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Thank
you and good evening ladies and gentlemen, members of the Noonday Rotary Club
and fellow Rotarians from Los Dos Laredos. I am humbled and profoundly honored
to be named a Paul Harris Fellow. The supreme measure of a person’s spirit
is the degree to which his or her thoughts and convictions continue to inspire
and to guide those who come after. Paul Harris’s vision of the power of
professional people, drawn from all walks of life , united in a common pledge
to work together for better communities, better states, better nations, a better
world, could hardly offer us a more timely inspiration for these troubled moments.
Rotary International, Paul Harris’s great legacy, champions all manner
of initiatives that bind together the human family in a just and equitable whole.
Rotarians have championed and funded, among countless other noble causes, an
end to polio, through a vastly expanded immunization program. If ethnic hatreds,
bigotry, and racism, are ever to be curtailed, that better understanding between
peoples will surely be, in part, because of Rotary’s aggressive sponsorship
of programs for travel, for study, and for cultural exchanges and professional
exchanges between nations.
It is
to the question of international relationships, ethnic division, racial divides
that I address my remarks tonight. Much airspace has been filled, much ink spilled
in recent weeks as professional commentators, pundits, and even serious thinkers
have, stirred by the events of September 11th, ask profound questions concerning
international relationships in the human family. First, the extreme, apocalyptic
position. We repeatedly read that our way of life is forever changed, that we
can never return to what we were before September 11th, and even that the challenges
and questions we now face are without precedent and, in their gravity, without
equal. As always, history serves as our only helpful companion in these uncertain
times. Imagine, it you will, living in Rome in the summer of 1527, as the Holy
Roman Emperor’s troops first take and then sack the city. The Pope, Vicar
of Christ and temporal ruler of central Italy, flees down the long causeway from
St. Peter’s Church, his acolytes running beside him to lift up his heavy
skirts and allow his legs to move more quickly. Finally, he reaches the temporary
safety of what we call the Castello d’Sant Angelo, the late classical monument
built to be the Emperor Hadrian’s tomb. From the castle’s ramparts,
Clement VII watches as Spanish, French, Italian, and German troops loot, kill,
burn, and reduce to rubble the Eternal City. It was hard for anyone who witnessed
these events, and most of all for Clement VII, to imagine how life could continue.
More than four hundred years later, as Europeans again saw their continent wasted
and ravaged, many questioned, after World War II, if life could ever be the same
again, if indeed it could continue. Elie Wiesel, the great Jewish novelist and
philosopher who himself survived the Holocaust, posed a terrifying question:
Did perhaps those unthinkable events, the pitiless and unprovoked slaughter of
6,000,000 Jews, signal an end to Yahweh’s covenant with Israel?
Both
Clement VII and Elie Wiesel were correct; life after 1527 and 1945 could not
ever be the same. But life would continue, beautiful, flawed, imperfect, mysterious.
And the very human labor of investigation, questioning, and discussion flows
on in our day, unabated, as we try to understand how, repeatedly, internal and
external bonds between peoples and nations, domestic and international pacts
of conduct, could suddenly have given way to barbarism, violence, and cruelty.
Are there any precepts or principals of conduct or universal truths to guide
and to restrain our fears and impulses? How do we reconcile the contradictory,
dizzying variations on the human condition? Institutions and thinkers and political
leaders crowd us with solutions first authoritative, and traditional, then permissive
and progressive; first spiritual and poetic, then numerical and scientific; first
conservative and cautious, then aggressive and revolutionary. And to add to the
confusion, one basic human reality: all of us find practices outside our own
culture alien, disquieting, even wrong. Are there any unique lessons one people
may offer another? How can we begin to think constructively about the Other,
the unfamiliar, the threatening?
To
examine these vexing questions, we have as our guide the profoundly lucid writings
of Isaiah Berlin, Russian-born Oxford dom, Professor of Social and Political
Theory, who died in 1997, and who devoted the last years of his life to a study
of pluralism—moral, ideological, cultural, ethnic—and a consideration
of our shifting responses to this fundamental human dilemma, the curse of “otherness” which
doomed humankind’s most grandiose, and most famous common undertaking—the
Tower of Babel.
