• Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Director

This past weekend, while our holiday dinner warmed in the oven, my dear friend and I leaned against the kitchen counters and talked.  My friend and I share a concern about certainty, and rigid perspectives about paths to change.   After we’d talked a while about these things, my friend said, “It’s all about complexity.” 

Recognizing complexity, accepting complexity, tolerating and even appreciating complexity.  This is one of the most essential practices of the work of liberatory change, and among the most  difficult.

I understand complexity as a lot of moving parts, relating to and affecting each other in many ways, changing all the time. Complexity is by its nature confusing, sometimes chaotic, usually troublesome, almost always challenging.

In my work, I usually think in terms of complex systems – organizations, networks, and communities of all sizes. But what if I apply those definitions to individual people?  What if I recognized, tolerated, even celebrated their complexity? 

Like many, I mourn the passing of Archbishop Desmond Tutu this week. I have been moved and inspired for decades by Tutu’s unwavering commitment to nonviolence and human rights, by his practiced faith, and his apparent kindness, all of which I aspire to in my own life and work.

And Desmond Tutu was complex. He was the revered Bishop of Johannesburg, then Archbishop of Cape Town, and an “entertaining, excitable, impish little man.”1 A devoted Christian, irritated by tardiness to times for prayer, Tutu also once said that if he got to heaven and found there a homophobic god, he would rather spend eternity in “the other place.”2  *

Heads of State around the world this week have mourned the loss of a “moral giant.”3   And one prominent South African social change leader remembered Tutu this week as a “Black elitist,”  who had, “abandoned the Black majority to enjoy the material comforts of the post-[apartheid] era.” 4

I can choose to ignore the parts of Desmond Tutu with which I’m uncomfortable.  I can choose to let those diminish his light in my eyes.  Or I can nod and say, of course; of course he was complex.

I choose that nod.  I choose to practice recognizing, tolerating, even celebrating complexity. I choose to see people whole, or at least to assume they are much more than the parts I see.  When I can, I choose to find common ground even as I am honest about my disagreements or discomfort.

That’s not hard, for me, with Desmond Tutu, because I don’t live in the complex political history of South Africa.  It is very, very hard for me when I think of many political leaders in my own country, and when I consider its history.   Patrick Gaspard, the new Director of the Center for American Progress, reflected on the complexity of the United States in that regard recently, when he said, “There is an unmistakable history of brutality towards Black people in this country that was legal, systemic and tied to profit systems . . .and that legacy continues to be manifesting in so many ways.” 

Then he continued,  “but what’s also undeniable is the fact that America has made a journey at every level of society to push through that.”   When Gaspard served as a U.S. diplomat in South Africa, he was often asked, how the U.S. could take a moral position on human rights, given its history and present conditions. Gaspard’s response was that, “it was actually because of that history that we had a perspective that was unique, that gave us a sense of what we could contribute to the broader conversation of rights in the world and what it means to promote and then protect the interests of the most vulnerable in society.”

It's not one or the other for Gaspard, it’s both. It seems to me that his recognition of the complexity of US history  offers more pathways forward. He doesn’t deny its past or present brutality, or the work push through and even overcome that brutality, or the possibility of turning its lessons to strength in the larger work of the world.

Holding all of that, it seems to me, opens more pathways to change.

As temping as it is to reduce people and systems to their parts, I believe people cherish their own complexity.  I know when my own complexity is challenged, when I am seen as only one or a few things, and especially when stereotypes are attached to them, boy do I bristle. (Don’t even get me started on “Okay, Boomer.”) I’m not at all inclined, in those instances, to appreciate the complexity of the other. I don’t even feel like sitting next to them.

I imagine that others feel the same, and where does that get us?

If I want to be an agent of liberatory change, I certainly get to disagree, and I get to say that, and it’s imperative that I resist actions and ideas that limit the possibility of people and planet thriving, even living.

And also, if I want to be an agent of liberatory change, I don’t think I get to reduce any human being to their parts, especially their stereotyped parts. I don’t think I get to use the power of my position or personality to cause them great harm. That will only lead to more harm, which is not in the interest of a more equitable and nonviolent future.

Resisting the impulse to dismiss complexity is very, very hard, most of the time. So it’s a practice; I’ll keep trying and failing and trying again, but it’s a critical practice.

When I was growing up there was little ceramic plaque on the kitchen wall of our house, an Amish saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” I didn’t know it then, but that was a lesson in complexity.  The formidable challenge of recognizing, tolerating and celebrating complexity is to do something about the dirty bathwater, and at the same time, cherish the baby.

If I don’t, I can practically hear doors closing on the possibility of change.

——-

References

1. The Most Reverend Desmond Tutu Obituary. in The Guardian online. 12/27/21

2. Moral Giant: How The world Reacted to Desmond Tutu's Death. in Al Jazeera online. 12/27/21

3. Touched Many of Us: South Africans Mourn Desmond Tutu's death. in Al Jazeera online. 12/27/21

4. 'Radically Optimistic': the think tank chief who thinks the US can 'self-correct.' By David Smith, in The Guardian online 12/26/21