Roshi
Joan Halifax asked this question in the TED talk I posted about last week,
implying that we don't do enough to teach our children compassion.
On reflection, I think we do more to teach our children than
we generally give ourselves credit for. This teaching is not called "compassion
class". It is called drama. For instance, my daughters attend a very popular theater workshop in our neighbourhood. The faculty that they develop through theater is compassion;
they learn to get into someone else's skin.
I didn't learn drama as a child, but I did attend a couple
of corporate leadership workshops, in America, that were built around acting
technique. The idea is - learn to act, get into the other's skin, understand others
more completely, communicate better, discover yourself, discover your own
authentic leadership voice, and therefore ride away into the golden sunset of
promotions and profits - which sounds awfully naff, but was actually quite helpful.
"Compassion has enemies...like pity, and moral outrage..."
I came across these words in a TED talk by the Buddhist Roshi Joan Halifax, to whom compassion is a higher faculty, a more important experience, than outrage. Obvious maybe, but worth noticing, amidst the cacophony of shrill news-anchors.
I was at a marvellous family event in Bangalore recently: an uncle and aunt's fiftieth wedding anniversary. It was a evening of laughter, music and food, brimming over with emotion, triggered in part by family photographs assembled from the past seventy-five years. When I came home, I started to explain to my daughters how all the people at that evening are related to us, and struggled. I still need to call my mother to clarify exactly how I'm related to my relatives.
I know exactly how I'm related to my first cousins, and for most part, to my second cousins. I'm hazy about genealogical links beyond that. Regardless, there are several members of my family, important people who I know and care about, who are in that hazy-genealogical-link zone. There are also several people who operate as members of the family despite not being specifically related either by blood or by marriage.
While my family is large and colourful, it is not unique. I know other Indian families which operate the same way. Mediterranean (and therefore Latino) cultures have a similarly capacious, rambling sense of family. Maybe family is the wrong word: clan, kinsfolk or the Welsh cymri might be closer to the mark. But what is it, this circle of kindred spirits? If it is not delineated by ancestry or marriage, is it infinitely large?
Professor Robin Dunbar thinks my clan isn't infinitely large, it consists of no more than one hundred and fifty people.
Dunbar's theory is that a stable social group is one in which "an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person". Keeping track of this complex web of relationships is cognitively difficult, and gets ever more so as the size of the group increases. Dunbar's observation is that this web of relationships gets unmanageably complex, or too computationally intensive for the human brain, when the group size approaches one hundred and fifty. Empirically, we've lived through most of recorded history in settlements of about one hundred and fifty people.
This is sometimes mis-interpreted as "you can't have more than one hundred and fifty friends". I don't think Dunbar's number makes any such claim.
For instance, I play tennis with an Oxford-educated Asian-Brit landscape-architect called Jason. I know Jason as a tennis buddy, and in that limited context, he is a good buddy. I don't know anything about the other spheres of Jason's life - his Oxonian tribe, or his landscape-architect tribe - and therefore my friendship with Jason is not computationally intensive. It is one dimensional, rather than a matrix. I don't think Dunbar's concept in any way limits the number of simple, or one-dimensional, friendships I can have. The Dunbar number is about the number of people in a self-regulating matrix of relationships, not about simple one-to-one friendships.
I also don't think the Dunbar number limits the number of distinct tribes I can belong to. I belong to Dunbar-tribes from family, school, college and from work. Each tribe is manageable because it is no more than one hundred and fifty people. If it were all one network, it would be overwhelming. Facebook's new "smart lists" feature is an attempt to capture this reality.
Understood this way, my family is a constantly shifting network of about one hundred and fifty, with people, or entire branches, coming in and peeling off as time passes and circumstances evolve. At one time, say one hundred and fifty years ago, a large family like mine would have operated to strict command-and-control protocols. Family would have defined every aspect of identity. Now, the family, or the clan, operates as an opt-in network, in which location on the family tree is not irrelevant but is not defining either. Welcome to the brave new world of open source kinship.
Jodi Kantor's new book The Obamas reports that "Barack refuses to miss dinner with his family more than twice a week". Apparently, this is not good. Obama's family-centric approach "left him, when the going got tough, short of friends, short of people who owed him, short of people who felt that the White House was interested in them". Effective presidents are meant to be out and about, schmoozing with potential allies.
Powerful men across the political spectrum face the same trade-off - between family time and schmoozing - on this side of the pond. David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are all in what the Economist calls their "Gruffolo years", the time when dads read stories to their children. By most accounts, all three party leaders make time for their families.
I clearly sympathize with Obama's and Cameron's choice (I'm writing this after having read out The Blackberry Mouse to my daughters). I want to believe that work can and should be organized so it can be done within defined working hours. But the truth is, there is a trade-off. I inhabit a less exalted world than the Obamas' and the Camerons', but even in my little world, schmoozing is clearly useful, but it is a potentially infinite drain on time and energy.
