“Your weakness is your strength”

These are the words of the great choreographer Pina Bausch, as quoted in her old friend Wim Wenders’ magnificent film. Several other great sayings of hers are quoted: “Dance, or we are lost” and “Show us what you yearn for” – but it’s not for the words that this film is so profoundly worth seeing.

Words can never capture the truth, they can only point to it, and worse than that, they need interpreting, so your interpretation may be different from mine. Anyway, words are not our fundamental reality or our deepest truth – which is why it’s so easy to tell lies. People can lie with their bodies too, but the body can be trained to tell the truth – and that was Pina Bausch’s life work.

And the moment one tries to describe the effect of the film in words one falls into paradox – like the title of this posting. Her dancers show us the vulnerability of desire and the strength of that vulnerability; how at our most physically powerful and triumphant we’re also terrifyingly weak and lost – how the knowledge that we’ll one day die casts a long and sorrowful shadow over all of us, the young and vigorous included.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the film is the extensive use of older dancers, in their 40s and 50s, even in their 60s – and we see the marks of time on these bodies not as a curse or a blemish, but as tokens of an inner beauty and dignity.

In fact, everyone we see in the film has a beauty and dignity which, although it’s our birthright, easily gets covered over with compromises, lies, evasions and self-deceptions – all of which Pina Bausch worked with her dancers to strip away, showing the naked, tragic, joyful essence of human-ness which lies beneath. It takes work to do this: sustained, concentrated, focused work, guided by a compassionate wisdom which is in all of us, but which itself takes work to uncover. This kind of wisdom isn’t taught in schools, unfortunately, but we can recognize it when we see it. And the person this film reveals to us was above all a great spiritual teacher.

As the film reminds us, focused, conscious and disciplined physical movement is one of the oldest and deepest forms of spiritual practice – whether we’re talking about Tai Chi, yoga, or more modern traditions such as Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms. This is maybe the deepest paradox of all, that somehow we become most open to transcendence when we’re most embodied – wholly holy, one might say.

At a time when, as Marcus Anthony points out in a recent post, all-pervasive digital technology and ubiquitous gadgets are disconnecting all of us, and especially children, from self-presence and physical groundedness, this truth needs to be embodied, quite literally, in all programmes of education and personal development.

Go and see “Pina” if you possibly can (to further pick up Marcus’s point, technology enables us to view it in 3D and with fantastic high-definition sound), to be reminded that the fragility, vulnerability and need of the body is the gateway through which we must pass to experience all of life’s greatest gifts. Here's to you Pina, and to you Wim – and to all brave and beautiful dancers everywhere.

The Practice of Forgiveness

This posting is inspired by a very moving story that Marcus T. Anthony relates in his blog about some extraordinary healing that he witnessed during a recent visit to Beijing by the spiritual teacher Leonard Jacobson. No one who knows China could doubt the need for this in the light of the wounds caused by the Cultural Revolution, not to mention more recent events such as the uprising of 1989 and the troubles in Tibet and Xinjiang a couple of years ago. And of course, government censorship and control of the media make it particularly difficult to bring these matters into the light of day – which is why the events that Marcus describes are so remarkable.

However, I don’t particularly wish to single out China, but to raise a more general question about how such collective wounds can be healed, and how we should look at them. One of the things that’s striking about these kinds of trauma is how persistent they can be, under certain circumstances.

Take for example the American Civil War, which on paper ended almost 150 years ago, but which in some sense is still going on. All around the Southern States the Confederate flag continues to be displayed – sometimes in a spirit of fun and playfulness, but far more often in defiance of the alien values imposed by the North and still resented today. The election of Obama has added additional fuel to this world-view, which is more than tinged with notions of white racial superiority.

In a strange way the American Civil War seems less healed than the much more recent Second World War (at least as regards Western Europe), if only because no one apart from a tiny handful of insane fanatics argues that the Nazis could or should have won it. That must be one reason why relations today between the former combatants, all members of the European Union, are on the whole relatively cordial and relaxed.

If we look a bit further East, though, we find a deep unhealed bitterness in the troubled relations between Israelis and Palestinians (which dates back in fact to before WWII), and between China and Japan. In both these cases a kind of ethnocentric narcissism – the belief that one’s people or nation are chosen, special, central or superior – predated the conflict, and was intensified by the persecution which the people in question experienced.

Of course, these are complex issues about whose causes it’s dangerous to generalise, and there are probably far more differences than similarities between the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the American Civil War, the Holocaust and the Sino-Japanese war – as conflicts. But I wanted to look specifically at healing and forgiveness: are they enough points in common to be able to see how a healthy collective recovery can take place, and is it a similar process to individual recovery?

