Joie de vivre is a French expression which basically refers to an attitude of exuberant enjoyment of life. Or in other words, to simply delight in life—to not simply pursue happiness but instead to be happy. This is an attitude that very few people seem to possess—look around you, no really, take a look around you. I can bet it’ll be hard to find or spot people who live with an attitude of joie de vivre. The various trials and tribulations of life can certainly beat the joy out of one's life, but it is really so important to strive to retain that joy for life, or else we run the risk of becoming mere hollow versions of ourselves. What's the point of earning money or having material riches, if one doesn't even relish or experience a joyous existence?

Think about the grumpy joyless bosses or leaders or coworkers or any sort of people you may have interacted with in the past (or even have currently)—it isn't much fun to work with individuals like that, is it? Misery begets misery, as the old saying goes. There is some research too that suggests that joyless or unhappy leaders tend to be ineffective leaders—after all, if you have a gloomy joyless Squidward for a boss, you wouldn't necessarily be happy yourself, would you? There is a journal called the Journal of Happiness Studies which focuses on topics like happiness, subjective wellbeing, and other related variables. If you peruse the articles through the various issues of that journal, you will begin to see how very important happiness or joy is for a variety of outcomes, be they personal, organizational, or societal outcomes.

Now dogs are quite definitely the best at exemplifying this undying spirit of joie de vivre. Think about your own pet (if you are fortunate enough to have one), and remember how he or she treats you jubilantly when you get back home from work. And then when you prepare to go out for a walk or a hike with your dog; if your dog is like a majority of dogs out there, then he or she will probably bounce about the house or at least politely wait with eager anticipation.

This essay is dedicated to Renée (1929–2023)

The year is 1934, during the Great Depression, which has plunged many families in Aotearoa/New Zealand into grinding poverty. In a rural, working-class kitchen, there is a palpable air of tension as a family goes about its routine tasks. Mary, a woman in her fifties, irons washing, while Granna, her mother, writes in her notebook and reminisces about the sea journey to Aotearoa when she was a young woman. Mary’s granddaughter Jeannie makes tea, while her grandson Cliff plays his mouth organ. Their mother, Iris, sits still at the table. She snaps at her children, and Mary attempts to calm her. When Iris’s brother-in-law Ted pulls up his van outside, they all freeze. Ted directs Mary and Cliff to carry in a homemade coffin, placing it on two chairs.

This excruciating drama of waiting is the opening scene of the play Wednesday to Come by New Zealand playwright and novelist Renée, first performed at Downstage Theatre, Wellington, in 1984. The coffin, which remains onstage until the end of the play, contains the body of Iris’s husband Ben, who has killed himself at one of the government relief camps set up during the Depression to provide work for unemployed men. During the course of the play, his family discovers that Ben became deeply depressed in his time at the camp. They find a harness among his meager belongings and learn that he was yoked to a plough along with a team of men because men were considered cheaper labor than horses. Although the play’s narrative is fictional, it is based on the real suffering of working-class families during the Depression, including the fact that in 1933 the government decreed that families of unemployed men were only entitled to welfare payments if their men went away to work in the rural relief camps. Historian Tony Simpson writes of the camps:

I want to respond generally to these wonderful contributions by citing a passage from Emerson's “Experience.” This is a passage that I loathe as much as I love. It thereby expresses for me the radical ambivalence possessing me concerning the idea of America as it has traditionally been expressed. Just as Dante possessed T. S. Eliot's idea of art's visionary moment by a unique sublimity, so, too, Emerson's vision of America as a compensatory dream-vision always emerging is for me the manifest destiny, the femme fatale of the revisionary madness haunting and destroying any hope for America's future. Here is the infamous (for me) Emersonian passage:

I’ve never been to prison, but I spent five years in a boys’ boarding school. That's why I understood immediately and at a visceral level the most famous story concerning Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a story retold by Martin Esslin in his book Theatre of the Absurd (a book, by the by, that named the Absurd as an enduring dramatic genre, to the enduring dismay of most play-wrights so labeled).

