Politics and Conscience by Roger Lipsey

Author:Roger Lipsey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2020-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

Hammarskjöld would have worked for and approved the UN-sponsored Paris Agreement on climate change of autumn 2016. He would have pressed for more.

12

Courage

“EVEN WITH THE BEST of men, half-hearted and timid measures will lead nowhere. The dynamic forces of history will overtake us unless we are willing to think in categories on a level with the problem.”1 Hammarskjöld was speaking with a group of lawyers and law students in Montreal in 1956. His point is striking about well-intentioned leaders who may nonetheless fail to be daring and imaginative enough to resolve the challenges they face. His endorsement of shrewdness and integrity as the ideal formula for the diplomat comes to mind, and also what he once described as the higher duty of creative action. Hammarskjöld’s thought is a weave of connections.

His focus in the forum of nations was invariably moral courage. But he knew that physical courage was an unwritten part of the secretary-general’s job description. A trusted journalist with whom he spoke during the Suez Crisis reported that “he said very clearly that he was quite aware of the fact that when you step out in front in a situation, you can become a target. And he was quite aware of the fact that he would someday become a target.”2 He took personal risks on rare occasions when he judged risk taking to be necessary; as already noted, he went toward facts, facts not always benign. When he intervened directly in conflict zones, his prestige and authority were in many instances, though not all, enough respected to encourage return to negotiations.

He didn’t speak publicly about physical courage, though his journal doesn’t miss the topic. “Courage?” he asked himself there in 1956. “On the level where the only thing that counts is a man’s loyalty to himself, the word has no meaning. ‘Was he brave?’ ‘No, just logical.’ ”3 This may strike you as too logical, too high a standard. Correct it, then, with lines from a poem he entered in his journal in the last spring season of his life, when the Congo Crisis was in full swing:

Body,

My playmate,

You must not flinch

Nor fail me when

The moment comes

To do the impossible.4

I have no idea what specifically he anticipated, but he knew that the Congo had become a killing field.

Where moral courage was concerned, he had a commanding inheritance. “From generations of soldiers and government officials on my father’s side,” he said early in his UN tenure, “I inherited a belief that no life was more satisfactory than one of selfless service to your country—or humanity. This service required a sacrifice of all personal interests, but likewise the courage to stand up unflinchingly for your convictions concerning what was right and good for the community, whatever were the views in fashion.”5 But inheritance is one thing; finding the right words and persuasive clarity at the right moment is another. Depending on circumstances, he could be serene and reflective or steely and unyielding. With his Secretariat colleagues early in his tenure, he brought to bear a gentle intelligence grounded in ideals.

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