Innovate with Love

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  • What’s the Harm in Teaching Men to be Tough?

    In sociologist Brené Brown’s TED talk on vulnerability and shame, she relates the story of a man who comes up to her at a book signing and asks why she doesn’t write about men.  She just doesn’t, she says.  He retorts, that’s convenient, leaving Brown a bit flummoxed.  But then, in a moment of deep vulnerability, the man goes on to say that his wife and three daughters, whose books Brown just signed, would “rather me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall down.”

    It’s a moving scene, and Brown uses it to illustrate her point is that it’s not just male teachers, coaches, mentors, brothers, fathers who teach men to be emotionally invulnerable—it’s the women in their lives.

    My personal experience with this is varied, but it largely holds true.  Though I didn’t lose anyone close in 9/11, something about the nation’s shared trauma and outpouring of grief, by both men and women, loosened something in me—gave me permission to feel my own difficulties more honestly.  That winter of 2001, at age 24, I found myself at a point in my life where I could admit to being lost and confused in my life, depressed, and deeply unsure of myself—so deeply that, for the first time in my life, I was actually willing to seek help.  At the time, the women in my life did not support me to do so; instead, perhaps like the man’s wife and daughters, they gave me the message that I was fine.  Just straighten up and fly right was the message I got—be more positive and success-minded.

    Thankfully, I took a stand for myself, and I did get the help I needed, and it became the beginning for me of a long journey toward a version of masculinity that incorporates vulnerability—the ability to admit failure, doubt, confusion, flaws, and harms I had a part in, and to have a rich, honest emotional life that allows me to feel grief and loss as well as empathy and connection with others.  All this has led to real, durable  happiness and a sense of inspired purpose.  Today, I think of this vulnerability as a deep gift that opens me to life in a way I never was before, and it also is the key to being deeply authentic in an empowered way—and this is my greatest strength.  The vitality in my body, the love in my heart, the steadiness in my voice, the clarity in my thinking—none of these would be available without this empowered authenticity, and this authenticity is just not possible without vulnerability.

    Looking back now, the women in my life support this happier, stronger version of me completely, but as it was developing, it wasn’t so easy.  I can’t say if the female projection of invulnerability onto men is a universal experience, but I do know from all my conversations with men over the years, that this pattern is very common—perhaps much more common than the women supporting men in vulnerability.  As Brown mentions, it is the rare woman who is free enough of her perceived need for the men in her life to project status and success that she will just meet male vulnerability with openness, support, and simple care.  Instead, these qualities may be there, but are often mixed with fear, avoidance, and denial.

    For a man, it can be existentially difficult, as in life-or-death-scary, to break through the expectation to have thick skin and never show weakness, especially when the close women in his life do not support that possibility.   But, it’s also clear to me that this is a vicious cycle in our broader society—as Brown points out from James Mihalik’s research—men are normed to project emotional control, pursue status, put work first, and project the capacity for violence.

    A vulnerable, authentic, empowered masculinity that incorporates and transcends these norms toward higher ideals of emotional balance, genuine usefulness to those in need, and non-violence requires many men to break free of the programming that the women in their lives might initially prefer.

    The stakes are high.  Globally, most of our large social institutions are still run by men, and the culture of male invulnerability runs so deep that even when women are in positions of power, they often feel they must conform to it, or else be cast aside.  Invulnerability leading to inauthenticity has real consequences—every major improvement in the direction of world institutions, whether medicine, banking, transportation, politics, food & agriculture, environment, any area of human endeavor—requires the individuals leading institutions to be strong enough to admit things are off course, to own the part they themselves and their institutions have played in things being off course, and to chart a new direction.

    So it’s my hope that we all find our way to an empowered authenticity, for our personal happiness and for the greater good.  It’s my hope that the traditional gender roles men and women have played, can continue to evolve forward into a more mutually supportive space—where men support women in finding their strength and their public voice, and women support men in finding their vulnerability and their inner truth.

