On hope

I used to run design thinking events with international students. I would take them through a guided process, to find new ways of building intercultural connections in their environment. In the divergent phase, I saw radical ideas emerge – real original stuff. Then time came to select one idea and pitch. It was just a pitch, low stakes, not a lifetime commitment. Yet students would always pick the safest cliché – ‘Food brings people together.’

We commonly confuse two types of strategy. The first identifies the best way to reach a goal, given a set of constraints. I call this shallow strategy. The second – which I call deep strategy – questions and refines the goal itself, and the constraints.

For-profit organisations, in their immense majority, never reach the level of deep strategy. The goal is a given – make money. Corporate Social Responsibility, B-Corp charters and other ESG frameworks are only stricter sets of constraints. We’re still in shallow strategy. Make money while meeting a few sustainability criteria.

In my experience, not-for-profits and charities are the only structures that engage in deep strategy. Yet even there, even on the board, discussions often get stuck in the shallows. You know, those tedious discussions, where the goal is far from clear, and someone raves at length about the best software to use.

Apollo, God of oracles, was known as loxios, ‘oblique’. He revealed truth indirectly. The same applies to the Christian God. We have not a revealed book of truth, but the Gospels – four elliptic narratives about the life of Christ.

If we seriously believe in a God creator of Heaven and Earth, maker of all things seen and unseen, could that God not have chosen to engrave his commands in letters of fire, and held them floating in the sky above Jerusalem, for all to see? No, God decided that he would reveal himself indirectly – and let us free to believe – as a matter of deliberate design.

This may be the most valuable insight I got from my two years in preparatory class. My French teacher was having a rant. ‘People speak of literature, and schools, and the Humanities, as if all this was ‘not the real world’. You hear that all the time. It’s not the real world. And yet here we are,’ he said, pointing his finger to the ceiling, then out the window, ‘I’m paid good money to teach you, we’ve got a huge library full of books on top of us, and this is prime real estate in the heart of Paris. I call this the real world.’

There are two main forms of charity work.

One is remedial. It aims to reduce suffering, right here right now. It’s homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and blood donations. It’s firefighters and emergency room doctors.

The other is preventative. It aims to prevent suffering, at some point in the future. It’s public health, social work, and education design. It’s risk management, culture, and governance.

The second is impossible, unless faith and hope complement pure charity.

From the age of 18, I’ve had a Greek quote from Heraclitus on my desk: ‘ἐὰν µὴ ἔλπηται, ἀνέλπιστον οὐκ ἐξευρήσει, ἀνεξερεύνητον ἐὸν καὶ ἄπορον.’ In my translation: ‘As for what is beyond hope, it will not manifest unless you hope for it. It’s not something you just stumble upon already made. It has no shape of its own.’

On witchcraft

Posted by julienleyre

‘Women have always been healers’. This is how Barbara Ehrenreich opens her pamphlet Witches, Midwives and Nurses. In the Middle Ages, wise women served as health practitioners, among the peasants and the poor. They alleviated suffering and saved lives. To do this, they relied on empirical experience, transmitted from others, or derived from observation and intuition, through trial and error.

At the beginning of the modern period – with the rise of capitalism – those women were banned from medicine. Church and State leagued against the ‘witches’, systematically tracking, persecuting, and executing them. Their crime – often – was curing people without the right to do so. This was a dangerous form of concurrence for the new figure of the male doctor, upper class, university trained and properly licensed. It was all the more dangerous as doctors’ training relied on ancient canons and dogma, rather than empirical experience. For centuries, their capacity to cure and care was therefore doubtful. Hence the witch hunts, so that the rich would bleed, while the poor were deprived of the more available and affordable care offered by wise women.

Women came back on the healthcare scene, though, as the figure of the nurse emerged. Except she – for in her initial guise, she was very much gendered – was not a wise healer, with deep empirical knowledge of plants and practices to cure ailments. Rather, she was modelled on the society lady, offering gentle and docile support to the trained (male) doctor. From expert healers, women had been recast in the default role of professional assistants. And what if people suffered, or couldn’t afford care – as long as class and gender norms were kept in place.

When I was a child, my mother ran a one-person graphic design agency. Her logo was a witch on a broom. My cousin is a speech therapist with unconventional methods – cats, dogs, donkeys – and stunning results. She has a witch hanging from the ceiling in her practice. On the other side of my family, one of my aunts used to gather herbs and keep goats as pets. Another would cure sunburns by imposition of the hands, a gift passed on by an old wise woman. I even heard that my grand-father was from a family of village healers. Witchcraft, in short, is not a thing of the distant past for me, but part of my heritage.

