6
On Mattering
Lessons from Ancient Wisdom, Literature, and the New Sciences

Barbara Mossberg

The new sciences, especially chaos and complexity theories, show us that everything affects everything else, which undermines the notion that any one country, any one kind of people, or any one set of ideas is central while others are at best tangential. This realization also can free you up from any remaining fear that only certain leaders—at the top of countries, global corporations, or international agencies—have power and the rest of us are nobodies without the means to make a difference. In the final essay in this section, Barbara Mossberg demonstrates how ancient wisdom, literature, and modern science combine to affirm that we all do matter—and hence how important it is that each of us steps forward to make a difference. Her essay is, thus, a call to you to assume responsibility for your own part in making the difference needed today. In the process, she also urges you to take the time to understand complexity, beginning with your own.

To believe … that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense…. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within…. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’m Nobody—who are You?
Are you—Nobody—too?
—Emily Dickinson

Who are you? The struggle for identity and belonging is our human work. We may not know who we are, but we long to be present in our world, accountable and responsible. We need a self-knowledge that locates us within our community. But what if Emily Dickinson speaks universally—that in society’s eyes we feel we are nobodies?

Society itself is at stake in the encouragement—and recovery—of what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls the “genius” within each of us. To feel unimportant is to be alienated from public life. In the catastrophe of social invisibility, we lose each other; we waste human capital. Our civic life depends upon a reading of our capacities and our hunger to serve, to be heroes, to matter vitally. Recognizing who we are, invoking meaningful engagement with our world: this is leadership’s transforming role.

Observing that we devalue our own thoughts, Emerson coaches the spirit to rise up from a conviction of inferiority or irrelevance or misuse. Speak your truth, Emerson says. The encouragement of our particular “genius” is transformative: in so doing we discover as well as heed our truth. And like Emerson’s invocation of our genius, leadership’s vision serves as a magic mirror, revealing the power of individuals and communities to become fully realized through self-knowledge.

The lens of literary and cultural analysis provides a way for leaders to nourish the desire to be so much more than how we are perceived. Transformational leadership “reads” our identity’s letter and spirit with hope; it opens a way to conceive of our larger possibilities for being in our world. The possibility of viewing oneself and our external world in ways that transcend the chaotic surface is transformational leadership’s gift. To be considered essential for what we can give others nourishes meaningful engagement with our world. In such reading, no one is a “nobody,” obscured in insignificance; we can imagine ourselves into who we really are, and in our change, change this world.

Transformative Leadership Is Rocket Science

Leadership is rocket science. I offer that equation in playful seriousness, linking one field of genius, poetry, to another, physics. When we say “rocket science,” we often mean knowledge out of our sphere (literally). What unfathomable equations can make a rocket lift off into space against the laws of gravity? Poetry makes its own unfathomable equations (that is to say, metaphor) to make something equally improbable happen: the heart’s lifting, the spirit rousing into the realm of stars, the mind thrusting in neural heat. Both poetry and rocket science blast one away in transformative velocity to another level. It is from this vantage point, the rocket ship or poem, from which one acquires a perspective of how we belong to each other and the earth. To see earth from space is to see a spherical perfection, a harmony that reveals the flow of things that from this height appear as one: water, cloud, land. As astronauts have observed (and in the process, become poets, like Story Musgrave), from this vantage, divisions disappear, the “whole” appears; and the whole is beautiful.

Drama, story, and science record a holistic vision of interdependence vital to community. As Mary Zimmerman (2003) in The Arabian Nights says: “It is a precondition of war that we view other people as fundamentally different from ourselves. It is a precondition of literature that we view other people as fundamentally the same.” Revelation of the whole is a corrective vision. Victor Hugo (1996, p. 735) writes in Les Miserables: “Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn’t every war fought between men, between brothers?” And Einstein (1950) said:

A human being is part of the whole called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty…. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.

The words “compassion” and “embrace” are integral to conception of “the whole.” From perspectives of the whole, it’s obvious how all things are interconnected and essential. No one is Nobody. Brought to us by rocket science and poetry, this ecological and spiritual vision frames leadership’s opportunity and challenge. Responsive to and responsible for “the whole,” leaders face communities experiencing themselves as fraught with seemingly impossible incompatibilities. Diversity seems an obstacle to coherence. Organizational categories separate and divide even as they blur, collide, realign, and overlap in shifting alliances. The organization may seem illegible as a coherent text, but if it can’t be read, what hope is there for its leadership?

