12
THE BELOVED COMMUNITY
Grandfather
Look at our brokenness.
We know that we are the ones
Who are the divide
And we are the ones
Who must come back together.
The end is the creation of the Beloved Community...
It is this love that will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.
I CAME TO NEW YORK A FEW DAYS AFTER 9/11, INTO A STRICKEN city of the walking wounded. A charnel breeze, burnt and bitter, blew through the ghost town of Tribeca, making the lungs and the heart ache. Like everyone, I couldn’t sleep; I’d snap on CNN at three in the morning, nod off with it still murmuring. Below my window, ad hoc choirs of passersby serenaded firemen at the stationhouse next door, its bricks festooned with Missing posters, homemade floral wreaths, and kids’ crayon drawings of skyscrapers blooming with flame and cherry ladder trucks zooming to the rescue. I watched friends straggle back toward faith or lose it.
U2’s bittersweet ode to love, loss, and bravery, “Beautiful Day,”was on the airwaves. Beneath tragedy’s skin, there were invisible sinews of tenderness. Even my most tough-minded friends seemed surprised at how catastrophe had catalyzed a sense of mutual belonging, had reawakened—on the street, in offices, cabs, and elevators—some instinct to be better, to love more. Despite the news testifying to an ineradicable streak of human brutishness, you could feel what anthropologist Stephen Gould called“the victorious weight of innumerable little kindnesses.” It became impossible to relegate compassion to mere sentiment, to a poignant lump in the throat or a one-off act of charity. It was as basic as air.
But things gradually drifted, in fits and starts, back to normal. “Everyone was wide open,” observed a friend, “but then they crusted over again.”As the months passed, there were fewer uncalled-for hugs, tears, and smiles. Down went the“Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War”placards on Union Square; up went the velvet ropes that let some in and kept most out. Subway riders no longer wedged their bodies into a closing door so stragglers wouldn’t be left behind. New York’s patented get-outta-my-way-I’m-going-places street pushiness made a comeback.“People loved that tender we’re-in-this-together feeling, however awful the cause,”said my friend, a lifelong Manhattanite.“But they couldn’t quite hang onto it.”
How to understand this mysterious force at once fundamental and fugitive, emerging in crisis as our natural endowment, only to be crowded out by our pressing little agendas? To say nothing of our national ones: the notion of building a more compassionate world quickly took a backseat to the dictates of security. The then secretary of defense sardonically quoted Al Capone:“You will get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.”The peacemakers were banished to the kids’ table with the rest of the utopians. It’s said we’ve crossed a historic threshold, from an interregnum of innocence to a new age of terror.
I don’t believe it. Yes, there is awful public tragedy, wrenching private sorrow, the dire clangor of arms. Plague-dogs of rage and cynicism roam the planet’s nameless back alleys (and some name-brand front offices too). And we are not safe. I read it in the Times; I can read it in Thucydides. It is a long battle, this struggle between love and hate. But if love is ever to triumph, it’s not enough for us to just knock the haters off their thrones. We need a regime change of the heart.
That somber week in September, the barricade-keepers by the“pile”—terse Irish cops and narrow-eyed young soldiers with M-1 carbines—looked shell-shocked. Behind them grim truths were being excavated by the hour. The sky above was a mottled bruise from the lingering miasma of vaporized glass and steel and bone; fused elements new to Earth sifted down from the plume over Ground Zero. There seemed to be nothing to do but mourn and leave the cleanup to the uniformed municipal employees who now straddled the truncated skyline. I felt useless, but I couldn’t imagine what I could do—what help I could be to the guys scooping up the horrific wreckage with cranes and dump trucks. I was unaware that behind the barricades something—something heartening, even wondrous—had escaped the jaws of darkness entirely.
Its epicenter was Saint Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Church, an eighteenth-century architectural gem at the foot of the towers, that had survived miraculously unscathed (“standing defiant,”in the mayor’s phrase). A team of young parishioners and clergy had immediately reopened the chapel, and the entire world had flooded in. The site had attracted givers from every compass point (disaster experts call this the“convergence phenomenon”), some with official sanction, others fast-talking their way through police lines, all intent on supporting the rescue workers. Those city crews faced a disheartening task, searching around-the-clock for survivors in what was turning out to be a mass grave. But out of the cauldron of despair arose something beyond the ubiquity of death: a community based on, in the words of one volunteer,“trying to outdo one another in the showing of love.”
Theologian Courtney Cowart, then forty, was in a church office a few blocks from the towers when the planes hit. She’d heard the percussive roar of a hundred floors pancaking, endured a sudden dark night as her building’s ventilation system sucked in the black soot. She had made her way out through the chaos, managing to shepherd some visiting monks and clergy to safety before the second tower fell and she had to run for her life.“I was one of those gray ghosts coming up Fifth Avenue covered in ash,”she tells me over breakfast in a Greek greasy spoon. It had been a near-death experience, she says, one that had kindled an overwhelming desire“to walk back into the enormity of the void”and somehow be of help.