It was also part of popular culture, from when I was a kid. I remember Elizabeth Montgomery twitching her nose on Bewitched, I remember shows about mysteries on TVs, and book series on paranormal experiences om the bookshelves at home. I remember reading La sorciere de la rue Mouffetard in primary school, and becoming a healer or a magician myself every lunchbreak during a role playing game stint in Middle School. Later on, it was Harry Potter, X-men, and vampires. More recently, it’s been Astro-memes, and the fascinating Weird Studies podcast – introduced by my co-author Corin Ism – reflections on art and philosophy ‘at the limit of the thinkable’. So, yes, for me, magic has always been part of the fabric of life.

Back in high school, I was often praised for my ‘synthetic spirit’ – esprit de synthèse. I ended up inquiring from a teacher what they meant by it. It’s your capacity, they said, to make sense of things, and express that meaning clearly. Find relevant patterns, and summarise them in a way that others understand. Like a good reduction – this is how I think of it now – it’s about caramelising knowledge.

‘Synthetic spirit’ is not an expression I’ve heard much in English. When I typed ‘esprit de synthèse’ in Google Translate, the machine proposed ‘analytical mind’. I can see the overlap. My friend Ashish is an analytics lead in a tech start-up. He describes his role as solving puzzles, finding answers to questions from heaps of data. Sorting through the mess takes time, but the result comes in a sudden flash, like magic.

I can see the overlap, and yet the words carry distinct overtones. Analysis implies a process of division – breaking things down into their parts. It has a surgical cleanliness to it. It also sounds like it can be professionally taught and assessed. Synthesis, by contrast, is intrinsically murky. It’s odd bits put together, in context, guided by intuition and experience. The proof is in the pudding – and like any great pudding, the recipe won’t capture the secret: it’s all in the sleight of hand.

As we outsource our memory to the Internet, one of the risks is that we lose our capacity for synthesis. I recently stumbled upon a dialogue with the editors of a new book, ‘A global history of the 20th century’. The authors – both history professors – describe a common shortcoming among their students. They’re able make sense of a specific historical event (say, May 68 in France), but they struggle to place an event in its broader context. They can’t articulate its relevance, or follow the various chains of rippling causality connecting it with everything else that happened in the world.

Things always make sense in relation to each other. Without enough background knowledge in our heads, we become unable to make meaning, no matter how much is accessible online.

Writing a global history of the 20th century is about providing such background knowledge: a shared foundation for historical sense-making. That work is relevant because, as time passes, matters of concern shift. They certainly did since the 19th century, and the German Idealist vision of a ‘universal history’ centred on the rise of Europe and human progress. Unless we consider the 20^th century through lenses relevant today – demographic explosion, questions, political violence, or the Anthropocene – we will have nothing but a set of disconnected facts.

Good synthetic work, like good comedy, can do wonders for its time. Then it fades. Like old jokes, insights from that sense-making work either enter common consciousness as commonplace knowledge – or they become antiquated oddbits.

I remember this conversation with a lover once, who identified as a wizard. We were speaking of the Radical Faeries, and the long tradition of queer resistance. ‘They used to call them witches,’ he said, ‘they were men and the women who chose an alternative life, and lived in the woods. They would make soup, using whatever was nutritious – forest animals, leaves, insects. That was a free life – it was in touch with the environment too – but it was threatening to the mainstream. So to discourage people from leaving the village, they focused on the witches’ brews, and used disgust. Imagine eating toads!’ Then he laughed – ‘They did the same for us. Imagine anal sex!’

Capitalism sets a clear distinction between the place of work and the place of care. There is a private space for social reproduction – where women exert invisible labour – and a space of economic production, dominated by men. Witches blur the categories, and therefore threaten capitalist constructions. Imagine, healing methods that cannot be reproduced at scale, and monetised! What a scandal! Besides, we should get rid of those forests and commons, with their messy governance and proliferating wildlife. Better enclose the fields, and breed sheep.

Magicians rely on external forces to transform the world. The gift should be shared freely. This is the wisdom behind Peter and Simon the magician. Professionals have no such qualms. They learn formal skills in learning institutions – at a measurable cost – take long apprenticeships, and charge accordingly. For healers and other intuitive practitioners – facilitators, coaches, change experts – the relationship is not so straightforward. We learn on the job, from others, or in a sudden twist of genius. How much, then, should we charge?

I have learned not to compromise on sharing the gift for free, by-passing all advice to the contrary. But what I am comfortable charging for is constraints on my own timetable. The gift should be shared freely, true, but if you want it next Thursday from 8 to 11, there’s a cost for that. Or if you have any further request – format, direction, delivery mode – then again, here’s a cost.

My mother taught me to think by myself: ‘Others are doing it’ was never a valid excuse, but a source for deep mockery. My step-mother had a more professional outlook. Her default frame of mind was ‘What’s everyone else doing?’

Good design requires a balance between introspective judgement and social exploration. But each of us has a preference, a default direction. This is a defining trait of character, and when left unspoken, a major cause of disagreement.

In Christianity, nothing is forbidden. This is the crucial break. There is no sinful act in itself. Sin only lies in the relationship we have with our own actions. This is radical freedom.

