Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.
Martin Luther King Jr.
April 3, 1968
When I started writing newspaper columns 41 years ago this month, I wrote mostly from my head. Some columns, I noticed, were better received than others. Those were the ones where my heart was more involved. These days I have to “feel” a column before writing it.
Music helps — the instrumental, reflective, emotional kind that clears the channel between head and heart. When the channel opens, the writing flows. It takes more than intellect to write. I also need the lubricant of emotion. Anger is an emotion, but writing angry, while sometimes therapeutic, is less well received because no one wants to feel yelled at as they read.
It’s not easy to remove anger when writing about Trump, and I end up writing about him more than I want to. He’s a waste of time and energy. But he has hurt so many and not writing about that feels wrong. I don’t write “about” him so much as “for” those he has harmed.
Donald Trump is America’s foremost example of how not to be a human being. He is the perfect reverse role model. His head is married not to his heart but to his ego. As far as anyone can tell, he has no heart — in the symbolic sense. He has an anatomical heart that somehow keeps him alive, but the channel between his metaphorical head and heart must be so badly blocked that he can’t get in touch with his better self (if he has one). Which probably explains why his actions are so harmful.
Did you know that before he became the world’s premier practitioner of genocide, Adolph Hitler wanted to be an artist? He was turned down when he applied to a prestigious art school. The images he rendered were technically proficient, but his drawings had one glaring omission: people. They were devoid of humanity, which makes sense since he, too, was devoid of humanity. All head, no heart, like Trump.
A well-traveled quote of foggy origins holds that “The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master” (David Foster Wallace used it in his Kenyon College commencement address, “This is Water”). In most normal human beings, there are times when the head leads and times when the heart leads. It’s a dance. When it’s going well, it is as graceful as a waltz. Knowing when to lead and when to follow is the key.
Without the emotional heart, the rational mind shrivels, becomes dogmatic, unsympathetic, harsh, punitive, rigid, rule-based. Without the head, the heart becomes melodramatic, excessively sentimental, overly sensitive, hyper-emotional, anti-rational. One without the other produces the comedy of errors that characterizes our current political divide. Republicans, it is said, need to reconnect with their hearts, and Democrats need to reconnect with their heads. Whichever party embraces both will win over the American people.
Ideology is the idolatry of ideas. Divorced from the intuition, imagination and inspiration of the heart, ideology leads to ineffective policies, detached from people’s lived experience, unleavened by caring and consideration.
If the rational, logical mind is a better servant than master, then it’s better to lead with the heart — but not always. The heart sometimes needs to be overruled by the head, which should have happened in the 2024 election, but did not. Ideally, the heart keeps its eyes on the prized destination, while the head plots the most effective way to get there. An equal partnership — a marriage between heart and head — works best.
Such a marriage unleashes the vast potential of our creativity, and will ultimately harness the energies of love — the very fire that Teilhard de Chardin predicted humanity would someday “discover” for the second time in human history.
That fire is our collective genius, the place where passion and practice converge, where homo becomes sapiens, where intelligence transforms into wisdom. Multiply that by billions and who knows what homo sapiens might accomplish.
At the moment, our country seems to be operating with heartless heads and/or headless hearts. The results are mechanistic, backward, ineffective, self-defeating. Like artificial intelligence, it is common-sense impaired.
With the marriage of heart and head, we could be brilliant. Healed. Where poetry merges with prose, beauty with design, art with artifice, the muse with music. Common sense for the common good. Becoming more than high-functioning animals. Being truly human. Recover the lost chord that connects heart and head and the two become one in the ultimate act of pro-creation. Body and soul, duality to singularity, binary to unitary, thesis and antithesis to synthesis.
Out of many, one.
That’s the dream.
And our evolutionary necessity.
