Ursula King

The Power of Love and Compassion in Governance

Ursula King 
Professor Emerita of Theology and Religious Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies; University of Bristol, UK.; Member of the Advisory Board for the Spirit of Humanity Forum

Love is the free and imaginative outpouring of the spirit over all unexplored paths.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man

Discussions about governance can take place at many different levels; they encompass a wide range of dimensions, processes and projects. It is vital to reflect on the essential elements required for good and fair governance in all human groups, at all levels, from small and private to larger public and corporate organisations to global institutions with immense influence and power. To be effective and have an impact on the human community, these reflections must be rooted in participatory and collaborative dialogue since they have a decisive impact on the dynamics of the future, on what Thomas Berry called “reinventing the human” and “the great work” required to find our way into the future.

Central to this is “the way of love” or the “power of love” which often finds practical expression through acts of compassion addressed to our fellow humans and all living beings. Love and compassion are deep energies within human beings, affecting many activities and experiences in personal and social life.  Love is a great power that has deeply moulded human cultures from religion to the arts, philosophy, psychology, politics and countless other aspects of human behaviour. Love is a universally active, creative potential that provides a strong binding force for the various types of human groupings, whether family, clan, tribe, state, nation, or a global commonwealth, and it thus creates a firm basis for social coherence and for just governance. We also speak about the love of knowledge, the love for our work, the love of nature. Love is a universal concept that relates to many different experiences; it involves the idea of relating to each other, of bringing together and integrating different aspects into a larger whole.

Given the complexities of our global world it is no longer enough to simply describe and compare love and compassion. We need to make greater creative and innovative use of their powers by “seeding” their energies, by bringing about a new awakening that will stir and change human beings and creatively transform their modes of governance by motivating them to work for a viable future for planet Earth and all its people.

          

I call ideas about the extraordinary transformative powers of love and compassion “pneumatophores”. Let me explain. Pneumatophore is a term from the plant kingdom referring to the air roots of plants growing in swampy waters. Such roots are literally carriers of pneuma, of air or spirit. I use this word metaphorically to point to those transformative, empowering ideas that can serve as bearers of spirit and channels for new life of individuals and communities today. Within the secularity of modern society we need many such pneumatophores: ideas that are vibrant bearers of spirit, ideas that can literally “inspire” and guide us to generate new life. Such ideas may be drawn from traditional religions, secular society, the sciences or the arts; they may arise from the sacred or the secular, from national, transnational or global contexts – it does not matter where they come from as long as they lead us to a heightened awareness and sensibility, a sense of global responsibility, and a new kind of spiritual literacy that can help people to live a life of dignity on the planet without destroying the life-support system of the earth or killing each other.

A striking example of a powerful pneumatophore is the remarkable idea about the great capacity of “love energy” for the transformation of people and planet found in the writings of several contemporaries. Given the extraordinary critical situation we are in, it seems imperative to reflect on what love and compassion is, and what difference they can make to our world and our lives.  Since so many efforts in exercising love and charity have so dismally failed, the question arises whether we need an altogether different kind of love.

Two twentieth century thinkers have pursued this question with extraordinary determination and power: the French Jesuit scientist and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968). Unknown to each other, they both developed a most inspiring, insightful and deeply transformative vision of the energies of love and their immense potential for the transformation of humanity if we but can awaken to the universal powers of these energies within us at a global level. Awakening the spirit of humanity must mean the awakening of and further development of all the energies of love the human species is capable of. It is impossible to discuss this in any detail here, but I can perhaps convey something of the overall appeal of these ideas from these two thinkers.

Teilhard criticised the traditional concept of love as too static, too “spiritualised”, too divorced from its cosmic roots, from natural passion in which all love, including the love of God, has its starting point. He spoke of “the transformation of love” whereby love itself is undergoing a change of state, which we have to study as systematically as any other aspect of the human phenomenon, for love not only makes possible and deepens personal development, but it is equally necessary for the development of society. He said that “with love omitted there is truly nothing ahead of us except the forbidding prospect of standardisation and enslavement - the doom of ants and termites. It is through love and within love that we must look for the deepening of our deepest self, in the life-giving coming together of humankind.”

