THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 25

The Hammer in My Mind

There is a particular silence that arrives when the person sitting opposite me has run out of words. It is not peaceful silence, nor is it the comfortable pause between people who know one another well enough not to fill every available space. It is the silence of somebody who has reached the edge of what they can explain and discovered that the facts have not reduced the pain. I have sat on the other side of that silence more times than I can count, sometimes as an accountant, sometimes as an adviser, sometimes as a friend and occasionally as nothing more complicated than the nearest available human being. In those moments, I have rarely known whether I was supposed to supply an answer, a plan, an objection, a phone number or merely a shoulder that did not move away when the tears began.

My first instinct has usually been to do something. Sitting still can feel remarkably like neglect when another person is hurting, even though the two are not necessarily the same. The analytical part of me begins assembling information, identifying causes and testing possible solutions before the person has finished describing what happened, while the human part recognises that the problem may not yet be ready to become a project. Between the two of them, I have often reached for whatever tool seemed available, sometimes before establishing whether it was the right tool or whether I had been invited to use it. A hammer is reassuring in that way because it gives the hand something to hold and the mind something to imagine doing.

That may be why If I Had a Hammer¹ has stayed with me. On the surface, it is one of those songs that seems simple enough to be sung by a group of people who may not agree on much else, provided somebody starts at the correct pitch and the rest are willing to take their chances. Its images are basic: a hammer connected with justice, a bell connected with freedom and a song that imagines love among brothers and sisters. There are no complicated economic models, no legislative amendments and no committee appointed to determine the appropriate size of the hammer. The song simply places a few symbolic tools before us and asks what sort of world we might build if we were prepared to use them.

The title begins with a condition, but that condition no longer works for me. If I had a hammer suggests that the obstacle is the absence of equipment, whereas my life has gradually shown me that the hammer was already there. It may have taken the form of knowledge, language, persistence, anger, professional experience, an ability to explain difficult things or an unwillingness to look away when something did not make sense. I did not always recognise those things as tools, and I certainly did not always use them well, but I cannot honestly claim that I was standing empty-handed. The more uncomfortable question is what I did with the hammer once I realised it was in my hand.

The song was written as protest, and protest has always required more than identifying that something is wrong. Almost everybody can manage dissatisfaction, particularly when the consequences are borne by somebody else. We can shake our heads at injustice, complain about government, curse the greed of the powerful and then return to whatever was on television before the disturbance began. Protest asks us to move beyond disapproval and risk becoming inconvenient. That is where the hammer begins to acquire weight, because justice is much easier to sing about than to pursue when pursuit may cost time, money, comfort, reputation or access to the room in which decisions are made.

I have never considered myself a protest singer, although that may be only because nobody should have to endure the musical consequences. My protests tended to emerge through advice, questions, letters, arguments, books and the occasional refusal to accept that a ridiculous rule became sensible merely because it had been printed on official stationery. I learned that systems acquire authority partly because ordinary people become too tired to challenge them. They surrender not because the system is right, but because the system has more time, more forms and a person at the other end of the telephone trained to repeat the same sentence until resistance becomes medically inadvisable.

That anger sits near the centre of Dumbing It Down. It is the anger of knowing that the room is capable of better thought but has decided that certainty is more attractive than intelligence. It is the anger of watching people who ask genuine questions treated as difficult while those who repeat familiar nonsense are rewarded for being cooperative. It is also the anger of having reduced parts of myself to make other people comfortable, only to discover that comfort rarely produced better decisions. The rage was not created by believing I was superior to everyone around me; it was created by seeing what was possible and then watching possibility repeatedly discarded because it did not fit the accepted shape.

How Did We Get Here carries a related anger, but it stands a little further back from the wreckage and examines the road. It asks how apparently rational people accepted arrangements that produce plainly irrational outcomes, and how self-interest learned to dress itself in the language of economic necessity. It looks at the tiny compromises that eventually become a culture, the absurdities repeated until they acquire the protection of familiarity and the decisions nobody remembers making even though everyone is now required to live with them. The anger in that book is not satisfied with locating a villain because villains are too convenient. It suspects that most disastrous systems survive through the participation of decent people who tell themselves that nothing useful can be done.

That is where If I Had a Hammer becomes more than a pleasant piece of folk history. It asks what happens after recognition. Once I have seen the injustice, heard the warning or noticed the person left behind, what am I entitled to do with that knowledge? I can declare that the matter is too large for one person and be entirely correct, but correctness does not always release me from responsibility. The world has rarely been repaired by people waiting until they possessed enough power to guarantee success.

