"Morality
Without Apology: Reclaiming Hubert Humphrey's America"
Diana
Chapman Walsh
Rothenberger
Lecture
University
of Minnesota
September
9, 2012
The
invitation to present this lecture was irresistible on several counts. First,
the purpose of the series has great salience in the present moment -- to
consider the kind of leadership we need, across society generally and, in
particular, at this time of great uncertainty, throughout the health care
system. Second, one couldn’t help but be impressed by the lineage of the
lectureship -- the very distinguished roster of previous speakers. It’s an
honor to join their company. Third, the linkage of the lecture series to the
“emerging physician leaders” program roots the occasion in the aspirations of
real leaders taking on real problems. Fourth, the warmth of the invitation was
another distinct draw -- from Dr. Rothenberger the inspiration for the lecture
series and his colleagues. And the ultimate magnet -- as is so often true --
was the pull of friendship. In my case the Goldberg family, and especially my
dear friend, Luella Gross Goldberg.
The
invitation presented challenges as well. My area of deep expertise and personal
experience -- the ground on which I have stood (and from which I have led) for
the past 20 years -- has been higher education far more than health care. I was
a scholar of health care policy in my early career, and -- now -- in a
distinctly different role, have after a long hiatus returned to that field as a
member of national governing and advisory boards (as you’ve heard). But
bringing the two worlds together in a way that might have currency for you
required some mental gyrations on my part through the summer. Luckily I found
them enjoyable. Now we can all hope that you will too.
I
begin by taking my inspiration for the title
of this talk from my colleague and friend, Donald Berwick. It was he who
recruited me, five years ago, to the governing board of the Institute for
Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the organization he co-founded and led for over
20 years. As you may know, Don returned
to Boston in early December after 16 months of service running the Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services, CMS.
He held a recess appointment that was never renewed
because it became a lightning rod in the fight over the act of congress that,
despite its complexity and flaws, finally “erases the major injustices that
[have] disgraced American medicine” and satisfies “a fundamental requirement of
political decency that every other mature democracy .. met long ago.” That’s a
quote, an assessment of the Affordable Care Act by legal scholar, Ronald
Dworkin. Don Berwick calls it, simply, “a majestic law.”
Always a riveting orator, Don brought back from the
nation’s capital a voice that is carrying greater urgency and moral heft since
he left. It is the voice, as he has said, of morality ... without apology. My
basic thesis today is that more of us need to be finding our own words -- and
ways -- to carry our versions of Don’s message ...that more of us -- indeed all
of us, no matter what roles we are playing in organizations, places of work,
communities and the civic sphere -- need to be thinking of ourselves as
leaders, and as leaders of a particular sort, conscious of opportunities to
speak up for those things we most value in the worlds we inhabit, committed to
creating venues in which others can find and speak their truths, can seek
deeper understanding and forge coalitions to work for the common good.
I want to ask whether we can be less coy about engaging
those around us in thinking -- with us -- about who we are and want to be as
Americans, about what we believe makes our lives worth living, what we can do
to secure a future worth having, for ourselves, our kids, our grandkids ... my
three-year old grandson, Sean.
For I worry -- with many others -- that the foundations
of our democracy are being eroded by our growing unwillingness to examine “in
the public square” the moral and spiritual convictions that are being twisted
in the endless spin machines and then lost in choices being made by default,
without the care they warrant.
And that takes us back to Don.Just days after he left
Washington, last December, Don galvanized an audience of several thousand
health care providers at IHI’s annual forum. He titled that talk “The Moral
Test,” and it’s available on-line.The following May, he addressed Harvard’s
physicians and dentists as they received their degrees in a talk entitled “To
Isaiah,” which appeared in JAMA on June 27. You may have read it.
What caught my eye
for this encounter with you was that on both occasions Don quoted the late
Hubert Humphrey -- the legendary public servant of your city, your state, your
university, our nation -- in words inscribed in the entrance to the
headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services that bears the
Senator’s name.
“The moral test of government,” Humphrey said on the occasion of
the building’s dedication, “is how it treats people in the dawn of life (the
children), in the twilight of life (the aged), and in the shadows of life (the
sick, the needy, and the handicapped.)”
Don’s Washington experience has forged him into an even
stronger prophet than he has long been on behalf of quality health care,
leading IHI in its pursuit of a
“never-ending campaign to improve health and health care worldwide, to improve
the lives of patients, the health of communities, and the joy of the health
care workforce, and reduce health care costs.”
