What a thrill to be a guest on a podcast I have listened to and learned from for years!
Episode #21: Grace Lockrobin on Community Philosophy in a Time of Crisis
Grace is a philosophy teacher, trainer, facilitator, scholar and advocate. Over the last fifteen years – through her many projects in the places people live, learn, work and play – she has enjoyed philosophical conversations with thousands of thinkers of all ages, backgrounds and levels of experience. Through her workshops, training, talks and writing, she has shared her thinking and practice nationally and internationally.
Working in the community, she founded Thinking Space in 2008. She is also an accredited trainer with SAPERE and Dialogue Works, a specialist with The Philosophy Foundation, a contributor to P4C.com and a board member of the European network SOPHIA.
Working in academia, she is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Leeds where she runs ‘Philosophy Exchange’ – a project that brings together philosophy students, teachers and children in weekly philosophical enquiry. She also consults with other UK universities, helping to set up similar programmes. Grace is currently finishing a PhD in Philosophy at UCL Institute of Education where she writes on ethics, education and aesthetics, funded by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) doctoral award.
Continue reading “Episode #21: Grace Lockrobin on Community Philosophy in a Time of Crisis”Dao Du Jour II, Day 30:
Chapter 30: Not Making War
“Things flourish then perish.
Not the Way.
What’s not the Way
soon ends.”
~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)
This chapter is doubly confounding. First, it chiefly focuses on war, which makes these four lines seem out of place. Second, it seems to contradict a central tenet of Daoism (and the Buddhism it inspired): the truth of impermanence. Here, the Way is negatively identified with what endures.
But the Dao is in the details.
When discussing the wise ruler, the text traces the root of war to “boasting,” “domineering,” and “arrogance” that turn prosperity into “bad harvests.” To make war is to starve and stampede over the root of peace first and foremost in the soul. Economic prosperity is an expression of spiritual prosperity; or, in the language of the Gospel, true wealth comes from poverty of spirit, from those who can empty themselves of ego to receive the grace of God and humbly tend the bounty of creation. To “end soon” is to refuse to accept the impermanence of things, and to make war on them—to conquer nature is to treat oneself and others as things, not persons.
Heidegger said that while things perish, only human beings die. The distinction is not just about our (apparently—see “elephants, grieving”) special awareness of our mortality, but about our freedom to accept or reject it. He was referring less to biological death, and more to spiritual life. Heidegger’s insight is bracingly captured by the late psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott: “the catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened.” The anxiety that lurks around and seeps through the edges of our everyday experience puts us on guard and spurs us on to seize the day and crush this and kill that—to conquest, to war—because it convinces us that if we do not, things will fall apart. But the catastrophe is that things have already fallen apart, including us. Being born, we fall into the world, and prop ourselves up, first physically, then psychologically. And much of our propping and prospering is centered on covering up that primal catastrophe, and pretending that we can outfox fate and prevent perishing.
Death, put another way, is not the end, but the beginning. Aligning with the Way, one is reborn again and again. It is not about living forever, or even for a long time, but about keeping alive the child, the beginner’s mind, that plays without why; these are the rulers, the chapter tells us, that “prosper because they can’t help it.” It is Nietzsche’s third metamorphosis of the spirit: “Innocence the child is and forgetting, a beginning anew, a play, a self-propelling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yea-saying.” As Joseph Campbell liked to say, “if you’re falling, dive.” Build sandcastles with disciplined abandon, knowing they will end soon. And if you dive, you begin to “fall upward,” in Father Richard Rohr’s happy turn of phrase. Gravity is turned into a tailwind, chaos is conducted, catastrophe is not averted, but converted. Tolkien’s Christianity found its way into his philosophy of storytelling through what he called the “eucatastrophe,” the sudden opening to heaven that can only happen in hell.
The Daoist sage agrees with Zarathustra: the path of eternity is bent, and all that is straight lies.
New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”
Dao Du Jour II, Day 29: Just Justice
Chapter 29: Not Doing
“Those who think to win the world
by doing something to it,
I see them come to grief.
For the world is a sacred object.
Nothing is to be done to it.
To do anything to it is to damage it.
To seize it is to lose it.”
~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)
Burnout is the bane of social activists. Their passion for justice is a double-edged sword that fuels and foils them. Yeats’ poem “Second Coming” is commonly invoked to contrast doubting, dithering, and divided progressives with militant, united, on-message conservatives: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
But the invocation misses four things.
One, today’s progressives are brimming with passionate intensity.
Two, if you are full of passionate intensity, you have no room for anything else. If you never empty out, you will always be running on empty, fueled by the fumes of grievance and resentment, the “fossil fuels” of fanaticism.
Three, if you are full of passionate intensity, convinced you are “on the right side of history,” you are no longer “the best.”
Four, the passionate intensity on the Right is grounded in something beyond politics: in a word, God. It is worth considering whether this is why they win, and whether we ought to see this as a sort of secret weapon that makes political conflict, like combating terrorism, a kind of asymmetric warfare. To be fair, the Right are neither terrorists nor holy warriors, and the religious bent of their politics is either cynical and craven, or benighted and misguided. But their ethos is rooted in a theology.