As he wrote in his great book The Human Phenomenon: “Humanity, the spirit of the Earth, the synthesis of the individual and peoples, the paradoxical reconciliation of …unity and multitude – for all these things, said to be so utopian, yet which are so biologically necessary, to actually take shape in the world, is not all we need to do, to imagine that our power of loving develops until it embraces the totality of men and women and of the Earth?”

Pitirim A. Sorokin shares a similar vision about the transformative powers of creative love in his great work The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation. Not unlike Teilhard, he writes that “we know about ‘love energy’ much less than about light, heat, electricity, and other forms of physical energy”. He maintains that “Unselfish love has enormous creative and therapeutic potentialities, far greater than most people think. Love is a life-giving force, necessary for physical, mental, and moral health.” It is the universality of love for all which is essential, for “only the power of unbounded love practiced in regard to all human beings can defeat the forces of interhuman strife, and can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet.”

Sorokin’s discussion of the “production, accumulation and distribution of love energy” is very challenging. Viewing love “as one of the highest energies known”, he rightly points out that the generation of love has been given “little thought, time and effort” in practically all societies; “it still remains in the most rudimentary form, corresponding to the primitive manual technology of material production in preliterate tribes.” Until now little effort has been made in the human community to produce love deliberately beyond what is produced “naturally”. Just as Teilhard de Chardin was interested in “the technicians and engineers of the spirit” to calculate and attend to our “spiritual energy resources”, Sorokin speaks of the “inventors and engineers of love production” who have helped to produce love in groups or in humanity at large, but this has happened spontaneously and haphazardly rather than deliberately. This shows an astounding lack of organized effort, and this neglect threatens the very future of humanity. So far, the family has been one of the most efficient agencies in producing altruistic love, but this love has to be extended beyond the family “for the human ‘world market’.” Such an extension of love can initially begin through an extension of existing “networks of love”, but the more arduous task of the “solidarization of humanity” requires conscious scientific efforts, a great deal of scientific research, and new techniques of altruistic education.

Much more would need to be said to convey the full impact of these ideas on the transformative powers of love as developed by these two twentieth century scientists (with Sorokin mainly drawing on the social sciences, and Teilhard on the earth sciences and human origins). Both thinkers were great prophetic visionaries, much misunderstood by their contemporaries. Both experienced the vital dynamic of love with such force that traditional concepts could not contain their ideas. They forged their own vocabulary, at times difficult to grasp, yet indicative of the newness of what they had to say. Both shared a deep existential sense of the torrent of love energy in the world – unchannelled, unstudied, unused, but there to be harnessed for the most powerful spiritual transformation of people and planet. To make creative, active use of this most tremendous of all resources, Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the urgent need for greater “amorisation” and for a science of “human energetics”, whereas Sorokin captured the same idea by speaking of the process of “altruization” and of a new science of “amitology”.

These are abstract ideas, but they may help us to trace the “way of love” more clearly, affirm it more strongly, and walk it more courageously, so that it may become a much more solidly sustaining and permanent foundation for all human lives. I think these “seeding ideas” or what I have called “pneumatophores” can contribute something vital to discussions about love and  compassion needed in all forms of governance to inspire, nurture and sustain the universal spirit of humanity so much needed in the evolutionary development of the human species in the twenty-first century.

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Kul Chandra Gautam

Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and Former Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF

Keith Runyon

Websites:

http://www.centerforinterfaithrelations.org/festival-of-faiths/

On the Good, the Bad and the Flourishing - and the Power of Empathy to bring the latter about

By Christophe Horváth, Primeast Southern Africa, 1 June 2014

As long as we criticize, fight and resist “the bad”, believing that we are “the good”, we really operate from the very same level of ego-consciousness, and can never achieve true Peace. True transformation can only come from soul consciousness that realizes that there is no “us” and “them”, and that the problem is not with “them”, but with our collective ignorance, lack of love and compassion for one another, and our failure to take responsibility to act accordingly.