    Published September 23, 2014 on now-defunct blog, the He-Said-She-Said Forum.

  • Clare and Harris Wofford’s India Afire

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    It was suggested to me by a friend, Rajeev Goyal of www.PushforPeaceCorps.org, that I reach out to former Senator and Peace Corps Associate Director under JFK and LBJ —  the Honorable Harris Wofford. 

    Before I did so, I wanted to read his book India Afire, which he co-authored with his now late wife Clare. It was published just three years after India’s independence in 1951, after a six-month trip they took together to India in 1950.

    I had to interlibrary loan request it, and am at Lauinger Library on the Georgetown campus now, looking out at a full moon and the Washington monument and Kennedy Center in the distance, giving it a read.  

    On the title page is a quote:

    Pray tell me, what am I to do with a fifth of the human race living on the verge of starvation?

    — Gandhi

    So it started off well; Gandhi is perhaps my single greatest hero and most frequent object of daily meditation. His beautiful memorial on Massachusetts Avenue is a near-daily stop on my way to or from work, where I stop to touch his feet and read the inscription “MY LIFE IS MY MESSAGE”,  reminding myself to live likewise.  
      On the second page, the Woffords write:

    India is afire with the same revolt affecting all Asia, but the course it is taking is still far from communism.  After all, Gandhi consciously struck the first great Indian sparks.  Having witnessed the results of Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle and studied his story, we rank him as the world’s greatest revolutionary.  

    I welled up with pride and joy upon reading this. Here is Wofford, a young American who will go on to be a great leader — a Senator, college President, moral leader of the Peace Corps — who ranks Gandhi higher even than George Washington or Thomas Jefferson.  
    We are in agreement on this. Not that the accomplishments of the American revolutionaries aren’t extraordinarily great.

    An aside — just last Sunday, I had occasion to visit Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, which was the scene of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence and US Constitution, and to ponder the scene a while, to try to feel what it must have been to be in a world in which there was no living memory or knowledge of democratic nationhood–where consent of the governed and merit of the governors ruled, rather than bloodlines–and to strike out into the unknown to try it.  It’s immense.

    However great, Gandhiji had a universal human vision that went even beyond the Founding Fathers’  national one, though they were no strangers to the idea either.  I’d go so far as to say, they were the first modern men to give voice to it.  Yet even today in America, most of us struggle to really believe this:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

    The self-evident truth of a Creator endowing us with such rights may be easy for us to confer upon fellow Americans, but the deeper morality this calls us toward — a universal humanistic vision of defending these rights equally for all mankind, especially those who lack the basic conditions of life to defend it for themselves — is just now evolving.  After nearly two and a half centuries of struggle for slaves, women, blacks, and immigrants in America, we have only in the past two generations begun awakening to the possibility that our nation can play a purposeful and intentional role in the enduring establishment of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness for all people everywhere.  

    Which brings me back to the Woffords — they were funded on this trip by the Foundation for World Government, an organization begun in 1937 in New York.  They write:

    Undoubtedly we were drawn to some aspects instead of others by our “one world” bias…. By the time we left for India, six years of our lives had largely revolved around the world government idea.

     When I saw “one world” on the page in quotes, I again was deeply moved as one of my own passions is one-planet living.  They are not at all the same in a sense, but they are of a kindred intent — peace on earth through unity.  

      One-planet living is about self-responsible economic choices such that one’s lifestyle does not make it impossible for others to live on the Earth, either now, or in the future.  Today, if everyone on the planet lived as the average American consumer does, driving gas-guzzling automobiles, and living a consumerist lifestyle that generates so much trash at such large volumes, it would require nine planet earths to fuel this lifestyle for everyone. The off-planet harvesting of mineral resources depicted in James Cameron’s Avatar film is not a fantastic fiction; it will be a necessity if we keep up our present modes of consumption.  But I just cannot imagine what we’d do to our own planet before we start harvesting others. One-planet living is about the hope that we can each set an example, at home, work, and in society, in how we practice meeting our own needs and those of our family — to share the earth fairly with the rest of life on this planet.

