Dialogue (part 1): the right word at the right moment
Dialogue was centrally important to Hammarskjöld as secretary-general. Not dialogue as a kind of theater or performance, but dialogue for the sake of peace and human development. However grave the topic, however highly placed the individual, private informal conversation was best. Press conferences were useful to rally public opinion and they were often enough fun, a game of intellectual cat and mouse. Meetings governed by diplomatic protocol were a day-to-day requirement, and Hammarskjöld valued articulate, reasoned exchange. As well, he didn’t mind fireworks if they shed light. In all settings, he sought a balance between his native idealism and firmness. His respect for the word was immeasurably great. His recognition of its frequent corruption in public life was also great.
In this entry, the first of two on dialogue, we encounter him at work; then in private correspondence with a Swedish poet and translator; and last, recording in his private journal his pure love of the word—as if to exorcise some recent, unspecified abuse in the public arena.
From a press conference, January 1955:
A journalist: You have…very well informed yourself on the Asian situation…. Now, what—hypothetically—can a Secretary-General of the United Nations…do with all this information that he is carrying around like gold nuggets? What can he do with this information in this terrible world which you have described, where everyone is afraid of everyone else?
Hammarskjöld: Well, the risk of mistakes and false initiatives may be reduced. The possibility of saying the right word at the right moment may be increased.
(Public Papers II, 454)
From a letter of May 3, 1958, to Erik Lindegren, poet and future member of the Swedish Academy:
Things are not going so well, and I think the time has come for the so-called intellectuals to make their voice heard with greater urgency.
I saw the other day old Martin Buber—he really is a great man—who said that he felt that we have come to a stage where the individual life has been completely gobbled up by political life and that political life now represents a world without any exit and without any entry. He talked about our dehumanized existence in which language has ceased to have its normal function of communication in order to establish a living contact between human beings. I think he is basically right, and I think that is one reason why poets should add a new dimension to their task as guardians of straight human communication where respect for the word still is maintained. (
Hammarskjöld Collection, Swedish National Library)
Respect for the word is the first commandment in the discipline by which a man can be educated to maturity—intellectual, emotional, and moral.
Respect for the word—to employ it with scrupulous care and an incorruptible heartfelt love of truth—is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race.
To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells. It causes man to regress down the long path of his evolution.
“But I say unto you, that every idle word that men speak....” (Markings, 112)
Much of the art or discipline of dialogue is embodied in Hammarskjöld’s simple words: saying the right word at the right moment. The journalist questioning him pointed to the mass of knowledge Hammarskjöld had acquired: what use was it? His reply makes clear that knowledge is the basis for effective dialogue—and reinforces a point in his approach to political processes which we have encountered before: the need for good timing. If knowledge lays the basis for the right word, finding the right moment is another challenge altogether. One can be popping, ready to explode—but the right moment to speak hasn’t come yet, and one knows it.
The second text evokes Hammarskjöld’s high and affectionate regard for the Israeli philosopher, author, and translator, Martin Buber (1878–1965), whom he went out of his way to meet for private discussions in both New York and Jerusalem. The mood of Hammarskjöld’s remarks is darker than usual here. It wasn’t like him to see things in such black-and-white terms. Is the political arena wholly dehumanized now? Do words no longer connect us now? Who knows why his mood was somber then. But we can rediscover in what he writes the crucial importance of open political dialogue, in which words mean.
The third and last entry is fierce. In the privacy of his journal, he sets down the truth as he knows it. Reading the second and third entries together gives some measure of the challenges he faced, the challenges we face.
