Stepping back for the big picture

I have to say that I very much admire the efforts of General David Petraeus in his capacity as Commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq. He is one of the more thoughtful people to have at that command and one of the best prepared, intellectually, to handle that job.



There is a part of me that envies his willingness and capacity to focus on the smaller picture of achieving success, in the form of sustainable Iraqi-led security amidst the violence that plagues that situation, before stepping back for the big picture.

I am a consonant big picture thinker. It is my biggest strength, I think. It is also a tendency that has got me in much trouble, often.

I am not someone who easily walks away from a situation and says, "It's not my problem," or "It's not my job." It's just not in me. In no job or responsibility I have had in a very long time have I ever been able to shirk an ultimate sense of responsibility. I have watched many friends and colleagues do it. I have had many bosses who do it. The vast majority, by far, in both categories. I have watched many politicians, journalists, academics, activists and various public servants and observers do it. Probably the vast majority in that category, as well, in the bigger picture.

But I've just never been able or willing to think that way. I take responsibility for all of the most serious responsibilities that we and I face very, very seriously. I just don't think I'm seriously capable of anything else in my life, at this point.

Maybe that's a mistake. It's definitely unconventional, I know. But I do think we'd be better off if more people reasoned and thought like this rather than less.

In the last 3-6 years of my life, for the first time in my life, I've started to pull back, some, in my heart. At least, I've been more unsure of this commitment than at any point in my life.

The world has just gotten meaner in that time. We've rationalized our worst instincts. And, worst of all, some have had the audacity to call it "progressive."

But progress can't happen when we rationalize our worst instincts.

Progress is only what happens when we embrace our best instincts, and take responsibility for our worst instincts.

Everything else is bullshit and a lie. And it doesn't matter how many times we tell a lie. It never becomes true with repetition.

Hitler had to learn that lesson the hard way. Stalin did as well. Every most power-obsessed leader and follower in the world has had to learn that difficult and destructive lesson the hard way.

Castro believes he has escaped that lie. As does Kim Jong Il. As does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As does Hu Jintao. As does Robert Mugabe. As does Myanmar's military leader Senior General Than Shwe. As does Sudanese President Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir. As does Ismail Haniyeh. As does Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. As does every dictator, terrorist, and thug who has ever walked the earth.

None of them have. None of them will.

Progress is not something we can thugishly impose on one another. Progress, as David Petraeus' career illustrates, is something that can only occur patiently, honestly, and with more decency and good will, over time.

Many have tried to define progress as the retreat of those who they engage in political warfare with and their ability to win ground for their causes, by hard or soft means, as Joseph Nye might put what he says now of soft power, in my correspondence with him, as not a more liberal commitment to the use of power - a commitment more consistent with our liberal and democratic values - but merely a social scientific term for less aggressive forms of manipulation and power.

But this is not only a dishonest view of progress and policy, a view that could fit the objectives of groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Nazis, and the Communists, as much as genuinely liberal and democratic progressive forces. It is a foolish notion of power and politics, which assumes that retreats signal final losses that they do not, in fact, signify.

Progress happens despite such setbacks, always, to anyone doing an honest reading of liberal democratic history. And no effort to rationalize such setbacks as actual progress have either made them so or convinced the vast majorities of liberal democratic peoples that they are, in fact, so, over the long term.

If you doubt that, I suggest you spend a small portion of your time studying Nazi or Soviet history, both of which were premised upon ideologies of progress, both of which convinced many people that such a premise was true, and both of which failed to stand the test of time that a more honest accounting would provide, over time.

Sometimes I wish I could just focus on the small picture, so that I could avoid the trouble that challenging sacrosanct notions of the big picture often creates for me. It would make my life easier, perhaps.

But it wouldn't be honest. And what I have to offer is too important to pull back from it, now, I think.

But it would nice. To just be a normal person who takes what life gives me, more, rather than someone wanting so much more from life.

This must have been how Hobbes felt. He was just trying to develop an idea of governance that would transcend the chaos created by power-hungry partisans that plagued his time. That is my same concern.

Though, knowing how few people actually know who Thomas Hobbes or Baron de Montesquieu or John Locke or even John Stuart Mill is, it is tempting to want to abandon it all and pursue something a little more lucrative and popular and less challenging and controversial.