On a fateful day in late July 1997, after we had twice walked like a line of ducks behind a mine detector, beeping all too often for my poor nerves, through two different minefields on our search mission earlier that morning, I found myself standing in a clearing in a jungle forest, in a valley some thirty meters down from the road over the Pich Nil Pass, which runs through the Kirirom Mountains, halfway on the road from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville, in Southern Cambodia. Suddenly, I heard an alarmed shout from up high above us. I knew then that we had been seen. A pregnant moment of silence …, and then a violent burst of bullets from a mounted machine gun, seemingly going on forever, from right over our heads, spraying its murderous load right down at us.

The five of us were an ad hoc team working with the UN Centre for Human Rights in Cambodia, investigating the extra-judicial killings that had taken place during and immediately after the July 1997 coup d’état. I was the one who, together with my Cambodian translator, had been the first to have found the remains of several burnt and buried bodies in the same area over the previous days. The day before our chief investigator had suggested that we’d return with a larger team, as there might be much more evidence to find in the same area, which was under military control. The night before we went back, I had had a nightmare with this single continuous image which filled me with a paralysing dread – the barrel of a machine gun sticking through a bush, pointed straight at me…

Because of the importance of the mission, I went along, notwithstanding my darkest fears. And here I stood then in that godforsaken patch of forest. My colleagues had somehow managed to throw themselves down and find shelter, but I was just standing there in the clearing, like a crystal vase, waiting to be hit, and shattered into a million pieces. The tree next to me was perforated, like a cardboard box, just above my head, and branches and leafs fell all over me – my world falling apart in slow motion around me. I have never tasted such an ugly, metallic taste of angst in my mouth, and knew for certain I was about to die.

As by miracle, I wasn’t hit, and neither were any of my colleagues. It turned out later that, unbeknownst to us, we were in a natural basin in the terrain protecting us, and we simply could not have been hit. But what became equally clear later was that the soldiers had indeed fired with the intention to kill us all. We were later arrested by a patrol of heavily armed adolescent soldiers, and, although seriously threatened, later reluctantly released, grace to our UN status and credentials. But we very nearly laid down our lives there, on the battlefield for human rights.

I am sharing this personal story, not to highlight the violent murder and abuse often inflicted by regimes based on ego, power hunger and greed, as we are all aware, but also to show that often our well-meant – sometimes cavalier - attempts to expose dictators, and fight their foot soldiers and their injustices, are actually locked in the same level of thinking, and therefore doomed to fail.

I learned this the hard way, both in my human rights work and environmental advocacy work – in Cambodia, Burma and elsewhere. When our mission is all about exposing the “bad guys”, we can easily fall in the trap of starting to operate from the same low vibrancy level as the very ones we are accusing – i.e. from a place of anger, hatred and fear. As long as there is us and them, and us being right and them being wrong, and us blaming and pointing fingers, we are all operating from the same ego consciousness level – whether as perpetrator, victim, or vindicator - and there will never be true peace.

“Good” and “Bad” will be forever in a struggle for the upper hand. We will forever be stuck in this war between “good” and “evil”, unless we find a better way. It is only “Greatness” in our being, leadership and actions of service that can overcome and transform this.

The first step in transforming the wrongs of the world, has to therefore start with ourselves. I have come to see that our outer world is a - delayed – reflection of our inner world. Transformation therefore has to start with our own awareness and consciousness, our own presence and authenticity, and our own love and compassion. With seeing our oneness, interconnectedness, and interdependence as humankind. With truly “getting” that there is no “them”; there is only “us”.

One deep insight I got from the Spirit of Humanity Forum 2014 is this sense of higher synthesis. Where we all know about the destructive systems, practices and behaviours that threaten people and life on our Planet (the “bad”), and the democracy, human rights, development, humanitarian and sustainability movements and organisations (the “Good”), the new insight that emerged was the one of the Flourishing (the “Great”) of humankind in healthy, dynamic and enduring harmony with Nature and Planet Earth, and the new, higher level of collective human consciousness that is required to bring it about. In my view, the Flourishing can never be achieved by fighting and exposing the bad, but it can only be attained by transforming the mind-sets, heart-sets and behaviours of ourselves and all of humankind. What this requires is no war or revolution, but nothing less than the widespread evolution of human consciousness.