Bigweld provided the simpler version in Robots: “See a Need, Fill a Need.”² It is advice uncomplicated enough to survive contact with children, which may be why adults spend so much effort finding exemptions from it. The words do not require the need to be profitable, fashionable, tax-deductible or capable of being photographed beside an oversized cheque. They suggest that noticing carries a consequence, and that usefulness begins by responding to what is actually missing. I took that adage seriously, although seriousness in my hands has occasionally been known to escape supervision.

Seeing the need has rarely been my difficulty. I see gaps in systems, weaknesses in plans, dangers in decisions and distress hiding behind the sentence that insists everything is fine. The problem is that once seen, the need can begin to feel personally assigned, as though the universe has issued a work order and placed my name in the responsible-officer box. Other people may be capable of responding, and the person affected may even prefer their response, but the hammer has already shifted in my hand. Action feels not merely possible but morally required.

That is how “See a Need, Fill a Need” can be pushed beyond the edge of the envelope. I have pushed it so far at times that the envelope was no longer visible and the person who supplied it may have been regretting the postage. There is virtue in responding quickly, particularly when delay is the mechanism through which institutions hope inconvenient people will disappear. There is also danger in assuming that the quickest available response must be mine. A person can become so committed to filling needs that he neglects to ask who created the need, who benefits from its continuation and why the same shoulders are expected to carry it every time.

Being the shoulder to cry on sounds gentle, but even that role has complications. A shoulder supports without directing, remains present without claiming the grief and does not demand gratitude for the privilege of being dampened. I have not always been that disciplined. There are times when I have listened while also constructing the answer, waiting for the opening in which I could move the conversation from pain to action because action was the language I understood. The person beside me may have needed witness rather than strategy, but witness can feel inadequate to someone who has built an identity around usefulness.

The need to be useful can be generous and selfish at the same time. It can arise from compassion, but it can also protect against the fear of becoming unnecessary. When people require advice, explanation or rescue, there is little time to wonder whether I belong, whether I am valued or whether the room would continue functioning without me. Usefulness supplies its own temporary answer. It says that I must matter because something would remain broken if I left.

Retirement has made that question harder to avoid. Work provided a continuing stream of needs, each arriving with dates, documents, numbers, consequences and somebody hoping that I could make sense of them. The needs were not always pleasant, but they were wonderfully clear in comparison with the wider question of what a person is for once the formal work begins to recede. A hammer hanging unused on the wall may still be a perfectly good hammer, but the hammer does not know that. It waits for the next nail and may begin to interpret every sound in the house as evidence of structural collapse.

The song does not spend much time considering the personality of the person holding the tool. It assumes that the hammer will be used for justice, the bell for freedom and the song for love, which is a generous assessment of human beings presented with instruments capable of making considerable noise. History suggests that hammers have not always waited for a morally suitable target. Bells can summon people towards freedom or warn authorities that freedom is attempting to escape. Songs about human fellowship can be sung beautifully by people who remain highly selective about which humans they regard as family.

The hammer is therefore not virtuous by itself. It acquires moral character from the hand, the intention, the target and the willingness to examine the result. A hammer can construct shelter, repair a loose board, break a lock or sound an alarm against metal. It can also damage what patience might have preserved, flatten what difference might have contributed and strike simply because anger has convinced the hand that movement is better than thought. The possession of a tool is not evidence of wisdom.

I know the attraction of movement. Anger produces energy when depression has removed almost everything else, which makes anger feel useful even when it has no clear destination. The Black Dog can drain colour, momentum and purpose from a day, while rage can suddenly restore all three, although usually in shades unsuitable for interior decoration. There is a kind of relief in discovering something outside myself that deserves blame. The hammer feels lighter when the target has been declared responsible for the weight of the world.

That does not make the anger false. There are people and institutions that deserve challenge, and there are arrangements so grotesquely unfair that calm acceptance becomes a form of cooperation. The danger lies in allowing justified anger to certify every action taken beneath it. Rage can identify the fire while remaining completely unqualified to design the rebuilding. It can wake me, move me and prevent surrender, but it cannot be trusted to select every nail.

The mega-rich and mega-powerful present the most obvious target because their excess has become so vast that ordinary language struggles to describe it. We speak of billions as though adding another three zeros merely requires a slightly wider wallet, while people at the other end of the system ration food, medical care, heating, housing and hope. Wealth is treated not merely as possession but as proof of wisdom, discipline and social value, even where it has been inherited, extracted, sheltered or enlarged through rules unavailable to those whose labour helped create it. The pile becomes the argument: the person must deserve authority because the person possesses enough money to purchase access to everyone who has it.