On filial piety

Posted by julienleyre

There’s a story by Dino Buzzatti that moved me deeply as a teenager. It’s called Humility. It’s about a man who goes to confession in a little parish church. The priest hears him out. That man has only the most minor sins on his mind.

Over the years, the man returns to the priest. Once he says ‘when people call me father, I feel a slight sense of pride’. The priest smiles and gives him absolution. Then the man comes again, a few years later ‘when they call me your eminence, I feel a slight sense a pride,’ and again a few years later ‘when they call me your holiness, I feel a slight sense of pride.’ The priest wonders, why would people poke fun at this simple soul?

Finally, towards the end of his life, the parish priest goes on a visit to the Vatican. There he waits in line to receive a blessing from the pope. When his turn comes, he kneels, and hears a familiar voice tell him: ‘I’ve been coming to you for years. I’m glad you finally came to me.’

At my nearby salon, an old man is chatting with the hairdresser. He’s praising ‘Asians’: ‘You’re hardworking, and you never cause a fuss. I’m like that too.’ The hairdresser nods. ‘My sister and I, we started working in high school, and we just didn’t stop. I think it’s just this ethics from Dad.’ The hairdresser nods. ‘Dad was the man of the family from the age of seven. He had to work hard. He taught us work ethics. You can’t be lazy in this world.’

I wonder meanwhile. Is it wise to take your seven-year-old father as a role model? If you work non-stop, from early years, when do you get time to pause and reflect? And if you don’t, how do you know the work you’re doing is right, useful, or healthy? Do this by necessity, yes – but by choice, and proudly?

My step-mother used to resent me for whatever support I received from my dad. ‘He works so hard to give you a good life’. Other times, she would turn on him. ‘You’re married to your job, it’s the only thing that matters.’ I didn’t fail to note the contradiction: was it all for me, or for the sake of the job itself?

Here’s a paradox I’ve been pondering for a while. Since our systems are broken – I’m talking about our seeming incapacity to prevent general collapse – we cannot trust anyone who is or has been in a position of power. Clearly, they were not able or willing to shift the system enough. Neither can we trust anyone who is not and has never been in power. They were not able, or willing, to reach a position where they could influence the course of things. So, no one is left for us to take as a model or just admire.

A good ancestor no longer needs to be alive. We worship them precisely because they’re willing to disappear. Zombies and vampires, by contrast, make for terrible ancestors. They feed on the living to preserve a semblance of life.

Towards the end of The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow offer a new take on the long story of human innovation. It’s not about the lone hunter making a better spear to help on the mammoth trail. Their praise goes to groups of anonymous women from the Neolithic, who painstakingly selected the best herbs, fruits and potatoes to make the best soup.

When he decided to write a musical piece about Moses, Arnold Schonberg faced an artistic conundrum. How to depict the voice of God talking from the burning bush? He didn’t use a deep bass, but a choir of women.

On emotional shifts

Posted by julienleyre

Last year, one of my friends turned anti-vaxxer. There was an aggressive Facebook comment, a confused exchange on Messenger, a meeting in person after lockdown, and a few back and forth emails. Then silence.

He was not a very close friend, but we’d known each other for a while, and supported each other on various projects. This lost relationship affected me. So, a few weeks ago, I got curious and cyber-stalked him.

His Twitter feed got me locked in fascinated horror. I had expected links and videos vindicating Ivermectin and the dangers of the vaccine. The rest was a surprise: memes mocking trans-rights or vegan food, articles framing climate change as a hoax, and a snippet from a One nation senator, captioned ‘absolute legend’.

I sensed a spiralling anger in myself, as I doom-scrolled through that feed. We used to build community together, joined efforts to make the world more hospitable. Now we were on opposite sides. I felt an urge to debate in my head, engage, change his mind.

I doubted it would achieve much. I let it cool down. Luckily, I had a martial arts class to go to. On the way back, anger washed off by sparring, I pondered. Apart from an occasional caption, nothing on that feed was my friend’s actual writing. It was all re-tweets and shares.

I started seeing the grotesque humour in the situation. Here he was, a proud advocate of independent thinking, serving as an echo chamber only. As if a grumpy conspiracy-bot had taken over his handle.

With this came greater empathy. Savvy communicators, no doubt, crafted the content he shared. They got inside his brain, and reproduced there. I thought of the zombies in Dawn of the dead, repeating the routines of their past lives, locked inside a shopping mall. Like them, my friend was stuck in a loop of self-reinforcing belief. His brain was mush, and he wanted mine.

‘He’s gone’, I thought, ‘let’s run.’ It was no longer about truth or justice. It was about staying alive, and safe. Certainly, any sense of blame had passed, and I was able to let go. I looked at his feed again, just now. I was amused, and a little bit sad. I think this is how mourning progresses.

The tragic character says ‘I would rather suffer and die than compromise my identity’. That’s Antigone, that’s Elektra, that’s Oedipus. By contrast, the comic character says: ‘I’ve got so many faces, I’m sure we can find an angle that will satisfy everyone.’

