A Brief Report on Pathfinders Through the Dark Wood of Modern American Culture

During this time of intense introspection and self-interrogation, prompted by sheltering in place for weeks on end and by racist hate crimes against African Americans by white supremacist haters and police, and urban human rights protests in cities across the nation, I find it helpful when friends let me know what they’re reading and what’s keeping them afloat at the moment.

One friend recently sent me a quotation that said, “What we tolerate we encourage.” I’ve been grinding on that one for weeks; I like the harshness of “condone” better than the gentle approval of “encourage.” I take toleration in this case to mean a “passive acceptance of the unacceptable” and the intolerable, an almost reflexive setting aside or muffling of conscience. If a part of one’s culture tolerates hate, and another part doesn’t, then the autonomic nature of cultural habit and cultural ideals can become tightly knotted in contradictions that many of us find impossible to live with and struggle for the rest of our lives to untangle.

For myself right now, as I try to find my way again the through the dark woods of human cruelty, three pathfinders are leading the way: Valley “Tut” Mason, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, and Dr. Viktor Frankl. The first two are figures from my childhood, and both were admired by my mother.

Tut is without question the kindest, most optimistic and generous-hearted person I have ever known. And my life has been blessed with many wonderful people. I was seven when he entered my life as my mother’s handyman, gardener and friend. I knew nothing of politics or racism in l947 of course. My family had been through a terrible divorce and Tut knew all about terrible conflicts. And yet he didn’t seem to have an ounce of hate in him. He became the saint of my childhood. He grew up under Jim Crow in Tuskegee, Alabama, was an infantryman in the trenches of WWI and suffered gas poisoning. When he returned to Alabama, he apparently refused to subject himself and his family to Jim Crow oppressions, and through his ingenuity and the positive genius and optimism of his character, drove to Southern California in the 1920s and found a place in South Pasadena that he and his family could buy. And there he remained for the rest of his life, or so I surmise.

My direct knowledge of him was from the perspective of a troubled and very frightened kid. Tut, I think, didn’t tolerate fear in himself or in me, and so didn’t encourage or condone it. I was drawn to his humor, his good cheer and his seemingly lighthearted references to “making it through anything.” (I hope I’m remembering his words correctly.) I spent as much time with him as I could. And now he’s become a symbol for me of the power that comes from self-confidence and with refusing despair, traits that all human beings have in themselves if fortune lets them find them.

My mother, like many in postwar America and Europe, came under the spiritual influence of a German physician, missionary, musician and philosopher — Albert Schweitzer — who started a “Forest Hospital” in a place in French Equatorial Africa, now Gabon, called Lambaréné. He was there because, he said, he couldn’t tolerate the pain of others — physical pain and the pain caused by colonialism, and the guilt he felt as a European — without trying to do something down-to-earth about it. My mother felt that she could never live up to his example. Most people felt the same way. I certainly do.

In 1922, Schweitzer wrote “The Philosophy of Civilization.” I chanced upon it in my early 30s. There I found his warning: If we did not do something that no other generation of humans have done — make an immediate leap of being away from war mongering and hatred in all its demonic forms — then the whole world would come apart. We didn’t make the leap, of course. World War II killed at least 90 million of us around the globe, brought about nuclear weapons and the greatest of human technological follies and indirectly led to a global economy that has as some of its byproducts both climate change and viral pandemics.

Schweitzer worked “in the service of mercy” because of what he called, “The fellowship of those who bear the mark of pain.” And who makes up this fellowship? “Those who have learned by experience what physical pain and bodily anguish mean, belong together all the world over; they are united in a secret bond. One and all they know the horrors of suffering to which man can be exposed.”

That’s why, I think, so many of us can feel the cop’s knee on our necks and hear the hopeless words of George Floyd in our nightmares, “I can’t breathe.”

In 1952, Schweitzer was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of “reverence for life.” In his book “Civilization and Ethics” he wrote, “Ethics is nothing other than Reverence for Life. Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.”

James Brabazon, Schweitzer’s biographer, explained, “Reverence for Life says that the only thing we are really sure of is that we live and want to go on living. This is something that we share with everything else that lives, from elephants to blades of grass—and, of course, every human being. So we are brothers and sisters to all living things, and owe to all of them the same care and respect, that we wish for ourselves.”

When I discovered psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” it was during a hard time of sickness in my family. At first, I flipped through the book but then became increasingly aware that Frankl had managed the miracle of just staying alive in four Nazi concentration camps. Then, as good fortune would have it, I stumbled upon the words that described Frankl’s great inner strength. He wrote that there’s only one thing that no one can take from you, the freedom to interpret what’s happening to you. From that insight, Frankl wove his theory of “logotherapy” — helping his patients to focus on what they felt gave their life meaning. I think one could say Frankl had a particular reverence for life as it is actually lived in the solitude and suffering of real human beings.

I know many of us are questioning ourselves and our lives in this crucible of medical, political and social plagues. And some of us choose to be on the front lines, helping others directly. One friend, a retired physician whose name I won’t mention so as not to cause him embarrassment, just spent a two-week stint with COVID-19 patients in Gallup, walking his talk. My admiration for him is boundless, as it is for all the nurses and doctors staring down this plague.

These pathfinders through the “dark wood” tell us to do more, not what we think we should do, but what we feel we must. Never more than that, but never less. Perhaps it’s just listening, paying deeper attention, focusing conscience on what matters when it comes to civility, equality and compassion. Perhaps it’s just bringing our own deep cultural and mental habits into the light and seeing what they imply. Perhaps it’s realizing and being transformed by our grief, even if no one else knows, though it’s likely to show up, somehow, in our behavior. What matters is looking ourselves straight in the eye, all of us, and not flinching from what we find in the arena of our conscience.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it