An accountant is supposed to understand accumulation. I understand compound returns, investment structures, tax concessions, business risk and the ordinary human desire to provide security for those we love. I do not regard money as evil, and I have spent much of my working life helping people retain more of what they earned within the law. Money can buy choice, time, safety, treatment, education and distance from people who exercise power through deprivation. The problem begins when enough ceases to exist and accumulation becomes its own moral justification.

Capitalism is very good at answering how more can be produced, but less impressive when asked why more must always be wanted. It has generated invention, enterprise, employment and improvements that should not be dismissed merely because the system has also generated grotesque inequality. The analytical Jeff objects when a criticism ignores those achievements, because an economic system cannot be assessed solely by its worst participants. The human Jeff then asks why those achievements are repeatedly used to silence discussion about the people crushed beneath them, as though any criticism of the engine amounts to a demand that everyone return to walking.

I do not know whether a non-capitalist world would be kinder. Human beings have shown an impressive capacity to reproduce hierarchy under almost any economic label, and changing the sign above the building does not necessarily remove the people occupying the executive floor. Revolutions undertaken in the name of equality have often created new elites with better slogans and fewer restraints. The hammer of justice has sometimes been used to clear the way for another throne. Suspicion of capitalism does not require romantic innocence about its alternatives.

Gene Roddenberry nevertheless offered a model worth considering through the future imagined in Star Trek.³ In that future, at least within the Federation’s broad ideal, material scarcity has largely been overcome and the acquisition of money is no longer presented as the central force organising human life. People work to develop themselves, contribute, explore and improve humanity rather than merely to remain fed and housed. It is optimistic, certainly, but optimism should not be dismissed merely because the present has invested heavily in disappointment.

The Roddenberry model asks what human beings might become if survival could no longer be withheld as an incentive. Our present arrangement insists that most people sell a substantial portion of their waking lives in order to earn permission to continue existing, and we call that freedom because they may occasionally choose which purchaser receives the hours. The system works better for some than for others, particularly for those whose assets earn more while they sleep than another person can earn through a year of labour. We then explain the difference as merit, even when the starting points were separated by generations.

A society without material want would not automatically produce noble people. Some would still seek status, influence, admiration, control or the satisfaction of being difficult at meetings. Scarcity is not the only fuel for human appetite, and removing money would not remove ego. Even aboard the Enterprise, somebody would probably want a larger cabin and claim it was required for strategic thinking. Humanity has never needed currency in order to find new ways of ranking itself.

Yet the question remains valuable because the current system benefits from convincing us that no other arrangement can be imagined. We are told that greed is human nature, competition is unavoidable and inequality is the price of progress, usually by people doing rather well from the invoice. Perhaps they are right about some of it, but inevitability has always been one of power’s favourite disguises. If a television future can imagine humanity growing beyond the worship of accumulation, the least our present can do is explain why billionaires require another tax concession while children require charitable appeals.

That is when Father Mulcahy enters my thinking. In the MASH* episode “Change Day,”⁴ money entrusted to Hawkeye is stolen, and the normally gentle chaplain takes to the public-address system to condemn the thief. His appeal gathers momentum until he reaches the biblical fury of “O ye generation of vipers,” at which point even Hawkeye seems to suspect that the message has achieved sufficient spiritual penetration. It is funny because Mulcahy’s anger is so out of keeping with his usual manner, but it is effective because the anger comes from a man whose gentleness has never meant indifference.

I remember that image less as a precise quotation than as an approach to the nest. Mulcahy does not possess military command, economic power or the ability to search every tent, yet he uses the instrument available to him. He broadcasts conscience into a camp accustomed to announcements about wounded soldiers, missing equipment and the condition of the evening meal. The thief can avoid the chaplain’s eyes, but avoiding his voice becomes more difficult when it arrives through every speaker. Mulcahy cannot overturn the structure, but he can make wrongdoing less comfortable inside it.

The mega-rich are a considerably larger nest of vipers, and I do not own their public-address system. They control too many of the speakers, sponsor too much of the programming and employ people skilled at explaining why their interests coincide perfectly with the national good. When regulation approaches, they warn of lost investment; when taxation approaches, they warn of lost enterprise; and when accountability approaches, they warn that success is being punished. The person struggling to pay rent does not generally have a government minister available to receive that warning.

My hammer cannot reach that height. I can become angry, write books, challenge clients, question policy and point out the absurdity of treating extreme accumulation as though it were a public service, but the towers remain standing. The nest may hear the noise and interpret it as distant renovation. Power is protected not only by money but by scale, distance and the exhausted belief among ordinary people that nothing they do will matter. The hammer begins to feel embarrassingly small.

