were fighting, killing and being killed. I would have been drafted, but was exempt because I was married and had a child. (If I had been eligible for the draft we would have gone to live in Canada. I don't believe Deb and I talked about that, as my exemption was palpably clear to me.) You know that at the time of King's speech, beginning with my work for The RAND Corporation a little earlier in the 60s and extending into the focus of The Christopher Reynolds Foundation's grantmaking, I'd been writing about US policy in Vietnam and was a student of love, peace, and their antitheses. 

One of my mentors, the historian Henry Steele Commager, was at King's speech, as was Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, another of my heroes. I was teaching at Hampshire College and was an active member of the organization — Clergy and Laymen [today we would say laity] Concerned About Vietnam — that brought King on that occasion to Riverside Church.

It was an extraordinarily moving act of truth telling. I remember it vividly, and thought it would interest you these many years later. I didn't know until recently that the text had been preserved and had become publicly available.

 

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence

 

Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

 

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:

I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, and some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I'm in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.

Since I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be — are — are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954;¹ and I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954 -- in 1945 rather -- after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China -- for whom the Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States' influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing -- in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon, the only solid -- solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred -- rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak of the -- for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do [immediately] to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

Part of our ongoing -- Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary. Meanwhile -- Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality...and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala -- Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light."² We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."³

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing -- embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate -- ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us."⁴ Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says:

Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet ‘tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when "justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."⁵

 __________________________________

¹ King stated "1954." That year was notable for the Civil Rights Movement in the USSC's  Brown v. Board of  Education ruling. However, given the statement's discursive thrust, King may have meant to say "1964" -- the year he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Alternatively, as noted by Steve Goldberg, King may have identified 1954's "burden of responsibility" as the year he became a minister.

² Isaiah 9:2/Matthew 4:16

³ Isaiah 40:4

⁴ 1 John 4:7-8, 12

⁵ Amos 5:24

The Stories of Marilynne Robinson

[Note from John: I've been absorbed for many years by the writing of Marilynne Robinson; absorbed and moved. I should say especially her five novels, Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020). Her five collections of essays on diverse topics — The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012), The Givenness of Things: Essays (2015), and What Are We Doing Here? (2018) — are equally revelatory of her extraordinary mind and gifts as a writer, as are her as yet uncollected articles, essays and reviews in Harper's, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books and other publications. 

Even the simple act of assembling that list astonishes me with the evidence of her consistent productivity. If I've been especially taken — that is the word — by her fiction, by the care, generosity and coherence, the grace of her novels, that certainly expresses my own deepest drawing to narrative, to storytelling as a genre that has always, as long as I can remember, been most compelling in my love of reading, going back into my childhood and the vivid memory of being read to by my mother's father and mother. For virtually my whole life I have treasured my grandfather's copy of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, carefully annotated in pencil by his marking of those passages he would read to us, his grandchildren, and those he well-judged would be more likely to tax our patience. I've done just the same in the communities of which I've been a grateful member in more recent years, with Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales.

Stories have probably been sung as often as told, thereby adding a village, tribal or cultural collective expression and significance to their character. At a summer camp for young boys I can still remember, 70 or more years later, lines of our songs, some of which gave voice, around the campfire, to a shared identity. Schmaltz, perhaps, but in that time and day resonant with meaning. We were together:

Up in the mountains far and free,

Where the pines tower to the stars,

There is a camp of husky, manly boys,

And it's most beyond belief,

How they come to attention when they hark

To the words of the Heap Big Chief.

But returning to the impact of Marilynne Robinson's novels, I might best characterize it by my reading and contemplation of the friendship that developed and flourished between her and Barak Obama. He first read her work after she had already won the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead in 2005. He was still a junior senator from Illinois, and read Gilead during his campaign for the Presidency. He wrote later retrospectively of who and what he had found (I draw here upon a passage from a longer New Yorker article reprinted below):

"He thought he would learn more about Iowa [Robinson had taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and the University of Iowa her whole adult life, as well as — on shorter occasions — at many other colleges and universities], but he was moved to learn more about America. In Robinson, Obama found a writer who loves this country as much as he does, and in the same way: both see a profound beauty in the ongoing, collective effort to become a more perfect union. 'There’s something old-fashioned about Marilynne,' Obama says, describing Robinson as 'unashamed to reach for big themes and big questions—about how we give our lives purpose, and how we deal with death and what it means to be redeemed from the mistakes and flaws of our lives. There’s a fundamental compassion and a deep humanity rather than cynicism about people that runs contrary to what a lot of our art these days reflects.... "

In 2015...."President Obama delivered the eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, a state legislator from South Carolina who was murdered, along with eight others, by a white supremacist while attending a Bible study at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Robinson and Obama had begun a correspondence, and in his eulogy the President quoted one of the novelist’s letters to him, as he spoke of calling, even in a time of extremity and anguish, on “that reservoir of goodness, beyond and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary course of things.” That was, you will recall, the occasion on which he sang "Amazing Grace."

"A few months later, Robinson and Obama met for a public conversation at the Iowa State Library, in Des Moines. Although she taught for more than thirty years, Robinson does not have much of an interrogative mode; she learns by reading and observation, in both cases through sustained acts of attention rather than overt inquisition. And so their planned conversation turned into the President interviewing the novelist; the questioner-in-chief listened as Robinson spoke about fear, faith, public education, and what she regards as the necessary features of a functioning democracy and a good life. In return, she almost willfully refused to ask him anything—trusting, as she always does, that if someone, even the President, has anything to say he will say it."

In November 2015, The New York Review of Books published a two-part conversation between Obama and Robinson, covering topics in American history and the role of faith in society.

Time now for me to offer readers of Reckonings a wonderful account of Robinson's novels, written by Casey Cep in The New Yorker for the print edition of October 5, 2020.]

 

Marilynne Robinson’s Essential American Stories

 

The author of Housekeeping, Gilead, and Jack looks to history not just for the origins of America’s ailments but for their remedy, too.

By Casey Cep
September 25, 2020
The New Yorker

It is the only one left. A hundred years ago, Robert Frost bought a ninety-acre farm near South Shaftsbury, Vermont; it came with an old stone house and a pair of barns, but he also wanted an orchard, so he planted hundreds of apple trees. Time and wind and winter storms have had their way with them, and today only one remains.

Earlier this summer, Marilynne Robinson followed a path through the fallow field that used to be Frost’s orchard, then looked for a long time at the last of his plantings. She does not generally like visiting the houses of writers gone from this world. “They feel like mausoleums,” she says. “I prefer to think of my favorite writers off somewhere writing.” Because of the pandemic, though, it had been months since she had left her summer house, by a lake in Saratoga Springs, so she was open to an adventure. She ambled around the farmhouse and its grounds, looking at Frost’s books and through his windows, studying his barns, recalling her grandfather’s flower gardens while photographing the poet’s, and admiring a bronze statue of Frost before posing obligingly beside it.

But it was the apple tree that seemed particularly charged in Robinson’s presence. More trunk than tree, barren except for a single branch with a few withered attempts at fruit, its shadow was barely longer than hers. As a writer, Robinson is a direct descendant of Frost, carrying on his tradition of careful, democratic observations of this country’s landscapes and its people, perpetually keeping one eye on the eternal and the other on the everyday. As a Calvinist, she has spent a lot of her life thinking about apple trees.

This one seemed very far from Eden, but Robinson is accustomed to tending gardens that others have forsaken. She has devoted her life to reconsidering figures whom history has seen fit to forget or malign and recovering ideas long misinterpreted or neglected. Her writing is best understood as a grand project of restoration, aesthetic as well as political, which she has undertaken in the past four decades in six works of nonfiction and five novels, including a new one this fall. Jack is the fourth novel in Robinson’s Gilead series, an intergenerational saga of race, religion, family, and forgiveness centered on a small Iowa town. But it is not accurate to call it a sequel or a prequel. Rather, this book and the others — Gilead, Home, and Lila— are more like the Gospels, telling the same story four ways.

Although Robinson began her career by writing a book she believed was unpublishable, and has persisted in writing books she believes are unfashionable, she has earned the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, the praise of Presidents and archbishops, and an audience as devoted to her work as mystics are to visions. At seventy-six, she is still trying to convince the rest of us that her habit of looking backward isn’t retrograde but radical, and that this country’s history, so often seen now as the source of our discontents, contains their remedy, too.

Last fall, at the end of a day spent working on Jack, Robinson sat down for an improvised dinner at her home in Iowa City, where she has lived for three decades and where she taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop until she retired, four years ago. She considered the day a success because she had perfected a single sentence. “I feel that everything has to be structurally integral, and that, if I write even one sentence that does not feel right, it’s a flawed structure,” she says. Robinson has converted her dining room into something like a rare-books library, its long table covered in enormous seventeenth-century volumes of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, and the cushions and blankets that protect them, so she had arranged small dishes of crackers and cheese and assorted tarts in the kitchen. The result seemed like something out of a Louisa May Alcott novel, she observed. Then she clarified that it actually was out of an Alcott novel — An Old-Fashioned Girl, which features an unconventional meal in a sculptor’s studio, a scene Robinson has always cherished for its depiction of the freedom of the artistic life.
Robinson read Alcott as a child, the way many American girls do; she also read Moby-Dick, at age nine. Born during the Second World War, she was brought up in the Idaho Panhandle, where her family had lived for four generations. Just about the only thing that wasn’t rationed at the time was books, and Melville’s unruly opus was one of her favorites: an endless font for the vocabulary lists she liked to compile, and a metaphysical primer for making sense of the world. When she wrote her first novel, decades later, her nickname for the manuscript was “Moby-Jane,” and the conversation between it and Melville is obvious from the opening sentence: “My name is Ruth.”

That book’s actual title is Housekeeping, which, Robinson points out, might just as easily have been the title of Thoreau’s Walden, another influence. Like Walden, Housekeeping is concerned with how the self stands in relation to society. Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, have been abandoned by their mother and left at their family’s homestead, where they are raised by a series of female relatives—first their grandmother, then two great-aunts, and finally their mother’s eccentric sister, Sylvie. Lucille follows the path of respectability, apprenticing herself to her home-economics teacher, while Ruth ventures farther and farther into the wilderness around and within her.

What Melville did with a whaling ship and an ocean, Robinson does with a family home and a lake. “We both drowned a lot of people,” she says, laughing. With her serene gravitas, Robinson can seem somewhat like a benevolent mountain, but her sense of humor is quick and abundant. Housekeeping is an epic made from the domestic, a depiction of childhood that takes seriously the strangeness of being a sentient creature in the world. Robinson shared the novel with a writer friend, who found it remarkable and sent it along to his agent, Ellen Levine. Levine read the manuscript on a dreary day at a dreary hotel while accompanying her husband to a medical conference and found that it changed the weather. “It was just transporting,” she says. “The language and the feeling of it was haunting and beautiful.” She has represented Robinson for more than forty years.

As much as she loved the book, Levine warned Robinson that she was not sure anyone would publish it; when Farrar, Straus & Giroux decided to do so, the publisher warned them that it might attract very little in the way of readers or reviews. Robinson’s editor thought some revisions might help, but she agreed to only two changes: striking a passage about a lumberyard deemed too lyrical, and changing a dog’s name from Hitler to Brutus. When Housekeeping came out, in 1981, Doris Lessing declared that “every sentence is a delight” and Walker Percy called its prose “as sharp and clear as light and air and water.” Anatole Broyard, in his review for the Times, wrote, “Here’s a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life, waiting for it to form itself. It’s as if, in writing it, she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions and achieved a kind of transfiguration.”

Broyard was right about the patience that had gone into the book’s composition. Robinson had been gathering ideas and metaphors for her novel for more than a dozen years, collecting them on loose-leaf paper and in spiral notebooks that she squirrelled away in the drawer of a sideboard. Housekeeping is not autobiographical, but writing it required summoning her Western roots, calling forth a place where she had not lived in nearly two decades. “I would close the shutters,” she says, “and sit in this very dark room and try to remember.”

Robinson is once again sitting in darkness recalling her childhood; the windows in her kitchen have long since gone black, but she has not yet turned on a light. “I’m a sort of twilight person,” she says, getting up to make coffee before settling back into conversation. She spent much of her childhood in the town of Sandpoint, in the shadow of the Bitterroot, Cabinet, and Selkirk Mountains, on the banks of Lake Pend Oreille, where her uncle drowned in a sailing accident before she was born. In Housekeeping, that lake appears as Fingerbone, which has claimed the girls’ mother in a suicide and their grandfather in one of literature’s most memorable train wrecks: “The disaster took place midway through a moonless night. The train, which was black and sleek and elegant, and was called the Fireball, had pulled more than halfway across the bridge when the engine nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid after it into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock.”

The tallest building in Sandpoint was a grain elevator, and, historically, the half of Robinson’s family who weren’t ranchers were farmers. Her father, John, worked in the lumber industry, first as a logger—Robinson remembers him smelling of pitch and sawdust—then as a field representative, moving his family all around Idaho, and briefly to the East Coast, before settling in Coeur d’Alene, where Robinson graduated from high school. Her mother, Ellen, was a formal and exacting homemaker. Robinson’s brother, David, two years older, decided early that he was going to become a painter and declared that she should be a poet. He told her once that God is a sphere whose center is everywhere but whose circumference is nowhere, a sentence she never forgot, partly because it reflected her own experience of holiness and partly because it demonstrated something of increasing interest to her: how to capture the ineffable in language.

Robinson was a pious child, but her parents, who were Presbyterians, did not go to church often. What services she did attend she mostly spent pushing the coins for her offering into the tips of her white gloves to give herself toad fingers. But she recalls feeling God’s presence everywhere: in the pooled creeks where tender new trees rose up from drowned logs; in the curious basalt columns that seemed like ancient temples; and in the lake, nearly fifty miles long and almost twelve hundred feet deep, cold and dark, like mystery itself. The Idaho of her childhood was a strikingly quiet place, its people reticent, its landscapes romantic; beauty was a given no matter which direction you looked.
When Robinson was not quite twelve, she and her family were in an automobile accident. Another driver crossed the center line, totalling their car, injuring both of her parents, breaking her brother’s leg, and leaving her with a concussion. All four of them were hospitalized. The crash was so traumatic that Robinson does not drive, creating a rare dependency in someone who is otherwise almost entirely self-sufficient. Already in childhood she was comfortable with solitude, even with loneliness; her needs, including her need for other people, were remarkably limited. One of Robinson’s schoolteachers told her that “one must make one’s mind a good companion, because you live with it every minute of your life,” advice that she either took to heart or never required.

At eighteen, Robinson followed David, a senior at Brown, to Rhode Island, enrolling at the university’s sister school, Pembroke College. It was the early sixties, and she found herself ideologically adrift: too serious-minded for the countercultures embraced by some of her peers, and unmoved by the Freudian theories espoused by some of her professors and the behavioralism advanced by others. She and David took long, meandering walks around Providence, undeterred by rain or snow, ruining their hats and shoes, discussing aesthetics and ethics. When David graduated, he went to Yale for a doctorate in art history, and, once Robinson had mastered the train schedule, they continued their walks in New Haven.

Robinson still likes to walk while thinking and talking. One day, strolling through the stately oak savanna of Rochester Cemetery, in one of Iowa’s last remaining patches of native prairie, she narrates the ecology of the area and some of its human history, pointing out the generations of headstones hidden among a tiny sea of hills. She is formidably erudite but punctuates her speech with the surprisingly sweet refrain “you know?” The answer is almost always no—no, we do not know much about the Albigensians or the Waldensians, have nothing to say about the migratory habits of pelicans, had no idea that the first English translator of Philipp Melanchthon’s systematics was an African-American philosopher named Charles Leander Hill, have not read Marlowe’s translations of Ovid, have read the first volume of Calvin’s “Institutes” but, alas, not all of the second. But “you know?” is less a question than an assurance, part of why Robinson was a beloved teacher: there is a lot we do not already know, but no limit to what we could learn, and no reason to underestimate one another.

In other ways, too, Robinson is a patient guide. A stop in Stone City, named for the area’s many limestone quarries, near where Grant Wood painted, is followed by one at Anamosa State Penitentiary, which prisoners built from the limestone, and where Robinson recounts her own experiences teaching and meeting with the incarcerated. Next is a visit to the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, where, before entering, she lingers in the parking lot to discuss the miracles in the Synoptic Gospels, and, upon exiting, returns to the same topic, which leads her to a distinction she draws between the religious imaginations of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson.

Robinson’s own religious imagination took shape during her sophomore year of college, when a philosophy professor assigned Jonathan Edwards’s The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended. The treatise contains a footnote that changed her life; in it, Edwards observes that although moonlight seems permanent, its brightness is renewed continuously. Believers often say that God meets them where they are and speaks to them in voices they can understand, so perhaps it is fitting that Robinson found her own revelation in a seldom read yet much maligned two-hundred-year-old book. An eighteenth-century evangelist articulated what she had always felt: that existence is miraculous, that at any moment the luminousness of the world could be revoked but is instead sustained.

Another truth revealed itself in that encounter: that history is not always a fair judge of character. Edwards had been reduced in the popular imagination to the censorious preacher of a single sermon, but the man who once called us “sinners in the hands of an angry God” spent a lifetime pointing out that we are creatures in the embrace of a tender and generous one, too. Likewise, Robinson came to see Edwards’s fellow Puritans not as finger-wagging prudes but as radical political reformers who preached, even if they did not always live up to, a social ethic with strict expectations around charity—a tradition of Christian liberalism and economic justice rarely acknowledged today.

Robinson thought about going into the ministry, but when she did not get a scholarship for seminary she returned to the West, for graduate studies in English at the University of Washington, where she wrote a dissertation on “Henry VI, Part II.” (Characteristically, she was drawn to one of Shakespeare’s least-known and least-loved plays.) While there, Robinson married another student, whom she met in a seminar on the literature of the American South, and their first son was born not long afterward. When her husband got a job as a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in 1970, the family moved from Seattle to the Pioneer Valley, where their second son was born. The marriage ended two decades later; she does not speak of the divorce, or of the man to whom she was married. But she loves to talk about motherhood and her children, and she describes bringing them up as the most sustained act of attention she could imagine. “When you watch a child grow, it is pure consciousness coming into being,” she says. “It’s beautiful, complex, and inexhaustible. You learn so much about the mind, how language develops and memory works.”

Robinson says that she “aspired to mythic status as a mother,” although the mothers of mythology are a mixed bunch, and her own mother was a source of some consternation. Both of her parents were very conservative, and the gap between their politics and hers grew over time. Robinson’s relationship with her mother was interesting, but not easy. Her mother prized respectability above all, and for a while Robinson seemed to strive for that standard. She recalls winter mornings in Massachusetts when she got up early to bake, so that the house smelled of fresh bread when the boys awoke, and summer afternoons when they gathered gooseberries from the back yard to make pies, and hours spent tending the flower gardens that adorned their white clapboard house on a maple-shaded road. But Robinson had an outlet for her ambition that her mother never did: around the edges of all that domestic activity, she was turning herself into a novelist.

“I don’t ever remember her writing,” Robinson’s younger son, Joseph, says, “but I do remember playing with my brother a lot, so it must have been happening then, while we played, or maybe while we slept. It was this other life she had, because when we were children, and she was home with us, she interacted with us all the time—down on the floor with us, in the yard with us. Whatever she is doing, my mother is not distracted.”

Robinson felt that she and her brother grew close because of the isolation of their childhood; wanting the same for her own children, she took them to Brittany for a year, in 1978, while she and her husband taught at the Université de Haute Bretagne. “We were the only Americans—it was really something,” her older son, James, recalled. “We went to this rural school, and people made such a big deal about us.” Because of a higher-education strike, Robinson had plenty of time to work on Housekeeping. “I was probably the only person in France thinking of Idaho,” she says.

The experiment abroad was so successful that the family did it again in 1983, when both parents taught at the University of Kent. By then, Housekeeping had been out in the world for two years; another twenty-one would pass before Robinson published her second novel. But she never stopped writing, and it was while living in Canterbury that she found the subject for her next book—an exposé inspired by daily news coverage of nuclear pollution from a plant on the northwest coast of England called Sellafield.

“It’s my most important book,” Robinson says of Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution. “If I had to choose, and I could only publish one book, ‘Mother Country’ would be it.” This is a surprising preference, since many of Robinson’s readers have never heard of it. “I was clipping these articles, reading about plutonium and cancer rates,” Robinson recalls. “Everyone seemed to know what was going on, but no one seemed to be doing anything about it. So when we came back to America I didn’t even really unpack, I just started writing about it.”

Although her journalism up to that point included little more than a few columns and a profile of John Cheever for her college newspaper, Robinson quickly wrote a magazine article, which Levine placed with Harper’s in early 1985. Farrar, Straus & Giroux then commissioned a book on the subject, in which Robinson drastically scaled up her argument. The latter half of Mother Country is an expansion of the article, an account of the nuclear program at Sellafield and its literal and figurative fallout—including an indictment of environmental activists with Greenpeace UK and Friends of the Earth, who Robinson felt were complicit in covering up the extent of the catastrophe. The first half is something else entirely: a thoroughgoing and thoroughly scathing political and social history of modern England.

