Submitted at the
PAL-101B: Exercising Leadership: Mobilizing Group
Resources
Professor: Hugh O’Doherty; TF: Max Klau
This paper attempts to unpack the word “responsibility”
as it circulated through several conversations in PAL-101B throughout the
spring semester. In dealing with this
topic I introduce a distinction between “little-r” responsibility and “big-R”
Responsibility. I then discuss the
relationship between Responsibility and love, and how a special kind of
spiritual leadership and authority might be necessary to help people increase
their capacity for both. I then conclude
with a discussion of contemporary forms of spiritual leadership and the next
“intervention” in my career that attempts to combine these forms.
I give several caveats to readers of this paper. What follows is a reflection on my own
experience, my own understanding of the world, and my own ideas. It only holds as much authority as one can
grudgingly grant a 25-year old graduate student. You will find sweeping generalizations and
assumptions that betray the enthusiasm and immaturity of a young thinker. You will find assertions only loosely rooted
in the history of philosophy or deep anthropological and sociological research,
and therefore you might find yourself amid hyperbole and polemic, the rhetoric
of a manifesto. It is only by putting my
perspective on the table, however, that I can lay visible my blind spots and
prejudices for the harsh fires of critique.
I publish it as a call for people’s interventions into the systems of my
own naïveté.
In a private conversation with Hugh O'Doherty, the
professor of PAL-101B, I asked him about his purpose and goal in teaching the
course. If everyone were to take the
course, what kind of world does he envision emerging? His answer was that perhaps people would genuinely
take responsibility for their actions and their role in systemic dynamics and
challenges. How does this desire for a
culture of responsibility underlie the framework and pedagogy of the
The conclusion I have come to is that there are two ways
of using the word responsibility. The
first is what I call "little-r responsibility." To learn responsibility means that you simply
understand that the actions you take have an impact on wider systems of action,
communication, and meaning. In the
context of material ecology, learning responsibility might simply mean studying
the quantity and impact of pollution involved in producing the sneakers you
wear. It does not mean actually
changing your buying patterns. In the
social ecology of PAL-101B, I began to think about responsibility in terms of my
contributions to the success or failure of a holding environment for people's
communication and expression. When Hugh
told us that the receptivity of the audience determined whether would-be
performers on metaphor night would sing, he was highlighting our responsibility
for events we might otherwise see as out of our control. I believe this is a powerful form of
teaching, because it engages people to contemplate the extent of their own
power, both positively and negatively.
It also shows us ways that we might be contributing to a troublesome
atmosphere or problem, thus pointing toward ways that we can empower ourselves
to change and improve our world.
Still, there is another layer or sense to the word
responsibility. This second meaning I
call "big-R Responsibility."
This Responsibility has an active connotation and involves actually taking
Responsibility or holding yourself Responsible for the impacts you
have. If responsibility is the knowing,
Responsibility is the enactment. The
troubling realization I had through PAL-101B is that no one can be compelled to
actually take Responsibility. They can
only be shown their responsibilities and given the choice of whether to act on
that understanding or not. An authority,
activist, or would-be "leader" might chide people for not taking
Responsibility for their actions. They
may threaten them with images of war, environmental catastrophe, or eternal
damnation. Members of a group can also
demand Responsibility from other members, as when people in the PAL-101B large
group would declare in an accusatory tone that we had failed to create a safe
space. The trouble is that these
activities are doomed. I have come to
believe that people only take Responsibility when they are ready, when their
sense of the boundaries of self has naturally evolved to a wider expanse. This is a developmental process that takes
time and a very particular alchemy of challenge, support, and space. As much as it is about the development of
Responsibility, it is about the development of the capacity to love.
The Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick defines love as the
extension of the boundaries of self to include another. Of course, from a spiritual perspective we
might say that ultimately all beings are interconnected, boundaries are
illusion, and therefore anything short of total dissolution of the self into
universal love is the mark of illusion and ego.
