John le Carre
“I wrote about people who were groaning under the weight of the Cold War, who were being deprived of the spirit of optimism, who were working in the dark, really not believing they would ever see the light.”
That is novelist John Le Carré (aka David Cornwall) speaking to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross in 1989. You can hear the weariness in Cornwall’s voice. “It seemed to me that sooner or later, somebody would cry halt, but it never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that that would be the Russians." Le Carré made this statement two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but by then, it was evident that it was only a matter of time after the wall came down in Berlin.
Le Carré, who died last month at age 89, wrote about the challenges of moral ambiguity, pursuing a cause that seems at once seemed righteous but in time reveals itself to be morally bankrupt as the other side. What sets in leads to a sense of boredom as well as apathy.
Flash forward to today that sense of weariness seems to encapsulate where we are now. We are tired, bone-tired of the deprivations caused by the pandemic and the subsequent economic hardships. Over 300,000 have died, and tens of millions have lost jobs. However, there is hope with the approval of new vaccines to protect us from the novel coronavirus.
A glimmer of optimism will not restore our losses. It will present us with new opportunities. How we proceed post-pandemic will define us as a people. To do so means confront a host of challenges related to the after-effects, chiefly women, displaced from jobs. We must also confront racial inequality with systemic changes, not patches. And worse, the pandemic has revealed mental health problems, including rising rates of clinical anxiety and depression.
Questions for our New Normal
Our new normal, whenever it comes, perhaps later next year or so, will be different. Working virtually has become a necessity and is likely to remain a way of life for many. There is a particular convenience to it; at the same time, not everyone is equipped to work remotely, physically in terms of space and psychologically in terms of emotional connection.
Our organizations will need leaders with a renewed sense of moral clarity to address the following questions:
- How will we live up to the commitment of racial equity in the workplace?
- How will we ensure that employees working virtually will have equal development opportunities?
- How will we serve the needs of the communities in which we live?
- How can we prepare our organizations for the challenges that are coming next?
Essential to the answers to these questions must be a sense of optimism. We should intend that we will find the answers and implement them. This effort defines the clarity necessary to proceed. Morality will emerge from the choices we make.
“There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind,” wrote John Le Carré in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. “Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.” Le Carre was framing the spies' efforts, who believed they were essential to finding good in a world gone wrong. Not a bad mandate for us to follow now as we contemplate the end of what we knew and what we will help shape going forward.
We, of course, will not get things right the first time. The challenge is to continue to grow and to experiment.