The story, in case you have never heard it, tells of a landmark production of Godot at the maximum security prison at San Quentin in 1957, directed by Herbert Blau. As Esslin reports it, the recondite drama that had puzzled sophisticates in the theatre centers of the world “was immediately grasped” by the inmates who saw in it a reflection of their petrified existence and who followed the play with mesmerized attention. It is easy to want to treat this miraculous conversion narrative skeptically, especially after having spent a career teaching the play to wary students. As with the college crowd, surely the hard-bitten convicts included a handful who scoffed at Beckett's precious allegory. Nonetheless, it appears many were truly spellbound by the play, a remarkable feat for any drama under much less adverse circumstances, and that it was especially the figure of Lucky, the bound menial of Pozzo whose great discharge of thinking climaxes the first act, who drew their most intense sympathy. Of him more later.

Like the prisoners, we sequestered pupils had tasted the absurd. We had peered into the abyss of absurdity. To us schoolboys, marooned in a brick fortress on a windswept hilltop in provincial Germany, gazing uncomprehendingly at the distant world through the bars of Latin grammar and differential equations, overeducated and overripe with puberty's desires, the repetitive, loquacious immobility of Beckett's figures was our immobility, just as their awkward, testy love for each other was our love, too. From there on, Godot has always been a work that kept on answering questions I didn't know I’d asked, or perhaps posing questions I didn't know were askable.

The end is almost nigh […] well, at least the end of this book is almost near, to be precise. Here, we are finally at the final chapter of this particular volume. It was certainly a lot of fun for me to write this book, as I was able to dive somewhat deep into the world of dogs, which is a world I’ve been an avid fan of since I was a kid. I must have read hundreds of books on dogs and various dog breeds and attended several dog shows in both India as well as the US. And I plan to continue attending some more shows in the days to come, I have also gone on short trips and visits to meet with several dog breeders—it's always fun to go meet a new or unique breed. In short, I really do love dogs—they are such wonderful beings and companions, that life is truly unfathomable without them.

The whole idea behind this book was to write about certain qualities that I believe are qualities leaders ought to have, in order to be exemplary and effective leaders. I attempt to show you how we can learn about those qualities by learning about dogs. I have essentially described various dog breeds and attempted to showcase how they embody the qualities that I consider essential for leaders. Through the various chapters in the book, I have endeavored to introduce you (i.e., the swashbuckling reader) to a variety of dog breeds, some of which you may have already known about, but I bet there are many breeds in here, which you’ve never heard about, and now after reading the book, you have. As I’ve alluded to in several places in the book, many dog breeds actually would have fit into multiple chapters throughout the book, but I intentionally wanted to focus on unique breeds per chapter, instead of using the same breeds throughout. Otherwise, honestly, I could have probably written the whole book with just seven dog breeds, that is, the titular five and maybe a Shepherd or a Retriever to round up a magnificent seven. But I also want this book to help people learn about the many wonderful dog breeds out there in the world—there are loads more that I simply couldn't even begin to cover in the book.

Sanctions undermine the liberal order that they are intended to protect. By challenging the principle of innocent until proven guilty, the Political West erodes its moral standing not only in target countries but across the Global South. Undermining the property and legal rights of individuals and states damages not only economic interdependence but also the very idea of deeply interconnected economies. The trend towards deglobalisation accelerates as states seek to insulate their economies and make them more resilient by short-ening supply chains, increasing localisation and import substitution. The geopolitical effects are also severe. Sanctions on Japan precipitated the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Unilateral coercive measures, as sanctions are better called, act as a form of ersatz war, entrenching the growing hostility between Russia and the West, a process that was later repeated vis-à-vis China. In his study of peasant rebellions in Southeast Asia, James C. Scott examined the moral economy of economic activity and relationships. The term is applied here to highlight the morally contentious ground on which sanctions are applied today. Without procedural justice and impartiality, not only the legitimacy of the sanctions but that of the sanctioning states themselves is questioned. No less important, sanctions contribute to the overall deterioration in the geopolitical environment, indefinitely locking states into patterns of hostility.

