2 Venus square Mars ~ 14º Gemini/Pisces
5 
Full Moon Lunar Eclipse ~ 15º Sagittarius
8 Venus square Ceres ~ 10º Gemini/Pisces
10 Sun Into Gemini Decan 2
13 Mars conjunct Neptune ~ 20º Pisces
17 Mercury retrograde ~ 14º Cancer
18 Mars sextile Pluto ~ 23º Pisces
20 Mars sextile Jupiter ~ 25º Pisces/Taurus
20 Sun into Cancer Decan 1 (Summer Solstice)
21 
New Moon Solar Eclipse ~ 0º Cancer
23 Neptune Retrograde at 20º Pisces
25 Venus Direct at 5º Gemini
26 Mars square Nodes ~ 28º Pisces
28 Mars sextile Saturn ~ 0º Aries/Aquarius
30 Jupiter conjunct Pluto ~ 24º Capricorn
Beautifully Human
Naomi Wachira Beautifully Human is song that is a simple push back of anyone who might think that a person is less than because of the color of their skin or anything in their outward expression that might be considered different or other. It is a celebration of the sacredness and value of every human being created. We might not always agree on many things, we might not always have the same perspective, we might not always have uniformed outward expressions, but we are all beautifully human because we have been endowed with life, breath and the privilege of being in this lifetime and in this moment. May we all remember that we are BEAUTIFULLY HUMAN! BEAUTIFULLY HUMAN Words & Music by Naomi Wachira DORELI Music, ASCAP © 2017 I wish the world could believe, that my brothers and sisters we are meant to be No we are not accidents; no we are not, We are not the sons and daughters of the damned Pre-Chorus So don’t treat us like we are a cursed race Don’t treat us like we are a cursed race We are human, we are human too … Chorus I know that I am, I am, I am, I am I wish we didn’t have to prove our worth, And the world could finally see us as equals, No we are not accidents; no we are not, We are not the sons and daughters of damned Pre-Chorus So don’t treat us like we are a cursed race, Don’t treat us like we are a cursed race We are human, we are human too … Chorus I know that I am, I am, I am, I am Pre-Bridge Don’t make me prove, why I should be, why I belong, Why I deserve to be here, I deserve to be here x2 And I know that I am, I am, I am, I am And so is anyone who can walk, who can talk, who can laugh, who cry, feel pain So is anyone who can’t speak, who can’t hear, who can’t see, who’s never had a free mind, So is anyone whether brown or white or any other color We’re Beautifully human, Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautifully human, Beautiful
A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s Rare Conversation on Forgiveness and the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility
By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)
NOTE: I wrote this essay five years ago, about a conversation that took place fifty years ago – both important timestamps in reflecting on how the ideas therein speak perfectly to the present moment, and how they speak imperfectly but importantly as historical counterweights in a continually evolving context. This essay was the first installment in a multi-part series covering Mead and Baldwin’s historic conversation. Part 2 focuses on identity, race, and the immigrant experience; part 3 on changing one’s destiny; part 4 on reimagining democracy for a post-consumerist culture.
On the evening of August 25, 1970, Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901–November 15, 1978) and James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) sat together on a stage in New York City for a remarkable public conversation about such enduring concerns as identity, power and privilege, race and gender, beauty, religion, justice, and the relationship between the intellect and the imagination. By that point, Baldwin, forty-six and living in Paris, was arguably the world’s most famous living poet, and an enormously influential voice in the civil rights dialogue; Mead, who was about to turn seventy, had become the world’s first celebrity academic — a visionary anthropologist with groundbreaking field experience under her belt, who lectured at some of the best cultural institutions and had a popular advice column in Redbook magazine.
Art by Wendy MacNaughton for Brain Pickings
They talked for seven and a half hours of brilliance and bravery over the course of the weekend, bringing to the dialogue the perfect balance of similarity and difference to make it immensely simulating and deeply respectful. On the one hand, as a white woman and black man in the first half of the twentieth century, they had come of age through experiences worlds apart. On the other, they had worlds in common as intellectual titans, avid antidotes to the era’s cultural stereotypes, queer people half a century before marriage equality, and unflinching celebrators of the human spirit.
Besides being a remarkable and prescient piece of the cultural record, their conversation, the transcript of which was eventually published as A Rap on Race (public library), is also a bittersweet testament to one of the recurring themes in their dialogue — our tendency to sideline the past as impertinent to the present, only to rediscover how central it is in understanding the driving forces of our world and harnessing them toward a better future. This forgotten treasure, which I dusted off shortly after Ferguson and the Eric Garner tragedy, instantly stopped my breath with its extraordinary timeliness — the ideas with which these two remarkable minds tussled in 1970 had emerged, unsolved and unresolved, to haunt and taunt us four decades later with urgency that can no longer be evaded or denied.
Although some of what is said is so succinctly brilliant that it encapsulates the essence of the issue — at one point, Baldwin remarks: “We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope.” — this is nonetheless a conversation so complex, so dimensional, so wide-ranging, that to synthesize it in a single article or highlight a single dominant theme would be to instantly flatten it and strip it of power. Instead, I am going to do something I’ve never done in nearly a decade of Brain Pickings — explore this immensely valuable cultural artifact in a multi-part series examining a specific viewpoint from this zoetrope of genius in each installment, beginning with Mead and Baldwin’s tapestry of perspectives on forgiveness, the difference between guilt and responsibility, and the role of the past in understanding the present and building a more dignified future.
As they bring up their shared heartbreak over the bombing in Birmingham that killed four black girls at Sunday school a month after Martin Luther King’s famous letter on justice and nonviolent resistance, Mead and Baldwin arrive at one of the most profound ongoing threads of this long conversation — the question of guilt, responsibility, and the crucial difference between the two in assuring a constructive rather than destructive path forward:
MEAD: There are different ways of looking at guilt. In the Eastern Orthodox faith, everybody shares the guilt of creatureliness and the guilt for anything they ever thought. Now, the Western Northern-European position and the North American position on the whole is that you’re guilty for things that you did yourself and not for things that other people did.
[…]
BALDWIN: The police in this country make no distinction between a Black Panther or a black lawyer or my brother or me. The cops aren’t going to ask me my name before they pull the trigger. I’m part of this society and I’m in exactly the same situation as anybody else — any other black person — in it. If I don’t know that, then I’m fairly self-deluded… What I’m trying to get at is the question of responsibility. I didn’t drop the bomb [that killed four black school girls in Birmingham]. And I never lynched anybody. Yet I am responsible not for what has happened but for what can happen.
MEAD: Yes, that’s different. I think the responsibility for what can happen, which in a sense is good guilt — which is sort of a nonsensical term —
BALDWIN: Yes, but I know what you mean. It’s useful guilt.
MEAD: Responsibility. It is saying I am going to make an effort to have things changed. But to take the responsibility for something that was done by others —
BALDWIN: Well, you can’t do that.
Mead illustrates the perils of confusing responsibility and guilt with an exquisite example from her own life as a mother, from the time in the mid-1940s when she was heading a university initiative to foster cross-racial and cross-ethnic relationships:
I said, “You come down out of that pine tree. You don’t have to eat pine needles like an Indian.” So she came down and she asked, “Why do the Indians have to eat pine needles?” I said, “To get their Vitamin C, because they don’t have any oranges.” She asked, “Why don’t they have any oranges?” Then I made a perfectly clear technical error; I said, “Because the white man took their land away from them.” She looked at me and she said, “Am I white?” I said, “Yes, you are white.” “But I didn’t took their land away from them, and I don’t like it to be tooken!” she shouted.
Now if I had said, “The early settlers took their land away,” she would have said, “Am I an early settler?” But I had made a blanket racial category: the white man. It was a noble sentiment, but it was still racial sentiment.
With an eye to this demand for responsibility in the present rather than guilt over the past, the conversation once again reveals its contemporary poignancy:
BALDWIN: No.
MEAD: It’s what we do this week that matters.
BALDWIN: Exactly.
MEAD: That’s the only thing there is; there isn’t any other time.
A 1573 painting by Portuguese artist, historian, and philosopher Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s, from Michael Benson’s book Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time.
They revisit the subject of guilt, with its perilous religious roots, and the complexities of forgiveness in discussing the crime of slavery:
MEAD: Then we’ve nowhere to go.
BALDWIN: No, we have atonement.
MEAD: Not for the sin against the Holy Ghost.
BALDWIN: No?
MEAD: I mean, after all, you were once a theologian.
BALDWIN: I was once a preacher, yes indeed.
MEAD: And the point about the sin against the Holy Ghost is that —
BALDWIN: It is that it cannot be forgiven.
MEAD: So if you state a crime impossible of forgiveness you’ve doomed everyone.