That’s an ambitious mission, being stewarded, ably, since Don’s
departure, by Maureen Bisignano, his long-time co-leader and, now, successor.
In his new role, Don is asking all of us -- “We the
People” -- to find the moral courage, the wisdom and the compassion to face up
to Hubert Humphrey’s test -- a moral test, he says, not only of our government,
but also of our society, our country, and of your professions -- many of you --
the healing professions and those that surround and support them.
For if you cure the patient’s leukemia, as Don did
Isaiah’s, only to watch him die violently of a disease Don named
“hopelessness,” have you met your obligations as healers? Have we passed the
most basic test of what it should mean to be a United States citizen? Dr.
Berwick warned the Harvard graduates that the answer is no:
“Isaiah's life and death testify to a further duty, one more
subtle—but no less important ... It is to cure, not only the killer leukemia;
it is to cure the killer injustice.”
We’ve learned a lot about leukemia -- not enough to be
sure, but enough to accord it a hopeful place in the chronicle of modern
medicine’s epic struggle against “the emperor of all maladies.” At the Broad
Institute Eric Lander occasionally reviews with the board an elaborate “cancer
map” illustrating both how far we have come in the decade since sequencing the
human genome and how far we still have to travel. We’ve learned what we need to
do, Eric says; what remains is to get on with it.
What have we learned about injustice?
One thing we do know is that injustice breeds inequality
(and vice versa) and that inequality is an independent cause of illness and
death, other things being equal. Across time and space, and along the life
span, a person’s position in a socioeconomic hierarchy affects her health and
longevity. In Aaron Antonovsky’s unforgettable words -- and his metaphor from
the Titanic -- “Death is the final lot of all living beings but the age at
which one dies is related to one’s class.”
We have a substantial literature on health inequalities,
on poverty and health, and on connections between extreme poverty in the US
(Michael Harrington’s “Other America”) and disease burdens we associate
with developing countries. A growing
number of American households live on less than two dollars per person per day,
more than double the number 15 years ago, 1.46 million now.
We know that poverty kills, directly and indirectly, with
the hopelessness that killed Isaiah. Less obvious, perhaps, is the finding that
inequality itself -- the gap between the top and the bottom in a society --
affects its population’s health. That’s the social class gradient in health
that Alan Marmot and his colleagues highlighted in the late 1970s among British
civil servants, the stepwise gradient that pointed to the effects of something
more than just poverty. Each group on the socioeconomic scale had higher
mortality rates than the one just above it. The pattern applied across many of
the major causes of disease and showed up in morbidity data too.
Other research showed that the countries with the most
equitable distributions of income or wealth had the healthiest populations, and the countries that improved equity over time showed the
greatest improvements in the health of their populations. These findings were
gaining currency at around the time, 1990, that I was being recruited to the
Harvard School of Public Health by Harvey Fineberg -- dean then -- to re-found
and lead a modern department of “health and behavior.”
Harvey had majored in
psychology at Harvard; my graduate training was in medical sociology. We arm wrestled
briefly about the department’s mission as expressed in its provisional title.
Ultimately, we settled on a compromise that threaded a path between the
intellectual claims of larger departments. You can imagine that dance. We
wedged the word “social” into Harvey’s original proposal and I agreed to chair
a new department of health and social behavior. We didn’t say much about what
we meant by “social” behavior but I needed that word because the one thing of
which I was certain was that health was a social phenomenon as surely as it was
a biological one.
We launched a program called Society and Health and set
out to codify and trace some of the major social factors affecting the health
of populations. But the Wellesley presidential search committee (Luella playing
a prominent role) plucked me out of that position before we ventured very far.
I relate that bit of personal history in part because it
accounts for my selection of inequality as the theme for this talk. It
explains, as well, why I was excited, while preparing for this encounter with
you, to immerse myself in a summer reading program that puts Don Berwick’s
Isaiah challenge in a broader context, while underscoring its importance,
urgency, even portent.
Let’s take a quick look at a representative few of those
writings on my reading list. And then we’ll strike out on our own.
Joe Stiglitz, a colleague from the Amherst board and the
2001 Nobel laureate in economics, has been writing more for lay audiences since
winning the prize. His most recent book, The Price of Inequality, addresses Don Berwick’s
charge to the Harvard graduates, Don’s charge to us, through the moral vision
of Hubert Humphrey.
Joe documents an
enormous increase over the past quarter century in inequalities of wealth and income in the US.
He summarizes and contextualizes extensive
cross-sectional and longitudinal data and explains in detail why and how the
gap has widened so fast. And he spells out why we should care.
