“There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic,” Maya Angelou wrote in contemplating courage in the face of evil, “because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”

How to prevent that cultural tragedy, which poisons the heart of a just and democratic society, is what Theodore Roosevelt (October 27, 1858–January 6, 1919) examined when he took the podium at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23 of 1910 to deliver one of the most powerful, rousing, and timelessly insightful speeches ever given, originally titled “Citizenship in a Republic” and later included under the title “Duties of the Citizen” in the 1920 volume Roosevelt’s Writings (public library).

Theodore Roosevelt

A century before Caitlin Moran cautioned that “cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas,” Roosevelt admonishes against “that queer and cheap temptation” to be cynical, and writes:

The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twister pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities — all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.

One of the tendencies I find most troubling in contemporary culture is that of mistaking cynicism for critical thinking. This confusion seeds a pernicious strain of unconstructive and lazily destructive opprobrium. Amid this epidemic of self-appointed critics, it becomes harder and harder to remember just how right Bertrand Russell was when he asserted nearly a century ago that “construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it.”

With an eye to those lazy critics — the dead weight of society — Roosevelt offers:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat… The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.

The entire twenty-seven-page speech, found in Roosevelt’s Writings and on par with JFK’s superb speech on the artist’s role in society, is a masterpiece of thought and feeling, replete with insight into what it means to be a good citizen, a good leader, and a complete human being. Complement this particular fragment with Leonard Bernstein on the countercultural courage of resisting cynicism, Goethe on the only criticism worth voicing, and philosopher Daniel Dennett on how to criticize with kindness, then revisit Eleanor Roosevelt on how uncynical personal conviction powers social change.

It may be an elemental property of human nature to fantasize about utopias — a fantasy all the more alluring the more dystopian one’s actual society is. But the inescapable fallacy of the fantasy is that while a utopia promises universal flourishing for everyone, not everyone has the same criteria for flourishing. Homogeneity, as Zadie Smith observed in her superb essay on optimism and despair, is no guarantor of a just and equitable society. We all dream different utopias — something Margaret Mead and James Baldwin tussled with in their fantastic forgotten conversation about the problematic metaphor of the melting pot. An ideal society is not one that seeks to level the differences into a flat universality but one that welcomes them into a glorious topography of diverse human flourishing.

That is what Portuguese writer Henriqueta Cristina and Brazilian artist Yara Kono explore in Three Balls of Wool (Can Change The World) (public library) — an unusual and poignant picture-book about the meaning of freedom and human dignity, published in partnership with Amnesty International.

The story, reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s lovely vintage semiotic children’s books on humanitarian subjects, is told through the perspective of an eight-year-old girl and her refugee family, exiled from their home country under threats of imprisonment and a sense of political gloom, which the young girl can’t quite understand, though she intuits their gravity through the deep lines furrowing her parents’ foreheads.

The family arrives in a new country that at first shines with the promise of a better life, clean and orderly. “Here there are no poor people and all the children go to school,” the girl’s mother tells her. But soon the seeming utopia unravels into a tyranny of uniformity. At school, all the children wear sweaters in one of the three permitted colors — solid gray, solid green, or solid orange — and all the buildings look like “a bunch of gray shoeboxes staked one on top of the other.”

One day, the mother launches a quiet rebellion against the tyranny of homogeneity and conformity — an embodiment of artist Ben Shahn’s insistence that “without the nonconformist, any society of whatever degree of perfection must fall into decay.” It starts with a grey sweater she unravels into a ball of yarn, then an orange one, then a green one. Out of these three balls of wool, she begins knitting sweaters of all stripes and patterns, remixing the solid givens into previously unimagined possibilities.

Soon, the little girl and her brothers are clad in countercultural sweaters that become the awe of the neighborhood.

People begin gathering at the local park each Sunday, unraveling their old solid sweaters and knitting variegated new ones, transfiguring the same three colors of yarn into every imaginable combination of shape and pattern — a testament to Kierkegaard’s assertion that “the more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.”

By springtime, the entire city is an explosion of combinatorial color.

The story doesn’t reveal what country the refugees left, nor what country they arrived in, but through the semiotic description of their new home I sense familiar echoes of my own childhood in Communist Bulgaria. The afterword confirms my intuition — the book is based on the true story of a Portuguese family who fled from Portugal’s right-wing dictatorship at the peak of the Cold War in the 1960s, then lived as refugees in Algeria and Romania before finally settling in Czechoslovakia. They returned home to Portugal shortly before the end of the Carnation Revolution — a peaceful uprising that began on April 25, 1974 and ended the half-century dictatorship. “Today, Portugal has a democratically elected government and every child goes to school,” Cristina writes in the closing of the afterword.

Printed on the last spread of the book is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, before Portugal was a member. Its first article reads:

All human beings are born free and equal in rights. Endowed with reason and conscience, we should act towards one another in a spirit of kindness and community.

Its thirtieth and final article reads:

This declaration does not give any government, group, or person the right to infringe upon the freedoms of any other.

Three Balls of Wool, which is absolutely lovely both as a picture-book and as a symbolic cultural message, comes from Enchanted Lion Books — the Brooklyn-based independent powerhouse that has brought us treasures like Cry, Heart, But Never Break, The Lion and the Bird, The Paper-Flower Tree, and Bertolt. Complement it with Albert Camus on what it really means to be a rebel and Ben Shahn on nonconformity and the creative spirit.