Chaos Theory: Reclamation of a Fragmented and Fraught Spiritual Landscape

This is where theory comes into play, for chaos theory and literacy theories conceive the whole as not broken but defined by diverse, changing, complex elements. Metaphoric and literal altitude enable equations of the fractured and the whole, a vision of how each element is essential to the integrity of the system.

Chaos theory revelations of the dynamics of the whole illuminate interdependence: any element anywhere can affect the system; a gesture can influence far-reaching changes. The energy of an initial action generates turbulence: even mandated changes destabilize. Yet in due course, turbulence “self-organizes.” And when a leader upholds a vision of the whole that does not whitewash conflict and turbulence but recognizes dynamic connections and flow, people’s understanding of what seems hopeless or fearful can change.

The Butterfly Effect: A Transformational Understanding of Leadership and Power

Expressed as the theory’s famous anthem, “the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causes a cataclysmic storm system in Texas,” chaos theory provides an alternative view of power not determined by size or position. The most demoralized Nobody speaking one’s truth can change a community and its future. Intrinsic to the redemptive way leaders can visualize and interpret coherence of the whole is the notion of “fractals” in complex system behavior. “Irregular” and diverse viewpoints and ways of knowing that appear irreconcilable coexist simultaneously; the behavior of each part expresses a truth about the whole.

For me as a new president of a historic college (the whole) with conflicting constituencies and contested mandates (the pieces) (Mossberg, 2001a, 2001b, 2006), the lens of chaos theory revealed an institution whose needs and capacities were intelligible. I was responsible for bringing together and moving forward diverse elements of a community in transition (each part equally important). Reason and imagination seemed applicable to a vision of the whole behaving according to natural laws. Dynamical systems theory is a corrective to a traditional understanding of power and opens new ways of understanding leadership in an interdependent organization. My thinking was transformed; I recognized that my own leadership responsibilities to help preserve the institution’s history and character of innovation while adapting to new mandates was one of many changes perturbing the system. Knowing how initial turbulence self-organizes over time gave a long-term perspective that liberated community creativity.

The “chaos” of diverse ideas on how to proceed as a whole was a crisis of institutional identity undergoing necessary growth. As an interpretive literacy tool, chaos theory helped me “read” and know that, as Mark Twain (2010, p. 288) said of the music of Richard Wagner, “it’s better than it sounds.” Success for the organization could be understood not in terms of change outcomes per se, but rather in terms of promoting the expression of community “genius” —what is productive for nourishing human aspirations. Transformational leadership can help both individuals and communities in mutually supportive work that fosters identities of significance. To visualize a butterfly when one sees a cocoon is to read with optimism and hope stages of emergence in our journey from physical matter to socially matter-ing.

Chaos theory’s special gift to leadership is trust in the whole dynamic system of community. Based on “hard science” and documented history, the theory supports faith in each fractal as an inseparable part, illuminating, and not undermining, the efficacy and integrity of the whole. In this way, chaos theory supports trust for the discordant, the eccentric, the slow and the hyper, the different. It supports trust in the system when things are turbulent, for the leader of a chaotic system knows that things will self-organize: they have to. It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law.

Chaos Theory as Transformational Literacy

Seen with trust, a community experiences its fractious, fractured identities in more positive ways. Each person is a fractal, a butterfly, a strange attractor, with the capacity to matter. To imagine oneself as representative of others, the genius on which Emerson says community depends, is the empowering work of transformational leadership. Transformational leadership invokes respect of the self—both humble and heroic—in relation with others. Ancient stories chanted struggles of identity. In Homer’s Odyssey, a man leading a team confronts multiple monsters that obstruct and demoralize their journey home from the war. Trapped by the cannibal Cyclops eating his teammates two by two, Odysseus saves himself and his crew by creatively calling himself Nobody. Of course, this is clever, because when the Cyclops calls for help and is asked who is doing him wrong, he yells, “Nobody!” Nobody comes, and Odysseus and his crew escape.

This story offers a window into the role of leaders whose community may comprise people who are so-called nobodies in the world—or suspect that is how they are perceived. Identity is tragic or triumphant. If someone feels indispensable to community, community is nobly served. From the times of The Odyssey to today’s Wizard of Oz, we see transformational leadership practice, a recognition promoting essential community needs—bravery, problem solving, compassion, loyalty, and love. The identity generating these qualities is often a struggle with “monstrous” forces making one feel inadequate or insignificant. In the nineteenth century, the poet Tennyson reprised the character of Odysseus as an old man, who longs to “shine in use.” He exhorts his companions to never give up the effort to “seek a newer world” (Tennyson, 1990, p. 166).

