I have never understood the idea that you can’t talk to terrorists. I don’t mean in the moment of vioence being committed. I mean the idea that negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan for example, are a non-starter for Canada.
We have committed 6 years to the “war on terror” and the exit strategy seems to be “kill all the bad guys before going home.” This is an impossible condition for victory. At some point people have to sit down and talk about how they are going to leave each other alone, no?
This interesting article in the NY Times is about Jonas Gahr Store, the Norwegian who brokered the Oslo Peace Accord in 1993. In it he talks about the need to talk to people as an alternative to say, unilateral declarations of war on hundreds of previously unconnected networks:
Norway’s message to the United States is blunt: the next administration, whether headed by Barack Obama or John McCain, should pronounce the war on terror over. Because it has tended to isolate the United States, polarize the world, inflate the enemy, conflate diverse movements and limit scope for dialogue, its time has passed.
“The way this has been framed, as an indefinite war that will last for decades, has impoverished our ability to understand the point of departure of the conflict and how we should deal with it,” Store said. “Engaging is not weakness, and by not talking the West has tended to give the upper hand to extremists on the other side.”
He continued: “Moderates lose ground if they cannot show tangible results. You don’t engage at any price, but the price can come down and we can achieve more.”
Norway has kept channels open to Hamas and to Syria. It has spoken with the Hamas leadership. It is convinced the West missed an opportunity by not talking in March 2007 to the elected Palestinian national unity government composed of Fatah and Hamas members. It argues that Taliban elements can be drawn out of terror into politics through talks.
In all of this, Norway has used the greater diplomatic latitude it enjoys as a non-member of the European Union. The E.U., like the United States, lists Hamas as a terrorist organization.
“We have enormous reason to be upset with Hamas because it spent every day after Oslo trying to destroy Oslo,” Store said. “But there is a strong realist tradition in Hamas oriented toward a political landscape. In general, it should be in our interest to get organizations out of military activity and into politics. The political working method has not been sufficiently tested.”
Interesting.
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Dave Pollard has published a comprehensive list of books which together might hold to the keys to How to Save the World. To those I would add these, from my library, as a modest addition to tools which help us make best use of our collective intelligence.
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The blog posts dried up because my evenings were taken in celebration, but here’s day four.
There is a deliberate pattern that unfolds over the week of the Shambhala Institute. Monday is a day of arrival and orientation to one’s personal intention and the building of a collective field of learning. Tuesday and Wednesday, we enter the learning journey that brings us all to challenge and to the very edges of the internal questions we are living with. Thursday and Friday are about celebration and re-entry into the world.
Thursday saw a plenary session that was startling for its content and its process. Adam Kahane, Meg Wheatley and Jim Gimmian presented a keynote plenary about strategy at the edge, and the edge they tried to cultivate was one where everything we believed in might not be true. We began in small groups discussing the question of what we believed at our deep core. A sample of these beliefs were harvested from the the audience and these beliefs were taken to be representative of the general sense of the community. Such values as inclusion and the power of relationships to transform systems and the beliefs around presence and intention were the sorts of things that were harvested.
When these beliefs were harvested, Meg then asked the question “What if these were all false?” There then began a kind of heady conversation on stage between these three rather large presences about hope and hopelessness and the clarity of living without beliefs at all. Adam invited the audience to pull their chairs around the stage in a tight mob, a claustrophobic crowd all facing the three. It was deliberately provocative and controversial and it seemed to have the effect of leaving people either shocked and confused nd in grief, or elated and detached. I was certainly in the latter group.
I was elated, because I guess I just am. My first reaction to Meg’s question was similar to my friend David Stevenson’s reaction: we were surprised that Meg had adopted the assumption that we believe these things are even true at all. We both know that they are simply beliefs. They could just as easily be true as not, and the question “What if these beliefs were false?” was simply pointing at another belief as well. It felt as if we were playing an odd shell game, shifting around emotional centre from one thing to another until people were finally felt either manipulated or above it all. There was a huge mix of reactions to the plenary along a wide spectrum of emotions.
I think the point of the exercise was to help us find freedom from our beliefs and not be addicted to communities and situations that feed unhelpful views of the world. I’ve seen Byron Katie doing similar work and imagine her hosting that plenary, inviting people not only to question their beliefs but also introduce a practice for how we could continue to question them and in so doing find more and more clarity as we design strategies from the edge where our selves meet reality.
