Against rationalization

a reflection on the legacy of Paul Farmer

In some ways, growing up for me has been a forty-two year confusion about what humans manage to rationalize. It started early, of course. As soon as I started weaving a theory of the world around me—trying to connect the dots between my own canopy bed in our Victorian house on Tejon Street and the vestibule downtown where that woman slept all night. Why? Why? Why? What did our contrasting shelters say about our souls? How did our souls get this way?

I spent much of childhood, it seems to me, looking around at the grown ups in my midst—my parents, my teachers, my neighbors—thinking, Are we all okay with this? Mostly the answer seemed to be yes. Yes, for reasons too complex to explain to a little girl.

I kept waiting to catch up to the complexity.

I took a seminar on human rights in college and discussed the “cultural relativity” of female genital mutilation and felt myself appropriately humbled. I saw the water I swam in. I understood that my perception of shelters and souls was socially constructed. And yet…

I looked around the classroom and couldn’t shake the feeling that so much of learning is an exercise in making academic and “interesting” what should break our fucking hearts. I was glad I was more well read after four years in the Ivy League, that I had a better bullshit detector, but my moral compass felt like it was on the fritz. In some ways, I was still the kid asking: Are we all okay with this? but I’d also become a young adult expertly trained to rationalize away the question.

Rationalizing felt way better. It’s what powerful men do, I’d realized. Wrap an existential question in theories and certainty, and maybe vilify a political party or a particular leader, and you’ve got yourself a publishable op-ed or a cold, hard cash-earning speech. It’s not self-searching or incriminating. It doesn’t require tenderness. It doesn’t risk people thinking you are naive. It’s highly rewarded—the rationalizing.

Plus, if you ask some version of the little kid question— Are we all okay with this? —too many times, people don’t want to hang out with you because it reminds them of their own ignored questions and tender parts.

I was working on rationalizing various things and it was going pretty well. I was debating Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. I was writing a column in a righteous beltway publication. I was feeling powerful on some days. And then I read Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

And not only did it show me that there was a way to wrap stories around the many little kid questions that still haunted me (that was Kidder’s part), but it also showed me that grown-ups I admire never stop asking: Are we all okay with this? Kidder writes:

One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase “looking for life, destroying life,” Then he explained, “It’s an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies.” I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind. It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity. At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the “erasing” of people, the “hiding away” of suffering. “My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.”

Other people also modeled this for me over the years—professors and mentors and friends—but reading that book was a real turning point for me, both as a writer and a moral actor. I tried to write stories, like Kidder, about people I admired because they were resilient in the asking of existential questions and relentless about humanizing dehumanizing systems. They were full of rage and mirth simultaneously. They were inside of classrooms and courtrooms, inheriting trauma and wealth, and saying, we are not okay with this. That became my book Do It Anyway, and it gave me some of the richest friendships I’ve ever had.

Just as childhood is not pure, neither was Farmer, neither are any of us who keep asking the existential questions about fairness. I got that from Kidder’s book, which didn’t deify Farmer, but revealed him in his struggle—to be a good doctor and a good partner, to be a deep-feeling person and a strategic-thinking leader, to be angry, but not let it burn you up or out.

I guess what he modeled for me could be summed up in this way: To avoid rationalization entirely is impossible. To resist it is not childish, but noble.

The world is infinitely complicated. You don’t have to catch up to the complexity; it will inevitably catch up with you. It will bury you with considerations, contextualizations, and unintended consequences. But if, in the midst of the rubble, you can resist explaining away your earliest moral instincts, then you will have preserved something good and true. You might make some people’s lives more livable, more beautiful even. You might make some people uncomfortable. You might feel sad in a sad world. You might feel mad in a maddening world. It’s not an easy way to be—especially if you travel between cultures and classes like Farmer did—but there’s succor in the resistance. It’s the best way I know to stay human.

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Please please read my friend, Dr. Sriram Shamasunder, on Paul Farmer—his mentor, colleague, and friend.

Want to read Mountains Beyond Mountains with me? Or reread it? Maybe we could do a little zoom book club on it in a month and talk about our childish questions together. Maybe we can get Sri to come. Let me know if that’s of interest in comments. xo