We are making
collective decisions, his book shows, that have rendered the US economic system
not only “inefficient and unstable” (bad enough), but also “fundamentally
unfair” and “we are paying a high price for our inequality,” which -- Stiglitz
argues (quoting him) -- is distorting “our political system” and threatening to
erode “confidence in our democracy and in our market economy ... along with our
global influence” and even, if trends continue, “our sense of national
identity.”
All of this reflects
choices, Stiglitz adds, not inexorable natural processes, a cause for both hope
and despair. We know how to create “a more efficient and egalitarian society,”
we have time-tested policy tools. That’s the hope.
The despair is that “the political processes that shape
these policies are so hard to change,” the more so as the “moneyed interests”
have re-written the economic and political rules of the game, while masking
their motives and deflecting public awareness from the
extent of inequality, the reasons for it, the injustices behind it, and the
corrosive consequences flowing from it. That’s Joe, trying to redress the
balance.
He
is joined by Paul Krugman, in his new book, End This Depression Now. Krugman shares
Stiglitz’s frustration. He too sees the political gridlock in Washington as a
symptom, in large part, of concentrated wealth. He writes of “a small but
influential minority,” insulated by “extraordinary income growth,” that has
“chosen to forget the lessons of history and the conclusions of several
generations .. of economic analysis, replacing that hard-won knowledge with
ideologically and politically convenient prejudices.”
The longer-term lessons of history are the focus of a
fascinating analysis of Why Nations Fail (the title of their
recent book), by a pair of senior economists, Daron Acemoglu at MIT and James
Robinson at Harvard. Strong economic and political institutions are the sine qua non for success, they show, not geography, or natural resources, or
culture per se. Through two thousand years of history, nations that fostered
economic growth and prosperity for their people did so because of manmade
institutions that avoided decay and stagnation through political systems that resisted capture by elites.
So, are we being captured by elites? Yes, warn a number
of other economists, social scientists, and public
intellectuals, who often work at the margins of their disciplines in and out of
the academy. Some are advancing a vision
of a “new economy” as an alternative to what Juliet Schor labels
“business-as-usual” (BAU) markets. BAU markets, they say, assume and create a
scarcity mentality and ever-escalating consumption that despoils the
environment and diminishes the quality of time-starved and stress-filled lives.
These
critics call for broader measures of prosperity and for policies supporting wiser
choices at the individual level that they hope can -- over time -- yield
benefits on the ecological and human levels. In Schor’s words we can choose to
“work and spend less, create and connect more .. emit and despoil less, enjoy
and thrive more.” This sounds appealing ... and wildly unrealistic, romantic,
even naive. Why? Because that’s not who we are any more.
A
new book by the influential Harvard ethicist and legal scholar,
Michael Sandel (known for his PBS course on justice), explains why. Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy, tracks
the expansion of market reasoning into all aspects of modern life -- “the
commodification of everything,” he calls the trend, which he documents
arrestingly in a litany of examples that are so ubiquitous and familiar that
we’ve mostly stopped noticing them pile up. You can upgrade your prison cell
for $8/night; hire a surrogate mother from India for $6,250; buy the cell phone
number of your physician for $1,500; emit a ton of carbon into the atmosphere
for $18; and -- an example he cites from Minneapolis -- drive solo in the
carpool lane at rush hour for $8, although my driver yesterday said it varies
by the level of demand and can cost much more than that on busy holidays.
Expansion
of the logic of buying and selling, Sandel says, “has sharpened the sting of
inequality by making money matter more throughout the whole of life. At the
same time it has divided us -- he coins the phrase “skyboxification” -- with
“people of affluence” sitting high in glass-encased skyboxes (real and
metaphorical) oblivious to the concerns of the people below.
Everyone’s
experience is impoverished as a result, he says, not only because the incursion
of market logic where it doesn’t belong degrades the value of things “that
money can’t buy,” but importantly because it undermines democracy. A thriving
democracy requires, Sandel concludes: that “people of different backgrounds and
social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the
course of everyday life. For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our
differences, and how we come to care for the common good.”
Well, there
was more on the reading list, but I will take mercy on you now and ask: if
these analyses, and others like them, are mostly on target, if they offer the
analogue of Eric Lander’s cancer map -- what does this moment require of us?
Our understanding surely, our best attempt to reach our own conclusions, with
the most reliable information we can assemble, our own and ongoing year-round
reading lists.
