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Newsletter | Letter from Michael Lerner
Letter from Michael Learner - November 12, 2006
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Dear Commonweal Friends:
I hope this letter finds you well. I write to you from Human Nature, the best natural foods restaurant in Tel Aviv. We were delayed arriving because police had blocked off Ben Yehuda Avenue while a remote-control bomb-disposal machine—a large yellow tinker-toy on six wheels—examined what turned out to be an abandoned pair of trousers directly across the street from the restaurant. Nothing out of the ordinary in this city. My wife Sharyle and I arrived here after a fascinating European conference that the Collaborative on Health and the Environment co-sponsored in Paris. Tonight we discuss the Collaborative on Health and the Environment with colleagues from the Abraham Joshua Heschel Center here.
The news from Commonweal is good. Charlotte Brody continues to provide inspired leadership for our work. I describe in the Commonweal Letter my engagement with the Cancer Help Program, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and the wonderful new Fund for Women's Health at Commonweal, inaugurated by our friend and colleague Susan Braun.
In this letter, I want to explore with you something entirely new: the idea for a new school at Commonweal.
Genesis. The genesis of the idea for a new school grows from reflections I have shared with you on where each of us finds the wisdom that sustains us in our lives. The quest for that wisdom was the principle subject of my last letter to you (online at www.commonweal.org). I wrote that I thought that the wisdom traditions as described by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy were not dead. They have survived Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. I suggested that Theilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry, and Mary Evelyn Tucker have charted some of the directions for these resurgent wisdom teachings.
The wisdom traditions have been refined by their passage through modernism and postmodernism. Most readers are no longer persuaded by those parts of wisdom traditions shaped by ancient tribal, racist and patriarchal assumptions. Most readers no longer assume a single wisdom "story" is definitive. Interpreted in new ways for our time, the ancient wisdom traditions have clearly survived the acidity of modernism and postmodernism.
A second inspiration for the new school was a note from Howard Gardner, the eminent Harvard psychologist and longtime Commonweal friend, who alluded to the old conception of the Invisible College. I checked Wikipedia and found this beautiful description:
The Invisible College refers mainly to the intrinsic ideology of the free transfer of thought and technical expertise, usually carried out without the establishment of designated facilities or authority structure, spread by a loosely connected system of word-of-mouth referral or localized bulletin-board system, and supported through barter (i.e. trade of knowledge or services) or apprenticeship...It is akin to the old guild system, yet holds no sway in recognized scholastic, technical or political circles. It is merely an attempt to circumvent bureaucratic or monetary obstacles by knowledgeable individuals and civic groups. Said entities generally feel a need to share their methods with fellow journeymen, so to speak, and to strengthen local techniques through collaboration. In short, it is a grassroots educational system.
You could say I would hope that a new school might be one manifestation of the Invisible College.
Four Precepts. What would a new school based in the wisdom traditions look like? Here are four possible founding precepts:
First, we imagine the new school would value self-remembrance, which, since time immemorial, has been one of the surest paths to a larger way of life. Some might prefer the phrase contemplative practice. But self-remembrance occurs in many ways, of which contemplation is but one. God, the theocentric traditions say, hid wisdom not on the highest mountaintop, nor in the depths of the sea, but in the last place we would look—in our own hearts. The new school would encourage remembrance of this heart wisdom.
Second, we imagine the new school would value freedom. Today we are free to choose our philosophical or spiritual compass in ways previously forbidden. This freedom is thrice significant: as a fact, a moral imperative, and a grave danger. It leads both to creative individuation and to profound personal and societal risks. Thus freedom must be balanced with a recognition of responsibility.
Service is the third precept that gives meaning to the responsibility that compasses freedom. A life of service is recognized in the wisdom traditions as one of the surest paths to fulfillment and inner peace.
In our time, a life of service and responsibility must inevitably address the global ecological imperative of our time. The ecological imperative, our fourth precept, requires a commitment to both sustainability and justice. We cannot build a sustainable world based on eco-fascism or a slave class. We cannot build an ethic of sustainability without an ethic of justice. We will never have perfect equity. But there must be limits to economic and environmental injustice. We must urgently seek them.
We imagine these four precepts—self-remembrance, freedom with responsibility, a commitment to a life of service, and an ecological ethic devoted both to sustainability and justice—to be basic to the intentions of a new school worthy of the name. Are there better formulations of founding precepts? We welcome your thoughts.
Why a New School? Readers of this letter know that Commonweal programs like the Cancer Help Program, Rachel Naomi Remen's Institute for the Study of Health and Illness, or the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, are small in terms of their organizational structure. Yet the power of their example often resonates across the country, and sometimes beyond.
