Let me offer what I think are the virtues in leaders who could serve as living instruments of a culture of dialogue.
TOLERANCE. The capacity to accept difference and not to feel threatened by it. The world that is emerging will be one where people of various faiths, languages, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, and tastes will have to live and work in close proximity with one another, or face the prospect of dying in the battlefields of prejudice.
OPEN-MINDEDNESS. The willingness to open oneself to the question “how shall I live,” rather than assume that there are fixed answers already available.
SOLIDARITY. The capacity to feel the pain of others as if they were our own. It is the readiness to find common cause with those who are struggling against oppression, exploitation and despair. Global and real-time news has made it difficult to ignore the sufferings of those living outside our shores.
GENTLENESS. The ability to respect life, other people, and oneself. It is the capacity to keep one’s poise in the face of aggravation, to distance oneself from emotionally-charged situations. Modern technology has multiplied our capacity to cause irreversible harm on other people and on the world itself.
SOLITUDE. The ability to be by oneself, to befriend silence, and to pause regularly, if only to contend with the noise in one’s head.
PRUDENCE. Sensitivity to personal boundaries, the deep respect for the right and need of people to be left alone. The world will be a complex landscape of varied identities and preferences, even as new forces try to homogenize these in the name of profit. Prudence means the ability to navigate one’s way through this potential minefield.
HUMOR. The ability to laugh at oneself. An abundance of humor will be needed in a world which [is] driving people to aspire relentlessly for instant success and personal fulfillment. The effort will be exhausting and frustrating.
IRONY. The ability to take oneself as one is – imperfect, incomplete, a product of the accidents of one’s culture and upbringing. It is to give up trying to be everything, but to want only to become oneself.
PRAGMATISM. The ability to think that the world, life, and truth itself are made, rather than discovered. The emphasis is not so much on the veracity of beliefs and ideas as such, but on their implications for what we should do and how we must live. [The] challenge will not be to decide which truth is a better version of reality but how to get the advocates of all these truths to converse with one another so that they can come to a consensus on what to do.
HOPE. The willingness to suspend judgment on the ultimate fate of the world, or the nature of human beings, or the end of history. Hope is the ability to ask new questions and to propose novel ways of looking at situations. Our century will open up new vistas into old human problems not just as an effect of technology, but as a result of the interaction of diverse minds and cultures.
None of these virtues is new. They are all found in some measure in each one of us. Some virtues die from lack of nurture. Others merely recede into the background because they seem strange when held by solitary individuals. We must create and multiply the occasions for bringing these virtues out and recognizing them in others. This is where leadership is needed. [What] we need are transformative leaders who will not be deterred by failure. The power of example is infectious. Someone has to start the process of creating a new humanity, and persevere until a critical mass of transformative leaders emerges.
We already have enough politicians in our society; what we lack are leaders who will stay with the people until they are strong enough to call to account those who make decisions in their name.
Enduring peace in Mindanao will not come from politicians and warriors, but rather from the painstaking efforts of leaders rooted in their communities, and who, themselves, are examples of a new way of being and of living. These are the real peace leaders, individuals who accept diversity as a fact of life, a boon rather than a misfortune, and are determined to form a human community in which others can live in freedom, and without unnecessary suffering and humiliation. Their sole instrument is dialogue, and a capacity for open-ended conversation. To the ten virtues I have just enumerated, let me add just one more – courage; the courage to be different, but only in the sense that one has been able to overcome his own prejudices, to stand up for peace rather than war, to seek dialogue rather than confrontation, and work for solidarity rather than exclusivity.
Only in this way, I believe, can we overcome the “narcissism of small differences,” and begin to build a humanism of shared destinies.