“Our respect for other people, for other nations and for other cultures, can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order,” the great Czech dissident turned president Václav Havel observed in reflecting on the interconnectedness of our fates in a globalized yet divided world. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted a quarter century earlier. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Every once in a while, we stumble into situations that jolt us into a sudden and palpable awareness of that inescapable interconnectedness, even across the greatest gulfs of difference. That is what Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) experienced in the spring of 1984, when she was diagnosed with liver cancer, but declined medical treatment and instead chose to undertake her teaching trip to Europe as previously planned. In West Germany, she found herself challenged to revise her existing framework of identity and belonging, emerging with a novel understanding of kinship and difference. Lorde recorded her awakening experience in a series of diary entries found in A Burst of Light: and Other Essays (public library) — the stunning volume that gave us Lorde, shortly after her cancer diagnosis, on turning fear into fire.

Audre Lorde (Photograph: Robert Alexander)

Upon arrival in Berlin, Lorde was struck by a reality she hadn’t even conceived of: black German women. As she reconfigures her existing frame of reference for kinship and difference to factor in the fact of their existence, she writes in her diary:

Who are they, the German women of the Diaspora? Where do our paths intersect as women of Color — beyond the details of our particular oppressions, although certainly not outside the reference of those details? And where do our paths diverge? Most important, what can we learn from our connected differences that will be useful to us both, Afro-German and Afro-American?

Afro-German. The women say they’ve never heard that term used before.

When Lorde asks one of her students about her experience of selfhood growing up, the young woman tells her that the nicest thing she had ever been called was “war baby.” Lorde notes the absurdity — black women have lived in Germany since long before WWII, and several of her students can trace their Afro-German heritage to half a century before the war. Recounting her conversation with the young woman in her class, Lorde writes:

“I’ve never thought of Afro-German as a positive concept before,” she said, speaking out of the pain of having to live a difference that has no name; speaking out of the growing power self-scrutiny has forged from that difference.

I am excited by these women, by their blossoming sense of identity as they’re beginning to say in one way or another, “Let us be ourselves now as we define us. We are not a figment of your imagination or an exotic answer to your desires. We are not some button on the pocket of your longing.” I can see these women as a growing force for international change, in concert with other Afro-Europeans, Afro-Asians, Afro-Americans.

Reflecting on this powerful revelation of the path to kinship across difference, Lorde adds:

We are the hyphenated people of the Diaspora whose self-defined identities are no longer shameful secrets in the countries of our origin, but rather declarations of strength and solidarity. We are an increasingly united front from which the world has not yet heard.

Audre Lorde from Literary Witches, an illustrated celebration of trailblazing women writers.

At the heart of Lorde’s arresting encounter with the Afro-German women and her subsequent recalibration of her own conception of what it means to be black is the recognition that every plight for equality is governed by the first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy — any fragmentation within the movement is a diffusion of energy that only weakens it, relinquishing the lost energy to the oppressor’s gain. Upon returning from the first international Feminist Bookfair in London, shaken by the overtone of racism that “coated and distorted much of what was good, creative, and visionary about such a fair,” Lorde writes:

The white women organizers’ defensiveness to any question of where the Black women were is rooted in that tiresome white guilt that serves neither us nor them. It reminded me of those old tacky battles of the seventies in the States: a Black woman would suggest that if white women wished to be truly feminist, they would have to examine and alter some of their actions vis-à-vis women of Color. And this discussion would immediately be perceived as an attack upon their very essence. So wasteful and destructive… We should be able to learn from our errors… But we don’t get there from here by ignoring the mud in between those two positions.

In a sentiment consonant with Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s admonition that a society “is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful,” Lorde adds:

Feminism must be on the cutting edge of real social change if it is to survive as a movement in any particular country. Whatever the core problems are for the people of that country must also be the core problems addressed by women, for we do not exist in a vacuum. We are anchored in our own place and time, looking out and beyond to the future we are creating, and we are part of communities that interact. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous. While we fortify ourselves with visions of the future, we must arm ourselves with accurate perceptions of the barriers between us and that future.

Lorde continues to process these complex and intertwined questions during the remainder of her European travels. With an eye to the dark side of identity politics, she writes after returning to New York:

I am thinking about issues of color as color, Black as a chromatic fact, gradations and all… I see certain pitfalls in defining Black as a political position. It takes the cultural identity of a widespread but definite group and makes it a generic identity for many culturally diverse peoples, all on the basis of a shared oppression. This runs the risk of providing a convenient blanket of apparent similarity under which our actual and unaccepted differences can be distorted or misused. This blanket would diminish our chances of forming genuine working coalitions built upon the recognition and creative use of acknowledged difference, rather than upon the shaky foundations of a false sense of similarity.

A solid foundation, Lorde comes to recognize in the unfolding months, requires not a false sense of similarity but a true sense of kinship across difference. A year after her return from Europe, she writes in her diary:

How can we use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future?

All of our children are prey. How do we raise them not to prey upon themselves and each other? And this is why we cannot be silent, because our silences will come to testify against us out of the mouths of our children.

A Burst of Light is an electric read in its entirety. Complement this particular portion with Albert Einstein on the interdependence of our fates and Hannah Arendt on the immigrant plight for identity, then revisit Lorde on the courage to break silence and the indivisibility of identity.