Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  You have to see the paradox as a large truth, and as a caution. We have a way of talking about beauty as though beauty were only skin deep. But real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness in order to understand it. It’s just what you said. You’re talking to your wife and this blue sky goes gray. Horror overtakes us. You can’t separate those two things. But we have to be as aware of the beauty as we are of the darkness. I visit Auschwitz, or I go to Sumatra soon after the great tsunami, and I realize there’s no hope for anyone who remains traumatized by such horror for the rest of their life.

  You know, people say you shouldn’t talk about certain things, because others get nervous when you do. Torture, for example. But a person who speaks in public of what is beautiful—that also makes people nervous, especially people who maintain, for whatever reason, a jaded, cynical separateness from the world.

  It also makes some people anxious when you speak of faith, because immediately they think, “Christian faith? Or Islamic faith? What kind of faith are you talking about?” If it’s me, I’m not talking about any of those. I am talking about a belief in the capability of other people. When I’m in a place of physical danger—in Antarctica, for example, diving underneath the sea ice there—my faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists who’ve worked at understanding the human dilemma for a long time, I have faith in those people. I trust them.

  We say in my business—television production—“Trust the process,” which means count on the people who are responsible for different phases of the work to do what they have to do to make it all come out all right. You do your bit, they do their bit, and the production goes on. That’s the way life goes, too.

  It is. I have to think there have been times in your own life as a journalist when you’ve lost faith or looked into a situation that made you feel you were never going to recover from it, but you do. And you do because somebody reached out to you. A letter. A phone call. There’s a circle of people who stay in loose touch who renew your sense of what we have to do, say, about addressing the fate of the earth. We all like to root for the home team. I like to root for humanity, and I want to believe that we can come to a state of grace. That we can do better than we’re doing now. I believe fiercely in that. And I meet people in every corner of the world who affirm it.

  You said once that for all of us living in North America, nature is the oldest metaphor in our story. Is that still true?

  That’s our ancestral stuff. When people experienced an emotion for which they had no language, they had to find a referent out there in the world for it. Our stories began where we used animals and wind and light as a context in which to develop ideas that were very complicated. That’s how people began to communicate. When you’re in wild or underdeveloped environments, with traditional people, their relationship to the wind—the wind is alive for them. It has a soul. And it’s an I–Thou, not an I–it, relationship because the wind is part of their moral universe. Some of those people have a sense—well, of holiness, of the Great Mystery of which they believe they are a part. We’ve created instead a world in which we have excluded from our moral universe everything but ourselves. Nature has become our separated “other”—we’ve said, “If it doesn’t serve us, kill it, move it, destroy it, crush it. Make it serve us. If it doesn’t, it’s no good.”

  What we’re trying to do now is to wake up to what humanity has known for longer than 10,000 years, namely, that you can’t direct the play. The play is not directable. You must participate in the play. You must get out of the director’s role of telling everybody what to do and how to behave and who can be on stage. You must put all that aside and step onto the stage with other men and women. And say, “We’re in this together.” We need to discover an arrangement that allows us to care for each other. But we can’t exclude—we can’t make nature the banished relative, no part of the human family.

  That’s a classic metaphor: life’s a play and we all are actors on its stage. All of us have walk-on parts in this unending drama.

  And who is to say one person has a walk-on part and someone else is the star? What happens if a person speaks imperfect English in a culture like ours, is not articulate, but can dance in a way that makes you shiver? Why is that a walk-on part? Take television—God bless television, but you can turn on the television every day and see people who assume an expertise that they clearly don’t have. The kind of expertise we need is not a more facile grasp of policy, but a more complex love of humanity.

  But some people are hard to love, Barry.

  I’m not talking about [the Liberian dictator] Charles Taylor, or Idi Amin, or Hitler, or Stalin, or any of these reprehensible human beings. What they did, we must condemn. But humanity is also Michelangelo, Darwin, Epictetus. I mean, if you have the Bach cello suites in your head at the same moment that you’re looking at a gas chamber at Auschwitz, you somehow hold on to the possibility of understanding what we’re actually enmeshed in.

  Well, this of course is the puzzle, isn’t it? In that “high civilization” of Germany, Hitler’s generals strolled in their gardens, listening to Bach and Beethoven, while a mile away the gas chambers were working overtime.

  They lacked the imagination to see that their own humanity was being destroyed there. What I am trying to say is those six cello suites that Bach wrote are an homage to the other side of humanity, where there’s beautiful proportion and rhythm. Use that fuel to open yourself up, even when—especially when—other things have broken your heart.