[…]
Look, there have been millions of crimes committed against humanity. Millions! Now, why is one crime more important than another?
BALDWIN: No, my point precisely is that one crime is not more important than another and that all crimes must be atoned for.
MEAD: All right, all crimes… But when you talk about atonement you’re talking about people who weren’t born when this was committed.
BALDWIN: No, I mean the recognition of where one finds one’s self in time or history or now. I mean the recognition. After all, I’m not guiltless, either. I sold my brothers for my sisters —
[…]
MEAD: I will not accept any guilt for what anybody else did. I will accept guilt for what I did myself.
[…]
BALDWIN: We both have produced, all of us have produced, a system of reality which we cannot in any way whatever control; what we call history is perhaps a way of avoiding responsibility for what has happened, is happening, in time.
This is a conversation underpinned by a profound baseline mutual respect and punctuated by wonderfully sweet in-the-moment manifestations of it — Mead and Baldwin frequently repeat each other’s words in a gesture of validation, and even bicker amicably about not letting the other be too self-effacing (“If I’m bright at all, and that’s debatable,” Baldwin says in one aside, and Mead quickly interjects, “It’s not very debatable.” “It’s very debatable to me,” Baldwin counters. “Well, permit somebody else to do the debating,” she quips affably.) But they have no reservations about voicing, if courteously, ideological disagreement — which is what makes the conversation so rich, stimulating, and full of wisdom. One of the most moving instances of this dynamic emerges when they return to their divergent views on guilt and responsibility, only to discover under the surface divergence profound common ground:
BALDWIN: I’m responsible for it. I didn’t stop it.
MEAD: Why are you responsible? Didn’t you try to stop it? Hadn’t you been working?
BALDWIN: It doesn’t make any difference what one’s tried.
MEAD: Of course it makes a difference what one’s tried.
BALDWIN: No, not really.
MEAD: This is the fundamental difference. You are talking like a member of the Russian Orthodox Church… “We are all guilty. Because some man suffers, we are all murderers.”
BALDWIN: No, no, no. We are all responsible.
MEAD: Look, you are not responsible.
BALDWIN: That blood is also on my hands.
MEAD: Why?
BALDWIN: Because I didn’t stop it.
MEAD: Is the blood of somebody who is dying in Burma today on your hands?
BALDWIN: Yes, yes.
MEAD: Because you didn’t stop that? That’s what I mean by the Russian Orthodox position, that all of us are guilty of all that has been done or thought —
BALDWIN: Yes.
MEAD: And I will not accept it. I will not.
BALDWIN: “For whom the bell tolls.” … It means everybody’s suffering is mine.
MEAD: Everybody’s suffering is mine but not everybody’s murdering, and that is a very different point. I would accept everybody’s sufferings. I do not distinguish for one moment whether my child is in danger or a child in Central Asia. But I will not accept responsibility for what other people do because I happen to belong to that nation or that race or that religion. I do not believe in guilt by association.
BALDWIN: But, Margaret, I have to accept it. I have to accept it because I am a black man in the world and I am not only in America… I have a green passport and I am an American citizen, and the crimes of this Republic, whether or not I am guilty of them, I am responsible for.
MEAD: But you see, I think there is a difference. I am glad I am an American because I think we can do more harm than any other country on this earth at the moment, so I would rather be inside the country that could do the most harm.
BALDWIN: In the eye of the hurricane.
MEAD: In the eye of the hurricane, because I think I may be able to do more good there.
[…]
We are responsible for that. That we are responsible for those unborn children, black, white, yellow, red-green, as the Seventh-Day Adventists say — all of them. We agree completely on that.
Now, is it necessary at this moment in history … for someone who is black to take a different stance in relation to the past although we take the same stance in relation to the future? Now it may be. You see, the question I was raising earlier is that maybe in order to act one has to take a different stance.
BALDWIN: … Now, a thousand years from now it will not matter; that is perfectly true. A thousand years ago it was worse; that is perfectly true. I am not responsible for that. I am responsible for now.
MEAD: Now.
Discus chronologicus, a German depiction of time from the early 1720s; found in Cartographies of Time.
Reflecting on “that peculiar chemistry which we call time,” Baldwin stresses “the necessity of the long view” — something triply necessary today, amid our epidemic of short-termism — and considers the relationship between the past and the present in making sense of responsibility:
[…]
MEAD: The more one wants to be an activist the narrower the time is.
BALDWIN: Precisely! Precisely!
MEAD: What the kids say … if you cut out all the past —
BALDWIN: You can’t.
[…]
They are acting in the past. They don’t know it. It takes a long time to realize that there is a past… It takes a long time to understand anything at all about what we call the past — and begin to be liberated from it. Those kids are romantic, not even revolutionaries. At least not yet. They don’t know what revolution entails. They think everything is happening in the present. They think they are the present. They think that nothing ever happened before in the whole history of the world.
They return to this dance between past and present a few hours later:
MEAD: For the future. For the present and the future.
BALDWIN: If we don’t manage the present there will be no future.
As someone who thinks a great deal about the interplay of hope and cynicism, I was particularly moved by Baldwin’s de facto disclaimer to the whole question of demanding responsibility from others:
The enactment of this moral optimism, Baldwin argues and Mead agrees, is in the hands of the future generations — those generations to which, half a century later, you and I belong — which lends their conversation extraordinary poignancy:
MEAD: I know.
BALDWIN: And the question is, How can it be arrested? That’s the enormous question. Look, you and I both are whatever we have become, and whatever happens to us now doesn’t really matter. We’re done. It’s a matter of the curtain coming down eventually. But what should we do about the children? We are responsible; so far as we are responsible at all, our responsibility lies there, toward them. We have to assume that we are responsible for the future of this world.
MEAD: That’s right.
BALDWIN: What shall we do? How shall we begin it? How can it be accomplished? How can one invest others with some hope?
MEAD: Then we come to a point where I would say it matters to know where we came from. That it matters to know the long, long road that we’ve come through. And this is the thing that gives me hope we can go further.
A Rap on Race is spectacular and pause-giving in its entirety — the kind of perspective-normalizing read that reminds us both how far we’ve come and how much further we have yet to go, equipping us with that delicate balance of outrage and hope that translates into the very moral courage necessary for building a more just and noble world. Complement it with Baldwin on the artist’s responsibility to society and Mead on the root of racism.
The Magnificent James Baldwin Explains The Riots Of 1968
David Hoffman To support my efforts to create more clips please donate to me at www.patreon.com/allinaday. This is a clip from a documentary that ran on network educational television in early 1969. In it, poet and author James Baldwin gives his perspective on why inner-city Negro citizens rioted and burned their neighborhoods in 1968. Whether or not you agree with his point of view, he is an extraordinarily articulate speaker. During this challenging time regarding race relations in America, hearing the magnificent James Baldwin explained the 1968 riots gives a sense of perspective for the protests that are happening across the United States right now as a result of the death of Floyd George at the hands of police.
NYC Cop Kneels for George Floyd Protesters as Other Cops Look on With Disdain
Status Coup Status Coup’s Jordan Chariton reported from George Floyd protests in New York City on June 2nd, 2020. You can watch the full livestream of the protest here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgvqq… SUBSCRIBE to this channel for progressive news and investigative reporting! http://youtube.com/statuscoup?sub_con… SUPPORT our investigative reporting GoFundMe if you can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/status-cou… SUPPORT Status Coup’s INDEPENDENT IN-THE-FIELD reporting for as $5 bucks a month: https://statuscoup.com/join/ HELP US DEFEAT THE SUPPRESSION OF INDEPENDENT MEDIA! Joining our email and text list will ENSURE you know when we’re live: 1)JOIN Status Coup’s Email List: https://statuscoup.com/ 2)JOIN Status Coup’s text alert list by texting 474747 and enter Coup **SUBSCRIBE to this YouTube channel, CLICK the bell, and CLICK ON ALL NOTIFICATIONS SOCIAL MEDIA 1)FOLLOW Status Coup on Twitter: http://bit.ly/39F2tcc 2)FOLLOW Status Coup on Instagram: http://bit.ly/2Fm5b8z 3)LIKE Status Coup on Facebook: http://bit.ly/39G5RDN 4)FOLLOW Status Coup on Twitch: http://bit.ly/2SWlX6m Check out the Status Coup merchandise store! http://bit.ly/2QuqauQ Please RATE Status Coup’s Podcast 5 Stars and leave a review! https://apple.co/2IzCY2v
Rep. Barbara Lee proposes racial healing and truth commission amid pandemic, protests
Tal Kopan June 1, 2020 Updated: June 2, 2020 (SFChronicle.com)
WASHINGTON — As a spate of recent killings of black Americans and a weekend of intense protests have left the nation reeling, Rep. Barbara Lee is introducing legislation to create a racial healing commission.