    One-world government, as the Foundation for World Government conceived, was about seeking an end to international conflict through a fair, federalist union of nations.  The Woffords wrote:

    Within a week–a staggering week in which human misery hit us from every side–our world government glasses were knocked off, and for many months, lost.  Overwhelmed by the immediate economic problems that meant life or death for millions, we were swept away from the world federation idea by the heart-wrenching poverty, ignorance, and disease surrounding us.  World government seemed a thousand miles down a road littered with tragic immediate problems crying for solution.  In the end we were hunting a prescription for a new kind of lens which would cure our former nearsightedness to such problems without obliterating the old insights.  We wanted glasses that would keep the world’s misery in sharp focus and show as well the longer-range but inescapable road of world unity.

    World unity or world peace seems a good bit less inevitable today. I’ve been testing out the notion with my friends — who are broadly a profoundly hopeful, broad-minded, forward-thinking bunch — this notion of the inevitability of world peace.  I get one response: bewilderment.   In America, we are profoundly conditioned to predicate our entire lives on its impossibility.  So just act locally goes the argument.  
    I do not feel this way at all — while the intuition has been with me all my life, it only became a real, deeply-held conviction recently, in the past few months: world peace is inevitable, and it is very possible. 

    I am working on a fuller discussion of how and why that’s really so, but my basic case is premised as follows:
    1. The world is a profoundly interconnected system, that tends toward various states of durable, but dynamic, equilibrium, which, with great reliability, tend to overtake unstable states.  
    2. There are tipping points in the development of these equilibria, in which the dynamic forces of conversion are in rapid realignment toward stability.
    3. We have now enough examples of how such conditions have arisen in various local contexts to reasonably apply these lessons in the establishment of equilibria to the entire system to create rapid, effective interventions that change the course of equilibrium.
    4. The fundamental underlying theme of all these interventions — ranging from political to scientific — is the loving application of our attention and knowledge to the solution of immediate problems in everyday living, while holding firm to the principle that we do no harm to the greater good in the process. 
    5. We will certainly not be right in every case, but with persistent effort over time, we will be far more right than we will be wrong. 
    So, in essence, my case for world peace is technical — grounded in making smarter everyday choices, as individuals and as social groups, states and nations — but also aspirational — grounded in the faith that life and love will win out in the end, and that our only real choice is whether we want that end — world peace — to come sooner or later. 
    The Woffords wrote a great treasure of a book; I just read the chapter on their visit to Andhra Pradesh, then simply called by its capital city’s name — Hyderabad, my birthplace. At the time of their visit, it was the center of the Communist movement in India.  They visited a Gandhian who had returned to a small village to teach and help uplift it through Gandhi’s vision.  I’d never before had as direct narrative contact with what that vision was.  

    Ranga Naikulu, who had left Gandhi’s ashram Sevagram three years prior, to set up camp in a village outside of the city of Warangal, in what had then become a Communist stronghold:

    At first everyone was suspicious and kept their children away from the “new teacher.” They feared that the Nizam Government would punish them if they cooperated with anyone associated with Gandhi.  With no room made available and no students, Ranga opened his school under a tree by the edge of the village, after persuading a few poor children from nearby villages to sit with him. The villagers watched cautiously, and then slowly began sending their children to him….  By now Ranga taught fifty-seven village children, most of those from two to fifteen in the little hamlet of 345.  Those whose families insisted that they work in the daytime he taught at night, along with some of the willing adults…   He had already prevented many child marriages and eased others by getting them to school even after they were wed.  

