Gentle Unpacking

How do you tolerate intolerance? One of the idea-tools I find useful from Yogic philosophy is Ishwara. It roughly translates as “God understood as a person” in contrast to an impersonal, impossible to reduce to words, transcendent “explanation”. Your Ishwara then becomes the closest you can possibly come to an explanation. Your Ishwara and mine can co-exist because they are imperfect and thus compatible. 

Unless of course you insist that mine can’t exist, and your way is the correct way, and I am not willing to accept the binary you are imposing. If me not saying you are wrong or I am wrong, is seen by you as saying you are wrong! I am not allowed to have a “believe what you want as long as it doesn’t impose on me” view. 

There are some impositions we can’t avoid. Some joint decisions we must make. Sometimes you have to come up with pragmatic hacks. “I am going to be as tolerant as possible, but I am going to have boundaries”. 

I like the idea of unconditional love, for example. But what can happen if you gift someone that love, is they come at you hard to test those boundaries. Holding space for someone still needs to include the paradoxic condition of them being loved but no longer involved. 

That is hard when you have a story you tell about yourself. Reality seldom permits completely consistent stories. Real life is a messy combination of learning and unlearning. Everything that happens challenges our story. We have to hold and release to create. We look for answers, while needing to make peace with constantly improving our questions. 

Gently unpacking issues that may never reach resolution.

Best Practice

One of my favourite essays to regularly reread is Scott Alexander’s “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup”. It reminds me of how some of our biggest fights are with the people we most agree with. Because we care so much about the same issues. We understand the same nuance that other people don’t even see. An advantage of being a Global Citizen is the natural social experiment that goes on. We get to see Best Practice at play in a variety of contexts. Our issues, but not our issues. What if we changed this aspect? What if we keep that aspect the same? A strong temptation in any research is to provide Public Relations and Legal Arguments for pre-existing beliefs. Numbers and words to pad our gut feel. Looking far from home is often an easier way to unpack issues that are too close to see. Then, like Bruce Lee, we can take what is useful, discard what is not, and add what is uniquely our own.

Too Close

Deal

There are four tools to deal with risk - avoid, mitigate, transfer or accept. 'A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.' Risk is like stress, it isn't that it shouldn't be taken, it is that it should be taken consciously. Our muscles respond to stress. It is what builds strength. Strength is built over time through regular exposure. Avoiding risk altogether is impossible. Life has a way of putting us to the test. We can mitigate it through knowledge and preparation. We can transfer or share it by building support. We can accept it if we build the confidence that we can cope. We can deal.

A painting I did as a schoolboy

Not About You

I have had a couple of attempts at becoming a Vegetarian. I am completely convinced that we need to dramatically reduced our meat consumption. The two most compelling reasons for me are environmental sustainability, (the amount of food needed to produce meat) and the horrors of factory farming. I am not vegetarian.

The push back I have is that it is not that relevant if I, Trevor Black, am a vegetarian. It is very relevant if the 7.5 Billion people on the planet are eating too much meat. The minute I put myself on the moral high ground and start preaching to others that they too should do what I am doing, my experience has been that defence mechanisms kick in. Whatever the issue.

We are nudged. We move from where we are, not from where others want us to be. The best form of judgement, in my experience, is when someone who likes me and is on my side says, 'do you think we are doing this wrong?'

The same is true of the other messy issues we are working on. I am not a fan of pitch fork attacks on individuals who get it wrong. If someone gets it wrong, we have gotten it wrong. Whether the issues is racism, privilege, sexism, homophobia, intolerance or any of the other ills we perceive in others. It is amazing, for example, how in South Africa (which is fundamentally a very religious, conservative society) someone who is very aware of race and gender issues can still be homophobic. Someone who is liberal can still be unaware of their privilege. A feminist can still be racist.

There is a push for 'personal' experience and to speak from your perspective. From your 'lived experience'. While we can only see things from our perspective, we would do well to own all our challenges.

If you live in a racist society, and you are not racist, well... it's not about you.