ROCHESTER, MN -- I spent a little time recently trying to dream up a name for my new weekly column in the Twin Cities Daily Planet. I tried to distill in my mind the most essential and useful work that journalism offers society in a single phrase, and I ended up with talking with strangers. 

From the first day that I worked as journalist 29 years ago, the toughest and most rewarding part of the job has always been this single bit – walking up to perfect strangers and having the chutzpah, the fabulous bad manners, to start asking questions.  

So I Googled “talking with strangers” and I read a couple of books, and lo and behold, I discovered that the ancient Greeks considered talking with strangers – they called it “xenia” or “love of strangers” – an essential civic practice.  They saw this form of hospitality not merely as a polite thing to do, but as an absolutely required Athenian duty. 

Debating Chops

For the Greeks, talking with strangers was a way to glean troves of new and useful ideas to put to use themselves. Socrates used the practice as a way to hone his debating chops. But most of all, xenia was a national security policy for ancient Greece because it helped catch wind of plots against Athens that always were brewing nearby on the peninsula.   

This got me wondering. America’s foreign policy and predominant mood today isn’t xenia but its opposite, xenophobia, an unreasonable yet still gut-grabbing fear of strangers.  

If we flipped that around and made xenia instead of xenophobia our national obsession, would we be doing better? Would we be happier, more popular in the world, and safer? 

Could xenia become the ethical basis of a more generous, inspiring, imaginative and realistic citizenship and journalism? 

Averting Eyes

Which brought me to my main Google treasure – a dazzling debate on just these questions between two political philosophers, Danielle Allen and Dana Villa, on Chicago Public Radio a while back. Their recorded conversation is the richest and most suggestive discussion of this topic I’ve ever encountered. 

Allen, who joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ about a year ago, argued strongly that xenia is the paramount civic practice. She recalled the classic schoolyard admonition -- “Don’t ever talk to strangers!” -- and she called for new, xenia-based American social values to counteract xenophobia’s corrosive effects.  

“The averting of eyes is a habit of citizenship,” Allen said. “We need a different habit. We need to prove ourselves to other citizens to try to build trust. We must talk to strangers in order to learn more about what’s out there in our polity, and what our world is like, so that when it comes time to make choices about national policies, we have a good database to draw on.”  
"Too Much Trust"

Villa, a professor at Notre Dame and a specialist in Socrates, argued with equal persuasiveness that xenia, while useful and important, is the lesser of two civic virtues, the prime one being the will to fight dangerous national policies with the truth.  

“I don’t think that distrust is the problem,” Villa said. “I think there is too much trust, too much trust in government, too much deference to authority. At the national level, the talking with strangers model breaks down and we have to focus on fighting against the way that prejudices and popular opinion congeals to give a seeming mandate to fairly radical and extremely dangerous national policies.”  

Journalism is in chaos these days with many newspapers and other news media closing, downsizing and changing their business models, often by increasing celebrity and lifestyle stories and decreasing news.  

A Lifeline

Many journalists and citizens are seeking a return to basic guiding principles, and I think Villa and Allen throw journalism a lifeline.   

They offer an interlocking pair of axioms of enormously inspiring common sense, ethical depth, descriptive power and potentially practical use to journalism and society.  

Dana Villa’s axiom is already familiar and, in an ultimate sense, probably the more important of the two: society needs citizens to speak truth to power. It’s more important because if power doesn’t hear and act on the truth, ultimately we all may die.  

Local to Global

But Allen’s axiom – society needs to value and teach the practice of talking with strangers -- is the actual stepwise method to reach that end. It’s the local practice that starts in the breast of a single individual person, then builds outwards to embrace  neighbors and small communities and finally the state, the nation, and the world.  

Talking with strangers and speaking truth to power are continuous and interlocking, linked as means and end. We’re all quite familiar and comfortable with the second part of the equation, but we haven’t considered the first part for a couple of thousand years.  

It’s time to dust off xenia and give it a spin.  

MINNEAPOLIS, MN -- The following headline popped up last week in my email alerts set for Eritrea, a tiny nation bordering the Red Sea in the Horn of Africa: “Eritrea Shuts Christian Students into Shipping Containers.”

To reach Doug McGill: doug@mcgillreport.org
Permalink www.mcgillreport.org/eritrea.htm

July 30, 2008

A Son of Minnesota Returns as a Worldly- Wise Monk

ROCHESTER, MN -- Jim Reynolds began his 40-minute talk to a group of Mayo Clinic physicians and health care workers last week by closing his eyes, putting his palms together and intoning an ancient chant in a dead language. 

" I am of the nature to age, I have not gone beyond aging; I am of the nature to sicken, I have not gone beyond sickness; I am of the nature to die, I have not gone beyond dying,” he chanted to the group of health care workers, first in the archaic Indian Pali language, and then in an English translation.

Jim Reynolds, you will have guessed by now, is a Buddhist monk. He is actually known now only by his Buddhist name, Ajahn Chandako, and he serves as the abbot of a monastery near Auckland, New Zealand.