The proposal would form a nonpartisan group of experts to confront the legacy of slavery and racism in the U.S. and propose ways forward, the Oakland Democrat and congressional colleagues said Monday in a call announcing the effort.
“This is really about telling the truth,” Lee said.
She said she has been working on the idea for three years, and that the current pressures of the coronavirus pandemic and civil unrest only make it more timely. “The environment that has been created makes this resolution and this effort more important,” Lee said.
Lee has been a longtime activist and advocate for addressing inequality, and her Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Commission was set for unveiling Monday before protests erupted in cities across the U.S. in response to the police killing of George Floyd last week.
Floyd, who was African American, died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes, during which Floyd pleaded repeatedly that he could not breathe. He lost consciousness and was pronounced dead a short time later. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was fired and has been charged with murder.
Video of the incident shocked the national consciousness. But Lee and her colleagues noted that the incident was only the latest example of African Americans dying in police custody, and said the fact that they have a higher rate of coronavirus infection than other groups highlighted their disadvantaged status in society.
“I know when we talked about this, Rep. Lee and I, several months ago … neither one of us would have imagined we would be in the place we are right now,” said Rep. Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles. “Having a resolution like this that calls for healing, that calls for reconciliation, that calls for truth, is exactly what the country needs right now.”
Bass pointed to the importance of being honest about the nation’s beginnings as a way of confronting all of the issues, current and systemic, that face African Americans and other people of color.
“We don’t really know our history, our own history very well,” she said. “It’s very hard to identify oppression if you’re not aware of the origins.”
The bill does not get into specifics about the commission’s makeup, resolving only to form a group “to properly acknowledge, memorialize, and be a catalyst for progress toward jettisoning the belief in a hierarchy of human value, embracing our common humanity, and permanently eliminating persistent racial inequities.”
Lee said she also supports other legislation creating reparations to African Americans for slavery, but that is not the focus of her proposal. Her resolution has 28 Democratic co-sponsors, including civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, and the chairman of the Rules Committee, Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, whose committee would clear the way for legislation to come to the House floor.From peaceful protest to mass arrests: Police in Oakland fires tear gas at protesters condemning the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer during the fourth night of demonstrations in the Bay Area.Video: Matthias Gafni, Mallory Moench, Erika Carlos
It’s unclear if the bill can pass Congress. Lee said in an interview last week she had mentioned it to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, but had not discussed it in depth. Pelosi listed Lee’s bill as being a way to “look at the full picture” on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, but was noncommittal on moving it forward.
Democrats have a majority in the House, but the Senate is controlled by Republicans, who have been critical of discussions of viewing American history through the lens of slavery as an original sin.
But Lee said she hoped the effort could be bipartisan, though no Republicans are signed on to sponsor it.
The commission should not be viewed as another in a long line of token panels, said Wade Henderson, former president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Lee’s effort could have a broad scope that looks to examine and then heal the deep wounds in society caused by racism and discrimination, Henderson said.
“This is not merely about equity and equality and fairness as we understand it. It’s also about the national security of the United States,” Henderson said. “We face three parallel crises that when taken together pose the greatest challenge that our country has faced in a century.”
Henderson said those three crises — coronavirus, police brutality and discrimination writ large — are “the fruit of a poison tree,” namely slavery and racism.
Tal Kopan
Tal Kopan is The San Francisco Chronicle’s Washington correspondent. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan. Previously, she was a political reporter for CNN Politics, where she covered immigration, cybersecurity and other hot-button issues in Washington, including the 2016 presidential election.
Prior to joining the network, Kopan was a reporter for POLITICO in Washington, D.C., where she reported for their breaking news team and policy verticals, including a special focus on the Department of Justice, courts and cybersecurity.
Kopan started her career working in Chicago with local media outlets ABC7 Chicago and Fox Chicago News.
Her work has earned her awards and fellowships from the Atlanta Press Club; National Press Foundation; Loyola Law School, Los Angeles; and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Kopan graduated with honors from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in “law, letters and society.”
©2020 Hearst
35 Pics Showing The Other Side Of The George Floyd Protests
Bio: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | |
|---|---|
| Coleridge in 1795 | |
| Born | 21 October 1772 Ottery St Mary, Devon, Great Britain |
| Died | 25 July 1834 (aged 61) Highgate, Middlesex, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Poet, critic, philosopher |
| Alma mater | Jesus College, Cambridge |
| Literary movement | Romanticism |
| Notable works | The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel, Conversation poems, Biographia Literaria |
| Spouse | Sara Fricker |
| Children | Hartley Coleridge Berkeley Coleridge Sara Coleridge Derwent Coleridge |
| Signature |
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (/ˈkoʊlərɪdʒ/;[1] 21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He also shared volumes and collaborated with Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Charles Lloyd. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on William Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including suspension of disbelief.[2] He had a major influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and American transcendentalism.
Throughout his adult life Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, which had not been defined during his lifetime.[3] He was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction.
Early life and education
Main article: Early life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in the town of Ottery St Mary in Devon, England.[4] Samuel’s father was the Reverend John Coleridge (1718–1781), the well-respected vicar of St Mary’s Church, Ottery St Mary and was headmaster of the King’s School, a free grammar school established by King Henry VIII (1509–1547) in the town. He had previously been master of Hugh Squier‘s School in South Molton, Devon, and lecturer of nearby Molland.[5] John Coleridge had three children by his first wife. Samuel was the youngest of ten by the Reverend Mr. Coleridge’s second wife, Anne Bowden (1726–1809),[6] probably the daughter of John Bowden, Mayor of South Molton, Devon, in 1726.[7] Coleridge suggests that he “took no pleasure in boyish sports” but instead read “incessantly” and played by himself.[8] After John Coleridge died in 1781, 8-year-old Samuel was sent to Christ’s Hospital, a charity school which was founded in the 16th century in Greyfriars, London, where he remained throughout his childhood, studying and writing poetry. At that school Coleridge became friends with Charles Lamb, a schoolmate, and studied the works of Virgil and William Lisle Bowles.[9] In one of a series of autobiographical letters written to Thomas Poole, Coleridge wrote: “At six years old I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarll – and then I found the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments – one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark – and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the window in which the books lay – and whenever the sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read.”
Coleridge seems to have appreciated his teacher, as he wrote in recollections of his school days in Biographia Literaria:
I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master […] At the same time that we were studying the Greek Tragic Poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. […] In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words… In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse’s daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose! […] Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master’s, which I cannot pass over in silence, because I think it … worthy of imitation. He would often permit our theme exercises, … to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the day.[10]
He later wrote of his loneliness at school in the poem Frost at Midnight: “With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt/Of my sweet birthplace.”
From 1791 until 1794, Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge.[11] In 1792, he won the Browne Gold Medal for an ode that he wrote on the slave trade.[12] In December 1793, he left the college and enlisted in the 15th (The King’s) Light Dragoons using the false name “Silas Tomkyn Comberbache”,[13] perhaps because of debt or because the girl that he loved, Mary Evans, had rejected him. His brothers arranged for his discharge a few months later under the reason of “insanity” and he was readmitted to Jesus College, though he would never receive a degree from the university.
Pantisocracy and marriage
Mary Matilda Betham, Sara Coleridge (Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Portrait miniature, 1809Image of Coleridge, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Vision of Sir Launfal (by Coleridge and James Russell Lowell), published by Sampson Low, 1906.Plaque commemorating Coleridge at St Mary’s Church, Ottery St Mary
,_Portrait_miniature,1809.jpg){kind=link}
Cambridge and Somerset
At Jesus College, Coleridge was introduced to political and theological ideas then considered radical, including those of the poet Robert Southey with whom he collaborated on the play The Fall of Robespierre. Coleridge joined Southey in a plan, later abandoned, to found a utopian commune-like society, called Pantisocracy, in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. In 1795, the two friends married sisters Sara and Edith Fricker, in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol,[14] but Coleridge’s marriage with Sara proved unhappy. He grew to detest his wife, whom he married mainly because of social constraints. Following the birth of their fourth child, he eventually separated from her.
A third sister, Mary, had already married a third poet Robert Lovell and both became partners in Pantisocracy. Lovell also introduced Coleridge and Southey to their future patron Joseph Cottle but died of a fever in April 1796. Coleridge was with him at his death.
In 1796 he released his first volume of poems entitled Poems on various subjects, which also included four poems by Charles Lamb as well as a collaboration with Robert Southey and a work suggested by his and Lamb’s schoolfriend Robert Favell. Among the poems were Religious Musings, Monody on the Death of Chatterton and an early version of The Eolian Harp entitled Effusion 35. A second edition was printed in 1797, this time including an appendix of works by Lamb and Charles Lloyd, a young poet to whom Coleridge had become a private tutor.