And this all begins with our own self-acceptance, for we cannot truly care for others, and see them for who they truly are, if we have not first learnt to love ourselves, all of us, our strengths and weaknesses, our shine and our scars. And this means self-forgiveness, and full open-eyed engagement with all of our guilt and shame. It requires us to learn to become fully naked, authentic and vulnerable. Only then can we truly engage with others, from the deepest heart and soul level.

Inquiries for self-reflection:

·       What can you do to be more present, to be more aware, to be more in the here and now?

·       What attachments and addictions can you let go of that drain you from your energy to be present and available in the here and now?

·       What can you stop craving and chasing, so you can enjoy a life of more simplicity and enoughness, and presence to, and acceptance of, what is (rather than what we believe should be)

·       What shortcomings and wrongdoings, guilt and shame, can you forgive yourself for, or ask forgiveness for, so that you can let them go once and for all?

·       What other incompletions are occupying your mind, that you either need to deal with or let go of?

Once we are starting to fully accept ourselves, we can become fully present for and truly empathize with others, recognizing our own humanity in all their trials and tribulations. To experience true empathy, we need to feel other beings’ pain and suffering, as well as their pleasure and joy, acutely within ourselves, as if it were our own.

Inquiries for self-reflection:

·       How can you make it a practice to really truly listen to another, without being in the course of formulating your own righteous answer in your mind – just being fully open and welcoming to the message of the other, without any judgment, bias or distraction?

·       Can you listen to the listening of the other, behind their story – and see that it may come from the same ‘thrown-ness’ or victimhood that you may have experienced, now or in the past?

·       Can you see yourself in the other, and see that, fundamentally, you share the same humanity, the same needs, and, ultimately, the same aspirations?

What marks the greatest leaders of our time, such as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi and Mother Theresa, is precisely their ability to empathize with those who struggle, engage those who thrive to the cause, see a greater future, and facilitate its co-creation with all involved. A great leader is committed to the success of the whole group, rather than just that of himself, or of some smaller interest groups. Only a leader who empathizes with all can be truly of service.

Ubuntu is the essentially African understanding that I am who I am because of who you are. “Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu” in Zulu language means that a person only becomes a full person through other persons. This signifies that for us to be fully human we need a profound sense of empathy with others. This empathy, in turn, requires us to truly love and accept ourselves, as, if we do not have love and compassion for ourselves, then how can we truly feel love and compassion for anybody else? It also requires us to have the courage to be vulnerable, as, when we can love and accept ourselves, and be authentic about both our strengths and weaknesses, then we can also accept the light and shadow in others, and love them anyway for who they are.

When there is lack of responsibility, ownership, vision and integrity in a country, and when abuse, complacency and indifference are the norm, I suggest that this is a consequence of both a prevailing lack of empathy, as well as of lack of self-love, self-esteem, self-worth and sense of fundamental human dignity in society. If this is so, then the fundamental inquiry is really the following:

Inquiries for self-reflection:

·       How can we inspire, heal, liberate and empower others to accept and love themselves more, so that empathy for self and others can become the primary lens through which we all look at each other?

·       How can we start with ourselves, accepting and loving ourselves fully, so we can be the transformation that we want to see in the world?

When we operate from Soul – beyond ego – we can connect with other Souls, and experience their pain and suffering, as well as their joy and elation, as our own. This is a manifestation of our Oneness. Empathy then, is our ability and practice of stepping into the shoes of another, and bringing the best of who we are to their support, knowing that this, ultimately, is only in our own enlightened Self-interest.

In closing, self-love and empathy are the essential conditions for us to become true transformational servant leaders – so that we can be love and compassion in action, and contribute to bringing about the Flourishing of Humankind and Nature on Planet Earth, which is, I believe, the greatest purpose we can have in our life.

