· A Personal-Political Support Circle
· True North Groups
· “Fooled by Science” Excerpt
· Readers' Comments
A Personal-Political Support Circle
On September 9, I sent the following ”An Invitation to Experiment” to about 60 friends and associates:
Can you help test the following format for a “personal-political support circle” Saturday, September 17, 2-5 pm, at 1280 Laguna, #6-J, San Francisco? Please let me know if you’re interested.In response, eight women and one man have expressed strong interest. One said, “I am very interested in your process and see it as an important step in the support and development of activists.” Another said, “What do I think? It's great. AND, per usual, how do we get activists and want-to-be activists to participate and essentially ‘break with habits’…”?
Participating in this experiment involves no ongoing commitment. It could be a one-time event.
If you can’t come Sept. 17, can we discuss this idea some other time, either in person, online, or on the phone?
The personal-political support circle, which Brandon Faloona and I designed, is intended to be a simple, user-friendly tool to help political activists become more effective by supporting each other in their self-development efforts.
With no trained facilitator, a wide range of individuals and organizations could conduct circles either just once or on a regular basis. An existing organization could convene a circle at the beginning of their meeting(s). Three or more members of a particular organization could do so separate from their routine meetings. Or friends and/or relatives could gather informally.
Eventually a network of circles might affiliate with one another, share reports on their efforts, and occasionally gather with members from other circles for fun, fellowship, and sharing.
With those thoughts in mind, the proposed format follows:
· Break Bread (informally share a meal, perhaps a potluck, or special snack while enjoying each others’ company).
· Silence (one minute to meditate, pray, reflect, or relax).
· Check-in (going around the circle, individuals report on how they feel at the moment).
· Self-Development Report (going around the circle, individuals report on their recent efforts to be a better person, if any, as well as their thoughts about future such efforts).
· Political Action Report (going around the circle, individuals report on their recent communication with an elected official or public administrator concerning a possible change in public policy, if any, as well as their thoughts about future such efforts).
· Open Agenda (the circle engages in open-ended conversation and/or decision-making about activities in which some or all members may want to participate; if the circle is held at the beginning of an organization’s meeting, it could proceed with its routine agenda).
· Evaluation (individuals report how they feel about the meeting).
Ground rules:
· All comments are kept confidential.
· When going around the circle, participants may choose to pass.
· Each person defines his or her own self-development goals and methods.
· If all participants belong to the same organization, they may coordinate their political action; otherwise each person may define his or her own political action goals and methods.
· When going around the circle, others offer little or no feedback; the emphasis is on listening and being heard.
· Time limits can be established as needed. Apart from the breaking bread and open agenda items, the rest of the circle might take a total of two minutes or so for each participant.
What do you think?
Yours,
Wade
Only two respondents, both men, expressed negative comments. One said, “I don’t entirely share your orientation toward personal growth and self-development.” The other said, “What you've come up with is not my bag.” I’ve asked each to elaborate, but have not yet received a response.
Another reason why I believe something like this approach could be helpful is that it could be a way for activists to recruit individuals who aren't currently engaged and support them in acting on their concerns, even if only by communicating with one elected official once a month. Then, after their toe is in the water, more involvement becomes possible.
Unfortunately, however, it is proving difficult to findi time for those who are interested in a “personal-political support circle” to meet.
Despite the strong responses to “Why Compassionate Politics” (see below), the lukewarm feedback thus far to the support-circle idea leads me to suspect that this project may not get off the ground. It may not be a good enough of an idea as currently formulated. The cultural forces militating against it may be too powerful (it’s interesting that most of the affirmation has come from women). Or I may not have the skills and capacity to initiate it.
I’ll continue to test it a bit longer. We do have a small meeting set for October 1 to consider these and related ideas. Only four people are confirmed for that meeting at the moment, but more may join in between now and then. Regardless, I’ll reevaluate everything at this meeting and afterward (after reading True North Groups, which I’ve ordered and is discussed below).
In the meantime, others are welcome to experiment with the “personal-political support circle” format. If you do, please let me know how it goes. Perhaps you can move this idea along.
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True North Groups:
A Powerful Path to Personal and Leadership Development
by Bill George and Doug Baker
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
•By the author of the best-selling True North (150,000 copies sold)
•Offers an innovative way to develop a confidential support group that helps us develop as people and as leaders
•Filled with practical resources to assist in every aspect of creating a True North Group
All too often, we find ourselves forced to confront life’s challenges on our own. What we need is an intimate group with whom we can examine our beliefs and share our lives. For the past thirty-five years, Bill George and Doug Baker have found the answer in True North Groups—small groups that gather regularly to explore members’ greatest challenges. These groups provide opportunities for the honest conversations essential to develop the self-awareness, compassion, emotional intelligence, and authenticity required to be inspired human beings and inspiring leaders.
“At various times,” George and Baker write, “a True North Group will function as a nurturer, a grounding rod, a truth teller, and a mirror. At other times the group functions as a challenger or an inspirer. When people are wracked with self-doubts, it helps build their courage and ability to cope.”
Drawing on recent research in psychology and sociology, George and Baker explain why these groups are so critical to our personal and professional success. They cover every detail from choosing members, establishing norms, and dealing with conflicts to evaluating progress and deciding when it’s time to restructure. True North Groups provides a wealth of practical resources, including suggested topics for the first twelve meetings advice on facilitating groups, techniques to evaluate group satisfaction, and much more.
For the millions of people who are searching for greater meaning and intimacy in their lives, this book will help them to grow as leaders and as people—and to stay on course to their True North.
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From “Fooled by Science,” H. Allen Orr, New York Review of Books.