In 1796 he also privately printed Sonnets from Various Authors, including sonnets by Lamb, Lloyd, Southey and himself as well as older poets such as William Lisle Bowles.
Coleridge made plans to establish a journal, The Watchman, to be printed every eight days to avoid a weekly newspaper tax.[15] The first issue of the short-lived journal was published in March 1796. It had ceased publication by May of that year.[16]
The years 1797 and 1798, during which he lived in what is now known as Coleridge Cottage, in Nether Stowey, Somerset, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge’s life. In 1795, Coleridge met poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. (Wordsworth, having visited him and being enchanted by the surroundings, rented Alfoxton Park, a little over three miles [5 km] away.) Besides The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge composed the symbolic poem Kubla Khan, written—Coleridge himself claimed—as a result of an opium dream, in “a kind of a reverie”; and the first part of the narrative poem Christabel. The writing of Kubla Khan, written about the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and his legendary palace at Xanadu, was said to have been interrupted by the arrival of a “Person from Porlock” – an event that has been embellished upon in such varied contexts as science fiction and Nabokov’s Lolita. During this period, he also produced his much-praised “conversation poems” This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, and The Nightingale.
In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which proved to be the starting point for the English romantic age. Wordsworth may have contributed more poems, but the real star of the collection was Coleridge’s first version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It was the longest work and drew more praise and attention than anything else in the volume. In the spring Coleridge temporarily took over for Rev. Joshua Toulmin at Taunton’s Mary Street Unitarian Chapel[17] while Rev. Toulmin grieved over the drowning death of his daughter Jane. Poetically commenting on Toulmin’s strength, Coleridge wrote in a 1798 letter to John Prior Estlin, “I walked into Taunton (eleven miles) and back again, and performed the divine services for Dr. Toulmin. I suppose you must have heard that his daughter, (Jane, on 15 April 1798) in a melancholy derangement, suffered herself to be swallowed up by the tide on the sea-coast between Sidmouth and Bere [sic] (Beer). These events cut cruelly into the hearts of old men: but the good Dr. Toulmin bears it like the true practical Christian, – there is indeed a tear in his eye, but that eye is lifted up to the Heavenly Father.”[18]
The West Midlands and the North
Coleridge also worked briefly in Shropshire, where he came in December 1797 as locum to its local Unitarian minister, Dr Rowe, in their church in the High Street at Shrewsbury. He is said to have read his Rime of the Ancient Mariner at a literary evening in Mardol. He was then contemplating a career in the ministry, and gave a probationary sermon in High Street church on Sunday, 14 January 1798. William Hazlitt, a Unitarian minister’s son, was in the congregation, having walked from Wem to hear him. Coleridge later visited Hazlitt and his father at Wem but within a day or two of preaching he received a letter from Josiah Wedgwood II, who had offered to help him out of financial difficulties with an annuity of £150 (approximately £13,000 in today’s money[19]) per year on condition he give up his ministerial career. Coleridge accepted this, to the disappointment of Hazlitt who hoped to have him as a neighbour in Shropshire.[20]
From 16 September 1798, Coleridge and the Wordsworths left for a stay in Germany; Coleridge soon went his own way and spent much of his time in university towns. In February 1799 he enrolled at the University of Göttingen, where he attended lectures by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Johann Gottfried Eichhorn.[21] During this period, he became interested in German philosophy, especially the transcendental idealism and critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and in the literary criticism of the 18th-century dramatist Gotthold Lessing. Coleridge studied German and, after his return to England, translated the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the German Classical poet Friedrich Schiller into English. He continued to pioneer these ideas through his own critical writings for the rest of his life (sometimes without attribution), although they were unfamiliar and difficult for a culture dominated by empiricism.
In 1799, Coleridge and the Wordsworths stayed at Thomas Hutchinson’s farm on the River Tees at Sockburn, near Darlington.Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s daughter Sara Coleridge – 1830. Portrait by Richard James Lane
It was at Sockburn that Coleridge wrote his ballad-poem Love, addressed to Sara Hutchinson. The knight mentioned is the mailed figure on the Conyers tomb in ruined Sockburn church. The figure has a wyvern at his feet, a reference to the Sockburn Worm slain by Sir John Conyers (and a possible source for Lewis Carroll‘s Jabberwocky). The worm was supposedly buried under the rock in the nearby pasture; this was the ‘greystone’ of Coleridge’s first draft, later transformed into a ‘mount’. The poem was a direct inspiration for John Keats‘ famous poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci.[22]
Coleridge’s early intellectual debts, besides German idealists like Kant and critics like Lessing, were first to William Godwin‘s Political Justice, especially during his Pantisocratic period, and to David Hartley‘s Observations on Man, which is the source of the psychology which is found in Frost at Midnight. Hartley argued that one becomes aware of sensory events as impressions, and that “ideas” are derived by noticing similarities and differences between impressions and then by naming them. Connections resulting from the coincidence of impressions create linkages, so that the occurrence of one impression triggers those links and calls up the memory of those ideas with which it is associated (See Dorothy Emmet, “Coleridge and Philosophy”).
Coleridge was critical of the literary taste of his contemporaries, and a literary conservative insofar as he was afraid that the lack of taste in the ever growing masses of literate people would mean a continued desecration of literature itself.
In 1800, he returned to England and shortly thereafter settled with his family and friends in Greta Hall at Keswick in the Lake District of Cumberland to be near Grasmere, where Wordsworth had moved. He was a houseguest of the Wordsworths’ for eighteen months, but was a difficult houseguest, as his dependency on laudanum grew and his frequent nightmares would wake the children. He was also a fussy eater, to Dorothy Wordsworth‘s frustration, who had to cook. For example, not content with salt, Coleridge sprinkled cayenne pepper on his eggs, which he ate from a teacup.[23] His marital problems, nightmares, illnesses, increased opium dependency, tensions with Wordsworth, and a lack of confidence in his poetic powers fuelled the composition of Dejection: An Ode and an intensification of his philosophical studies.[24]
In 1802, Coleridge took a nine-day walking holiday in the fells of the Lake District. Coleridge is credited with the first recorded descent of Scafell to Mickledore via Broad Stand, although this was more due to his getting lost than a keenness for mountaineering.[25]
Later life and increasing drug use
Coleridge at age 42, portrait by Washington AllstonMain article: Coleridge and opium
Travel and The Friend
In 1804, he travelled to Sicily and Malta, working for a time as Acting Public Secretary of Malta under the Civil Commissioner, Alexander Ball, a task he performed quite successfully. He lived in San Anton Palace in the village of Attard. He gave this up and returned to England in 1806. Dorothy Wordsworth was shocked at his condition upon his return. From 1807 to 1808, Coleridge returned to Malta and then travelled in Sicily and Italy, in the hope that leaving Britain’s damp climate would improve his health and thus enable him to reduce his consumption of opium. Thomas De Quincey alleges in his Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets that it was during this period that Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict, using the drug as a substitute for the lost vigour and creativity of his youth. It has been suggested that this reflects De Quincey’s own experiences more than Coleridge’s.[26]
His opium addiction (he was using as much as two quarts of laudanum a week) now began to take over his life: he separated from his wife Sara in 1808, quarrelled with Wordsworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in 1811, and put himself under the care of Dr. Daniel in 1814. His addiction caused severe constipation, which required regular and humiliating enemas.[27]
In 1809, Coleridge made his second attempt to become a newspaper publisher with the publication of the journal entitled The Friend. It was a weekly publication that, in Coleridge’s typically ambitious style, was written, edited, and published almost entirely single-handedly. Given that Coleridge tended to be highly disorganised and had no head for business, the publication was probably doomed from the start. Coleridge financed the journal by selling over five hundred subscriptions, over two dozen of which were sold to members of Parliament, but in late 1809, publication was crippled by a financial crisis and Coleridge was obliged to approach “Conversation Sharp”,[28] Tom Poole and one or two other wealthy friends for an emergency loan to continue. The Friend was an eclectic publication that drew upon every corner of Coleridge’s remarkably diverse knowledge of law, philosophy, morals, politics, history, and literary criticism. Although it was often turgid, rambling, and inaccessible to most readers, it ran for 25 issues and was republished in book form a number of times. Years after its initial publication, a revised and expanded edition of The Friend, with added philosophical content including his ‘Essays on the Principles of Method’, became a highly influential work and its effect was felt on writers and philosophers from John Stuart Mill to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
London: final years and death
Blue plaque, 7 Addison Bridge Place, West Kensington, London
Between 1810 and 1820, Coleridge gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol – those on Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as a model for contemporary writers. Much of Coleridge’s reputation as a literary critic is founded on the lectures that he undertook in the winter of 1810–11, which were sponsored by the Philosophical Institution and given at Scot’s Corporation Hall off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street. These lectures were heralded in the prospectus as “A Course of Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry.” Coleridge’s ill-health, opium-addiction problems, and somewhat unstable personality meant that all his lectures were plagued with problems of delays and a general irregularity of quality from one lecture to the next. As a result of these factors, Coleridge often failed to prepare anything but the loosest set of notes for his lectures and regularly entered into extremely long digressions which his audiences found difficult to follow. However, it was the lecture on Hamlet given on 2 January 1812 that was considered the best and has influenced Hamlet studies ever since. Before Coleridge, Hamlet was often denigrated and belittled by critics from Voltaire to Dr. Johnson. Coleridge rescued the play’s reputation, and his thoughts on it are often still published as supplements to the text.