I’ll
put in a plug for another of my boards, The Kaiser Family Foundation, which has
carved out a role as a trustworthy source of nonpartisan analysis to inform
health policy, with special emphasis on the impact of policy on people. There’s
a wealth of information on their websites. We can be better informed. But is there more that these times demand of
us?
One
thing more, I believe.
We
need to evolve a different discourse about difference in this second decade of
a new millennium that is teaching us, if nothing else, how radically
interdependent we are as an immature species on a fragile planet.
We
need a new understanding of how to transform our conflicts rather than glossing
them over as too hot to handle while we draw farther apart. We need a commitment
and a set of skills to engage at a deeper level through conversations that open
us up rather than shutting us down.
These
sound like homilies but what I have to offer are concrete experiences from
leading Wellesley, hoping they may have some resonance for you. Colleges and
universities are in many ways petri dishes for working through problems
confronting the larger society.
During
my time at Wellesley -- as on other campuses -- we were watching the twin forces of
globalization and technology tie humanity, at breakneck speed, into more and
more complex networks of mutual dependency.
And our own local struggles were
reminding us of the work we still have to do if we are to evolve the social
sophistication required to live interdependently -- in our diversity -- now
living side-by-side with otherness to a degree never before seen or imagined.
Peter Senge calls this “the greatest learning challenge human beings have ever
faced.”
Little wonder, then, that the
challenges that brought me to my knees as a college president originated, more
often than not, as disagreements over differences. The pattern was established
in the first months of my presidency, with a big test in a very public battle
between two senior professors -- a Jewish woman, a classicist, and a black man,
an Afrocentrist, who become caricatures of themselves as they took one another
on in escalating cycles of contempt and calumny. That struggle occasioned a one
sentence note from the president of a Quaker college -- a school rooted in pacifism.
““Welcome to the culture wars,” it said.
Though never again on that scale, the
tests continued through my 14 years on the job, in the typical parade of campus
skirmishes: student-led uprisings over identity and power, conflicts within
academic departments playing out ancient grudges or reacting to shifting
alliances, eruptions on the electronic conferences, sticky judicial cases,
unpopular tenure decisions, controversial hires, provocative speakers, and many
not-so-subtle bids for institutional resources and recognition, inflected, more
often than not, with identity claims.
At the same time – and this is
important -- I loved being president of Wellesley; it was the privilege of a
lifetime in every respect, and, in most respects, it was a joy. And this tough
and confusing arena -- this engaging of our differences -- was, oddly enough,
among the richest and most fertile fields we had for deep and sustained
learning -- mine, that of my administrative team, the faculty, alumnae,
trustees, and, especially, the students.
I can’t count the number of times a
student would circle back to me with a new take on a particularly painful
eruption. There might have been tears in my office, protests in the halls
outside, angry email exchanges, temper tantrums ... the whole mishegas.
But then, later, one or another
participant would re-emerge, through a note or an email message, at a five-year
reunion, occasionally in more public way -- in a speech or a writing. She would
find a way to let me know how much the incident had taught her, how grateful
she was for the lesson, hard-won though it was.
So the students taught me early that
the way to survive the culture wars would be to convert them into learning
experiences, to push them deeper than they might otherwise have taken us
without a nudge from the president -- a nudge intending to open a new
opportunity for institutional growth.
And the trick, I learned, was to view
differences as inevitable and healthy -- not something to be managed or
suppressed -- to hold, honor, and amplify the differences within the community
as a necessary step toward forging bonds of unity.
This meant admitting that no college --
indeed no institution -- will ever be a utopia, free of ignorance, incivility,
and disagreement. When we tried to smooth all the rough edges we would find
that we had muted or marginalized dissent and driven it underground.
We
came to see conflict as a necessary, generative force and differences of
opinion and experience -- polar positions and contradictions -- as a critical
part of any learning process. Learning involves first mastering new categories
and then integrating them into a larger, more organic whole.
The
differentiation stage requires heightening and sharpening differences --
intellectually and experientially -- widening the gap between two opposing
poles, really seeing and feeling what's different -- walking all the way into a
charged or hostile field. Absorbing its energy.
The
integration stage becomes possible when, finally, you are able to find a new
position -- a new place to stand -- that incorporates the two conflicting
realities in a third, more complex and more comprehensive whole. That's the
essence of the creative process.
But
while we needed our differences heightened and amplified, not muted and papered
over, we also discovered how important it was to avoid over-personalizing those
differences, converting them from divergences of viewpoint, fact or
interpretation, to personal attacks, affronts and wounds -- or triggers to that
most corrosive of emotions, humiliation.