Our limitations, however, are our perceived reality, and the gradual
unfolding of ourselves from the egocentrism of childhood to saintly love is the
great and terrible drama of human existence. We can not forcefully accelerate people’s
process of self-transcendence, of transforming Other into extended Self, of
transferring responsibility to Responsibility.
In the Tree of Life of the Jewish mystical tradition, this reality is
expressed as a cosmic balance between Chesed (loving-kindness and expansion)
and Gevurah (strength, boundary, and contraction). The two combine to produce Tif’eret, or
beauty and harmony.
At a certain point in PAL-101B, I leaned heavily towards
Chesed and felt that the best way for us to create an atmosphere of work and
progress was to engage in a kind of therapeutic self-disclosure. If we could just create a safe enough
environment for people to pour out their hearts, we would find our way toward
authentic issues and problems. How,
then, could I actively contribute to that atmosphere? The only way would have been to disclose
something personal myself, a place of vulnerability. I thought this would create a space for
authenticity, for commitment, for love.
When I began hunting around in my memory and present for
something to share, however, I found myself feeling somewhat uneasy and even
dirty about the activity. Why would I
emotionally prostitute myself for the good of a group filled with people I do
not authentically love? The anxiety I
felt was not so much a fear of being attacked but a deeper sense that to share
myself intentionally and manipulatively would be wrong. On further reflection I
realized that sharing something personal in a premeditated, artificial way
would contribute to a false sense of security.
It might deceive someone into thinking that I felt a safe space had been
created, and based on a preliminary (and perhaps valid) trust of me, they might
disclose something as well. Because the relationships
and environment were not adequately prepared, however, they might face an
attack that would “boil over” of the zone of productive disequilibrium and then
shut down further engagement.
The more disturbing possibility, however, is that people
would begin sharing excessively, caught in an orgy of emotional venting and sappy
consolation. Each disclosure would further
build the sense that a safe space had been created, when in fact the whole
thing would have been founded upon a lie that I had enacted by sharing myself
at an inauthentic moment. This
atmosphere would begin to put extensive strain on authorities in the group, who
would have to work double time to maintain the boundaries of the space. The
members themselves, having been deluded into a cultic and false sense of
security, would not even understand that such work needed to be done.
An authentic concern about this possibility emerged when I
heard several people in the class complain (both within the big group and
one-on-one) that they did not like the culture of enforced risk that we seemed
to be cultivating in PAL-101B. For
authority (either individual or collective) to demand that people take
emotional risks is dangerous and potentially abusive road, enforcing a kind of
cultishness that we would all rather avoid.
They insinuated that this kind of atmosphere is a particularly American
phenomenon, taking root in a place that does not realize the perils of
collectivism the way Germans and Soviet bloc citizens might. An Israeli classmate of mine in PAL-101B stated
a particularly astute and startling version of this sentiment when he remarked
that in fact we only have responsibility for ourselves. At first I found this comment to be somewhat
abrasive and selfish, and then I found a truth in it for myself. We can only be Responsible for our own
learning and the development of our own capacity to be open and to love. Therefore we should only make decisions about
disclosure and vulnerability from a personal and reflective stance.
We are left, then, with a challenge. How do we create environments where people
can learn the fact of their responsibility for the creation of group dynamics
and adaptive challenges without creating a culture of compulsory Responsibility,
obligatory risk, and cultish participation?
At the end of the fall semester, I ran into
At the beginning of PAL-101B, when we began discussing
our understanding of "leadership," it was to this experience that I
pointed. My intuitive understanding of
leadership was deeply connected to this moment of leading by example, of
something ephemeral in how a person carries themselves. Upon reflection I have come to understand
that leadership in that situation lay in the expansion of what Andreas
considered within his realm of Responsibility.
In addition to taking Responsibility for speaking his mind, was taking
Responsibility for actually creating a space in which he could be heard. It was not a selfless act, but rather a more
expansive, effective, and whole way of being himself.