  We talk about wilderness. I spend a lot of time in “wilderness.” We’ve lived forty years in rural Oregon. Have you ever seen a wilderness calendar with anything but lyrical images? Nature’s not just a lyrical experience, a kind of Bierstadt painting. Nature is the full expression of life, and you have to be present to all of it, the flooding, the earthquake. And you have to ask yourself, why does the Dalai Lama still laugh? Why does Desmond Tutu, with whom I once worked, why is he capable of such laughter, given how he saw his own people treated during apartheid? I think part of the answer is that people like Desmond Tutu find a way between the darkness and the light to be fully alive.

  I understand you are working on another book, one that takes you from the cradle of humanity in South Africa to Australia, from Antarctica to the Galapagos.

  Yes, and let me tell you what has hit me about all that traveling. Somebody asked me once, “How can you talk so much about community when you’re gone from your place in Oregon so often?” And I tried to think of what I’d learned living there, in my chosen place, that helps me answer that question without feeling guilty. The answer was right in front of me. For forty years, about two hundred yards from the front of the house where I look down on the river, Chinook salmon have spawned. Every year they come back. They have to run a gauntlet, but they’re there every year. No one in their right mind would say that those salmon, who come and go, aren’t members of the community. The community couldn’t survive without them. And that was the moment I thought, “Well, I’m just like them. I’m rooted deeply here. This is my home. But I go like they do out into the ocean. And I try to bring back a story. They’re fulfilled by their travels, and so am I. My work is to go out there and look and come back and say what it is that I saw.”

  It intrigues me that way out there, in the far corners of the world, you see humanity clearer than many of us who are right here.

  Here’s the deal. I had really good teachers. They awakened in me a capacity for metaphor. Science is a way of knowing, dance is a way of knowing, writing is a way of knowing—that’s what they taught me. And when I am walking on the ground out there—my body is paying attention through its senses. That means the earth, too, is a teacher. The Inuit people, the Yup’ik and Inupiaq Eskimo or Pitjantjatjara people in Australia—all have different ways of trying to understand the Great Mystery. You don’t talk when you’re out there, they say, you listen. And the most important lesson you’re taught is that you are not the center. This
is what Copernicus was trying to introduce. Are you going to be able to manage this idea that the sun doesn’t revolve around us, but we revolve around the sun? We’re still feeling the reverberations of that. Darwin told us that all life is on the move, though in no particular direction. When you’re walking the earth, it’s talking to you about that. You listen.

  In my files, Barry, I have kept an account of remarks you made some twenty-five years ago when you received the National Book Award for Arctic Dreams. And you mentioned then a word you came upon when you were once visiting in Japan.

  I was with a novelist named Kazumasa Hirai, a wonderful storyteller. And I asked him, “What do you mean when you say you’re a storyteller?” And Kazumasa-san told me the Japanese use the word kotodama to carry the sense of something ineffable. He said your job as a storyteller is to be the caretaker for that ineffable part of the world, the spiritual interior of the world. Storytelling is the best protection we have, I think, against forgetting the spiritual interior of our lives, of all lives.

  I was talking to a mutual friend of ours one night, someone who’s always been an affirmative and optimistic fellow, and he said, “Moyers, for the first time in my life”—and he’s in his fifities—“I’m beginning to think this America I believed in won’t work. That the forces arrayed against justice and fairness are so great that we’re going to go down.”

  Later that very night, I came across something you wrote some time ago: “There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.” What a good phrase: “leaning into the light.” Where are you today on the path between confusion and conviction?

  Bill, people think that if you’ve written a book and somebody’s given you a pat on the back for it, you’re all settled, you know—everything’s fine. But the truth is, I am frightened all the time. An old question from my childhood comes back: “Who cares what you have to say?” So, my path is the same path it’s always been. It’s a path through confusion and a lack of selfconfidence, through embarrassment with my imperfection. But at the same time, I know I have seen things that have dropped me to my knees in a state of awe. Knowing that those things are there, I do my best to be a witness to them, to write carefully about them, to break through.

  In recent years I’ve come to a better understanding of the virtue of reverence than I have ever had before, and here I’m borrowing from an American philosopher named Paul Woodruff. I read his book Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue. He says that reverence is rooted in the understanding that there is a world beyond human control, human invention, and human understanding, and that no matter how sophisticated our technologies for probing reality become, the Great Mystery will be there forever. It’s not ours to solve. When you come upon something incomprehensible, some dimension of this Great Mystery, reverence brings you to your knees. You can open up to it and come out of your own little small tiny place in the world and realize what it is to be fully alive, a part of all life evolving.

