It's tempting to expect perfection from those we admire, but we romanticize lone heroes at our peril. A few years before one-time supporter Jon Krakauer challenged the truthfulness of Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea, a professor asked me my thoughts on using the book as a reading for first-year students, to encourage them to become more engaged with global issues. I hesitated. Mortenson was doing valuable work, I said. The book was a great read. I admired his creativity and courage, and the leap of faith he took to begin building his schools without the slightest guarantee of success. I admired how he persisted through seemingly endless obstacles to sow seeds of hope. His approach seemed a powerful rebuke to Bush administration assumptions that if the U.S. just bombed enough of the bad guys, the region's problems would disappear. Mortenson also appeared to respect local Pakistani and Afghan culture in a way that seemed to offer key lessons for America's broader relationship with the world.
But even before the Krakauer revelations, I was wary of heralding Three Cups as a prime model for engagement. The same story of unimaginable individual heroism and sacrifice that drew people in could also leave them feeling insignificant in comparison. "Three Cups is an inspirational story," readers would tell me. "But I can't climb Himalayan mountains. I can't go into an Afghan village and build a school from scratch. I can't raise millions of dollars for projects halfway around the world. It would be great if I could be Greg Mortenson, but I'm not and can't be, so the best I can do is support his good work."
Three Cups still presents an infinitely more hopeful message than that of detached cynicism. But the story, as Mortenson presents it, can easily buttress the myth that those who make change have to be almost superhuman, or saints. It can feed what I call the perfect standard trap, where people convince themselves that unless they're some kind of unimaginably perfect hero, supremely eloquent, confident, and capable and of immaculate moral character, they're not going to be able to make change. Stories of courage in seemingly impossible situations can inspire us to act in more modest ways, but the more their protagonists choices seem drawn in larger than life strokes, the harder it is to make this link. So while it's not Mortenson's fault that he's lived his life in dramatic relief, there's a limit on the lessons we can draw.
But Mortenson's story, at least as he's presented it, focuses so much on his own individual action and choices that everyone else appears to act most effectively as spear-carriers for his cause. As we learned from the amazing revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, institutional change, in contrast, requires common action, initiative, and voice, not just supporting the work of charismatic leaders. The story Mortenson presents leaves few ways for those it inspires to act, beyond raising money to promote his initiatives.
The arc of Mortenson's fame also reminds me how much our culture enshrines lone entrepreneurs as the ultimate change agents, while displaying a commensurate disdain for those who've long worked in the trenches. We see this in international development, where businesspeople or celebrities receive massive publicity for their glamorous new projects, while groups like Oxfam or CARE that work year after year in local communities are left invisible in the shadows, or presented as dull, bureaucratic, and retrograde in comparison. We see the same thing with America's educational debates, where those who talk glibly of solving poverty and inequality with the instant solutions of high stakes testing, charter schools, or eliminating the long-held rights of teachers receive massive attention, while the experiences of those who've actually spent 20 or 30 years in the classrooms are disdained and ignored. Sometimes fresh approaches can shake things up, and Mortenson's focus on getting Pakistani and Afghan girls enrolled in school may well be one of those transformative ideas. But his books still feed the narrative that the best way to make change is to ignore pretty much anything that anyone else has been doing all along, and to charge ahead with your own Lone Ranger initiatives. So even before the Krakauer revelations, I believed that Mortenson's books had their limits as models for how ordinary people can create social change.
Now we learn from Krakauer and 60 Minutes that key parts of the story were fabricated, or at least grossly embellished. There's something profoundly disturbing in turning a Pakistani community that went out of their way to host him into narrative cannon fodder by presenting them as Taliban kidnappers. Or by apparently manufacturing the book's powerful opening story about his stumbling into a Pakistani village half-dead and being nursed back to health by a community where he would build his first school. Or by profoundly exaggerating both how many schools his institute has helped build and the number where students actually ended up enrolling, as opposed to the institute funding empty buildings that ended up converted to storage sheds. When a foundation solicits the money of tens of thousands of donors by saying they're using it to build schools, the majority of the money shouldn't be going to promote a book.
I don't know why Greg Mortenson decided to play fast and loose with the facts. Maybe he felt the actual story wasn't dramatic and enticing enough to inspire people to care. Maybe he was distracted and overloaded, and left the writing to his co-author. Maybe he'd told the questionable stories so often he'd come to believe them. None of this erases his important work, or genuine humanitarian motives. Those of us who work for change all have our faults, and if we waited until we were impossibly perfect people we'd, never find the moment to act. But for all Mortenson's valuable work, the gap between the worlds he purported to depict and the words through which he described them can't help but undercut his message, because we no longer know which stories are real and which are not. Had he presented a more modest and accurate tale, where it was clearer that he was only one courageous human being among many, it might have actually presented more useful lessons to spur the action and involvement of others. Or maybe it would have sunk without a trace in the sea of distraction we call our culture, because we're so primed to respond only to the larger than life. The risk now, though, is that the debunking of his work will feed cynical withdrawal from those who previously placed him on a pedestal. That would be a tragedy because we need their involvement if we're to move toward the kind of more humane world that, for all Mortenson's flaws, I believe he has still worked passionately to create.
Paul Loeb is author of Soul of a Citizen, with 130,000 copies in print including a newly updated second edition now being used in hundreds of schools to promote civic engagement. He's also the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. See www.paulloeb.org To receive Paul's articles directly www.paulloeb.org/subscribe.html You can sign up here for his Huffington Post pieces.