    His success, moderate as it was, stemmed from his emphasis on village living instead of literacy.  He began with lessons in baths and cooking and health.  He dispensed antimalarial drugs and information.  Now this village had no malaria, whereas those nearby had a rate of probably 25 percent.  Ranga and his students were constructing a drainage system: while we walked through the ankle-deep mud, his students were trying to fill in the bogs and level off the road.  Through the school he hoped to awaken public service and village planning.  He had many ideas for the future: movable trench latrines, dairy and grain co-operatives, elective village councils, and the introduction of cottage industries.  Already he was spreading the use of the charkha, through his regular school periods of hand-spinning.  And some peasants were now using cow dung as fertilizer for the first time. He had started paper and glucose-making and beekeeping, but the raiders had destroyed his equipment.  Soon, however, they would start again now that the new school buildings were finished.

    This sounds remarkably like the life of a number of Peace Corps volunteers I have known, the world over.  It had never occurred to me before there could in fact be a very direct link between the Gandhian program and the Peace Corps program — but it seems obvious now, considering the Woffords and others subsequent involvement with the Peace Corps, and the Agency’s emphasis on respecting local culture and tradition, and upliftment through providing trained men and women.  I wonder where they got the idea?  This is something I’d like to ask Senator Wofford about.   

    I will report back on what he says.  

    There are many more wonderful things I could share about this book, but I’ll stop here for now; it’s been a beautiful session of meditation, connecting to the cause of peace in the sweep of history, in my birthplace and in my homeland, and to the Gandhian and American visions for it world over.

    I sign off feeling deeply grateful to be alive.

  • Vishada Yoga

    My dear auntie Gita posted a question on Buzz, remarking on the sadness of searching for a teacher — I commented:

    http://www.google.com/buzz/gita.madhu/1NDBJpprn66/The-search-for-a-Guru-is-rather-sad-One-drowning

  • What’s my bias?

    This earlier post on media bias led me to think, perhaps it’s best to abandon objectivity altogether, and instead be totally, even painfully, subjective — but with self-awareness.   Also, it reminded me that this blog is itself is a media outlet of sorts, and so I should be clear for myself and for you, the reader — what’s my bias?

    The graphic is from an Australian Computer Science education conference — referring to experimental bias that creeps into the work of computer scientists — but it’s useful generally as a way to visualize the cyclic, self-reinforcing nature of bias….

    My bias? Well, as much as none of this ‘should’ matter according to the objectivist view — the reality is that I was  born into a Hindu Brahmin family, of the Telugu 6000 Niyogi subsect from Andhra, who were originally, of all things, known as good public administrators.  My family is descended from the sage Mowdgalya, a lineage of rishis said to have authored the Atharvaveda Upanishad. Today, in addition to the philosophical foundation of the Vedas, and extensive influence from Buddha’s teachings, we practice in Ramanuja’s strain of Vaishnavism, with deep connections to the Tirupati Balaji temple and its tradition of Vishnu tantra. 

    I was born in Hyderabad, India, but raised in Woodbridge, New Jersey, and McLean, Virginia. I went to public schools, but was always in gifted and talented programs, honors classes and magnet schools, including the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia. My father was a strong Democrat when it came to American politics, and a Congress Party of India supporter, with strong Marxist/socialist philosophic leanings. My mother was one of India’s first women electronics engineers, and bought me my first computer at age 9, and she’s been in government service all her life, both in India and the US. Of all public thinkers and leaders, perhaps the most formative was Gandhi, whose autobiography I read at age 17 while traveling in India and doing research on HIV/AIDS epidemiology — and that’s changed me forever.

    These facts are the core of the deep spiritual, scientific, political, and social convictions that are with me today. Of course, I am very much my own man, but it’s surprising, for as much of a rebel as I’ve been in my life, how little I’ve really strayed from that basic foundation of belief.  All those influences were really baked into my source code, so to speak.  Today, I have the engineer’s conviction that the world’s problems are solvable; the scientific conviction that they’re understandable; the spiritualists’ conviction that they — the whole world over, each and every single person — matters; and the political conviction that, with the right leadership, it’s all possible — real transformation …

    I also have the experience in adult life of, many, many times, getting stuck — wanting, needing, believing I needed to be doing something different, but not finding the ability to, long after it no longer really ‘made sense’.  It’s the human condition in a sense, not just to err, but to keep erring because a known error can be less fearsome than an unknown one. But it’s probably the main lens through which I see myself and my life and human life in general: flowing versus stuck. Growth or stasis.  And having spent my entire adult life addressing this divide in myself through the very scientific, technical, spiritual and social predispositions I described above it’s brought me around to the same belief: real transformation is possible.