The church’s corporate types seemed bureaucratically paralyzed and virtually incommunicado. Instead, a makeshift community of helpers sprang up of its own accord, like proverbial grass blades poking through pavement, and the ensuing stories are legend: giant vats of Cajun food cooked up by a crew that materialized from New Orleans, truckloads of brand-new boots donated to workers whose own had virtually melted off in the smoldering pit. Under the auspices of the chapel’s Reverend Lyndon Harris, and with Courtney as newly minted chief of staff, what had begun as a ragtag collection of food and aid stands planted amid knee-deep debris became a twenty-four-hour, all-volunteer support operation for the men and the women digging through the rubble.
But there was a story behind the story, she says—a mystery, a revelation of something so marvelous that many who witnessed it are still grappling with its impact. Ten thousand volunteers of every political stripe, income level, race, and sexual persuasion, of every religion and no religion, had transubstantiated tragedy into an ad hoc affirmation of humanity’s indestructible goodness of heart.
It was a defining event for those who experienced it, a harrowing of their old ground of belief and the planting of new, still-unknown seeds. Joseph Bradley, a hardhat crane operator who had helped build the World Trade Center when he was twenty-two, had volunteered to help pull up the wreckage. Like so many workers at the site, he was overwhelmed by the carnage at the pile, sinking to the curb after his first night under the savagely bright arc lamps, his head cradled in his hands.“That’s when the Salvation Army kids appeared,”he remembers,“in their sneakers with their pink hair and their belly buttons showing and bandannas tied around their faces. They came with water and cold towels and took my boots off and put dry socks on my feet.
“And then, when I got to Houston Street, a bunch more of these kids, all pierced and tattooed with multicolored hair, had made a little makeshift stage. They started to cheer as we came out, and that was it for me. I never identified with those people before, but I started crying, and I cried for four blocks. I can’t tell you—I was taken so off guard.
“I got home and saw my wife, who asked, ‘Joe, are you okay?’
“‘Sure!’ I said. You know, the bravado came back.
“But she said, ‘Are you sure? Go look in the mirror.’
“There I was with my filthy dirty face and just two clean lines down from my eyes.”
A community of love was the last thing anyone had expected to find in the mouth of Hell. Douglas Brown, a monastic prior, had stood upon the still-smoking pile and imagined he was standing on a new Golgotha. The awesome devastation, he said, was“like a place of crucifixion.”To him fell the soul-crushing task of blessing human remains as the heat of the wreckage coursed up through his shoes and the naked, crazily canted gothic arches from the tower’s first floor seemed to mock all sacraments.
One day he saw a small, aged fireman digging through a slope of debris, searching with his comrades for his missing son, who had last been seen trying to rescue people in the collapsing South Tower. A week later Brown saw a news photo of the same fireman tenderly carrying a body from the pile. He prayed that the man had found what he had been seeking.
“It struck me then, on the spot, that what I was seeing, acted out in front of me, was all that Jesus said about the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine of his flock and goes looking for the one who is lost—this obsessive commitment not to leave anybody behind, even though it was clear no one would ever be found alive, that they still needed to be found, they needed to be cherished and honored.”
SAINT PAUL’S, WITH ITS GOLD-ENCRUSTED ALTAR AND SPARkling chandeliers, was the church of the eminent and the powerful. George Washington had once bowed his head in his own reserved pew. The altarpiece—Mount Sinai wreathed in clouds and lightning—was the work of Pierre L’Enfant, designer of the nation’s capital. It was Wall Street’s chapel, where titans of American finance had searched their souls, seeking benediction (and maybe absolution) for the keenness of their enterprise. Now it became a church dedicated only to the fruits of compassion.
In place of Stations of the Cross, the enactment of Christ’s tortured journey, there were instead what one called“stations of compassion”that grew to include gourmet meals and clothing, massage therapists and grief counselors. Everything was donated in a spirit the people who were there still remark upon.“Everybody who walked in that door experienced the same amount of love,”recalls one volunteer.“It didn’t matter who they were. It was so unconditional and so overpowering. And when you were there, you knew that every creature in that room was loved as much as you were—and you were loved more than anybody. I mean, there was no quantity to it.”
Few of us, it seems, feel deserving of uncontingent goodness, yet here it was in flagrant abundance. Maybe it was embarrassing to know, really know, that it had been there all along, free for the taking and the giving. Martin Cowart, a fifty-three-year-old Tribeca restaurateur, was recruited by his cousin Courtney to run the food service. He’s no sentimentalist. Only blocks away was the charred hulk of the bank where he’d once worked as a numbers-juggling financial wizard. He’d traded his pinstripes for downtown hipster black in his second career in the viciously competitive New York food trade. His last venture, a shabby-chic neighborhood coffeehouse, had just lost its lease before the planes tore into the towers. He remembers his awe at the small miracle that became known by the shorthand“Nine-Twelve”by those who were part of it.“People helped each other because there was nothing else to do,”he says.“The emotional need was so great that it was almost like madness, a human madness of giving and receiving to each other no matter what that was. It was such a strong current, you could not resist it.”
