May 2010 – Page 6 – Simon Fowler

rLiving Day 16: Knowing the poor 2 (Directness)

This morning at church two guys from our class led us in the third discussion about Poverty. In our first session they asked “Do you know the poor?” and, “Who are the poor?” and “Why are people poor?”. The questions helpfully uncovered assumptions, personal experiences, and a full range of possibilities as to causes, without descending into idealogical/political debate or absurd characterizations of the poor or ourselves.

Last week, and again this week, we were asked, “Do you know the poor? Literally, do you know anyone who’s poor?”. I haven’t asked permission of the group to share our discussion so for the sake of this post, just ask yourself that question.

Relational Proximity Dimension #1 is “Directness”. My relationship with someone is better and healthier the less mediated it is. It can be mediated by technology or other people: these reduce our ability to communicate fully. It can also be mediated, even when face to face, by dishonesty and fakeness: there’s a real me and a real you, any fronts we put up reduces directness.

If you don’t know anyone who is poor then I suggest you get to know someone who does (even an organization). You’ll then have a weak link that holds enormous potential.

Merely being conscious that I am, in fact, connected to someone seems to make a difference to me being more compassionate and more committed (i.e. doing something about it). ‘Directness’ as a relational dimension of life helps me think more concretely about my place in the world. This helps both when thinking about the poor, but also, among other things, in thinking about food and trade. A human being with a beating heart picked my asparagus. I am connected to them (and therefore have a responsibility to them), albeit mediated by a number of organizations, financial transactions and people. Directness probably explains why child sponsorship works well, because you can see the link.

Very simply, you could be just two or three degrees of separation from someone who needs something that you have. What I don’t like about the diagram above is the dollar signs. It bothers me that my relationship with the poor, or anyone else, is defined in monetary terms. I don’t like it because money, like power (another relational dimension, see post and comments from Day 13), seems to confer value in so many people’s eyes. Money of course IS power in this relationship, but it’s not the only power (unless it’s the only mediator, which in most cases it is) and it still shouldn’t confer ‘value’ or dignity. It also reduces their multidimensionality to a dollar figure. To mitigate that I gave everyone a beating heart.

Social Network Analysis is an exploding field that could eventually help us better realize our connectedness to each other (see Nicholas Christakis’ video at the end of Friday’s post for an example). But just being aware that you already have a relationship with the poor is a first step.

Actually, make that a second step. How much do you disclose of your personal needs – material or otherwise – to other people, even people close to you? Same here. It’s probably the same for them, too. If we’re not prepared to be vulnerable to one another in our current socio-economic relationships why do we think we’ll have the right attitude to love the poor, with humility and respect, when we meet them? This is where the other element of directness comes in. We need to learn to unmask ourselves, to expose ourselves enough that our relationships can become ones of mutual giving and receiving.

Anyway, give that diagram a ponder with respect to your relationship with the poor, or those who grow your vegetables or make your shirts. How does it help your thinking?

rLiving Interlude: Reflecting^3

Half way through the 30 days and it’s late and I’m pooped so this is just a little reflection on the first 15.

It just so happens that I’ve spent several weeks reading and talking about ‘reflection’. One theme that’s come out in discussions with clients and with subject matter experts and, well, anyone you talk to, is that no-one has time for reflection. No-one has time for it, but everyone needs it. They don’t have time for it because they’re too busy. They’re too busy because everything is needed in a hurry.

It just so happens that the Forum Corporation, where I work, published a book this month with Harvard Business Press called “Strategic Speed” (Free pdf download of Ch. 1). I project managed the early research stages of the book . One of the “why, of course!” and “really?” findings of the research was that people, teams and organizations that “took time to reflect, to think” before and after (i.e. it’s not just a pondering about the past) achieved the purposes and goals FASTER and MORE SUCCESSFULLY than those that didn’t. Everything may have taken longer to “get done” but they actually achieved the results, the value they were looking for sooner, and for longer.

Having never really written much before, in my 43 years of life, writing a blog post every day has been pretty taxing. But the process of writing them has been extraordinary in helping me crystallize ideas I’ve pondered and randomly discussed for years and years. It makes me wonder how much more progress I could have made in my thinking (and action) if I’d taken more time to write these down. The spiritual discipline of journaling makes more sense to me now. The difference with a blog is that the public nature of it, and the 30-day project I’ve committed myself to, has a powerful focusing affect. By writing something down I have to choose the words and the sentence. I have to decide on the idea, the thesis and the antithesis. These mental processes involved in writing for an audience are real brain training. That’s why universities should probably keep giving written assignments.

