Article
Change
Character
Purpose
Virtues
6 min read

Life is messy, take part

James Baker's political vocation sheds light on why character counts in this networked world.

Emerson Csorba works in deep tech, following experience in geopolitics and energy.

Two men in seats adress a pyjamap-clad Ronald Regan.
James Baker, left, briefs a recovering Ronald Reagan, right, in hospital .
White House via Wikimedia Commons.

Few White House Chiefs of Staff have been better than James A Baker III. Nicknamed the ‘Velvet Hammer,’ Baker was originally a Democrat, and only introduced to politics in his forties. But he made up for lost time, serving as the original catalyst behind President Ronald Reagan’s time in the Oval Office. He later served as Secretary of State, helping maintain peace following the Cold War.  

In their recent biography of Baker, The Man Who Ran Washington, Peter Baker (no relation to James) and Susan Glasser write that, when called out of his retirement to lead the Republican strategy in the Bush-Gore 2000 Florida vote recount, ‘Baker’s reputation was so formidable that Democrats knew they would lose the moment they heard of his selection.’ More precisely, Baker ‘was not defined by his era; he helped to define it.’  

And yet, the calm, cool and collected former Texas lawyer was – by the end of his tenure as White House Chief of Staff – broken. In Chris Whipple’s The Gatekeepers, a history of American White House Chiefs of Staff, a former Reagan staffer reflects that in a conversation long after their tenures, ‘Baker’s eyes filled with tears. He told me what it had been like for him to be chief of staff in a White House riven by different philosophies and ideological outlooks. And every day various people would try to take Jim Baker out.’  

Baker, a problem-solver and political moderate, battled with his more ideological counterparts for the ‘soul’ of the Reagan presidency. This battle was ‘more emotionally grueling and deeply painful than almost anyone around him knew.’ His struggles were a harbinger of the more divisive American politics to come. Surrounded by long-time Reagan loyalists, he was an unexpected selection for the Chief of Staff role. He ran the Gerald Ford and George Bush presidential campaigns against Reagan but was recognised by the Reagans as the right person for the job. Baker kept focused within the Reagan Administration despite team members undermining him.  

Baker shows that responding to a call requires that a person engage in the world as it is. This realism helps us to reform the world through service. 

Through his participation in the world, Baker reminds us that life is messy. This is especially the case when engaging in communities involving competition between multiple worldviews, philosophies, or ideologies. Keeping the ship steady amid such variation comes with emotional cost. But participation is better than withdrawal from the scene of action, and into the safety of technology.  

Balancing between perspectives requires a personal sense of restraint. Peter Baker and Glasser note, for instance, that ‘one of the keys to Baker’s success over the years was knowing when to back off’ in meetings. This balancing is difficult. Baker succeeded in his political vocation in part because he participated in this swirling mix of perspectives, but the balancing involved suffering.  

What can we learn from Baker on the messiness of life? What does he show us about the living-out of a vocation? Baker was clear-eyed about his calling: that of serving his friend Reagan (and afterwards his close friend George Bush). He put his strategy and negotiating skills to good use as part of a larger life project. This calling strengthened Baker’s persistence, despite the trials and tribulations of participation in the world. Baker shows that responding to a call requires that a person engage in the world as it is. This realism helps us to reform the world through service.  

‘Once we remove ourselves from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life… we become less willing to get out there and take a chance.’ 
 

Sherry Turkle 

How did Baker discover his political vocation? And what is a vocation? The philosopher Robert Adams defines vocation in his Finite and Infinite Goods as ‘a call from God, a command, or perhaps an invitation, addressed to a particular individual, to act and live in a certain way.’ The theologian Oliver O’Donovan defines vocation somewhat differently in his Finding and Seeking. He describes it as ‘the way in which the self is offered to us…. The course of our life that will come to be our unique historical reality.’ O’Donovan focuses on service, where vocation is ‘not a single function, but an ensemble of worldly relations and functions through which we are given, in particular, to serve God and realise our agency.’  