As Robinson saw it, the roots of the Sellafield crisis lay in failures of political economy and moral reasoning which went back to the sixteenth century and the beginnings of the Poor Laws. While the developed world grandstanded about the superiority of its scientists and its social order, she alleged, one of its leading nations was poisoning its own people for profit. “My attack will seem ill-tempered and eccentric, a veering toward anarchy, the unsettling emergence of lady novelist as petroleuse,” she wrote. “I am angry to the depths of my soul that the earth has been so injured.”

The reviews were mixed. Some critics challenged her conclusions and the facts on which she had based them, while others seemed affronted that an American would presume to criticize the nuclear program of any other country and by the claim that Britain’s political foundations were so compromised. Although the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in the United States, Greenpeace UK sued Robinson for libel, and, when she refused to remove the passages in question, the book was banned in Britain.

For Robinson, the book’s reception was evidence of the very cultural hubris she had diagnosed, and only confirmed her sense that the economic interests of the ruling few routinely inflict tragedy on everyone else, with nuclear pollution being simply the most recent and potentially most disastrous iteration. The state had failed its citizens, advocacy groups had failed the public, and an entire civilization had cosseted itself in a deluded sense of its own rectitude. Only the individual conscience could be trusted, she concluded, and moral courage would often place individuals at odds with society.

So far, at least, Mother Country has not joined the ranks of Silent Spring or The Other America. But, if the book did not change the world, it did change the course of Robinson’s career. After its publication, she began writing long, tendentious essays about the things she thought were worth thinking about: “Puritans and Prigs,” “Decline,” “Slander,” “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion.” Robinson has published five essay collections, four of them in the past ten years. Like Mother Country, the essays bear a trace of the high-school debater who could leave other students trembling: Robinson does not suffer fools, or foes, or sometimes, it must be said, friends. Even those who admire her can leave an argument feeling a little singed.

Mother Country also helped determine the future of Robinson’s fiction. After the Sellafield lawsuit, she sought solace in historical examples of people whose moral clarity was disregarded by their contemporaries. She read about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, then turned her attention to the life and work of abolitionists in the United States. The year after Mother Country was published, Robinson accepted the job in Iowa, and, once in the Midwest, began exploring a constellation of colleges those abolitionists had built, among them Grinnell, Oberlin, Carleton, and Knox. Many of these institutions were integrated by race or gender or both—an egalitarianism so radical that a century later it took federal courts and the National Guard to enforce it elsewhere—and Robinson wondered what had happened to the visionary impulses behind them. The Second Great Awakening began as a broad movement for social and moral reform and spread across the entire frontier, only to be snuffed out after a single generation and misremembered today as nothing but an outburst of cultish religious enthusiasm.

What puzzled Robinson was not the moral clarity of the abolitionists but how the communities they established could so quickly abandon their ideological origins. This was Jonathan Edwards all over again: historical figures, flawed because they are human but full of promise for the same reason, who are maligned, underestimated, or forgotten. We often say that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but that suggests that all we can learn from history is its errors and its failures. Robinson believes this to be a dangerously incomplete understanding, one that distorts our sense of the present and limits the possibilities of the future by overstating our own wisdom and overlooking the visionaries of earlier generations. “It is important to be serious and accurate about history,” she says. “It seems to me much of what is said today is shallow and empty and false. I believe in the origins of things, reading primary texts themselves—reading the things many people pretend to have read, or don’t even think need to be read because we all supposedly know what they say.”

This conviction was evident in Robinson’s seminars at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and remains so today in her lectures around the world. She has assigned Calvin and Edwards when teaching Melville, read all of Sidney in order to talk about Shakespeare’s sonnets, and constructed her critiques of modern scientism from close readings of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud. She pursues the same project at her Congregational church, where she advocates for the reading of texts like John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity while also calling for more outreach to immigrants and multilingual carols for children.

Robinson has been a member of her church for almost as long as she’s lived in Iowa. She can regularly be found arranging the flowers in the sanctuary, socializing during coffee hour, and bowing her head during the Prayers of the People. Occasionally, she has preached exegetically rich sermons on, among other things, economics, scriptural language, and grace. Those sermons are sometimes disarmingly personal. “I have never been much good at the things most people do,” she confesses in one of them, before describing the single day she spent as a waitress—a spectacular failure, in which she spilled soup on a customer and was banished to the kitchen, where an older waitress, taking pity on her, tried to give her that day’s tips. Robinson likens the waitress’s offer to the widow’s mite in the Gospels: “a gift made freely, in contempt of circumstance.” Yet she felt that she could not accept it, and struggles still with the question of whether she should have done so. She credits the waitress with teaching her that generosity is “a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.” In that respect, she notes, it “is so like an art that I think it may actually be the impulse behind art.”

Robinson is a gifted preacher, and when, after two decades, she finally started writing another novel, it was because she had begun to hear the voice of a Congregationalist minister. He was an old man, and she sensed that he was writing something at his desk while a young child played at his feet. This turned out to be the Reverend John Ames, drafting a letter to his son, a miracle from a late-in-life marriage—so late that he fears his heart condition will kill him before he can teach the boy so much as the Ten Commandments or their family’s history. “It came easily, like he was telling me the story, and all I had to do was listen,” she recalls, pointing to a grassy bank beside the Iowa River not far from her old office, where, eighteen months after she first heard the reverend’s voice, the novel’s final pages came together. A plain patch of riverbank, near one of the university’s footbridges, it is akin to many of the places Robinson conjures in her work: simple yet rendered beautiful by our attention. “I don’t mean that I was ever seized, or that what I experienced was a vision,” she says, “but I felt engaged by the character—his voice, his mind. I liked listening to him. He was such good company that I missed him when I had finished writing.”

That book, Gilead, which was published in 2004, definitively established Robinson as one of the world’s greatest living novelists. Her nonfiction had taken on the thunderous tones of a prophet, but in her fiction she found the range of the psalmist, sometimes gentle, sometimes wild, and always full of empathy and wonder. “I have a bicameral mind,” she says, explaining that her lectures and essays are a way of “aerating” ideas that often originate in agitation or outrage, whereas the novels are a different exercise entirely. The essays are the most explicit expression of her ideas, the novels the most elegant. “With any piece of fiction, any work of literature, the assumption is that a human life matters,” Robinson says. For her, this is a theological commitment, a reflection of her belief in the Imago Dei: the value of each of us, inclusive of our faults. “That is why I love my characters. I can only write about characters I love.”

Gilead is sometimes mistaken for nothing more than a plainspoken novel about good-hearted religious people in a small Midwestern town. But in reality it is the morally demanding result of Robinson’s encounter with the abolitionists. She modelled the eponymous town of Gilead on the real town of Tabor, Iowa, which was founded by clergymen who created a college and maintained a stop on the Underground Railroad. The narrator’s grandfather, also a Reverend John Ames, was a radical abolitionist who went west to the Kansas Territory from Maine in the decades before the Civil War. At the time, that territory was the site of violent clashes between Border Ruffians, who wanted slavery to be legal there after statehood, and Free-Staters, who wanted to outlaw it; somewhere between fifty and two hundred people died in the conflict, which became known as Bleeding Kansas. After his stint there, the first John Ames settled in Iowa, where he preached with a pistol in his belt, wore shirts bloodied from battle, gave John Brown sanctuary in his church, and served as a chaplain in the Union Army. His son, the second Reverend John Ames, was a pacifist who rejected his father’s zealotry, recoiling from the violence of the First World War and quarrelling with his father over Christian ethics.

Something always comes between fathers and sons, but what divides these two has divided all of Christendom: whether to turn our swords into plowshares or take them up in a just war. Asked one Fourth of July to speak during the town celebration, the elder Ames makes the case for the latter path: “When I was a young man the Lord came to me and put His hand just here on my right shoulder. I can feel it still. And He spoke to me, very clearly. The words went right through me. He says, Free the captive.” Others heard the same call, he continues, and they answered it courageously, often at their own peril. “General Grant once called Iowa the shining star of radicalism,” he says. “But what is left here in Iowa? What is left here in Gilead? Dust. Dust and ashes.”

It is from the third Reverend John Ames, inheritor of both visions of the Christian life, that we learn the fate of his grandfather. Around the same time as that scorching and sorrowful oration, a Black church in town was burned, forcing out the last of Gilead’s Black citizens; heartbroken, the “wild-haired, one-eyed, scrawny old fellow with a crooked beard, like a paintbrush left to dry with lacquer in it,” returned to Kansas and died there alone.

That would be plot enough, a recounting of three generations of the Ames family, but for Robinson it is only prologue. “Love is holy,” the third Ames tells his young son, “because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.” This conviction, which Robinson shares, is tested in the pastor not by his father or grandfather but by his godson, Jack, a ne’er-do-well who has spent his life vexing his own father, a Presbyterian minister named John Boughton, who is Ames’s best friend. Boughton has eight children, but Jack is his prodigal son, and the two pastors have spent much of their friendship puzzling over him. So inexplicable is the boy’s character—a youthful tendency to lie, more serious transgressions in adulthood—that Ames contemplates the possibility that he botched Jack’s baptism. This one troubled soul, so beloved by both men, makes them revise their theologies constantly, for what kind of Heaven would accept the likes of Jack? Yet how could it be Heaven for the Boughtons if Jack wasn’t there?

“So many people tell me about their Jack, about how they love someone who is difficult or who has done some awful thing,” Robinson says. She is walking across the Sutliff Bridge over the Cedar River, midway through a tour illustrating where the Iowa of her life meets the Iowa of her imagination. She pauses to listen to the wind whistling through the trusses, noting how much it sounds like a musical instrument, before returning to the subject of prodigals. “I believe the parable is about grace, not forgiveness,” she says. In the Gospel of Luke, “the father loves his son and embraces him right away, not after any kind of exchange or apology. I don’t think that is forgiveness—that is grace.”

But Jack has not only come home for a blessing; he has brought judgment, too. For almost all of Gilead, we trust the temperate Reverend Ames, especially when it comes to the status of Jack’s soul. In the final few pages, though, we see how easily self-righteousness can cloud anyone’s vision: Jack, whose full name is John Ames Boughton, turns out to be the closest thing to a true inheritor of the moral clarity of the original John Ames. Gilead is set in the nineteen-fifties, in the early days of what Robinson calls the Third Great Awakening—the civil-rights movement. Unbeknownst to anyone in Gilead, or to readers until the final pages, Jack has fallen in love with and married a Black woman, and he returns home alone to see whether the town will receive his interracial family. Although the anti-miscegenation laws that were passed when Iowa was a territory were not adopted when it became a state, it is unclear, in the novel as in life, whether its star might still shine, as Grant says, or if the first Reverend Ames was right, and all that radicalism has turned to dust and ashes.

In 2005, Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize. A few years later, Barack Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois, read it during his first campaign for the Presidency. He thought he would learn more about Iowa, but he was moved to learn more about America. In Robinson, Obama found a writer who loves this country as much as he does, and in the same way: both see a profound beauty in the ongoing, collective effort to become a more perfect union. “There’s something old-fashioned about Marilynne,” Obama says, describing Robinson as “unashamed to reach for big themes and big questions—about how we give our lives purpose, and how we deal with death and what it means to be redeemed from the mistakes and flaws of our lives. There’s a fundamental compassion and a deep humanity rather than cynicism about people that runs contrary to what a lot of our art these days reflects.”

The year Obama was elected, Robinson published another novel, Home, which retold the story of “Gilead” from the perspective of Glory, one of Jack’s sisters—and, in doing so, demonstrated how little we sometimes know about the sufferings and tribulations of even those closest to us. It was with Home that the scope of Robinson’s Gilead series began to emerge—the way it shared not just the metaphysics of Frost and Melville but also the intergenerational geography of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Six years later, Robinson published another novel, Lila, which goes back in time to introduce Ames’s wife, a child of the Dust Bowl whose life has been marked by extreme privation. Lila is the mirror image of Jack: someone with every reason to be bad who instead is inexplicably good. She meets her future husband when she walks into his church, and in their first conversation confides, “I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do.” He replies, “I’ve been wondering about that more or less my whole life.” There are thirty-five years and an unimaginable gulf of education and opportunity between them, but the Reverend Ames falls in love. Like all the Gilead novels, Lila is almost shockingly beautiful, tender where it is a love story, and bracing when it raises the existential questions that consume its protagonists.

A year after Lila was published, President Obama delivered the eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, a state legislator from South Carolina who was murdered, along with eight others, by a white supremacist while attending a Bible study at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Robinson and Obama had begun a correspondence, and in the eulogy the President quoted one of the novelist’s letters to him, as he spoke of calling, even in a time of extremity and anguish, on “that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary course of things.”

A few months later, Robinson and Obama met for a public conversation at the Iowa State Library, in Des Moines. Although she taught for more than thirty years, Robinson does not have much of an interrogative mode; she learns by reading and observation, in both cases through sustained acts of attention rather than overt inquisition. And so their planned conversation turned into the President interviewing the novelist; the questioner-in-chief listened as Robinson spoke about fear, faith, public education, and what she regards as the necessary features of a functioning democracy and a good life. In return, she almost willfully refused to ask him anything—trusting, as she always does, that if someone, even the President, has anything to say he will say it.

Over time, Robinson has become linked to Obama the way Whitman is tied to Lincoln and Kennedy is to Frost. “Marilynne’s politics are reflective of a view that I share,” Obama says, “that the ideals and the values of America at their best promise the capacity for us to live together despite our differences, and that those values and ideals are not discredited by our failures to live up to them. It just means that we’ve got to work harder.” Both look to the past and see not only evil and tragedy but also a North Star: the “self-evident” truth that all of us are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights. “It is likely that we will constantly fall short of these ideals and these values, and yet it is still worthwhile to try to live up to them. Marilynne’s faith and my own says we’re sinners and we’re mortal and confused and afraid and clumsy and we hurt people, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t try to do better.” Both, Obama says, “take seriously the project of trying to live right, and that’s true for individuals and that’s true for the country.”

Robinson’s most recent essay, published in The New York Review of Books in June, was titled “What Kind of Country Do We Want?” The title of her most recent collection is What Are We Doing Here? For someone not inclined to ask questions, those sharp queries reflect an urgency that Robinson feels more and more. “I am too old to mince words,” she writes in the preface to the book; the author is now the same age John Ames was when he began writing a letter to his son. Robinson fainted last fall in church, but the cause turned out to be a common thyroid condition, easily treated. “Nothing to worry about,” she said, one evening this summer, in the darkening silence at her house in Saratoga Springs. For all her concerns about the world, Robinson is seldom concerned about herself. “I am not an anxious person,” she says, “about death or anything else.”

Robinson started Jack in Iowa but finished it in Saratoga Springs, which is also where her children and their families gather for Christmas. James, a computer programmer, lives in Iowa City with his wife, while Joseph, a museum director, has settled in California with his family after a spell in Queens, where Robinson moved briefly to help out after her first grandchild was born. Photographs of family decorate both of her houses, and her granddaughter’s smiling face provides the background on her phone. “There is something wonderful about the family, about the way the institution perpetuates itself,” she says. “I did not expect that, but I look at my grandchildren, and I think, how wonderful. And then, one day, one of the children calls and he is baking a rhubarb pie like we did when they were young and like my mother did, and I think, that is it, the generations.”

Robinson still talks regularly with David, her brother, who fulfilled his own childhood prophecy of becoming a painter. Retired from the faculty of the University of Virginia, where he spent two decades producing a seven-hundred-page comparative history of world art, he lives with his family in Charlottesville and paints bright, complex still-lifes. He also paints the occasional portrait, including one of his little sister, made not long after she finished Housekeeping, in which she looks like a cross between Isabel Archer and Whistler’s Mother.

Still, despite her closeness with her family, Robinson has long led a strikingly autonomous life. “There was teaching, and there are deadlines for talks or things, but mostly I have control of my time, and what I do with it is keep to myself,” she says. “I am grateful for my life, for my time. I read and think. I have been privileged to do almost exclusively what I want.” She wakes up with a couple of cups of coffee, reads at least one and usually two newspapers, and then settles into writing, often while listening to music. (The soundtrack for Housekeeping was Bessie Smith; Jack was written with a contemporary-gospel station playing in the background.) She generally writes her fiction by hand in spiral notebooks and her nonfiction on her laptop. She can go weeks without opening the mail, and, if she likes a movie, she may see it four times. Before the coronavirus, her only regular socializing was her weekly church service (lately on Vimeo), though a few very close friends managed to draw her out, usually at their invitation and sometimes at their insistence. Two of her friends from Iowa City have a long-standing Scrabble game with Robinson that she loses gracefully, despite her knack for playing unexpected words like “eft”—which, “you know?” is a juvenile newt. Ellen Levine recalled taking Robinson to the races in Saratoga Springs, where they bet on horses based only on their names and spent their serendipitous if modest winnings on ice cream. Another day, they picked blackberries, which they carried by making little baskets out of their T-shirts. “I remember Marilynne saying what we were doing was ‘cousinish’—what a perfect word.”

The pandemic prevented visits from family and friends this spring, which gave Robinson more time to finish Jack. She is now working on a lecture for the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death, a sermon for the four-hundredth anniversary of the first worship service at Plymouth, a book about Shakespeare, a book about the Old Testament, and a collection of essays on Christology. She does not yet know if there will be another novel in the Gilead series. Robinson has closely followed the protests occasioned by the murder of George Floyd, and has been heartened by them, because, she says, they “reveal the actual authority in this country: the people.” She has been concerned for a long time that we have turned against the Third Great Awakening—that we have been nurturing our fears and starving our virtues, neglecting the poor, abusing the vulnerable, and failing not only the generations that will come after us but also those that came before.

All these concerns are written into Jack, though the book’s immediate origins are much like those of Gilead. “I heard these two people walking around in the dark,” Robinson says. “I heard them talking in this sort of otherworldly environment, and they were talking freely in the way that people do when they are killing time.” The voices turned out to belong to Jack Boughton and his future wife, Della Miles. They were wandering through a graveyard in St. Louis, falling in love as they talked about perception, predestination, angels, Emily Post, “Hamlet,” Deuteronomy, and doomsday. In frequently subtle ways, the three earlier novels all revolved around Boughton’s prodigal son; now, finally, here was Jack’s own story. “I always knew that Jack was the loneliest man in the world,” Robinson says, as night fills the floor-to-ceiling windows of her home, the lake barely visible now except where boat lights blink in the distance. The next day, visiting the Robert Frost Stone House Museum, she recites a bit of one of the poet’s sonnets, which she uses in the book to explicate Jack’s troubled soul: “I have been one acquainted with the night / I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.”

But not even Jack can stay lonely forever. In this new novel, his darkness is lit by Della, the daughter of a Methodist minister, who has left her family in Tennessee to take a teaching job in Missouri, at the first Black high school west of the Mississippi River. In that same sonnet, Frost refers to “one luminary clock against the sky” which “proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right,” and poor Jack is caught in a love neither entirely impossible nor entirely possible in his place and time. Interracial marriage is still illegal in St. Louis, and Della’s parents are followers of Marcus Garvey. No one in the Miles family is heartened by the appearance of a wayward white atheist in Della’s life.

Della, too, knows the danger she is in—whether walking down the street with her lover, eating with him in public, or entering his boarding house. And that is without even considering the troubles brought specifically by Jack, who trails trouble everywhere. “I have never heard of a white man who got so little good out of being a white man,” Della says. Newly released from prison—for once, he has been convicted of a crime he didn’t commit—Jack has resolved not only to stay sober but to accomplish something even harder: to do no harm.

Robinson observes a distinction between an author who knows about his characters—which is to say, who knows what they say and what they do—and an author who can “feel reality on a set of nerves somehow not quite his own.” Her own such gift was already obvious, perhaps most of all in her rendering of Lila Ames, but it has become even more impressive with Jack, whose shame and fear of hope we feel for ourselves, and whose prodigality, at times baffling in the earlier books, is now ours to experience from the inside. Acutely aware of his own failings, Jack wants to warn Della off, and so he describes himself to her as the incarnation of his father’s worst fears. That man of God, he says, “was uneasy with the thought that there might be dark certainty in the universe somewhere, sentence passed, doom sealed, and a soul at his very dinner table lost irretrievably before it had even stopped outgrowing its shoes.” Were you that bad, Della wonders? Yes, Jack tells her—and yet there is nothing to be done after that night in the cemetery, when, like Shakespearean lovers, their fates are sealed.

One of the many beauties of Jack is the way that it aligns our sympathies so fully with its terribly difficult protagonist by presenting him as both Robinson and Della see him. “Once in a lifetime,” Della tells Jack, “you look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world. And if you love God, every choice is made for you. There is no turning away. You’ve seen the mystery—you’ve seen what life is about. What it’s for. And a soul has no earthly qualities, no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have. There is nothing to be said about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognize it.”