The modern concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and its treatment dates back to World War I. In those days it was referred to as ‘shellshock’, but this is basically one form of PTSD, resulting from a level of threat to someone’s physical safety and well-being so intense and sustained that it overwhelms their ability to cope and recover. Treatments for PTSD are enormously varied, but they usually include a phase of psychological debriefing, where the experience is fully acknowledged and spoken of, followed by some sort of reorientation process, where the traumatised person acquires new habits of thought and feeling, leaving behind their understandable hatred and resentment for the perpetrator. Without this reorientation there is no healing – just reliving the experience perpetuates the trauma rather than leaving it behind – constantly re-enacting the fear and anger associated with it.

We generally tend to use individual trauma and recovery as a model and metaphor for collective phenomena – for instance, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the Mandela government in South Africa after the end of apartheid followed a similar model to the reconciliation between the victims and perpetrators sometimes organised with a view to healing the psychological wounds caused by violent crime. It’s regarded as having been pretty successful, and it makes perfect sense that it should be, given that collective hatred (and healing) is no more than the sum or expression of large numbers of individual feelings.

When protests broke out in many Chinese cities about the dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu islands last year it was with the connivance of the government (no one could unfurl an anti-government protest banner of any sort in a Chinese city without being instantly arrested), which finds it convenient to keep resentment on the boil over the appalling crimes committed by the militaristic-fascist Japan of the 1930s and 40s. (It’s fair to acknowledge that there seems to be a reluctance on Japan’s part too to acknowledge and apologise for these crimes in the way that Germany has for the horrors of the Nazi period.)

The title of this post is a quote from Marianne Williamson: “The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world”. It may sound simple, even banal, but it absolutely isn’t. Notice the word ‘practice’: forgiveness isn’t something that one does in an instant of casual generosity; it’s a habit of mind which one needs to work at, especially if one’s been subject to violence, hatred or exploitation. And the thing is, we most of us have, to a greater or lesser extent, and at some time or other. Forgiveness is a practice, and it’s also profoundly practical – without it, the work that we need to do, as individuals and as societies, can never be accomplished.

The Princess, the Fairytale, and the Blood Sacrifice

29 July 1981; London was as deserted as if a neutron bomb had hit it. My wife and I (also newly married that year) cycled up to her aunt’s house in Highgate to the Royal Wedding party she had organised for her show-biz pals; we had the normally traffic-thronged streets to ourselves.

We all laughed, drank and ate extravagantly, sunning ourselves in her huge and luxuriant garden. Show-business seemed the best way of framing this event, which a normally sceptical and hard-to-move British public had become more engaged with than anything, by all accounts, since the Queen’s Coronation nearly 30 years previously.

So what was it the captivated so many of us about the Royal Wedding? It certainly wasn’t the groom – the heir to the throne has never been enormously popular. It was of course Diana who did it, a myth in the making when the media referred to her as “Lady Di”, before she even became Princess of Wales. Shy, elegant, beautiful, innocent and unassuming in her manner despite her impeccable pedigree (her mother was a personal friend of the Queen’s), she was a better fit for the role of fairytale princess than anyone Hollywood could have come up with – the charismatic unknown who rescues a tottering movie.

I hardly need to recap the story of possibly the most written- and speculated-about person on the planet for the rest of her short life. The point of bringing her up is to focus on the symbolic dimension of her life and death, as the sacrificed princess who dies in order to perpetuate the dynasty. In the royal houses of pre-Roman Britain a son could only inherit the kingdom from his father if his mother had been a ‘throne-princess’ – a virgin descendant of the same royal house; in other cultures the virgin princess is literally sacrificed – it’s her blood which guarantees the longevity and survival of the kingdom.

When Diana died in 1997 the conspiracy theories abounded; many friends of mine were convinced that she’d been murdered by the British Secret Services because she was about to marry a Muslim (the Egyptian playboy Dodi Al-Fayed). Others locate the ‘blood conspiracy’ on a more occult and symbolic level; for a detailed account of these see this link .

Whether one believes any of this or not isn’t the point: what clearly happened to Diana was that she was the recipient of a huge volume of projections, acting out the unlived, unexplored and disowned areas of people’s psyches in the same way that movie and music stars do – and that this was also her downfall. Young and inexperienced herself, and lacking effective support and guidance from her stuffy new ‘family’, she was overwhelmed by the vortex of incoherent but powerful emotions that swam around her.

And today, of course, another Crown Princess is to be installed, when Kate Middleton marries Diana’s elder son. But the circumstances are very different from those of William’s parents: they’re the same age, and have been lovers for eight or nine years. The excitement of the public seems to me much less; William and Kate seem more like a typical “we might as well get married” 2011 couple than the stuff of fairytales. Mindful of his mother’s fate, William has asked that they be allowed to live ‘a normal life’ – a strange request from a man who will one day wear the crown of England. But we can take this too on a symbolic level – he and Kate are refusing as far as they can the projections which destroyed his mother, to ‘desacralise’ the monarchy in a sense.

