An H of G

“Good morning, Hank. It’s Tuesday. Today I want to talk about the phrase ‘H of G,’ which is maybe my very favorite saying of the many, many, many sayings of Dr. Paul Farmer, the co-founder of Partners In Health, who died last month at the age of 62. H of G is short for a hermeneutics of generosity. Now, if you’re anything like me, you run screaming from the mere existence of the word hermeneutics. Like, there are many reasons I chose not to go to divinity school after working as a hospital chaplain, but the thought of having to use the word hermeneutics a lot was certainly on the list. But basically, hermeneutics just means interpretation. A hermeneutics is like the interpretive lens you bring to looking at a text, especially a sacred text. And because I was a double major in English and Religious Studies, by the time I graduated from college, I had been hermeneuted half to death, and the word had sort of lost all meaning to me. Until, that is, I heard Dr. Farmer talk about a hermeneutics of generosity.

Here’s how Dr. Paul once defined H of G: ‘I know you’re a good guy; therefore, I will interpret the things you say and do in a favorable light.’ That’s the H of G: know you’re a good person, so I will interpret what you say and do in a favorable light. Even if I don’t know you, I will assume that you’re a good person unless I have very strong evidence to the contrary, because almost everyone is trying their best, and almost everyone sees their own actions in a generous light, and so I’m gonna try to do that too. Now, the H of G is, like most things, much easier to say than to do. What are things that are easier to do than they are to say? Rumination! It’s not that hard to say; it’s just so easy to do. Anyway, the H of G is hard to do in practice, right?

Like, imagine you’re in a grocery store and you’re on a tight schedule, and you only have a couple items, and the person in front of you has, like, 14 crumpled coupons that they are smoothing out one by one so that they can be scanned, and the whole process is taking FOREVER. It’s relatively simple to deploy the H of G in this situation, right? You just tell yourself that maybe this person’s children crumpled up the coupons and that the coupons are really important to them being able to afford groceries. But what if this person is digging those coupons out of a designer purse that you happen to know cost four thousand dollars? What if they’re yelling at the supermarket clerk for failing to scan the coupons fast enough, or yelling at you for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to you? Now it’s getting much harder to deploy the H of G. Harder but not, Dr. Farmer would argue, impossible. When people yell, it is because they are afraid or angry.

And I have found that when I can deploy an H of G, which certainly isn’t all the time, I am, on average, more empathetic, more curious, more engaged, and less judgmental, angry, and miserable. Now, this is not in any way to minimize the role that anger and disgust play in bringing about change. I think we should be angry about injustice, and I think the world’s shared apathy to the most poor and most marginalized should bother us. But I also think if we look at the world through a lens of generosity and a presumption of general good faith, the shared big problems of injustice and inequity are no longer merely about people being terrible or systems being inherently crappy. Instead, these problems become about failures: failures of empathy, failures of resource allocation, and failures of will. We can address those failures. They aren’t inevitable or necessary. We can see from history how they’ve already changed, and so now progress feels possible. Not only that, but the world’s profound and horrific injustice becomes even more profound and horrific, because we know now that together we can choose a better world. And so I think an H of G is hard work precisely because it asks us to believe that together we can address our shared problems, the failures of empathy and resource allocation that lead to marginalization and impoverishment.

Dr. Farmer left us many legacies, but that is one I’m trying to hold on to in these difficult days. Hank, I’ll see you on Friday.”