At the 2014 Spirit of Humanity Forum, Christophe Horváth co-facilitated Session V “Stories of Nations” on the value of empathy, and provided musical inspiration together with his colleague, Masankho Banda. Since 2008, Christophe has been a consultant, facilitator, trainer and coach with Primeast, working as its Head serving the Change Agents and Social Entrepreneurs Sector. His current work is all about inspiring, liberating and empowering leaders and teams of purposeful organisations in the non-profit sector to be the best they can be and to contribute to the Flourishing. Christophe is also an inspirational singer, writer and public speaker. Married with three children, he operates from his base in Lilongwe, Malawi. Prior to his current position, Christophe worked for 15 years in refugee protection, human rights, environmental advocacy and development cooperation, in Belgium, Turkey, Cambodia, Burma, Indonesia, East Timor and Malawi.


You can find more about Christophe and his work on:

http://www.primeast.com/sector/change-agents

http://www.linkedin.com/in/christophehorvath

You can reach him directly via christophe.horvath@primeast.com

Christophe Horváth

Primeast’s Head serving the Change Agents and Social Entrepreneurs Sector, and heads Primeast's Southern Africa office in Lilongwe, Malawi.

Websites:

www.primeast.com/sector/change-agents
www.linkedin.com/in/christophehorvath

Yaqing Mao

Love: the source of a truly happy life

Three stories in developing ‘Child Friendly Schools’ in China

By Yaqing Mao,

Deputy Dean, College of Education Administration, Beijing Normal University

  

I was pleased to have the opportunity to attend the Spirit of Humanity Forum in Reykjavik in April this year, and shared my thoughts on the topic of core values in governance. As a Chinese educator and researcher, I deeply believe that love is the source of a truly happy life, and therefore love must be at the core of the values in any schools. In my experience of leading the ‘Child Friendly Schools’ project funded by the UNICEF and the Chinese government, I have learned a great deal with regard to the importance of love and compassion in education. 

Here I recall three stories.

In June 2006, for the UNICEF project, I went to spend some time at the University of Lund, Malmo, Sweden. Whilst in Malmo, I also visited some local schools, and in one of the schools, I met a Swedish teacher who had recently returned after an extended stay to China. She told me that she fell in love with Chinese culture and has been sharing her experiences in China with her students. I noticed, on the one of the boards in her classroom, the Chinese character “LOVE” written in its traditional form of which the Chinese character "heart" was a part (held with hands). In 1950s, Chinese language underwent reform and the characters taught in schools have since then been in their simplified forms. However, the traditional forms are more pictographic and more expressive of the etymology of each word. Therefore I was impressed by this teacher’s sensitivity to the deeper meaning of this Chinese word, and had been contemplating on this particular character and the notion of love since then, especially when I considered the aim of our Child Friendly Schools project. What kind of place should a school be, if not a place of love, a place built with our hearts and with care? What should be the mission of a school if not enabling each child’s flourishing?

         

Shortly after returning from Sweden, I went for a meeting in Shanghai. Arriving at the airport, I found a gigantic billboard showing the same Chinese character "love" in its traditional form, accompanied by a sentence saying "The character can be simplified, but love, missing a heart, cannot be." Indeed, in the contemporary version of the character of love, the part of heart (held with hands) is removed, leaving just the hands, which is the origin of the character “friend”. In changing the form, the character “love” has now missed out the heart and instead is stressing the meaning of support, camaraderie and friendship. Once again, I contemplated on the nuanced but most significant difference in the two ways of writing the same word. This had made me realise the need to persist on our greater mission: no matter how the aims and goals of our projects may vary, the heartfelt love must be undoubtedly what underpins all our educative endeavours.

博愛

At the beginning of the Child Friendly Schools project, many school Principals considered the idea of inclusion as being receptive. That is to say that the schools are open to children of all backgrounds and all abilities within the community. However I noted that in the day-to-day running of the school, there was little engagement with children with special educational needs or disabilities. Often they were permitted to stay on their own when the rest of the class participate in outdoor activities. When I enquired, I realised that this was because school leaders and teachers recognised these children’s special needs, had sympathy for them and therefore allowed different treatments for these students. Despite the good intention, the result was that these students were feeling isolated from the rest of the school.