But without challenge and controversy, and all of the serious disincentives to this work, there never can be real progress.

Everything else is a lie, at worst, and a half-truth, at best.

I want something better. For my kids and future generations. And for me.

And that is worth stepping back for.

Joseph Merrick, and what strength and courage looks like

If you have not seen The Elephant Man, before, I highly recommend it. It's David Lynch's and John Hurt's strongest film, I think.

I'm watching it, right now. It's the first movie I remember really making me sob as a kid. It's a very beautiful film.

"I am not an animal! I am a human being! I...am...a man!"

I cry harder, today, than I did then. It's a good sign for my humanity, I think.

Jospeh Merrick, referred to as John, in the movie and by others, because of a mistake in the book by Sir Frederick Treves, is what true strength, courage and dignity look like. I can't imagine living through the numerous cruelties and indignities he experienced and maintaining his gentleness of spirit.

It's more strength than I have ever known, that is for sure.

Too often humanity confuses cruelty, aggression, and power with strength. At times aggression and power are needed. But their abuse and use when they cause unnecessary hurt and tragedy is cruelty. Their rationalization, as Lord Acton wisely observed, has been the bane of human civilization. And the cruelty that is the fact of their abuse is one quality of the human condition that needs no excuse. As someone who has known and been responsible for cruelty, as much as aggression and power, I can say that with confidence.

Joseph Merrick reminds us what genuine strength and dignity really look like.



As John Hurt says in the special features, "Well, I would say that if you can manage to get to the end of The Elephant Man without being moved, I don't think that you'd be someone I'd want to know."

I'd want to know you. But I'm not sure I could respect anyone who took that attitude.

John Merrick took his life. It is an unfortunate tragedy for me. I wish I could say that I would have more strength in the face of the challenges he faced. I hope I would. But the strength it took him to face a life of such unparalleled cruelty and infringements on his dignity is ultimately unknowable to me.

Joseph Merrick's autobiography ends with this poem by Isaac Watts.

Were I so tall to reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with my span,
I must be measured by my soul,
The mind's the standard of the man.

I am blessed for having known something of him.

Our inadequacies and mine

I just had an email exchange, in the last few days, with one of my oldest and best friends, about Jesse Helms.

My friend and I were college roommates, student and coach on our college debate team (Carson was the strongest debate coach I ever had, by far), fellowtraveling liberals, and good friends.

We both came from a ideological background of young liberals who had, generally, grown up hating Jesse Helms for his unfailing bigotry, intolerance, and mean-spiritedness. Amongst liberals, Jesse Helms was everything that fueled liberal self-righteousness. He was everything that liberals hated amongst what they thought was common to conservatives, without them acknowledging it. He was stupid, base, narrow-minded, and nasty. And his polarizing attitudes and politics earned him the derision of liberals. And I was writing a friend who could share in my revulsion for this man and his legacy.

I still believe those things are true. Jesse got better by the end. He embraced more compassion with his advocacy of tripling the American foreign aid budget for addressing the crisis of AIDS in Africa. He never apologized publicly, that I heard, or took any real responsibility for his racism and homophobia. But he did move away from his racism, at least, hiring none other than James Meredith, the first black student accepted to the University of Mississippi, and I hope his repulsion for homosexuality and homosexuals. And he showed real compassion for the millions suffering with AIDS, disease, and poverty in Africa and much of the world.

More importantly, Jesse had many good qualities, all along, that liberals, like me, overlooked in their own revulsion for his hateful and small-minded attitudes.

Jesse Helms took American freedom, sovereignty and his opposition to the totalitarian Soviet dictatorship seriously. His advocacy of the cause of Soviet dissident, Miroslav Medvid, who was disgracefully returned to Soviet hands by President Ronald Reagan days before a American-Soviet summit, helped make far less likely that Medvid would face KGB retribution. Helms was a public and needed critic of the United Nations, both of its flaws and of real and potential incursions on American sovereignty and self-determination.