Sanctions from Hell

The modern era of sanctions was launched by Congress's adoption of the Magnitsky sanctions in December 2012, followed by Obama's expulsion of diplomats in 2016. Putin's ‘cronies’ became an easy although dangerously unspecific target, along with assorted oligarchs and genuine criminals. In July 2017, Congress adopted the landmark legislation, ‘Countering America's Adversaries through Sanctions Act’ (CAATSA). The CAATSA sanctions limited the president's ability to ease or lift earlier ones. Obama's sanctions had been introduced by executive order, but they were now codified in statute and therefore cannot be rescinded by presidential decree. The target was no longer alleged Russian crimes but the Russian corporate economy as a whole. This came on top of the cessation of most military-to-military contacts in the wake of the 2014 Ukraine crisis with the exception of ‘deconfliction’ procedures in Syria. A reluctant Trump had no choice but to sign the measure.

In 1966, when I was nine years old, my father began work, as Art Director to John Box (his friend and mentor), as Production Designer, on the film that would win them a second Oscar, Columbia Pictures’ spectacular screen adaptation of Oliver! This thumpingly popular musical is not a work many people would associate with “vision,” but the film and its creation, though I did not realize it for many years, inspired my life and my life's work.

My father, Terence Marsh, born 1931, the only child of a printer's journeyman and his pretty Irish wife, an occasional stand-in for film stars, was a natural-born artist, a film fan, and a young man set on his future the moment he saw the title “art director” in the credits on a cinema screen. He studied art and architecture and, after surviving National Service, spent six years as a draughtsman at Pinewood Studios, learning his craft, “everything from blueprints and budgets to storyboarding, and from scenic painting and set dressing to mastering special effects.” He went freelance in 1960 and joined the team that made David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) as one of four assistant art directors to John Box. His primary mission on the film was to build, in Spain, a simulacrum of the Red Sea port city of Aqaba, a triumphant piece of ingenious design. (Tall, blonde, handsome, and handy on a motorbike, he also doubled for Peter O’Toole in the opening sequence.) Box took father with him to the challenges of Doctor Zhivago (1965), recreating Moscow on the hard standing of an unbuilt housing estate near Madrid; the film earned the two their first Oscar together. Father made, eventually, five Dickens films, many comedies (which he also wrote and produced), and several films which have become classics by popular acclamation, partly because of the power and suggestiveness of their design, including The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999).

My career looks, at first sight, nothing like my glamorous father’s. Born 1957, as I grew up, I gravitated away from “the business” and film toward literature and academia, despite the dead end it presented at the time in Britain.

The Beloved Community

The immediate aim of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956 was the integration of seating on city buses. Black and white citizens ought to be able to sit wherever on the bus there was seating. The status quo was that whites sat near the front of the bus. Blacks sat at the back of the bus. If all the front seats had been taken when a white person joined the bus, a black person in the seat nearest the white section had to relinquish their seat. After a year's struggle (and many years before), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of desegregating buses. The boycott was a great victory; progress was made in social justice, and the immediate goal was met, if not exceeded by the Supreme Court decision.

However, the goal of bus integration—though not to be diminished in its place in the civil rights movement—was a small episode in a far greater narrative. In December 1956, at a gathering of the Montgomery Improvement Association to celebrate the Supreme Court decision, Martin Luther King Jr. told his audience that the goal of the bus boycott was the “creation of the beloved community” (cited in Marsh 2005 , 1). Bus integration was but a small sign pointing to a grander vista. To focus on the detail would be to miss the overall picture. “Beloved community,” as King termed the panorama, became a motif underlying all of his later work. He said in 1958, “The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community” (Washington 1986, 12), and elsewhere in the same year, “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness” (Ibid., 18).