This is Robinson’s entire cosmology: the world is self-evidently miraculous, but only rarely do we pay it the attention it deserves. Robinson calls her style of writing cosmic realism, a patient chronicling of the astonishing nature of existence. Her attentiveness to creation at every level is what makes her fiction so convincing: she sees everything, including us. “I believe that all literature is acknowledgment,” she says. “Literature says this is what sadness feels like and this is what holiness feels like, and people feel acknowledged in what they already feel.”

The final scene of Jack is set in one of the most famously contested spaces of the civil-rights movement. In the hands of a lesser novelist it would seem unconvincing or contrived, but in Robinson’s hands it is revelatory. Jack and Della are together yet necessarily apart, seated on a segregated bus. They have decided against their families and in favor of each other, and Della is pregnant with their child, who everyone worries will have a more difficult life than either of his parents. We know from Gilead that, in eight years, Jack will find the courage to return home to Iowa, after a two-decade absence, and will appeal to his namesake for help convincing his father and the rest of the town to accept his wife and son. And we know that there will be another twinned generation of these two families, in the form of two boys named Robbie: Robert Ames, the son of the elderly John Ames, and Robert Boughton Miles, Jack and Della’s little boy. But, for now, Robinson leaves the lovers in motion, in the middle of their own lives, in the middle of history.

It is in this moment that we realize that Marilynne Robinson’s grand restoration project includes one of the oldest but most misunderstood stories we tell about ourselves. Like Adam and Eve, Jack and Della are banished, but they are banished together, and that is enough of a miracle that Jack reconsiders what he has always thought about Genesis: that the fallenness it describes is his lot in life, and our lot in the universe. Too often, he now thinks, we attend to only “half of the primal catastrophe,” focussing on what was lost in the garden while forgetting what was gained. But, Robinson insists, “guilt and grace met together,” for in eating from the tree of knowledge we did not only learn about evil. We also learned about goodness. ♦

Layli Long Soldier's poems

Layli Long Soldier's poems are a treasure.

Her first book, Whereas (2017), won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. It is a response to the U.S. government's official apology to Native peoples in 2009. That apology, writes Krista Tippett in On Being, "was done so quietly, with no ceremony, that it was practically a secret." Krista continues, "Layli Long Soldier is a writer, a mother, a citizen of the United States, and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She has a way of opening up her life, and American life, that inspires self-searching and tenderness." She lives in Santa Fe.

John Freeman wrote of Whereas in The Los Angeles Times: "Writers who live between two languages face an extra challenge in their role as lexicographers of metaphor. They must create a mythology through language that acts like double-pane glass. As in, they must correct for the distortion of the words they are translating from one language to another...Layli Long Soldier manages this double-ness with the precision of a master glassblower."

She illustrates that quality in her experience as a young mother and her realization that she must speak to her child in Diné, the Lakota language: "Whereas her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father's language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics."

 

The title poem of Whereas is a sequence—poem and prose poem:

 

WHEREAS a string-bean blue-eyed man leans back into a swig of beer work-weary lips at the dark bottle keeping cool in short sleeves and khakis he enters the discussion;

Whereas his wrist loose at the bottleneck to come across as candid “Well at least there was an Apology that’s all I can say” he offers to the circle each of them scholarly;

Whereas under starlight the fireflies wink across East Coast grass and me I sit there painful in my silence glued to a bench in the midst of the American casual;

Whereas a subtle electricity in that low purple light I felt their eyes on my face gauging a reaction and someone’s discomfort leaks out in a well-stated “Hmmm”;

Whereas like a bird darting from an oncoming semi my mind races to the Apology’s assertion “While the establishment of permanent European settlements in North America did stir conflict with nearby Indian tribes, peaceful and mutually beneficial interactions also took place”;

Whereas I cross my arms and raise a curled hand to my mouth as if thinking as if  taking it in I allow a static quiet then choose to stand up excusing myself  I leave them to unease;

Whereas I drive down the road replaying the get-together how the man and his beer bottle stated their piece and I reel at what I could have said or done better;

Whereas I could’ve but didn’t broach the subject of “genocide” the absence of this term from the Apology and its rephrasing as “conflict” for example;

Whereas since the moment had passed I accept what’s done and the knife of my conscience pierces with bone-clean self-honesty;

Whereas in a stirred conflict between settlers and an Indian that night in a circle;

Whereas I struggle to confess that I didn’t want to explain anything;

Whereas truthfully I wished most to kick the legs of that man’s chair out from under him;

Whereas to watch him fall backward legs flailing beer stench across his chest;

Whereas I pictured it happening in cinematic slow-motion delightful;

Whereas the curled hand I raised to my mouth was a sign of indecision;

Whereas I could’ve done it but I didn’t;

Whereas I can admit this also took place, yes, at least;

WHEREAS we ride to the airport in a van they swivel their necks and shoulders around to speak to me sugar and lilt in their voices something like nurses their nursely kindness through my hair then engage me as comrades in a fight together. Well what we want to know one lady asks is why they don’t have schools there? Her outrage empathy her furrowed brow. There are schools there I reply. Grade schools high schools colleges. But why aren’t there any stores there? There are stores there. Grocery stores convenience stores trading posts whatever what-have-you I explain but it’s here I recognize the break. It’s here we roll along the pavement into hills of conversation we share a ride we share a country but live in alternate nations and here I must tell them what they don’t know or, should I? Should I is the moment to seize and before I know it I say Well you know Native people as in tribes as in “people” living over there are people with their own nations each with its own government and flag they rise to their own national songs and sing in their own languages, even. And by there I mean here all around us I remind them. Drifting in side-glances to whirring trees through the van windows then back to me they dig in they unearth the golden question My God how come we were never taught this in our schools? The concern and furrow. But God the slowing wheels and we lurch forward in the van’s downshift and brake. Together we reach a full-stop. Trapped in a helix of traffic we’re late for check-in security flights our shoulders flex forward into panicked outward gazes nerves and fingers cradle our wristwatches so to answer their question now would be untimely because to really speak to it ever is, untimely. But there Comrades there Nurses. I will remember the swing of your gold earrings. There your perfume around me as a fresh blanket. There you checked my pulse kindly. There the boundary of bedside manners;

WHEREAS a woman I know says she watched a news program a reporter detailed the fire a house in which five children burned perhaps their father too she doesn’t recall exactly but remembers the camera on the mother’s face the mother’s blubbering her hiccuping and wail she leans to me she says she never knew then in those times that year this country the northern state she grew up in she was so young you see she’d never seen it before nobody talked about them she means Indians she tells me and so on and so on but that moment in front of the TV she says was like opening a box left at her door opening to see the thing inside whereas to say she learned through that mother’s face can you believe it and I let her finish wanting someone to say it but she hated saying it or so she said admitting how she never knew until then they could feel;

WHEREAS the word whereas means it being the case that, or considering that, or while on the contrary; is a qualifying or introductory statement, a conjunction, a connector. Whereas sets the table. The cloth. The saltshakers and plates. Whereas calls me to the table because Whereas precedes and invites. I have come now. I’m seated across from a Whereas smile. Under pressure of formalities, I fidget I shake my legs. I’m not one for these smiles, Whereas I have spent my life in unholding. What do you mean by unholding? Whereas asks and since Whereas rarely asks, I am moved to respond, Whereas, I have learned to exist and exist without your formality, saltshakers, plates, cloth. Without the slightest conjunctions to connect me. Without an exchange of questions, without the courtesy of answers. This has become mine, this unholding. Whereas, with or without the setup, I can see the dish being served. Whereas let us bow our heads in prayer now, just enough to eat;

 

Two Short Essays on Raoul Peck's extraordinary new documentary film series: "Exterminate All The Brutes"

1. NEW DOCUMENTARY “EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES” WAS 500 YEARS OF GENOCIDE IN THE MAKING

The fact that Raoul Peck’s new HBO film on white supremacy exists shows that something profound about the world is changing.

Jon Schwarz
The Intercept
May 2, 2021

 

IN THE FINAL episode of Raoul Peck’s HBO documentary, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” Peck says in a voice-over, “The very existence of this film is a miracle.”

That is 100 percent true. Before this moment in history, it would have been impossible to imagine that one of the world’s largest corporations — AT&T, owner of HBO, with a current market cap of $220 billion — would have funded and broadcast a film like this. The fact that it somehow squeezed through the cracks and onto our TVs and laptop screens demonstrates that something profound about the world is changing. Decades, centuries of people fighting and dying were required both to widen the cracks and mold someone like Peck, the right human at the right time, to step through.

“Exterminate All the Brutes” is a sprawling disquisition — four episodes, each an hour long — into the invention and consequences of 500 years of “white” supremacy, presented via a high-gloss pastiche of old footage, newly filmed dramatizations, and clips from Hollywood movies. “White” needs scare quotes because the film makes clear that whiteness is not something that exists in reality — like, say, the moon — that is right there whether we believe in it or not. Instead, it’s something imaginary that we’ve somehow all agreed on, like pieces of paper having value.

These two made-up concepts meet in the $100 bill via the man on its face, Benjamin Franklin. In 1751, Franklin wrote an essay that makes clear that anyone can be classified as “white” or read out of the white race, depending on the needs of the moment.

Franklin was desperate to keep the British colonies “white,” but by white, he didn’t mean European. For Franklin, only the English and Saxons counted. Germans, Swedes, Russians, and the French were hilariously “swarthy,” and thus “will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”

At the same time, as the miniseries illustrates, the English were colonizing Ireland and demoting its nearly translucent inhabitants to nonwhite. A famous British clergyman named Charles Kingsley, extremely liberal by the standards of the day, wrote home from a trip to Sligo that the people somehow had skin “as white as ours” but nevertheless were subhuman “chimpanzees.” In the U.S., the Irish were the standard by which nonwhiteness was measured, to the extent that African Americans were sometimes referred to as “smoked Irish.”

Of course, America eventually promoted the Irish to white, on the condition that they would be team players. Across the world in South Africa, the apartheid regime decided that Japanese immigrants were loyal enough to be “honorary whites.” The sorting process can even be seen in real time in a 1949 Atlantic article by a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt about his trip to the newly born Israel. The country, he explained, could be useful as “the best guarantee” for Western interests in the area. Jewish people, who had previously been “moth-eaten” and “grease-spotted,” now possessed “physical beauty, healthy vitality, politeness, good nature” and were comparable to Thomas Jefferson. Arab people were in the way but “about as dangerous as so many North American Indians,” and therefore nonwhite and “foul, diseased, smelling, rotting, and pullulating with vermin.”

Peck may be only the filmmaker who would want to take on this gigantic subject and then manage to present it as is, simultaneously terrifying and preposterous. Born in Haiti — i.e., the western half of Hispaniola, the island where Columbus landed in the “New” World — Peck has lived all over the planet and has a humanistic sympathy for all people, both at their best and their absolute worst. He’s made several dozen films, many documentaries, and was nominated for an Oscar in 2017 for “I Am Not Your Negro,” about James Baldwin.

At the outset, Peck says, “This is a story, not a contribution to historical research,” and he knows what he’s doing as a storyteller. Every minute of the miniseries has startling moments that examine the story of Europe’s colonization of the world from the other end of the gun — or, by this point, the other end of a Predator drone’s AN/AAS-52 Multi-Spectral Targeting System. Manifest Destiny, the White Man’s Burden, France’s Mission civilisatrice, Spain’s Misión civilizadora, Portugal’s Missão civilizadora — all are reframed so they can be seen as the code words they were.

Peck also does a masterful job excavating how this idea was birthed. It wasn’t that Europeans decided that they were superior to the rest of the world’s people and therefore had to conquer them. It was the other way around: The rest of the world had the land and gold that Europe coveted, and so, over hundreds of years, Europeans developed a jerry-rigged justification for how stealing it all was okay and indeed praiseworthy.

“Exterminate All the Brutes” borrows its title from a famous line in “Heart of Darkness,” the 1899 novel by Joseph Conrad about the colonizing of Congo. (Moviegoers may be more familiar with “Apocalypse Now,” an adaptation of the book with the location switched to Vietnam.) At one point, the narrator, Marlow, explains why there had to be some kind of reason for the rapine and plunder:

It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale … the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea — something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to …

A report by the upriver colonial agent and mass murderer Mr. Kurtz makes clear what this means in practice. Kurtz begins by declaring, “By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,” and quickly degenerates into an exhortation to “exterminate all the brutes!”

This was not some oversimplification written to make a tendentious point but instead an exact depiction of reality, then and now. Trent Lott, the Senate minority leader at the start of the Iraq War in 2003, initially asked for prayers for the U.S. military “as they engage in an intense but noble battle … We went in there to free those people.” Six months later he mused, “If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens.”

The series jumps around in time to examine a seemingly endless number of genocides — some that may be hazily remembered today, many that are totally forgotten. But Peck’s purpose is not just to make a list of atrocities. Rather, he is arguing a case that culminates in the film’s exceedingly disturbing last 20 minutes.

The Holocaust, Peck shows, was not an inexplicable outburst of madness, unconnected to the rest of history. It was instead the logical culmination of the ideology of European colonialism and white supremacy. “When what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one wished to recognize what everyone knew,” he says. “Auschwitz is the modern industrial application of established extermination methods.”

That’s where “Exterminate All the Brutes” leaves us. It does not offer any solutions or false hope. In fact, after watching it, it’s hard not to consider that whiteness is a demonic whirlwind that may end by destroying everyone — starting with its traditional victims but eventually engulfing people who thought that their whiteness would protect them and are in for a big surprise.

On the other hand, there is the miracle of the documentary’s existence. That by itself means that deep tectonic plates are shifting in the world’s consciousness. It’s not impossible that this film will someday be considered a key part of a long, complex, messy reckoning that will see whiteness relegated to humanity’s Museum of Terrible Ideas. If people have a future, it will be one in which tourists come and gape in horror that anyone ever thought this awful concept made sense.

 

2. FROM "DEMOCRACY NOW":  RAOUL PECK – INTERVIEWED BY AMY GOODMAN AND NERMEEN SHAIKH FOLLOWING PECK'S 4-PART SERIES "EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES"

A new four-part documentary series, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” delves deeply into the legacy of European colonialism from the Americas to Africa. It has been described as an unflinching narrative of genocide and exploitation, beginning with the colonizing of Indigenous land that is now called the United States. The documentary series seeks to counter “the type of lies, the type of propaganda, the type of abuse, that we have been subject to all of these years,” says director and Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck. “We have the means to tell the real story, and that’s exactly what I decided to do,” Peck says. “Everything is on the table, has been on the table for a long time, except that it was in little bits everywhere. … We lost the wider perspective.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Republican lawmakers are continuing their attack on schools for teaching students about the true history of the United States, from the genocide of Native Americans to the legacy of slavery. Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona criticizing what he described as the department’s promotion of revisionist history, including The New York Times 1619 Project, which reexamined the pivotal role slavery played in the founding of the United States. In his letter, McConnell wrote, quote, “Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil,” he said.

New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who created the 1619 Project, responded by saying, quote, “Republicans across the U.S. are pushing laws to mandate 'patriotic' education & to prohibit the teaching of the #1619Project and about the nation’s racist past.”

Well, today, we spend the hour looking at an epic new series that delves deeply into the legacy of European colonialism from the Americas to Africa. The documentary is titled Exterminate All the Brutes. It’s directed by the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. It’s been described as an unflinching narrative of genocide and exploitation, beginning with the colonizing of Indigenous American land. This is the documentary’s trailer.

RAOUL PECK: Here is the story we have been told. In Columbus’s travel journal, they were discovered. But there is no such thing as alternative facts. There is something we need to talk about, three words that summarize the whole history of humanity: civilization, colonization, extermination. This is the origin of the ideology of white supremacy. This is me in the middle, and I just want to understand: Why do I bring myself into this story? Because I am an immigrant from a [bleep] hole country. Neutrality is not an option.

It’s time to own up to a basic truth, a story of survival and violence. We know now what their task truly is: Exterminate All the Brutes. It’s not knowledge we lack. You already know enough. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know. Who are we? What if, from the beginning, the story was told the wrong way? The nightmare is buried deep in our consciousness, so deep that we do not recognize it. And over the centuries, we lost all bearings, because the past has a future we never expect.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer for the HBO documentary series "Exterminate All the Brutes," which is available on HBO and HBO Max. Time mmagazine said the series, quote, “may well be the most politically radical and intellectually challenging work of nonfiction ever made for television.”
We’re joined by the Oscar-nominated Raoul Peck, who joins us from France. He was born in Haiti, grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after his parents fled the Duvalier dictatorship. His past films include "I Am Not Your Negro" about James Baldwin, "Lumumba" about the Congolese prime minister, the founding leader of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, and "The Young Karl Marx."

Raoul Peck, it’s great to have you back on Democracy Now! This is an epic masterpiece, this four one-hour documentary series. Can you talk about how you went from I Am Not Your Negro, which was the story of James Baldwin, to creating this masterpiece?

RAOUL PECK: Well, basically, after "I Am Not Your Negro," I went throughout the world with the film. I was fortunate to be able to see how the film was received in many different places. And one of the common threads through that was the type of reaction that you just mentioned, like Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. You know, this denial is somehow a sign that they feel that they are entrenched now, they are attacked. There is great fear about some sort of civilization going overboard.

And for me, it’s a symbol that the type of lies, the type of propaganda, the type of abuse that we have been subject to for during all these years. I am old enough to have heard many other people, like Rick Santorum, Mitch McConnell and many others throughout the years. The only difference now is that we have the means to counter them. We have the means to tell the real story.

And that’s exactly what I decided to do, to, once and for all, put everything on the table without any semblance of holding back my punches. Everything is on the table, have been on the table for a long time, except that it was in little bits everywhere, because science, sociology, anthropology, etc., politics, have been cut up in little pieces, so we lost the wider perspective. And the film does exactly that, to bring us to the core story, to have the whole matrix of the last 700 years of basically Eurocentric ideology and narrative.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Raoul Peck, in providing this broader historical context, you trace the origins of contemporary modern forms of biological racism to the Spanish Inquisition and the so-called purity of blood statutes — that is, limpieza de sangre —

RAOUL PECK: Exactly.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — that was a means of distinguishing old Christians from conversos — that is, Jews but also Moors — from the pure blood of Christians. These laws, you say, are the antecedents of the ideology of white supremacy. For the first time in the world, the idea of race based on blood was enshrined into law. So, how should we understand the continuities between the purity of blood statutes and the forms of racist violence we witness today? Because the entire argument of this truly magnificent work is that the past is not really past. It is, as you say, the past has a future that we can’t anticipate.

RAOUL PECK: Well, the thing is that we are accustomed to not see history as a continuity, as you say. And we came from a very specific history. And we are not some sort of tribalist tribe that came out of nowhere. Today’s civilization is basically embedded in the capitalistic societies. And that story started around the 10th and 11th century with the first accumulation of riches, accompanied by killing and exiling of Jews, killing Muslims, trying to go all the way to Jerusalem. And those first Crusades were able to create a lot of — or not create, to basically extract a lot of riches that allows the monarchy to be able to finance trips to discovering new roads to the East.

And the accident, which it was, of the so-called discovery of the new continent was not something they planned. And when it happened, they basically created a totally new concept, which is the concept of discovery. And from that day on, you know, you could just go somewhere, put a flag, deploy military flags and say, “This is mine,” no matter who was on that land before.

And I remind you that at the time of Columbus, there were basically 100 million people on both continents in America. So, you can imagine what it meant. Within a hundred years, more than 90% of them were totally annihilated. So, it’s a very specific moment in the history of the modern world. For the U.S., it seems like it’s the beginning of a new world, but it’s not. It’s a continuity of a lot of action that have been the source of European civilization, basically.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to a clip from "Exterminate All the Brutes," where you explain settler colonialism.

RAOUL PECK: From the beginning, the extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. Free land was a magnet that attracted European settlers. This particular form of colonialism is called settler colonialism. But as a system, it requires violence. It requires the elimination of the Natives and their replacement by European settlers.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is another clip from your series, "Exterminate All the Brutes." In this dramatized scene, a white man, played by the actor Josh Hartnett, engages in a standoff with a Native American woman leader.

GEN. THOMAS SIDNEY JESUP: [played by Josh Hartnett] "I do not want to spill Seminole blood, kill Seminole children, Seminole women. Give us back the American property you stole from our good fellowman planters and settlers, and I will let you move to the Injun territory the U.S. government has provided for your people." ABBY OSCEOLA: [played by Caisa Ankarsparre] "You call human beings your property?" GEN. THOMAS SIDNEY JESUP: "They’re slaves." ABBY OSCEOLA: "You steal land. You steal life. You steal humans. What kind of species are you?"

AMY GOODMAN: So, we were listening to Abby Osceola, or the woman who plays her, of the Seminole Nation. You say her story goes deep into the history of this continent. Talk about who she is and why you choose to center her and the Seminole Nation in the first part of your series, including their solidarity with enslaved Africans.