Many who were there commented how shared suffering had engendered a sense of wholeness, even joy, a profound paradox one summed up cryptically as,“Most pain, best time.”
“For me, it was hearing the story of a person who lost a loved one, every single day,”says Martin Cowart.“I felt this deep, deep sense of human pain that I don’t remember I had ever felt. I think the common denominator is the breakdown of your ego to a place of vulnerability. We are brought up to think we all want to be happy and comfortable and up— and that’s what we’re programmed to go for. And I don’t think anybody in their right mind would want to go for the other. But when you have been put there, you become aware that you can relate to others who have been there as well— hearing firemen talking about finding bodies the night before and feeling the pain they were going through. And it wasn’t morbid. It was just...connected.”
With that connection, all barriers seemed to tumble. Jews from a nearby synagogue helped celebrate the Eucharist. A clergyman laughs at the memory: “’You did the what?’ I asked them.’Yep,’ they said. ‘We did. This is our church, too.’ It was a full-service chapel for everybody. Even the atheists were happy.”
Another parishioner remembers being deeply affected as a rabbi stood at the pulpit to deliver a memorial sermon.“He said, ‘The crucifix is one of the most beautiful symbols of mankind because it points straight to heaven and across to each other. Now is the time to strengthen that“across.”’”In the Church of Nine-Twelve,“across”became the only hierarchy. New York’s notorious codes of class and signifiers of status disintegrated.
“When somebody asks, ‘What do you do?’ and I say, ‘sanitation worker,’”says Tony Palimeri,“I always have in the back of my mind that they might be saying, ‘But you’re a garbage man.’ But everybody was so great. They didn’t care what I did. They didn’t care I was heavy. What they cared about was me as a person. Nobody had any agenda. No one was trying to outshine anyone. Just people coming together saying, ‘You help me. I’ll help you. We’ll help each other.’ And I started to learn a little bit about people—that we all need each other.”
Mary Morris, assistant to the dean of the seminary and wife of an Episcopal priest, recalls her astonishment as the staid institution’s pecking order turned upside down:“I saw a bishop cleaning toilets at Saint Paul’s while a sanitation worker was preaching! Every time I went down there, and I encountered somebody I would never ever have spoken to in my real life, it’s like my soul went up in love. Our facades were stripped. It was like it pushed Mary Morris, egocentric human being, aside. What Nine-Twelve taught me, absolutely concretely, is we’re all in it together and we’re all the same. And when you are equal, there are endless possibilities of communion and community.”
Each person in his own way felt he was bearing witness to something unprecedented, some proof positive that a less troubled world was possible, one where simple compassion made the carnage splayed at their feet seem a vestige of some bygone dark age. Was the experience at Saint Paul’s a freak exception in troubled times, a temporary resurrection of what theologians call“the primitive church”—or a homing beacon of the future?
“Up until that point, universal love was theoretical for me,”says Courtney Cowart.“I’d only read about the idea, and then it appeared in our midst, this microcosm of the Kingdom on Earth made visible. Then it was gone, vanished, with only the people who were there knowing how real it was—and still is.”To her the story of the little church that stood was not a symbol of defiance or evidence of the indomitability of a faithful nation. It was a harbinger, a living prophecy of the caring society to come.
It was what Martin Luther King Jr. had glimpsed one day in the spring of 1966, after the March to Montgomery, as he gazed out over several thousand homeward-bound marchers who had been delayed at the airport. Amazed and touched as he looked out over the crowd, King wrote in Where Do We Go from Here: “As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids and shop workers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future.”
For Courtney Cowart, Nine-Twelve changed everything. Whatever she’d thought was important, her rising career as a theologian, was reshaped in the crucible. What she had seen was more than what the Church could be. She had seen what the world could be.“I realized I would not be able to go back to arguing over altar linens,”she says wryly.
That September she had been thrilled to have lunchtime colloquies with the archbishop of Canterbury. Now, she spends two hours each day feeding lunch to Mr. Pierre, the paralyzed, speechless father of a Trinidadian friend.“I didn’t know where the treasure was,”she says.“In God’s economy you put the other first. That’s what makes us thrive and feel most joyous.”Wasn’t this, after all, the original impetus behind every church and synagogue and mosque and temple: an affirmation that compassion is a contagion, its flame leaping heart to heart, blazing without being consumed, like the miraculous desert bush?
I’ve heard other anecdotes of this mysterious conflagration that fires souls, melding them together. My friend Svetlana grew up in the old Soviet Union, where joining the Young Pioneers was obligatory and college students were expected to volunteer to serve the state. One summer she and a few other young women were put in charge of a rustic retreat for forty hard-luck kids, mostly preteen victims of child abuse.
