During the height of the COVID pandemic, while flipping through old copies of America’s Best Essays in search of light or meaning, I read the forward to the 2007 edition by David Foster Wallace. The pandemic was a dark season in my life for many reasons, and in that space, David Foster Wallace’s words resonated:
“Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting ... to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the 'moral clarity' of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of information and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time and to need help. [To be a free, informed adult] requires not just the intelligence to discern one’s own error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on and out therefrom, bravely, toward the next revealed error.”
The older I get the less I realize I know. Acquiring the humility to understand not only that we know very little but that we have far less control over what happens to us comes through a painstakingly slow process. When I think of what I know now (that I “know” very little), I must confess I shudder a bit at my own past “moral clarity of the immature.” How many things I fancied I “knew.” How many filters I used that distorted what I saw. How many people I did not hear because I assumed things as I “listened.”
Being trained as a lawyer, I was and am open to the idea that there are myriad sides to any story or conflict. I also have seen in courtrooms how flimsy “eyewitness” testimony is and how many different psychological factors go into what we perceive and remember. Five witnesses to the same car accident, if taken to different rooms, will all remember something different. The driver was distracted. The pedestrian darted out of nowhere. The traffic light was green. The extent to which we are not fully and accurately perceiving the world becomes increasingly evident any time different people describe the same event or conversation.
As a diplomat, I learned and relearned how much our cultures affect how we perceive the same series of events. Whether it is the directness or circularity with which we say things, the way we maintain or avoid eye contact, how and when we press someone to do something, or even whether we show someone the bottom of our shoes, the tiny corner of the world into which we are born colors everything.
Thankfully, these experiences and professions left me quite open to what David Foster Wallace wrote. But it wasn’t until I stumbled across another quote, that led me to listen to countless podcasts and read books by its author, that I invested significant time in considering the “ego” and the role it plays in our sense of certainty and righteousness about what we “know.” The quote was from Eckhart Tolle:
“To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness.”
I had never read anything by Tolle when I came across the quote, and I found myself re-reading the sentence over and over. Grace is my favorite word, and I wanted to understand how to be in a “state of grace, ease, and lightness.” Everything around me felt ungraceful, difficult, heavy. But I kept mulling the words “to offer no resistance to life.” What did that mean? We surrender to all that happens to us? We give up? How do we do that and is that desirable? I wrote the quote on a scrap of paper and put it on my refrigerator door.
I then read two of Eckhart Tolle’s books The Power of Now and A New Earth. He is a quiet German-American who, at 28, lying in bed in a fit of existential, suicidal panic thought “I cannot live with myself anymore.” This triggered for him an epiphany about how much we are “with our own minds.” How much we are consumed by our thoughts that look into the future with anxiety, into the past with regret. If we were able to reduce our racing thoughts and focus on just the present moment, much suffering would disappear. Of course, monks have spent decades perfecting the art of being present, and I doubt I will ever come close.
But what I found most interesting about Tolle’s writing is his emphasis on the “ego.” To Tolle, our ego is essentially what we identify as. Our form. Mother, father, wife, student, doctor, drunk, loser, philanthropist, hero. It’s the list of things we put in our social media description. The things we would tell someone at a cocktail party. We all have our narratives of who we are, and by adulthood, we can rattle off our roles and our “story” with ease. And in all of that identifying, by necessity, we are also saying what we are not.
Social media, in many ways, has reinforced our egos and our associations with roles and identities. I recently spent a year at Georgetown and Carnegie reading and teaching about social media and disinformation. At the heart of my quest was to understand why America felt so polarized. Of course, much ink has been spilled about the algorithms of social media and how they amplify both all the things with which we already identify and then amplify the “shock value” of content about those things. Over the past two decades, we have become increasingly rigid about who we are and rejectful of who we are not. This phenomenon is not only happening between the separate poles of political spectra, but within each pole as well. One of the most common verbs used at the moment to describe what is happening *within* similarly-minded groups is “cannibalize.”
We have also become quick to dispense with people. Last year, a documentary, 15 Minutes of Shame, explored the ways both public personalities and private citizens must now navigate harassment and public shaming online. Thankfully, the documentary does a good job of noting that some forms of public shaming have resulted in progress toward better outcomes. But in painful detail, the documentary describes stories in which every day people were subjected to a weaponized form of shaming or false accusations that were intended to hurt or destroy – often without an understanding of even the basic facts. People lost their jobs and had their lives destroyed by a 15-minute whipped up frenzy of unexamined outrage. And then the outrage moved on to a new target.
A few years back, a close friend told me about the author Jonathan Haidt. I have now come to believe that his book The Righteous Mind should be required reading for anyone living in the modern era. He examines moral psychology and the spectra across which we make several kinds of moral judgments and explains why conservatives value the traditional and liberals value change. The overarching message is that conservatives and liberals frequently come out differently on moral questions, but each gets there in a “rational” way. And neither is “wrong.” We have become so certain that the other “side” is “wrong” that we do not even have conversations with each other anymore. We do not try to understand. We label and move on.
Jonathan Haidt famously quoted Zen master, Sent-t’san, from 700 CE in a TED talk:
“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be ‘for’ or ‘against.’ The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.”
This is very much in keeping with the philosophy of Eckhart Tolle about the “ego.” Tolle would say the more we identify with labels or roles, the more inclined we are to defend that role or mindset in a knee-jerk, unexamined way. The most liberating thing we can do is to identify less with the avatars we create of who “we are” and simply be present in the moment, with an open heart and open mind, willing to listen and see others.
It's a bit hyperbolic, but I would submit there is no such thing as “good communication.” Very rare is the conversation in which each party walks away with the same understanding. I have come to believe that communication is instead a whittling away of misunderstanding. Adrienne Rich, in her essay "On Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying," defines an “honorable human relationship” as “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” As a society, we must get better at the long, sometimes terrifying process of listening to each other – of whittling away our misunderstandings. Of restating and clarifying. Of repeating back. Of coming to conversations with an assumption of good will.
We all go around this earth asking “Do you see me? Do you hear me? Does what I offer matter?” Many of our conflicts, since time immemorial, have arisen when the answer to those questions is a dismissive, self-righteous “no.” So, this March Forth, I commit to trying to distance myself from my ego, from my avatar, from my righteous certainty of things I “know.” I commit to listen and see more, and speak second, not first. I commit to using less labels for myself or anyone else. Perhaps the only label that should matter is Open-Minded Human (the acronym is even onomatopoetic – oommhh). For sure, we do not need to be so open-minded that our brains spill out. We can still make moral decisions, improve other people’s lives, and do good things in the world. But we can do all of those things with much more humility.