I see this approach as a celebration of human intelligence, in the service of peace. Things go wrong, the character shape-shifts, and projects an illusion to prevent catastrophe.

Contrast the romance of West Side Story with that in The Barber of Seville. The first unfolds like a doomsday machine, external forces pressing identities towards enormous pain, mutually assured destruction. In the latter, the lovers use tricks and costumes to bypass the desires of the old man who stands in their way. Desire trumps ego: they would much rather get what they want than remain who they are.

It’s my first time seeing Kabuki. I’m in Tokyo for just a few days. It seemed like a thing I should do. Plus, the friend hosting me suggested it. It felt rude to say no.

We’re sitting inside the dark theatre. I have no clear idea what’s happening. I know nothing about the art form. I notice, however, that once in a while, the actor takes a pose and freezes. The audience claps and shouts a name. Then the actor starts moving again.

Here’s what I noted then: it’s not a series of well-executed steps, not a melody, not a compelling monologue, that will yield admiration from the audience. It’s not movement, but stillness. And I thought, what if this was the result of a different stance towards the world? One where life is not perceived as a pile of rocks we must push up the slope until we die, but a constant whirlwind beyond our control – and noble effort is just about holding the flow for a moment. Then we detach, and let things return to their natural chaos.

The Catholic tradition presents a set of seven deadly sins, and seven virtues. Because the numbers match and I like symmetry, I’ve often reflected on the best way to match them.

For a long time, I used to think in terms of frontal opposites: deploy temperance as an austere shield against lust or gluttony, in a frontal battle for the soul. It didn’t work, and I would blame myself, or fall into moral despair.

More recently, I developed a different approach, where each sin is the perverted form of a virtue. Resistance, then, becomes a lateral strategy. It’s not temperance raised up to keep out desire from the body. Rather, it’s temperance as the deflector of sloth. It’s finding joy and meaning in simply being there, rather than frenetically running around in pursuit of desire.

The change maker paradigm sets young people, with a burning desire for justice, against the rigid structures of the world. It teaches rebellion as the art of pushing walls till they crumble. When I think about change, I prefer chemistry to mechanics. Bring the right molecules in contact, and let them react.

values cards project – spirituality

Posted by julienleyre

All through 2019, following on the reflections and practice I conducted in 2017-2018 on Christian, Confucian and Buddhist virtues, I had a regular (weekly-ish) Skype conversation with my friend and ‘virtue-buddy’ Patrick Laudon in Japan, to reflect on values. We did this simple thing: each time we spoke, we pulled a card out of a ‘values card’ pack, and had an improvised conversation to try and figure what we thought of that value. I took some notes during those conversation, and am now sharing a reviewed version, which I present in dialogue form. Those are neither a full transcript nor a perfect representation of our conversation – even less should they be understood as showing distinct positions in a debate. They’re no more than loose fragments of a conversation saved from oblivion.

A: When I hear ‘spirituality’, the first picture that comes to mind is the Virgin of Lourdes in a yoga pose. A bunch of ex-hippies, some sort of new age thing. A mix of tradition, moral education, Kumbaya community. A sort of, Canada Dry, it looks like religion, but it’s not religion.

B: I like that you’re articulate spirituality and religion. Let me try a definition. For me, spirituality is about relating to something greater than yourself. Buddhism, for instance, is a spirituality. Though now it’s also a religion in Japan, with established schools, and distinct symbols, and people who belong to it or not. So, yes, that would be the distinction. Religion is about formal schools, symbols, and a group with clear boundaries. You’re in it or you’re not. But spirituality, it’s looser. I’ve actually seen the word… there is this thing, this website called Kumbini, where you see two words, and you must pick one. One of the pairs that often comes up is religion vs spirituality. Most artists choose spirituality. It’s almost as if religion was an insult.

A: I’ve been associating spirituality with a form of new age commodification. And so, from a religious perspective, a Christian perspective if you want, there’s something sinful about it. It’s fetishism, idolatry. Then there’s this illusion of choice. That when you talk spirituality, you choose a tradition, like you can pick your favourite yoghurt at the supermarket. It’s the opposite with religion, tradition picks you, and then you can accept it, or you can refuse. Even when you convert, it’s about acceptance, rather than a proper choice. Spirituality, it’s not about conversion, it’s, yes, it’s consumerism.

B: Maybe, it’s a bit like, rationalism. Look at France and the cult of republic. It’s not just the cult of established power, there is a certain… ideal. We could call it French Republican monotheism, we replaced the kind with a president-king, and we have an atheistic dogma to replace the dogmatic church. And then there’s the rejection of communities, particularly Muslims, they’re too religious, too different.