“We were scared at first,”Svetlana remembers.“We’d been dumped at this place in the woods with all these screwed-up kids, no training, no teaching materials, no structure: good old Communism! What did we know?”Then, unexpectedly, something shifted.“The strangest thing”she says.“We fell in love with them, the most helpless kind of love. These kids were such a mess, so needy, that it just drew it out of us. Maybe it was our maternal instincts waking up with a bang, but we were drunk on unconditional love, and they felt it; they began to change, too, under the influence of this power.”
Svetlana’s not one for feel-good kitsch—she has, if anything, a certain Russian dolor—but she fills for a moment with a kind of wonder, smiling at the memory:“We found out we could easily teach them all their school subjects, all the ones they’d been miserably failing at, and they just soaked it up like sponges. I’m convinced we could have given them advanced calculus, and they would have learned it from us, under the force of this love. Honestly, it’s something I’ve never felt before or since. As the summer ended, I found myself wishing I could adopt them all. It was devastating to leave this community we’d all made.”
MANY SCIENTISTS REMAIN SKEPTICAL THAT THERE COULD be such a thing as a truly caring community. Some seem almost gleeful in wiping the moue of self-satisfied virtue from the do-gooder’s face, in stifling the trill of the pie-eyed optimist.“No hint of genuine charity ameliorates our vision of society once sentimentalism has been laid aside,”wrote biologist Michael Ghiselin in a famously acerbic passage.“The economy of nature is competitive from beginning to end...What passes for cooperation turns out to be a mixture of opportunism and exploitation...”
Science is a tough job, and someone’s got to do it, but—those sharp little teeth, rending at our most cherished beliefs. It’s a view that doesn’t conduce to sunlit idealism, but maybe that’s the point. There have been enough utopian pipe dreams about what society could be, based on dangerous wishful thinking about human nature (“scientific socialism,”anyone?).
But we sense that the picture Ghiselin and his ilk are showing us is only the torn-off corner of a much larger one. While those who sourly assess our possibilities have looked in one direction, some scientists are starting to look in another. A recent Emory University study showed that when players of a game called Prisoner’s Dilemma decided to trust each other and cooperate rather than betray each other for gain (as the game allows and even encourages), a part of the brain associated with feelings of joy lit up. Forget“Greed is good": Social cooperation has its own neurological reward-circuit, portioning out the endogenous dollops of pleasure that are evolution’s good housekeeping seal of approval.
The study of such“prosocial”(as opposed to antisocial) feelings is so new that it’s still possible for scientists to put emotions on the map that hitherto hadn’t been named. Jon Haidt, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia, wasn’t setting out to be the heart’s Magellan; it’s just that he’d gotten his own broken, and it hurt like hell. Miserable, Haidt had a sudden insight:“Hey, there’s an actual pain here; an aching heart isn’t just a metaphor”His dashed romance temporarily eclipsed by scientific curiosity, he began asking colleagues in the Biology Department how they would explain his feeling. The general consensus was the vagus nerve that ferries signals back and forth between heart and brain.
It made Haidt wonder about another heart sensation that had always intrigued him: that warmth in the chest (often accompanied by a“choked-up”feeling) that we sometimes get when we witness a good deed. Haidt found that this response, which he dubbed“elevation,”usually occurred when witnessing someone helping the downtrodden, the sick, or the weak. He quotes an interview with a woman who was driving home with three friends after a morning of volunteer work for the Salvation Army. It had been snowing hard, the flakes piled up in a thick blanket, when they’d passed an old woman trying to shovel her driveway. One of the men in the group asked to be let off.“I didn’t think much of it,”the woman said.“I had assumed that this guy just wanted to save the driver some effort and walk the short distance home. But when I saw him jump out of the backseat and approach the lady... I realized that he was offering to shovel her walk for her.
"I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy,”the woman reported, still surprised at her strong reaction.“I felt like singing and running, or skipping and laughing... I felt like saying nice things about people, playing in the snow like a child, telling everybody about his deed.”
That this small act of kindness had a specific and disproportionate effect tipped Haidt off that a built-in biological response might be at work. The woman had experienced such a profound lifting of her spirits that she gushed about it to her roommates, who in turn clutched their hearts and smiled. Why are we so moved by good deeds? he wondered. A neo-Darwinian to the core, Haidt was sure that evolution must have had something in mind to install such an automatic response. Elevation also seems to be unusually contagious, often accompanied by what he academically labels“changes in the thought-action repertoire.”When he asked his respondents if the feeling had made them want to do something, they described an almost overwhelming desire to“be with, love, and help other people.”