A Review of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
by David Brooks
…Second, most of these biological facts don’t matter, at least for Brooks’s purposes. What of our view of humanity changes if, when parents achieve an “attunement with their kids,” the molecule that “floods through their brains” is schmoxytocin, not oxytocin? The salient fact is that some molecule or some part of the brain underlies various aspects of consciousness or unconsciousness. But this is hardly news. As the philosopher Jerry Fodor once quipped, it’s been clear for a while now that mental processes occur north of the neck. The rest is a sort of biological bookkeeping that, while significant to the specialist, seems to provide the popular writer only with a long list of factoids. It’s not that these facts are wrong or unconnected to the higher-level phenomena—lust, emotional uplift, or insight—that Brooks discusses. They’re just superfluous.
In any case, surely what matters most to us about human nature typically takes place at a more macro level. In the language of biology, human nature is a phenotype—a trait or set of traits that is observable—and the underlying mechanics are a different matter altogether. (By analogy, imagine that an accountant opens a spreadsheet on his computer and unexpectedly announces that you have ten million dollars in your account. It’s true that, when the file was opened, this and that line of code in the computer program was executed. But it would be odd to conclude that this is the level at which something interesting just happened.) This kind of argument can be taken too far but Brooks at least owes us an explanation of why all these biological details are supposed to matter to his project.4
But perhaps the biggest problem with much of the science in The Social Animal is that it doesn’t tell us anything that Brooks’s narrative hasn’t already said. Most of us learn about human nature from experiences in real life or from the lives of those portrayed in fiction. And that’s probably as good a way to learn as any. When we begin to see, in Brooks’s story, that the adolescent Erica will never get far if she doesn’t master her anger, it doesn’t help to be told that, during times of stress, epinephrine surges or that self-control in children is a good statistical predictor of success later in life. As many have noted, our folk psychology differs from our folk physics in that, while the latter is notoriously poor, the former often seems remarkably good. Indeed, as Noam Chomsky famously suggested, when it comes to revealing what makes people tick, a scientific psychology might never outperform the novel. I have no idea whether this is true, but The Social Animal certainly makes one take the possibility seriously.
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Readers' Comments
Readers submitted the following comments in response to Why Compassionate Politics:
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i really like what you said and i totally agree - will have more time to think on these things in a little while.....will contact you from mexico. thanks for keeping on wade -- you're a good man.
loving blessings,
Gail Keene
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This is fabulous. You are definitely on the right track.
JaneAnne Jeffries
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One of the best WW yet!
Mary Hudson
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Hi Wade, Take a look at The Watchman's Rattle by Rebecca D. Costa. Good insight into this problem from a different perspective. How complexity leads to over load and the loss of cognitive skills which are replaced by beliefs that are not looking for working solutions. Her book foreshadows the Rep./Tea Party obstructionism with no proposed solutions.
Robert Kourik
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I just read your posting to Shared Purpose. Your statement -- “To my mind, to transform our social system, we must simultaneously change our institutions, our cultures, and ourselves.” – prompted me to wonder if you had read any of the works of Ken Wilber, specifically about his AQAL model – which explains why your statement is exactly on the money.
If you have not heard of Ken Wilber, please let me know, and I will describe the AQAL model for you.
Thanks for your thoughts about this important subject…..
Lynne Monds
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Good morning, Wade. Thanks for this message. I think your interview of the disaffected activist is very telling. I want to forward your message to another project, because I think it makes some strong points.
This question – of why activism – informed and truly insightful activism – is so difficult – is a very tough question.
Personally, I think the answer has to do with all the points your respondent mentioned
“Yes. Self-righteousness. Seeing everything in black and white. Taking the hard line.”
And maybe a few more – like complexity and the exploding interdependence of issues – and what I like to describe as “bandwidth limitations in human cognition”.
Put another way – there is too much going on, it is moving too fast, and we don’t have a way of understanding it that can keep up with the pace of change. We don’t have a vision, we don’t have a comprehensive framework to understand what is happening.
So – we revert to simplistic models with strong self-righteous tendencies – assume that we ourselves are the good guys, and the other guys are at best the unknowing dupes of some evil power (corporations, lobbyists, whatever).
Just for a simple-minded example – Obama was forced by our existing framework to choose “healthcare” rather than “jobs” – because in this current framework, he could only hope to take on one at a time. Is that his fault? Probably not – but an answer – a way forward, a way to overcome this problem – has to come from somewhere.
And I think that “somewhere” is going to have to come from spirit – the normal human link to broadband deep intuition and holistic perspective. We have to find a way to “get integral” – to somehow formulate a model that includes all the simultaneous forces – which are currently blowing us away and leaving our congress in something like static gridlock.
On my sharedpurpose.net system, we are just beginning a conversation on Thomas Friedman’s new book, “That Used to Be Us”. If you had the time, maybe you and I could talk a little bit about how “compassionate politics” could play a critically important role in the emergence of something new. Personally, I think it’s the only way. We need “the power of the spirit” reaching out in every direction – in the form of “community weaving” – pulling all the simultaneous contingent forces into one holistic/integral framework, almost certainly coordinated over the internet – bringing everything into one framework – in a way that follows that simple model of the NoLabels.org motto – “Everybody AT the table, everything ON the table…”
That conversation on sharedpurpose.net is right here:
http://sharedpurpose.net/groups/forum.cfm?tq=579379&login=100803
If you got the time, I think your comments on “Compassionate Politics” would reach an interested audience – many in the Bay Area.
Thanks Wade – hang tough, keep banging.
Bruce Schuman
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