In the
Diesel Cafe during the winter months, my friend
At that
moment there arose a certain state of discomfort or disequilibrium as I
recognized a gap between my espoused and enacted ways of being. And in that moment I had a choice. I could accept the challenge, breathe deeply,
and let myself open up. Or I could dodge
the challenge with a joke, avoiding work by saying it's just too hard for me to
meditate with eyes open, at least not with the waitress's outfits in that
joint. In that particular moment, I
chose the former. I checked in with my
breath, the sensations in my body, and the texture of the objects, people, and
space around me. I noticed the tensions
in me that were driving me towards witty comments to impress this woman and
simply sat with them, choosing not to give them voice. We held the silence for a minute or so until
I told her all the reflections I have just written here.
The common thread between my experiences with Andreas and
Lauren was that both of them had made endeavors to operate in a way that
allowed them to be more present for the people and world around them. Andreas, rather than rushing into a flurry of
a conversation, wanted to give me the requisite space and time to listen. Lauren showed me that she was actively
cultivating a presence and heightened awareness that could bleed into every
moment of her days. Within me, this more
expansive presence and Responsibility highlighted my own potential to
"resonate at their frequency" and forced me to confront why I was not
doing so.
Framing things in the PAL-101B model of leadership, Andreas
and Lauren’s statements served as interventions to perturb my own system of
interaction with the world. They raised
me into a productive state of disequilibrium by forcing me to confront my own
internal contradictions and failures. I
then had a choice to engage in work avoidance by laughing off or dismissing the
experience; instead I chose to engage the work and be mobilized. In the case of Andreas, I let the encounter
confirm my resolve to take PAL-101B. In
the case of Lauren, I have begun cultivating a practice of "checking
in" with myself in the moments of daily life to kindle a meditative
awareness beyond the cushion.
Discussing these experiences in Heifetzian leadership
terms still begs the question of where I draw the boundaries around the
"system" and what the precise "adaptive challenges" might
be. In this situation, however, I am
uncertain that such an exercise or question would be fruitful. The disposition to listen, to be fully
present, to keep oneself open and balanced is a disposition useful in
confronting any adaptive challenge. It
is, in a sense, a way of building one's capacity to be on the balcony, to hold
steady, and to find the sacred heart of innocence, curiosity, and compassion. These are experiences of feeling a connection
with spirit.
The question I ask, then, is whether there is a kind of
spiritual leadership that emerged in my conversations with Andreas and
particularly with Lauren. Its function
is neither the preservation of safety nor the disruption of equilibrium, but
the nourishing of people's capacity to undertake leadership challenges. Its function is inspiration - the gift of
breath, of space, of energy and determination.
One alternative view is that there is no distinct activity
called spiritual leadership; there is only leadership in the domain of
spirituality. Let us say, for example,
that people in a community are falling back on alcohol for consolation for lack
of faith, or are seeking spiritual connectedness in sex or psychedelic
drugs. For them to look for strength in
the Within and Beyond of spirit would represent a change in behavior and
understanding, and is thus an adaptive challenge. Mobilizing people to do this kind of inner
work, to cultivate the discipline of daily prayer practice or to trade a Friday
night of drinking for a meditation session, would constitute a kind of
leadership. It would involve making
interventions to highlight people's own desire for spiritual connectedness and
the gap between their lived and ideal lifestyle. People would find themselves perturbed by the
presence and challenges of the spiritual leader, who would then have
responsibility for following through and supporting people's construction of
practice, understanding, and meaning in an ongoing state of productive
disequilibrium.
What, then, might constitute authority in the spiritual
domain? First and foremost is the
maintenance of safety and boundary around spaces of spiritual practice and
engagement. I mean this in a literal sense,
for example, of preventing interruptions and intrusion into a meditation
session. But there is also another, more
explicitly spiritual level at which authority can be exercised. When I participated in a ten day Vipassana
meditation retreat last summer, one of the stipulations was that people not
engage in any other practice besides the techniques they taught. The intention, it seemed, was that everyone
should be able to isolate and perceive the benefit of the practice by
itself. Furthermore, they felt that the
teaching staff was equipped to handle peculiar states of mind encountered in Vipassana
but not through an unanticipated combination of practices. Their rules served to ensure the security of
individuals and the community by limiting people's internal activity.
