What to do? Amid a paralyzing deluge of dismal surprises we ask simply; what to do? I was surprised to learn there is a whole violent alt-right movement to the far right of the young Turning Point man killed in Utah. He died doing a very American thing—speaking freely–although I disagree with his viewpoints. I’ve known young men like Kirk, so I wonder how he would have evolved as many like him do. I’m so sorry he fell to cowardly violence.
We are well and truly off any map. It was already clear that our tools for answering that question were simply inadequate, unhelpful before the volcanic maga explosion and its continued deadly shards. Frankly, our old ways of thinking are in the way of a serious attempt to act in an accountable manner.
So the Fellows of the Leading Causes of Life Initiative wrote a book that turns to be more relevant that we knew it would be back in the old days (a year ago ago). Thin book, thick title: Taking Responsibility for the Life of Complex Human Systems: Deep Accountability. You may say, along with my sister in law, “I’m out; can’t do it!” If you have grandchildren, you can’t be out. They will ask you what you did in these days and you will want an answer.
This book moves crisply through 83 pages unlocking and weaving new tools for thinking in the new ways we will all need in order to look each other in the eye (grandchildren can wait). It’s available now on Amazon but consider buying direct from Elgar. We will be officially releasing the book at Cambridge University the afternoon of October 3rd.
I am tempted to focus on the chapter that was the bravest (at least for me), “storm. This roots in the polymath radical, Ivan Illich, who five decades ago surgically eviscerated the self-serving intellectual corruption of the health science industry. He could see even then, it would its own ugly reckoning, now imminent. At this point we have seen the demolition of public health, but that is a small potato compared to the savagery about to ensue when the maga-mob goes after the serious money of non-profit healthcare. I’ll come back to that chapter in a few weeks.
The chapter we need most this week is the one on Joy.
“There is an intelligence, a deep knowing, we may call joy. Joy is not what we experience as an end. Joy is how we navigate, the evidence we are on the right track, doing the right work with the right people in the right way. When in doubt, move boldly toward joy.”
Joy is how we navigate; it tells us what to do as it tells us why. I don’t mean stupid optimism or Facebook puppies. I mean joy informed by the science, experience, tradition and presence of how thing work in this amazing world by moving toward each other (chapter 6, Involution).
Joy and lament are sisters. I am also sorry for all the public health friends taunted and humiliated by the cowardly destruction of institutions such as the CDC, HRSA, WHO, USAID, AHCR. All flawed and compromised, of course. And they all worthy of respect for their moral and intellectual foundations. This is the time for every scientist, administrator, student, researcher and policy-maker to claim the joy of work well done, policy well-conceived, risks-well-taken, arguments well-made and discipline sustained. Although you have lost your badge, remember that joy as it will tell you what to do next.
Go clean up the vacant lot down the street, take some trash out of the stream. If you know the joy of pursuing equity, go do that with some actual humans down the block. If you thrilled with the joy of creating climate policy, go to a grove of trees. TC and I often go to the meadow above the canal and put our fingers into the living soil to feel the fierce emergent energy. Let the joy in.
There will be a time—soon—for us build again. We must prepare to do that work guided by science, ethics and spirit, tuned to the deep joy a free people experience doing the right things.
Fear can be a true signal. But most of the fear today is artificial, self-serving and disingenuous. The loud lies and willful obfuscation are designed to be entirely false signals.
These false fears all rest on the lie that there is not enough.
There is enough in the world for everyone of every difference that can be named in every language. There is enough. I would not have thought so even five years ago in the former times, but there is even enough energy. Read Bill McKibben’s new and shockingly hopeful book, Here Comes the Sun. Bill is a somewhat dower Methodist ecologist who once almost made me drive my car into an abutment while listening to his audiobook Eaarth. He now writes—surprised—that the sun has arrived in the very nick of time. The exponential growth in solar and collapse of prices is a true signal that we have enough energy. And that sun falls everywhere all the time. No cabal can own it as has been true of our short-lived coal and oil age. It really is a new day.
This is why the fear people want to destroy the true signals of abundance, the solar panels and turbines that even Texas loves.
Joy is curious, appreciative and thus creatively grounded in the nitty gritty world of what might be possible. In this sense, joy and love are synonyms as both drive out fear (1 John 4:18) How does it do that? Fear is nothing but an absence of hope; joy and love are stirred authentic hope. Fear evaporates—turns to vapor—in the presence of the real.
Fear sees nothing beyond its own exaggerated weaknesses. Fear is anxious with no fine motor skills and none of the patience or diligence that the work of discovery demands.
The possibilities out of which the future emerges are unlocked by the unlimited creative imagination of spirited humans. Every act of creation, innovation and way-finding I have ever seen is marked by joy, often laughter. And the joy is not postponed to the end of the process; it is the energy along the way. It is the sense of emergent discovery long before the way is found.
Fear can’t take a joke. Joy laughs all the way down the road to the future. Measure our steps, says the great hymn. Measure them in joy.
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