Sebastian Cutill:

Above all, we need to start by acknowledging that for the vast majority of analysts, this war has delivered a shock that does not confirm, but puts in question our sense of reality.

It drives home the point that adopting a realistic approach towards the world does not consist in always reaching for a well-worn toolkit of timeless verities, nor does it consist in affecting a hard-boiled attitude so as to inoculate oneself forever against liberal enthusiasm. Realism, taken seriously, entails a never-ending cognitive and emotional challenge. It involves a minute-by-minute struggle to understand a complex and constantly evolving world, in which we are ourselves immersed, a world that we can, to a degree, influence and change, but which constantly challenges our categories and the definitions of our interests. And in that struggle for realism – the never-ending task of sensibly defining interests and pursuing them as best we can – to resort to war, by any side, should be acknowledged for what it is. It should not be normalised as the logical and obvious reaction to given circumstances, but recognised as a radical and perilous act, fraught with moral consequences. Any thinker or politician too callous or shallow to face that stark reality, should be judged accordingly.

From a 2020 global health class and in honor of Paul Farmer, who fought the good fight.

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Whose Justice? Which Calculations?[1]

            Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains is in many ways a book after my own heart. It’s certainly not that my life could compare to Paul Farmer’s, or even that my writing could compare to Tracy Kidder’s. As a Christian, a surgical tech, and a worker in the medical mission field, I have a serious interest in global health, which makes Paul Farmer’s life as attractive and inviting as it is inspiring. And yet, the book would probably not stand out much at all in my own mind if it did not stand so far apart from one of the first assignments in this class, the TED Talk from the famous statistician Hans Rosling.

            I have often wondered what exactly Albert Einstein meant when he said that the certainty of mathematics depends on a kind of distance from reality.[2] Of course, he wasn’t saying that mathematics has no relation to reality, but surely it’s true that, since life always retains some degree of mystery and ambiguity (as well as disorder and value), using mathematics requires a certain separation from what we normally experience. I still can’t say that I completely grasp what he meant, but I think that if I were going to apply Einstein’s meaning to the work of any one person in the world, it would be Hans Rosling. In the assigned talk, posted under the title “Reducing Child Mortality—A Moral and Environmental Imperative,”[3] Rosling laments what he claims is the false belief that places like Africa are not doing well or that the data in Africa is nonexistent or unreliable. “I’ll prove them wrong on both points!” he says. What follows this claim is a series of charts and graphs that supposedly prove something. What it is they prove I haven’t figured out, much less how they amount to any sort of “moral imperative.” Maybe it’s best to admit that I’ve never liked talking about people and numbers in the same sentence, so when Rosling says, with no small amount of excitement, that he’s got numbers to prove how wrong we are about the world, that everything is much better than we imagine and experience it to be, I can only feel a certain resistance to his enthusiasm. And it didn’t help that I had already started reading about Paul Farmer.

            Putting aside the question of whether the story that Rosling tells—and it is a story—is even factual or narratively correct,[4] it stands in remarkable distinction to the life, and the approach, we are confronted with in Mountains Beyond Mountains. In some ways, the distinction is written in plain language, as when Farmer is asked by Ophelia to define anthropology: “He told her, in effect…that anthropology concerned itself less with measurement than with meaning” (72). In fact, it would seem that in many ways measurement is antithetical to such meaning. The sort of meaning that Farmer has in mind is not the sort that can be gathered and collected to form some point or line on a chart. Continuing to summarize Farmer’s answer about anthropology, Kidder says, “As in mastering a language, one had to learn not just the literal meanings of words but also their connotations, and to grasp those one had to know the politics and economic systems and histories of a place. Only then could you really understand an event like the mango lady’s death” (72).

            The mango lady is a woman who, because of inexcusably terrible roads, fell off a truck and died on her way to a market in Haiti. For Farmer (and for Ophelia), she is an unforgettable representation of the myriad needless deaths that take place every day. And for me, she represents at least two clear points of departure from Rosling. First is simply that it was unnecessary—and it matters that it was unnecessary. As Thomas Pogge has pointed out, the problem with data sets, like those Rosling champions, is that they do not tell a moral story at all. “The morally relevant comparison of existing poverty… is not with historical benchmarks but with present possibilities: How much of this poverty is really unavoidable today? By this standard, our generation is doing worse than any in human history.”[5] Like Pogge, Farmer is not ultimately concerned with historical benchmarks but with present ones; he simply thinks we should be doing more, much more, to help the poor. Rather than seeing how historically low the numbers might be, he sees how unnecessarily high they certainly are.

