This Power We Have to Foster Each Other's Flowering
The dramatic tension between the primal desire to be connected to others and the hardwired instinct to protect ourselves from others' possibly hurtful attacks explains why relationships are so hard.
A weaving of sources.
make each other
the exception
that flowers between
fact and fancy
the improbable form
in which
a more beautiful
structure of being
might be found
I pulled this card out of my Almanac of Birds deck a while ago and have been sitting with it. Carrying it around with me as a bookmark, taking it out every so often to read anew. Letting it sink in and cogitate. It tickles my brain at some deeper, associative level I can't quite nail down or verbalize. It speaks to me but I'm having trouble speaking about it without descending into the dry, logical mode of analysis.
We mutually blossom in the space between fact and fancy.
That was my attempt to find words for it when I shared the image on Facebook. It is in the right realm, but doesn't quite capture it.
"Between fact and fancy." That's the phrase that keeps echoing. That middle area that is not quite fact and not quite fancy, not fully concrete and objective while not fully imaginary and subjective. Intersubjective, perhaps, the types of fancy that become fact due to our mutual belief in them. We are always negotiating that space between us where our differing perceptions of the facts intersect.
This is more generous than that, though. We don't negotiate, we "make each other." It's a giving and creative act, this power we have to foster each other's to flowering. It's a gift we reciprocally give each other. My belief in you and your belief in me is what leads to the flowering, my fancy about the fact of you and your fancy about the fact of me. When we see the inherent value in each other.
It's not the location between fact and fancy that is exceptional, it's engendering each other to flower in that space that is the wonder. It's through being seen as worthy that we achieve the form in which a more beautiful structure of being might be found. We become more because of others.
A gift from my feed:
What we give doesn't always return, but what we give is always what we are.
Wish I knew a source so I might dig deeper. Regardless, it speaks for itself. We can't control how others respond, only what we ourselves do. Even at the risk of lacking mutuality and reciprocity, it is in striving to make others the exception that flowers between fact and fancy that we find our own meaning, that more beautiful structure of being.
We become more because of others.
The seeing is generous because it means accepting others as they are with all their flaws and mistakes, getting past judgment to valuing their inherent worth.
Our fixation with flawlessness is deeply ingrained. It pulses at the roots of cancel culture, moral puritanism, correctional violence, and unattainable beauty standards. Is this a trait we inherited from nature? Isn’t evolution constantly perfecting life? . . . Evolution isn’t an engineer, but a tinkerer. . . .Natural selection . . . is a force that acts within systems impacted by constraints and history. It can be positive in that it produces adaptations, and negative in that it eliminates less fit variants. . . .Evolution is responding to circumstance. Random mutations continually arise. When these improve survival or reproduction in a specific place, natural selection tends to preserve them across generations. Rather than evolution designing based on a grand vision, it tinkers to find more workable ways to thrive within a given environment. . . .While an engineer selects materials and tools best suited for executing their design, natural selection works with what’s available. . . . With tinkering, everything can be put to use. This is partly why we see nature having created such rich diversity, having used different building blocks to address the same basic questions of living. . . .An engineer’s success is revealed as a perfect, finished product. Natural selection, meanwhile, has produced a beautiful panoply of imperfect compromises. . . . Imperfection is the backbone of our lives.Nature has never demanded perfection of us, nor has evolution ever rewarded it. Total perfection would mean the end of evolution: the very force that produced us. What is consistently rewarded is adaptivity. This is what I aspire to. Like nature, I long to flourish in all of my unfinishedness. I want to tinker: to iterate in dialogue with the world, and learn to make everything of use. To know, in my very bones, that imperfection makes me human.
We get made through tinkering, through trial and error, learning from mistakes, perpetually and in relationship with circumstances. We are not abstract ideals, we are dynamically situated in a specific time, place, perspective, and experience. We are of our environments.
From Reweaving the Rainbow:
we evolved to identify patterns
to form lessons from chaos
but life is not a test
mistakes are only
a jumping-off point
a way to grasp our edges
the contours of our geometry
and give them new shape
Mistakes are only a jumping-off point.
-----
Because we are dynamically situated in a specific time, place, perspective, and experience, we are each unique. We are always at least somewhat different than each other. The instinct is to judge those differences as deviations and deficiencies. We fear that valuing a different manifestation of human experience will devalue our own manifestation. A more beautiful structure of being might be found in seeing those differences as complementary to our own, equally worthy and valuable.