Besides maintaining safety and boundary, spiritual
authorities such as priests and shamans have traditionally served an
intermediary role between people and the realm of spirit, giving assurances to
people's faith, blessing people and relationships, and praying on others'
behalf. Each of these activities could
be seen as "taking the work back" from people in a social system,
thus lowering the temperature and lifting the burden of discipline and practice
for members of a spiritual community.
Like any kind of authority, spiritual authority can be
granted informally (to an elder whose council is sought in times of personal
crisis, for example) or formally (via the priestly robes and ordination). The degree of control which a community will
allow a spiritual authority figure to exercise is, as with any authority, a
measure of how much work they want to avoid taking on themselves.
Although this analysis of authority and leadership in a
spiritual context is a tidy application of the Heifetz framework, I would still
say that there is something special about the spiritual "domain" in
that it permeates all areas of life. To
grant someone spiritual authority is to literally give them sway over definitions
of life, death, right, and wrong; to exercise spiritual leadership is to focus work
on the most fundamental capacities of people to hope, to dream, to survive, and
to live openly and passionately. Just as
the realm of spirit seems to transcend and include the realms of matter, body,
and mind, the exercise of spiritual leadership and authority seems to transcend
and include other activities in a social system. It is a “meta-leadership” and
“meta-authority” that increases others’ capacities for exercising leadership
and their sense of security in diverse contexts. Therefore it involves a great capacity for both
Responsibility and humility lest it become a dogmatic and limiting activity.
Who, then, do members of contemporary society grant
spiritual authority and seek for spiritual leadership? The structures of organized religion seem
natural places to look, but they are also marred by scandals (such as the
Catholic pedophilia debacle) and violent inter-religious conflict (as in
There are, however, a few archetypes and roles that are
emerging in western society that have potential for new kinds of spiritual
leadership and authority.
The question I pose is this:
how well do experiences with music, spiritual teachers, holding environments,
and online communities succeed in helping people develop Responsibility and
love? How can these experiences be
combined effectively? This is a question
I do not expect to answer in a paper, but rather through the experience of my
career and lifetime. It begins now with
a project called the Wake Up & Stay Up tour.
The Wake Up
& Stay Up (WUSU) tour is coming together through a partnership between me
and several other idealistic young adults.
In the next section of this paper, I will describe the intentions of the
WUSU project and analyze it using both the PAL-101B leadership framework and
the analysis of Responsibility and spiritual authority above. My intention is to describe the system we see
ourselves engaging, our plans for engaging it, our purpose in doing so, and the
potential challenges we face.
Wake Up is, put simply, a concert, featuring a rock band that is presently forming but includes myself and my partner in the endeavor, Kal-El. We intend the concert be a place to catalyze joy, interconnection, and the beginnings of a spiritual "wake up call." Then, for several days after each concert, we will organize events that help people "Stay Up," or integrate the concert energy into ongoing processes of personal transformation and community building. Our intention is to develop a methodology for doing these events as part of a "tour," sowing seeds and then returning and revisiting to continue nurturing what grows. We would also endeavor to support and create online communities of spiritual practice and community organization as an infrastructure for people's ongoing work.
The week of
transitional events after a concert will include work in both the “guru” style
(talks, guided meditation sessions) and the “holding environment” style
(Quaker-style circles, seminars, discussion forums, and dialogue sessions). The purpose in all of this work will be to
help people connect with spirit and with each other. From this point of expanded awareness, love,
and understanding of responsibility, we would hope to engage people in
conversations about adaptive challenges within ourselves, our families, our
communities, and our organizations. If
we catalyze a social movement towards an ethic of global peace and justice and away
from ethnocentric and materialistic lifestyles, we would be deeply grateful. We would also be grateful to mobilize some
adaptive work in a few people’s lives.