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Barbara Crosby
But it's not his idea. The Afghan people have been working on the education of girls since the 1920s.
One big problem with Mortenson as a spokesman for Afghan girls and women is that he knows virtually nothing about the history of Afghanistan or the history of the struggle for rights by Afghan women and girls over the last eighty years.
Please please PLEASE invest in some serious reading about the history of the struggle for women and girls in Afghanistan, so that you understand that this transformative idea is one that Afghans themselves have been trying like crazy to put into action for over eighty years.
The poor Afghans in this struggle have never gotten any credit at all from anyone in the West.
Nobody in America seems to understand that there has been a feminist movement in Afghanistan since the 1920s when the first girls for schools were opened.
In 1970, the student body at Kabul University was 52% women.
So gosh, please don't get so worked up about how Mortenson had some "transformative" idea for Afghanistan, as if they'd never ever had the idea of educating girls before he came to the country.
Kabul University was 52% women in 1970. Where was Mortenson then?
If you're under the impression that you've learned anything about the Taliban from Mortenson -- you haven't. He calls people Taliban in his book who quite simply are not Taliban and never have been.
If an Afghan tribal elder is open to educating girls, then he is not a Taliban, and you have not converted any Taliban by building schools in his village.
It's frustrating to see people get so confused about the difference between ordinary tribal Pashtuns, who do have a closed, very patriarchal tribal society, and the Taliban, who are sociopaths who want to inflict all of Afghanistan, even the non-tribal areas, with a totalitarian radicalized version of Islam that goes far beyond any normal Afghan tribal customs in oppressing women.
No program can succeed in Afghanistan when it is run by people who can't tell the difference between the Taliban and the ordinary tribals.
Contrast these famous do-gooders with, say, the 8,000 Peace Corps volunteers now in the field -- living in tiny villages, eating village food, speaking the local language -- for two years at a time. Can we name even one of them?
I'm not suggesting that what people like Greg Mortenson do isn't pretty amazing. Even with (apparent) exaggerations thrown in, he's a brave and determined guy. But it turns out that there are a lot of amazing people out there, doing much with little, day after day, for little or no recognition. Those are my role models. If they were just a bit more famous, maybe we all wouldn't be so afraid to take a chance because we're "not perfect like Greg Mortenson."
I'd suggest that both are required - grass routes support AND somebody who may be larger than life that can entrain everybody.
Imagine how much more violent the Civil Rights movement would have been without MLKjr being there to promote non-violence.
Imagine how much violence would have happened in India had Ghandi not been there to provide peaceful leadership for all the frustration of the Indian people.
But also imagine how little progress would have been made if MLKjr and Ghandi had been there but the 'common action' had not.
We have the common action here now in America, and I even include the Tea Party people in this generalization. As misguided as some of their actions are, they know something is horribly wrong in this country.
I had fervently hoped that Obama was going to be the leader we so desperately need which is why I worked my tail off to get him elected. But if you ignore what he says and look at what he does, he's clearly betrayed us. In fact, I defy anybody to cite any major difference between Obama's policies and Bush's policies that will change the direction of the country for the better. Sure, Obama speaks in coherent sentences, but he's merely rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. We're still going down.
I appreciate your article especially as it relates to creating change and the propensity of surely this culture to be in awe of and look for the savior or the charismatic leader that rises above the "average" and does the things we all wish we were powerful enough to do – and in doing so makes us believe we are not powerful in our own right. In addition, the singleton fascination we have with the power of one never seems to translate into the power of one that is in every-one. Granted we all need role models and heroes but at the same time as you have articulated so well in numerous publications including this one we all have a place and are all capable of effecting meaningful change even if we don't go half way around the world to do it. Working down the street is as meaningful if there is a need.
That being said, what I find more troublesome is that this whole conversation is taking place in the first place. Why would 60 Minutes look at Mortenson and do such a spread on him, questioning the voracity of his autobiographical story (by definition the genre puts him in the center) and in general dissing his work. I can not get to the bottom of "why him, why now, and more importantly, who is benefiting from this?"
It seems like a gang up is going on.
Thanks always for your good work!!
Peace.
I think Mortenson is an appropriate person to question because so many people have become part of his dream. Of course I wish the media would spend more time also going after the bankers and the speculators and the others who pillage oureconomy from the shadows
I agree that it's a real challenge to involve people beyond just giving money, and that we need to honor the non flashy tales as much as the glamorized ones.
However, I’ve first-hand knowledge of JK’s own deceit in his paperback of Where Men Win Glory – The Odyssey of Pat Tillman. “Jon Krakauer’s Credibility Problemâ€* describes his deceit in detail (posted at http://www.feralfirefighter.blogspot.com)
First, Krakauer falsely claims “… I discovered additional evidence of deceit by high-ranking Army officers.†In reality, just two days after his first edition was released, 200 pages of my material was literally handed to him that described in detail how Gen. McChrystal played a central role in the cover-up of Pat Tillman’s 2004 friendly-fire death in Afghanistan.
Second, and more important than his stealing credit for his “discovery,†Krakauer’s greater act of deceit was that of omission. In his revised edition, despite having been handed my detailed material, he failed to describe how President Obama and the Democratic Congress continued the Bush administration’s whitewash of Gen. McChrystal. After reading his book, you’d think the Democrats tried to do the right thing, but they were “stonewalled†by the Bush administration. What utter rubbish! And he knows it.
Jon Krakauer is a hypocrite when he “throws stones†at Mortenson for “deceit†when Krakauer’s own hands are not without sin.