Leadership in Our Time

In our time, we know more about the universe and ourselves than all who have come before us could even imagine. And the more we’ve learned, the deeper the ultimate mysteries have become. We’re high up enough now on the lofty hill of advanced knowledge and informed speculation that we can see the vast reaches of enduring enigma that are stretched out before us, and perhaps even slightly glimpse a heretofore hidden expanse of possibility beyond conception that roils around us. In this new context, with its astonishing vistas, any willful expression of individual human arrogance or cruelty or pettiness should be an embarrassment of massive proportion. All displays of greedy self-aggrandizement or hints of malicious wickedness in the face of the sheer magnificence of existence surely represent the nadir of stupidity.

Most of us know honorable and morally admirable people, truly good souls who are as imbued with kindness, compassion, and personal humility as they are invigorated by love and a hope of good things to come that this world has not yet experienced in the abundance and universality we should desire. But the decent and honorable take that as a challenge and a calling that suggests some version of their mission on earth, to bring a little more goodness as well as whatever is fine into the lives of others and the immediate future that so needs its healing balm.

So when we see the angry, aggrieved, snarling and yet smugly bloated little egos of people who have risen into positions of public service and intended leadership, and yet have fallen so far from the moral requirements and high expectations of those offices, their sad smallness of spirit and perversion of character glare forth in high contrast with the transcendental qualities of truth, beauty, goodness, and unity to which the better angels of our nature have always aspired. These individuals we watch from afar have become contemporary cautionary lessons of how it can be that what Blaise Pascal called the greatness and wretchedness of our condition can shed half its potential and devolve into something truly squalid that sets us all back and seeks to hold us down from the great flourishing that is our intent and purpose.

We should first grieve the loss of what might have been so many fine minds and souls who instead have meandered into the opposite of what was meant and could have been for their time on earth. We need to have real compassion for their loss, and our own that has come as the consequence of their degradation. And then we should work to see to it that we no longer allow such people into positions of power and responsibility for which they are neither qualified nor deserving. We’re here for more and better and greater things. We have a responsibility whose weight too few of us have felt and discharged with the care and serious gladness it merits. But now we know anew. We have an opportunity, as most generations have had in their own times, to awaken afresh to our duties. We can see the absurdities we have to face when we haven’t cared enough or worked hard enough to secure the common good. But then, that's why tomorrow beckons us forth.

Inner Conditions for Knowing

Some people will just never understand you, no matter how hard you try to make yourself known.

There are personal conditions, requirements, preliminaries, for understanding and knowing. And, conversely, there are inner obstacles to both. On one level, this is obvious. There are things that little children can't know or understand. We can teach a four year old to say, "Business can't be about just profit maximization." But she won't really know or understand what she's saying. Likewise for "Mommy's a comptroller."

What we often forget is that we've come across here a universal truth. Throughout life, there are conditions for knowing. Not everything can be gotten from a book, or the internet, or an app. If you've never been to Manhattan, or Helsinki, you can't really know those places. You can read about them and gather endless facts. But there is a different sort of knowledge that only being there confers. At a certain level, you can understand a lot about tennis or golf through just reading enough books and watching the sport played. But there is a form of knowledge you don't have unless you've played a lot. There's other knowledge you can access unless you've played really well. The top pros understand the game in a way that weekend amateurs can't.

I'm convinced that there are also spiritual or moral conditions for knowing. We interpret the world, in part, through who we already are. A thoroughly selfish person can't recognize and know real altruism when it's staring him in the face. A person suspecting enemies and jealous detractors everywhere finds it nearly impossible to experience real friendship. An angry person sees life through a different lens than the one used by a happy person.

At different stages, and in different conditions, we have access to different things about the world. Technology will never provide universal access to all truth, no matter how much can be encoded. Our own growth will give us a form of access that can't be replicated in any other way.

So, we should remember that growth brings access. There are plateaus in life, and we can easily forget that, no matter where we are now, in our own inner lives and personal accomplishments, further growth is awaiting us, and it will bring greater knowledge and understanding. We shouldn't expect to have it all figured out already. There are endless adventures that await us.

So: Think growth today. And seek to develop, however slightly, the inner conditions for new understanding. Expand your existential territory. That's a good part of why you're here.

The Breathtaking Joy of Existence

Check out Albert Einstein musing on the faith of his birth and how he expands out from it:

Judaism appears to me to be almost exclusively concerned with the moral attitude in and toward life. […] The essence of the Jewish concept of life seems to me to be the affirmation of life for all creatures. […} There remains, however, something more in the Jewish tradition, so gloriously revealed in certain of the psalms; namely a kind of drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of this world, of which man can attain but a faint intimation. It is the feeling from which genuine research draws its intellectual strength, but which also seems to manifest itself in the song of birds…

That one clause made me smile: "a kind of drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of this world, of which man can attain but a faint intimation."

Here's what's both humbling and exciting to ponder: We can sometimes have a huge, intense, soul enlarging experience of that beauty and incomprehensible sublimity, a mystical realization coming to us unheralded, and stopping us in our tracks. I recently wrote on one such experience I had during a daily walk, some weeks ago (click here). And sometimes, like Saul, on the road to Damascus, it's a life changing experience that reorients everything for us, opening us up anew and turning us onto a path we hadn't really seen before.

Just like the Psalmist, we can feel that "drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of the world." And yet, however great and overwhelming the experience might be, Albert E considers it merely "a faint intimation" of the true reality that encompasses us. Just think about that, and its implications.

Wouldn't it be great to carry with us every day that sense that we're living and working amid immensities whose grandeur and scope are so great that our highest mystical experiences capture only a glancing glimpse of the hem of its garment? Then, perhaps, we'd really have a new moral attitude, and an affirmation of all life that would make us lights in the darkness that so sadly seems to engulf many in our time.

Truth is a wildly blazing sun. Carry with you at least a small candle in its honor. Cast light in the darkness wherever you go.