We live in a universe of particles and waves. . . .In some experiments, light acts as a wave, spreading out and producing patterns of interference. In others, light acts as a particle, arriving in distinct packages called photons. Danish physicist and philosopher Niels Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize in 1922, proposed that these apparently contradictory ways of understanding light were in fact complementary: each revealed an aspect of reality that would be incomplete on its own, but together illuminated a holistic picture. . . .Through the lens of complementarity, opposites do not negate one another, and duality reveals more dimensions of existence. Rather than contradiction being taken as evidence of falsity, it opens the door to a wider view. Paradox expands our understanding. . . .How we observe reality scientifically can hold a mirror to how we live our lives personally, culturally, and ecologically. . . .When I try to contort myself into boxes, I find only confinement. When I welcome paradoxes, I find myself expanded. New dimensions of life open to me.We are living in a time of competing cultural truths that goes beyond the twisting of facts into falsities. . . . it can feel as if we are living in fragmented realities. . . . What if we allowed our truths to coexist rather than constantly trying to convince each other to see the light, when light itself is a paradox? . . .Nature is a balance of stability and chaos, life sustained by death, individual yet relational, both brutal and beautiful—and all of it, complementary.
What if we allowed our truths to coexist rather than constantly trying to convince each other to see the light. We can be both individual and relational.
From my feed:
Hi, Norwegian here.
A hard thing to explain about social democracy is that we WANT our taxes to go to the "undeserving."
Not because we're naive.
Because it works.
Healthy people cost less.
Educated people contribute more.
Housed people are more stable.
The "undeserving" are actually pretty good investments.
But the main point is that in a healthy society there are no "undeserving."
There are just people.
Follow for more from a social democracy,
where dignity is not a privilege.
Which leads marvelously to the book I want to share in this post.
Of Dignity: The Essential Role It Plays in Resolving Conflict by Donna Hicks, (forward by Desmond Tutu)
A valuable and insightful book.
Valuable, insightful, and practical--Hicks developed what she calls the dignity model after more than twenty years working at international conflict mediation, at bringing leaders of warring nations and parties together to help them find common ground. She found what is most necessary and effective, most pragmatic, is getting them to see each other's dignity.
Valuable, insightful, and practical--Hicks developed what she calls the dignity model after more than twenty years working at international conflict mediation, at bringing leaders of warring nations and parties together to help them find common ground. She found what is most necessary and effective, most pragmatic, is getting them to see each other's dignity.
Dignity is an internal state of peace that comes with the recognition and acceptance of the value and vulnerability of all living things.So relationships only work when treating others with dignity becomes the baseline for our interactions. We must treat others as if they matter, as if they are worthy of care and attention. The key lies in being able to see the essential humanity of the other. Dignity violations are at the heart of every international conflict:
Our desire for dignity runs deep. I believe that it and our survival instincts are the most powerful human forces motivating our behavior. In some cases, our desire for dignity is even stronger than our desire for survival. People risk their lives to protect their honor and that of people in their social groups; wars are fought over dignity threats. This paradoxical reaction--putting one's life on the line to protect one's dignity--puts dignity ahead of survival.More importantly, dignity is the key to all relationships, not simply international ones. Hicks wrote this guide to share what she learned with everyone. It is easy to read and always interesting, with examples for each concept drawn from all walks of life. The ideas she shares sometimes seem so obvious and common sense as to not need explaining, except, as she articulates, each one is difficult to successfully achieve on a consistent basis because they can run counter to our evolved, ingrained instincts; we have to learn how to fight our natures.
What we need for survival (a connection to the group) can also feel like the greatest source of threat to our survival (when the connection becomes hurtful). These two realities can live comfortably side by side when we are getting along with one another. The problem arises when we threaten each other's dignity--when a relationship becomes the source of pain instead of pleasure.Developing the skills that Hicks presents in this book leads to healthier relationships and a happier self.
This dramatic tension between the primal desire to be connected to others and the hardwired instinct to protect ourselves from others' possibly hurtful attacks explains why relationships are so hard. . . .
Our sensitivity and vulnerability to being injured by others and our ability to injure them--both part of our evolutionary legacy--set us up for struggles in our relationships. Relationships break down when the need for individual self-protection overrides the need for connection. We walk away from a relationship--political or personal--if it begins to feel threatening or does not serve our individual desire to be treated well. Our self-preservation instincts predispose us to favor disconnection over connection: "better safe than sorry." Is it any wonder that intimacy feels threatening? Being vulnerable sets us up for being injured or re-injured.
The act of honoring dignity is powerful in and of itself: it makes us feel good and look good, and it brings out the best in each of us. When we extend dignity to others, we open ourselves to the possibility of becoming more caring, more loving, more compassionate--in a word, more human. I think I finally understand what Archbishop Tutu means by ubuntu. "A person is a person though another person," he believes. "My humanity is caught up, bound up, inextricably, with yours. We can only be human together."This book is full of valuable information for every reader.
