Composing a Life

with the Renaissance man can develop in the lives of men and women who multiply their spheres of sensitivity and caring.

TEN
VICISSITUDES OF COMMITMENT

    A NOTHER KIND OF DIVIDEDNESS haunts our efforts even more than multiple and conflicting commitments—the dividedness created by distrust or doubt. All too often, we find ourselves investing passion and belief in individuals and institutions that cannot be trusted but must instead be approached warily in the face of corruption or potential rejection. The women I have been working with are all idealistic in different ways, committed to abstractions like justice or intimacy and searching for the practical expression of these ideals, but perhaps this is because I came to this project deeply puzzled about the viability of such idealistic commitments in an imperfect world. It is hard enough to put together a graceful composition from diverse components, harder still when the components are shoddy and flawed. Some contradictions cannot be resolved.
    I have been especially curious about the relationship between the idealism of dependency, an unquestioning belief in social myths, and idealism as a form of criticism, defining what ought to be even while knowing that it is often not so. It is especially important for women to avoid mistaking the fear of questioning the foundations of their security for commitment. Women have traditionally been vulnerable and have translated vulnerability into a simulacrum of trust. It is possible to be deeply committed to a marriage and still open-eyed, to hedge one’s bets against the reality that marriages do come to an end—and then proceed in the belief that careful commitment to a new marriage is still worthwhile. It is also possible to be deeply critical of a person or an institution and still to be committed to it. It may be worthwhile to invest time and resources passionately in support of a cause, but it is wiser to avoid burning bridges or putting on blinkers as the tokens of commitment. A degree of caution need not be equivalent to disloyalty; blindness is not a virtue. My mother once wrote a book about the American national character whose title was drawn from the proverb “Trust in God and keep your powder dry.” Women, especially, all too often test the Lord’s good will by leaving their gun-powder kegs out in the rain.
    The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy. Since her student days, Johnnetta has taken positions calling for radical change, criticizing what exists. When she became a part of what used to be called “the system,” she brought her skepticism with her, reshaped into a building tool. It is not easy to find the right balance between trust and skepticism, commitment and independence. Many people marry again after divorce, but if they have learned from experience the balance will be different.
    One of the lines of disillusionment that most people follow is the discovery that parents are less than we as children believed, and this carries over to discoveries about all the structures of authority and institutions in which we work. Oddly enough, as we all know from adolescence, it is possible to question authority passionately, to argue that it is entirely wrongheaded, and still at some level to believe in continuing good will. The real loss is the awareness that good will is absent.
    At one level, trust is the premise of a child, a necessity for survival in a position of dependency. Children need to believe in the good will of parents, even when they are neglected or beaten. Often they become convinced that they deserve their sufferings because it is easier to embrace a sense of diffuse guilt and unworthiness than to believe in the malevolence of all-powerful beings. Today, I am unwilling to work from a position of dependent trust, and I believe the capacity to be self-supporting is a precondition to genuine partnership and responsible participation. At the same time, adult trust is a necessity of human social life. When it is violated, it is not easy to build again.
    My husband and I went to Iran in 1972 aware, inevitably, that the shah was widely regarded as a corrupt tyrant and that many people were longing for the overthrow of the monarchy. Still, it seemed to us possible to work for improvement within the existing structure, and both Barkev and I looked for openings for constructive change. The Iran Center for Management Studies, where Barkev worked, developed