    It’s not just possible — it’s necessary — to transcend our lesser selves and the ‘laws of biological behavioral gravity’, as my great-uncle Dr. N.C. Surya termed it .  It’s only by knowing what weights we bear, what our karma has shaped us into, that we can transcend.  ‘With skill, determination and scientific sincerity, we can fly.  No mystery is involved in airplane flight, he wrote.  Similarly, the flight of a human being into their better selves.

    So that’s it, my biggest, most basic bias — by training and experience — I believe we can utterly surprise ourselves.  In fact, it’s the one thing we can really count on.

     

  • Media bias in America including this blog

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    I had an interesting conversation with a friend and freelance reporter for NPR last night.  She will rename nameless here — interesting when a blogger has to protect the anonymity of a journalist source, isn’t it? 

    In any case, she told me she felt like to rise there she had to think and act like a 40-year-old white liberal male.  Her view was enlightening, because I’ve considered myself an NPR listener and supporter.  Her interest and connection to international issues had to be subdued because simply put, America was more important, by a lot.  This really got me thinking about their reportage because I’ve listened to NPR on and off for many years.  While it’s a markedly better mental diet than say CNN, Fox or other so-called ‘major’ American media outlets – it really is not very balanced globally.  I’d like to look at this issue of media coverage, and explore whether it’s more informed by humanism versus Americanism further.

    The Wikipedia entry on media bias in the US has a lot of great references as a start. It also makes the interesting point that professional journalism didn’t really exist before the early 1900s. Before that correspondents were often those who corresponded with the publisher, and newspapers were always understood to represent the interests of the publisher.

    Professional journalism, it seems, suffers from the same illusion of objectivity as much of the rest of academia.  This is a deep interest of mine when it comes to how science is practiced, and is the central life’s work of my friend and colleague of Professor Patrick Heelan, SJ, at Georgetown.  The hermeneutics of science is something few scientists are taught to consider at all.  They are trained into the seductive notion that there is an absolute scientific truth which they are revealing.  Journalists, writers of all kinds, are not so different…. 

    I don’t strive for that sort of objectivity, but for balance within myself, within the range of my own voice — I ask, am I speaking with compassion, appropriateness, integrity, and clarity?     But what defines what that is for me?  What’s my bias?

     

  • Quick Review of You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

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    At least, it works as a piece of creative pop philosophy, along the lines of Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital. Both books stimulate thought while affirming the conviction and creativity of its author and offering some fresh insight into the nature of our society’s relationship with information technology. Here is Chapter 2 of Lanier‘s book entitled “What is a Person?”.  And the overly glowing, albeit confused, Washington Post review.  The review is a bit confused because the book is, because there is a fundamental problem with the larger social discourse about the nature, meaning and impact of information technology. 

    We are not yet looking deeply enough into its intellectual foundations, which can be traced to the Greeks, to the interplay between Platonic idealism and Aristotle’s metaphysics — this was where the still-standing intellectual edifice of divorcing form and substance began. From it, we have now put ourselves in the strange posture of having ‘information’ be one of the most real, defining aspect of our day-to-day lives, but no clear notion of its right relation to reality in a philosophic or intellectual sense. Lanier’s work takes a worthy cut at the resulting hyperbolic claims that have been made about the power of information in the Web 2.0 age, but doesn’t get altogether to the heart of the matter.

    In the East, this divergence between form and substance never hardened.  It was a distinction held much more lightly, so that the term for the material universe, prakrti, encompassed, in addition to gross matter like earth and water, also mind, intellect and ego.I will have a good deal more to say on this …