A bit more from the book:
The dignity model is an approach I developed to help people understand the role that dignity plays in their lives and relationships. It is my response to what I have observed to be a missing link in our understanding of conflict: our failure to recognize how vulnerable humans are to being treated as if they didn't matter. It explains why it hurts when our dignity is violated, and it gives us the knowledge, awareness, and skills to avoid unknowingly harming others. It demonstrates how to rebuild a relationship that has broken under the weight of conflict and suggests what to do to reconcile.-----A good relationship feels good, but one in which both parties recognize and acknowledge each other's value and worth feels even better. . . . With safety comes the freedom to welcome intimacy and genuine connection.-----Scientists now know something remarkable: we are hardwired to feel what others are feeling without having to say a word. . . . that we are more than just individual entities hardwired for individual survival, that we are social beings that grow and flourish when our relationships are intact; our survival is inextricably linked to the quality of our relationships, and our growth and development occur in the context of relationships.-----Throughout our lives, our inner worlds are dominated by a struggle between the ontological drives to individuate, to become who we are, separate from all others, and to integrate, to remain connected, to belong, to be a part of something greater than ourselves. Thus, it makes sense that an assault on one's identity and the exclusion that results from it can be emotionally devastating. . . .Whenever people feel that they cannot be themselves, when they feel that they don't fit in or aren't safe to be who they are without fear of being treated badly or judged as inferior to others, their dignity is wounded.-----Money cannot satisfy the profound human desire to belong, to feel the comfort and safety that acceptance brings.-----Honoring dignity is not just about being nice. It even transcends the issue of survival. Instead, it is about living our lives in a way that promotes each other's physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being and expands our humanness.
Our survival is inextricably linked to the quality of our relationships, and our growth and development occur in the context of relationships. We can be both individual and relational, can simultaneously individuate and integrate.
I was in the minority of those who really liked the movie A.I. when it came out, and much from it has stuck with me. Including Dr. Know.
I'm a lifelong reader of science fiction, so I've always been intrigued by looking at how our technology is changing and how it then changes us. I was in library school and working as a high school librarian when this movie came out, and I've been anticipating Dr. Know ever since.
The magic of honoring dignity only happens when we can overcome our fear and become vulnerable. Extending dignity demonstrates a level of emotional development that is the polar opposite of our hardwired reactions of fear, rage, and revenge. We can't be curious to hear and acknowledge others until we get past fear.
Something like the film’s Flesh Fair, where unemployed humans destroy the robots that took their jobs, seems like a natural extension of today’s fierce opposition to data centers. But the prophecy that has already been fulfilled has to do with the way people obtain and process information with AI assistance. . . .David comes across a digital interface called Dr. Know, so named because “there’s nothing he doesn’t.” Dr. Know embodies the sum total of all human knowledge, neatly contained within an animated, overtly Einsteinian hologram. For a small fee, it will offer some of that knowledge . . .Finally, when David urges Gigolo Joe to press on further, Joe asks Dr. Know to combine Fairy Tale and Flat Fact. . . .It’s David’s eagerness to consume a combination of fact and fiction that is the film’s most prescient depiction of the future so far.A.I. anticipated that information would eventually become personalized around interest. Now, everyone with an iPhone has the ability to exist in a choose-your-own-adventure version of reality. Objective truth has become like a Whopper at Burger King: You can have it your way. . . .LLMs like ChatGPT learn to anticipate what their users really want out of a prompt—sort of like Gigolo Joe intuiting what David is after in the Dr. Know scene—before delivering the goods. . . .Unlike the fixed body of information found in books and archives, chatbots can use their silver digital tongues to tell users exactly what they want to hear. Ask a conversational AI to speculate on an outcome based on flimsy evidence and it will spin a compelling yarn designed to seem plausible. . . .David refuses to leave well enough alone because his question is rooted in an emotional truth . . . That desire matters more than evidence. . . .David’s yearning is so powerful that he chooses a beautiful myth over a harsher reality. As our own reality grows harsher, more people seem to be making the same choice. Maybe that is why no one can agree on anything anymore: It is hard to persuade someone that the way they feel is wrong.It’s much easier, though, for an AI to convince someone that reality is aligned with their feelings.
This is an intriguing perspective, the flip side of the dynamic I'm developing in this post. This is finding AI support for individuation at the cost of integration. In this space between fairy tale and flat fact, the relationship with others is missing--so there is only one person's perspective being amplified. The space between fact and fancy relies on meeting there with others; we provide the support for each other, and it doesn't work alone.
Not hearing the voices of others or acknowledging their value only leads to conflict.