When
conflict becomes personal, it deepens resentment or threatens a relationship
and shifts the focus from the intellectual work of understanding and learning
about a substantive difference to the emotional work of mending or compensating
for a damaged relationship, or of hunkering down in anticipation of
retaliation.
When
we were able to discover and address the true and legitimate needs expressed by
voices at the margins (needs that are seldom reflected accurately in the symbolic
or emotional demands that surface at first), then we saw ways to improve the
situation for everyone. So the task was to design encounters where we could
penetrate through the presenting symptoms to something more fundamental.
These
kinds of deep encounters required a willingness to be changed, to engage others
fully, expecting to absorb aspects of their otherness — openly, respectfully,
empathetically — being prepared to let the other’s testimony shake your
unexamined assumptions.
And
so the demands of leading in this way required inner work as a necessary
complement to the management of external events. I came to understand the inner work of
leadership as indispensable, the work of paying close attention to how I was
leading myself.
Accepting the presidency had been a
fairly blind leap for me and I faced a steep learning curve when I first took
up the job. The initial years were daunting, to say the least, as I fashioned
myself into an entirely different person than I’d ever been and learned about a
whole range of practical issues I’d never thought about.
But by far the most disconcerting
adjustment was an emotional one, as I learned to stand in a force field of
projections coming from every direction. People were constantly sending me
signals about what I would have to do to win their approval. They would love me
one minute, then hate me the next, all the while imagining me as the leader
they unconsciously needed me to be -- sometimes hero, sometimes goat.
It took discipline and conscious effort
to learn to guard my spirit against the dehumanizing effects of this echo
chamber of projections, to find solid ground on which I could stand apart from
the expectations of others without losing my connections to them.
Too often, instead, leaders fall into
one of two traps. They let their egos get hooked and soon they’re sucking all
the air from the room. Or they are crushed by the criticism and build walls
around themselves.
I knew I didn’t want to lead in either
of those lonely ways and so, with help, I worked hard to evolve a distinctive
style of self-conscious leadership rooted in a network of resilient
partnerships and anchored in the belief that trustworthy leadership starts from
within.
It was a long story and I’ll compress
it by saying simply that first of all, I was lucky to assemble an amazing team
of colleagues -- trustees, faculty, vice presidents and deans and other staff.
And then we learned together. I
learned; my partners learned; the college learned. And the learning is the
point. With time, intention, concentration -- when we allow our minds to drop
down into our hearts -- we do learn to change ourselves. And when we change
ourselves, things begin to shift.
Our learning at Wellesley began in self
questioning, and in an appreciation of the “relational, ecological, and
interdependent” nature of the world. We learned to take seriously the assertion
that knowledge is provisional and that knowing a communal reality requires
engaging it directly and seeing it whole, or trying to.
We drew on systems theory and
complexity science, looking for connections, and for the deeper structures that
repeatedly produce results no one wants. And from that followed the imperative
of listening to many voices, assembling different perspectives, fostering collaborative
efforts to build more compelling narratives -- both of our current reality, and
of a preferable future many could want.
We learned to reflect regularly on our own motivations and
self-delusions, while at the same time working with others to read the force
fields in the larger system. This enabled us, over time, to break down
boundaries, forge new relationships of mutuality and trust, unleash the
generative power of multiple mental models, and create new realities.
What we learned about how to work with
difference was contrary to conventional notions about how to drive deep
systemic change within an organization. The commonplace idea is that the change
process requires altering structures, issuing directives, developing strategic
plans and systems of accountability -- that real change, transformational
change, is BIG, top-down change.
These steps are important, of course,
but in our experience the hardest work of transformational change was the
quietest part, the inner and interpersonal dialogues through which we gradually
reconsidered habitual ways of thinking.
We saw the inside shift precede the
outside one, or dance with it over time as individuals and small groups began
to shift their mental models about how the world works and their taken-for-granted
assumptions about the rules of the game.
This is akin to the slow transformation
through which Americans have been moving for the past century in our
understanding of race, and, much more recently, sexual orientation.
Ironically, though, as we’ve just seen,
a similar transformation has heightened our tolerance of inequality. Shifting
that perception is going to take time, patience, humility, and Martin Luther
King’s faith that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. Inequality is
bending the curve in the opposite direction.
