The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
 --Ellen Key 

Many of us may be closet abstract-lovers. I mean, who wouldn’t choose a grand abstraction over a puny particular? In Charles Schultz’s 1959 comic strip, Peanuts, Linus said: I love mankind. . . It’s people I can’t stand. Both Albert Einstein and Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote something similar when they claimed to love humanity but hate people. Publicly, we may scoff at these admissions, but if we were to invite others into our own closets, they’d see that we’ve generally been a whole lot better at loving mankind than loving people (especially those people we neither like nor understand).

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamozov, a lady admits to Father Zosima, a wise elder, that she fears she may not be able to actively love. She confesses:

The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.

Here, she admits that she has great plans to serve humanity but that she becomes hostile to actual humans as soon as they get close to her. To love humans abstractly means that she can keep them at arm’s length. That is, she can love the idea of them without actually having to break bread with them or–God forbid–befriend them. Her advisor, Father Zosima, tells her he regrets that he can’t say anything more comforting, [but] active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Active, individual love is labor and perseverance, he explains. In short, active love is so much more demanding than abstract love.

Our struggle to love particular individuals with all their warts and gifts isn’t new. This is an age-old struggle. Thirty years ago, I stood in a college classroom teaching Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “The Lovers of the Poor.” In this poem, Brooks describes the ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League who magnanimously offer to give money to the poor, the very, very worthy and beautiful poor. And they agree to deliver the money in person, traveling from their wealthy Chicago neighborhoods to the projects. When they arrive, however, they find the sights and smells, the make-do-ness of newspaper rugs entirely too much for them. They decide it would be best to post the money and leave. These ladies have romanticized poverty and can only love the poor they’ve created in their minds, the worthy and beautiful poor. In contrast, these particular poor people don’t look, smell, speak, or act anything like they’ve imagined.

From a distance, we can love abstractly, legislate abstractly, create and reform abstractly. We do it all with good intentions, sometimes the best intentions. And we believe that when we generalize, we’re acting for the common good. Too often, we defend our broad strokes, rarely stopping to consider that we’ve lost sight of our intended subjects. Swedish writer Ellen Key argues that when our world becomes more terrible, our art becomes more abstract. When life becomes especially cruel, too many of us aim to soften its rough edges with abstraction.

The fact that we leap to abstraction–that we’ve always leaped to it–is no surprise. But once we recognize this, what do we do about it? I suggest that we start by asking our elected leaders to leave the sanctuaries of abstraction for the real relationships and experiences of the particular.

If we want to eliminate poverty, then why don’t we ask our leaders to move from their own communities into impoverished neighborhoods? Why shouldn’t they live in and among the very people they intend to help? Before they legislate programs for the poor, why shouldn’t we insist that they ask their new neighbors what these programs could and should be?

If we want to eliminate inequities and problems in public education, then why don’t we expect our leaders to enroll their own children in struggling schools? Why shouldn’t we demand that they see the challenges in these schools firsthand? Before they suggest sweeping reform, why don’t we ask that they start with their children’s schools by learning what it takes to create a better school, one classroom at a time?

If we want to address immigration, then why don’t we ask our leaders to move their families to border communities, so that they can experience the real challenges for both immigrants and natives? Why shouldn’t we refuse to accept the practice of legislating from afar and instead insist that our leaders learn from their neighbors, crafting policy and legislation based on their experiences with real people?

Some will argue that all this sounds good, but it’s not realistic. They will insist that our lobbyists and legislators must live in Washington, D. C. But I would contend that if teachers can teach remotely, why can’t legislators debate and legislate remotely? I would argue that millions have effectively relied upon platforms like Zoom for over a year, so this isn’t impossible. And finally, I would propose that it’s more unrealistic (and potentially more dangerous) to make policies and laws without basing them on real relationships and experiences. It’s more unrealistic to live in the world of abstractions than to join the world of the particular.

I’m proposing a kind of servant leadership that we’re sorely lacking. Our affinity with abstracting, with generalizing and romanticizing may seem naive and benign, but it is presumptuous and condescending at best. I’m not questioning good intentions but rather consequences. And these consequences suggest that we shouldn’t accept the type of leadership we currently have.

During my lifetime, I’ve only had the privilege to work under a handful of genuine servant leaders. For example, I worked under a high school principal who pushed a big rolling garbage can around during every lunch period, stopping to pick up trash and, more importantly, to talk with students, all 1,500 of whom he knew by name. Here was a leader who knew and understood the real world of those young adults in his charge, a leader who ultimately changed the culture of an entire school. He could have stayed in his office and eaten his own lunch in relative peace. He could have stationed himself there each day, making school-wide decisions from a comfortable desk chair. He could have, but he didn’t. Instead, he walked the hallways, visited classrooms, and greeted students coming and going from school. Each day, his actions revealed that he loved humans more than he loved humanity.

In her journals, poet Sylvia Plath wrote that [the] abstract kills, the concrete saves. As harsh as these words sound, I think she’s right. We’re killing the very people, institutions, and ideas we long to save by abstracting them. We’re the ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League come to call on a whole host of social, economic, political, environmental, and educational problems that affect real people. And all too often, we don’t show up–or we get of whiff of something unpleasant, and we run. We decide it would be better to send our policies, laws, proposals, guidelines, and regulations from the sanctuary of our abstractions.

That’s the bad news. But the good news is that we can learn from those servant leaders who understand that power is a privilege, a privilege that must be grounded in reality. Regardless of how horrifying the world is, they accept the challenge of climbing down the abstraction ladder into the mire. And to effectively lead, they know that they must first understand and love humans before they can ever understand and love humanity.