In our
oldest record of purposeful disputation, Plato presents his great teacher, Socrates,
as the spoilsport who continually forces rational, logical, and universally intelligible
constraints upon all discourse. And that spirit still inspired the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment, the attitude that brought forth our nation: “We hold these
truths to be self-evident...” provides a perfect window onto Enlightenment
thinking. All right-thinking persons can grasp the truth, which describes a universal
reality, intelligible to all reasonable persons, not contradictory, part of a
perfect whole. Renaissance poets and philosophers likened the universe to music,
perfect order and perfect harmony, even if they did think it depended upon the
sun going first over a flat earth, then around a spherical world! Only Machiavelli,
as Berlin shows, saw the fissure in our fond imaginings of the truth. Only Machiavelli
saw “an insoluble dilemma”, thereby “planting a permanent question
mark in the path of posterity.” Put simply, the claims of God and Caesar
cannot be reconciled. The “Great Goods can collide....one cannot have everything.” Surely
among rival cultures or peoples, but even within the same culture, “ends
equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other.” System of
value come into conflict without possibility of arbitration, Berlin tells us,
and this is not a tragic or isolated occurrence but the basic truth of the human
condition. The Romantics, who rebelled against the universalism of Enlightenment
reasonings, saw human life as fragmented, messy, protean, conflicted, hodgepodge,
cosmopolitan, mixed-up. Today we call it , multidisciplinary, multicultural,
multiracial, multilingual, multinational. And we no longer imagine a world in
which values and truth can be harmonized into one intelligible whole.
Isaiah
Berlin’s inspiration, his realization that our experience of the world
and our view of life is a Romantic, not Enlightenment one, Rousseau and not Mr.
Jefferson, came from Johann Gottfried Herder, who in 1774 wrote the following
description of the human condition. Note how Herder extols the unique quality
of each human being and each culture. The human story has many and varied parts.
Missing are the universal claims put forward by our Founding Fathers.
How unspeakably
difficult it is to convey the particular quality of an individual
human
being and how impossible it is to say precisely what distinguishes an
individual,
his way of feeling and living; how different and how individual everything
becomes
once his eyes see it, once his soul grasps it, his heart feels it. How much
depth
there is in the character of a single people, which, no matter how often observed,
and gazed
at with curiosity and wonder, nevertheless escapes the word which attempts
to capture
it, seldom so recognisable as to be universally understood and felt.
Berlin’s
answer to the question of how we can ever understand each other or live together
in a world so diverse and so divided is implicit in the words I just read from
Herder. Among those qualities we possess that mark us off from the brutes, empathy
alone may be a uniquely human experience. A mother crocodile cares for her newly-hatched
little crocs. Does she consider that another mother croc, nearby, may be as anxious
for her own? Would it occur to one dog to say to another dog, in Bertrand Russell’s
famous example: “My parents were poor but hardworking and honorable”?
Empathy is perhaps best illustrated by a remark attributed to Golda Meir after
the ‘67 War: “We can forgive the Palestinians for killing us. We
cannot forgive them for making us kill their children.”
Empathy
may, of course, in a few holy men and women, spring spontaneously and freely
from the simple goodness and wisdom inherent in the soul. For most of us, however,
empathy grows and takes root as we understand another person, another culture,
another view of the world. To live and to study in another country, to learn
the traditions, language, and history of other peoples offer the only sure environment
for empathy to flourish. I will conclude tonight by sharing with you three examples
that surely stimulate empathy for Spanish culture, three voices from Spanish
literature whose special slant on the human condition reveal essential elements
of Spanish nature, essential parts of the Spanish story.
First,
from the 11th century, the anonymous minstrel who sang the Poema de Myo Cid,
heroic telling of the life of Rodrigo Díaz, named respectfully by his
Moorish enemies el Cid.