RAOUL PECK: Well, the whole vision of the film is based in changing totally the point of view of who is telling the story. And in particular, because this story not only center from Europe but also center in the bottom or in the middle of the United States of America, I had to start the film from that particular point of view of this woman who is the head of her tribe, of her nation.

And basically, you know, the Seminole have been one of the rare tribes who were never really — who did not really obey to the enforcement of leaving their territories. And they were called the Invisible Tribe for a reason. So, it was important for me to start it from a point of resistance, from a point of an individual, of a woman. And watching this invader basically telling her to leave her land and to deliver the slaves that were — and, of course, you know, that’s a story that is not really well known, that a lot of slaves who escaped were welcomed by Seminoles and other tribes. And I wanted to start with that symbolic moment of resistance and also of solidarity, and from there, deploy the whole rest of the story.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Raoul, that is in one of the forms of continuity that you point to. The story of Native Americans is absolutely critical. And the erasure of this genocidal history, in particular in the United States, is evidenced, as you show, in the perverse use of Native American names and designations for military weapons, from Black Hawk to Apache, as well as military operations, the most recent and proximate of which was the May 2011 operation named Geronimo to assassinate Osama bin Laden. So, could you talk a little bit more about that, the way in which Native American history has been distorted, if not entirely erased, and the uses to which it’s been put in contemporary U.S. politics?

RAOUL PECK: Well, it’s clear that — and you see that throughout the film through different type of device or type of stories, level of stories in the film, is how everything is somehow connected. You know, the history of the Native American, which is, for me, the core story, whether it has been pushed out and erased sometimes or told the wrong way, it’s like a phantom. It’s already there. You can’t get rid of it. There are so many skeletons in those boxes, that they come up. And they are more and more coming out.

And it’s ironic that the very powerful U.S. Army, who was basically at its core created not only to fight the British at the beginning, but after independence was basically used to kill Indians and to keep slaves, Black slaves, on the plantations. So, basically, the U.S. Army, at the beginning, was the militia, you know? So, this story continues. It’s basically a story of 200 years, which is — in the whole history of humankind is nothing. So, as long — you can try to repress that story, but it’s coming out there. You know, as long as there will be Native American or there will be Black life, they will continue to tell that story. There is no escape from it.

And that’s why what I was saying at the beginning — you know, when you see people like Rick Santorum saying that, “Well, when we came, there was nobody on this land” — what did you do with the 100 million people? You have to explain that. So, it’s really — it becomes more and more absurd that Republican leadership at that level are capable of such ignorance. You know, it’s mind-bending. So, for me, it’s just the logic of the whole story. And that’s what we try to explain and to tell in this story of Exterminate All the Brutes. And I really — my objective is really to make sure that that kind of ignorance cannot be voiced anymore.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Raoul, another possible form of repression, another idea that has been repressed, is something that Sven Lindqvist, in his extraordinary book Exterminate All the Brutes, from which your film substantially draws, he shows how closely intertwined the idea of progress is with racism and even genocide. And in the film, you explain Darwin’s central, if unintended, role in providing scientific validation for racial prejudice and hierarchies with his notion of natural selection, saying in fact that genocide came to be regarded as the inevitable byproduct of progress. You show in the film, as well, the iconic late 19th century painting by John Gast titled American Progress. But, of course, this idea of progress remains central to the way in which global society and American society are organized. What alternatives do you see to this ideology, and where do you see it, if at all, taking shape?

RAOUL PECK: Well, it’s a very complicated question to answer. And I don’t really go by that way in assessing what the future will be or what are the solutions. I think any solution will first have to start with the real story. We need to sit down around the same table and agree on the diagnostic. We have to agree on the genocide. We have to agree in the whole line of history that’s been going on for more than 700 years. Otherwise, there is no conversation possible. So, I am not, and we are not, if I can speak for many others, it’s not about revenge. It’s not about — you know, it’s about let’s see the world as it is and let’s name all the things that happened and bring us to what the world is today. That’s what it is about. It’s not about showing how culprit you are or not. It’s about acknowledging the past and the present, because they are strongly connected.

So, for me, it’s the same thing as democracy. As long as we accept democracy as our mode of communication, if we want to come out of that situation, it’s implied that we have to sit down and have a real conversation, an honest conversation. But, unfortunately, we see that the dominant narrative is not ready for that. They are totally the back on the wall and can’t let go of their huge inequality that is actually in those last 30, 40 years that have never been as extreme as it is.

And January 6th is also another sign of a democracy which is in dire situation, you know, that this country which had been seen as the forefront of democracy and justice was able to attack the very center of that democracy. So, the confusion is just huge. And it’s difficult for me to acknowledge any type of solution. I think the solution should come from us, from all of us, and a collective decision. That’s the only vision I can have.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to another clip, from the second episode in the series, where Raoul Peck — he is the narrator of this series — explains what happened after Columbus arrived in what is now Haiti, where Raoul Peck was born.

RAOUL PECK: Instead of the bustling ports of the East Indies, Columbus came upon a tropical paradise populated by the Taíno people, what is now Haiti. Then, from the Iberian Peninsula came merchants, mercenaries, criminals and peasants. They seized the land and property of Indigenous peoples and declared the territories to be extensions of the Spanish and Portuguese states. These acts were confirmed by the monarchies and endorsed by the papal authority of the Roman Catholic Church. That’s more or less the official story. And through that official story, a new vision of the world was created: the doctrine of discovery.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from "Exterminate All the Brutes," the 18th century, known as the Age of Revolutions. But we often associate this time with the American Revolution or the French Revolution, not the Haitian Revolution, which was led by Black slaves, the first country in the Western Hemisphere to be born of a slave uprising — you say, Raoul Peck, the only revolution that materialized the idea of enlightenment, freedom, fraternity and equality for all. You know, Haiti becomes a republic, and the U.S. Congress would not recognize it for decades, fearful that the fact that Haiti was born of a slave uprising would inspire the enslaved people of the United States to rise up, as well. Can you talk about the erasure of the Haitian Revolution, your own country, Haiti, its significance for you, and how the U.S. dealt with Haiti all of these years?

RAOUL PECK: Well, you know, the best words for this is what Michel-Rolph Trouillot have written about silencing the past. It was key for the U.S. and all the other European powers to silence the Haitian Revolution, because it was, in their eyes, worse than Cuba in the ’50s. We were under a strict embargo, because all of them had economy that still relied on slavery. And Haiti was the worst example they could have. And Haiti was also beating them in terms of their own ideology of enlightenment, because Haiti, the first constitution of Haiti, basically stated that any man or woman or person who set foot on the island is a free person. And none of the other revolutions dared go so far, because they were totally involved in slavery and were profiting from it. So there was no way that the Haitian Revolution could be accepted.

So, when people say that America is the first democratic country in the Western Hemisphere, it’s not. It’s Haiti. And the story continue until today. You know, we have a history of being attacked, of being invaded, of many of our leaders come to power with the acceptance of the U.S. government. And it continue until today. Basically, the last two presidents we had came into power thanks to the support of the U.S. government. So, we have, unfortunately, a long story of abuse from the United States and also of resistance, because one thing that we can say is that the Haitian people were always — whether it take 30 years, five years or two years, they always make sure that they can get rid of those corrupt leaders.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to ask about one of the critical issues, Raoul, that you raise in the last part of the film, a critical question. You talk about your own experience living in Berlin, where you lived for 15 years and were also a film student, where you made a film on a Nazi torture compound. You say when you were there that you thought a lot about how a country that’s produced some of humanity’s best philosophers, scientists and artists also operated one of the most devastating, scientifically run and engineered killing machines. Now, many people have reflected on this question and the seeming contradiction in this fact by concluding that the Holocaust was some kind of historical aberration. In other words, that it stands very much outside the history of the Enlightenment and the ideas of humanism and universalism on which it apparently stands. But your film seems to suggest — even as this is raised as a question, your film suggests that other conclusions could be drawn. Could you talk a little bit about that?

RAOUL PECK: Well, it’s nothing new. In fact, there are many scholars that have worked on that specific question for the last 50, 60 years. And, of course, there is resistance to say that the Holocaust was a very special moment in the life of Western civilization. But it’s not. It’s a continuity of a wheel of genocide, a wheel of eliminate people that are deemed inferior. The structure of genocide are always the same.

You know, the person who invented the word “genocide,” Raphael Lemkin, in 1943 — we went to the New York Public Library, and in that library, in his file, there is a list of something around 42 previous genocides before the Holocaust. And he include in it, of course, the genocide against the Native American people. So, trying to make any type of genocide special, I think, is a really not correct way of seeing the history of humankind. They all copied from each other.

They are all, of course, specific. You know, you can’t directly compare the genocide in Rwanda with the genocide in Cambodia and with the Holocaust. They have different ideological reason. They have different historical reason. They have different people involved. But as the structure, as the system of genocide, they all obey the same pattern of first pinning down a special category of person, of people, and then start saying that we are superior to them, and they are insect. And as soon as you come to the point where they are animals or they are savages or they are insect, you are allowed to kill them. And that’s the excuse that was always needed for every imperialist, for every conqueror, in order to eliminate whoever was in the land they wanted to conquer. So, it’s similar. It has been similar throughout the history of humankind. And it became more specific within the concept of the capitalistic society, because then it was also linked to profit. It was also linked to make bigger territories in order to exploit large communities. So, I have had that discussion many years ago, back ago, including in Germany.

But today, I think we should move past that, what I would call the confrontation between who got the biggest pain. Do we put slavery confronted to the Holocaust or the Rwandis’ pain? You know, it’s not about that. We are all from the same human family. It’s not about who has suffered more. I think we have to acknowledge every piece of history that happened on this planet, and we have to give responses to them. And we have to explain why they happened, because it’s the only way that eventually we can prevent them to happen again and again.

AMY GOODMAN: And we want to talk more about that after this last clip from the series "Exterminate All the Brutes."

RAOUL PECK: Trading human beings, what sick mind thought of this first? Brought by force and pushed to death — slavery, or the trade, as they they referred to it euphemistically, a state-sponsored genocide. What does this say about the civilized world?

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could talk more about what this does say, and going back to the beginning, talking about genocide, the term coined by Raphael Lemkin, colonization, as well as civilization, and how you find hope today in the discussions, if this is all acknowledged, though you’re saying just acknowledging this is not enough?

RAOUL PECK: Yes, of course. But acknowledging it is a big step. And that’s what I wanted to say before, is that even for me as a filmmaker, telling that story, it took a lot of thinking in order to tell a story where for the first time you tell the story of the genocide of Native Americans, and then you tell the story of slavery, and then you tell also one of the major extermination story, which is the Holocaust. And for the first time, I think, at least on film, you can see the connections between them.

And for me, it’s a huge step. You know, it’s taking all those atrocity in a different context. And for me, it can only be the beginning of a wider conversation, instead of each part keeping their own malheur, keeping their own death, their own pain, and sometimes being used against each other, you know? And that’s a device that has been used for many, many years. And for me, the film is also a step to break that separate narrative. There is not many different stories. There is one historical knowledge. And we need to access it.

And to your question, that’s the leitmotif in the series, you know? We already know enough. The problem is, what do we do with that knowledge? Because everything I say in the film, everything that Sven Lindqvist tells the story about, or Michel-Rolph Trouillot, or Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, those are fact. Those are highly competent scholars who spent their life documenting the horror. And my use of their work, with them, was exactly that, to force the conversation to a more sovereign type of discussion and to push aside the blurring of history, push aside the ignorance that still reign in the discussion.

And, you know, I am not going to name them again, the two politicians I named, but I think a population are more and more interested in learning where they come from. You know, there is a reason why everybody now wants to have their DNA analyzed, because there is some sort of feeling of connection, you know? And it’s our job as filmmakers and U.S. journalists, as well, to lay that in plain sight. And then we can say, “OK, what do we do with this?” You know?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That’s exactly — we just have a minute. What do we do with this? Your film begins and ends with the same line that Sven Lindqvist says again and again: “It’s not knowledge that we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw the conclusions.” How does your film and the work of these other authors enable that courage?

RAOUL PECK: You know, I was primarily educated by Jesuits. And one thing is, maybe from that, that I believed in the notion of knowledge. I believe in the notion of learning the truth. And the film, for me, is the first step. And my wish is that every school, every university is able to watch the film and have discussion around it, because you cannot go further if you don’t know your own history, whatever the side you are on. But you need to know. And it’s not about accusing you of anything. It’s about facing your reality, because you can’t understand what’s going on. You can’t understand why policemen are still killing Black kids and Black men and Black women in this country, if you don’t know where it comes from. You know?

And it’s unfortunate. You know, we are in a time where we have huge instruments for communication and huge instrument for learning. You can go on the internet and learn about everything. But we lack a very condensed matrix of those histories that we have been built by. And each one of us needs to do our homework; otherwise, I don’t see any nonviolent outcome out of this.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, you’ve given us a remarkable assignment and an epic work to watch for all. Raoul Peck, acclaimed Haitian-born filmmaker, director of the new HBO four-part documentary series "Exterminate All the Brutes." Visit democracynow.org to watch our 2018 interview with Raoul about his films "The Young Marx" and "I Am Not Your Negro" about James Baldwin.

 

The Heart and Soul of the Biden Project, by David Brooks

The Heart and Soul of the Biden Project

It’s a daring revival of “the American System.”

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist, New York Times

April 8, 2021

 

What is the quintessential American act? It is the leap of faith. The first European settlers left the comfort of their old countries and migrated to brutal conditions, convinced the future would be better on this continent. Immigrants all crossed oceans or wilderness to someplace they didn’t know, hoping that their children would someday breathe the atmosphere of prosperity and freedom.

Here we are again, one of those moments when we take a leap, a gamble, beckoned by the vision of new possibility. The early days of the Biden administration are nothing if not a daring leap.

I asked Anita Dunn, one of President Biden’s senior advisers, to reflect on the three giant proposals: Covid relief, infrastructure and the coming “family” plan. What vision binds them together? What is this thing, Bidenomics? Interestingly, she mentioned China.

This could be the Chinese century, with their dynamism and our decay. The unexpected combination of raw capitalism, authoritarianism and state direction of the economy could make China the dominant model around the globe. President Biden, Dunn said, believes that democracy needs to remind the world that it, too, can solve big problems. Democracy needs to stand up and show that we are still the future.

I asked Cecilia Rouse, the chair of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, where our vulnerabilities lie. It is in our public goods, she said, the degradation of our common life.

“The model of the past 40 years has been to rely on the private sector to carry the load, but that sector is not best suited to deliver certain public goods like work force training and infrastructure investment,” she told me. “These are places where there is market failure, which creates a role for government.”

Brian Deese, the director of Biden’s National Economic Council, said that Bidenomics has three key prongs: an effort to distribute money to those on the lower end of the income scale, an effort to use climate change as an opportunity to reinvent our energy and transportation systems, and an effort to replicate the daring of the moon shot by investing big-time in research and development.

Some people say this is like the New Deal. I’d say this is an updated, monster-size version of “the American System,” the 19th-century education and infrastructure investments inspired by Alexander Hamilton, championed by Henry Clay and then advanced by the early Republicans, like Abraham Lincoln. That was an unabashedly nationalist project, made by a youthful country, using an energetic government to secure two great goals: economic dynamism and national unity.

Bidenomics is a massive bid to promote economic dynamism. It’s not only the R&D spending and the green energy stuff; it’s also the massive investment in kids and human capital.

If, as expected, Biden’s American Family Plan includes universal pre-K education and free community college, that would mean four more years of free schooling for millions of young Americans. As Rahm Emanuel said to me, when was the last time we achieved something as big as that?

It’s also a unifying agenda. For the past several decades the economy has funneled money to highly educated people who live in large metro areas. That has created a ruinous class rift that divides the country and fuels polarization. The Biden measures would funnel money to the roughly two-thirds of Americans without a bachelor’s degree — who work on road crews, in manufacturing plants, who care for the elderly and are disproportionately unemployed.

It’s kind of interesting to me that the Democrats, the party of the metro educated class, are promoting policies that would send hundreds of billions of dollars to, well, Trump voters.

Because the Biden plan owes more to Hamilton than to socialism, it’s not only progressives who love it, but moderates, too. Jim Kessler, an executive vice president at the moderate Democratic group Third Way, sent me an email this week with the subject line, “Why Mods Love Biden Jobs Plan.”

Is it a risk? Yes, a big one. If your historical memory goes back only to 2009, then you think there’s no risk to going big on spending and debt. But history is filled with the carcasses of nations and empires that declined in part because they took on too much debt: imperial Spain, France in the 18th century, China in the 19th.

The Biden plan would have us pouring money into some of our least efficient sectors. As Fareed Zakaria noted recently, American infrastructure projects often cost several times more than European projects. Adding just two miles of new track and three stations to the New York subway system ended up costing $4.5 billion.

You can pour a lot of money into American infrastructure and get relatively little back.

But we’ve had 20 years of anemic growth and a long period of slow productivity growth. The current trendlines cannot continue. These are necessary and plausible risks to take if America is not to drift gentle into that good night. Look at the cities, like Fresno, Calif., and Greenville, S.C., that have surged back to life in recent years. What did they do? They invested in infrastructure and community colleges. The Biden plan is what has already worked locally, just on a mammoth scale.

Sometimes you take a risk to shoot forward. The Chinese are convinced they own the future. It’s worth taking this shot to prove them wrong.

 

The Way We Get Through This Is Together

[Preface by John R. Boettiger: Rebecca Solnit is a freelance writer who has written more than 20 books on subjects including hope, feminism, the environment, politics, place, art and human rights. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a National Book Critics Award in criticism.

[Readers will see that my postings on the climate crisis often in these last months have come to focus as well – almost inevitably – on the coronavirus crisis as well. Together they are the two preeminent challenges of our times.]

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/mutual-aid-coronavirus-pandemic-rebecca-solnit

The Way We Get Through This Is Together

The way we get through this is together: the rise of mutual aid under coronavirus. Amid this unfolding disaster, we have seen countless acts of kindness and solidarity. It’s this spirit of generosity that will help guide us out of this crisis and into a better future.

Rebecca Solnit
Thursday, 14 May 2020
The Guardian

People behaving badly is a staple of the news, and the pandemic has given us plenty of lurid snapshots. In the US alone, we have seen protesters with guns in Michigan’s capital demanding an end to lockdown, anti-vaxxer women in a frenzy at California’s capitol, opportunists stockpiling hand sanitiser to resell for profit.

One of the biggest cliches about disasters is that they reveal civilisation as a thin veneer, beneath which lies brutal human nature. From this perspective, the best we can hope for from most people under crisis is selfish indifference; at worst, they will swiftly turn to violence. Our worst instincts must be repressed. This becomes a justification for authoritarianism and heavy-handed policing.

But studies of historical disasters have shown that this is not how most people actually behave. There are nearly always selfish and destructive people, and they are often in power, because we have created systems that reward that kind of personality and those principles. But the great majority of people in ordinary disasters behave in ways that are anything but selfish, and if we’re stuck with veneer as a metaphor, then it peels off to reveal a lot of creative and generous altruism and brilliant grassroots organising. With the global pandemic, these empathic urges and actions are wider and deeper and more consequential than ever.

A dozen years ago, the term “mutual aid” was, as far as I can tell, used mostly by anarchists and scholars. Somehow it has migrated into general usage in recent years and now, in the midst of the pandemic, it is everywhere. Mutual aid has generally meant aid offered in a spirit of solidarity and reciprocity, often coming from within struggling communities, empowering those aided, and with an eye towards liberation and social change. Generally it meant volunteer coalitions doing work such as rebuilding or food distribution or supporting resistance camps. One of the most striking aspects of this global crisis is how many forms of aid and solidarity there are. These new forms of generosity we are seeing – organising, networks, projects, donations, support and outreach – are numerous beyond counting, a superbloom of altruistic engagement.

This work has been made more difficult by the great withdrawal – the empty schools, shops, streets and offices. And that withdrawal is itself altruism in action – a withdrawal carried out by billions for the benefit of their communities, as well as their own safety. In the initial phase, we withdrew from the spaces we share out of solidarity: we moved apart to come together. We intentionally produced, in the form of business and school shutdowns and staying home, an unprecedented economic calamity as an alternative to accepting mass death.

In March, many small business owners and service workers in the US willingly shut down their enterprises, and thereby their livelihood, even before the official orders came. In April, 50 restaurant owners in the Atlanta area publicly rejected the Georgia governor’s invitation to reopen. Together they took out an ad in a local newspaper and wrote: “We agree that it’s in the best interest of our employees, our guests, our community and our industry to keep our dining rooms closed at this time.”

For some, staying home may be a strain, but for others it means financial ruin. Sacrificing your own financial security for the common good was a solemn commitment that people made across the world. It was one of the things that made this crisis distinct: how often refraining, not doing, not going anywhere, not continuing activities, was also an act of public-spirited generosity. This is willing sacrifice for the public good. But people have been doing more than that.