By framing WUSU as an attempt to mobilize adaptive work, I invoke the language of leadership interventions and immediately beg the question of “what is the system we are trying to engage?” Who are the agents, what roles do they play, what are their adaptive challenges, and how might we engage them? I would say there are three broad categories of people and institutions who will be involved in our work: North American youth; Madison Avenue; and religious communities and institutions.
On
Beyond utopian statements that “youth are our future” or that they are vulnerable and deserve a kind of protection (both of which have been used to fuel totalitarian political movements), I believe there is a special reason to engage youth in adaptive work. I believe that American society uses young people, particularly older teenagers and college students, to embody and dramatize the conflicts that permeate our hearts and minds. Adolescence is a stormy period because of rapid hormonal changes and increasing independence in our culture, fueling clashes with all kinds of authority. In Bob Kegan’s developmental theory, it is often a period dominated by “third order consciousness,” which makes meaning from role-relationships and often suffers great internal turmoil due to conflicting demands among peers, authority figures, and role models in the mass media. The struggle of youth to define themselves amid the landscape of consumerism, religious fundamentalism, and nihilism, are battles in everyone’s hearts. Struggles about whether making money is “selling out” or whether internal discipline is “square” are conflicts that people face at every age. Youth, however, are used to avoid that work every time an older person says, “well, when you’re my age and have kids, you won’t have that kind of freedom to march and meditate because you have to make money.” The balance between satisfying material needs, nurturing spirit, working for social justice, and keeping our planet healthy is one that we all must engage in.
Because of this intense inner conflict that youth hold for others in society, any ideology will find its most extreme form in a teenager as a Fromm-style “escape from freedom” – the Columbine shooters’ nihilism, the militant fervor of fans at a skinhead rock concert, the misogynistic blood-bonding of urban gang members. Each of these bonds (or “religions” from the Latin religare, to bind) can end up being a threat to the lives and mental freedom of youths and people who share their neighborhoods.
There is, therefore, a real need for society to create space and inspiration for youth in which they can move beyond escapes from freedom and intractable turmoil to a kind of leadership. The Wake Up & Stay Up project will endeavor to equip youth with the energy (through music), capacity (through spiritual practice), and understanding (through dialogue) to give work back to older members of society.
“Madison Avenue” is, for me, not only shorthand for the advertising industry but a symbol of consumerist capitalism as an ideology. Advertisements give voice to a fundamental current in American thought – you are what you buy, and whoever dies with the most toys wins. As holders of $4000 per year of disposable income and composing a $140 billion market[1], teenagers have become a huge target audience for this sentiment. Adults in various corporations use them to make money to fuel their own material desires, and in so doing they perpetuate the culture of consumption. This cycle leads to two serious problems: the displacement of value systems that are spiritual or community-oriented in favor of the profit motive; and a pattern of waste production that is environmentally catastrophic.
The adaptive challenge for me and all members of our society is that we can no more deny our existence as consumers with material needs than we can deny our connection to spirit. We can not frame Madison Avenue as an enemy, because to do so would avoid the work of grappling with material needs and addictions within ourselves. Furthermore, if WUSU or any endeavor is to be successful, it will have to engage in some form of advertisement and promotion that pulls it within the Madison Avenue system. The band might need a video on MTV and a photograph on the cover of Rolling Stone. In so doing, however, we will be challenged to simultaneously participate in that corporate culture and question it.
Moreover,
even if we do succeed in becoming a well-known catalyst for engagement in
spiritual and community development, we run the risk of embodying the issues
and being diverted, attacked, marginalized, or seduced. The media has a way of labeling people as
torchbearers for particular causes, comforting people that things are being
taken care of and then the rest of us can continue sitting on the couch. I felt this cynicism poke up its head when
Bono met with President Bush last year to discuss AIDS in
A look at the landscape of radio and television talk shows will quickly show that WUSU is not the only organization concerned with an erosion of values among youth. Conservative religious thinkers in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam are all prepared to blame the media, various musicians, the alcohol and tobacco “sin industries,” and illegal drugs for the downfall of American youth and society. They are calling for a return to traditional values, to traditional family roles, and to a life in religious community. They highlight the fact that churches, temples, and mosques offer opportunities for peaceful gathering and intergenerational conversation, an alternative to tumult of screens and streets.