At any rate, I had a shimmering moment of clarity about my own sort of permanent state of optimism. It’s obvious that we cannot know the future, even though many of us are certain that some things will surely come to pass or never change. But in the context of doom versus hope it seems clear to me that optimism may actually be the only useful stance. If things are not doomed, but merely hard, then it would seem that optimism would be a useful place from which to work. But if things are truly doomed and we are all about to face imminent death, then we have a choice: optimism or pessimism will have an equally useless effect. So why not learn from those we have seen die beautifully among us, and choose an optimistic and peaceful death. Making peace with our death, indeed, is really the last act that we will ever get a chance to perform, and it may be that this is what our lives are all about.
It seems clear to me now that pessimism (including the “I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist” stance) is simply a statement of fear that one is not yet friends with. And if one is not friends with fear, then one may actually not be resourceful enough to be of much use in a crisis, or in a moment of chaos and uncertainty.
In my own life I faced one such moment in in 1995 in a mountaineering accident. A group of us were traversing an avalanche slide on the slopes of Mount Seymour in North Vancouver when one of our party slipped and fell 300 feet off a cliff. In the moment that she disappeared, I found myself extraordinarily calm. Three of our party were rather more panicky and were unable to be of much help until we got them to safety, The two of us who remained calm were really living in a state of extreme optimism . The only thing to do was be peaceful and resourceful and get help as quickly as we could. It turned out that our friend survived and in fact the rescue effort was a text book example. I was struck during and afterwards that my adrenal state was actually calm. Of course there have been plenty of times when I have been frightened and useless, but in that deep crisis, my body somehow adopted calm presence as a response. I was fearless and unworried. My friend had gone over a cliff and six of us remained with an overwhelming need to find safety before we could do anything about her. But without that calm, we were in extreme danger.
It seems to me that a pessimistic stance is more about the individual’s fear of inadequacy. If you feel overwhelmed, you give up. But two people in exactly the same situation may react in totally different ways, meaning that there are no givens about any situation or any result.
I sometimes use a juggling metaphor to describe what I think of as my stance that “I’m not an optimist, I’m a realist.” When you juggle you are working with the reality of gravity. Gravity ensures that every ball that drops will hit the ground. That is reality. But juggling is not so much cheating gravity as it is entering a partnership with it – the reliability of balls dropping at constant rate is actually what makes juggling possible.
When I teach people to juggle they generally come in one of two attitudes. A pessimist might generally watch me juggle and say “I could never do that.” Even as they gradually learn to work with one ball and then two and then three, they will deny the possibility that they could ever juggle. Usually what they are speaking is their fear of inadequacy or embarrassment at failing. Perfectionists are often pessimists because the reality never lives up to their ideal. Pessimists often give up on themselves and me, and they never learn the deceptively simple act of juggling three balls.
Optimists on the other hand approach the situation with curiosity and are usually interested in the aesthetic experience of juggling as well. Optimists learn fast because they recognize immediately that the balls always drop, so there is no problem, and their challenge is to gain more and more mastery, producing more and more beauty and living into more and more amazement at what they can do. Once they learn one trick, they hunger for more, they take satisfaction in what they can do and seek to improve and do it better. They are fearless about their learning and this resourcefulness produces results that continue to surprise them. I have taught people with very little perceived natural ability to juggle within three minutes. I have also taught people who don’t believe in them selves as much, but who take so much longer because we have to break through the belief that dropping the ball is wrong.
The truth is that the balls always fall to to the ground. The beauty of juggling is simply the ongoing possibility that the balls might not drop.
When we partner with reality it doesn’t matter what beliefs we carry. They are all false. And so, taking the advice of my mentor and hero and partner Caitlin Frost who is a deep practitioner of Byron Katie’s work, we need only question the beliefs that cause us suffering and not worry about the ones that don’t. If we can think of a peaceful reason for keeping a thought, we should do so. If not, work to shed the thought and make friends with reality. I can see this work now as terrifying optimism, a fierce sharpening of our own edges where we meet the world with resourcefulness, power and care.