In March, the UK’s National Health Service called for 250,000 volunteers to sign up to help seniors, people who were isolating and medical staff who needed deliveries. More than three times that many signed up. Appreciation for the NHS grew even stronger, and the widespread weekly rounds of applause for its workers became one of the welcome interruptions of isolation. In mid-March, a website was launched listing several hundred new mutual aid groups across the country, so people could search their local area.

“In my area in London, we have had so many [mutual aid groups] that we’ve spun off down to street level,” one Londoner told me. “Our two-street collective has done shopping, picked up medicines, created an Easter-egg -in-the-window hunt for kids, all to help one another.” Another wrote: “Hackney in London has all the usual stuff like grocery buying and support, plus people are sourcing donated phones for people in hospital, laptops for kids who need them to access home learning and cars for healthcare staff redeployed to the makeshift Covid-19 hospital.”

A few weeks ago, I heard someone complain that Lexington, Kentucky, had four mutual aid groups – they were concerned that so many volunteers would be redundant; I was awestruck by the abundance. In the course of writing this piece, I looked at various new mutual aid projects: meal deliveries to the elderly in Paterson, New Jersey; the Twin Cities Queer and Trans Mutual Aid group in Minneapolis-Saint Paul; projects to aid the Hopi, Zuni and Navajo on reservations in the US south-west; a Washington state project to support the undocumented; sex workers organising to raise emergency funds.

I saw people stuck at home in isolation teach dance and drawing classes, tell stories, play music online to encourage others quarantining in place; Italians singing together from their balconies and Iranians reciting poetry from theirs; a young native Nevadan going fishing to feed members of her Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe. Most of us have seen, or performed, one-off acts of kindness – running an errand for a frail neighbour, chalking a cheerful message on the pavement, picking up the shopping bill for the struggling couple at the checkout, donating to a fundraiser for an acquaintance who has been laid off or taken ill. But such individual actions are not enough to address this triple catastrophe of a viral pandemic, a financial collapse and the emotional, educational and other consequences of the great withdrawal.

Thus there are also people building organisations to provide broader, ongoing practical aid – such as the young people in more than a dozen US cities delivering groceries and supplies to older and immunocompromised people via a network called Zoomers to Boomers – and others organising emotional support for those who feel isolated, including the UK’s adopt-a-grandparent programme. There are new groups, projects, organisations and networks, and old ones retooling for the crisis.

Fiji-based climate organiser Thelma Young-Lutunatabua told me about the return of traditional Fijian forms of equitable, cooperative food distribution to make sure no one was left out. “The way we get through this is together,” she said.

Fifteen years ago, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a mutual aid organisation called Common Ground Relief was founded by a handful of people inside the damaged area, including the former Black Panther Malik Rahim. (In the US, perhaps the most famous past examples of mutual aid are the Black Panther party’s 1960s-era food programmes to assuage hunger in inner-city neighbourhoods.) The group’s slogan was “solidarity not charity”, a phrase inspired by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: “I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”

As a definition of mutual aid’s ideals, “solidarity not charity” surfaces constantly today. Charity often implies that the afflicted population is powerless or incompetent to address its own needs. Sometimes, it can take away confidence and pride even as it gives tangible aid. Solidarity is, first of all, an affirmation that we are in this together, and mutual aid demonstrates that even in crisis we have strength and capacity to care for ourselves. The term comes from the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 book Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution, which argues that aiding and protecting others and serving the needs of the group rather than the individual has been essential to the survival of many species, and is evident in early and traditional human societies.

In the time of coronavirus, mutual aid has been used to describe myriad new volunteer cooperative projects that have arisen in response to disaster. But the landscape of outreach is complex and varied. Take, for example, the creation and circulation of masks. There is a whole spectrum of mask economies from corrupt profiteering and outright theft – including by the US federal government– to the very different world of creative mutual aid. Many of us, myself included, have made a few masks for those we know. Others have gone into bulk production.

San Francisco local government supervisor Matt Haney fundraised and organised the distribution of thousands of masks for the impoverished, densely housed – and houseless – residents of the city’s Tenderloin district, which he represents. Adriana Camarena, a lawyer from Mexico City, realised that the undocumented day labourers near her home in San Francisco’s Mission district had few supplies and little access to health information to meet the crisis. So she began making and distributing cloth masks and hand sanitiser, and giving brief educational talks to go with them.

Meanwhile, the artist and art professor Stephanie Syjuco settled into mask mass production to meet the needs of people in Oakland and Berkeley, starting with masks for a group working to address food insecurity among UC Berkeley students. By late April, she had personally made 700 masks. And the Auntie Sewing Squad, founded by Los Angeles performance artist Kristina Wong, now includes more than 500 members, and has produced more than 20,000 masks, by Wong’s count.

The aunties (and uncles, but mostly aunties) began by making masks for hospital workers, and then for farmworkers, people released by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) or getting out of prison, immigrant communities and other vulnerable groups. It’s a model of decentralised, volunteer-driven organising: whoever finds a need obtains pledges from makers until the required number is reached, and the beautifully made masks are gathered and shipped to their destination. Many pay for their own materials and shipping, and donations support others. This week, the squad is sending a van full of supplies, including masks, materials and three sewing machines, to the Navajo nation, which has been hard hit by the virus. The Navajo is just one of several indigenous communities they have reached out to.

The Auntie Sewing Squad even expanded to include cooking to support those who sew. “When you’ve been bent over a sewing machine for 12 hours, a nice order of pad thai is really welcome,” one auntie told me.

The US mask-makers, like donors to food-distribution programmes, are in part compensating for governmental failure. Had the federal government prepared for crisis, and supported the scientific advice on how to respond to pandemics, the need for these mutual aid efforts could have been smaller. There has been much talk of the underlying health conditions that make individuals more vulnerable to Covid-19. The US as a whole has underlying conditions – systemic racism, poverty and financial precariousness, lack of access to healthcare and the internet for rural and poor families – that have made this crisis far worse than it should have been. The old conservative argument against social programmes was that these needs should be met by individual and independent institutions’ generosity. In unequal societies, these were never enough to meet the need.

What is noteworthy for me about this crisis is that there is no clear distinction between purely volunteer- and donation-driven projects, and a host of other endeavours trying to meet the needs of the moment. There are many ways that businesses and workers are stepping up or shifting what they do and how they do it, out of altruism. A Buddhist group in Tallahassee, Florida, raised $500,000 to purchase masks from China for medical workers in their area. The jet belonging to the New England Patriots football team brought 1.2m masks directly from China to circumvent the federal government’s outbidding of Massachusetts on personal protective equipment (PPE).

Elsewhere, the New York Times reported on Amish families who, as other jobs dried up, turned to mass-producing cloth masks, face shields and other PPE for the Cleveland clinic, which urgently needed them. (This, like the California government program that lets otherwise shuttered restaurants deliver meals to isolated senior citizens, is when aid becomes literally mutual, meeting needs on both sides of the interaction.) Then there are the 43 Pennsylvania factory workers who chose to isolate themselves in their workplace for a 28-day marathon of 12-hour days, during which they produced tens of millions of pounds of polypropylene, the raw material from which a lot of PPE is made. Like the Amish, they were paid for their work, and were working in intense new ways, fuelled by social commitment, to meet an urgent need. One of the workers said: “We’ve been getting messages on social media from nurses, doctors, emergency workers, saying thank you for what we’re doing. But we want to thank them for what they did and are continuing to do. That’s what made the time we were in there go by quickly, just being able to support them.”

During the final 1,000 days of the second world war, shipyard workers in the San Francisco Bay Area produced 1,000 warships – a warship a day. Something like that epic, urgent industry seems to be at work now, but outside the federal government, or any government. In early April, the Bay Area branch of the news site Hoodline reported: “On Thursday morning, two tons of rolled sheet plastic arrived at a warehouse in Alameda. By the end of the weekend, it had become 16,000 plastic face shields. That remarkable turnaround is entirely owed to self-organisation by Bay Area makers, who have transformed maker spaces, universities, fabrication shops and almost anyone with their own sewing machine, CNC machine or 3D printer into an ad-hoc corps of medical supply manufacturers.” The report called the self-organised effort involving industrial-design students and teachers a “distributed factory”. Such decentralised efforts, organised without top-down authority, are exemplary mutual aid.

In April, 14 nurses and seven doctors from the same institution set off for a one-month assignment on the Navajo reservation, whose residents are facing high levels of infection. They were coordinated by the existing UCSF Heal Initiative(Health, Equity, Action and Leadership), which works with impoverished and vulnerable communities from Haiti to Nepal. Its mission statement is: “We seek to embody solidarity and contribute to the movement for global health equity led by communities themselves.” This initiative, based on the principle of “solidarity not charity”, has been working with communities under stress for six years, and will still be there when the immediate crisis is over.

During “ordinary” disasters – a hurricane, an earthquake – there’s a phenomenon called volunteer convergence, whereby people eager to help gather in the impacted areas. Sometimes so many people and so much donated material shows up that they pose management problems for those at the centre of the crisis. This is not an ordinary disaster – the impacted area is all over the world, and convergence is banned – but people are showing up in many ways. Some of this work is always going on – there is always suffering and injustice to assuage, and there are always people trying to do so.

Even ordinary disasters never really end. There are many ways in which Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans and other parts of the gulf coast lasted – though there are, at least, some positive aspects to this lingering impact. The Common Ground Health Clinic spun off from Common Ground Relief. Fifteen years on, it’s still delivering free medical care in the New Orleans region.

The Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis will not end – if ending means things going back to the way they were. Whatever “normal” meant on 1 January 2020, it will never return, and neither will millions of the jobs financed by the disposable income that has just dried up. It’s worth remembering that, in the past few decades, the return to 19th-century robber-baron capitalism – via the dismantling of social safety nets, and the transformation of education, healthcare and other basic human needs into for-profit schemes that served shareholders first – meant that everyday life had already become a disaster for too many billions of people before this crisis.

There is a long, rough road ahead. Without radical change, the way food, shelter, medical care and education are produced and distributed will be more unfair and more devastating than before. It seems likely that conservatives will argue for brutal austerity and libertarian abandonment of the most desperate, while the rest of us are going to have to argue for some form of post-capitalism that decouples meeting basic needs from wage labour – perhaps the kind of basic income that Spain is planning to introduce.

The devastating economic effect of the pandemic will make innovation essential, whether it is rethinking higher education or food distribution, or how to fund news media. The Green New Deal offers a model for how to move forward on jobs and leave fossil fuels behind as that sector founders and climate catastrophe looms. Protests in many fields – including nurses demanding PPE, and warehouse, delivery and food-service workers protesting against exploitative or unsafe working conditions – suggests that workers’ organisations may be gaining strength.

I believe the generosity and solidarity in action in the present moment offers a foreshadowing of what is possible – and necessary. The basic generosity and empathy of most ordinary people should be regarded as a treasure, a light and an energy source that can drive a better society, if it is recognised and encouraged. Mostly, it’s overlooked, undermined and sabotaged. Capitalism, and its octopus arms of entertainment, advertising and marketing, endeavour to reduce us to consumers. This means making us the kind of miserable, selfish, lonely people who seek fulfllment through buying stuff, and believe in competitiveness as a basic social force. Competitiveness, that driving word behind free-market ideology, means we are rivals and there is scarcity; each of us gets more by seeing that someone else gets less.

Competition is the antithesis of mutual aid, which is not only a practical tool but an ideological insurrection. The fact that even in places like the US, where these competitive, isolating messages have bombarded us for at least 150 years, millions still reach out in generosity, and are still moved to meet the needs that become visible in moments such as this, is testament to something about human nature and human possibility. Those urges are strong and deep, and they can be a foundation for something different. Indeed, they often have been before, when European social welfare was built up, when US social safety nets were created, and when people self-organised on smaller scales to take care of each other.

Some of that sense of urgency and shared destiny will fade away, as it often does after a disaster, but one of the important things to remember is that some of it was here before this pandemic. I sometimes think that capitalism is a catastrophe constantly being mitigated and cleaned up by mutual aid and kinship networks, by the generosity of religious and secular organisations, by the toil of human-rights lawyers and climate groups, and by the kindness of strangers. Imagine if these forces, this spirit, weren’t just the cleanup crew, but were the ones setting the agenda.

What I have seen after earlier disasters is that a lot of people aspire to “go home” and “back to normal”, but some find in the moment a sense of self and a sense of connection so meaningful that something about who they were and what they did in the crisis carries forward into how they live the rest of their life. Sometimes this is as intangible as a change of priorities and habits, and a new sense of agency; not uncommonly, it’s as substantial as a new coalition, a new network, a new set of policy priorities, a new political career or a decision to go into work that supports the whole. And even those who want things to get back to normal often find they are changed permanently in their sense of who they are, and what matters most. The pandemic marks the end of an era and the beginning of another – one whose harshness must be mitigated by a spirit of generosity. An artist hunched over her sewing machine, a young person delivering groceries on his bicycle, a nurse suiting up for the ICU, a doctor heading to the Navajo nation, a graduate student hip-deep in Pyramid Lake catching trout for elders, a programmer setting up a website to organise a community: the work is under way. It can be the basis for the future, if we can recognise the value of these urges and actions, recognise that things can and must change profoundly, and if we can tell other stories about who we are, what we want and what is possible.

 

It Could Happen Any Time

[Preface by John R. Boettiger: This is not the first time that my son Joshua has contributed to Reckonings, as you will see if you seek his name in "Search Reckonings" on the lower right of this page. I have plucked the following poem by William Stafford and Joshua's commentary from the website of his current congregation, Temple Emek Shalom in Ashland, Oregon (https://emekshalom.org/). What Joshua writes below, though written seven years ago on December 1, 2015, and in a different season, seems deeply appropriate to the time of crisis we are now experiencing. I also realize that today is the day of shabat in the Jewish weekly calendar, so I will close this preface with a longstanding prayer addressed to readers: Shabat Shalom. The traditional translation is “Good Sabbath.” This is a decent translation, but the phrase is very nuanced. ... So when someone wishes you Shabat Shalom, they are saying to you “May you dwell in completeness on this seventh day."]

 

It Could Happen Any Time

Rabbi Joshua Boettiger

12-1-15

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon.  It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know.  That’s why we wake
and look out — no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

– William Stafford

 

Sometimes the world feels like a very scary place; sometimes we don’t know what to do with the rush of horrific news in our world that we may receive in the course of any given day. And we feel the truth that, as Stafford writes, “it could happen any time.” So that is true. We cannot deny that it is so. And we wake up and look out and know that there are no guarantees in this life.

And yet there is more that could befall us at any time, and is in fact, is extraordinarily more likely to actually happen: sunshine, love, salvation.

We look out our window now. Sometimes our fear for our world and our loved ones in it clouds and darkens our vision. This is just what it is to be alive. And every generation feels it and has felt it and will continue to feel it.

And yet there is morning, noon, evening. Each of them an indescribable miracle; a gift staring us right in the face. We cannot deny that this is true – the gift that is this life; the miraculous in what we call the mundane.

May we have the courage to be who we are and to be in the world as it is. Hanukah is a season of miracles. May we have the courage to meet the miraculous half-way.

Hope and Falling Together: Rebecca Solnit in conversation with Krista Tippett (2016)

On Being with Krista Tippett

Rebecca Solnit

Hope and Falling Together

May 26, 2016

“When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up to become their brothers’ keepers. And that purposefulness and connectedness bring joy even amidst death, chaos, fear, and loss.” A singular writer and thinker, Rebecca Solnit celebrates the unpredictable and incalculable events that so often redeem our lives, both solitary and public. She searches for the hidden, transformative histories inside and after events we chronicle merely as disasters, in places like post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.

Rebecca Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and a regular writer for publications including The Guardian and The London Review of Books. Her books include A Paradise Built in Hell, Hope in the Dark, and a new collection of essays, The Mother of All Questions.

Krista Tippett, host: Rebecca Solnit describes her vision as a writer like this: “to describe nuances and shades of meaning, to celebrate public life and solitary life, to find another way of telling.” She is a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine and the author of profound books that defy category. She’s emerged as one of our great chroniclers of untold histories of redemptive change in places like post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. She writes that, so often, “When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up to become their brother’s keepers. And that purposefulness and connectedness bring joy even amidst death, chaos, fear, and loss.”

Rebecca Solnit: I want better metaphors. I want better stories. I want more openness. I want better questions. All these things feel like they give us tools that are a little more commensurate with the amazing possibilities and the terrible realities that we face.

Ms. Tippett:  Rebecca Solnit’s books include A Paradise Built in Hell, Hope in the Dark, and a new collection of essays, The Mother of All Questions. She was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and moved with her parents to the San Francisco Bay Area when she was young. I spoke with her in 2016.

Ms. Tippett: I usually start my conversations with an inquiry about the spiritual background of your childhood, and — however you would define that. And as I look at the sweep of your writing, I see so many elements that, to me, are profoundly spiritual — a long sense of time, a robust commitment to hope. You describe your childhood in so many ways — in one place, these are words you use: “a scrawny, battered little kid in a violent house.” And I wonder how you would think about that notion of the spiritual background of your childhood. And it occurs to me that perhaps some of these things were seeded by absence, as much as by presence.

Ms. Solnit:  I think that’s true. And when you ask that question, what comes to mind is a map of where most of my childhood took place. I wrote somewhere that I had an inside-out childhood, because every place was safe but home. If you went — just on the other side of the backyard fence was a quarter horse stud farm and then dairy farms and open space. And the landscape and the animals, domestic and wild, were this huge refuge and really fed me and encouraged me, and there was a sense of community with the non-human. And so that was if you went north, even just to the other side of the fence and beyond — it was just endless open space and oak trees and grasslands and wildlife.

And then if you went south, there was a really great public library. And the minute I learned how to read, it was as though I’d been given this huge treasure. Every book was a box I suddenly knew how to open, and in it I could meet people, go to other worlds, go deep in all kinds of ways. And I spent my childhood in the hills and in the books. And those — so that was not maybe what people think of conventionally as spirituality, but that was my company, my encouragement, my teaching, my community.

Ms. Tippett: That’s lovely. So the sweep of your work is wonderful, and it’s daunting, as an interviewer. But I actually thought I would start with — I’d just love to have a conversation with you about this piece that was in Harper’s not that long ago, about — I can’t remember the title of it. But it was ostensibly about the choice not to have children.

Ms. Solnit: Oh, yeah. It’s called “The Mother of All Questions.”

Ms. Tippett: The Mother of All Questions.” And part of what you were reflecting on, or a jumping-off point for your reflection, was the fact that people are so curious about that and, in fact, so presumptuous about it. And I think you make the case very quickly that it’s a valid and life-giving choice, not to have children. But in fact, the piece, like so much of what you write, becomes a reflection on the vast expanse of what it is to be alive. And so there’s this: you said, “People lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity in part from the belief that children are the best way to fulfill your capacity to love, even though the list of monstrous, ice-hearted mothers is extensive. But there are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.”

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, exactly.

Ms. Tippett: And you say — I love this phrase: “There’s so much other work love has to do in the world.” I just feel like that’s so worth just putting out in public life and reflecting on.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and it’s partly — we overemphasize this very specific zone of love. It’s as though we’ve hyper-mapped it and obsessed about it and shone lights on it and things. And then there’s this whole other territory of relationships, to the larger world in particular and to public life, to — I hang out with a lot of climate activists, and there’s this profound love they have for the natural world, for the future, for justice. And that really shapes lives and gives them tremendous meaning. And it benefits all of us that they have this and that this motivates them, because they’re acting on behalf of all of us. And we should call that love. And we should look at the way that —

Ms. Tippett: And it’s a passionate love, right? It’s a passionate love.

Ms. Solnit: Absolutely. It’s just — it’s ferocious, and it’s protective the way that mother love can be. And if anything’s going to save the planet, it’s that love. But mostly we don’t even acknowledge that it exists, and so we have these blank spots on the map of who we are. And I want to try and fill those in and encourage people to go there, to recognize that actually, their lives can take place or are already taking place there and that this will give them this bigger sense of self.

Ms. Tippett :So a lot of the themes that run through your work, the things you care about, I want to say they’re outliers in terms of what we know how to talk about in public — certainly, in intellectual circles. And so maybe let’s talk about hope, because I think hope is one of those.

Ms. Solnit: I can talk about hope till, I think, the cows come home.

Ms. Tippett: [laughs] Well, I just — I want to start — somewhere you write that your fascination with this — maybe you began to articulate your fascination with this when you registered your emotions and the emotions of others in response to the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco. And my sense is that what you — how you responded and how you saw others respond — it was not, perhaps, what you would have expected.

Ms. Solnit: The amazing thing about the 1989 earthquake — it was an earthquake as big as the kind that killed thousands of people in places like Turkey and Mexico City and things like that. But partly because we have good infrastructure, about 50 people died. A number of people lost their homes. Everybody was shaken up. But what was so interesting for me was that people seemed to kind of love what was going on. And when I’d ask people, or when it would come up in conversation, because for years afterwards around here, people would be like, “Oh, where were you at 5:02, or is it 5:03 P.M., on October 17, 1989?” And people would get this expression that I later ran into when I visited Halifax, Nova Scotia, after a big hurricane there, when I talked — and then eventually, I did a whole book on this mysterious emotion. People would light up. And everything we’ve been told about disaster by trashy Hollywood disaster movies with Charlton Heston and Tom Cruise, everything about the news — is that human beings are fragile, disasters are terrible, and we’re either terrified because we’re fragile, or our morality is also fragile, and we revert to our best-deal, savage, social-Darwinist, Hobbesian nature, and go out raping and looting.