At the same time, trouble brews. The pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church has forced a reckoning about the health and integrity of religious institutions. There is suspicion of organized religion and its tie to politics, with foreign governments looking warily at President Bush’s use of the word “crusade” to describe the war against (predominately Islamic) terrorist groups. Battles rage in Midwestern courtrooms and schools between those who believe in evolution and those who hold to a belief in divine creation, making religion seem antiquated, reactionary, and irrelevant to many who might otherwise participate in traditions of spiritual life and practice. For those privileged enough to read contemporary critical and social theory, religion is almost completely reduced to a fabricated narrative used to reinforce hegemony.
There is an enormous adaptive challenge, then, for anyone who would exercise spiritual leadership and authority in this landscape. How do you mediate among factions allied with materialist scientism and its dismissal of spiritual life, fundamentalists who strive for strict allegiance to literal interpretations of ancient texts, and new age gurus who would point to a common core of spiritual truths in all religions and advocate for their particular mélange of practices and beliefs?
There will, of course, be many battles fought along these lines and many interpretations and solutions. The WUSU answer is that being advocated by a cadre of religious teachers such as Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (my own teacher), Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Father Thomas Keating, and the Dalai Lama. These thinkers see the religions of the world akin to organs within the body of Earth’s collective spiritual life. The traditions contain a common, perennial core of beliefs and practices, but each has a particular angle on truth. To exercise spiritual leadership in this framework is to highlight the strengths of people’s birth religion and encourage seekers to be grounded in history and ritual, but also encourage them to have an open, pluralistic mind towards the truths that other religions hold. It is through dialogue that understanding emerges.
A key question, then, is how WUSU will engage religious institutions to encourage dialogue. Will we hold Stay Up events in churches? Will we invite religious youth groups to our concerts and help them lead dialogue sessions? Or will we ignore religious organizations in the structure of our events, allowing the conversations to emerge in the organic flow of dialogue? Initially, it will be in dialogue with the teachers who have come before us (such as the teachers of PAL-101B) that we formulate our hypotheses.
In a sense,
our entire intervention with the WUSU tour is an attempt to encourage this
disposition for dialogue – about the conflicts among values and ideologies in
our society, about the real and perceived responsibilities of youth, about the
work being avoided by both youth and adults in even addressing those conflicts,
and about the ways that we can strengthen our communities amid conflict and
increase our capacity to love. Our songs
will provide the first words in those conversations and a magnetic force of
unification, drawing people to engage.
The challenge as a magnet, of course, will then be to handle the
polarization that we inevitably cause, to engage the people who would label
themselves adverse or indifferent to our work.
We will also be struggling with the perils of enforced Responsibility
and the threat of developing a cult. By
writing this paper I hope to elicit responses that show me what our
responsibilities will be in that regard.
From there we can begin the move towards our own learning, our own gradual
claiming of Responsibility.
Erich H. Fromm. (1969). Escape
from Freedom.
Ronald A.
Heifetz & Marty Linsky. (2002). Leadership on the Line:
Staying alive through the dangers of leading.
Hazrat Inayat
Khan. (published on the web, date
unknown). The Unity
of Religious Ideals. http://www.spiritual-learning.org/message/khanindex.html
Robert Kegan. (1994). In Over
Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life.
Ed Sutherland. (2002, May
29). Carriers Make Full-Court Press for the Teen Market. M-Commerce Times.
http://www.mcommercetimes.com/Services/258
Ken Wilber. (1996). A Brief
History of Everything.
[1] Ed
Sutherland. (2002, May 29). Carriers Make Full-Court
Press for the Teen Market. M-Commerce Times. http://www.mcommercetimes.com/Services/258