Conflict stays alive when people do not feel acknowledged and when their voices are not heard.-----When we perceive that we are being offended or hurt by others--when someone violates our dignity--our instinctive, self-protective hardwiring tells us that what matters most is our own well-being and survival, not the survival of the relationship. When we feel that somebody is hurting us by violating our dignity, our instincts tell us to react just as intensely as our early ancestors would have: flee or fight. . . . Instinctively, then, we want to eliminate the threat by either withdrawing from the relationship or fighting back. Both options disconnect us.-----We do not deliberately hurt each other just for the fun of it. We are often unaware of the ways we routinely and subtly violate each other's dignity. At the same time, we are not fully aware of the power we have to make people feel good by recognizing their worth.-----Emotionally identifying with others is the sine qua non of this process.-----When we are psychologically injured, the area of our brain that is activated is the same area that is activated when we experience a physical injury . . . We wouldn't think twice about rushing our child to an emergency room if he broke his arm or leg; the pain and suffering of a physical injury is acknowledged immediately. When his spirit is broken by shame or humiliation, when damage is done to his sense of worth, there [is often] nowhere to go to take care of the wound. . . . We humans need acknowledgement for what we have suffered.-----If leaders want people to buy into and support their ideas about governance, understanding how to keep them feeling emotionally well balanced is fundamental. Treating them with dignity creates not only inner stability but a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves, whether it is an organization, a corporation, or a nation. Those who feel that they are seen, included, and recognized for their contributions are more willing to extend themselves for this greater good than are people who feel dismissed.-----[Nelson] Mandela's respect for humanity never faltered. It seems to have been the one anchoring truth that let him give even the most brutal of his captors the benefit of the doubt. Under circumstances that would drive most of us to demonize those who do us harm, Mandela didn't. He never doubted his captors' capacity for goodness and tenderness. It is as if he recognized something in them that they were not able to see in themselves. He saw something bigger, something greater, something sacred--he saw their dignity.-----Vulnerability is where the power lies; the magic happens when we expose the truth to ourselves and others and are ultimately set free by it. That is quite a paradox. Our instincts fool us into thinking that deception and cover-up are a good strategy for self-preservation. When our self-protective instincts overpower us--and they can at a moment's notice upon the hint of a threat--our life seems to be on the line. Making ourselves vulnerable at such a time feels like suicide. . . .When we can open ourselves to feelings, we are rewarded with the opportunity to connect in the most beautiful way. The walls of separation disintegrate, and we join together in a shared awareness of the painful aspects of our humanity. . . .Part of the magic of honoring dignity is that it quickly becomes reciprocal. Unlike offering forgiveness, which lies completely in the hands of the victim (the victim either forgives or doesn't forgive), honoring dignity engages both the victim and the perpetrator in the healing process; either one can act to shift the dynamics of the relationship. The forgiveness approach and the dignity approach are very different. When dignity is engaged, it is assumed that both parties are in need of understanding--that both contributed to the breakdown of the relationship, that both played a role, though perhaps not an equal role.-----Extending forgiveness or dignity demonstrates a level of emotional development that is the polar opposite of our hardwired reactions of fear, rage, and revenge. . . . Both processes, bestowing forgiveness and honoring dignity, show us what it looks like to not only master our emotional hardwiring but choose to reach out to those who do us harm with a recognition of our shared humanity.
Conflict stays alive when people do not feel acknowledged and when their voices are not heard.
Conflict is resolved when people feel we are acknowledging them and hearing their voices.
We are not fully aware of the power we have to make people feel good by recognizing their worth.
The magic of honoring dignity is that it quickly becomes reciprocal.
Reach out to others with a recognition of our shared humanity.
The magic of honoring dignity only happens when we can overcome our fear and become vulnerable. Extending dignity demonstrates a level of emotional development that is the polar opposite of our hardwired reactions of fear, rage, and revenge. We can't be curious to hear and acknowledge others until we get past fear.
Some days, I almost hungrily seek new questions. On others, I notice myself avoiding them. I reach for a familiar explanation, stick to my existing assumptions, or decide that I would rather not know.It’s interesting how different this is from childhood. Children investigate everything. They ask questions without worrying whether those questions are intelligent, useful, or appropriate.Curiosity comes naturally to them because they have not yet learned all the reasons to suppress it. But as we grow older, asking questions can feel increasingly risky, and I have come to believe that this reluctance to follow our curiosity often comes down to three fears.1. Fear of judgment: Curiosity creates social risk. Asking a question reveals that we don’t know something, and we may worry that others will see us as ignorant, naïve or unprepared. In environments that reward confidence and expertise, pretending to understand can feel safer than admitting uncertainty.2. Fear of change: Asking a question leaves open the possibility that the answer will change us. We may discover that a belief is wrong, an ambition no longer matters, or a story about ourselves is outdated or incomplete. Curiosity can disrupt the certainty that helps us feel psychologically stable.3. Fear of responsibility: Knowledge can create an obligation to act. Once we recognize that something isn’t working, we may need to make a decision or have a difficult conversation. Not being curious can help preserve our comfort, and sometimes our innocence and our ability to remain passive.We can’t eliminate these fears, but we can create conditions that make curiosity feel safer.First, find your curiosity circle. Spend time with people who reward questions rather than performances of certainty. A good curiosity circle gives you permission to think aloud, explore raw ideas, and change your mind. This is what this newsletter is providing for me.Then, practice learning in public. Share what you’re exploring before you have mastered it. Write notes and describe how your thinking is evolving.Learning in public gradually reduces the fear of judgment. It also helps others see that intellectual growth is not a straight line from ignorance to expertise, but an iterative process.Lastly, turn your big fears into tiny experiments. Try a new approach for a week. Have one conversation. Test one assumption. Collect a little more information.A tiny experiment turns curiosity into a manageable action for a specific duration. You don’t need to know where the question will lead. You only need enough courage to take the first step.Curiosity came naturally when we were children. As adults, it can become a deliberate practice. Ask the question that feels slightly uncomfortable. Follow the thread you’ve been avoiding. And let yourself be changed by what you discover.