Those myths became a secondary disaster, worse than the hurricane that hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005, because that’s why it was — the city was shut off, turned into a prison city, why the police were shooting black people in the back, why people were not allowed to evacuate and supplies were not allowed in while people were dying of exposure and lack of medication and et cetera.

So that was part of where I got hopeful, and then also, in a larger sense, one of the things I’m really interested in is, what are the stories we tell, and what are their consequences? And are there other ways of telling, other ways — other stories that don’t get told? And hopefulness is really, for me — is not optimism: that everything’s going to be fine, and we can just sit back. And that’s too much like pessimism, which is that everything’s going to suck, and we can just sit back.

Hope, for me, just means a Buddhist sense of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the fact that we don’t know what will happen and that there’s maybe room for us to intervene, and that we have to let go of the certainty people seem to love more than hope and know that we don’t know what’s going to happen. And we live in a very surprising world, where nobody anticipated the way the Berlin Wall would fall or the Arab Spring would rise up, the impact of Occupy Wall Street. Obama was unelectable, six months before he was elected.

Ms. Tippett: But I wonder, as you just described that, just then, what you said — in those moments of disaster, of crisis, we come face to face with the reality that unexpected things will happen — as you said, that life is surprising, in good ways and bad. That’s just true. But is there something life-giving, even energizing, about people actually having to face those bedrock realities in those moments?

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and there’s a way a disaster throws people into the present and gives them this supersaturated immediacy that also includes a deep sense of connection. It’s as though in some violent gift, you’ve been given a kind of spiritual awakening where you’re close to mortality in a way that makes you feel more alive. You’re deeply in the present and can let go of past and future and your personal narrative, in some ways. You have shared an experience with everyone around you, and you often find very direct but also metaphysical senses of connection to the people you suddenly have something in common with.

And then oftentimes, the people who do the really important work in disasters, which doesn’t get talked about much, are the neighbors. Who’s going to rescue you when your building collapses, when the ice storm comes, and the power goes out? It’s probably going to be the neighbors. And so the question is really two things. One is, how can we get there without going through a disaster, and …

Ms. Tippett:[ laughs] That’s right. That’s the question, isn’t it?

Ms. Solnit: And I think of that as this funny way the earthquake shakes you awake. And then that’s the big spiritual question: How do you stay awake? How do you stay in that deeper consciousness of that present-mindedness, that sense of non-separation and compassion and engagement — and courage, which is also a big part of it, and generosity? People are not selfish and greedy.

So and then the other question is, why has everything we’ve ever been told about human nature misled us about what happens in these moments? And what happens if we acknowledge, as I think people in the kind of work that neuropsychologists and the Dalai Lama’s research projects and economists are beginning to say, what if human — everything we’ve been told about human nature is wrong, and we’re actually very generous, communitarian, altruistic beings who are distorted by the system we are in but not made happy by it? What if we can actually be better people in a better world?

Ms. Tippett: A story I have always loved, that, to me — Dorothy Day, I just feel like, gets quoted all the time, more and more. Somehow, she’s really come to the forefront of consciousness. And you do write about — in your book, A Paradise Built in Hell, which I love so much — you write about the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, which killed 3,000 people and annihilated the center of the city, as you say, and shattered this hundred-mile stretch.

But Dorothy Day was in Oakland. She’s eight years old. She watches this thing that someplace you describe as — you say, yes, people fall apart, but in disaster, there’s also this falling together that we don’t chronicle. And she — the question she asked was — she saw, to me — this is me looking at this — she saw that people were capable of this; that all along, they knew how to do this, to take care of each other.

Ms. Solnit: Exactly.

Ms. Tippett: And she said, “Why can’t we live this way all the time?”

Ms. Solnit: No, that is her formative experience. She said, while the disaster lasted, people loved one another. And Dorothy Day is such a key figure for that book, both because the earthquake becomes a spiritual awakening and the template for what she pursues in her life, and because she’s somebody who had a partner and a child, and she kept the child, but she gave up family life for this larger sense of community she pursued as the founder of Catholic Worker. And she treated poverty as the disaster in which she would create this kind of communitas, this deeper, broader, higher, more spiritual sense of community than private life had offered her. And she’s so interesting as somebody who renounces it directly and connects this other sense so directly to disaster.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, and you talk about — in all the places you looked, and in your own circle as you were in that disaster, there’s virtue that arises, and that there’s a joy — there’s a hope and a joy. And I was thinking about that phrase of hers, “the duty of delight.” So it’s not — so yes, there’s — she makes sacrifices that seem — that would seem extreme in the context of most of our lives. But that joy was also something she claimed and hung onto.

Ms. Solnit: “Joy” is such an interesting term, because we hear constantly about happiness — “Are you happy?” And it’s — emotions are mutable, and this notion that happiness should be a steady state seems destined to make people miserable. And joy is so much more interesting, because I think we’re much more aware that it’s like the light at sunrise, or the lightning, or something — that it’s epiphanies and moments and raptures, and that it’s not supposed to be a steady state, and that’s OK. And I think it’s a word that comes up a lot more in spiritual life than “happiness,” that millstone, happiness.

Ms. Tippett: Absolutely, yeah. You draw a connection often between, I would say, the reasonableness of hope and the reality of darkness. Would you say something about that?

Ms. Solnit: Well, I really wanted to rescue “darkness” from the pejoratives, because it’s also associated with dark-skinned people, and those pejoratives often become racial in ways that I find problematic. So I wrote a book called Hope in the Dark, about hope, where that darkness was the future — that the present and past are daylight, and the future is night. But in that darkness is a kind of mysterious, erotic, enveloping sense of possibility and communion — love is made in the dark, often as not — and then to recognize that unknowability as fertile, as rich as the womb, rather than the tomb, in some sense. And so much, for me, of hope is not, as I was saying, not optimism that everything will be fine, but that we don’t know what will happen.

A guest of yours whose name I’m going to mispronounce — Walter Brueggemann…

Ms. Tippett: Yes, yes, theologian of the prophets.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and I listened to his interview, and he talked about how much hope is grounded in memory. And I was so excited to hear someone say that. We think of hope as looking forward, but memory lets us know, if we have a real memory, that we didn’t know. We didn’t know the Berlin Wall was going to fall, and the Soviet Union was going to fall apart, and the binary arrangement those of us who are older grew up in, where it seemed like capitalism and communism and the Cold War standoff was going to last for centuries.

If you study history deeply, you realize that, to quote Patti Smith, “People have the power” — that popular power, civil society, has been tremendously powerful and has changed the world again and again and again; that we’re not powerless; that things are very unpredictable and that people have often taken on things that seemed hopeless — freeing the slaves, getting women the vote — and achieved those things. And I feel like so much of what we’re burdened by is bad stories, both people who have amnesia, who don’t remember that the present was constructed by certain forces to serve certain elements and can be deconstructed and that things could be very different, that they have been very different, that things are always changing and that we have agency in that change.

And one of the simple examples I often go back to is that when you and I were small, to be gay or lesbian or otherwise — something other than standard heterosexual — was to be considered mentally ill or criminal or both, and punished accordingly. And to go from there to national same-sex marriage rights is an unimaginable journey. It’s — and that’s a lot of what my hopeful stuff is about, is trying to look at the immeasurable, incalculable, indirect, roundabout way that things matter.

My friend, David Graber, has a wonderful passage about how the Russian revolution succeeded, but not really in Russia. It terrified, or at least motivated, leaders in Europe and North America and elsewhere to make enormous concessions to the rights of poor and workers and really furthered economic justice in other places. And if you can say that a revolution was successful, but not in the country it took place in, then you can start to trace these indirect impacts.

Ms. Tippett: You can listen again and share this conversation with Rebecca Solnit at civilconversationsproject.org. We are expanding On Being’s Civil Conversations Project to be more of a resource for families and communities. Find audio, video, and a starter guide for beginning new conversations where you live and reinventing common life for this century, because the point of speaking together differently is to live together differently. Again, all that at civilconversationsproject.org.

Ms. Tippett: You have this wonderful sentence that “History is like the weather, not like checkers.” And you talk about — here’s another: “Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart; sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends towards justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc.” It’s an un-American way of thinking, but it’s an essential way, I think, to inhabit this century, in particular.

Ms. Solnit: There used to be products advertised in comic books and things — “Instant results guaranteed, or your money back.” If disappointment is your goal, that’s a sure-fire recipe for it. For example, Occupy Wall Street was pronounced a failure before it had really gotten going, and at one point, there were Occupies in New Zealand and Japan and Europe — in California alone, there were about 400 Occupies at the peak, in late 2011. And they dispersed, as these encampments and people — in which people had these extraordinary dialogues. And the impact of those dialogues is hard to measure. But you can look at Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio of New — the mayor of New York, as people who are carrying those frameworks into the mainstream and into electoral politics. And you can also look at both national things — the movement against punitive student debt and the …

Ms. Tippett: I feel like what you’re — you’re kind of — you’re drawing a map, and it’s a different kind of map than we came out of the 20th century in our heads with, which is about how social change happens. I think maybe the image people go to, in a default way, is maybe the civil rights movement, simplified — large numbers of people on the street, a charismatic leader, and laws that get passed right in that moment.

So let me ask you this, because, one, I very much appreciated your writing about Hurricane Katrina and the world after Hurricane Katrina. And this is one of these places where we’ve told the story in a certain way. And we — and even from the very beginning, the story was narrated and presented in a way that was largely just incredibly demoralizing. If you met someone — say, a Martian, who — [laughs] who was not here and had never heard of this, how would you tell, start to tell, the fullness of that story of Hurricane Katrina, what happened to this city called New Orleans and how that history is still being made now?

Ms. Solnit: I should say that all my work on disaster draws from these wonderful disaster sociologists who had this — do this incredible work, documenting what happens in disasters, and have since World War II. I’m kind of their popularizer, and people like Kathleen Tierney. But — and they say there’s no such thing as a “natural” disaster, meaning that in an earthquake, it’s buildings that fall on you. So what are the building codes? Who lives in substandard housing? Who lives on the floodplain? Who gets evacuated? Who gets left behind? What happened to New Orleans is that the levees failed. About seven-eighths of the city flooded, meaning that a lot of it was from a few feet to 15 feet or more deep in water, and just all systems failed, and some hospitals were able to run on generators.

There was a supposedly — there was what was called a mandatory evacuation, but people who didn’t have the resources to evacuate were left behind to face what happened. So that’s the set-up for it that creates a disaster. In Cuba, when there’s a mandatory evacuation, everybody receives the assistance they need to evacuate, so it’s our kind of laissez-faire, every-man-for-himself system that left what were often portrayed as the “criminal element,” was a lot of poor women, single moms with kids, a lot of elderly people. And a lot of the guys who got portrayed as gangsters and things were the wonderful rescuers and these really able-bodied young guys who did amazing things.

Then things happen, like they basically get sealed off. You can walk out of the central city to dry land, but the sheriff of a suburb called Gretna, and his thugs, get on the bridge with guns and turn people back at gunpoint. You cannot walk out of New Orleans to dry land, so you’re trapped. You’re a prisoner, essentially.

Ms. Tippett: And that was because of the narrative they were working off, in terms of who these people were?

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, well, the — all the clichés that surfaced in the 1906 earthquake, all the crap about human nature, about how we all revert — especially poor people, especially non-white people — how we revert to our savage, social-Darwinist nature, were aired. And the mainstream media — and this includes The New York Times and The Washington Post and CNN and The Guardian, all the major news outlets — it wasn’t — were the unindicted co-conspirators, I always say. They start publishing all this garbage about how there’s mass killings in the Superdome. And that was just believed so much that the Federal Emergency Management Agency sends a gigantic tractor-trailer refrigerated truck to get what turns out to be six bodies, not the 200 that are supposed to be there.

There’s all these stories that people are shooting at helicopters, so you can’t have helicopter rescues. And so they mount a campaign, not to treat suffering human beings and bring them resources, but to reconquer the city. Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, said, “We have troops fresh from Iraq, and they have M16s that are locked and loaded, and they know how to use them.” And it’s like, that is not a humanitarian effort. M16s are not how you help that grandmother dying on the roof. And some of those grandmothers died.

And so people were not a victim of a hurricane, they were a victim of vicious stories; of the media’s failures; of the failures of the government on every scale, from the city of New Orleans that left prisoners locked in flooded jails, to the federal government. And so that’s political failures, but behind those politics are stories.

And what’s interesting is that a lot of people believe those stories. And we often treat stories like they’re very trivial, like they’re story hour for kids or — but people live and die by stories. And people died of vicious stories in New Orleans. Everybody could have been evacuated in 24 hours. Everybody could have been evacuated beforehand.

Ms. Tippett: Well, and the stories you also tell that we don’t hear, which were life-giving — that in the immediate aftermath, more than 200,000 people invite displaced strangers into their homes through hurricanehousing.org, which I never heard about; that the massive number of people who went to New Orleans, who went to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild — that it was like the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, magnified a thousand-fold. So there’s also that taking place, and those lives, one at a time.

Ms. Solnit: And there was — from the very minute it all began, there was tremendous altruism. The first round of rescuers were people who were themselves inside the city who got boats or did other things to rescue people, who came together in buildings that weren’t damaged and formed little communities and took care of the vulnerable. But there are these extraordinary stories. And people really — that impulse to help is so powerful. And they talk — they call it “disaster convergence,” and it often becomes a problem, where you have — you remember after 9/11, people lined up around the block all over the country, to give blood. People really want to help. That’s who we are.

And New Orleans, for years afterwards, had all these people — church groups, and I saw amazing Mennonite builders rebuilding houses, and Habitat for Humanity, and I kind of loved it. It was the whole spectrum, from Catholic Charities to the Mennonites to pretty radical anarchists. And people working with Common Ground, which was founded by the Black Panthers and young white supporters and became a project that did a lot of different things, and not all of it worked out perfectly, but some of it was amazing, and it became really a part of the conversation. But they founded the first really good clinic for people who needed emergency care, who needed their diabetes medicine or their tetanus shot or their wound disinfected. And that split off into Common GroundClinic, which is still going strong more than ten years later. And that’s the kind of indirect consequences that I find so interesting to trace, is that here’s something that came out of Katrina that’s still helping people every day.

Ms. Tippett: Right. So we talked a little while ago about love and your idea that love has so many other things to do in the world, aside from these silos of loving our families and loving our children. So if I ask you just what story or people come to mind — if you think about the word “love” as a practical, muscular, public thing in New Orleans, ten years after Hurricane Katrina, what comes to mind for you?

Ms. Solnit: So many things; it’s a really magical place. People have deep connections in New Orleans. I would try to explain that people in New Orleans and Katrina lost things that most of us hadn’t had for generations. A lot of people lived in a neighborhood where they knew hundreds of people. They knew everybody who lived near them. They might have extended family. They might be like Fats Domino, who was born in a house in the Lower Ninth Ward, delivered by his grandmother. People live in their grandparents’ houses. They have these deep roots and wide branches.

And they engage in public celebration. They talk to strangers. And they — it’s a deeply Dionysian place, with the second line parades all — 40-something Sundays a year; not just Carnival, not just Mardi Gras. And it’s a profoundly spiritual place. So all these things are part of the place, and so they’re already really rich.

But a lot of people, after Katrina, felt like, OK, we really have to engage to keep this place alive. And there was a real rise in civic engagement, and a number of institutions around justice and policing were reformed. The police were actually taken over by the federal government, because it was the most corrupt and incompetent police department in the United States. They got a semi-decent mayor for a change, after a lot of corruption — particularly from Ray Nagin, who went to jail for it, the mayor during and after Katrina. And people really started to dream big, about “OK, here we are on the fastest-eroding coastline in the world, in a city that’s partly below sea level, in an era of climate change, increasing storms, and rising waters. How do we adapt?” And people are having this really exciting conversation about rethinking the city and how water works in the city, building systems of survival.

And again, this is like all disasters. The storm was horrible. It killed about 1,800 people. It displaced a lot of black people who were never able to come back, and impacted the continuity and mental health of the community. But it did create this engagement and this really creative planning of the future. And New Orleans might have just continued its gentle decline, without Katrina.

Ms. Tippett: Right, and it’s kind of an incubator now, isn’t it? Kind of a …

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, yeah, and a lot of the young people, these young idealists who moved there, fell in love with the place and stayed. And it’s complicated; some of them are the white kids who are gentrifying traditionally black neighborhoods. But they’re also — some — they’re not all white, and they are people who are bringing a passion for urban planning, community gardens; for thinking about these social and ecological systems. And the place is very energized right now in new ways, and it has retained quite a lot, if not all, of the energy it had before.

Ms. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, with writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit. I spoke with her during the 2016 presidential election.

Ms. Tippett: It seems to me that that story of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina becomes just an extreme example of a larger reality you see. And so here’s something you wrote, where it’s so beautifully stated — and in fact, each one of us individually, if we stopped to take it apart, has a story of a million events or actions or people without which we would not be. And you wrote, “Trace it far enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence.” [laughs]

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and it’s also about the unpredictability of our lives and that ground for hope I talk about — that we don’t know what forces are at work, what — who and what is going to appear, what thing we may not have even noticed or may have discounted that will become a tremendous force in our lives.

People in this culture love certainty so much, and they seem to love certainty more than hope, which is why they often seize on these really bitter, despondent narratives that are — they know exactly what’s going to happen. And that certainty just seems so tragic to me. I want people to tell more complex stories and to acknowledge that sometimes we win, and that there are these openings. But an opening is just an opening; you have to go through it and make something happen. And you don’t always win, but if you try, you don’t always lose.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, you don’t always win, but I think I come back to your idea that history is like — and in fact, our lives — are like the weather, not like checkers. So your point, which actually is, I would say, is the kind of complexity that I think theology at its best imposes — that you walk through the openings, and perhaps you don’t win that battle, or you don’t see the result you hoped for; perhaps you outright lose. But the complex way you’re wanting to tell the stories of reality and of our lives is that whatever we do, there are always consequences that we don’t control and can’t see and can’t calculate, but they matter. They count.

Ms. Solnit: The guy I’m involved with loves to say, and I’m getting — it’s from Foucault, and I’m getting it wrong — that “We know what we do. We know why we do it. But we don’t know what we do, does.” And I love that sense that we don’t know consequences. We can learn and surmise. And that a lot of what matters is indirect and nonlinear. And it’s like even checkers seems too sophisticated and complex for the metaphor. I use bowling, where people are like, “Either we knocked all the pins down with this bowling ball, or we had a gutter ball, and nothing happened.”

And my wonderful environmentalist friend, Chip Ward, likes to talk about the “tyranny of the quantifiable,” and I’ve been using that phrase of his for about 15 years. And it is a kind of tyranny, and I think — and it does get mystical, where you have to look at what’s not quantifiable. Martin Luther King is assassinated in 1968. A comic book about how civil disobedience works out was distributed during the civil rights movement, gets translated into Arabic and distributed in Egypt and becomes one of the immeasurable forces that help feed the Arab Spring, which is five years old right now; and most of it doesn’t look that good, but they did overthrow a bunch of regimes. And the French Revolution didn’t really look very good five years out, I was saying the other day.

Ms. Tippett: Oh, I know. It’s so important that you point that out — that we — and also, our revolution. These things are messy, and they take generations. And we forget that, and we’re already calling it as a loss, and it’s absurd, really. It’s absurd.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and I think that there are really good points to be made that — for example, that overthrowing a dictator is nice, but you need democratic institutions. In Egypt, for example, the military was a power that didn’t go away. And you need to not just have that amazing moment in the streets and that rupture, but you need to have an ongoing engagement with transforming the system and making it accountable. But what happened mattered, nevertheless, and I think for people, many people in the Middle East, just the sense that it’s not inevitable that we live in authoritarianism; we are not powerless. And I think of Alexander Dubček — the hero of the Prague Spring of 1968, which was quashed — playing a role in the 1989 revolution that liberated that country.

Ms. Tippett: That’s so true, yeah.

Ms. Solnit: And I want better metaphors. I want better stories. I want more openness. I want better questions. All these things feel like they give us tools that are a little more commensurate with the amazing possibilities and the terrible realities that we face. And what we get given, so often, are just these kind of clumsy, inadequate tools. They don’t help. They don’t open things up. They don’t shed light. They don’t lead us to interesting places. They don’t let us know how powerful we can be. They don’t help us ask the questions that really matter and that start with rejecting the narratives we’re told and telling our own stories, becoming the storyteller rather than the person who’s told what to do.

