Love and Knowledge: Recovering the Heart of Learning through Contemplation
By Arthur Zajonc, Physics Department Amherst College and Director of the Academic Program Contemplative Mind in Society
“Preventing conflicts is the work of politics; establishing peace is the work of education.” Maria Montessori1
It is a privilege to add my thoughts to those we have already heard. Jon Kabat Zinn spoke about the unification of knowing through contemplation, reminding us both how available mindfulness is, but also how difficult it can be to bring full awareness to the entirety of life.
Marilyn Nelson told us the story of teaching silence to those whose lives take them into war and conflict. We remember the young officer who pretended to be listening to music on his headphones, when really all he was listening to was silence.
We have participated in discussions and workshops suggesting that contemplative practices can be an important pedagogical method for ourselves and our students. And we have heard how important it can be to establish peace in ourselves in order to foster and maintain peace in the world.
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The Compassionate Humanity Community affirms:
Mission
We work to relieve and prevent suffering and make society more just, compassionate, and egalitarian — as we work on our self-development and how we relate with others as a model for the world we seek.
Core Principles
Respect for Equality
Everyone is created equal, with equal human rights and equal, infinite value. All citizens should be equal under the law. Everyone should treat others with dignity. No one should disrespect or control others due to one of their specific identities, such as race or gender.
Read MoreGoals
Cultivate justice and compassion
Assure everyone can meet their basic needs and participate fully in society
Oppose discrimination based on arbitrary traits like skin color
Strengthen unions, worker-controlled cooperatives, bottom-up hierarchies, and democratic equality throughout society
Organize peer-to-peer mutual support
Set aside the desire to dominate and exploit others for personal gain
Care for yourself so you can better serve others
Read MoreBy Michelle Goldberg
It’s no secret that many left-wing activist groups and nonprofits, roiled by the reckonings over sexual harassment and racial justice of the past few years, have become internally dysfunctional.
In June the Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote about the toll that staff revolts and ideologically inflected psychodramas were taking on the work: “It’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult.” Privately, I’ve heard countless people on the professional left — especially those over, say, 35 — bemoan the irrational demands and manipulative dogmatism of some younger colleagues. But with a few exceptions, like the brave reproductive justice leader Loretta Ross, most don’t want to go on the record. Not surprisingly, many of Grim’s sources in the nonprofit world were anonymous.
That’s why the decision by Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the progressive Working Families Party, to speak out about the left’s self-sabotaging impulse is so significant.
Read MoreBy Simon Schama
Feb. 12, 2022
Its title notwithstanding, “The Quiet Before” crackles with noise: Chartist orators whipping up support for suffrage in early-Victorian Britain; competing Futurist manifesto-shouters in a Florence theater in 1913, the evening concluding with a light bulb smashing against the side of Filippo Marinetti’s face “as he tried to read out a political statement”; white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville in August 2017. But Gal Beckerman’s elegantly argued and exuberantly narrated book also features quieter groups whose conversations, he demonstrates, eat away at the underpinnings of established authority: micro-commonwealths of letter-writing scientific observers in the 17th century; a West African newspaper in the 1930s constituted almost entirely from readers’ contributions; Deadheads dialing in to an early chat group lodged on a VAX computer in mid-1980s California. Great sea changes in politics and culture, Beckerman claims, would never have happened but for the creation of these kinds of collaborative communities operating under the radar of establishment scrutiny.
The idea that webs of allegiance, bonded by the conviction that one day their minority will become a majority, have brought about epochal change is not a new insight.
Read MoreBy Randy Thomas
We are living in the world in the greatest revolution in history, a huge spontaneous upheaval of the human race. Not a revolution planned and carried out by any particular party, race, or nation, but a deep elemental boiling over of all the inner contradictions that have ever been in people, a revolution of the chaotic forces inside everybody. This is not something we have chosen, nor is it anything we are free to avoid”
Thomas Merton
Indeed, we are living in the midst of uncertain and transitional times. The life, fate, and destiny of “human civilization” and our planetary home as we have historically come to understand it is unknown. It is a time of challenge, crisis, and opportunity for all of us.
Read MoreBy Carlos Lozada
It was early in my senior year of college when I received a comment from a professor, scribbled at the bottom of one of my papers, that would transform how I think and write, how I read books and how I try to read the world. So rare to possess written proof of an epiphany.
Carlos — this is just great! Nice job. You have a fine Hirschmanian mind.
Hirschmanian? I don’t recall, at age 20, knowing much about the social scientist Albert O. Hirschman — at least I hope I didn’t — but this nudge sent me deep into his writings on economic growth, political change and ideological temptation. Three decades later and almost 10 years after his death, I’ve yet to come up for air. Hirschman imbued me with skepticism of all-encompassing worldviews, which he dismissed as “shortcuts to the understanding of multifarious reality.” He warned against experts peddling self-serving agendas but also displayed “a bias for hope,” as one of his book titles has it, a caution against seductive fatalism at the prospect of political renewal. And particularly valuable for a time, like today, when polarization and demagogy are overtaking American politics, Hirschman bequeathed us a slim and vital book identifying the slippery arguments that pretend to engage in democratic deliberation, even as they strangle it.
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