Reflecting on this reflection on reflection, it’s incredibly satisfying to be getting my thoughts out there and to have gotten to a point in my life where I realize that, “you know what, yes, I actually think this, and I’m okay if people disagree with me because there’s more to learn, I know this isn’t the final word and I may yet be wrong.”

rLiving Day 15: World Peace (Purpose/Commonality)

“Social Networks are fundamentally connected to goodness, and what the world needs now is more connections.” Nicholas Christakis

“I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we’ll project into the world, and the more peaceful our world will be.” Jill Bolte Taylor

“When people of all different persuasions come together working side be side for a common goal, differences melt away and we learn amity and we learn to live together and to get to know one another. Karen Armstrong”

I have a contrarian side to me, and whenever I see hyberbole like this my snarky side switches on. Besides, I’m wikid tired right now so I’m not in my usual upbeat and bright-side mood.

Relational Proximity Dimension #5 is Purpose/Commonality: Our sense of connectedness and relationship is greater to the degree we have things in common or share a common purpose or identity. A good relationship has a direction to it, something that is common between the members that holds it together.

There’s rarely been a TED (www.ted.com) talk I didn’t enjoy and which didn’t fascinate me. It’s a great platform, wonderfully presented, and the technology, the discovery or the personal experience is invariably gripping and exciting. And what they’ve done to spread the ideas and concept is excellent. It has been accused and defended of elitism. Personally, I think it’s a fantastic way to make use of rich people’s money and to spread great ideas. If anything, however, the problem is that the speakers just can’t seem to help overstating their point. With an audience paying six grand a pop, just 20 minutes to pour out your life’s work, the spotlights … I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same.

But I also think they and their audience actually might believe their overstatement. Unfortunately the overstatement takes the talks from being mostly excellent, scientifically grounded and true-to-life to, well, amazingly utopian wishful thinking. (I speak as an idealist myself). Jill Bolte Taylor’s amazing description of watching her own brain have a stroke (truly, jaw-droppingly amazing) ends with an apparent choice between left brain individualism or right-brain universal life-force. My emotional & violent right brain freaks me out sometimes. And what part of the brain is the ‘we’ that’s doing the choosing anyway? Nicholas Christakis asserts that connections will solve the world’s problems. Connections like the Stazi had? Like the world banking system had?

And Karen Armstrong’s talk seemed grounded neither in anthropology nor anything like a robust theology. The ending actually I agree with (“get to know each other” would presumably comes first – I’m sure it wasn’t her best line, she looked exhausted). But the ‘common purpose’? It’s the “Compassion Charter” signed up to by 46,179 compassionate people so far. Sorry if you’re a fan but isn’t the problem uncompassionate people?? And I don’t want differences between me and others to go away, I want them transcended. I’m not saying we couldn’t do with more love, but not even the 10 commandments prevented human ingenuity for evil. A group of people simply agreeing to be more compassion isn’t, I’m desperately sad to say, going to solve our deepest problems. I totally commit to be being more compassionate. Then another day happens. As Solzenitsyn said, “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.”

I love and appreciate the longing for peace and goodness and love in these people and in their statements. The confirmation of relational proximity found in these social science, neuroscience and and humanistic statements I wholeheartedly welcome. But, firstly, mere ‘relational proximity’, socially networked togetherness, isn’t the whole answer; it just points the finger more acutely on the problem. I’ve said (in the 30-day index) that the five dimensions of relational proximity are nothing without love and commitment, and that love and commitment can barely consist without them. That’s why relational proximity I think is so powerful, and so much more powerful than nebulous ‘social networks’. If used to examine our lives, I think it reveals the reality of our choices and our relationships. Secondly, the that these connections are FOR something is crucial. What is the common purpose? Christakis says in his video that our global human network is a super-organism, it has a life of its own. I think world peace and compassion are good goals, but I actually think they’re penultimate; they’re derivative of something bigger, something, perhaps someone, more creative and dynamic and Personal.

And that is way too much thinking for one night. See below for all three videos and let me know what you think?