Ms. Tippett:I ’m very much a comrade in your reverence for something called public life and — which I think we’ve narrowly equated with political life, in recent generations, but opening that language up more. You’ve said public life enlarges you, gives you purpose and context. I want to come to this idea that — [laughs] maybe this analogy is more apt — we’re in the middle of this presidential election year, which is so confusing, messy, and there’s a lot of anger in the room. And where am I going with this? You — I don’t want to compare it to a natural disaster, but you said — [laughs] I think I am, in my mind. [laughs]

Ms. Solnit: Oh, go; do it. [laughs]

Ms. Tippett: But you said, in the middle of a natural disaster, there’s this joy that rises up. So on the one hand, we have this spectacle of — I think — let’s just say — I think I can safely say this: a presidential election is — which is not what any of us — how any of us would want it to be, perhaps. But tell me, where are you taking joy in public life right now? And that might have nothing to do with politics.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, I totally agree we need a broader sense of public life, that it’s a sense of belonging to a place, by which I mean the physical place — the trees, the birds, the weather, the coastline or the hills or the farms…

Ms. Tippett: The people.

Ms. Solnit: As well as the people and the institutions. And it’s one of the reasons I love New Orleans. People really engage with each other, just in every day, and — whereas sometimes, living in the Bay Area, it feels like where I’m in a zombie movie; everybody’s walking around in a trance, staring at their phone, and nobody’s in the private world your phone opens onto.

But it’s funny the way you describe it, because I think there’s a kind of self-forgetfulness and a sense of having something in common that brings that joy, when it comes in disaster. And of course, a presidential election is the exact opposite. It’s partisanship and this sort of deep attachment to “I’m right and you’re wrong,” and the squabbling.

Ms. Tippett: But — so put that aside, because I think that’s not very joyful for you or me. But where are you finding joy in public life right now? Where do you want to look, in terms of the larger narrative of who we are and what we’re capable of and what this moment — you often talk about — you say, “Whenever I look around me, I wonder what old things are about to bear fruit, what seemingly solid institutions might soon rupture, and what seeds we might now be planting whose harvest will come at some unpredictable moment in the future.” So where are you looking right now with intrigue?

Ms. Solnit: The climate movement, which was this embryonic, ineffectual thing, ten years ago — and I was in Paris for the climate conference, and it’s global. It’s powerful. It’s brilliant. It’s innovative, and remarkable things are happening and real transformations. And ten years ago, we didn’t even have the energy options. We didn’t really have good alternatives to fossil fuel the way we do now, as Scotland hedged towards 100 percent fossil-free energy generation, as all these remarkable things happened. So we’re really in an energy revolution that’s an evolution of — a revolution of consciousness about how things work and how connected they all are, and this incredible kind of war of the world against the fossil fuel corporations. It’s very effective.

But that’s the pragmatic side. What I also see is these deep connections between people in North America and Africa and the Pacific — the Philippines, Asia — this global movement that’s really coming of age and that has a kind of profound beauty, not in only some of the individuals I’m friends with who are doing great things, but a kind of beauty of creativity, of passion, of real love for the vulnerable populations at stake; for the world, the natural world; for the sense of systems and order — the natural order of the weather patterns, sea levels, things like winter.

Ms. Tippett: [laughs] Yeah, things like winter, yeah.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, yeah — winter as it used — winter and spring as it used to be, where the bird migrations happened in coordination with these flowers blooming and these insects hatching, et cetera. And what we recognize, when we address climate change, is this infinite complexity that has a beautiful kind of order to it, and it’s falling into disorder. And so the love, the intelligence, the passion, the creativity of that movement is one. And there’s many other things I could say, but right now that’s just so exciting.

And it’s negotiating. It’s negotiating, and this is what hope is about, for me. It’s not saying, “Oh, we can pretend that everything’s going to be fine, and we’ll fix it all, and it’ll be as though it never happened.” It’s really saying, the difference between the best-case scenario and the worst case-scenario is where these people in the Philippines survive, where these people in the Arctic are able to keep something of their way of life. And we’re going to do everything we can to fight for the best case rather than the worst case — without illusions; without thinking that we’re going to make it all magically OK and like it never happened. And so that tough-mindedness is also really beautiful; that pragmatic idealism.

Ms. Tippett: That tough-minded hope.

Ms. Solnit: Exactly.

Ms. Tippett: I think you would give it that word.

Ms. Solnit: And hope is tough. It’s tougher to be uncertain than certain. It’s tougher to take chances than to be safe. And so hope is often seen as weakness, because it’s vulnerable, but it takes strength to enter into that vulnerability of being open to the possibilities. And I’m interested in what gives people that strength, and what stories, what questions, what memories, what conversations, what senses of themselves and the world around them.

Ms. Tippett: We’ve run — well, we’re just over about a minute. I just want to ask you one last question. It’s a huge question, but just where would you start thinking about this? How is your sense of what it means to be human evolving right now, as you write and as we speak? What contours is that taking on that perhaps you wouldn’t have expected ten years ago, or when you were 15 and miserable? [laughs]

Ms. Solnit: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. I was a really isolated kid, and my brothers teased me when I did girl things, so I wasn’t very good at girl things, so I wasn’t very good at connecting to other girls, and I was just the weird kid with her nose in a book. And so I have really wonderful people around me and really deep connections, and that’s incredibly satisfying. And it’s all kind of amazing.

I think a lot of us wish you could send postcards to your miserable teenage self. I always thought that “It Gets Better” campaign for queer kids should be broadened, because it gets better for a lot of us. My mother, in her ever un-encouraging way, when I won some big prize, said, “This is all such a surprise. You were just a mousy little thing.” [laughs] But it is kind of a surprise. And it’s like, to have this ability to participate and really maybe be helpful to other people — to do really meaningful work — it’s all just this kind of astonishment.

Ms. Tippett: Rebecca Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a regular writer for publications including The Guardian and The London Review of Books. Her books include A Paradise Built in Hell, Hope in the Dark, and a new collection of essays, The Mother of All Questions.

What comes after fossil fuels?

What comes after fossil fuels?

By Bill McKibben, in The New Yorker, March 11, 2020

The fossil-fuel industry is slowly dying. It’s not just because of the transitory effect of the coronavirus, which has temporarily cut demand; it’s secular, as the economists say. Justlast week, Bloomberg reported that even natural-gas utilities are feeling the scorn of investors, who want to put their money in renewable electricity. The key question, of course, is how slowly the industry is dying—we badly need to speed up the current trajectory to catch up with the physics of climate change.

But it’s not too early to start asking what the industry will leave behind, beyond a badly overheated planet. And one answer, apparently, is a huge number of holes in the ground, not to mention a huge number of holes in government budgets. It turns out that, in jurisdictions around the planet, oil and gas companies have been failing to reclaim, or even plug, old wells that are no longer producing in commercial quantities. These unfunded liabilities are truly enormous.

Take Alberta, Canada, for example: the Alberta Energy Regulator has publicly estimated that the province faces $18.5 billion in costs for oil and gas wells that need to be decommissioned. But the A.E.R.’s internal review shows that the estimated cost could be up to forty billion to seventy billion. It has a hundred and seven thousand wells that are depleted past the point of profitability. Another ninety-three thousand wells are inactive, and seventy-seven thousand have been plugged but are awaiting the more expensive part of cleaning up the site. Many of those are “orphaned”—the companies that owned them have gone bankrupt—and some, in addition to leaving scars in the landscape, are still leaking greenhouse gases, such as methane, into the atmosphere, making life hard for the farmers who must work around them. The Alberta authorities have on hand about two hundred and twenty-six million dollars “in security deposits to pay for cleanup if companies declare bankruptcy.”

The picture looks much the same around the world. The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based think tank, published a paper last month pointing out that “asset retirement obligations,” the term for what oil companies will have to pay to decommission their old wells, are significant, though hard to quantify, since “companies are not required to disclose the relevant information and rarely do.” But, in Europe, for instance, in 2006, these environmental liabilities amount to half of the companies’ reported debt obligations. The working assumption has always been that the costs would be paid by the proceeds from future operations: drill a new well, and part of the profit will go to pay for capping the last one. But that assumption no longer makes sense: since climate change is forcing us to keep oil and gas in the ground, the revenue stream for that cleanup is likely to disappear.

“The risk that the taxpayers will be left holding the bag is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore,” the report concludes. “Moreover, industry’s argument calls into question why you would allow the oil and gas activity in the first place, if the project cannot pay for its eventual retirement.” A good point, and one that will be a drag on the already lagging fossil-fuel sector, as investors begin to ask more probing questions.

Mark Olalde and Ryan Menezes, in the Los Angeles Times, provided a really powerful closeup of one city last week: Los Angeles, it turns out, has nearly a thousand abandoned wells. “If not plugged and cleaned up, many of these orphaned wells will continue to expose people to toxic gases, complicate redevelopment and pose rare but serious threats of explosions. If the state were to tackle the cleanup, it would cost tens of millions of dollars.” Oh, and the city’s fire department has just one full-time well inspector.

If there’s a bright spot in all of this, it’s that the need to clean up these wells could provide ongoing work for precisely the workers who drilled them, allowing them an easier transition to the future. Two Canadian activists—Regan Boychuk, a founder of Reclaim Alberta and the Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project, and Avi Lewis, the co-founder and strategic director of the Leap—outlined in the Toronto Star what they call an “epic opportunity.” A government “serious about sparking the next boom in the oil patch,” they write, would force the companies that have extracted hundreds of billions in profits from Canada’s prairies to use the revenues from their mature and declining wells to underwrite the cleanup, creating “decades of full employment” in Alberta. That would be the closest thing to a happy ending the oil industry can still provide the planet.

 Climate School

• An ominous new report helps us understand the basic math of climate change. Scientists who, for the past thirty years, have studied three hundred thousand trees in tropical rain forests, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Amazon, report that the trees’ ability to soak up carbon from the atmosphere is, apparently, flagging. “We’ve found that one of the most worrying impacts of climate change has already begun,” Simon Lewis, a professor in the school of geography at the University of Leeds, in England, and one of the senior authors of the research, told the Guardian. “This is decades ahead of even the most pessimistic climate models.”
  
  
• A report along the same lines but more hopeful: Can large-scale plantings of a South African shrub help soak up lots of carbon dioxide? “Because of spekboom’s remarkable growth rate, its rate of carbon capture can rival that of tropical forests,” a scientist who has studied the plant for years told the BBC.

Passing the Mic

This week, I interviewed Vann R. Newkirk, II, a staff writer at The Atlantic, about his new podcast series “Floodlines,” which débuts this week. It’s an eight-part look at the legacy of Hurricane Katrina, which means, of course, that it’s also a look at the moment when both climate change and inequality emerged as concerns for many Americans.

 

Katrina felt revelatory—about climate change but also about who counts and who doesn’t in our country. I think a fair number of Americans were shocked to discover that lots of their fellow-citizens didn’t have cars, so they couldn’t simply flee. Was it a significant moment in the wider discovery of inequality in America?

I think Katrina and the levees breaking were a moment comparable to, say, the Dust Bowl, in terms of reorienting people to the shape of inequality in America. Some of the critiques of white supremacy (and environmental racism) that we consider almost standard today were considered fringe or conspiratorial before Katrina. 

The United Nations estimates that we could see a billion climate refugees this century. Given the lessons of the Katrina diaspora, what should we be thinking about when we read numbers like that?

The lesson of Katrina is that we already are seeing mass movements of people within the United States at the leading edges of climate disasters. Hurricane Maria, in 2017, reiterated that point, and state leaders should already be planning for large, permanent population shifts—both due to sudden disasters and to long-term attrition. Lots of people will be rethinking what “home” means. But another thing that Katrina should teach us is that maybe it’s time to also rethink the “refugee” framework. The American obligation to victims of climate change shouldn’t be motivated solely by altruism or charity. Rather, those victims have a claim against the rest of us—against U.S. government policy, against those who might profit off their displacement, and against those of us who warm and degrade the world—that we are morally bound to settle. This was the case during Katrina, and it will be for every climate-linked catastrophe down the road. 

I’ve stood under that new levee wall in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward at commemorations of the disaster and felt a welter of different emotions, from sadness and anger at the history behind it to a fear that it was, at best, a stopgap against a still-rising tide. What do you feel when you’re there, and what do you think longtime residents of that neighborhood feel?

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year around the Lower Ninth Ward and with people who have roots there, and in my mind it’s become something like a Black Atlantis. The depths of pride and nostalgia people have for it feel, somehow, even more powerful than most folks’ memory of home. It’s a place defined by precariousness but also by the pride of building something of your own, for a community that hasn’t often been allowed to have things of their own. Standing by the wall, thinking about the power of their memory and the depths of loss, I’ve been overwhelmed at times.

Scoreboard

🔄It’s hard to call this a win or a loss, but it’s certainly wild: Saudi Arabia announced that it would open the spigots and cut its oil prices by nearly ten per cent. The news—part of a fight with the Russians for market share amid falling demand—led to the most dramatic single-day decline in world crude prices in at least three decades. For motorists, it may mean paying two dollars or less for a gallon of gas, but for people worried about the climate it cuts two ways. Cheap oil means we’ll use more: expect the already robust demand for S.U.V.s to continue. On the other hand, the lower price makes it hard for many producers to drill new wells—in particular, high-cost producers, such as those in Canada’s tar sands.

⬆️ The Ivies have been the last redoubt for the oil industry, as they fight against the divestment movement—but last week Brown University announced the league’s first total divestment from funds that focus on fossil fuels. “People know that this sector is dying . . . and it’s just not a good long-term investment,” Brown’s president, Christina Paxson, told the student newspaper. “It carries too much risk for the endowment.” The announcement was followed a few days later by a similar pledge from Wesleyan—but, whereas Brown is already in the process of selling ninety per cent of its stock, Wesleyan said that the process could take until 2030, drawing a mixed reaction from student activists who point out that the climate crisis is now.

⬆️ For those keeping track of efforts to stop the financing of fossil fuels, an increasingly common note was struck by the Swiss bank UBS, which said that it was joining other institutions no longer interested in financing thermal coal, tar sands, or Arctic offshore oil projects—notably Trump Administration plans to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. An increasingly fascinating question: Exactly who will be willing to underwrite drilling in what’s been called America’s Serengeti.

Warming Up

Two pieces of music I’ve had on repeat lately: Dreams to Be Born, by Rebecca Foon, and Legacies, by Jesse Paris Smith. Both are meditative, absorbing, masterly; and they come from a pair of musical activists whose Pathway to Paris concert series has turned into an adroit nonprofit that spurs worldwide climate action.

—Bill McKibben

On Being

The On Being Project is one of the few programs available online to which I regularly attend. (Five others are Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, Poetry Magazine, Orion Magazine, Yes! Magazine, Betsey Crawford's The Soul of the Earth; as well, of course, as the major sources of news and commentary: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian's US edition, and The New Yorker.

On Being's founder and skilled interviewer is Krista Tippett, author of an excellent book, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, Unlike standard descriptions of books on sites like Amazon, the paragraphs about Tippett's book are not only useful in themselves, but offer a useful introduction to the On Being program itself:

 

“The discourse of our common life inclines towards despair. In my field of journalism, where we presume to write the first draft of history, we summon our deepest critical capacities for investigating what is inadequate, corrupt, catastrophic, and failing. The ‘news’ is defined as the extraordinary events of the day, but it is most often translated as the extraordinarily terrible events of the day. And in an immersive 24/7 news cycle, we internalize the deluge of bad news as the norm—the real truth of who we are and what we’re up against as a species. But my work has shown me that spiritual geniuses of the everyday are everywhere. They are in the margins and do not have publicists. They are below the radar, which is broken.

"Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and National Humanities Medalist Krista Tippett has interviewed the most extraordinary voices examining the great questions of meaning for our time. The heart of her work on her national public radio program and podcast, On Being, has been to shine a light on people whose insights kindle in us a sense of wonder and courage. Scientists in a variety of fields; theologians from an array of faiths; poets, activists, and many others have all opened themselves up to Tippett's compassionate yet searching conversation.

"In Becoming Wise, Tippett distills the insights she has gleaned from this luminous conversation in its many dimensions into a coherent narrative journey, over time and from mind to mind. The book is a master class in living, curated by Tippett and accompanied by a delightfully ecumenical dream team of teaching faculty.

"The open questions and challenges of our time are intimate and civilizational all at once, Tippett says – definitions of when life begins and when death happens, of the meaning of community and family and identity, of our relationships to technology and through technology. The wisdom we seek emerges through the raw materials of the everyday. And the enduring question of what it means to be human has now become inextricable from the question of who we are to each other.

"This book offers a grounded and fiercely hopeful vision of humanity for this century – of personal growth but also renewed public life and human spiritual evolution. It insists on the possibility of a common life for this century marked by resilience and redemption, with beauty as a core moral value and civility and love as muscular practice. Krista Tippett's great gift, in her work and in Becoming Wise, is to avoid reductive simplifications but still find the golden threads that weave people and ideas together into a shimmering braid.

"One powerful common denominator of the lessons imparted to Tippett is the gift of presence, of the exhilaration of engagement with life for its own sake, not as a means to an end. But presence does not mean passivity or acceptance of the status quo. Indeed Tippett and her teachers are people whose work meets, and often drives, powerful forces of change alive in the world today. In the end, perhaps the greatest blessing conveyed by the lessons of spiritual genius Tippett harvests in Becoming Wise is the strength to meet the world where it really is, and then to make it better."

________________________

 

Here is a letter written and posted online in early 2019 by Krista Tippett, conveying the most recent developments in the On Being Project:

 

It’s been a year of expansion and deepening at The On Being Project. Our beautiful team has more than doubled in size to be of greater service in a tender and tumultuous moment in the life of the world. I’m delighted to announce that Lucas Johnson has joined us as the first executive director of the Civil Conversations Project. You may remember him from this conversation taped at the On Being Gathering — another milestone among many this past year.

And I’m beyond excited to announce the launch of a whole new gathering space and experience here at onbeing.org. Our website had become unwieldy under the weight of 15 years of content and wasn’t serving the ways we’ve heard you engage with and use our work — for personal reflection, for discussion in family and community, and for teaching and social repair. In over a year of intensive labor, full of the care and creativity of many, we fashioned a digital home that is newly beautiful and hospitable.

Transcripts are easier to find and read. Search is vastly improved. And we’ve created new features to meet the needs, thoughts, and suggestions we’ve heard across the years.

There are Starting Points — curated for the kind of day you may be having, for particular challenges or curiosities, or to introduce someone new to On Being. There are Libraries — our entire archive made accessible and welcoming by topic — for browsing and diving deep.

The Civil Conversations Project also now has a robust presence at the heart of our online home. The Grounding Virtues and the Better Conversations Guide are integrated throughout onbeing.org as they have become woven into the fabric of The On Being Project as a whole. Poetry, so foundational to our work and sensibility, also has its rightful place — present along just about every pathway.

As we’ve contemplated the purpose and shape of The On Being Project, we’ve defined our mission in this way:

Pursuing deep thinking and social courage, moral imagination and joy, to renew inner life, outer life, and life together

This is an aspiration we take on with a generational sense of time. Onbeing.org will be a primary place where we are actively watching, learning, adding, and evolving. And you may already have noticed a new interactive volume and vitality as well in various social media spaces, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In the discernment of the last year, we have decided to discontinue the On Being Blog and columnists in their original form, but the wonderful writing that graced our project in recent years is present throughout this new site, and we are actively exploring what to incubate next. The Pause newsletter, which has grown in leaps and bounds as a beloved Saturday morning ritual, will be a primary way to stay on top of new developments and experiments to come – including our ongoing ventures on the road, in the old-fashioned flesh and blood.

On Being has always grown and evolved through listening to our listeners and to the world as much as listening to our guests. This is more than ever before, and we are so honored by every voice and life that joins this adventure, even for an hour. I believe that the people and projects and energies alive in our community and its kindred places are nothing less than the generative narrative of our time. This is emerging right alongside the destructive narrative that gets all the attention, and we are committed to nourishing, emboldening, and accompanying it — that is to say, you.

With deep gratitude and, yes, love,

Krista

 

Figuring, by Maria Popova

Maria Popova, editor and author of a wonderfully capacious and thoughtful online journal called Brain Pickings, has just published a remarkable book, Figuring. Of the book, she writes,

"It only took twelve years of Brain Pickings and the most beautiful, difficult, disorienting experience of my personal life. Figuring explores the complexities, varieties, and contradictions of love, and the human search for truth, meaning, and transcendence, through the interwoven lives of several historical figures across four centuries."

 

Here is Maria Popova's prelude to Figuring:

 

 

"All of it — the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had, the shepherdess singing in the Rila mountains of my native Bulgaria and each one of her sheep, every hair on Chance’s velveteen dog ears and Marianne Moore’s red braid and the whiskers of Montaigne’s cat, every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda’s newborn son, every stone with which Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets before wading into the River Ouse to drown, every copper atom composing the disc that carried arias aboard the first human-made object to enter interstellar space and every oak splinter of the floor-boards onto which Beethoven collapsed in the fit of fury that cost him his hearing, the wetness of every tear that has ever been wept over a grave and the yellow of the beak of every raven that has ever watched the weepers, every cell in Galileo’s fleshy finger and every molecule of gas and dust that made the moons of Jupiter to which it pointed, the Dipper of freckles constellating the olive firmament of a certain forearm I love and every axonal flutter of the tenderness with which I love her, all the facts and figments by which we are perpetually figuring and reconfiguring reality — it all banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source, no louder than the opening note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, no larger than the dot levitating over the small i, the I lowered from the pedestal of ego.