In 1812 he allowed Robert Southey to make use of extracts from his vast number of private notebooks in their collaboration Omniana; Or, Horae Otiosiores.
In August 1814, Coleridge was approached by Lord Byron‘s publisher, John Murray, about the possibility of translating Goethe’s classic Faust (1808). Coleridge was regarded by many as the greatest living writer on the demonic and he accepted the commission, only to abandon work on it after six weeks. Until recently, scholars were in agreement that Coleridge never returned to the project, despite Goethe’s own belief in the 1820s that he had in fact completed a long translation of the work. In September 2007, Oxford University Press sparked a heated scholarly controversy by publishing an English translation of Goethe’s work that purported to be Coleridge’s long-lost masterpiece (the text in question first appeared anonymously in 1821).[29]
Between 1814 and 1816, Coleridge lived in Calne, Wiltshire and seemed able to focus on his work and manage his addiction, drafting Biographia Literaria. He rented rooms from a local surgeon, Mr Page, on Church Street, just opposite the entrance to the churchyard. A blue plaque marks the property today.[30][31]
In April 1816, Coleridge, with his addiction worsening, his spirits depressed, and his family alienated, took residence in the Highgate homes, then just north of London, of the physician James Gillman, first at South Grove and later at the nearby 3 The Grove.[32] It is unclear whether his growing use of opium (and the brandy in which it was dissolved) was a symptom or a cause of his growing depression. Gillman was partially successful in controlling the poet’s addiction. Coleridge remained in Highgate for the rest of his life, and the house became a place of literary pilgrimage for writers including Carlyle and Emerson.
In Gillman’s home, Coleridge finished his major prose work, the Biographia Literaria (mostly drafted in 1815, and finished in 1817), a volume composed of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. He composed a considerable amount of poetry, of variable quality. He published other writings while he was living at the Gillman homes, notably the Lay Sermons of 1816 and 1817, Sibylline Leaves (1817), Hush (1820), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830).[33] He also produced essays published shortly after his death, such as Essay on Faith (1838)[34] and Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840).[35] A number of his followers were central to the Oxford Movement, and his religious writings profoundly shaped Anglicanism in the mid-nineteenth century.[36]
Coleridge also worked extensively on the various manuscripts which form his “Opus Maximum”, a work which was in part intended as a post-Kantian work of philosophical synthesis.[37] The work was never published in his lifetime, and has frequently been seen as evidence for his tendency to conceive grand projects which he then had difficulty in carrying through to completion. But while he frequently berated himself for his “indolence”, the long list of his published works calls this myth into question. Critics are divided on whether the “Opus Maximum”, first published in 2002, successfully resolved the philosophical issues he had been exploring for most of his adult life.[38]
Coleridge died in Highgate, London on 25 July 1834 as a result of heart failure compounded by an unknown lung disorder, possibly linked to his use of opium. Coleridge had spent 18 years under the roof of the Gillman family, who built an addition onto their home to accommodate the poet.[39]
Faith may be defined as fidelity to our own being, so far as such being is not and cannot become an object of the senses; and hence, by clear inference or implication to being generally, as far as the same is not the object of the senses; and again to whatever is affirmed or understood as the condition, or concomitant, or consequence of the same. This will be best explained by an instance or example. That I am conscious of something within me peremptorily commanding me to do unto others as I would they should do unto me; in other words a categorical (that is, primary and unconditional) imperative; that the maxim (regula maxima, or supreme rule) of my actions, both inward and outward, should be such as I could, without any contradiction arising therefrom, will to be the law of all moral and rational beings. Essay on Faith
Carlyle described him at Highgate: “Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life’s battle … The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman’s house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon.”[40]
More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge
The Coronavirus Update
06.01.20 (wired.com)
| An Italian doctor sends good news, poorer countries spike with infections, and scientists analyze the enzyme at the center of Covid-19. Here’s what you should know: Headlines Novel coronavirus is losing its potency, says a top Italian doctor The head of a Milan hospital told reporters that recent swab tests have shown a less viral load than previous findings, suggesting that the coronavirus in Italy may be less potent now than it was before. Italy is attempting a return to normal life after losing over 33,000 lives since the outbreak came to light on February 21. |
Towards a Moral Revolution
–by On Being, syndicated from onbeing.org, May 26, 2020
Transcript:
Krista Tippett, host:The world keeps changing, and moral reckonings are being driven to the surface of our life together: who will we be to each other in our communities, our nations, our globalized world? What are politics for; what is an economy for — and education, and health care, and borders? Jacqueline Novogratz is a voice I respect on the inadequacy of the simplistic ways we take up such questions, if we take them up at all — the necessity of moral imagination and the cultivation of character alongside all of the so-called hard skills that are no longer serving us.
This is at the heart of her book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World. It feels important to me, in a moment like this, to look below the radar of rupture — to see models and practices that work, and that in fact can take up the huge hard problems. Acumen, which Jacqueline Novogratz founded and leads, is an exercise in creative, human-centered capitalism: a venture capital fund that serves some of the poorest people in the world — people whose incomes have previously excluded them from the power of the market.
Jacqueline Novogratz:I think, in this moment of such peril and possibility, if we tapped into that stirring, that awakening, we really could build a world like the world has never seen before. And if there was ever a decade to do it, it’s this decade.
Tippett:And this century may require that of us if we’re to flourish in it, right?
Novogratz:I think this century does require it of us. I’m not a shame person, but man, I want future generations to look back on us and say, “Look how hard they tried,” not “Look at how blind they were.”
[music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating]
Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.
Jacqueline Novogratz began her career as a traditional investment banker. While still in her twenties, she helped start the first microfinance bank in Rwanda. And Acumen helped start the field of impact investing, which so many have now entered.
Jacqueline, I think you use the language of “moral imagination.” You’re the only person I know who uses [laughs] those words as much as I do. And really, moral imagination, moral revolution, moral courage — that’s what we’re going to talk about. And so I’m just curious, to start, about where you would go with your earliest memory of what the word “moral” meant when you were growing up in the 1960s, in your big, Catholic, Austrian-immigrant, military family.
Novogratz:I think the word “moral,” for me, conjures up first-grade classroom of Sister Mary Theophane in West Point, Highland Falls, New York, looking at a poster of a rice bowl with two hands holding it, and being told by the nun that we had an obligation, always, to think about people who were less fortunate than we were. And then her mantra was that to whom much is given, much is expected. And I think that instilled in me, in a deep and crystallized way, that we’re here for each other.
Tippett:That’s so consonant, really, with what you’ve walked into.
You know, you and I are roughly the same age, and I’m so aware right now, at this point in the young 21st century, of all these echoes from the 1960s — how things have come full circle or turned out so differently than we expected they would, starting out when we did.
Novogratz:Oh, my goodness.
Tippett:So you’ve written this book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: And you talk about — you left Rwanda in 1989 for Palo Alto to go to Stanford Business School; the Berlin Wall falls that year; the Soviet Union disintegrates; it’s the end of history; you are a banker, and you’re remaking banking, and capitalism has won. And you made a statement in a speech — I believe it was at a forum for business leaders. And you said Steve Jobs spoke to your business class. And you said, we thought we needed a technological revolution, but we needed a moral revolution. And that’s what you’re really writing about now and steeping in. And so just how would you start to talk about what that realization, what that phrase holds for you?
Novogratz:When I think back to that time — and it was really within the course of a month that the Berlin Wall fell, and then Jobs got on the stage and said technology will reshape the world. And both forces did: capitalism and technology did reshape the world and did lift a billion people out of extreme poverty. And, at the same time, it has left us — both forces have left us more unequal, more divided, more divisive, and facing long-term — not long-term, short-term climate catastrophe. And so when I say we need a moral revolution, it’s really one that is not dictated from above, but it’s a reframe of the system, because we have had a system that has put profit at the center. And what we need to do is shift that to put humanity and the Earth at the center.