What did King mean by the “beloved community”? He does not give us an exact definition, but in context the beloved community means something like a completely integrated society, a community where everyone counts simply by virtue of their humanity, and a community characterized by love and justice. It was an ineluctably social vision, for King was not an individualist.

The ideological clash between communism and capitalism gave way to a broader but no less entrenched confrontation. Manichean binaries are fostered, represented as a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. In his State of the Union address in March 2022, US president Joe Biden neatly divided the world into two camps: ‘In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security.’ Later that year, in a speech in Warsaw, Biden declared:

This was a resounding statement of the liberal view of international affairs, dividing the world into progressive and regressive camps. It was also an implicit condemnation of the purported ethical nihilism of realist approaches, in which the focus is more on outcomes rather than the purity of intentions. Underlying the renewed dichotomous approach to international affairs is a profound ‘epistemic’ clash between contrasting visions of security, development and peace. The struggle is one between distinctive representations of universalism, the foundations of the good life within societies and the appropriate relations between states. The Political West advances democratic internationalism, the view that all societies must ultimately conform to a certain model of modernity generated in the West, whereas Russia, China and many other states defend the Charter principle of sovereign internationalism – that the destiny of each state should be its own affair, as long as it remains broadly in conformity with Charter principles. Ultimately all states, including those in the democratic internationalist camp, insist on the right to defend their interests and therefore selectively apply Charter principles in the rough and tumble of international politics. This chapter explores the key developments and actors that shape the culture and politics of Cold War II.

Interior -- BOBST LIBRARY NYU – DAY

It is a Sunday in April 2024. MJ ROBINSON, a 50-somethingish woman, slight build, shortish silver hair with a “reverse Sontag” stripe of chestnut, sits surrounded by undergraduates, as she has been her entire professional career … aka practically since she was one herself. THE STUDENTS are working, sometimes assiduously, sometimes half-assedly, on their computers. Some are texting or scrolling social media. MJ sees a reflection of a Tik Tok video in the glasses of the student who sits across from her, noting his furtive glance. “What is she doing here? She could be my mother!” MJ imagines him thinking.

MJ turns to the sheaf of papers in front of her and a notebook open and overflowing with scribbles of the past year, since she agreed to contribute to a collection about “lifelong engagements with a work of art.” The essay is overdue. She is still struggling with it. She opens the last abandoned draft on her laptop and begins to type. We hear a helicopter …

INT. -- GENERAL CINEMA THEATRE 3 MARINA DEL REY, CA – NIGHT

September 14, 1990. A fourth-year film student sits in rapt attention and expectation as the film begins.

CUT TO:

The screen—a helicopter flies into frame and deposits RAOUL, in military dress, carrying a silver briefcase. The camera tracks with him across a busy outdoor market area, then holds on the doors of a bus. MARIE JENNINGS (played by Suzanne Vale, played by Meryl Streep) steps out of the bus along with TWO FRIENDS. We follow them to passport control, where Marie is pulled out of line and brought into a small office separate from her friends.

Raoul soundlessly slaps Marie who falls to the ground, then struggles back up to confront Raoul, bleeding slightly from the slap, chewing what the informed viewer guesses is a Kryolan blood capsule.

Early in graduate school, I audited a survey of Renaissance drama taught by Alfred Harbage, then near the close of his career. About a dozen undergraduates were enrolled, and about 15 graduate students sat at the back of the room listening with fascination to a splendid lecturer. At the time I knew virtually nothing about the subject: I had read only a couple of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries in college. So, when I encountered Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, it was a surprise. Here was a play that glorified war and celebrated a conquering warrior capable of great cruelty. At the time, the catastrophe of Vietnam had not yet entirely poisoned the body politic of America, and I had few qualms about identifying with military might. Only later did the subject matter of Marlowe's play begin to pall. Initially, I was an enthusiastic reader of what has been called an epic biography, the story of a brutal figure whom Elizabethan culture would have almost certainly called heroic. Few of us would apply that term without reservation today.