Powerlessness is difficult for me because it refuses to become a technical problem. If the obstacle were a calculation, a piece of legislation or a badly designed process, I could study it and search for the point at which leverage might be applied. Concentrated power absorbs leverage. It can wait longer, employ more specialists, appeal more decisions and redefine the conversation while everyone else is still locating the original question. Anger without leverage becomes a repetitive strain injury.

There is a temptation at that point to declare the whole exercise useless. If I cannot dismantle the nest, redistribute obscene wealth, free the trapped or bring justice to every person denied it, perhaps my hammer is merely a theatrical prop. That conclusion has the attraction of relieving me from responsibility while allowing me to remain morally offended. I can condemn the world from a safe distance and explain that meaningful action was impossible. Nothing changes, but my principles remain wonderfully undamaged through lack of use.

The song resists that escape because its scale is both enormous and personal. It imagines justice and freedom across the land, yet it places the instrument in an individual hand. It does not promise that one blow will transform the system, nor does it provide a progress report after the first chorus. It simply insists that the tool be used wherever injustice, danger or the need for human connection appears. The hammer may not bring down the palace, but it can repair the step on which someone might otherwise fall.

That smaller action should not become an excuse for leaving the palace untouched. Charity can relieve suffering while allowing the machinery producing the suffering to continue without examination. A food parcel matters to the family receiving it, but the need for the parcel still asks questions about wages, housing, health, taxation and the allocation of abundance. Being a shoulder matters to the person crying, but compassion should not prevent me from asking who placed the burden on them. Filling a need and challenging its cause are different tasks, and responsibility may require both.

There are times, however, when the cause cannot be reached from where I stand. The person opposite me does not need an economic thesis while their business, marriage, health or confidence is collapsing. They need someone who will remain in the room and resist turning their distress into an opportunity to display superior analysis. The hammer can wait on the floor while the shoulder performs the more necessary work. Patience is not always passivity.

That distinction has taken me a long time to learn because patience provides little evidence of usefulness. A plan can be written, a form lodged, a letter sent and a number calculated, each leaving behind proof that something was done. Listening produces no such document. There is no certificate confirming that another person felt less alone because I did not interrupt them with the answer. Yet some of the most important help I have given may have consisted of staying when I could not repair anything.

There is also a boundary between helping and taking over. The man with the hammer may begin by repairing a loose board and finish by redesigning the house while its owner stands outside wondering when they lost possession. Advice can become control when the adviser cannot tolerate a decision different from his own. Concern can become intrusion when the need to protect another person denies them the right to choose, fail, learn or refuse assistance. Even justice can become tyrannical when the person pursuing it assumes that only he can define what justice requires.

The analytical Jeff does not enjoy that possibility. He prefers to believe that a sound solution should prevail because it is sound, and that resistance is evidence the other person has not properly understood the facts. The human Jeff remembers that people do not live inside spreadsheets, however attractively formatted. They carry fear, history, loyalty, shame and private reasons that may never appear in the assumptions column. A technically correct answer can still arrive at the wrong human time.

The song’s appeal to love between brothers and sisters may therefore be the hardest part. Justice without love can harden into punishment, while freedom without love can become the right of the strongest person to ignore everyone else. Love forces the hammer-holder to see the person beyond the problem and the person beyond the opposition. It asks whether the blow is intended to repair, awaken or simply hurt somebody who has been declared deserving. Anger resists that question because anger prefers cleaner categories.

I am not suggesting that the mega-rich require a sympathetic cuddle before being asked to pay tax. Love does not mean the removal of accountability, and forgiveness does not require leaving the vault unlocked. It means remembering that the purpose of justice is not merely to reverse the direction of suffering. A system in which yesterday’s powerless become tomorrow’s unrestrained powerful has changed personnel rather than principle. The hammer must build something better or it becomes another weapon circulating through history.

That is why the song is a call to arms only in a particular sense. The arms are the capacities we possess: thought, language, courage, service, patience, collective action and the refusal to accept that cruelty becomes respectable when administered efficiently. The hammer can be a letter that will not let an institution hide behind procedure, advice that prevents a family from being exploited or a book that asks readers to notice how the accepted story stopped making sense. The bell can be the warning sounded before the damage is irreversible. The song can be the human voice reminding those beneath the machinery that somebody still knows they are there.

