Free The Open Road by Pico Iyer

South Africa after the end of apartheid, so that old crimes would neither be forgotten nor merely avenged; and the Dalai Lama by to some extent leaving his official Buddhism at home on such occasions to advance his favored “global ethics.” Havel (who had had to cancel at the last minute because of illness) had even appointed a scholar of Woody Allen to be his ambassador to Washington when he came to power, as a way, perhaps, of advancing a politics that did not rest with politicians.
    It was as if what they were really bringing the audience, even in this ritual exercise, was a frame to place around the events of the day, so that we could see them in the settings of something more lasting and expansive (“Creation,” Desmond Tutu would perhaps call it, and “justice,” maybe, for Shirin Ebadi, and “ultimate reality” or “human potential” in the Dalai Lama’s dictionary). By their nature, ideally, an archbishop, a monk, and a judge ask us to see the news of the moment in the light of principles that last much longer than mere moments.
    Look at America’s involvement in Iraq, Ebadi was effectively saying in her public statements, not just in terms of Washington’s relations with the Middle East, of the murderous Saddam Hussein and the crusading George W. Bush, but in terms of some principle of the sovereignty of states and the concerns that every nation might face if such principles were overrun. Look at your own life and all that you have suffered, Tutu was saying in his commission, not as something so large that it blocks everything else out, but from the perspective of the heavens, in which it is a mere speck on a canvas extending across centuries and continents. Look at Tibet’s dialogue with China, the Dalai Lama always said, not only in terms of this leader or that loss but, rather, in the context of an almost endless series of causes and effects that stretches indefinitely into the future. China and Tibet would always be neighbors and their destinies would always be intertwined; in taking care of the needs of the Tibetans, therefore, you could not afford to overlook the priorities and needs of the Chinese.
    As soon as Tutu was called to the front of the stage to receive his doctorate, accompanied by a large black tasseled cap, he recalled how he had received another such cap at West Point. It turned out to be many sizes too big, he said. “Now, any normal wife would at that point have said, ‘I think we need a smaller cap.’ But of course my dear wife, Leah, who has known me for so long, said, ‘This shows that my husband has much too big a head!’”
    The audience chuckled with delight; such self-effacement was exactly what it expected from a man of the cloth, and Tutu knew how to work a crowd just with the way his voice went up and down, melodiously. And yet, I thought—since men of God, as much as monks and lawyers, tend to be careful with their words—the joke contained, like much around it, a useful point. Don’t expect the world to fit its needs to accommodate you; work your needs around the circumstances of the world.
    I could imagine what some of my colleagues would say in response to all this—and a journalist’s job is to entertain such voices (as, the Dalai Lama might say, is a Buddhist’s). All three of the peace laureates were idealists, in the happy position of spinning out moral principles instead of dealing with a real world in which we more often have to choose between wrong and wrong than between right and wrong. All three of them had suffered, to be sure, and weathered their suffering with dignity, and yet suffering alone was no guarantee of wisdom, let alone of political authority. There was a reason why church and state were generally separate, and it was that church operated in the eternal world of justice, and politics acted in the much more qualified, temporizing world of men.
    But then I recalled the words I had read at the very beginning of Tutu’s most recent book,