In the New York Times this week, Tina Harrison Warren shares her story of burnout as an activist, and how an encounter with a Franciscan priest changed her approach:
Soon after I graduated, passionate about justice and wanting to make a difference in the world, I ran a church-based group that helped support undocumented immigrants and provided tutoring to their kids. I ran into the friar and we caught up.
He looked at me and said matter-of-factly, “You do not have the life of prayer and silence necessary to sustain the work you are doing.” I was a little insulted. What the hell did he know? But over the course of the next two years, he was proved right. I simply did not have the spiritual rhythms and practices to cultivate the wisdom, humility, thoughtfulness and rest my work required. I burned out quickly.
If politics is all there is, every conflict is the Final Battle, every election is existential, and every aspect of cultural life is drawn into its orbit. The old concept of identity politics, “the personal is the political” has been inflated beyond measure: since everything is political, and the personal is the political, everything is personal. And for the extremely online set, the political has become a matrix from which they cannot escape, except the machines are now the algorithms monetizing their attention by hijacking their limbic system.
Put another way, if there is only history, it becomes what James Joyce said it was: a nightmare from which I cannot awaken. I will oscillate between outrage and outage, and soothe myself with ironic detachment. The philosophical ancestor of the activist Left is Marx. Whatever the merits of his critique of capitalism, his materialism entailed that there is no ultimate spiritual or moral justification for his alternative. As C.S. Lewis put it in another context, “such men are better than their principles.” Their ethic writes spiritual and moral checks that their metaphysic cannot cash. What results is a spiritual eschatology, in which transcendence is sought not beyond history, through revelation, but within it, through revolution. As Shadi Hamid recently put it in The Atlantic:
No wonder the newly ascendant American ideologies, having to fill the vacuum where religion once was, are so divisive. They are meant to be divisive. On the left, the “woke” take religious notions such as original sin, atonement, ritual, and excommunication and repurpose them for secular ends.
The goal of necessity becomes not to understand the world, or celebrate it, but to change it by “doing something to it.” When the world or other people resist such doings, the problem is not you, but them. They are on the wrong side of history and must be awakened and perhaps, in Rousseau’s words, “be forced to be free.”
But there is another, older way. Warren writes:
The literature scholar Alan Jacobs argues that we need to embrace “not a permanent silence, but a refusal to speak at the frantic pace set by social media.” He calls silence “the first option — the preferential option for the poor in spirit, you might say; silence as a form of patience, a form of reflection, a form of prayer.”
….
Contemplative silence and prayer becomes the means by which we learn the limits of words and action, and where we learn to take up the right words and actions. It’s where we learn to slow down and then to work again at the mysterious pace of the Holy Spirit.
There is a deep vein of Christian activism in American history that used to be called “the social gospel” and, of course, the social justice teaching of the Church. The opposition of social justice and Christianity in America is a relatively new phenomenon. The term “social justice” has become so politicized that perhaps we should abandon it and, well, just talk about justice. Martin Luther King, of course, grounded his activism in the gospel, not just theologically, but practically. In his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he lays out the four principles of non-violent civil disobedience:
- Fact-finding to establish that an injustice has occurred
- Negotiation with the authorities
- Purification
- Direct Action
It is the third that is most important and that separates King’s approach from much of today’s activism on the Left.
That purification, of course, need not be carried out in a Christian vein. Eisenhower famously said that “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion with all men are created equal.” You can substitute the Dao for the Holy Spirit and not miss a beat.
How ironic that we now discover, in the endgame of late modernity, that we really can’t separate religion and politics? Prayer—understood broadly as the preferential option for silence—is the supremely practical secret to personal and political sanity.
New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”
Dao Du Jour II, Day 28: Three Ways to Carve
Chapter 28: Turning Back
“Natural wood is cut up
and made into useful things.
Wise souls are used to make leaders.
Just so, a great carving
is done without cutting.”
~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)
To comment on the passage seems hopelessly ham fisted. But we are condemned to meaning, to make our cuts with words in order to render things useful, true, and beautiful.
Today’s paradox leads one of three ways, what we might call the kenotic, the ascetic, and the aesthetic.
The kenotic path is that of Christ. Kenosis refers to the act of self-emptying, sacrifice, voluntary liquidation, and pure charity. Thought individually, it is Christ’s death (natural wood is cut up) and resurrection (made into useful things). Thought cosmically, it the Dao that courses through us that we harness, conduct, and channel to others—and the “other others” of nature. Transform the wood.
The ascetic path scorns the useful. Leave the natural wood as is. Let it be. Nature is already a great carving. Behold the wood.
The aesthetic path aims not for utility, but beauty. It does not “cut up” natural wood into commodities. Nature is indeed already a great carving, but she requests our help to display her magnificence. The patient poet can divine the shapes slumbering in the wood, and release them with winged words. The master carver apprentices himself to warp and woof, takes orders from the grain. She does not “cut,” she frees. Reveal the wood.
Which is the right path? Only the wise soul knows.
New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”
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