            Second—although, in a sense, preceding the first—her death cannot be understood from far away. Farmer’s approach, both through his use of anthropology and through the entire life Kidder portrays, is necessarily a present and personal one. In a word, it is incarnational—only once you’ve embedded yourself into a place like Haiti could you possibly understand what even one death means, much less place some sort of value on it. William James once remarked, in an essay otherworldly to Rosling, that a man “would needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that the total sum of significances is positively and absolutely greater at any one epoch than at any other of the world.”[6] Ask a Syrian refugee on the southern border of Turkey, or a Yazidi woman in Iraq, or a Rohingya father in Bangladesh, or a starving child in Yemen—ask them if the world is a much better place than ever before. Whose world? According to whom?[7]

I could not pretend to speak for Rosling, or Farmer, or Kidder, but the experience of reading about Paul Farmer and the experience of listening to Hans Rosling are, it seems to me, as night is to day. On one level, both men believe something very similar: both believe that most of us in the west have a certain view of the world, particularly of poorer countries, and they want to correct that view and promote a corresponding reaction. On a deeper level, the views we are asked to adopt could not be further apart, both in what they view and from where they view it. One invites us to soar above the mountains and see how nice things have become; the other stands where there are mountains beyond mountains and invites us to see the world and history “as if written in collaboration with a Haitian peasant” (116). One rises above the world and organizes numbers to make things look a certain way;[8] the other gets down on his hands and knees to listen to the world and to see what and who we are overlooking. One requires that you be wealthy and well-off and detached enough to do the math; the other requires that you be low and humble and involved enough to hear the poor.

            Peppered throughout Kidder’s book, and Farmer’s life, is a quality not only of depth and perspective but also of inspiration. In a world where we are more capable than ever of helping the poor, how do you inspire people to a life of care, service, and sacrifice? This is not only a question repeatedly asked by Farmer, but a question that a view of his life provides the answer to: it’s the life that inspires belief and belief that inspires action. A biography of someone like Paul Farmer’s is not neutral nor does it sit as a collection of data waiting for some application. “Not as a figure to watch from a distance, thinking, Oh, look, there is good in the world. Not as a comforting example, but the opposite” (102). The reason for that discomfort was mentioned earlier in the book: “because it implied such an extreme definition of a term like ‘doing one’s best’” (8).

            That challenge is as present today as at any time in any past.[9] And in that sense, Farmer’s life can intimidate as well as inspire. But here again Farmer stands out as an example. He did not begin by trying to change the world, but by applying himself to something relatively small.[10] Whether in Haiti or in downtown Augusta, each of us can be inspired to do the same. Rather than trying to quantify suffering, or progress, or our own moment of greatness, maybe we should listen again to William James, in a quote that Dorothy Day often handed out on little cards:

“I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. And I am for those tiny, invisible, loving, human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of human pride.”[11]

            Farmer seems to me to be an invitation to that sort of life, and also proof that that sort of life does not mean a life will have only a minimal impact. In the real world there are not always neat figures and progressing lines; instead there are mountain beyond mountains, and we only remain undefeated because we have gone on trying,[12] listening to and caring for those in need, even in some small but genuine way.

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[1] The title is a reference to Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

[2] “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” Taken from a speech titled “Geometry and Experience,” given at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, January 27^th, 1921. A transcript can be found here: http://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Einstein_geometry.html

[3] https://www.gapminder.org/videos/reducing-child-mortality-a-moral-and-environmental-imperative/

[4] https://quillette.com/2018/11/16/the-one-sided-worldview-of-hans-rosling/

[5] http://www.themarknews.com/2016/02/07/the-end-of-poverty/

[6] William James, “What Makes Life Significant.” Essay published in 1900. Rosling is, I think, exactly the presumptuous calculator James had in mind.

[7] The UNHCR is apparently not required to share Rosling’s optimism: https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html

[8] Jerry Fodor: “It belongs to the millennial moment to want to sum things up and see where were have gotten and point in the direction that further progress lies.”

[9] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age: “Our age makes higher demands of solidarity and benevolence on people today than ever before. Never before have so many people been asked to stretch out so far, and so consistently, so systematically, so as a matter of course, to the stranger outside the gates.” Pg. 695.

[10] Kidder discusses this in the afterword in Mountains Beyond Mountains.

[11] This quote is taken from a fantastic little lecture given in 2016 by the American Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh at Biola University Center for Christian Thought: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0qti9EyZzw

[12] T.S. Eliot, from the epigraph to Kidder’s book.

William Giraldi:

Melville remains one of the best American examples of how every important writer is foremost an indefatigable reader of golden books, someone who kneels at the altar of literature not only for wisdom, sustenance, and emotional enlargement, but with the crucial intent of filching fire from the gods.

… But we Americans have once again confused the incessant with the important, and somewhere along the line millions of our citizens have taken the illogical leap from being able to sign their names and send an email to the belief that they can write novels, which is rather like deciding to swim the English Channel simply because you’re able to take a bath. They haven’t realized that just as a successful violinist must train her ear in Bach or Stéphane Grappelli, a successful novelist must spend decades training herself in canonical literature. When Samuel Johnson said that “the greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book,” he wasn’t exaggerating.