Describing a conflict between the Cid and his king, Alfonso VI, the poet
exclaims:
¡Dios,
qué buen vassallo, si oviesse buen señore!
What
a great employee! If only he had a good boss!
Rodrigo has been exiled from his home and his family by
a harsh and unfair judgment of his king. While the poet
denounces the judgment and calls
into question the King’s character, the Cid himself offers no condemnation
of Alfonso’s order to exile. As he emerges in the poem, the Cid
embodies all the characteristics still at the heart of Spanish culture:
a ferocious sense of self, tempered by a deep loyalty, even submission,
to the king and to the Church. Fearless warrior, faithful husband, tender
father, reverent Catholic, honorable friend, dutiful servant of his king.
For Rodrigo Díaz, his moral qualities and the actions they reflect
do not depend upon how he is received by his superiors, by society, or
by the world. Although the King’s treatment is unfair, the Cid
will not sway in his loyalty; he does not betray his principles. “Antes
quebrar que doblar.” Better break than bend. A very common Castilian
saying. The reverse proverb exists in the more pragmatic, English tradition.
From
San Juan de la Cruz, in his Cántigo espiritual, comes our second example
of how Spanish culture reveals itself. San Juan speaks of la cena que recrea
y enamora. supper that restores life and love. I often think of these lines
as I am on my way home in the evening. No stresses in our professional or public
lives can dim the simple joy of returning home. These lines suggest that most
Castilian virtue: llaneza. Deliberate, direct, unadorned, simplicity, in one’s
character, person, and surroundings. The meaning of llaneza becomes very clear
during a visit to El Escorial, the great monastery-palace-library-necropolis-basilica
erected by Philip II in the latter part of the sixteenth century. The royal apartments
designed by Philip for himself and his family, fortunately preserved as he left
them, are simple, sober, uncluttered, reflecting the humble piety Philip felt
before God. All splendid decoration is left to the high altar in the basilica,
with Philip’s simple little bedroom accessible through a small door on
one side of the magnificent altar. Adjacent to this sixteenth-century palace
the eighteenth-century Bourbons created elaborate halls—marble, gold, silk,
fine furniture. No llaneza, no simplicity here. The French cousins, when they
came to rule Spain, fashioned for themselves private spaces adorned in a manner
the Castilian design had reserved for God alone. A respect for restraint, for
directness in human relationships and simplicity in human life, remain essential
components of the Spanish tradition.
Finally,
from the twentieth century, a dramatic statement of the Spanish conviction that
each of us bears an unrepeatable image, an identity and destiny forever our own,
never to be repeated by another. In García Lorca’s famous poem,
a young gypsy, handsome and well-dressed, a bit too well-dressed, dies as his
cousins knife him to death. As they kill him, the cousins taunt him: you weren’t
man enough to defend the family honor. So we are killing you. As the young man
falls dead, his profile is outlined against the sky.
Tres
golpes de sangre tuvo
y
cayó de perfil.
Viva
moneda que nunca
se
volverá a repetir.
Three
bloody blows he took
and
died on his back, his profile raised.
Living
coin that will never be struck again.
These lines capture what is perhaps the most widely held, sacred conviction
of Spanish tradition:
each human being plays his or her own, unique, unrepeatable part in the
human drama.
At no
time has the world’s messy jumble of cultures and races and peoples produced
greater potential for blessing or for pain. Because we have the capacity for
so much good or evil, the challenge has never been greater for all men and women
of good will. The programs and works envisaged by Paul Harris and continuing
in his name offer a means for exchange and understanding—the climate for
empathy to grow. Gabriel Miró, whose novels explore the mysterious relationships
between love, sensuality, and the Church in twentieth century Spain articulates
as the supreme human virtue a love of the world, love rooted in experience and
in understanding. “Sólo hay un heroísmo. Ver el mundo según
es y amarlo.” There is only one heroism: to see the world as it is and
to love it. Paul Harris’s legacy proclaims the truth of Miró’s
vision and promises a means for the dream to come true.
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