Feelings of elevation also seem to foster admiration and a desire for closer affiliation with the good deed-doer. Said the woman in the snow-shoveling incident,“Although I have never seen this guy as more than just a friend, I felt a hint of romantic feeling for him at this moment.”(I wonder if this attraction isn’t a sign that evolution is tickled by the prospect of a few more altruistic genes in the pool.)
Film directors, noted critic Roger Ebert, have learned they can reliably tear-jerk any audience anywhere by having the hero perform an act of noble self-sacrifice. Haidt has collected enough descriptions across cultures and through history to conclude that elevation is a universal human trait. A forty-six-year-old Japanese housewife described how she felt when she saw people volunteer to help after a natural disaster:“The heart brightens up [akarui] and I feel glad [yokatta], relieved [anshin], admiration [sugoi], and respect [sonkei].” A primary school principal in a small village in Orissa, India, reported a feeling of joy (ananda) and a tingling sensation in his body when he saw people in his school step forward to defend a teacher wrongly accused of having stolen some books. Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend about his“elevated sentiments”upon seeing“an act of charity or gratitude,”describing the feeling in his chest as“dilation.”(Think of the expression“My heart swelled.”)
A Unitarian parishioner told Haidt of his“tears of celebration”when his church voted unanimously to become a Welcoming Congregation (a church that officially invites homosexuals) after a gay member stood up and publicly came out for the first time. The man described it as“a tear of receptiveness to what is good in the world, a tear that says, ‘It’s okay, relax, let down your guard, there are good people in the world, there is good in people, love is real, it’s in our nature.’”It reminded me of a comment made by one of the Nine-Twelve communicants:“I discovered the emotional magnificence of life. The joy of being human. Living that love for real. The beauty of it. The glory of it. The confirmation of it. The glee of it.”
Elevation opens a picture window onto the expanse of our nature. It implies that we are drawn to each other’s goodness, hardwired to exult over it. The elation seems to stem, as much as anything, from sensing oneself part of some common stream of virtue—an apotheosis of you in me, me in you; a sort of we in us.
Haidt uses a secret weapon in his lab studies: an Oprah episode that he claims is a surefire tearjerker the flintiest heart cannot resist.“Bring it on,”I told him. I popped his“induction sequence” into my DVD as soon as it arrived, settling back to watch with a certain can’t-make-me-cry stoicism. It was the story of a ghetto kid whose life had been turned around by a kindly public-school music teacher. The young candidate for the thug life had instead gone on to fame as a jazz trumpeter, but he had never forgotten his crucial father figure. Years later it influenced his unexpected decision, at the pinnacle of his career, to become a public-school teacher. As he told his story, the camera panned to his old mentor planted in the audience, head bowed, overcome with emotion.
Then Oprah surprised the young man by showing a video of his students thanking him for changing their lives, and, well...the teardrop-shaped stain on this page is not the manufacturer’s watermark. Afterward I trundled over to the HeartMath equipment still set up in a corner of my living room and confirmed, as Haidt’s own studies have shown, that his devilishly sappy video increases heart-rate variability. My balloon was floating in the stratosphere: I was certifiably elevated.
“The effect is real, all right,”Haidt tells me.“One of my pet peeves is this notion that you can explain away virtue as just secret selfishness. Scientists haven’t looked at it in the right spirit. We really do have some beautiful things in our nature.”
He is particularly intrigued by elevation’s“power to spread. A witness to good deeds,”he writes, may“soon become a doer of good deeds... If frequent bad deeds trigger social disgust, cynicism, and hostility toward one’s peers, then frequent good deeds may raise the level of compassion, love, and harmony in an entire society.”I might once have taken this for a Chamber of Commerce brochure from the Wonderful Land of Oz. Now I’m not so sure.
STILL, LET’S FACE IT: FREQUENT GOOD DEEDS ASIDE, THE WORLD of frequent bad deeds is still very much with us. Hatred too is a contagion—and sometimes a pandemic. I found myself in the Balkans a few years back, not long after Serbia’s ethnic-cleansing campaign had been halted by NATO’s bombardment. The war was over, but war and peace are more than the victories and the defeats of armies. Even in Dubrovnik’s fanciest hotel, the grim-faced maitre d’ seemed a vestige of the old police state, still uncertain whether to greet the guests, guard the buffet table, or round up the diners for questioning.
I was in Croatia for a conference of peace activists. That week the country had advanced to the World Cup soccer quarterfinals, and bedlam ruled. Young men ran through the cobbled streets of the Old City waving flags and pounding the roofs of passing cars. A thoughtful Serbian student protest leader remarked that it had been like this when the malignant nationalism had taken hold in Belgrade. In every bar, he said, you could hear the hoarse bellowing of fight songs, see drunks tumbling into the street in hard knots, accosting passersby. There was a woozy, tingling excitement in the air.“You were expected to join in this euphoria, in everyone losing themselves in the group mind, or you were looked on with suspicion.”