And that is not going to come from above. That is going to come from each of us, changing our ways. I think, Krista, that we’re in this moment where we know our old and current institutions have run their course. But we have not reimagined what they need to become. And so, because there is no roadmap, we can only hold onto a moral compass. And that, for me, is the beginning of the moral revolution.
Tippett:But we’re in this, we’re this in-between generation that can see what’s broken but has to make up the new forms, and when you say, when you point to the need for a shared moral compass, that is also the work — how, in this world of proximity to difference, in this globalized world that, as you’ve pointed out, even though we were talking about it in the 1980s, in the 1990s, we could not envision what it has become and what it’s meant and what it’s given us to reckon with. So I think that’s really what I want to talk to you about: how do we start to develop a shared moral compass, and I think that’s what you’re working on in the spheres where you’re engaged.
Novogratz:When you and I were growing up, the world operated in separate spheres. There were rich countries, poor countries; capitalism, communism. And now there’s elements of the rich and the poor, of the developed and the developing, in every country, and we’re starting to understand — well, we need to understand — that we can’t just go to the polarities. We’re having this broken debate — if it’s not capitalism, then it’s socialism — rather than one that says, how do we take the best of each, move beyond ideology, focus on the problem that we want to solve, and then bring the best of us to bear on solving that problem, because that will bring out the best in who we are as well? And so the skills — which I also think are not the soft skills.
When I was growing up, we relegated skills like the moral imagination, like listening, like understanding identity as a tool rather than as a bludgeon, holding opposites without rejecting either side — those are the hard skills. And those are the skills we need to impart in our children, in our universities, in our workplaces, if we want to do the weaving and the integration that I do believe, as you said, is the work. And 20 years of investing, trying to reimagine capitalism, and using those tools to invest in entrepreneurs that are first and foremost trying to solve tough problems of poverty, has taught me that the greatest predictor is not even the business idea of real success. The greatest predictor is the kind of character that holds some of those skills that I was just talking about.
Tippett:So Acumen, which you began as the Acumen Fund works with the poorest people in the world. I think it’s important to articulate what you are working on, and people all around the world who you see and engage makes this assumption or this insistence that the market and the way we live economically, using capitalism’s power and its tools, can be part of lasting and generative social change. And it’s that kind of entrepreneurship that needs character to succeed. But you’re also redefining what we generally mean when we say “succeed,” especially in terms of entrepreneurship.
Novogratz:That’s right. In brief, it’s moving away from money, power, fame, which is the shorthand for what we’re seeing around us too much, today, to celebrating those people who release the most human energy into the world. And so one of the great joys of my life, particularly now, because I’m seeing it more than ever, is to work with entrepreneurs who aren’t cowed by this idea that if they’re not making a lot of money, they are not as successful as other entrepreneurs or they are not as real, in part because some of them are making enormous change. I think of Ned Tozun and Sam Goldman, who had the audacity in 2007 to say, “We want to eradicate kerosene from the Earth.” It’s been 130 years since Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb; 1.5 billion people have no access to electricity; no one else is solving it; we certainly aren’t solving it in the same old, same old ways of separation, either charity on one hand or traditional investment on the other, so let’s go after solving this problem. Let’s look at the poor as our customers. Let’s try to understand from their perspective — the moral imagination; let’s build something that’s affordable, that’s beautiful, that’s useful, that lasts; let’s figure out how to finance it. A traditional capitalist would say: “Too hard.”
And for five, six, seven years, we weren’t sure whether this company was going to make it. But a couple of weeks ago, we were able to announce that they’ve just brought light and, increasingly, electricity to 100 million of the world’s poor.
That’s a big number. That’s moving the needle. But when I think about what has driven Sam and Ned, it hasn’t been getting rich — it’s been lighting the world. And they’ve done it. And we need to celebrate them as role models. We don’t only need new business models, but we need to celebrate new role models.
Tippett:There’s a place where you say, “What if the golden rule were not ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ but, also, ‘Give more to the world than you take from it’?”
Novogratz:It’s such a simple rule. And again, right now when I see all this anger at “You’re a bad person because you’re wealthy,” “You’re a fuzzy-headed nonprofit entrepreneur because you clearly don’t know how to manage,” we’re just screaming at each other. If we moved from a metric that — or an ethos that recognized that we’re all part of this together, that we actually do face enormous changes that are going to impact all of us, and we just use that simple moral idea of giving more than we take, the whole world would change. We’d literally go from thinking of ourselves just as consumers, to citizens, and focus on sustainability rather than celebrating selfishness. And those are the mantras I’d like to see, which I think this next generation wants to embrace.
[music: “Falaal” by Blue Dot Sessions]
Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today with Jacqueline Novogratz of Acumen, an incubator of human-centered capitalism.
I want to talk about language before we go much further. Moral imagination has so much to do with what we see and the words we use. You have chosen to continue to use the word “poor,” but you don’t speak in terms of “disadvantaged.” Would you talk to me a little bit about what you’re describing here and the words that actually capture what you see and what this moral revolution would take in differently?
Novogratz:I do think we need a different language, a language that gets comfortable, again, with what we too often look at as “soft.” And I would include love in there, because I think real love is a hard skill. And at the same time, I get exhausted when we jump on words and, again, ascribe an evil characteristic to someone using that word, before we even interrogate it. And so when we were writing our manifesto, the phrase that “it starts by standing with the poor” was incredibly important to us. And there were people on our team who were really offended by that. Why can’t we say it starts by standing with low-income people?
Tippett:Right; it sounds demeaning.
Novogratz:It sounds demeaning, and also, as I have come to understand poverty, I reject the notion that poverty is just about income. We’ve got to think about the opposite of poverty being dignity or having opportunity and choice. And so we couldn’t come up with a better word than “poor.” The other piece of it was that, as investors, this pushed us toward our own bottom line, if you will, that when we look at making an investment, we have to ask ourselves, as enticing as it is, in a world that still looks at you in terms of your financial returns, to say, “Well, these people are vulnerable, even though they’re middle-class,” we wanted to be the organization that pushed ourself, took on something more difficult, by investing on behalf and with the truly disadvantaged — the poor.
And increasingly, and I think this is something that’s deepened in my own learning and our own learning, we’ve integrated this idea that if you care about the poor, you have no choice but to care about the climate, because in the context of climate change, there is no doubt about who gets hurt most.
Tippett:I think that’s such an important statement, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth, but dignity. And you’ve also really, in very granular ways, gotten into the fact that dependence can also be an enemy of dignity and that the language of “helping” people is problematic and, I think, also counterintuitively in this, as you say, this very stark, polarized debate about capitalism being good or evil, you’ve learned that the market can be a powerful listening device to poor people, in fact; that capitalism can be a humanizing way to accompany the poor.
Novogratz:What I think a lot of people don’t understand, and I didn’t understand, is that in a way, we make a mistake by looking at poor economies. When you’re looking at a community of low-income people, you’re looking not at a market economy, you’re looking at a political economy. And so where there is no real market, everyone has their hand in the lives of the poor: the government officials that usually, often — not usually, but often make low-income people pay for whatever grant or income support they’re getting; the religious leaders, who make a lot of decisions on their behalf; the family structures, mothers-in-law — all of these — certainly, aid organizations, charities; there’s mafias who control the markets in very extortive ways. And so the power of a fair marketplace, where people actually can have choice and dignity over their own lives, that is revolutionary. And if you’ve not spent time in slums or in rural areas controlled by bureaucracies and the politics of poverty, that can be hard to understand.
Tippett:I feel like there’s a sentence in your book that, to me, feels like an operating question for moral imagination: “The question is not merely how to make people better off, but what does it mean to be a whole human being?”
Novogratz:And also, Krista, I’m so delighted that you said operational, the operating model. When I think of moral imagination, we always say “the humility to see the world as it is and the audacity to imagine what it could be.” But I break it down into four steps, almost, that are truly operational. One, it starts with empathy, but it can’t end with empathy and putting yourself in another person’s shoes, because that too often leads to distancing and the reinforcement of the status quo — “Oh, those poor people, their life must be terrible.” The second step is immersion — Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights advocate, would call it proximity, but you have to get close to the people that you serve; you have to understand their problem. And the third piece is analysis. Then you have to understand the system in which they’re operating. And then you have to act. And my team will say, “Well, Jacqueline, moral imagination isn’t a verb.” I’m like, well, sometimes we just have to propel ourselves into action from that sense of knowing, because in the knowing, we have a responsibility to do. And so I like to think of it both as a beautiful phrase, but also one that demands that we extend that beauty to actually make a difference, rather than just imagine.
Tippett:So it’s aspirational, but it’s also fiercely pragmatic.
