A week of eulogies and retrospectives on the life of John McCain gave us a long-overdue lesson on how to evaluate our leaders. What we saw, with apologies to Charles Dickens, was a Tale of Two Senators. John McCain was our best of times, and our worst of times. He represented the age of wisdom, and the age of foolishness, the epoch of belief, and the epoch of incredulity. His was the season of Light, and the season of Darkness, the spring of hope, the winter of despair.
In less Dickensian prose, the late Arizona senator was, like all of us, a package deal, a complicated amalgam of good and bad, of decency and chicanery, of success and failure. He was a man of honor and principle. He was also a man of political expediency. He had moments of greatness and moments of shame.
Death has a way of triggering a contemplative introspection in the living. It’s an opportunity to hold a mirror to our lives and thought processes, with an eye toward making necessary adjustments. An adjustment is precisely what we need right now. We are living in a pathologically polarized moment, right smack in the middle of a highly charged civil war of deeply held values. It’s us against them, and we’re playing for keeps. As many noted psychologists (here and here) have observed, that kind of tribalism gives way to rigid, binary thinking. We see people as good or bad, either with us or against us. It’s a deeply skewed and destructive perception. To build and sustain the kind of political movement that can take us to a better place, we need to look beyond what we want to see in order to know what is really there.
Minutes after McCain died, my Facebook feed was filled with reactions. He was described with words like: honorable, brave, decent, compassionate and honest. He was praised for being against discrimination and reasonable on immigration Within an hour, the rebuttals appeared. They were from those who came to bury the senator, not to praise him. Their counterpoints? McCain cheated on his first wife, was deeply involved in an influence peddling scandal, opposed to making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday, cast a deciding vote upholding a presidential veto of the 1990 Civil Rights Act, and referred to his North Vietnamese captors as “gooks”.
What appeared as two factions fighting over an epitaph was an illusion. They were both right. John McCain was good and bad. Or, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “. . . nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” And “thinking” can be distorted by passionately held beliefs that filter people and events so that we see what we want to see.
McCain was the posterchild of the package deal approach to evaluating people. More than any of his contemporaries, he both owned his mistakes and had no problem abandoning fealty to partisan dogma when it suited his purposes. His death – as well as our reaction to it – offers a reminder that binary, black-or-white, either-or thinking, as tempting as it might be, is not a helpful way of understanding our world. Our desire to label people as heroes and villains, although understandable, is a fool’s errand.
Take Pope Francis, for example. Until last week, even I, as a recovering Methodist, was ready to nominate him for sainthood. “Who am I to judge”, he said of the Church’s position on gays. He focused on problems like poverty, climate change and corporate wrongdoing with an abiding intensity. He advocated for women’s equality and expressed an openness to allowing priests to marry. Then came the seemingly credible accusation that Francis had covered up a cardinal’s history of sexual abuse and pedophilia, triggering calls for his resignation. Do we move him from the good column into the bad? No. The amazing gifts this pope brought to his believers – and the rest of us – coexist with his human fallibility, one that may well have succumbed to a malignancy that seems to have permeated the culture of his church’s hierarchy. It’s a package deal. It’s important to see the entire package.
Every historical figure we’ve ever placed on a pedestal is a mere Google search removed from their warts. Mother Teresa, who became a saint last year, was accused of gross mismanagement and providing negligent medical care. Martin Luther King was found to have plagiarized portions of his doctoral dissertation. Mohandas Gandhi is said to have been openly racist toward blacks in South Africa and frequently shared a bed with his 17-year-old great-niece. The great emancipator himself, Abe Lincoln, was responsible for the country’s largest mass execution. In 1862, he ordered the hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux tribal members in Minnesota. Package deals, all of them.
The moral of this story is that we need to look at the whole package, and see all of its parts, in order to have anything close to an accurate understanding. The alternative is what organizational communication experts call a “frozen evaluation”. That means we lock in our assessment of someone – or something – and see only that which is consistent with our frozen evaluation. To ignore the fact that we are all complicated works-in-progress is to miss opportunities for meaningful, constructive connection.
Our current toxic environment of dark, deeply divided and angry discourse will not last forever. The McCain memorials laid bare our longing for harmony, or at least decency, in our politics. Our behavior can take us there. We can begin that journey by not writing everybody off who disagrees with us. As the late senator said in his farewell letter, “We weaken (America’s greatness) when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down. . .” There are many kinds of walls, including the ones we build around others who don’t share our views. To escape our current quagmire, we need to replace those walls with bridges. We will not reach everyone, but somewhere in all those package deals out there lies an opportunity to connect. Real change will not happen until we seize that opportunity.
Excellent piece, as always, Bruce. There are no perfect people. If we work to increase our consciousness, we can begin to accept or change those parts of ourselves that we don’t like.