This week I was reaffirmed in my belief that my work is to continue to be in the world living and working at every turn with the possibility that today the whole thing just might not fall apart.
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Day three at Shambhala and I’m humming. The artists staged what I heard was an incredible improvisational performance today that took the idea of being together in a field to a whole new level. I was in a conversation with some Art of Hosting mates at the time that was alos about fields and we were cracking open some deep learning about the ways in which we work together as friends, but the upshot was the same.
At the faculty retreat last weekend I sat in with the artists and had a conversation that was about the kind of work that art makes possible. I posited the assumption that fields cannot be created without art, an assumption we explored both in conversation and with an improvisational piece. Today one of the artists in that conversation, Wendy Morris, told me that one of her takes on the rock balancing thing was that the rocks make visible the very fine lines of balance. In the same way, art can illuminate the fine and subtle dynamics in systems and in seeing them crystalized with beauty another level of awareness and possibility becomes visible. This is certainly true in my expereince using poetry and graphic recording to harvest meaning from conversational process.
I am learning this week to enter deeply into the practice of “process artist” and to invite other who might be deep practitioners of conversational arts to explore other forms as well and integrate it with their practice. It’s simply a way of seeing differently, and sense making in a way that invites collaborative beauty.
As a taste, my rock balancing student, Jean-Sebastien posted lovely video today which is worth a look – and yes this means you Thomas.
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Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission launches today (hooray that my friend Jane Morley was named as one of the commissioners last week!) and I’m here at Queen’s University in Kingston to run an Open Space as part of a conference of academics, policy makers and public servants from First Nations and non-Aboriginal governments and institutions on the topic.
In Canada, the process that is being embarked upon today is spurred by the residential school experience. The main brief of the TRC will be to write the history of that 150 year period in Canadian history when residential school did huge amounts of personal and collective damage to Aboriginal children, families and communities.
But as I’ve been thinking about this topic in preparation for tomorrow’s Open Space, I’ve been thinking about reconciliation from a broader perspective, and I’ve been thinking about it specifically in relation to the way reconciliation helps us to create generative relationships that can be the basis for paradigm shifts. Today I was in a conversation with the Mohawk artist and teacher Rick Hill who filled me in on his experience of the Haudenosaunee worldview about relationships. Rick said that for Mohawks, the primary form of relationship is the family. So in the thanksgiving address used by Haudenosaunee Elders for opening gatherings, the natural world is referred to by family relations: mother earth, grandmother moon, our brothers and sisters in the plant and animal kingdom. Likewise, for important relationships, the Haudenosaunee government gives names to politicians and senior public servants because by doing so the confederacy “extends the rafters” of the longhouse to include strangers. Once you are named, you are family and once you are family, you are able to be in relationship.
When I asked Rick the question “What are the purpose of relationships?” he answered me by saying that relationships are the places in which we find peace. It is most important in all indigenous cultures I know of that this search for peace be a communal experience. In contrast to the Buddhist path of individual enlightenment, the Haudenosaunee worldview holds that collective peace cannot be served by an individual seeking their own path. In fact, such an act is dangerous and hubristic and leads to a reprimand from the clan mothers. The purpose of relationships, Rick said, is to find ourselves in a peaceful place together.
So this had me thinking about my opening tomorrow and so I called my partner Caitlin to get her thoughts and she said similar things. Her take on reconciliation is that it is actually a means to an end. Only when we are reconciled to what is real, can we find new things to do and new ways to be. As long as we live with the energy of unresolved historical stories, we cannot be in a place of generative shift. So Caitlin suggested an appreciative exercise, which I intend to begin with tomorrow. She suggested that each person take a moment to notice for themselves what reconciliation feels like, and what it allows us to do. From there we can ask the question of what might then be possible in the public sector in Canadian society if we achieved the kind of peace and resourcefulness that comes with having reconciled with each other. If what is needed is a fundamentally different way of being with one another, reconciliation represents not an end state in itself, but rather a pre-condition to moving to the generative space of co-creating new paradigms.
I’m curious to see how this all plays out.
Update: Opened space this morning and had a lively agenda setting session. My favourite ones so far included a Kingston City police officer who convened a session called “Why do we support and adversarial justice system?” and a new federal public servant who asked how non-Aboriginal people cna become allies of Aboriginal peoples.