Sometimes, as O’Donovan suggests, a calling captures our attention, even if we only know the immediate next step, as if stepping from a quayside onto a boat (a helpful metaphor used throughout O’Donovan’s work). For Baker, it was the death of his first wife that precipitated a call from his friend George Bush. In this conversation, Bush asked whether Baker would be interested in volunteering for a campaign, to help take his mind off his grief. What was initially a way to help keep his mind off a trauma became, over time, a life project.  

Baker thought carefully about the world and the people around him as precursor to action. He epitomised the thinking of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who writes that individuals should participate ‘in the times and places which confront us with concrete problems, set us tasks and charge us with responsibility.’ We must remember that people are multidimensional. This is not easy, Baker as a case in point through his political vocation. 

Unfortunately, while recognising this is a realm of considerable debate, aspects of our culture discourage genuine engagement in the world. Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, describes ‘networked life,’ where individuals use technological devices (we might think today of WhatsApp or Instagram) to withdraw from hard, in-person conversations. She says that people nowadays tend to communicate with others on their own terms. It is easy for people to engage – or disengage – others whenever convenient.   

Yet, as Turkle writes, ‘Once we remove ourselves from the flow of physical, messy, untidy life… we become less willing to get out there and take a chance.’ Networked life is for Turkle an escape from the messiness of life. It prevents encountering others as they really are. This leads to weak personal foundations: personal characters built on sand rather than on rock. It helps to be tested by conflict with others that are different than ourselves. This testing helps to reduce narcissism, in which we think more about ourselves than about the wider world.  

Marshall McLuhan, in his Understanding Media, reflects on the Greek word narcosis meaning numbness. The service of networked technologies, to which Turkle alludes, is in McLuhan’s eyes a worshipping of these technologies as God. This numbing via the worshipping of technology is contrary to Baker’s more engaged way of life – encountering others in person in their complexity.  

We can remind ourselves that life is messy. What we think we see upon first impressions may evolve upon continuous examination. And what is previously unseen may become evident over time. Jesus states that ‘For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light’ and later, that ‘Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.’   

The genius of James Baker was found not in academic intellect, but in his ability to understand others through real engagement in the world. This understanding of others, serving them, was the cornerstone of his vocation. Former White House speechwriter and now-columnist for the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan once commented – as reported in The Gatekeepers – that Baker ‘was a guy who didn’t seem to move forward with a lot of illusions about life or people or organizations or systems.’ Baker embraced the messiness of life, but also the importance of taking part to serve others and help restore the world.

Article
Awe and wonder
Culture
Sport
Wildness
6 min read

Surfing with Dostoevsky: what waves taught me about the journey

The water draws things out of us that we can’t see on our own

Rick writes and speaks on leadership, transformation, and culture.

A surfer carves a turn on a wave.
Oliver Sjöström on Unsplash.

 

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” For many, the true purpose of life is not merely a philosophical concept, but a fundamental inquiry. It's about uncovering something beyond our individual selves, an answer to the inherent question about the very meaning of our existence. 

The place where I find myself pondering this mystery is on my surfboard. Whether anticipating a wave or carving along its emerging curl, the ocean consistently beckons me to meditate on a quest for a re-enchantment of our profound spiritual mystery.

I have loved surfing since I was young. I remember the first wave I really surfed in Southern California. I was 14 and an insecure high school kid who struggled with a severe stutter. It was so bad that I viewed everything in my life through the lens of my stutter. Consequently, I always wanted to hide in the shadows and never be seen, because any time I opened my mouth to speak it was a mess. But something happened for me that day that forever changed how I saw myself. On that wave, I saw my potential, my person, not just my stutter. 

That morning the water was alive with a crazy energy churning just below the belly of my board. The waves were rolling in as beautiful lines etched against the morning sky. They stacked up on the outside reef and I picked my ride. I put my hands deep in the cold, blue waters and my heart began to race as I pulled and paddled toward the unknown. The wave that I chose rose to a perfect liquid wall. It was sheer beauty.