We can learn to get beyond our fears of judgment, change, and responsibility.
Speaking of curiosity for others, "other" doesn't have to simply mean other humans.
The local herds traveled along time-tested pathways they had learned from their ancestors — reliable routes that had been shrewdly forged between high-risk predation areas and short plant-growth seasons. This centuries-old migratory practice, researchers determined, is driven not by instinct but shared through cultural transmissions from parent to child or peer to peer. If a herd’s traditional pathways are disrupted, such as by human interference, it expunges “generations of knowledge.”Similar community-based behaviors exist in many nonhuman societies. Sperm whales communicate using group-specific dialects older than Sanskrit. Certain chimpanzee communities share knowledge of how to use stone tools to crack open palm oil nuts. Matriarchal forest elephants pass down wisdom about extensive pathway networks through the Congo Basin undergrowth, where new generations learn about established transit corridors by following their elders. White-browed sparrow weavers build nests according to the distinctive style of their cultural group, each of which has its own architectural traditions. . . .To be eligible for UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) nomination, cultural activities must be actively practiced today and fit within one of five key domains: “oral traditions and expressions,” “traditional craftsmanship,” “performing arts,” “knowledge and practices on nature and the universe” or “social practices, rituals, and festive events.” . . .But by failing to recognize animal culture, we risk destabilizing or losing the sophisticated nonhuman societies that created the world we think of as our own. . . .In some cases, nonhuman communities even demonstrate cultural practices that have clear parallels to our own. . . .As technology deepens humanity’s knowledge of other animal societies, a growing scientific cohort finds that distinction increasingly untenable. In a peer-reviewed treatise for Nature Sustainability last October, biologists, philosophers and evolutionary anthropologists from the University of Bristol, the University of Zurich and the London School of Economics and Political Science asserted that “animal cultures have intrinsic, irreplaceable value, and yet they are not adequately protected by preserving habitat. The time has come for UNESCO to explicitly protect non-human cultural heritage alongside human heritage.”They rooted their argument in three main points. First, they made the case that animals have demonstrated distinct cultures. By any conventional definition, animals possess socially learned behaviors, norms, traditions and knowledge that may be passed down through generations and are distinct from those of other groups. Second, they argued that animal cultures help other species survive, benefiting biodiversity, and provide value for humans by expanding our understanding of “the complexity and sophistication of the social lives of animals.” Third, they asserted that existing UNESCO protections for habitat areas, such as nature preserves, are woefully insufficient, because when societies move, their cultures travel with them.
Value and worth come in all manner of packages.
Not all AI is like Dr. Know.
The development and deployment of machine learning tools have allowed researchers like those at the MINT lab to gain insight into the behavioral capacities of species that operate on vastly different timescales and spatial dimensions compared to our own. And perhaps more broadly, they are opening a window for us to perceive hidden forms of intelligence that have surrounded us all along.Across the life sciences, a growing movement is rethinking cognition, intelligence, and communication in living systems long considered to be more like passive, mechanical automatons than dynamic, agential lifeforms. Rather than treating these traits as exclusive to animals with nervous systems, researchers have been investigating mind-like properties in plants, fungi, slime molds, microbial communities, and other distributed intelligences. . . .“Machine learning can certainly help detect patterns in such high-dimensional data, say, in time-lapse growth trajectories, root architecture, electrophysiological signals, volatile organic compounds, or multi-plant interactions,” he says. “In that sense, these tools can help make visible [the] dynamics that are otherwise too slow, distributed, or complex for us to perceive directly.”Plants communicate through chemical, electrical, hydraulic, mechanical, and sometimes acoustic or vibrational channels. They release volatile compounds into the air, exude chemicals through their roots, and respond to signals from neighbours, fungi, herbivores, pollinators, pathogens, and their symbionts. . . .Rather than thinking about the “syntax” of plant communication, like grammar in the human linguistic sense, patterns of plant communication are structured through the timing, intensity, concentration, sequence, combination, and repetition of their various signaling media. “A calcium wave, an electrical signal, or a hormonal cascade may have different downstream effects depending on the tissue, developmental stage, prior history, and environmental conditions of the plant,” says Calvo. The “meaning” of the signal, he says, is not in the molecule itself, but resides in the whole organism-environment system. . . .Understanding how a symbiotic fungus processes information across its distributed network (which can be composed of billions of “nodes,” or tips) requires integrating a vast amount of data that, until relatively recently, has not been possible. As Kiers explains, a fungal network can constantly reshape its body to accommodate new nutrient trade routes with other plant species. . . .What these approaches reveal, Calvo reflects, is not that these systems are “like us” in some parochial sense, but rather that life has developed an astonishing array of solutions to deal with the fundamental problems faced by all living systems.We understand these functions through the lenses of everyday decision-making, remembering our past, and communicating with our peers. However, plants, fungi, and other diverse intelligences on the tree of life have developed their own, distributed, embodied, environmentally embedded processes to build resilience and facilitate adaptation. We have shared a planet with these intelligences for billions of years, and with machine learning tools, we are starting to get to grips with the complexity of how they survive and thrive.