A: I’ve always thought an enlightened Catholic is better than a dim atheist. And the question here is, do we fight religion, or dogma, or just stupidity? But there’s another take on this, when we were speaking, I started to think about this thing, the cult of the Holy Spirit, and mad preachers in the Church. They could qualify as ‘spiritual’, quite literally. That’s, those American mega-churches, then? Are they ‘spirituality’, while the more established rituals, they’re religion? And so, then again, maybe that’s the ultimate downfall, when monotheism meets commercial practice. So maybe yes, spirituality does represent an intrinsic corruption of religion?

B: I wonder, what do you think would be spirituality for a rational, atheistic society? I think, when we took political power away from the church in France, we took out the good, and there is nothing really to replace it.

A: Well, there is the cult of common ancestors, the Pantheon and the ‘Great Men’ of the Republic. The unknown soldier. War monuments as landmarks of atheistic, republican spirituality. But there is something, I don’t know, kitsch about this. It’s like those shops in Paris, they called them ‘boutiques de creation’, they were selling arts and craft supplies, beads, ribbons, paper, that kind of stuff. And I always thought, it corrupted the meaning of creation. Trivialised it.

B: For sure, New Age caused more harm than good to spirituality. Because now, we can no longer talk about spirituality without seeming like we’re about to call in a Hare Krishna.

A: Could it be that, if we look again at those American mega-churches, or Pentecost even, there’s a revolutionary potential in spirituality, when it becomes common practice. It can create new communities, almost instantly. But when it’s just an individual practice, then it’s only consumerism.

B: So, could we say that one goal of religion is to establish new norms of exchange, based on a gift economy. And so, when enough people join, that’s very challenging to structures of power. But if it remains a set of disconnected individual practices, then it’s not a problem. So, religion is dangerous to the powers in place, but not spirituality?

A: That may be true. That we’ve limited spirituality to just individualism, and it reduces its subversive potential. While if you can extend it to the community, then it becomes the basis for new forms of solidarity, and it can threaten the power of the state. And for individuals, it’s the end of slavery.

B: I’m thinking now about those religious practices that have a social impact, like Zakat among Muslims. You give 2% of your income either to the poor, or to the mosque. And that’s somehow in addition to tax, but also creates another pool of money, parallel to what the state gets from tax. And here, I don’t know, I think we could say the divine goes before the state, this religious duty trumps tax, and that’s not in the interest of the state. It’s a counter-power.

A: In the same way that the Christian martyrs were resisting the power of the Roman state. And what this shows you, maybe, is that non-violence always wins in the long term. Because it’s just about the refusal to obey. But – that’s the greatest paradox of political philosophy, that La Boetie put forward, why do we do what we’re told? And if people start to refuse obedience, then everything collapses. Power is based on voluntary serfdom. And for that, non-violence is the most threatening strategy. It’s undermining the very basis of power structures. And so, that’s what spirituality can achieve, even maybe for individuals.

Values cards project – winning

Posted by julienleyre

A: When I think about why I do things, it’s always about reflection or connection. It’s about understanding, self-transformation, meeting new people. It’s not about success or competition. In fact, that’s a thing I meditated on during my spiritual exercises. That’s in the Principle and Foundation, that we should become indifferent to success or failure.

B: There’s this way of viewing the world, that uses ‘win/lose’ as an axis. If you’re using that model, typically, winning is about earning money, and losing is about money too. But life is much more complex than that. There’s a vast number of things that we’re involved in. While if you look at the idea of ‘winning’ (or losing), it implies that we’ve got a set of agreed rules, and we play by them. So, if you have ‘winning’ as a value, it means you see life as a game with clear rules to follow. While the way that I would see it is that life is a multitude of games with different rules, and we’re all playing a number of them at the same time. So, to see life in terms of winning and losing, properly, that would mean we understand all the rules of all the games. And that seems a bit excessive for me.

A: Also, when you talk about ‘winning’, it means someone else is losing, and I’m not sure that’s how society works, or how it should work. It’s not the goal we should go towards at least. I mean, we can we should all be winners, but then the concept doesn’t mean anything anymore. So, what’s a system that would allow everyone to benefit, and we’re not talking about winning?

B: In the 2000’s, there was a lot of talk about winners and losers. There was all this talk about personal responsibility, particularly in the USA. And it was like the goal of the government was to create conditions where more people can ‘win’ – but is that what the government is about? Or is it about helping the ‘losers’? Or is it something completely different?

A: When I hear somebody think in terms of ‘win/lose’, I always get an impression that they’ve got a kind of satisfied stupidity. It’s this American vision of personal responsibility, you’re the master of your own destiny, all that stuff, and if you do what you should, then you’re going to win.

B: This, or it’s like we project team sports and its artificial environment on the social world, which is much more complex. There’s a lot of sports metaphors for performance in coaching. But business is really not like an 11-player soccer game. Whatever works in sport, that doesn’t quite extend to social life or business.

A: So, what we were saying is, if ‘winning’ is a value for you, then it means you take life as a game, and so that’s a sign you might lack of seriousness. Or maybe that’s about you choosing not to take life seriously, so that it’s more bearable?