Writing may now be the largest hammer left in my hand. It does not require the professional title, the office appointment or the client’s authority to act, although it still depends on somebody being willing to read what I have written. Through writing I can take the anger from Dumbing It Down and How Did We Get Here and place it somewhere other than my own bloodstream. I can test it, question it and ask whether it reveals injustice or merely my frustration at being unable to command the result. The page does not automatically make anger wise, but it makes anger visible enough to examine.

Writing also allows the hammer to become a tuning fork. A thought struck on the page may vibrate inside somebody who believed the feeling belonged only to them. It may not change legislation or disturb the vipers, but it can produce the echo sought elsewhere in this book. Recognition is not revolution, yet people who recognise one another are less easily persuaded that their isolation proves their weakness. The song about fellowship begins there, before anyone has agreed upon the economic model.

Perhaps that is the part I have sometimes underestimated. I have wanted the result to be measurable, preferably by the end of the financial year and accompanied by a favourable variance report. I have wanted the person helped, the injustice corrected, the argument accepted and the nail driven neatly below the surface. Human change does not respect that timetable. A sentence may remain inside someone for years before life supplies the moment in which it becomes useful.

The words that formed me worked that way. They arrived through songs, poems, performances, films and the internal radio without submitting an explanation of their future purpose. If I Had a Hammer did not need me to understand political folk music when I first heard it. It only needed to leave the tool behind. The rest of my life gradually supplied the timber, the damage, the anger and the uncertainty about where the next blow should fall.

I still do not know how to take on the mega-rich and mega-powerful in any way that would cause them to interrupt lunch. I do not know how to replace capitalism with something that preserves enterprise while removing the worship of accumulation, nor how to ensure that the replacement would not create a different group of vipers. The honest answer may be that I cannot solve those questions, and pretending otherwise would convert moral concern into personal vanity. A hammer is not an economic system merely because the person holding it has strong opinions.

I can nevertheless refuse the conclusion that inability to do everything excuses doing nothing. I can support the person in front of me, challenge the rule within my reach, explain the complexity somebody has used as a weapon and make noise when silence would leave wrongdoing undisturbed. I can recognise when the hammer should be handed to someone closer to the problem, particularly when they have spent years being told they are too weak to hold it. I can also put it down when my intervention would serve my need to matter more than their need to be helped.

That may be the responsibility the song has carried towards me all these years. It is not the obligation to repair the world single-handedly, because that ambition contains more ego than justice and would require a considerably larger tool shed. It is the obligation to remain awake to what is happening, to use what I possess and to examine the consequences of my own certainty. The hammer in my hand is neither proof of virtue nor permission to strike. It is a question I must answer each time I lift it.

The person opposite me may still run out of words. The system may remain unfair, the powerful may remain insulated and the vipers may continue regarding my objections as background noise. I may still feel the old surge that says I must fix what I can see before the opportunity closes, and sometimes that surge will be right. At other times, the wiser response will be to leave the hammer beside me, keep my shoulder where it is and listen until the silence becomes safe enough for the other person to speak again. Justice may begin with the blow that breaks a barrier, but love sometimes begins when the hand chooses not to swing.

The hammer remains in my hand, although I hold it differently now. I know it can build and warn, but I also know it can bruise, dominate and exhaust the person who refuses to release it. I cannot empty the nest of vipers or create Roddenberry’s future before breakfast, but I can decide what happens within the small circle reached by my own voice, judgement and presence. The bell of freedom may be beyond me to ring across the whole land, yet I can still make certain it has not been packed away as an outdated instrument. Somewhere between the anger and the shoulder, the hammer and the song, responsibility waits for me to do what I can without pretending that I alone am what the world has been waiting for.

Notes

1. If I Had a Hammer, originally titled The Hammer Song, was written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays in 1949 and first recorded by the Weavers in 1950. Peter, Paul and Mary released a prominent recording in 1962, followed by Trini Lopez’s successful 1963 version; the particular recording central to Jeff’s earliest memory has not yet been identified.
2. “See a Need, Fill a Need” is Bigweld’s guiding principle in the animated film Robots, directed by Chris Wedge and released in 2005. Bigweld was voiced by Mel Brooks.
3. Star Trek was created by Gene Roddenberry and first appeared on American television in 1966. Later productions developed the idea of a broadly post-scarcity Federation in which material needs have largely been met and the acquisition of wealth is no longer humanity’s principal motivation.
4. “Change Day” is an episode of the television series MASH*, first broadcast in 1977. After money entrusted to Hawkeye is stolen, Father Mulcahy, played by William Christopher, delivers an angry appeal over the camp’s public-address system that includes the biblical expression “O ye generation of vipers.”