Value and worth come in all manner of packages. Sometimes it takes perceptions larger than ours to see it. We meet in space between fact and fancy through distributed, embodied, environmentally embedded processes.
The simple act of saying to a person, "Please say more about your experience," instead of rushing to "You're wrong," completely shifts the dynamics of a conversation. The person, instead of being put on the defensive, can now feel seen and heard. Nothing is lost by asking for more information. Whatever the response, it will enrich your understanding, and the person will feel more understood because you asked, because you showed that his or her perspective matters to you. Seeking understanding is one of the easiest ways of honoring dignity. Allowing people to feel understood is just one short sentence away: "Tell me more."-----The development of our understanding of our worth takes place in the context of our relationships. We start out completely dependent on others for dignity, then we shift the balance away from others while we seek an independent assessment of our worth, and finally we arrive at a place where we recognize that our dignity is once again tied to others, but at this more advanced state of awareness it is interdependence that we seek, not dependence. I am proposing, then, three developmental stages of understanding our dignity: dependence, independence, and interdependence. . . .At the interdependence stage we recognize that the most elevated experience of dignity is achieved in connection with others, where I's converge to become We.Continued growth, the ability to become what we are capable of being, is inextricably tied to others. We need others to help us understand who we are and how we affect others. Our awareness of our dignity takes on another dimension as we recognize the necessity of being connected to others to maximize the experience of our own worth. The safety and internal comfort that we achieve through and with others represent dignity at its finest. . . .Development is the product of the management of the ongoing tensions between our human needs for autonomy and inclusion, for individuation and for integration, for the need to see ourselves and the need to be seen. Ultimately, we develop our awareness of our worth in the context of relationships. . . .We have attained the joyous realization that what makes us most vulnerable is not being connected to others. Safety lies in connection. We need each other to become what we are capable of being.-----Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in the foreword:Dignity not only sustains but also energizes and enable. It accomplishes great things. It lifts the fallen and restores the broken. When the recognition of the good in the other is shared, it is the sense of personal dignity given that can bring peace to situations of potential conflict. People's awareness of their own dignity, their sense of worth, is the only answer to the inertia of and everyday life rules by feelings of uselessness. How wonderful it would be if we all, every one of us, became agents of dignity, purveyors of the truth that this God-given dignity is the birthright of all.
Allowing people to feel understood is just one short sentence away: "Tell me more."
The development of our understanding of our worth takes place in the context of our relationships.
We need each other to become what we are capable of being.
Way back up at the top of this post, I said the Almanac of Birds card tickles my brain at some deeper, associative level I can't quite nail down or verbalize. This essay gives some fascinating insight into that feeling.
What the Bard can teach science about language and the limits of the human mind.In the study of the human mind, old disciplinary boundaries have begun to dissolve and fruitful new relationships between the sciences and humanities have sprung up in their place. When it comes to the cognitive science of language, Booth may be the most prescient literary critic who ever put pen to paper. In his fieldwork in poetic experience, he unwittingly anticipated several language-processing phenomena that cognitive scientists have only recently begun to study. Booth’s work not only provides one of the most original and penetrating looks into the nature of Shakespeare’s genius, it has profound implications for understanding the processes that shape how we think. . . .Booth is resolutely dismissive of most of these modes of study. What he cares about is poetics. Specifically, how poetic language operates on and in audiences of a literary work. . . .What makes him radically different from his predecessors is that he doesn’t try to resolve or collapse his readings into any single interpretation. That people are so hung up on interpretation, on meaning, Booth maintains, is “no more than habit.” Instead, he revels in the uncertainty caused by the myriad currents of phonetic, semantic, and ideational patterns at play. . . .Unexploded puns conserve their energy and preserve these links, creating rich, multilayered, imbricating patterns throughout a work.What’s essential to Booth is that for readers and audiences—for everyone but the professional critic—these patterns usually remain below the threshold of our attention. . . . Shakespeare achieves this by weaving incredibly rich networks from the same kinds of “substantive nonsense and nonimporting patterns” that pop up in slang, jokes, songs, and nursery rhymes. Those dense networks of patterns, Booth posits, are “the principal source of the greatness we find in Shakespeare’s work.”A cognitive scientist looking at Booth’s explanation of Shakespearean effects would spot many concepts from her own discipline. Those include priming—when, after hearing a word, we tend more readily to recognize words that are related to it; expectation—the influence of higher-level reasoning on word recognition; and depth of processing—how varying levels of attention affect the extent of our engagement with a statement. . . .Booth claims that garden-path phenomena and similar ambiguities in Shakespeare’s sonnets are essential to create in the reader the same unsettling mental states that they describe. His style of approaching these “substantially gratuitous journeys in the mind” aligns neatly with modern cognitive scientific approaches in that he not only tolerates but celebrates uncertainty. For Booth, the idea that readers manage continually shifting provisional interpretations—and that they don’t notice themselves doing it—is an essential component of poetic richness. The sonnets are full of these “plays on momentary confusions.” . . .It may look like we’re sitting quietly in our chairs as we read a sonnet or watch one of the plays, he writes, but we’re really making great leaps from one association to the next, performing “mental aerobatics.” . . .His case for muted wordplay and unexploited paradoxes poses a more counterintuitive relationship between consciousness and language experience. Being too self-aware, he claims, can disrupt the experience of an unfolding verse and blind us to more subdued phenomena. . . .His theory may explain the ineffable mind-states that poetry creates in us: poetic experience as the interaction of barely perceptible mental processes whose delicate, scintillating play is usually washed out by the spotlight of conscious attention. . . .Shakespeare can free us from ourselves. His lush, prismatic verse grants us “a small but metaphysically glorious holiday” from how we usually comprehend language, a holiday that is in turn “a brief and trivial but effectively real holiday from the inherent limitation of the human mind.” Rather than plunging into the abyss of not-knowing, we soar above it.