B: Well, that’s the philosopher stance, right, to live a sad life with truth rather than a happy life with lies. To see life as a game so that it’s more bearable, that’s running away from from wisdom.

A: We have those discussions about distraction as an existential risk – that’s in Pascal, and that’s Kierkegaard, who talks about the danger of living for what’s ‘interesting’, rather than, say, living a life that’s morally right, a serious life. But then, there’s a passage by Descartes against that. It’s in the Passions of the soul, and it’s a passage I really like. He says that happiness is positive in itself, while sadness is harmful to you. So, we might genuinely wonder whether it’s better to be wrongly happy than to be rightly sad.

B: OK, so then, is it about winning and the idea of a game being opposed to the serious approach to life?

A: Well, what’s a game? It’s a pursuit or an activity without a clear objective other than itself. The goal of the game is to play the game. It’s about immediate pleasure, something that has no consequences outside the game. While a more serious approach to life sees the goal as important. Maybe that lack of seriousness is about an incapacity to set an objective, or a refusal to pay attention to the consequences of what we do. Maybe that’s a form of laziness.

B: The game is a game, it has not goal outside itself. So, we might as well just play, since nothing really matters. Carnivals are about that. You don’t pretend that things are more serious than they are. It’s all feathers and music. And there’s an existential wisdom to that approach – and to games also. Maybe precisely that thing about happiness as better than sadness. While if you take everything seriously, maybe that’s a sign that you don’t have very good judgement. If you take everything seriously, you might end up neglecting what’s really important – and that’s another form of intellectual laziness. It’s even dangerous – more dangerous than frivolity. That kind of serious approach is how you find yourself believing that the end justifies the means.

A: Maybe we can think of it as associated with Calvinism, since we’ve been talking about this American approach. If there is predestination, then nothing you can’t do anything that will lead you to salvation – it’s all outside of your reach. That means, life is not actually that serious, there’s nothing at stake, it’s all decided for you anyway. You can wait, you can look for signs of predestination, but ultimately, there’s nothing at stake. And so, you might as well play life as a game, and try to win.

Values cards project – joy

Posted by julienleyre

A: I see joy as associated with a desire for power.

B: There’s something about it that’s exuberant, something to do with activity.

A: It’s not a permanent state, but it’s connected to something you do.

B: It’s derived from an activity that’s geared towards the good.

A: It’s also connected to something particular. It can be an object or it can be an action, but it’s about something.

B: Maybe joy and happiness are like fear and anxiety. One is about a specific thing, the other is more like a looser state, without a clear object.

A: There are also people who are more or less prone to joy. You know those people who just seem particularly joyful.

B: And joy can be more or less calm.

A: There’s something religious about it too. Something Christian. I mean, it’s in Christian songs.

B: It’s like a greater capacity to rejoice – enjoy – whatever is coming from the outside.

A: It’s kind of like a candy-machine where you don’t need coins, it just comes when you press a button.

B: OK, so joy has an external source. It means there’s no self-contained joy. It’s a positive attitude, but also something to do with a kind of openness.

A: Yes, happiness is more about having a harmonious relationship with yourself, while joy is about your relationship with nature, or with God, or with other people.

B: So, what’s the opposite of joy? Maybe it’s vice, as the pursuit of an activity that will bring you temporary pleasure on the spot, and remorse afterwards.

A: Another opposite of joy would be rejection. When you’re closed off to things.

B: Or there’s pain, that’s more physical, there’s despair, and that’s more about your inner psychological state, but then there’s sadness, and that’s the opposite of joy?

A: Is joy an end in itself then?

B: Cultivating joy is an end in itself.

A: So, it’s about the pursuit of happiness, as a right and a duty.

B: A right that’s not associated to a duty doesn’t deserve to be defended

A: There’s Andre Gide, saying it’s a duty to make yourself happy

B: Or Gandhi, saying there’s a duty to be happy from the mere fact that you were brought to the world.

A: What about joy and desire?

B: Ha, well, at a first level, desire is about wanting what you don’t have. But at a second level, it’s about the capacity to rejoice from the things you have.

A: In Ignatian terms, you’d say the goal of our existence is to figure out the unique manner in which we’re called to pay homage to your creator. And then do that. Joy is just an epiphenomenon.

B: So, there’s a duty to be joyful. You can’t tell somebody to be happy, but you can bring joy to others through your own joy.

A: It’s a kind of hospitable virtue.

B: A Mediterranean virtue.

A: And what about joy and truth? There’s this passage from Descartes, in the Passion of the Soul, where he it’s better to feel fake joy than true sadness. I call that the Cartesian dilemma.

B: Well, this sounds like one of the only real ethical dilemma.