I’ve never been in a war. The idea of a whole society deciding to hoist a warm gun instead of a cold beer and turn it on their neighbors is mystifying. Supposedly, there was still sporadic shooting a few hours away in Mostar, even years after the conflict’s end. I convinced a young Croat named Igor who knew the town to drive me there. We pulled into a charming city center dominated by the snaggle-toothed stone walls of old Roman ruins—or so I thought, until Igor informed me they were bombed-out buildings, this one an office complex, that one a department store, here a mosque, there a church, now gutted and tumbledown. At one point, he said, opposing forces had arrayed themselves on opposite sides of the main street and simply blasted away at each other.
The bridges of Mostar over the meandering River Neretva, once famed for their beauty, had become infamous symbols of the gulf between the Muslim and Croat quarters of a newly divided city. At the height of the conflict, if you were a Muslim attempting to cross into a Croat area or vice versa, you stood a good chance of having your forehead drilled with a small, neat hole by a waiting sniper.
“How could they tell who was who?”I asked. Muslims here are mostly light skinned and often blue eyed; everyone looks alike. Well, Igor said, sometimes it was the ethnic giveaways: a scarf on a woman, the size and the composition of family groups. But mostly, since it was a small town, people knew each other on sight. The idea confounded me: If you recognized a former neighbor who was now your newly designated enemy, said Igor,“Maybe you just plugged him, pam!”
I was reminded of how, a few years ago, authorities in my town had taken a sixth-grader into custody, confiscating a select list of classmates on which he’d penciled the word Kill next to each name. (I live in the Columbine shooting state; there’s no such thing here as a schoolboy prank.) The student told police he’d created his roster based on which kids“looked weird”to him: a boy with freckles, a girl who was too skinny. The Balkan madness seemed just as arbitrary: the sociopathy of small differences; the mind’s gearbox seized up in low, stuck in some primitive sortition of good and bad, friend and enemy; its talent for abstract distinction turned, during a time of derangement, into a murder motive.
We wandered into the Muslim part of town, finding ourselves beneath a seven-story mosque, its minaret crowned with a curlicue of metal flame, the speaker system blaring a recorded muezzin’s call to one o’clock prayer. But the people themselves were taciturn. The streets were reservoirs of silence, brimming with terrible secrets.
We finally stumbled by accident across a little office with a sign that read“Human Rights.”A stocky, dark-skinned man in his late forties excused himself from a meeting of Muslim and Croat young people—reconcilers in whom all hope for the future resides—and came over to talk. He wanted to explain what had happened here. Igor translated as he began his story where everyone did, with recitals of territories seized and retaken over centuries, capped by the rise of the crazy men, Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milosevic (“an idiot lost in space and time”), who used boundaries and ethnicities to fuel their megalomaniacal ambitions.
But what had really happened? I asked. In this city every third marriage was a mixed one, with residents living side by side in an ethnic patchwork locals compared to stripes on a tiger skin. He shrugged: Mostar had been a symbol of harmony, a rendezvous of East and West, and so, of course, it had to be destroyed. The propaganda machine had cranked into overdrive.“Who you prayed to, where your family was originally from, suddenly became all-important—to get people to hate each other. People are not poultry,”he sighed,“but they behaved that way.”
He described the night they’d come for him.“They burst into my apartment in their black ski masks, and I thought I was dead for sure. But then I suddenly recognized the one holding the AK-47—he was the son of a neighbor! I recognized him from his voice, his eyes. ‘I know you,’ I said. ‘I know your father. I knew you as a child.’” At first the man tried to disguise his voice by lowering it to an ominous growl, but then he hesitated, softened for a moment, and spared his neighbor’s life.
I kept pushing for more of an answer, though I was beginning to realize there wasn’t one. We’d lapsed into French by this time, his fluent, mine such as I could retrieve from the undergraduate mists.
“C’était les têtes vides,” he finally sputtered.“The empty-heads! Without a brain! People in town, one after another, people you knew, people you’d always known, all were tout-à-fait empty-heads!”For some years, it seems, the Empty Heads had been the region’s dominant political party.
Or perhaps it was not so much a case of empty-headedness as heads stuffed with loony ideas, minds hijacked by roving gangs of delusions, brains infected with some mutant cultural spirochete against which they had all too little resistance.“Men will die like flies for theories and exterminate each other with every instrument of destruction—for abstractions,”notes an all-too-prescient 1938 paper on aggression and war. What was it Gandhi said about your thoughts becoming your destiny? Here was a textbook example of the power of mental fixation to paint reality in any color—in this case, dead black.
The mass mind-meld was, per usual, incalculably amplified by media, fueling the descent into society-wide paranoia. Says Milos Vasic, editor of Vreme, the only independent magazine in Belgrade during the war:“All it took was a few years of reckless, intolerant, warmongering propaganda to create enough hate to start the fighting.” To understand what happened, Vasic says,“Imagine a United States with every little TV station everywhere broadcasting Klansman David Duke. You too would have war in five years.”