He not only tolerates but celebrates uncertainty. For Booth, the idea that readers manage continually shifting provisional interpretations—and that they don’t notice themselves doing it—is an essential component of poetic richness.
Continually shifting provisional interpretations. That's the space we need to find, where many, seemingly contradictory ideas can be true together, simultaneously.
One final bit from Dignity: The Essential Role It Plays in Resolving Conflict by Donna Hicks, the key ideas she spends a book expanding:
Dignity has these ten essential elements. We have to become aware of its essential elements to understand how to honor the dignity of others. Since our lack of awareness can make us violate others' dignity, we have to learn how that can happen. We also have to develop our sensitivity to the ways others experience us. With a developed sensitivity to others' points of view, we can minimize the times when we unknowingly violate their dignity and increase our chances of communicating that we value everyone we meet.THE TEN ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF DIGNITYAcceptance of Identity - Approach people as being neither inferior nor superior to you. Give others the freedom to express their authentic selves without fear of being negatively judged. Interact without prejudice or bias, accepting the ways in which race, religion, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, and disability may be at the core of other people's identities. Assume that others have integrity.Inclusion - Make others feel that they belong, whatever the relationship whether they are in your family, community, organization, or nation.Safety - Put people at ease at two levels: physically, so they feel safe from bodily harm, and psychologically, so they feel safe from being humiliated. Help them to feel free to speak without fear of retribution.Acknowledgment - Give people your full attention by listening, hearing, validating, and responding to their concerns, feelings, and experiences.Recognition - Validate others for their talents, hard work. thoughtfulness, and help. Be generous with praise, and show appreciation and gratitude to others for their contributions and ideas.Fairness - Treat people justly, with equality, and in an even-handed way according to agreed-on laws and rules. People feel that you have honored their dignity when you treat them without discrimination or injustice.Benefit of the Doubt - Treat people as trustworthy. Start with the premise that others have good motives and are acting with integrity.Understanding - Believe that what others think matters. Give them the chance to explain and express their points of view. Actively listen in order to understand them.Independence - Encourage people to act on their own behalf so that they feel in control of their lives and experience a sense of hope and possibility.Accountability - Take responsibility for your actions. If you have violated the dignity of another person, apologize. Make a commitment to change your hurtful behaviors.-----The ten temptations to violate our dignity are ways in which our hardwired instincts have set us up to violate our own dignity. . . . The ten temptations to violate dignity are all tendencies that we have to manage within ourselves. Sometimes we have to restrain ourselves--hold back from acting on our instincts alone--and sometimes we have to fight the impulse to do nothing. All human beings share these tendencies; they are a species-level problem. People in different cultures may react in different ways, but in the end, the tendencies are our common inheritance.THE TEN TEMPTATIONS TO VIOLATE DIGNITYTaking the Bait - Don't take the bait. Don't let the bad behavior of others determine your own. Restraint is the better part of dignity. Don't justify getting even. Do not do unto others as they do unto you if it will cause harm.Saving Face - Don't succumb to the temptation to save face. Don't lie, cover up, or deceive yourself. Tell the truth about what you have done.Shirking Responsibility - Don't shirk responsibility when you have violated the dignity of others. Admit it when you make a mistake, and apologize if you hurt someone.Seeking False Dignity - Beware of the desire for external recognition in the form of approval and praise. If we depend on others alone for validation of our worth, we are seeking false dignity. Authentic dignity resides within us. Don't be lured by false dignity.Seeking False Security - Don't let your need for connection compromise your dignity. If we remain in a relationship in which our dignity is routinely violated, our desire for connection has outweighed our need to maintain our own dignity. Resist the temptation to settle for false security.Avoiding Conflict - Stand up for yourself. Don't avoid confrontation when your dignity is violated. Take action. A violation is a signal that something in a relationship needs to change.Being the Victim - Don't assume that you are the innocent victim in a troubled relationship. Open yourself to the idea that you might be contributing to the problem. We need to look at ourselves as others see us.Resisting Feedback - Don't resist feedback from others. We often don't know what we don't know. We all have blind spots; we all unconsciously behave in undignified ways. We need to overcome our self-protective instincts and accept constructive criticism. Feedback gives us an opportunity to grow.Blaming and Shaming Others to Deflect Your Own Guilt - Don't blame and shame others to deflect your own guilt. Control the urge to defend yourself by making others look bad.Engaging in False Intimacy and Demeaning Gossip - Beware of the tendency to connect by gossiping about others in a demeaning way. Being critical and judgmental about others when they are not present is harmful and undignified. If you want to create intimacy with another, speak the truth about yourself, about what is happening in your inner world, and invite the other person to do the same.