Corona thoughts – On mourning

Posted by julienleyre

A few weeks ago, I took many things for granted. That I could go out in the morning and sit in a café for hours, to work or read a book. That I could take a train to Brighton, or Williamstown, and walk along the beach. That I could have spicy Sichuan food, or beer and chips, or a pizza for dinner. Or invite as many friends over as I wanted, for no reason.

I reacted to Covid-19 in three phases. First came smugness, with a touch of denial. I’ve worked in global catastrophic risk for years, this is a mild crisis, why the panic? Then came anger and sadness. The government is taking away my freedom, who made those decisions, on what basis? Finally, I experienced calm acceptance. Things have changed, life continues, though different in its daily form.

A few years ago, I took many things for granted. That there would be fish in the sea forever, and polar bears, and coral reefs. That, forty years from now, Miami, Mumbai and Guangzhou would be dry land, and I could go visit, if I wanted to. That I could live in blissful ignorance of peak oil, rainforest destruction, and the structure of electric grids. That I could focus on writing or teaching, then expect a peaceful retirement as new generations continued.

That world is gone, but I have not yet found a sense of calm acceptance.

On January 9, 2019, I saw this photograph in my Facebook Feed.

The facial expression of this man, and with the caption underneath, made me pause. We have associated success with economic growth, and let our happiness depend on it. Whoever attached their identity to this paradigm will experience loss when considering climate change and its impact, including on the shrinking economy. We do not like to experience loss. Hence, denial.

The middle-aged white man faces the prospect of deep sadness: for we were probably closest to living a perfect life, and so, our dreams might have been crushed most. This comes with enormous emotional burden. Yet how ill-equipped are we to deal with this sadness.

I learned about this phenomenon during a cross-cultural training session: women typically fare better in difficult situations than men. A simple reason to this: most men in leadership positions have never encountered genuine hardships or setbacks. Sure, they worked hard, and didn’t get to their position without efforts and focus. But if they made it, it’s because they passed every obstacle. Success defines their sense of identity

Not so women, used to countless micro-aggressions, endless exposure to unconscious bias. Women do no better than their male counterparts in difficult cross-cultural situations. But setbacks are part of their identity. So, when a negotiation collapses, when hostile behavior starts out of nowhere, when everything falls apart, they can step back, reflect, and try again. Not so male leaders: whatever behaviour has led them to success, they continue. When it stops working, they don’t know what to do. Some experience complete breakdown.

The new ‘white man’s burden’ is this unexpressed sadness. That the world we inherited, the world that we continued building, is dead. That whatever behaviour has led to success up until now no longer works. That we’re at risk of complete breakdown. That we’re stuck in denial.

My hope for Covid-19 is, it is shrinking the economy. It is forcing us to stop and pause. It is causing sadness and suffering. And so, there is hope that it will accelerate the mourning process we need.

Mindless consumerism is joyful. I like to go to cafes, I like to take a train to the beach, eat spicy Sichuan Food or beer and chips or pizza, and invite friends over for drinks and dinner. This was the attraction of Australia: good weather, wealth and a relaxed lifestyle.

In a chapter of Crowd and Power, Elias Canetti talks about the various forms that human groups can take. He describes what he calls ‘multiplication packs’: groups geared towards production, agricultural collectives amassing corn, wheat, rice, and rejoicing in the harvest. He describes, also, different types of group: what he calls the ‘funeral pack’. They come together to lament the passing of a fellow human – and in that shared sense of extreme loss, find a sense of unity.

We have organized our societies around economic growth: multiplication of resources. Maybe, we need to shift this, and bring back the tragic sense of funeral packs. Have an Easter moment of collective loss, in which we can find a new basis for unity.

It’s a cool morning of June 2019. I’m sitting at a long table underneath a metal awning in the highlands of Bali. I have joined a ‘creative retreat’ organised by my friends of the School of Slow Media. I just spent the night sleeping in a freezing tent, with two sweaters and a coat. I am having breakfast now, and my friend Ai is sitting next to me.

I tell Ai about a figure I encountered during my spiritual exercises: Joseph of Arimathea. When Christ dies on the cross, as Peter hides and Mary laments, Joseph goes to Pontius Pilate, asking for permission to take down the body of Jesus, and give him burial. Joseph is a practical man. The savior is dead, now there is a body on a cross, and that body must be moved, embalmed, buried. There are concrete steps to take: buy the myrrh and frankincense, buy the shroud, find the tomb, get an authorization from Pilate, find someone to take down the body, embalm it, shroud it, place it in the tomb, close the tomb. Joseph of Arimathea is at the centre of Easter, the shadow figure of Holy Saturday. Not the lamentation of death, not the joyful hope of the empty tomb, but the down-to-earth, pragmatic efforts of burial.

‘I identify with Joseph’, I told Ai, ‘and I think, I’d like to think more about him. I think our times need this figure.’ Then Ai draws a diagram on a napkin, and starts explaining to me: ‘in a paradigm shift, composting work is necessary. Something dies, something emerges. And part of what needs to happen is, elements of the previous paradigm must be broken down, so they can be used in the new.’ We talk for a while about composting, recycling, beetles. And mourning.