How much easier it must be for Manmohan Singh. He didn't have to face these hard trade-offs between bedtime stories and professional schmoozing when he became Prime Minister of India, aged 72. Maybe working into what used to be the "retirement years" isn't all bad.
I caught the Tintin movie on a flight recently, and it was a
mixed bag. I loved the look. The motion capture technique works well. It
strikes a nice balance between
maintaining the texture of the original comic and creating something
contemporary. But the movie takes a bunch of
arbitrary, and entirely unnecessary, liberties with the story and
characterization, which grates on committed, long-term Tintin fans like me.
Like, for example, Captain Haddock's Scottish accent. There
is no indication in any of Herge's comics that the Captain is Scottish. One doesn't have to be a Scot to love Scotch. Sure, Captain Haddock still is endearing even with his accent, but why
introduce this Scottish distraction?
Scottish identity is especially distinctive and pungent
right now, with a referendum looming on Scotland's independence. A Scottish
accent also communicates class. The Scottish upper classes - the kind of people
who trace their lineage to colonial naval captains, are heirs to stately homes,
and are christened Archibald - typically speak with upper-class English accents. Even The
Scotsman is not sure how to react to this Scottish Haddock. Embrace him,
because he is cool and Scottish? Or cringe, because he reinforces the
stereotype of the Scot as a drunken grouch with a heart-of-gold? I don't think Spielberg
is trying to stir these ghosts, but by treading on this ground, he inevitably does
so.
Fortunately, Spielberg's Tintin hasn't been saturated with a
specific identity. He remains the Tintin we grew up with - the Tintin of
indeterminate age, social class, nationality, sexuality and politics - which is
the genius of Tintin. His ambiguity is his strength. Tintin is neutral. So, it
is easy to project any self, any identity, into Tintin. As a Tam Bram boy in Madras, I didn't have to make an effort to locate myself in Tintin's skin, and go exploring the world of the Incas, Tibet, Al Capone's Chicago, Syldavia or
the moon. I would have had a harder time getting myself into a Scottish, or
even an explicitly Belgian, Tintin.
Another grouse: they don't sail to the Caribbean in
search of Red Rackham's Treasure. Surely, they can't edit out that sequence!
Exploring the wreck of the Unicorn in Professor Calculus' anti-shark submarine
would make for some wonderful cinema.
I blame Steven Spielberg for these grating deviations from
Herge's script, rather than his co-producer Peter Jackson. Steven Spielberg
first heard about Tintin when his Indiana Jones character was likened to
Tintin. Peter Jackson grew up as a Tintin devotee. He also grew up as a Lord of
the Rings devotee, and he struck that delicate balance between fidelity and re-interpretation
perfectly when he made the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Peter Jackson will be
directing the next Tintin film, so I'm optimistic that the next film will show
a more refined instinct for what is, and is not, sacred about Tintin.
Peter Jackson could do worse than to cast himself as a Kiwi
Captain Haddock. He looks the part. Check out the featurette below...
Che Guevara is an iconic hero, universally beloved and
revered. Fidel Castro is often seen as a villain, hated and reviled as one of
the world's last Stalinist thugs. But, are they really all that different? Or,
did Che just have the advantage of dying young and therefore remaining pure,
while Fidel lived on, grappling with and being tainted by an imperfect world?
This thought was triggered by the book I reviewed in my last
blog post, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, by Philip Pullman. Pullman's
intent was to contrast noble, idealistic Jesus with his cynical fictional twin
brother, Christ. Pullman conceived Christ as a metaphor for the institutional
church. I understood Christ even more broadly, as a general metaphor for institutional life. The
tension between an organization's ideals and its reality is universal. The only way to be genuinely Jesus-like is to die young, and to therefore
avoid the failures and compromises that inevitably come from engaging with the
messy real world.
To further strengthen the analogy, Che and
Fidel have really cool beards, like Jesus and Christ. Though I don't think
either Jesus or Christ smoked cigars...
I read, and enjoyed, a book that called Christ a scoundrel. The book is by Philip Pullman, a well known atheist. Pullman isn’t being subtle about his name calling, Christ is referred to as a scoundrel in bold print, in the book’s title.
Initially, I wasn’t sure if I should be blogging about a book that calls Christ a scoundrel, I'm not here to offend people. Then, I found that the Church of England Newspaper called the book “magnificent” (while noting that five hundred years ago Philip Pullman would have been burnt at stake as a heretic). The former Bishop of Edinburgh wrote a thoughtful and positive review in The Guardian. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s review found in it “a voice of genuine spiritual authority”. My blogging about the scoundrel Christ should be okay.
Pullman’s book is a retelling of the life of Jesus, with a twist.