Helms took many stands that I agree with, today, generally for reasons very different than the Senator. I share his concerns about forced busing and forms of integration that attempted to force racist whites in the South, and racist blacks, for that matter, to overcome their racism, a task that force could not possibly accomplish. I also share his skepticism of government taking on unsustainable commitments to the welfare of Americans and people around the world that I think are better and would be more generously funded by private and voluntary donors, long term.

Whereas Jesse Helms often seemed to oppose such measures out of sympathy with the racism and small-heartedness of too many of his fellow North Carolinans and Americans, sentiments that, his apologists' protestations to the contrary, I believe he often shared, I oppose such measures based on what I think is a more realistic assessment of what people are and will be willing to do in changing attitudes in more compassionate and generous directions, to genuinely look out for the interests of their fellow Americans and human beings, in the most sustainable way possible, voluntarily and of their own free will, and to do so in the most honest, proactive, diverse, caring, generous, successful, and responsible ways possible.

So Jesse and I differ in some pretty substantial ways. Where much of Jesse's worldview was animated by his bitterness, pettiness, and opposition to those many things in the world he hated, I am primarily driven by my love for humanity and others and my genuine concern for their welfare and policies most likely to care for their welfare. I do think that is the most real difference between Jesse Helms and, I hope, many of his fellow Americans and citizens of the world, and much of the reason why I was offended by the authority he wielded in one of the most powerful representative bodies in the world.

Having said all that, I saw something else, these past few days.

I saw one of the clearest examples of the aphorism that I have worked to live by in my life probably more than any other.

It was an aphorism by a common hero of Jesse Helms' and mine. It was a great man who lived thousands of years ago who was persecuted and murdered for his commitment to his fellow men and women. And he had one of the most astute and powerful observations of the human condition of any I have known.

Jesus of Nazareth, in the years previous to 26-36 A.D./C.E., made what I regard as one of the most notable comments on the human condition of any I have ever heard. There are many variations on it. But the essence, as found in the King James biblical version, is this:

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

I've always said that Jesus' question was better aphorism than approbation. It's a better straightfoward observation of human nature than something to chastise our fellow human beings with. And I very much doubt that Jesus meant it as a chastisement, given that a genuine commitment to not passing judgment was a fundamental commitment of his life and teachings.

I am a soft atheist (I attend the Christian church I attended as a child, Unity Church, and find more in common with Christian believers than I find difference) and was a Christian youth leader as a young man. I am a spiritual ecumenical and a political indepenent, today. I am atheist as a technical matter; I don't believe there is enough evidence to warrant the existence of a supernatural being that runs the affairs of humanity. I have no particular stake in the legacy of Jesus of Nazareth as messiah, as the son of God, as a great leader, as a great man, or anything of the kind.

I just believe that he was a great man. And that this teaching he had to offer, along with his commitment to love, compassion, forgiveness and other central virtues of the human condition, are some of the most important and too often denigrated virtues that humanity has to offer.

It is a central commitment of my life to treat others as I would want to be treated. To love others as I would want to be loved.

And I realized over the course of the last few days that this has been a serious failing of mine, a beam that has sat in my eye for most of my life, while I concentrated on the splinters in the eye of Senator Helms.

Jesse Helms had ugliness to be repulsed by, that is for sure.

But that is the whole point of Jesus' teaching.

The bitterness, pettiness, and ugliness of others does not justify our own.

And I have been justifying my own bitterness, pettiness, and ugliness toward Jesse Helms my whole life in the name of pointing to the same in Jesse.

I am embarrassed by this blindspot. Not because I haven't experienced it before. I have experienced it a million times, before, of course. I am embarrassed because it was the very same blindspot that I so abhorred in Jesse as a young man.



And the truth was that I was being harsh with Jesse in the very same way that I felt he was harsh with the world.

And I am embarrassed that it took Jesse's death for me to see that.



It's one of the wisest observations about human nature that I have ever known:

We are more likely to see see the splinter in our neighbor's eye than the beam in our own. We are more likely to see the faults in others than the faults in ourselves. And we are likely to use others' shortcomings to rationalize our own. It is one of the wisest observations about politics, nevertheless people. And it is true of me as much as anyone else.

I'm sorry, Jesse. I'm sorry all I could see was your faults and not my own frailties. And, worse, that I used your weakneses to excuse my own.

Godspeed, Senator Helms. Rest in peace, Jesse.