Years later, I found myself teaching Tamburlaine and sensed that at least some of the students were not engaged by our discussion. I paused and addressed a woman in the front row who looked especially dyspeptic: “You’re not engaged by this play, are you?” With disgust, she answered, “Naah.” Why? I asked. She replied, “because it's about all that male stuff.” This exchange clarified a growing feeling: the play suffered not only from doubts about military action that has proved singularly self-destructive in our national life (think of Afghanistan and Iraq) but also from a sense that drama no longer speaks to us unless it spotlights women characters and their issues. Admittedly, Marlowe's play brings onstage Zenocrate, the title character's wife, and her speeches express romantic attraction: “As looks the sun through Nilus’ flowing stream, / Or when the morning holds him in her arms, / So looks my lordly love, fair Tamburlaine” (3.2.47–9). Yet it's also true that she figures in few scenes; she's secondary to the play's principal business—confrontation. I began to realize that, despite the appeal of Marlowe's poetry, students would no longer warm to the play.

This topic was earlier slated for a later appearance and was going to saunter in as Chapter 9 in this book. However, seeing a natural fit with Chapter 5, I decided to focus this chapter on respect instead. Respect is a virtue that seems to be increasingly waning in this world of ours. People seem to be experiencing a lot of incivility at work and elsewhere, and a lack of respect seems to be getting to being endemic across societies. That does not auger well for the future of our overall civilization, as respect is the grease that helps propel the wheels of civilization. Cooperation and coworking go a long way further if respect is along for the ride. This absolutely applies in the workplace as well as in personal life. Leaders who are respectful find that their followers are respectful too, and sometimes, this works vice versa as well.

In this chapter, I will focus my explanation and discussion on how one can be respectful, and how one can command respect. You need both for optimal mileage—while it is important to be respectful to others, it is equally important for you to be able to command respect as well. Just like kindness, there is no point in being sublimely respectful in the midst of appalling disrespect. Limitless respect like limitless kindness in the face of disrespect or unkindness has no benefit for any individual, be it a leader or a non-leader.

Dogs absolutely fill in these two dimensions of respect really well. For instance, there are some dog breeds that inspire respect. When someone looks at certain breeds, they will automatically give those dogs respect. The appearance and history of those breeds dictate that respect is a given, when interacting with these dogs. The old chestnut about “Size Matters” actually does weigh in here considerably. And then, there are dogs that are respectful to the hilt—the polite lot, who are simply stunningly respectful in all their interactions. Sometimes, you have breeds that fit both descriptions, but of course, but for the purposes of this chapter, I’m going to focus on adhering to a demarcation of the two.

As Western society has developed over the last several hundred years, it is clear that we have become increasingly uneasy about violence. Visible public executions are no longer seen. Governments now go out of their way to justify wars and violent interstate actions. Spanking children, even by their parents, is now being questioned. Ironically, while violence is becoming less acceptable in real life, our society is obsessed with a cult of violence in its entertainment industry. Still, when governments justify real violence—as opposed to the virtual violence of TV, movies and video games—violence is advocated now as the lesser of two evils, as a last resort and is undertaken reluctantly. This standpoint is a change from, say, the way the Allies looked at the conduct of World War I. Then, violence was seen as a cleansing of society, a positive good.