At that moment, it was just me and that wave. I realized I didn’t have to talk to anyone or worry about what others thought of me. Instead, I felt alive and free to be me. In this freedom, I could feel the exhilaration of pulling and paddling toward the horizon full of fear and excitement. I was caught up in the rush of the unknown size, shape and personality of the wave and what I would do once I caught it.  

In a split second, I pivoted 180 degrees, perfectly positioned my body on the board, put my hands deep into the rising pitch, pulled in, and snapped up to my stance all in a single movement.

As I dropped in, my insecurities, my doubts, my fears …. my stutter vanished like the mist spraying off the curling wave. In that instant, I felt a connection to something beyond me as I found my line and carved up and down the face of the wave. I was forever hooked like an artist sculpting beauty out of a block of stone. On that wave I saw myself in a new and different light of potential. I converged with the board, the moment, with what needed to be done, and looked for what could be done. I found something more, something beyond me.  "The experience of art is a cleansing of the spirit, a return to deeper emotional and imaginative states,” as Pablo Picasso put it.

You might say it’s weird but surfers have a deep sense of trust in the experience of surfing;  the wave draws things out of us that we couldn’t see on our own.  It inspires us to push our limits until we see and realize our potential, until we see something more.  

Surfer Easkey Britton is the first Irish woman to be nominated for the Global WSL Big Wave Awards. She is a scientist, academic and social activist, with a PhD in Environment and Society and she is always one to look in places others aren’t for the answers to difficult questions. She said,  

“A wave is like a mirror to our soul. Whether we paddle out and into the horizon, take a drop down the face of a liquid wall, or dive deep under a mountain of water as it crashes overhead, the wave reflects our fears, our willingness, our vision, our potential.” 

Are we willing to look at ourselves in the mirror? Or better yet are we willing to venture out into the wild and let something else bigger than us show us … us? 

I am not saying that wave gave me something to live for, but it did show me I was something more than my insecurity, my shortcoming, my limited view of who I was and what I perceived I could be. It revealed something outside of and beyond me. It acted much like that mirror Easkey talked about, and it revealed that I hid behind a cover, a disguise, a fear. In a melodic almost musical repose, it crashed on the shores of my perception and gently but powerfully rattled my forming identity and revealed something more. 

Dostevesky speaks not of a moment but of a journey to find something, to find that thing that moves your soul, that stirs your being into that sense where we ponder “something to live for.” Surfing did that for me.

For the surfer the reward is the journey of the never ending search for the next wave. It’s not about just one wave, just one drop. It’s the whole experience of the journey, wave after wave; it’s the sensation of the ride and the work that gets us there. It’s where we find a sense of significance, a sense of something greater. As Henri Matisse put it, "Creativity takes courage.”

I remember when I was studying at Oxford University, I longed for the noise of the calming surf. Instead, all I could hear was the occasional buzz of traffic outside and the silent enchantment of academia whispering in the quiet, cold, majestic city parks. Yet like the ocean it too in its own way was quietly calling me to find that “something to live for.”   

Surely now in a world of powerful currents and unsuspecting waves, we need more than ever to find something to live for—something beyond ourselves. This era of rapid technological advancement, instability, division, and volatility underscores a heightened need for deeper discussions about meaning, hope, purpose, and what truly gives life value.  Like a surfer paddling out toward the horizon, dropping in on a wave, and finding her line, we need to never give up the search for the immeasurable and fascinate our soul with this journey. For the surfer there is a great, almost deep joy in finding that ethereal line stretched out in the emerging pitch.  

The wave, though external, compels us to look beyond our individual selves. It pushes us to experience something vast, transcending the confines of our self-centeredness and exposing us to a world—and potentially a hope—far grander than our limited perception.

As I carve up and down the face of the wave like that sculptor, I continually deepen myself into this essence of something greater, something bigger than me. I am ever drawn to its soulful re-enchantment as it gently but powerfully confronts me with the microcosm of my ‘me-ism’, with the truth that I was created to live for something and perhaps even for Someone vastly bigger than myself.

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