The book itself shows how each of these ideas work in practice and offers suggestions for how readers can learn to adopt them as habits. It's imminently practical.
It's in putting them into practice that we become what we are capable of being.
On the more pragmatic side is this. I'm afraid I don't have a link to offer because, as far as I can determine, the content is only accessible in the emails he sends to those who sign up. From Arthur Brooks' weekly newsletter:
Researchers have demonstrated the happiness effects of kindness in novel ways—for both givers and receivers. For example, in one experiment, participants were instructed to engage in random virtuous acts toward strangers, such as holding a door open or feeding a parking meter. Then the recipient’s reaction was assessed: Compared with strangers who did not receive these kindnesses, those who did were almost four times more likely to display such a genuinely happy smile.The recipients of kindness weren’t the only ones who got happier, though; the givers did too. Immediately after the experiment, these participants reported higher positive moods, joviality, gratitude, optimism, and life satisfaction than beforehand. This is consistent with many other studies. For example, psychologists in 2004 found that when students were assigned to engage in five minor acts of kindness and sacrifice a week, the practice reliably raised their overall happiness levels compared with students who did not engage in these acts.One way to act on this research is to, well, be kind. But here’s another interpretation: Logic follows that one way we can raise others’ well-being is by giving them opportunities to be kind and helpful. Try these three rules, if you’d like to become more generous, but asking for kindness is hard for you.1. Be alert to offers of generosity. A good place to start is simply to be alert to offers and resolve to accept them whenever possible. . . .2. Reciprocate the kindness. Your next step can be to turn a small favor like that into a healthy social pattern by reciprocating. A culture of generosity is like the circulation of blood: It can’t stop in one particular location. . . .3. Ask for small favors. You can start the cycle with others by asking for something most people love to give. . . .
Kindness creates more happiness for both givers and receivers.
The development of our understanding of our worth takes place in the context of our relationships.
We need each other to become what we are capable of being.
I'll end with one more bit from Maria Popova, who has already been in this post via her Almanac of Birds and Reweaving the Web; from The Marginalian:
We make the world not with our ballots — though they do, oh they do matter — but with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of, the stories we believe to be true. Politics, after all, is just the weaponized business of belief. . . .Reading, of course, teaches us that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives — it complicates our story of what it means to be alive, it opens our eyes and our hearts to how other people and peoples in other times and other places have lived, how their ways of being might deepen and broaden and elevate our own. . . .Natural religions, the old ways, have mythology and visionary practice . . . The two levels, of course, are (1) acting as social glue and intensifying the bonds of the culture and the coherence of it; the other is liberating and transcendent, of freeing one from the bonds of ego and conditioning. It’s fascinating to see the dialectic of these two roles as they work out in different times and places. Some traditions within great traditions tend toward total mysticism, others ground themselves entirely in secular affairs. All religions are one at the point where life is given to the spirit, and real breakthrough is achieved. I doubt that any of the world religions ever have or could achieve a fusion of the two levels . . . The thing is, “world religions” are always a bad deal: they are evoked by the contradictions and problems of civilization, and they make compromises from the beginning to be allowed to live. . . .Snyder’s vision for this coming revolution of consciousness is not against growth but for symbiosis rather than parasitism, for interdependence rather than selfing, as the path to growth.The longing for growth is not wrong. The nub of the problem now is how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth-energy of modern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature… If people come to realize that there are many nonmaterial, nondestructive paths of growth — of the highest and most fascinating order — it would help dampen the common fear that a steady state economy would mean deadly stagnation. . . .The only hope for a society ultimately hell-bent on self-destructive growth is not to deny growth as a mode of being, but to translate it to another level, another dimension… The change can be hastened, but there are preconditions to doing that… Nobody can move from [one] to [the other] in a vacuum as a solitary individual…. What have to be built are community networks… When people, in a very modest way, are able to define a certain unity of being together, a commitment to staying together for a while, they can begin to correct their use of energy and find a way to be mutually employed. And this, of course, brings a commitment to the place, which means right relation to nature.
There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives. Learning to appreciate them helps us achieve a more symbiotic interdependence.
There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
posted by Degolar @ 8:33 PM
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