"All shall be well..."

As I have mentioned in a few recent posts, I've been paying a lot of attention to the Harvard Business School professor Arthur C. Brooks lately.  Dr. Brooks is a social scientist who teaches a class at Harvard called "Leadership and Happiness".  In his "spare time", Dr. Brooks also writes a column for The Atlantic called "How to Build a Life" and has a podcast called "The Art of Happiness".  I recently read a book that he co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, Build the Life You Want, and I am currently enrolled in his MOOC on EdX called "Managing Happiness".  I am currently listening to episode #14 of his podcast ("Happy Monkey"), in which Dr. Brooks interviews his intellectual hero, colleague, and friend, Dr. Martin Selgiman, positive psychology expert and author of several books, including The Hope Circuit and Learned Optimism.  In this particular episode, they talk a lot about Dr. Seligman's research on "learned helplessness" and "learned optimism".  I found the episode particularly insightful, as the interview occurred during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic a few years ago.

While there were several interesting points made in the podcast (which I am confident will be the subject of a future post), I was particularly intrigued when Dr. Seligman compared and contrasted two very old philosophical concepts.  First he mentioned a famous poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats called "The Second Coming".  Yeats wrote the poem in 1919, shortly after the end of World War I and during the middle of the Influenza Pandemic that lasted from 1918 through 1920.  The so-called "War to End All Wars" changed the geopolitical landscape and resulted in an estimated 40 million military and civilian casualties (dead and wounded).  In addition, the Great War contributed to the spread of the influenza virus that infected nearly 500 million people (1/3 of the total global population) and killed anywhere from 17 million to 50 million people (some reports estimate the number of deaths as high as 100 million).  Needless to say, the times during which Yeats wrote his poem were volatile, uncertain, chaotic, ambiguous, and turbulent.  

Yeats paints a deeply disturbing and mysterious picture that describes an alternative to the Christian idea of the Second Coming - Jesus's prophesied return to Earth as a savior announcing God's celestial and holy city, the New Jerusalem, and the Kingdom of Heaven.  The poem's first stanza describes a world of chaos, confusion, and pain.  Here we have one of the poem's most famous lines: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world..."  The second stanza is longer and provides a vision of the future - in this case Jesus's return as savior is replaced with the arrival of a grotesque beast: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"  Rather than providing a message of hope, Yeats provides one of despair.  Civilization, as we know it, has ended forever.  Time is up for humanity.  It's easy to imagine why Yeats felt the way that he did, given what was going on in the world at that time.  Yeats' image of the future is a depressing and pessimistic one.  His phrase, "slouching towards Bethlehem" has been used by a number of authors (e.g., it is used as the title for a collection of essays by Joan Didion) to describe the coming of the apocalypse, one that will change our world forever.

Dr. Seligman suggests that during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us probably were thinking, "This is how it all ends."  Similarly, given everything that we are going through as a society today, it's easy to be sad, depressed, and pessimistic about the future.  However, Dr. Seligman offers an alternative viewpoint, one that comes from a fourteenth century theologian, Julian of Norwich.  What's interesting here is that Julian's real name was Juliana - her Revelations of Divine Love are the earliest surviving English-language works attributed to a woman (she was known by Julian, as it was easier during those days for a work to be published if it was written by a man).  Julian lived her entire life in the English city of Norwich, which at that time was a center of commerce and religion.  The city went through a number of crises during her lifetime, including most notably the Black Death of 1348-1350.  Julian became seriously ill in 1373 and had a number of mystical visions, which she wrote about after making a miraculous recovery.

Julian of Norwich writes, "God did not say, You shall not be tormented, you shall not be troubled, you shall not be grieved, but God said, You shall not be overcome...All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."  Interestingly enough, the Catechism of the Catholic Church references this particular passage (I believe it comes from two different texts, but I am not certain) when asked the question, "Why does God allow suffering and evil in this world?"

These are two completely different viewpoints of the world.  One (the Yeats view) is very pessimistic, while the other (Julian's) is optimistic.  It is the latter viewpoint that both Drs. Brooks and Seligman recommend.  One of the most important things that we can do as leaders is to restore optimism and hope during difficult, turbulent times.  As former President and CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty once said, "A leader's job is to paint reality and give hope" (more on that later).  I am reminded, once again, of the famous poem "Lincoln, Man of the People" by Edwin Markham.  The last stanza of the poem begins with an iconic view of leadership:

So came the Captain with the mighty heart;

And when the judgment thunders split the house,

Wrenching the rafters from their ancient rest,

He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again

The rafters of the Home.   He held his place—

Held the long purpose like a growing tree—

Held on through blame and faltered not at praise.