"How can we know this and still succumb to the illusion of separateness, of otherness? This veneer must have been what the confluence of accidents and atoms known as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., saw through when he spoke of our 'inescapable network of mutuality,' what Walt Whitman punctured when he wrote that 'every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.'

"One autumn morning, as I read a dead poet’s letters in my friend Wendy’s backyard in San Francisco, I glimpse a fragment of that atomic mutuality. Midsentence, my peripheral vision — that glory of instinct honed by millennia of evolution — pulls me toward a miraculous sight: a small, shimmering red leaf twirling in midair. It seems for a moment to be dancing its final descent. But no — it remains suspended there, six feet above ground, orbiting an invisible center by an invisible force. For an instant I can see how such imperceptible causalities could drive the human mind to superstition, could impel medieval villagers to seek explanation in magic and witchcraft. But then I step closer and notice a fine spider’s web glistening in the air above the leaf, conspiring with gravity in this spinning miracle.

"Neither the spider has planned for the leaf nor the leaf for the spider — and yet there they are, an accidental pendulum propelled by the same forces that cradle the moons of Jupiter in orbit, animated into this ephemeral early-morning splendor by eternal cosmic laws impervious to beauty and indifferent to meaning, yet replete with both to the bewildered human consciousness beholding it.

"We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives. All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for our history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

"Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making. In the course of our figuring, orbits intersect, often unbeknownst to the bodies they carry — intersections mappable only from the distance of decades or centuries. Facts crosshatch with other facts to shade in the nuances of a larger truth — not relativism, no, but the mightiest realism we have. We slice through the simultaneity by being everything at once: our first names and our last names, our loneliness and our society, our bold ambition and our blind hope, our unrequited and part-requited loves. Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams. Lives interweave with other lives, and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life: What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love? Two Nobel Prizes don’t seem to recompense the melancholy radiating from every photograph of the woman in the black laboratory dress. Is success a guarantee of fulfillment, or merely a promise as precarious as a marital vow? How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?

"There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

"So much of the beauty, so much of what propels our pursuit of truth, stems from the invisible connections — between ideas, between disciplines, between the denizens of a particular time and a particular place, between the interior world of each pioneer and the mark they leave on the cave walls of culture, between faint figures who pass each other in the nocturne before the torchlight of a revolution lights the new day, with little more than a half-nod of kinship and a match to change hands."

 

The Spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt

This is a somewhat longer talk I first gave as the keynote address for a conference at The University of California at Berkeley on the subject of Women and The New Deal, and then, in a somewhat revised form, at The Redwoods in Mill Valley, California. Readers will see a little repetition of phrases and anecdotes included in the already posted talk on Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That was shortform, if you will. This is longform.

 

The Spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt

John Roosevelt Boettiger
Thursday, January 3, 2019

I’m inclined to identify my grandmother as among those William James called the “twice-born,” those who have experienced a renewal—a personal transformation, after enduring trauma and loss that could have buried the gift of a loving life but decidedly did not. In fact, the rebirthing that followed her trauma and loss drew her into an adulthood that nourished us all and led her to be one of the most well-known women of the 20th century. She was a great gift to me, and to so many others.

Like her other grandchildren, I knew my grandmother as Grandmère. (Thanks to her early caretakers, she was bilingual since childhood.) In my teens and 20s I often lived and traveled with her. We said goodbye the day before she died in November 1962. Eleanor Roosevelt was not only my beloved grandmother, but my first and best mentor. Her values did more to shape my own than those of any other person. I’m deeply grateful for her, for our time together.

She was a loving grandmother in my early years. She held my mother Anna’s hand when I was born. She joined us for many visits to our home on Mercer Island in Lake Washington, near Seattle. When my father—also John Boettiger—left for combat in World War II, I knew her when my mother and I—responding to my grandfather’s call—came east to live in the White House for the duration of the war.

When I think of the essence of Eleanor Roosevelt’s spirit, the word that first comes to mind is a plain one. Its value is that it’s the word she used most commonly to describe herself and her care for others’ lives. Most of all she wanted to be useful.

When using that simple word to assess herself and her service on others’ behalf, she held herself to a high bar, and served those she loved, those for whom she worked untiringly in the wider world—the poor, those (in her husband’s words) “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” those who suffered from racism and imprisonment, even death by lynching, as well as ordinary folks in search of a viable, meaningful life—she worked for all of those, with an energy that exhausted and inspired others of us who were a lot younger than she.

I remember words spoken in eulogy about her by one of those she knew and admired as he knew and admired her: Adlai Stevenson. As our ambassador to the United Nations he spoke to the General Assembly two days after she died and a few days later at a memorial service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. “Yesterday,” Stevenson told the General Assembly, “I said that I had lost more than a friend —I had lost an inspiration: for she would rather light candles than curse the darkness and her glow has warmed the world. My country mourns; and I know that all in this Assembly mourn with us.”

The United Nations itself, Stevenson added, “is in no small way a memorial to her and her aspirations. To it, she gave the last 15 years of her restless spirit…,” her labors, her love, her ideals—as he said, “ideals that made her, only weeks after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, put aside all thoughts of peace and quiet after the tumult of their lives to serve as one of this nation’s delegates [to the UN]…Her duty then as always, was to the living, the world, to peace.” It was her leadership, Stevenson said, that helped give the world “after years of painstaking and patient travail one of the most noble documents of humankind, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

I remember, too, a serendipitous occasion in 1958, when I was living with her at Val-Kill, her home in Hyde Park, browsing in her library. I came across a biography entitled Adlai Stevenson: Conscience in Politics. Opening it, I found an inscription: “To Eleanor Roosevelt, my conscience,” (signed ) Adlai Stevenson.

One of a few aspects of my grandmother’s character inadequately recognized by her biographers was her sense of humor. She comes across in too many accounts as knowing and wise but sober. No one who heard her wonderful narration of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” would believe that. Nor anyone who sat around the table at a rambunctious family dinner at her home. She always led the toasts, the first being “To the president of the United States” to which she often enough added, “It’s to the office we raise our glasses, not necessarily to the present incumbent.”

In order to deepen my account of Grandmère’s spirit, I need to share with you a particular story that cuts close to home for me. My father returned from the war with battle fatigue, what we now know as PTSD, compounding a lifetime of susceptibility to depression. Despite my mother’s entreaties, he would not seek treatment. (In those days there was little effective treatment to be had). We had moved to the desert outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, where my parents were determined to sink all their resources into a brave but ill-starred effort to establish a liberal Democratic daily newspaper, The Arizona Times, which came, alas all too briefly, to be.

In all senses of the term—financial, marital, psychological—the costs were too high. My parents’ marriage broke under the stress. My mother Anna’s greater resilience served her well, literally re-grounding us in Los Angeles. My father hadn’t her inner resourcefulness. He struggled with his pain for two years without finding a way through it, and in despair he took his own life. He was fifty. I was eleven.

That is background. Now the foreground. I lived with my grandmother on vacations during my undergraduate years at Amherst College. One day I’d drafted a paper about the United Nations. Knowing her deep knowledge of the UN, before departing for work that morning I gave her the draft, asking her, if she had time, to take a look at it and let me know her thoughts when I returned home that evening.

It wasn’t until 1 or 2 in the morning that I returned home. I expected to find her asleep. But she was in her study, lit only by a gooseneck lamp over her desk and a low fire in the grate. She was signing and adding brief handwritten notes to letters she had dictated earlier in the day, and listening to Gregorian chants on the phonograph. I asked her if she’d had time to read my draft, and her reply touched a deep and tender place in me that she had the remarkable insight and love to understand. She said, “I did, and what struck me most was how your writing is like that of your father.” I didn’t know how to reply. No one had spoken to me about him in the eight years since his death.

How could she possibly know—I hardly did myself—how my hunger for him remained. So she filled my silence. “Come sit by the fire with me and I’ll tell you about him”: how much she had loved him, admired his writing, how deeply she wished she could have done more to save my parents’ marriage and prevent his suicide.

I realized later that Grandmère and I had experienced, at the same age—she just before she was ten, I at eleven—the loss of a treasured, anguished,
self-destructive father.

Her mother, though, was something else, if hardly more accessible. She remembered Anna Hall Roosevelt as extraordinarily beautiful, but reserved,
stern, lacking empathy and understanding, minimal in performing the tasks of mothering, disappointed in her daughter’s shyness and solemnity. “I can remember standing in the door,” Grandmère wrote, “very often with my finger in my mouth—which was, of course, forbidden—and I can see the look in [my mother’s] eyes and hear the tone of her voice as she said: ‘Come in Granny.’ If a visitor was there she might turn and say: ‘She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned, that we always call her Granny. I wanted to sink through the floor in shame…” Anna Hall died of diphtheria at age 29 when her daughter Eleanor was eight.

Given her childhood—her father Elliott’s alcoholism, his addiction to opium, many long absences from home in fruitless searches for cure, and his own semi-suicidal death at age 34; given her mother’s disregard; and the strictures imposed by her stern grandmother Hall, to whom she was entrusted after her mother’s death, it’s not surprising that mothering did not come easily to Eleanor Roosevelt, especially when her children were young. She felt anxious responsibility: helplessness, dependency. She wrote later, “I do not think that I am a natural born mother… If I ever wanted to mother anyone, it was my father.”

I think the point I want most to convey is that given those emotional absences and losses of Grandmère’s childhood, it’s all the more remarkable that she developed such a vivid capacity for sustained, close love and friendship as she grew through her adult life. I think of her deep friendships with Lorena Hickock, whom we all knew as “Hick”; with Joe Lash, who would become her first biographer; and later with her physician and confidant David Gurewitsch, as well as her many longtime friends like Esther Lape, Molly Dewson, Isabella Greenway, Justine Wise Polier, Lady Reading in England.

I won’t try to summarize this evening the most important and complex relationship in her adult life, with her husband Franklin, but there’s no doubt that it was a profound and knowing if sometimes stressful alliance.

Why stressful? Well, she was a compassionate and canny political and social activist. She understood him, supported him, sought his support, and knew she wasn’t burdened with the responsibilities and limits of the presidency. They shared the same humane liberal vision for the country and the world. If she sometimes provoked impatience (“Dear God,” [my grandfather is said to have said] “make Eleanor slow down.”), she always consulted him, and often enough responded to his requests and needs in ways he could not or would not. I think of her brilliant address to the 1940 Democratic party convention in Chicago, and her strong support for the nascent civil rights movement. There was a basket in his bedroom reserved for appeals and information from her, a basket that was seldom empty. On balance, I’d say that she, more than any other of his close advisors, enriched his conduct of the presidency.
____________________

Having spoken of the absences of her childhood, I want to circle back for a moment to the gifts of those early years that nourished her growth into the woman she became. However frequent and long her father’s absences, their love for each other was real, and fueled by her imagination. His presences, however infrequent and undependable, stayed in her heart.

On another occasion, reflecting upon her childhood, she offered a revealing comment about what she felt a strength of her adult years:
“Thanks to my childhood, I was very disciplined by the time I grew up. I remember the method by which a nurse taught me to sew, when I was only six. After I had darned a sock, she would take the scissors and cut out all I had done, telling me to try again. This was very discouraging, but it was good training…. When people have asked how I was able to get through some of the very bad periods in my later life, I have been able to tell them honestly that because of all this early discipline I inevitably grew into a really tough person.”

“A really tough person.” It was true in the sense that she intended: able to withstand suffering, hardship or difficulty; strong, tenacious, responding vigorously to challenges. Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote of it truly, “For Roosevelt, being a lady and being tough was no contradiction in terms, and her explicit fusing of the two turned older understandings inside out.”

Then, for three years, there was Allenswood, probably the greatest early gift to her growth into the woman she became. When she was turning fifteen, Grandmother Hall sent her to an English boarding school headed by a remarkable Frenchwoman, Marie Souvestre. Her time at Allenswood, and particularly her vivid relationship with Marie Souvestre, nourished a vitality and independence of mind, an inclination to know and speak the truth, and a new confidence in relationships with her peers. Most notably, Souvestre also stimulated her social and political consciousness, reinforcing the central guiding principle with which I began: to be useful to others.

I think that’s the best way to understand the thoughtful recollection of her friend Isabella Greenway, who wrote: “Even at that age life had, through her orphanage, touched her and made its mark in a certain aloofness from the careless ways of youth. The world had come to her as a field of responsibility rather than as a playground.”

Finally, there is a second important element in Eleanor Roosevelt’s life and spirit that has too often been overlooked by her biographers. I mean her Christian faith and her Christian practice. It may have been the only subject on which she and Mlle. Souvestre disagreed. In a conversation with her friend William Turner Levy about Souvestre, my grandmother said, “She simply refused to acknowledge that she was following standards she hadn’t invented. She was following love, as we all must, and that is to follow God.”

She abandoned the severe religiosity of her grandmother Hall, but throughout her whole life she kept her habits of regular evening prayer at her bedside, and of church attendance. In one of her books, The Moral Basis of Democracy, she wrote, “We do not begin to approach a solution of our problems until we acknowledge the fact that they are spiritual. Even more than other forms of government, she added, democracy requires “a spiritual, moral awakening…We may belong to any religion or none, but we must acknowledge that the life of Christ was based on principles which are necessary to the development of a democratic state.”

She was distressed that many Americans [these are her words] “who call themselves Catholic, Protestant or Jew, behave as though religion were something shut up in one compartment of their lives. It seems to have no effect on their relationship to their surroundings and activities.” When I was living with her in Hyde Park, I remember often driving her to St. James Episcopal Church, at first, I confess, because no one who was visiting her was interested in going, and she was sometimes, let’s say, an inattentive driver.

I was always moved that she kept by her bedside at Val-Kill a framed copy of a prayer attributed to St. Francis that says a great deal about her spirit. Listen to the choice in the pairs of words, for they describe the character and radiance of her spiritual practice and its centrality in her private and public life:

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is discord, union;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
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;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Grandmère has been gone now for more than half a century. I’m more deeply knowing and grateful today than I was as a teenager for her presence in my life. I have in my home a small replica of a statue by the sculptor Penelope Jencks, a lovely statue and likeness whose life-size original stands on the southern tip of Riverside Park at 72nd Street in New York City. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll see it, linger with it a while. I have a photo of that statue that I trust fits the theme of this evening. A couple of years ago, some enterprising soul—a woman, I know—climbed the statue and added a pink knitted cap. She would have been very pleased and would have joined in your laughter.

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

I gave this talk to the United Nations Association of San Francisco on Human Rights Day, December 10, 2018.

 

Remembering Eleanor Roosevelt
and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

John Roosevelt Boettiger
San Francisco, December 10, 2018

 

Good afternoon. Thank you for the privilege of talking with you about a subject that is simultaneously very dear to my heart and also a little daunting. That’s always been so, as long as I can remember, not only on special occasions like today’s celebration. Junior high and high school, college and graduate school years; whenever. Anticipating a visit from my grandmother subtly changed the normal emotional tones of my family. We were excited but—what? — a bit less relaxed? a tad anxious? She was “Mummy” to my mother, “Mother” or “LL” to my father (the initials stood for “Lovely Lady,” dreamed up by a small group of admiring newspaper reporters, including my father, well before my parents had met), and she was “Grandmère” to us kids, my sister, my brother and me. But we all knew that she was also Eleanor Roosevelt. Thus the frisson, the small undercurrent of anxiety, perhaps that she would hold us as she held herself, to a high bar….Thankfully that frisson dissipated with the hugs of greeting.

My grandmother has been gone now for over half a century. I’m more deeply knowing and just as grateful today as I was as a child for her presence in my life. I lived and traveled with her in the still formative years of my late teens and early twenties. She was my loving, compassionate and indefatigable Grandmère. She was bilingual virtually from her first words. She was Grandmère to my sister and brother when she held my mother’s hand during my birth in March 1939. About 20 years later she and I looked at each other across the boardroom table of the American Association for the United Nations in New York. Time and again over those years she taught me, not so much with words as by example, her devotion to peace, reconciliation and love, in our homes, with our families and friends, our churches and synagogues, communities of fellowship, our relations with other nations, and, of course, the UN. She has been and remains, far and away, my first and best mentor. I had to remind you, my sister said, she wasn’t a saint. Like the rest of us, she had her share of impatience, anger, dismay, suffering, loss—more than her share of loss, I say.

Remembering the two of us sitting across from each other at the AAUN’s boardroom table, I also recall another of her practices for which I’ve been grateful. It was one of the secret sources of her virtually superhuman energy: her mastery of the short and restorative power nap. I can still see her in my mind’s eye. She would nod her head slightly and close her eyes as if she were thinking carefully about the agenda being discussed. A minute or two later, she would raise her head. To the other board members at that table, she never missed a beat. I don’t think anyone but me knew she was briefly, restoratively and thoroughly asleep.

During the years of World War II, when I was very young and my father had left for combat, my grandfather Franklin — PaPa, as I knew him — invited my mother and me to leave our home near Seattle and come to live in The White House. Those White House years were extraordinary personally, but my memories of FDR at that time were more vivid than those of Grandmère; I imagine because she was so often traveling, alone and with friends, in the States and visiting our troops abroad. She was always learning, following her purposes as well as those of her husband, as “his eyes and ears.” Some of you may remember a New Yorker cartoon from that time: two coal-grimed miners deep underground, one looking up, startled, and saying to the other, “My gosh, it’s Mrs. Roosevelt!”

My time living and traveling with her more consciously and intimately was later, when naturally I came to share her devotion to the United Nations. I sat at that AAUN boardroom table with her because there was a seat on the board for one student, the president of the Collegiate Council for the United Nations. So while I was too young to accompany her during the years of crafting the Declaration we celebrate today, I’ve always felt her presence palpably on the 10th of December each year, the anniversary of that day in 1948 when she presented the Declaration to the General Assembly; and the entire Assembly, for its first and perhaps still its only time, stood as one to applaud: applaud the Declaration, which was adopted without a single dissenting vote, and applaud her and the fruits of her labor.

And labor it was. She said of that work at the time, "I drive hard, and when I get home, I will be tired! The men on the Commission will be also!" She was appointed to the US delegation to the United Nations by President Truman in 1945. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson said to the General Assembly two days after she died in 1962, “I have lost more than a friend; I have lost an inspiration…The United Nations itself is in no small way a memorial to her and her aspirations. To it, she gave the last fifteen years of her restless spirit…,” her labors, her love, her ideals—“ideals that made her,” he said, “only weeks after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, put aside all thoughts of peace and quiet after the tumult of their lives to serve as one of this nation’s delegates [to the UN]…Her duty then as always,” said Stevenson, “was to the living, the world, to peace.” It was her leadership, he added, that helped give the world “after years of painstaking and patient travail one of the most noble documents of humankind, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

She soon dispatched the skepticism and won the admiration of the men who were her fellow American delegates. So it was natural, to them and to the representatives of other countries, that early in 1947 she was elected to chair the commission that worked to give birth to what I’ve come to think of as a humane cross-cultural embodiment of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature,” and the living circumstances that allow those angels to flourish. In her own estimation and in the historical record, the Declaration was her greatest single achievement. Its accomplishment also demonstrated and required her supple political savvy, especially in her skillful, determined negotiations with Andrey Vyshinsky and Alexei Pavlov of the Soviet Union. She made ingenious alliance with the able Canadian representative John Humphrey, the Lebanese philosopher turned master diplomat Charles Malik, and especially the legal genius and yet-to-be Nobel Peace Prize winner René Cassin of France. It was Cassin’s contribution, it’s been said, that “transformed what might have been a list or ‘bill’ of rights into ‘a geodesic dome of interlocking principles.’”

She knew, of course, that the Declaration was aspirational, a source of guidance intended to clarify the character of the human adventure and the crafts of government at their best. The covenants that would have given it more legal clout died on a vine not yet dug deeply enough into our humus, or human soil. That said, she was as devoted to the completion of the Declaration as to anything in her lifetime. She believed it set a standard to assess our accomplishments as individuals, families, villages and cities, businesses and nations.

In her address to the General Assembly exactly 70 years ago today she said, "We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This declaration may well become the international Magna Carta for all men, [women and children] everywhere.”

But she also wisely, realistically, said that documents expressing ideals “carry no weight unless the people know them, unless the people understand them, unless the people demand that they be lived.” [italics added].

So I think the most revealing, deeply felt, enduring and well-known remark she made about human rights was this: "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 person; 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 concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."

Hers was an inspired, I think deeply grounded, blend of contemplative and active living. I treasure her wisdom and courage, her humor, her accomplishments, her truth-telling, and my memories.