… Art must pass through art to realize itself and endure. What is Harold Bloom’s notorious theory of “the anxiety of influence” if not a command that we become wiser readers, wiser lovers of poetic tradition, Sherlock-Holmesian text detectives? For Bloom, every “strong” poet is engaged in psychic “agon” with a strong poet who came before because every strong poet unconsciously knows he is “belated,” too late to be original. “Without Tennyson’s reading of Keats,” Bloom writes, “we would have almost no Tennyson.” As on Darwin’s battlefield, agon leads to evolution. An animal’s struggle for survival eventually builds a better beast. A writer’s struggle with classics eventually builds a better book.

If this does not open a door to understanding incarnational thought and practice—albeit via negativa—I don’t know what could. From Walker Percy’s essay “The Loss of the Creature”:

It is assumed that since the Grand Canyon has the fixed interest value P, tours can be organized for any number of people. A man in Boston decides to spend his vacation at the Grand Canyon. He visits his travel bureau, looks at the folder, signs up for a two-week tour. He and his family take the tour, see the Grand Canyon, and return to Boston. May we say that this man has seen the Grand Canyon? Possibly he has. But it is more likely that what he has done is the one sure way not to see the canyon.

Why is it almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon under these circumstances and see it for what it is—as one picks up a strange object from one’s back yard and gazes directly at it? It is almost impossible because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind. Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on. The thing is no longer the thing as it confronted the Spaniard; it is rather that which has already been formulated—by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon. As a result of this preformulation, the source of the sightseer’s pleasure undergoes a shift. Where the wonder and delight of the Spaniard arose from his penetration of the thing itself, from a progressive discovery of depths, patterns, colors, shadows, etc., now the sightseer measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex. If it does so, if it looks just like the postcard, he is pleased; he might even say, “Why it is every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!” He feels he has not been cheated. But if it does not conform, if the colors are somber, he will not be able to see it directly; he will only be conscious of the disparity between what it is and what it is supposed to be. He will say later that he was unlucky in not being there at the right time. The highest point, the term of the sightseer’s satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed symbolic complex.

James Baldwin on Shakespeare:

The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it. I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw: his public streets and his private streets, which are always so mysteriously and inexorably connected; but he trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and will again) the lot of an American writer — to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who have eyes to see and see not — I am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them.

That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people — all people! — who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there.

From Sara Hendren’s very enjoyable book, What Can a Body Do: How We Meet the Built World:

Desire lines can provide low-tech crowdsourcing for urban planners and architects, letting the habits of the walkers dictate to them how a space is best traversed, rather than trying to decide it up front. Some large campuses have postponed the paving of pathways until desire lines have first been created. One celebrated case was in the remodeling of the Illinois Institute of Technology, a project taken up by Dutch architect Rem Kookhaas and his firm, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in the late 1990s. That campus presented a particular conundrum for achieving social cohesion. It had doubled the footprint of the original institution but had only half the enrollment. What kind of building would energize and unite the school? The OMA group studied desire lines and used them to plan the campus center, unified by a long single roof. The building wasn’t so much a new creation as an observation of extant use: it effectively enclosed the pathways and connections between on campus that were already established. The single-plane building is like an archive, capturing activities in motion. It took its form from travel behaviors made newly visible, not from a series of architectural types pre-identified for recreation, shopping, and the like.

This kind of practice is a human-centered design approach to landscape, paying close attention to the details of movement and patiently observing an area over time. […]

But desire lines may also be evidence of something more than pure practicality. The casual disobedience of a desire path as an alternative to the formally prescribed walkway is remarkably simply as a human choice, willfully out of step with the way things are. Cities and towns are often planned, well, by planners, by people tasked with creating systems that make mathematical sense for groups at the scale of hundreds or thousands. They roll out pathways conceived around the efficiencies of use and cost-benefit, shunting people up and down stairs or elevators , nudging them between turnstiles and onto trains for the fastest transport. And these efficiencies are often to the good. But the emergent, informal, human-made lines are organized not only by efficiency but by desire. The human individual is also making a path through life, through interiors and exteriors, a life that cannot be measured in abstract bureaucratic terms. […]

Interesting enough on its own. But… What if creation is meant to be something similar, or even had to be. What if, to be truly incarnational, the world had to play itself out, to be “caught” in motion by God?

What archive could ever fully house the evidence of desire in the millions of walkers who daily traverse a cityscape, all the wishing and wanting that drives each path, with all their untold forms of assistance, all the getting “organized” that got them out the door and into the street? “Walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust.

And walking with is a mode of being in the world as well as making it.