And, so, I would like to leave you with
the thought that -- as you continue to pursue with scientific rigor and with
passion the challenges of advancing medical science, delivering the best
possible medical care, and, at the same time, reforming the health care system
so that it works better for everyone -- you also hold space in your minds for
the larger context signified by this Rothenberger lecture series.
For our culture urgently needs -- in
all sectors, including your own -- next-generation leaders who will be equal to
today’s challenges in all their complexity and who will be skillful at leading themselves
with compassion and equanimity ... with love -- love understood as connection
in the way Paul Tillich defined it: the unifying impulse, the recognition of
our interweaving with all living beings.
What if the way ahead for a safer,
saner future is a leadership grounded in connection, in love? Can we sculpt leaders who are gifted in the
ways of community and connection? Can we grow up leaders who “lead from
within,” as Parker Palmer has advocated, who understand that they have a
special responsibility to manage their own inner shadows, lest they cast more
shadow than light on those around them?
Ah, the rejoinder comes, these are
times for muscular leadership. We are told to be afraid, be very afraid, and to
place our trust in heroic deciders offering simple comforts. But surely these
nervous times call for Einstein's new levels of thinking, the more urgently if
we believe we’re entering a period of profound change. What kinds of people do
we want leading our vital institutions through historic transformations? How do
we want them to lead? What should we expect of leaders we can trust?
I’m convinced we’ll need leaders who can bridge and balance
tensions without collapsing them, who can hold contradictions creatively so
that they will open our minds and hearts to wider syntheses, rather than
shutting us down.
We’ll need leaders who can hold the contradictions between
power and love. “Power without love is reckless and abusive,” Martin Luther
King said in the last weeks of his life, “and love without power is sentimental
and anemic. ... [The] collision of immoral power with powerless morality ...
constitutes the major crisis of our time.”
At Wellesley, I learned that my power—the power of the
presidency—existed for the essential purpose of enabling others to find their
purpose, their authority, their self-authorship. And I learned that to achieve
this I would have to remain open to others in a way that is the essence of love
as the drive to sustain unity and maintain connection.
I would have to respect the other person’s reality, the
other person’s yearning, the other person’s path of growth, to be open to influence
back from others and their different realities. And this in turn taught me the
value of diversity as a resource for learning in a community.
I learned to hold another tension -- and this one was harder
still -- to honor my inner life in the face of all that was swirling around me.
It took time and concerted effort to develop the skills to manage external
realities and yet maintain a quality of attention in the present that could
enfold past and future, embrace complexity, and help me try to meet each new
moment with equanimity.
I didn’t always succeed at this -- far from it -- but I
learned to find my way back when I was lost, and to know this quality of
mindful presence as a capacity I wanted for myself, and for my leadership team,
because I wanted it for our students.
It’s been said that this new generation, escaping into
social media as their world spins out of control, is being raised on
“information without context, butter without bread, craving without
longing.”
And yet, we have good evidence that today’s youth are
longing for more nourishing fare. The disciplines they will need in the years
ahead are the ones we will all need and they are a life's work, never fully
mastered, always requiring conscious cultivation.
We'll need the strength to stare down our demons of fear and
despair so that we can engage the world with curiosity, opening our minds and
freeing ourselves of regret, recrimination, and the defeat of shame and blame.
We’ll need to hear and tolerate the diversity within ourselves,
to recognize our own inner voices, identities, moods, to notice how fluid and
ephemeral they are so that we can see and appreciate differences in others and
use the practice of self-discovery to move beyond ourselves.
We’ll need to move beyond dualities -- beyond either/or and
then on beyond the simple corrective of both/and, move to true multiplicities
of seeing and of understanding, multiple lenses that acknowledge how competing
language games and inequalities of power and control create lived realities
that may never even intersect unless we stretch ourselves to bring them
together.
And
this, I think -- finally -- returns us to Don Berwick’s charge.
Those
of us whose primary work is outside the political realm have an essential role
to play -- in the civic spaces we occupy -- stimulating deeper dialogues about
diversity, working toward a greater capacity to harvest the richness in the
differences that divide and yet enrich and define us.
I
see this work as the most fundamental challenge to 21st-century leadership. And
I see it at the heart of the question of whether we can craft more creative and
affordable responses to the needs of the growing numbers of Americans living in
Hubert Humphrey’s dimly-lit and dangerous spaces, in the dawn and the twilight,
and the shadows of modern life.
And it is here, perhaps, that we do have our
antidote to the hopelessness that killed Isaiah in our immense capacity as
humans -- under the right conditions -- to find and awaken the best in
ourselves and one another.
I hope so.