Mourning is a process of decomposition. Things used to go together: a face, a voice, an emotion, an organization, a house, a relationship. Dreams, hopes, projections. No more – we must undo those associations. In the same way, when a certain system falls apart – like the civilization we built on a mistaken belief that there would be cheap energy forever, and a stable climate – we must take it apart, so that its elements are available again, to build something new.

Last year, when a new government was elected in Australia, whose leader denied climate change, I experienced a deep sense of anger and sadness. The mourning process was starting.

I tried sharing an invitation, to come together in mourning: mourning for the world that was, for a world where we could imagine a stable climate, and calmly project ourselves into the future, without fear of apocalypse. What I was proposing was not a plan, not a solution: just a moment of collection, to welcome and share the sense of sadness, embrace the mourning process, in the hope that we could come out the other end, with calm presence, and build something new. Bury the dreams of the past, so that new dreams can come.

The Gospel doesn’t tell us what happens to Joseph of Arimathea, beyond his contribution to the Easter mystery. Tradition, however, offers a story. Joseph held a cup that received the blood of Christ on the cross. After placing Jesus in the tomb, Joseph leaves Jerusalem. He travels North, all the way to the distant Isle of Britain, where he lived and died in peace, hiding his treasure with him. Yet to future generations, pragmatic Joseph bequeathed a dream, the Quest for the Holy Grail: a promise of eternal life, an inspiration to virtue, the leaven of a new fellowship.

Cardinal virtues – a project for 2017

Posted by julienleyre

fortitude-2

This is a sharp memory from my grade Ten French class. We were studying French moralist writers of the 17th century, and our teacher explained one of the fundamental religious debates of the time: the respective role of Grace and Virtues on our salvation. It was the height of religious wars in Europe, and the question of Grace was at the core of a theological opposition between Protestants and Catholics, echoed in France in a polemic between two Catholic factions, the Jesuits and the Jansenists (represented by Pascal). According to Jesuit views – inspired by Renaissance Humanism – God offers his supernatural grace to all humans; it is our duty to meet Him halfway, and use our free-will to deliberately cultivate virtues and accomplish good works. This goes directly against the belief of Jansenists – as well as most Protestant theology – who take a more pessimistic view of mankind: our sinful nature is such that only the Grace of God has efficacy to grant us salvation. All attempts at cultivating moral virtues and conducting good works carry the risk of fostering pride and delusion.

What exactly do we mean when we talk of virtues? For over twenty years, I’ve worn a symbol of my father’s home region around my neck, the ‘guardian cross’, blending a heart, an anchor and a cross. The symbol represents Faith, Hope and Love – three virtues that Paul’s Epistles identify as defining Christianism, and known together as theological virtues. Today, in our post-Christian world, the word virtue evokes at worst a conceited bigot, at best a coy individual, looking for shelter from a corrupting world. But it was not always this way: in its original meaning, virtue has the same root as ‘virile’, and refers to the character of a good citizen – in a famous reflection on the dominant affect in various, Montesquieu associates Virtue to Republican rule. Through the works of Sts Ambrosius, Augustine and Thomas,Catholic theology considers not three, but seven fundamental virtues. Four cardinal virtues, identified in the works of Aristotle, and therefore common to Christians and Pagans, complement Faith, Hope and Love: known as Cardinal Virtues, they are Prudence, Temperance, Justice and Fortitude. On a recent public profile I wrote – ‘I like to listen and look for common ground’. My exploration of Cardinal Virtues in 2017 will both allow me to reconnect with my own Catholic heritage, and reflect on universal forms of good behaviour – what makes a good citizen in a range of tradition, and how to cultivate one’s own character.

Last year, I started a daily blogging project – a daily page of handwriting which I posted online after light editing. After three months, this was interrupted by a demanding new role with the Global Challenges Foundation. The project I was in charge of setting up has now found its shape, systems are in place, and I’ve been able to reduce the extent of my engagement. This allows me to resume daily writing meditation. So this is what I propose for 2017. I will associate a virtue to each season: Prudence and Summer, Temperance and Autumn, Justice and Winter, Fortitude and Spring. Every day, I will reflect on the season’s virtue, decide a way to practice it over the course of the day, and write about the experience in the evening in a diary. At the end of each week, I will write a short blog post summarising what I did and learnt. Marking the end of each season, I will take a full week to reflect, and compose a deeper written meditation. The project will blend writing and practice – and hopefully, lead both to personal transformation and valuable intellectual insights.

I look forward to this year exploring virtues – and hope we can all learn from this.

Julien Leyre – 忠廉

Moral reflections & professional musings across cultures and languages

christianity

On hope

On witchcraft

On filial piety

On emotional shifts

values cards project – spirituality

Values cards project – winning

Values cards project – joy

Corona thoughts – On mourning

Cardinal virtues – a project for 2017