His head is shaved, he never handles money, and he owns little more than his begging bowl, a pair of sandals, and the coffee-colored robes on his back.

Ajahn Chandako (the name Chandako means "one who aspires") is also a Minneapolis native and a Buddhist spiritual teacher with a growing international reputation. Last week, he returned to his home state to teach people how to meditate and to give a series of pithy, gently humorous talks in Minneapolis, Grand Rapids, Northfield and Rochester.

Graveyard Humor

"When I lived in monasteries in Thailand, the meditation halls sometimes had human skeletons hanging in them,” Ajahn told the group of 70 Mayo Clinic employees, flashing a mischievous ear-to-ear smile. “The skeletons hung there for everyone to reflect on, and they had little handwritten signs on them that read: ‘Once I was like you. And one day you will be like me.’”

A knowing chuckle rippled through the room. The health care workers  absorbed Ajahn's graveyard humor as pragmatic wisdom – a useful reminder, perhaps, of nature’s ultimate primacy over all the powers of medicine.

At the end of his Mayo talk, an eager hand shot up in the front row.

“Could you show us how to meditate?” a woman asked.

So, for a few minutes, in a conference room in the middle of a busy Mayo Clinic day, Ajahn taught people how to close their eyes and summon internal spaciousness and ease by using only focused attention and wholesome intention – the channeled inner zeal to become disease free.

Broad Compassion

From a Buddhist view, Ajahn told the Mayo audience, illness is a profound opportunity for spiritual transformation.

“In the old days, if you were a forest monk in Thailand, it was almost inevitable that you would get malaria,” he said. “So when you finally got it, you wouldn't see it as something abnormal, but rather as a normal human experience and an opportunity for spiritual practice.”

When skillfully and fearlessly embraced, Ajahn said, illness offers a rare chance to directly experience the most essential truths of nature. While unwelcome and painful, such an experience naturally imparts an intrinsic wisdom that can replace deep-seated arrogance with humility, anxiety with equanimity, and narrow self-regard with broad compassion.

Rock and Roll

The story of Ajahn Chandako’s emergence as a leading Buddhist teacher encompasses an epic journey from a bright teenager with a passion for drums, to a globe-trotting wanderer, to a disciplined meditator in jungle huts, to the worldly-wise New Zealand abbot and global spiritual teacher that he is today.

Born and raised in Minneapolis and Massachusetts, and a 1984 graduate of Carleton College in comparative religion, Ajahn Chandako says his boyhood was a happy one. He doesn’t recall a particular leaning towards Buddhism, except for one thing.

"If I saw a photograph of a Buddhist monk, something went off inside of me,” he said. “It struck me hard like a gong. It hit the depth of my heart.”

Throughout his high school college years, that strange inner call took a back seat to typical teenage distractions, especially rock and roll. He was a drummer in several bands – in “The Generic Band” the musicians wore plain white T-shirts that read “Drummer,” “Guitarist” and “Singer.”

Last Fling

Social injustice and environmental problems stirred a strong desire to act in response, Ajahn said, but he was dogged by a sense of unreadiness.

“Even if there is sincerity, there may not be the wisdom to know what is helpful and what is destructive,” he said. “Increasingly, I began to think that at least I can clean up this little corner of the environment” – here he pointed to himself. “I could clean up my own mind, and my own behavior."

His first taste of the monastic life came on long meditation retreats after college at the Hokyoji Zen Practice Community in southeast Minnesota, under the famous meditation teacher, Katagiri Roshi. Those were followed by even longer stints as a lay meditator at a monastery in Thailand, where he was first exposed to Buddhist monastic life that was fully integrated into a society where monks had a firm and high standing.

Harrowing Journey

Nearly ready to don the monk’s robes, Ajahn decided he wanted to travel widely through Tibet, which would be impossible once he ordained. This remarkable interlude is described in one of the most beautifully-written travel memoirs ever penned by an almost-monk, The Outer Path – Finding My Way in Tibet.

The story describes a harrowing foot-and-bicycle journey to Tibet in 1987, long before it was easy for Westerners to travel there. The book combines gorgeous descriptive prose with a young man’s struggle to meet the demands of an overwhelming inner drive to undertake ascetic discipline.

“Although I’m traveling lightly, I’m still carrying too much baggage,” he writes one evening by candlelight in a drafty cave carved into the cliffs overlooking Lake Manasarovar in remote western Tibet.

Bright Lights

"Often I feel in the awkward position of being half-monk, half-adventurer. I no longer take things like worldly achievement, social expectations, and money seriously, but I’m still living a secular life. I’m beginning to think like a monk, yet I continue to follow old habits.”

Staring at the brightly flickering candle by which he writes, Ajahn reflects on the pitfalls of his adventurous life, from his rock-and-roll days to his run-ins with Chinese police and nearly dying of hypothermia in Tibet.

“An insect appeared, circled the flame, and dove in to its death. It occurred to me that I am not much smarter. Attracted by bright lights, how many times have I jumped into the fire and been burned?”

Within a few months, Ajahn had returned to his Thailand monastery, shed all his excess baggage, shaved his head, and turned in his shirts and pants and shoes for a few plain squares of cloth and sandals.