Novogratz:It is fiercely pragmatic. And it’s funny, because people often — in fact, when we talk about polarities and holding opposites in tensions and — I’ve had more than a couple of investors say, “You know, Jacqueline, you talk about love all the time. But then it comes, we’re sitting at the negotiating table, and you’re hardcore.” And it’s like, we’re patient capital, we’re not stupid capital. [laughs] That love actually is about caring so much that you want other people to succeed. That is hard to do.
Tippett:And that requires expectations and helping them develop capacities and growing, stretching.
Novogratz:That requires expectations, because if we think they’re gonna be — that’s right. And we have to set standards high so that people live up to it, because if we put low expectations on people, we all know very well that all of us will stoop down to them. And so that’s what love is.
Tippett:I also feel like what’s so odd to me, when the word “love” gets used in public spaces — and you’re doing that, and I’m doing that, and I feel I hear that rising up — and one reaction people have, like you’re talking about these investors, is that it’s soft. But we know, each and every one of us in our actual lives, that it is the hardest thing and is not laissez-faire; the people we love the most — there’s a lot of engagement.
Novogratz:It is the hardest thing, and inside of it is another secret — we don’t talk about it enough — which is, for anyone who is caretaking someone who’s been sick or who has lost someone, for anyone who’s accompanying someone in a real way, there are times when that love takes every ounce of courage and perseverance that you have in your body, and those are also the times when you like yourself the best.
And I think that is the opportunity we have now in the world — that we feel like there’s such darkness around us, but we all know that it’s in those times that we can elevate ourselves if we get outside of the small parts of ourselves, which right now are being sparked too often by, frankly, the easy stuff.
Tippett:You know … this is pulling back a little bit from this conversation we’re having about this realm of entrepreneurship and leadership and economic life, which is just another way to talk about human life — but it’s very resonant with how you’ve also looked at what’s been happening in our country and in the world in these last few years. You wrote after the 2016 election — and this is really echoing with what you said a minute ago about the opposite of poverty is dignity — you said this was an election “about dignity, about being seen, about feeling counted. It was about people who wanted their voices heard so powerfully that they were willing to overlook language and actions they would never accept in themselves or their children.” And I really appreciated the place you went later in the piece, where you said, “And whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton won the election, the U.S. would be staggering, wounded and bleeding, left to wonder how we got to a place where we feel we hardly know each other.”
Novogratz:This is why I think we have an opportunity to build the skills of identity. What worries me is, I see identity too often used as a bludgeon rather than a tool and a mechanism to enhance our understanding of each other. And in that same vein, we are so focused on our own identity that we’re missing the opportunity of recognizing that, yes, we need to learn about our identity and the many different component parts of our identity so that we can connect with those similar identities that exist in other people who, on the surface, may seem completely different than ourselves. And that’s also a skill, and it’s one that takes a lifetime to master, but we can all start on the path.
I had a great experience with the — I think you may have interviewed Jonathan Haidt, actually. So I had the great privilege of taking Jon to India. And Jonathan has studied shame and marginalized peoples and, of course, how we use language.
Tippett:What’s his book?
Novogratz:The Righteous Mind, which is so spectacular. And so we do something that we took from the oral history project StoryCorps. But instead of putting people face to face, we do something that we call “story walks”, because we found that when you let the air blow around people, magic can sometimes happen. And the idea is that you go walking with each other, 20 minutes: one person talks, tells their story, and the other person — then the other person asks questions for ten minutes, and then you repeat on the way back. And it’s good to do it in a group. We brought the group back, and I had paired Jonathan with a guy named Vimal Kumar, who is from the scavenger caste, which is the lowest caste in India. These are people consigned to essentially picking up human waste, usually with some cardboard or plastic. And so then, when you get back, you’re supposed to introduce each other, and some do it in the first person.
So Jon started and said, “I’m introducing Vimal, so I’m going to speak as Vimal.” And he said, “I’m Vimal Kumar, and I was born in the scavenger caste. We are the people consigned to picking up waste, and no one ever touches us.” And he said, “My mother, however, got a job at a private school, and they allowed me to go to school as a result of it. But we couldn’t afford a uniform. I had to go to school in rags, and I sat in the back of the class, and I never spoke. But my mother was so proud that, when I was eight years old, she invited the whole school over to have a birthday party, and she spent two days cleaning the house, preparing for it. And then, on the day of the party, no one showed up.” And Jon started crying. And he said, “So I’m sorry, but I have an eight-year-old son. And the truth is, Vimal and I don’t have anything in common.” He said, “I am from a privileged background. I went to the best schools. I live in New York City. I’m a professor. My children have no want. And I can’t even believe that Vimal has been able to survive in the way that he’s so extraordinary.” And then Vimal took a deep breath, and he said, “No, Jon. You’re wrong.” He said, “You love India, I love India. We both have two children. We’ve both studied shame.” He said, “And besides, Jon, you’re a Jew. You understand what it feels like to have people think about you in a certain way for no reason other than what you were born. And finally, Jon, we both have Ph.D.s.”
Tippett:[laughs] That’s good.
Novogratz:[laughs] And you look at that, if these two could bridge that gap, we in the United States, who have so much in common, can find our ways to heal ourselves and to see ourselves in each other again — that we have a common endeavor in this country, to build a country where we can make good on the promise that all men were — and women — were created equal. And then we can help extend it to everyone on the planet, because we represent the planet now in ways that have so much to teach if we would just take that privilege seriously.
[music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions]
Tippett:After a short break, more with Jacqueline Novogratz. You can always listen again, and hear the unedited version of every show we do on the On Being podcast feed — wherever podcasts are found.
[music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions]
Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today we’re exploring the wisdom of Jacqueline Novogratz’s work and writing. She was an early innovator in the field of microfinance in Rwanda and in impact investing in the U.S. and globally. Acumen, the organization she founded and leads, has brought basic services to hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people. Jacqueline has described her recent book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, as a love letter to the next generation — including young Acumen Fellows around the world.
Tippett:You know, I feel like all of these practices that you have described and written about that we’ve been talking about, about figuring out how to be both audacious and humble, how to understand that you don’t plan your purpose but live your way into it, and ask that question of what you’re doing; of carrying around beautiful questions, powerful questions like “What are you doing when you feel more beautiful?”; of listening, not to convince or to convert but to change yourself — these are everyday practices that can be transformative, and immediately transformative. And just like that story you just told, this is all happening, all kinds of people all around us are making these moves. I sometimes think of this as the generative narrative of our time that just doesn’t get a light shone on it the way the dysfunctional, destructive narrative of our time is so privileged and so heavily investigated. And your work is full of these stories of this generative map that is emerging.
Novogratz:Absolutely. And the exciting thing now, Krista, which I couldn’t have said ten years ago, is that it’s not pretty language, and it’s not just a few people; it is a movement that is happening around the world and that the role models who are emerging are not reaching thousands of people, they’re reaching millions of people — in the case of d. light, 100 million people … that there’s a hard edge to these scaled companies that can only exist if you bring on a different skill set that understands how to put capital in its place, how to partner with government rather than malign it, how to understand identity and build inclusive organizations — and I’m not just talking, as you said, about entrepreneurs. We need to use these same skills in our universities.
Tippett:All of our disciplines.
Novogratz:In the military.
Tippett:Lawyers.
Novogratz:Every discipline. Our lawyers and our health care system, to make it patient-centric.
And that’s why a few young people are like, “Well, Jacqueline, you’re known as the pioneer of patient capital and impact investing, and yet, your book is all about moral leadership.” And I was like, “Because at the end of the day, that’s the work. I can — with all respect — hire really smart young people to do spreadsheets and valuation. But building a company that disrupts a system and creates a market that reaches 100 million really poor people — that is a leadership play.” And, as you also imply, I’m not just talking about entrepreneurs or organization builders. I’m talking about social workers and nurses and all of us.
Tippett:And that scale is the upside of that technological revolution that we did get. That is the generative possibility: that good can be amplified at such a different scale now than was true when you and I were growing up.
Novogratz:If we keep this technology and this capital in its place, and we realize that it’s up to us to bring the moral aspect to it.
Tippett:I do love the story you tell about — was it Felicula? Is that how you say her name? This enterprising nun who also became one of Rwanda’s first three women parliamentarians. And she was such a friend and mentor and partner to you, when you were so young there, starting out. Would you tell the story of — and she died, right?
Novogratz:Well, she was murdered.
Tippett:She was murdered. And would you tell the story of how, suddenly, or just a few years ago, her name was invoked in a new century, in a new world?