I remember a conversation with a student leader, half-Bosnian, half-Serbian, who belonged to an interethnic youth organization that called itself the Post-Pessimists. She told me how, at the height of the war, she had been horror-struck to see Serbian television news footage of an atrocity committed by Bosnian troops. A few weeks later, sneaking across the border to visit her Bosnian relatives, she had seen the same footage again, only now it was attributed to Serbian troops.“For all I know,”she said,“it was some old footage from World War II!”She looked at me and said, half in plea, half in declaration:“So, do we just keep our parents from killing each other, or do we change the whole human equation?”
THAT’S EASY: CHANGE THE EQUATION. BUT IS THERE ANY inoculation that could prevent the next outbreak of this dread social pestilence, this anti-elevation that turns friends to enemies and town squares to ancient ruins? Violence is not just the doing of crazy men, who’d remain street-corner ranters if no one saluted. Real peace seems to depend on a culture’s baseline immunocompetence, some self-healing system that kills hate germs dead on contact.
Colombian priest Leonel Narváez so believes in social healing that he is leading a government-sponsored, historically unprecedented experiment in mass psychotherapy. With the goal of helping tens of thousands of ex-combatants from his country’s brutal civil war reintegrate as civilians, he has organized cadres of therapists to address combat traumas that, left untreated, would inevitably trigger renewed conflict. Leonel had spent long years working in what he calls“The Kingdom of the FARC,”the rural villages controlled by the insurgent Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, mediating between the guerillas and the government.
Leonel grew up in the same small town as the former FARC leader, nicknamed Tirofijo, or“Sure Shot”after his flair for killing enemies with a single bullet. They even shared the same birthday, although they couldn’t have been more different. The town’s old people said of Tirofijo,“The desire for vengeance ate him up.”Leonel, now in his late forties, has long been consumed with the desire to make the only permanent peace—the peace of the heart.“I was once trying to explain to Tirofijo that hatred and anger mostly hurt the person who experiences those feelings. Tirofijo just snapped, ‘Get down from the clouds, priest!’”
Leonel, head in the clouds, maybe, but feet planted on terra firma, has moved ahead with a series of bold social initiatives, founding Schools of Forgiveness and Reconciliation known by the acronym ESPERE (Spanish for“hope”), which are slowly spreading throughout the country. He doesn’t plan to quit until he’s turned his whole war-accursed nation into a beloved community. Though he is a strong believer in justice and human rights, he is convinced that what he simply calls“tenderness”is the ultimate antidote.“The heart is where violence is born,”he says,“and so it is there where peace is reborn.”
Leonel knows that the world has had its fill of grand social engineers, the ones with the Big Ideas who pretty well screwed up the twentieth century for everyone else. He just wants to ensure that brotherly love and forgiveness aren’t“a monopoly held by churches and priests but indispensable elements of everyday life.”His ideas may look simple in the extreme, but that simplicity is deceptive.“Against the irrationality of violence, it is necessary to propose the irrationality of forgiveness,”he says slyly.
For him it’s not just about the FARC or the government or the right-wing paramilitaries. It’s about the sodden meanness of the streets, the domestic violence against women and children, the police who“model aggression to the citizens,”even the human rights workers who, he says,“have so much anger and hate they’re also in the trap.”His“reconciliation schools”represent a crucial step from peace treaties to peaceful entreaties, from truce enforcement to truth-force. He recites his classrooms’ core curriculum:“I decide to move from darkness to light; I choose to forgive; I see with new eyes; I share the pain; I accept the other within me.”It’s a new pledge of human allegiance.
”We need new ideas of conciliation,”says Leonel.“Not just techniques because they don’t get to the root.” This is more than just a wistful lament from a new-age Catholic priest who wishes everyone would just be really, really nice to each other. The mayor of Bogotà has asked Leonel to help him transform the city of 8 million into a new urban paradigm based on mutual understanding.
“We’re going to try to transplant it into civics,”says Leonel.“We’re proposing a citywide network of reconciliation. We’re going to try to reverse the historical and cultural attitudes that say you react to violence with more violence, that you should punish a crime with a crime. It’s hard even for me to believe, but now there’s a bill in the Congress for a new law based on restorative justice. We’re training the police not to speak the way their gun speaks, but to speak with their hearts. We need a whole culture of reconciliation, where even people who get aggressive behind the wheel learn to drive with compassion.”
Tirofijo died before Leonel could realize a fond wish:“To be the one to say to him, with great respect: ‘Get down from the clouds, Don Manuel. Without forgiveness and reconciliation there is no future. Not for you and not for anyone!’”Leonel’s goal, he says, is to help build a new city from the inside out.