Indeed, it took some time for school leaders to truly understand the difference between commiseration and compassion. Our commiseration/sympathy for the child with special needs can create emotional distance between us and the child. This is what happened in some schools. Although intending to be humanising, our commiseration can equally be dehumanising and belittling because by pitying the child’s physical difficulties and other educational needs, we were reducing the rich reality of his/her life. By contrast, our compassion for the child with special needs will enable us to understand his/her desire to be treated equally and as normal. This understanding would urge us to act on our deepest feeling and love for the child by providing the support he/she needs in order to participate in the school’s activities fully, and thereby to be included.

One headteacher told me that the most important thing for him was to help every student find his/her own values in life and self-worth, but to do so, a caring environment must be in place in the school. When a school shifts its approach to inclusion from commiseration to compassion, the children also change their attitudes towards special needs in themselves and in others. As our results show, children with special needs are becoming more confident and happier and feel that they can indeed do better for themselves.

Based on the three stories above, I try to response to topics of the SOH Forum.

First, heartfelt love is fundamental to children’s happiness and thriving in education. What does heartfelt love consist of? I believe that the following elements are fundamental: understanding, respect, care, compassion and responsibility. In other words, love without understanding is blindness; love without respect is arrogance; love without care is sham; love without compassion is pity; love without responsibility is indulgence. In the Child Friendly Schools project, each teacher and school leader must ask himself/herself whether he/she is offering the children truly heartfelt love, and whether his/her love is proactive, rigorous and nurturing and contains these key elements above. The Chinese sage Confucius implores us to cultivate love as a primary virtue. Therefore, as an educator, I believe that love must be at the centre of a school’s ethos.

Second, humanity is a core value of any school. This, I believe, is of great importance for contemporary Chinese society.

China is at the new historical junction where the society is gradually adopting a more “people-oriented” development strategy. During this transition, a single-minded pursuit of economic growth cannot meet the overall needs of the society or engender hope for its people. I believe that such shift must begin with transforming our educational system. In the past, education was considered as an important means to promote economic growth, and therefore education in China was focusing on the cultivation of skills for employment and market competition and basing its long-term evaluation mechanism on measuring students’ academic attainments. At present, the aim of education is being re-considered by the Chinese government and Chinese people. We recognise that the older view of education, although was once helpful in China’s contemporary history, also had detrimental effects, i.e. children’s critical thinking skills, creativity, imagination and the abilities take to responsibility for themselves and for others were hugely neglected. Therefore, we are updating our educational system aimed to help our children become knowledgeable, ethical and responsible citizens.

I am convinced that a truly happy life for a young person is more than academic achievement, but also involves his/her ability to connect with others and with the world, and above all with his/her inner values. In other words, education in China must explicitly be aimed at cultivating humanity which can encompass the cultivation of many essential attributes, such as talents, good personality, the ability to be free, rationality, moral sentiment, self-worth, and more. And equally important is that schools are places of humanity – of love, care and respect, so that children and young people educated in this way can aspire to be fully human themselves.

Reflection on Contribution

Christoph Quarch-Reflection on contribution

It was a great experience for me to participate in the 2^nd  of Humanity Forum and to share some insights of mine concerning the general Topic: The Power of Love and Compassion in Governance and Leadership. On Friday, 11^th April, I had the honour and privilege to contribute my reflections in the section "Philosophy, Religion, Spirituality". Doing this I focussed on the issue of language: How can we talk about love without talking about love but in love? I noticed: It happens so easily that speakers fall into their usual jargon, e.g. when religious leaders speak about "love and compassion" as a stereotype. How might a fresh and authentic language look like - a language in which the word "love" triggers a particular vibrations within our souls and hearts? That we so rarely experience love in our social institutions might have got something to do with the simple fact that usually there is a language of hostility, competition and technocracy. What actually seems to be required is a new kind of "Universal Poetry" (F. Schlegel), which enables people to talk in a pure and authentic way.