In fact, the necessity to see ourselves “shining in use,” inextricably connected to a larger whole, is identified as cultural wisdom. In one of the earliest Greek dramas, the Sphinx is the gatekeeper to the city of Thebes; it does not allow anyone to enter the city who cannot pass its citizenship test. If this were a Jeopardy! episode, the question would be “man,” and the answer would be, “What walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the afternoon?” The test is a poem, an equation, a metaphor, of the human being as complex, chaotic, diverse, changing—and continuously coherent. As unrelated as our growth processes seem, they express the same being. But, as the story goes, people cannot recognize this description of the dynamic whole of human identity. They not only are denied community; they are killed.

Ancient Wisdom Requires Leaders to See What We Mean

A vision of ourselves, diverse but one, ever evolving into new forms as we live out our common destiny, is critical: to live with, or live at all, we need this vision of how our complex individuality shows itself differently at different times—and how all these “selves” relate and contribute to the whole. Our community depends upon an ability to envision our shared fates. Our ability to be empathetic, sympathetic, and compassionate, our motivation to be generous and fair, derive from a fractal knowledge of how our various realities each speak to the whole of human experience. Thus, it is not only community at stake in the self-knowledge required by the Sphinx. It is life itself.

In Sophocles’s (1996) drama, the fateful riddle is finally interpreted by Oedipus. Oedipus enters Thebes and is crowned king; literacy makes him leader of the community. But his knowledge of “man” is limited. He does not know who he is—how connected to others. Unbeknownst to him, a man he has killed is his father; a woman he marries is his mother. The whole community suffers for his crimes. In his leadership role to save the community, Oedipus must identify who jeopardizes the community: himself. He must learn not simply that he has killed the wrong man and married the wrong woman, but that everyone matters: metaphorically, everyone is related. Self-knowledge is rooted in mutual belonging. This portrait of leadership is a call to “read” our experience in this world in transformational ways based on an understanding of what we each mean to each other.

Some might object that the Sphinx is a literary fiction. But that’s part of the point. Historically, education in the liberal arts has been considered essential to leadership because such studies take us out of ourselves to imaginatively experience the diversity of the complex world around us. Engaging with literature, for example, we identify with men and women, young and old, cultures and personalities and values different than our own; we are Willy Loman and Blanche Dubois and Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield and the Invisible Man and Henderson the Rain King and Ishmael and Nikki Giovanni “ego tripping,” we are kings and queens and fallen women, we are elephants and lions and pigs (as in Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who; Robert Kraus’s Leo the Late Bloomer; E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web). Each becomes part of how we see and value and understand our world and ourselves. We are like Tennyson’s Ulysses, “part of all that I have met,” and thus, we become more global, and (who knows?) perhaps more compassionate citizens—the wisdom behind the Sphinx story.

Combining insights from chaos theory, psychology, and the humanities reveals an inspiring understanding of what we each mean to our community. Leadership “reads” a community and how its individuals belong. In encouraging people to speak their truth, leadership casts everyone in a role of dignity and worth. Chaos theory and other emergent sciences support a conviction of our connection with each other and the world by which we need to go forward. Literature is a model of such imaginative engagement that invokes self-knowledge. Identity narratives, scientific revelations of how the world works, and human psychology are fractals of the same human story of longing and belonging: the ambition and power of the human spirit to matter to someone and something beyond oneself.

… And It Is Wizardry

Revelations of interdependence come from the perspective of time and space. Revelation’s root is revelare, “to lift, to raise.” Our ability to perceive ourselves as connected to each other and our world depends upon a leadership vision that “beams us up.” This transformational literacy is artfully expressed in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum, 1987), where characters are convinced they do not have what it takes to be human, to be literally present in their community. They need a “wizard” to recognize their abilities to get the courage, empathy, and intelligence called for.

Literature and physics, history and math provide the same wizardry for the Nobody within: a vision of ourselves that allows for expansion beyond ourselves into the realms of knowing and being in the universe that release us into a greater understanding of our capacity to be … greater. This literacy is the wizardry of transformational leadership, theories supporting an essential view of the world that is—given time—as orderly, as creative, as resilient as a poem or equation expressing a complex whole: the genius of “I” and “us” together all at once.