In Pullman's telling, Jesus is born with a twin brother called Christ. Jesus is a passionate, charismatic idealist. Christ is a clever, careful pragmatist, an apparatchik. Jesus connects with real people, and moves or exhorts them to a more fulfilling life. Christ hero-worships his brother Jesus, diligently records his words, and conceives of an institution he calls “the church” to celebrate and immortalize Jesus, an idea Jesus despises.
Jesus says “if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the left as well...love your enemies, and pray for them...The road that leads to life is a hard one, and it passes through a narrow gate, but the road to destruction is easy, and the gate is broad...do to others as you hope they would do to you.”
Christ says “think of the advantages if there were a body of believers, a structure, an organization already in place...I can see the whole world united in this Kingdom of the faithful...local groups under the guidance of a wise elder in the region, the regional leaders all answering to the authority of one supreme director, a kind of regent of God on earth...I can see Caesar himself having to bow down before this body, and offer obeisance to God’s own kingdom here in the world...I can see the majesty and splendour of the great temples, the courts, the palaces devoted to the glory of God, and I can see this whole wonderful creation lasting for generation after generation.”
Pullman makes no secret of his contempt for the church, his anger about “the Crusades, the witch-hunts, the heretic-burnings, the narrow fanatical zeal that comes so swiftly and naturally to some individuals in positions of power when faith gives them an excuse”. His character Christ is written to be the object of this contempt, this anger. Pullman explains: “I wanted this Christ to embody as much as possible of what the church later did to alter, edit and ignore the words of Jesus, and to benefit from his death and supposed resurrection.”
So, in Pullman's story, Christ betrays Jesus to the Romans. The church needs the crucifixion to happen, to serve as its founding myth. Pullman sees the church as the judas who betrays Jesus.
Yet, paradoxically, by writing Jesus and Christ as distinct characters, and by juxtaposing them, Pullman liberates the good man Jesus from the scoundrel Christ. Jesus' greatness is so much more apparent when the evil that has been done in his name can be decanted into another character.
Even his portrayal of the scoundrel Christ is kinder than it might have been. Pullman explains, “Christ developed in a way I hadn’t expected, and found himself with a human conscience, tempted and torn and compromised”. The modern church has good reason to be so relaxed about Pullman’s heresy.
I find I can relate to this tension - between an ideal and an institution that claims to stand for that ideal - more directly, more emotionally, by porting it into an Indian context. These lines from Tagore’s Gitanjali are often cited as the animating spirit behind India’s freedom:
"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action--- Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."
Unsurprisingly, the Republic of India doesn’t always live up to Tagore’s ideal. That isn’t a reason to lose faith in either Tagore’s ideal or in the Indian republic.
Perhaps the only certainty with any institution is that the institution seeks to enhance its own power. This is true for nation states, churches, business corporations, NGOs, universities, armies...the whole shooting match...they’re all out to turn themselves into something majestic, splendid and glorious, lasting generation after generation. In the process, they can do terrible things. Limiting their power, so terrible things happen less often, is good. Yoking that power to a higher ideal, doesn’t always work, but is not bad.
So, just how much of a scoundrel is Pullman's Christ, thought of both as a character in this story, as well as a metaphor for the church as an institution?
Pullman's narrative starts
at Jesus' conception. The story continues along Jesus' noble path - rejecting
Satan's temptations, the sermon on the mount, the cleansing of the temple -
until it descends to the squalor of Christ taking money from Caiaphas to betray
Jesus. That narrative arc feels like the fall of man. it shows Christ as a
scoundrel.
However, Jesus is not Adam. His story didn't begin at his conception. Jesus was born into a context, a context which is
apparent even in Pullman's tight narrative. Jesus was born into a world of
brutal Roman oppressors, of the rigid and corrupt Jewish establishment, and of
any number of transient spiritual cults. These cults, however transient, gave people
something they valued - a sense of purpose and belonging. In that context,
creating an durable institution that would provide people with some of this
value feels like the right thing to do.
Was it worth betraying Jesus to create such an institution?
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe Pullman's Christ is like one of John Le Carre's spies,
Smiley's people, doing shady deals that may or may not work, for a cause that may or may not turn out to be just, like Kim Philby, the upper-class Englishman who betrayed his people to spy for the soviets because he sincerely believed in the communist ideal. Maybe Christ's dilemma was like Brutus':
Brutus loved Caesar, but loved Rome more. History judged Brutus kindly. Either
way, Christ seen in context is an ambiguous character, not obviously a scoundrel.
Or maybe (I don't like this thought, but it is too strong to resist) it comes down to youth. Jesus had the charisma, idealism and moral clarity of youth. Like John Kennedy, Jim Morrison and James Dean, like Gautam Buddha, Adi Shankara and Swami Vivekananda, Jesus died young, and remained pure. Christ lived on, to be tarnished by an imperfect world, to be called a scoundrel for his troubles. Looked at this way, the benediction that follows most naturally from the life of Jesus and Christ are the words of another man who was once called Judas: "may you stay, forever young".