  But I’ll tell you something about Paul Woodruff. He was in Vietnam at its worst. And I wonder if he would ever have understood this sense of reverence if he hadn’t seen the savagery.

  Absolutely. Back to what we were saying earlier. How do you introduce yourself to the darkness in the world? And how do you walk away from it and have something to offer besides reasons for despair and grief? He did just that when he wrote that wonderful book.

  You know, I have seen truly horrible things. Truly horrible things in the world. And in those moments I broke down and was given to despair. Despair is the great temptation, but I thought, “If I have any kind of self-respect, I cannot allow myself to fall apart. I must find a way to put myself back together. If I can discover a language that will help someone else who is broken in half, if I can tell them a story that sticks, that helps them heal, well, then I’m okay.”

  One of the characters in your book Resistance is a woman dying of Parkinson’s disease, who hands her daughter Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning and says to her, “Now’s the time for you to read this book.”

  She thinks her daughter is grown-up enough to understand. It’s the same thing that you just described with Paul Woodruff, don’t you think? That the parent sees in the child the moment in which the child can appreciate that there is another response to the horror besides self-destruction and despair. That we can enter the bleakness that human beings are capable of, creating, and not allow it alone to define what it means to be human.

  There’s a story, Bill—I don’t remember the philosopher, the Greek philosopher—about Zeus and Prometheus. In this account, Zeus says to Prometheus, “Okay, you stole fire. That’s great for you. Now your people have technology. Wonderful. But two things are missing here, if you wish your people to thrive. I am offering you justice and reverence. If you don’t take these two things to heart, your fire—your technology—will fail you. It will be your undoing.”

  So lean into the light.

  Yes, lean into the light.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF GUESTS INTERVIEWED

  MICHELLE ALEXANDER

  The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2009)

  KAREN ARMSTRONG

  Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (Knopf, 2010)

  The Case for God (Knopf, 2009)

  Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time (Atlas Books/HarperCollins, 2006)

  The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (Knopf, 2006)

  Buddha (Viking, 2001)

  The Battle for God (Knopf, 2000)

  Islam: A Short History (Modern Library, 2000)

  ANDREW BACEVICH

  Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (Metropolitan Books, 2010)

  The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (Metropolitan Books, 2008)

  The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford University Press, 2005)

  American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Harvard University Press, 2002)

  BENJAMIN BARBER

  Con$umed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (W.W. Norton, 2007)

  Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy (W.W. Norton, 2003)

  Jihad vs. McWorld (Times Books, 1995)

  DOUGLAS BLACKMON

  Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II (Doubleday, 2008)

  ROBERT BLY

  My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems (HarperCollins, 2005)

  The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine (co-authored with Marion Woodman; Henry Holt, 1998)

  Sibling Society (Addison-Wesley, 1996)

  Iron John: A Book About Men (Addison-Wesley, 1990)

  A Little Book on the Human Shadow (edited by William Booth; Raccoon Books, 1986)

  Kabir, Try to See This! Versions (Ally Press, 1976)

  GRACE LEE BOGGS

  The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-first Century (with Scott Kurashige; University of California Press, 2011)

  Living for Change: An Autobiography (University of Minnesota Press, 1998)

  Conversations in Maine: Exploring Our Nation’s Future (co-authored with James Boggs and Freddy and Lyman Paine; South End Press, 1978)

  DAVID BOIES

  Courting Justice: From NY Yankees v. Major League Baseball to Bush v. Gore, 1997–2000 (Hyperion, 2004)

  THOMAS CAHILL

  A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green (Nan A. Talese, 2009)

  Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe (Nan A. Talese, 2006)

  The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (Nan A. Talese, 1999)

  How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic
Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (Nan A. Talese, 1995)

  JAMES CONE

  Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis Books, 2011)

  Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968–1998 (Beacon Press, 1999)

  Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Orbis Books, 1991)

  MIKE DAVIS

  Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (co-edited with Daniel Bertrand Monk; The New Press, 2007)

  Planet of Slums (Verso, 2006)

  Dead Cities: And Other Tales (The New Press, 2002)

  Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Metropolitan Books, 1998)

  City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990)

  Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (Verso, 1986)

  ROSS DOUTHAT

  Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (co-authored with Reihan Salam; Doubleday, 2008)

  Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005)

  MICKEY EDWARDS

  Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost—and How It Can Find Its Way Back (Oxford University Press, 2008)

  Behind Enemy Lines: A Rebel in Congress Proposes a Bold New Politics for the 1980s (Regnery, 1984)