The limitation of Commonweal programs up until now is that they are focused on very specific subjects. We work with at-risk children, with adults with cancer, on transformative education for physicians, and on health and the environment. We also have an extraordinary permaculture garden. But if you are not engaged in one of these domains, it is difficult to engage directly with Commonweal's work. Many friends of Commonweal wish there were a way for them to connect more personally with Commonweal. The new school would provide a way for friends new and old to engage with us—and for us to engage with these friends and the wisdom of their communities.
Ultimately, the new school would be designed for people who are exploring the kind of deep learning that many of us recognize as central to our lives. It would be designed for people like us who seek, with all our faults, to live lives of service and who have a great passion for learning. It would not stop at the boundaries of the wisdom traditions, but it would use the perennial philosophy as a guide to the cultivation of learning and wisdom.
Design Criteria. It seems to me we would need a design for the new school that is modest, interesting, and useful. Modest of necessity because we would have a tiny staff. We imagine that the new school would be co-created by people who volunteer their time.
The curriculum would be intrinsically interesting. The design process itself would also be interesting—a collaborative learning project in itself. The late Don Michaels, a close friend of Commonweal, praised learning organizations that embrace, rather than punish, error. Designing the new school would be, in effect, the first part of the curriculum. That process would need to embrace error to succeed.
How could we create the most useful, inexpensive, creative approach to collaborative life-long learning possible? We would need to identify people who stimulate our learning process—thought-leaders, action-leaders, experiential leaders—whom we find interesting and inspiring. We would need to identify texts, experiences, and practices that enrich what Howard Gardner and Daniel Goleman have described as our different minds or intelligences. This suggests that the curriculum would best be founded on a relatively conscious dialogue about the nature of mind or intelligence, the mapping of different domains of human knowledge, and the conditions under which we seek to cultivate wisdom, compassion and ethical learning in our time.
The curriculum for the new school would begin in domains of our expertise at Commonweal. But I see no reason why the domains of the curriculum should be bounded. Many domains of knowledge are relevant to the quest for wisdom and a life of service. Why limit what we might explore in advance?
Some of us prefer to learn in community and in dialogue. Others learn best on our own. Most of us cherish some combination of community learning and solitary learning. In fact, solitary learning is not solitary at all. Alone with a text, an experience or a practice, we are in dialogue with ourselves. If we choose our materials with care, we are also in dialogue with the greatest minds of all time.
Live and Online. The new school would be both virtual and live. We imagine that the online offerings of the new school should be available free to anyone anywhere in the world who wants to join us in collaborative learning.
We would interview the people we select as teachers—thought-leaders, action-leaders, and experiential leaders. We would ask them about their work and the principle resources they would recommend. We would put the interviews online as downloadable audio or video interviews. We would also ask the teachers to nominate other teachers for the new school.
A good website for the new school would be the relatively easy part—the one-way transmission from exceptional teachers to those who seek to learn. The good news is that Commonweal has five years of experience with The Collaborative on Health and the Environment. CHE is an intensively IT-based collaborative learning project. So we would be able to borrow many technologies and insights for the new school directly from CHE as a starting point.
But how would we design the online collaborative learning process that the new information technologies make possible? How would we design interactive processes that link students to each other and that allow unknown teachers to emerge—as indeed they have in the Collaborative on Health and the Environment?
As to the face-to-face learning experiences, I have no doubt that in our domains of competence we could identify some of the best teachers available. In other fields of intense personal interest to many of us, we also have access to extraordinary resource people. I imagine we would start with face-to-face new school events in the Bay Area. And I imagine we might often simply point to events that were of interest to the new school community. We would not have to sponsor these events, but rather point to them and possibly find ways of reflecting on them together.
A further design question would be how we "curate" the new school curriculum as we move beyond our early choices of teachers. How would we select what we regard as useful and set aside what does not seem to fit? This might be quite challenging, since ideas of what constitutes high quality differ.
You can tell that our thinking about the new school remains at a very early stage of development. If I have been reticent in this letter about the specific content that I would contribute to the new school, it is because my personal curricular interests would be on a par with the contributions of many others. It is the collaborative life-long learning design process that has been my focus here.
Will the new school come into being at Commonweal? We have already invested months in thinking intensively about it with valued colleagues inside and outside Commonweal. My guess is that it will come into being—at least as an experiment—if enough of us find it of interest and if we find the means to co-create it together. We welcome your participation and suggestions. If you are interested in co-creating the new school with us, please email us at: thenewschool@commonweal.org.
Thank You for Your Contributions to Commonweal—We Need Your Continuing Support
I want to close, dear friends, by saying that none of what we do or explore at Commonweal would be possible without your generous contributions. The Commonweal Letter lists the foundations and individuals who have most recently supported our work. I thank all of you with all my heart.
For over three decades, Commonweal has been a partnership of work in the service of life. You, the community of Friends of Commonweal, make Commonweal possible. I hope we continue to merit your support.
May the New Year bring you health and joy.
With warm best wishes,
Michael Lerner
President