Novogratz:For me, in so many ways, sometimes many roads lead back to Rwanda. And it was literally 30 years, almost to the month, when I first arrived in Rwanda to set up that microfinance bank. And Felicula was one of three women parliamentarians who were among my co-founders. And she was the one I loved most. And she really wrapped her arms around me and — talk about crossing every line of difference — and taught me so much about her country. She didn’t have such a head for business, but she had a heart for the world, man. And I loved her. And one of the first things she and her fellow parliamentarians did — women parliamentarians did — was to eradicate bride price, a few years into their tenure. And it was too quick, probably, for their constituency.
Tippett:Explain what that meant.
Novogratz:So bride price — which still exists in traditional form — was that you would — an enterprising and prospective son-in-law would gift his prospective father-in-law three cows to marry the man’s daughter. And Felicula was really insulted with this idea of reducing women to chattel and wanted to change it. And so a few days after this law was passed, it was rescinded in another vote — a big backlash happened — and Felicula was killed in a mysterious hit-and-run accident. And that was really the first time in my life, at age 26, that I had to confront the price some people pay for rejecting the status quo.
And then we went on to build this bank, and then the genocide happened, and the surviving women with whom I had started this bank ended up playing every conceivable role, including bystander, victim, and perpetrator. And so the bank continued to stumble along, somehow, in those early years after genocide.
And now here I am, 30 years later, and I’m standing at a hotel reception with the president of the country and most of his ministers —
Tippett:In Kigali.
Novogratz:In Kigali, the same place, except I’m a much older woman, with wrinkles on my face to show it, and I know the downsides of what this work can be. I’m laying out this vision for this 70 million dollar, for-profit, off-grid energy fund that’s going to help electrify the country, and before I get onstage, a young woman walks up to me and says, “Miss Novogratz, I think you knew my auntie.” And I said, “Really? What was her name?” And she said, “Well, her name was Felicula.” And I burst into tears. And I said, “I’m sorry — who are you?” And she said, “My name is Monique. I’m the deputy general of the central bank.” And I literally, still crying, I turn to the president and his ministers, and I said, “If you had told me 30 years ago, when we were starting that microfinance bank, that in one generation a woman would be running the economic sector, the financial sector, I’m not sure we would’ve believed you. Maybe our dreams weren’t big enough.” And I understood, in that moment, that I was back in Kigali on that night to complete work that Felicula had started but couldn’t complete in her lifetime and that at this point in my life, I needed to continue that work but, also, dream so big I won’t complete them in my lifetime, but to enable another generation to take that work forward, too.
Though this little institution that we had started endured the murder of Felicula and genocide and so many challenges; the work had continued anyway, her work had continued, and it continues today; and that all of us stand on the work of those who went before us. And it’s really our individual and collective obligation, in a world that focuses too much on our rights and not enough on our responsibilities, it’s our collective obligation to take that work forward and imagine and then integrate human dignity, sustainability, and elevate the best of ourselves and bring ourselves to each other. And I think, in this moment of such peril and possibility, if we tapped into that stirring, that awakening, we really could build a world like the world has never seen before. And if there was ever a decade to do it, it’s this decade.
Tippett:And this century may require that of us if we’re to flourish in it.
Novogratz:I think this century does require it of us. And I’m not a shame person, but man, I want future generations to look back on us and say, “Look how hard they tried,” not “Look at how blind they were.”
[music: “Hotels” by Tape]
Tippett:I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today with Jacqueline Novogratz of Acumen, an incubator of human-centered capitalism.
[music: “Hotels” by Tape]
Tippett:This is really granular but, I think, really helpful — you describe in the book how you have modified the Jesuit Examen, which is supposed to be five steps. And I’ve tried this, so I found this really useful, because I never was able to stick with the five steps.
Novogratz:Five is too many. I’m sorry. [laughs] I know that’s sacrilege.
Tippett:But you’ve turned it into three, so just talk about this, because this is a daily practice that you weave into …
Novogratz:I try to do it every day. I don’t do it every single day. But when I do do it, my day is different; and that is, to start with intention. What do you want to accomplish in the day? Who do you want to be? And then check in with yourself later and ask yourself how you did. Do an account. And what did you learn from it? And then, importantly, forgive yourself for what you didn’t do or what you did poorly. And then the most important part of all is to express gratitude.
And when I do those acts, whether you call it three or four, I feel like I’m moving, and I’m also, at the same time, grounded.
Tippett:One thing we haven’t — one word we haven’t discussed that I — well, no, you’ve mentioned “accompaniment.” It’s an important word to you, it’s an important word to me, but also, I feel it emerging all over the place. I didn’t realize — you taught me this — that this was also a Jesuit phrase. I did not know that.
Novogratz:It is.
Tippett:I want to read this beautiful — it’s a couple paragraphs from your book, everything you’ve been talking about, this moral leadership that we are all called to, whatever our sphere, because all of our spheres have to be transformed in this way — we’re not called to do it alone, which was also a 20th-century lie.
Novogratz:It was a lie.
Tippett:So we surround ourselves with others who can hold us and hold it, the work, on the days that we can’t. So anyway, you wrote, “This is the secret of accompaniment. I will hold a mirror to you and show you your value, bear witness to your suffering and to your light. And over time, you will do the same for me, for within the relationship lies the promise of our shared dignity and the mutual encouragement needed to do the hard things.
Whatever you aim to do, whatever problem you hope to address, remember to accompany those who are struggling, those who are left out, who lack the capabilities needed to solve their own problems. We are each other’s destiny. Beneath the hard skills and firm strategic priorities needed to resolve our greatest challenges lies the soft, fertile ground of our shared humanity. In that place of hard and soft is sustenance enough to nourish the entire human family.”
Novogratz:In my way of seeing the world, I think accompaniment is so critical, and again, I think it’s so hard. And when you do it best is when you’re not asking for thanks in return.
I also — going back to this country, America — I also think, Krista, that it could be an organizing frame for how we think about a big part of our economy that we’re overlooking.
Tippett:Accompaniment could be an organizing frame?
Novogratz:I do; I do. I’ve seen it in companies in Africa and in South Asia — not just companies, in solutions, where — you look at the HIV crisis and the AIDS crisis of southern Africa, and community members were trained in showing up for people with HIV-positive who had to take their antiretrovirals and combine that with eating high-caloric food. And so the community members were trained in the rudiments of health care, and they would show up, they would check on whether they had taken their meds, etc., etc., and they would also help stave off the isolation and loneliness that comes, often, with any chronic disease. And so I’m seeing a generation of young people in the United States bring home some of these models, accompaniment models, which I think, given our opioid crisis, given our incarceration crisis, given our health care crisis, could play an extraordinarily powerful role.
City Health Works, which trains women from the community in Harlem, New York — in again, basic health skills. They show up and teach women who have chronic diseases, like diabetes and hypertension, simple things: how to go to the grocery store; how to buy food; how to go on walks — not how to go on walks. They go on walks with them. They bring them into community. And they have so reduced the number of hospital visits that they’ve created a revenue stream from government to the organization, enough so that they can cover all their costs, become profitable. So, suddenly, you have an economic and social model that has at the heart of it a healthier community, a more efficient government, and a stronger civil society.
That’s the reframe. And so we think about accompaniment as a beautiful, soft skill — you and I know how hard it is, but beyond that, if we had the real moral imagination, we could begin to create economic models that made sense for all of us and not just for a chosen few of us.
Tippett:Again, aspirational and fiercely pragmatic. [laughs]
Novogratz:I love that. Thank you. [laughs]
Tippett:So if I ask you today, this week, what is making you despair, and where are you finding hope, what comes to mind right now? Of course, we’re talking about a hard-edged hope, not a squishy hope.
Novogratz:One of the biggest lessons of my life, Krista, has been that we can’t separate the world into monsters and angels and that there’s nothing like loving people and knowing friends who played different roles in the genocide, including being perpetrators, that makes you have to confront that most raw element of what it means to be human. And the only conclusion I could make was that there are monsters and angels in each of us and that those monsters really are our broken parts — they’re our insecurities; they’re our fears; they’re our shames — and that in times of insecurity, it becomes really easy for demagogues to prey on those broken parts and sometimes make us do terrible things to each other.
We’re seeing that all over the world right now. And we have to fight against that. And that’s where the moral revolution becomes a matter of whether we choose to dive into the dark, the perilous path, or whether we choose to create a narrative and make that narrative real, which is our shared destiny, the possibility of collective human flourishment, our repairing the Earth in ways that make it more beautiful — and the choice is ours. And so my hard-edged hope comes from having lived and worked in communities that have had to contend with both. And like flowers breaking through granite, I’m gonna choose hope every time. And I frankly — despite all the dark, I remain a stubborn, persistent, hard-edged, hopeful optimist. I do!
Tippett:[laughs]
Novogratz: And that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Tippett:[laughs] Thank you, Jacqueline.
(Submitted by Sarah Flynn)