I CAN’T ALWAYS SEE IT, THIS GLIMMERING HOPE BECOMING A reality. Nor hear it, for that matter, what with Alpha Chimp Björn rolling his orange war drum down too many of the world’s Main Streets, slam-banging for all he’s worth. But I like to think he already senses he’s a creature of the past, making a big noise while he still can. With the day fast approaching that a handful of angry, calculating people can blow up not just a restaurant but the city that lists it in the Yellow Pages, the good of each is tied to the good of all. What happens in our own hearts is suddenly as big as the whole world. It’s true our human task is made harder by the institutionalization of hurt and harm, by an accumulated investment in the ruin of our own prospects. But we are, collectively, wiser than our leaders, kinder than our institutions, and more open-hearted than our dogmas.
On my better days, I feel I’m witnessing, across the planet, the subversive innervation of some neural net of kindness whose filaments are so fine as to be invisible (but like threads from a spider’s spinnerets, more tensile than steel). It no longer seems far-fetched to imagine a kind of compassion insurgency—a revolt against all the wasteful diversions of our creativity; a Good Society Movement, if you will; a self-emergent, adaptive cultural mutation. Could the sum of all the little changes be a popular uprising of the heart that will burst forth, as did the soft revolutions of ironclad Eastern Europe, seemingly out of nowhere? Is our global organism developing prosocial antibodies against the plague that has too long infected the body politic?
I know citizen-negotiators who have reconciled Azerbai-janis and Armenians—nationalities with centuries of murderous grudgery—using just skills of compassionate listening and bearing witness to each other’s hurt. I know a freelance mediator who believes that parties in conflict want nothing more from each other than empathy. Marshall Rosenberg has brought the technique he calls Nonviolent Communication to nearly sixty countries, from Afghanistan to Turkey. He travels around the world with a guitar case and a suitcase full of silly props—a jackal puppet (to symbolize paranoid, judgmental thought and speech) and giraffe ears (to signify an ability to listen openly—giraffes having the animal kingdom’s largest heart-to-body ratio). He’s seen how kindness spreads person to person, he says. He’s seen the techniques he calls Nonviolent Communication taught in a hundred schools from Ashkelon in Israel to the Navajo nation. He’s an utter eccentric, plainspoken and deliberate, with a mournful look that disguises the sly, slow-dawning sense of humor that has helped to reconcile Tutsis and Hutus, rival street gangs, and battling spouses.
“I feel like there are two different worlds,”he tells me.“There’s the world I’m living in, where every day I meet people who are doing all these wonderful things. And then there’s the world of these folks,”he says, gesturing to the complimentary copy of USA Today lying on the bedspread in his hotel room. He shakes his head.“They don’t seem to connect at all.”
It does seem that we suffer from a collective cognitive dissonance. We know the children are starving; the ice caps really are melting. We know our designer sweats are connected to designer sweatshops, our automobiles to the turbid atmosphere, the food on our table to the dwindling water table and the chemicalized soil. We sense that life in the developed world has become a desire machine cranked up to maximum RPM, spinning out a dizzying succession of induced wants for which satisfaction is supplied, scratches for itches, at fair market price—no matter the cost. We also know there’s already enough to feed, clothe, house, heal, and educate everyone, without exception. It’s less a shortage of resources than a shortchanging of imagination: compassion being an ability to imagine—to see —the connection between everyone and everything, everywhere.
From that standpoint, isn’t that connection love itself? Isn’t it love itself that underlies all wanting? Don’t we only consume the Earth in our hunger for a love already abundant in our own hearts— and waiting in each other’s? And if, enriched by that love, we took less and gave more, would we not see the Midas world we’ve built recede, and the outlines of the Beloved Community emerge?
THAT COMMUNITY’S FOUNDING MEMBERS ARE THE ONES WHO root for the other team, the people Martin Luther King Jr. prophesied we would become when“our loyalties...transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation.”I know a young Bosnian woman named Nadja, who was terribly wounded by Serbian shrapnel during the siege of Sarajevo. After the war, watching one of the Serbian soldiers who had rained death on the city weep during his televised trial, she wept, too. When her brother angrily scolded her, telling her this could have been the very man who’d lobbed the mortar round at her, she said:“I can’t keep a separate heart, one for my friends and one for my enemies.”Nadja’s no pushover: She has gone on to become an effective global campaigner against child slavery and the abuse of women.
She echoed a Burmese activist named Ka Hsaw Wa, who told me he learned to feel empathy—what is called in his language ko gin ser (“my heart is trying to be your heart”)—for the government soldiers who have attacked and tortured him and his people, even as he opposes their brutality with the nonviolent weapon of international law. He is an effective activist—his group won a case against a California oil giant complicit in brutalizing villagers to build a pipeline—yet he confides he prayed for the corporate exec who lost his job after their victory.
He and growing numbers of others are the loyal subjects of the Country of You in Me, the Empire of Everybody. Behind the daily headlines that give little hint of it, I can’t help but see the obvious: a world yet poised on the brink of self-discovery, awakening to the fact that if we are to go anywhere, we must all go there together.