The fact that the understanding of violence has, and is, changing raises the important question: how do we form a moral sense about violence—what makes violence right or wrong? The answer is complex, and an adequate answer will need to take into account a multidisciplinary approach from history, sociology, psychology and political science. A partial answer has come from moral philosophers. Moral philosophy considers those aspects of human self-understanding that include the way we make decisions and what is important in making those decisions. In my forthcoming book, Love as a Guide to Morals [published 2012], I suggest that moral sense is formed by the complex interaction of feelings, thoughts and choices. I call it the Triad of the affective, the reflective and the elective. My suggestion is that in the formation of moral sense, the ways we feel, think and choose are equally important. The three form the legs of a stool. Without any of the three the stool is imbalanced and will inevitably fall over. So, a morality based in thinking without feeling will be remote, lack compassion and will often promote gross injustice. A morality rooted in feeling with no deep thought will be wooly, unclear and inexact where exactitude is needed. Either without choice will be ineffective, mere words with no moral bite. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the relationship of reason and sentiment.

To invoke Shakespeare's dedication in the Sonnets, my friend and colleague Dan O’Hara has been “the onlie begetter” of this collection, and then—continuing the Shakespeare reference—he stepped offstage and asked me if I would take over as editor. But it was Dan who first shared with me T. S. Eliot's description of the function of great art: “The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime. […] There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, […] which can never be forgotten, but […] is never repeated integrally; and yet which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience.”

What would happen, Dan and I speculated, if we asked scholars, writers, and artists to recall a particular work of art that has stayed with them for a lifetime (Eliot's “larger whole of experience”)? More important, why has it stayed? Or grown in importance? Or changed with them over the years? Now, in his new role as consultant, Dan cited other writers who have echoed Eliot's definition: Matthew Arnold called such moments “touchstones,” Joyce “epiphanies,” and Woolf “moments of being.” Dan added, “Even Heidegger called them moments of being, seeing not just literature but existence itself as full of possible moments of being. Such moments, like love affairs, punctuate and shape our lives.”

The purpose of this collection is to complement studies of literature, many of which, understandably, approach a work as a document for the age—its philosophy, history, politics, with the work serving as a commentary on life but aesthetically distinguished, by definition, from reality. If the study reflects the life of the writer, her or his personal feelings, this is to the good, but still the work's “purpose” is to reflect the real world beyond its covers, or beyond the stage. If the purpose of the criticism is the work itself, as a self-contained aesthetic unit, the critic might be charged with practicing art for art's sake. Of course, given the need to make such studies more “practical” or “useful” in the curriculum, there is a drive to make the humanities relevant and needed.

After 1989, NATO became a politico-military organisation and ultimately transformed the Political West in its image. Neo-realists assumed that having completed its primary task, the containment of the Soviet Union, NATO would disband. Instead, it launched various expeditionary wars while remaining the cornerstone of the collective defence of Western Europe. It thereby became an obstacle to the transformation of the European security order. A collective defence body is very different from a system of collective security. It applies a logic of inclusion and exclusion and imposes hierarchy into alliance relationships. Russia was stuck on the outside of an expanding system centred on Washington. Transatlantic ties took priority over a re-envisioning of European continentalism. From this failure stemmed incalculable consequences. Instead of indivisible security on a continental scale, Washington enlarged NATO to bring the former Soviet and some other states under its defence umbrella. This was the free choice of the countries concerned, but their choice was structured by the options on offer.

It is not hard to imagine an alternative pan-European security structure encompassing all states in some sort of continental security confederation. In the early 1990s, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was touted as the framework for such an entity, while NATO's Partnership for Peace programme was welcomed by Moscow. The idea of some sort of OSCE security council, analogous to the UN Security Council, was also advanced as a way of regulating great power relations in the region. A major security role for the EU was also proposed. In the end, the paucity of institutional and intellectual innovation at the end of Cold War I is striking. NATO enlargement became the only game in town. Any short-term gain was balanced by the long-term degradation of the European security environment, as well as the profound internal transformation of the Political West itself. In the absence of a security order that included Moscow, the security dilemma intensified. European security became defined against Russia, rather than with Russia. In May 2024, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov noted that an acute foreign policy confrontation between Russia and the West was ‘in full swing’, with the Western powers seeking to impose a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia and the very existence of the country under threat.