Outward Ripples

"I could have gone off to the Amazon and become an ecoterrorist, blowing up bulldozers that were ruining the rainforest,” Ajahn said. “But I knew that would potentially harm other people, and it wouldn’t come from a peaceful mind. If one is practicing meditation correctly, it naturally leads to a reduction in anger and selfishness and greed. It very directly affects the people around us, our family and friends, the people we know best.

“Ripples start to go out in unseen ways. Immediately, the idea that meditation is somehow selfish just doesn't make sense. It has immediate and far-reaching benefits.”

To contact Doug McGill: doug@mcgillreport.org

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink www.mcgillreport.org/chandako.htm

July 16, 2008

From the Jungle, Insights on Words
and War

ROCHESTER, MN -- In her very first interviews last week after being rescued in the jungles of Colombia, following six years of brutal captivity, Ingrid Betancourt remembered and reflected on a great many things.

But her most inspiring reflections, I think, were the startling words she uttered on two separate occasions last week about language itself – about words and their profound role in shaping human and political affairs.

“We’ve reached a point where we must change the radical extremist vocabulary of hate and very strong words that intimately wound human beings,” she said in a Monday interview with French radio, her voice clear and strong, her eyes alert and piercing.

So often in our private and public discourse, we rush to solve our problems with words. We may use them quickly, in defense or reaction, or we may spend time composing careful screeds of reason and reflection.

In either case, we rarely stop to think about the very medium we are using to douse the flames. What if we don't know as much about language as we thought? This question certainly goes to people who by the millions today are writing on blogs and web sites, and thus are profoundly shaping public discourse, as well as to professional writers, politicians, and full-time activists.

Public Peace

Is it possible that human beings remain collectively quite ignorant about how language actually works in the process of continuing individual and social hurts, and of easing suffering and harm?

What if, despite our best intentions, we often are actually using gasoline instead of water to extinguish our public and private conflagrations? 

Last Friday, in a second interview, Betancourt elaborated on this point. She described how the tonally sensitive and timely use of language is critical to achieve forgiveness first within oneself and between individuals, and how that step in turn creates a broad foundation for public peace.

Her points about language unfolded after the interviewer, Stephen Sackur, asked Betancourt about the very first moments in the rescue helicopter when she and her colleagues first learned they were free.

“At that moment, you could see the guys who had been responsible for your captivity, themselves bound,” Sackur said. “One of them was naked. Did you feel immense anger? Did you want to go and kick them?”

The Right Tone

“No, no,” Betancourt replied softly. “I was kneeling, telling my companions not to do that. At that moment, for some seconds, I prayed. I prayed to God. You know, I think it is very important to be free, totally free. And I think that anger or seeking revenge or bitterness is something like chains. The same chains they had us wearing all those years. It’s like those kinds of chains.”

She used gentle, careful language right there to break her chains.

“We are human beings, and human beings are beings of words,” Betancourt added. “The word is what makes us different. Words are our strongest weapons. We need to talk to make peace. It’s not easy. We know in our everyday life in a family, when there is a problem, that finding the right words, and saying them in the right moment, with the right tone, is so difficult. Well, that also happens for a nation.”

All around the world today, in many countries and spheres of life – scientific, journalistic, political, religious, spiritual – more and more people, including lay people, are considering language and its closely interrelated roles in daily life, the media, public affairs and democratic systems.

Better Metaphors

Mystics like Eckart Tolle; scientists like George Lakoff; popular writers like Deborah Tannen; and global economists like Amartya Sen are all highlighting how the ethical use of language in both private and public spheres, the two being blurred these days, is a key to human progress.

Tannen, in her book “The Argument Culture,” examines how the metaphors of “fighting,” “war” and “aggression,” so deeply buried in human consciousness, covertly direct much human behavior, much to our collective detriment. Learning and following more peaceful and collaborative metaphors to describe human interaction, self-representation and decision-making is critical to making peace as humans, Tannen says.

George Lakoff, Drew Westen and other neuroscientists and psychologists meanwhile have empirically described how language triggers discrete, measurable, predictable feelings and psychological moods. They thus are manipulated by propagandists – such as corporate advertisers and government leaders and political spinners – for distinctly anti-social ends.

A Last Question

Drawing closer to Betancourt’s recent comments on language, writers like Amartya Sen, Anthony Appiah and Amin Maalouf show how language works to establish and perpetuate divisive identity groups.

Such “descriptive misrepresentation” degrades people for political ends and “seriously miniaturizes” human beings, Sen says.

In a dreadful experiment in human suffering and language that distinctly was not of her choosing, Ingrid Betancourt reached similar conclusions.

At the end of the interview, the BBC host asked her one last question.

“When you think about yourself, Ingrid Betancourt, how have you changed over the last six and a half years? How are you different now from the woman you were, running for president, in 2002?”

“I’m a woman," Betancourt replied. "I’m a fragile woman. The difference is that now I know that I’m fragile. So I take care.”

Copyright @ 2008 The McGill Report
Permalink http://www.mcgillreport.org/betancourt.htm