A columnist in the London Guardian suggested as much: that what William had in mind was to bring the British monarchy closer to the Scandinavian model: the Kings and Queens of Denmark, Norway and Sweden – which are among the most open and egalitarian societies on the planet – minimise protocol and in some cases even have normal jobs.

However, as Timothy Garton Ash went on to point out, he has plenty of time to think about it; his grandmother is likely to rule for another 5-10 years, after which his father will take over. Though Charles will be an old man by then, the Windsors are long-lived, and we’re likely to have to wait till 2035 or 2040 before we see King William V (aged nearly 60 by then). Who knows what, if anything, will be expected from him at that point?

Personally, I wish them well. Refusing other people’s projections is a good way to embark on any of life’s adventures, marriage very much included. May the tragedy of his mother’s short life not be visited upon William or upon his family.

Tripoli, 1973

It was Friday, so we were going to the beach as usual. As in most Muslim countries, the weekend was Friday and Saturday – and we were none of us so devout that we objected to working on Sunday. But Friday of course was the big one, the Muslim holy day.

One was very conscious of Friday in Libya; the place I lived was called Suq-al-Juma’a – Friday Market. Once a sleepy little village with a large square where camels and goats were traded, it was gradually being absorbed into the city: white concrete villas like mine springing up among the prickly-pears and the old mud-brick courtyard houses. Next to our house was a small mosque; the call to prayer went out five times a day, every day, starting at 6:00 am in the summer – though it was on tape. The elderly Hajji who owned the dusty little store opposite our house and doubled as the imam was no longer expected to drag his old bones up those steep, narrow stairs.

Anyway, back to the beach. I and the two other young unmarried male teachers (we had little else in common, but Libya had thrown us together) had planned to meet at the school as usual with our swimming and snorkelling gear and pile into my yellow Renault for a day at the ‘40 km beach’. I never did find out what the locals called it, but it was a popular spot; a long bar of sand with a grassy bluff a couple of hundred metres back from the sea, on which stood a small shrine to a local wali (saint), a low white structure made of whitewashed daub with a dome and crescent on top, like a miniature mosque.

But I don’t recall seeing many of the numerous Libyan families who flocked to the ‘40 km beach’ on Fridays and Saturdays paying their devotions to the wali. Instead they would all gather on the beach, the men in their bathing trunks and the women in their thick blanket-like barrakans that covered every part of their bodies, leaving only a Cyclops-like hole around the bridge of the nose to squint through. While the women took care of the young children, the men and older boys would barbecue immense quantities of lamb in between dips in the sea, before finally piling into their Datsuns or Toyotas to drive back to the city.

On the way to the beach we stopped, as we often did, at a small café-cum-gas station to get a coffee and to buy some Fanta. On the television – there was of course only one channel, and it was in black and white – the country’s new young leader Colonel Gaddafi was holding forth in his usual elaborate, ritualised, impassioned and rhetorical style. The few customers in the bar were watching, respectful and slightly baffled.

My Arabic wasn’t good enough to understand most of what he was saying, but I guessed that, like most of his speeches, it was about the unequal relation of the Arab world with the Western powers, especially the British and the Americans: Palestine, oil, Saudi Arabia etc. Plus, of course, the history of Libya itself, a backwater Italian colony up till World War II, and an Anglo-American protectorate from then till 1969. The Italians never found the oil, but the Brits did in, back in the 1950s: with its pro-Western puppet monarch Libya had been a safe haven for BP, Shell, Esso and the rest – and the Americans even had a huge air force base right on Tripoli’s corniche, a mere 8 km from the city centre. The West had taken the place for granted, and it was almost undefended when that unknown 27-year old junior officer staged his military coup. Almost the first thing he did, of course, was to kick out the Americans.

We drank up our coffee and left fairly hurriedly – the atmosphere was never too friendly during Gaddafi’s speeches, and spent a pleasant day frolicking on the beach. On the way back I stopped for gas, and when I went in to pay he was still speaking – which made six or more hours non-stop, outdoing even his great hero Nasser. (The Egyptian revolutionary leader nationalised the Suez canal, provoking the disastrous Anglo-French invasion of 1956; his many-hour-long speeches were broadcast on outdoor loudspeakers all over the Arab world, causing grown men to stop in the streets and burst into tears of pride and passion.)

Over the year and a half or so that I was there, Libya gradually became less and less hospitable to Westerners, as the populace got to know more of the history that they’d never learned in school (those who’d even gone to school). There was a huge amount of natural grandeur and beauty to the place: incredible Roman and Greek ruins, awe-inspiring desert landscapes, and of course those astonishing, endless, largely deserted, sandy beaches, but I was glad enough to leave all the same. This wasn’t primarily because of the politics but the enforced celibacy and the lack of alcohol and merry-making – the lack of pretty much anything, in fact, in this vast country three times the size of France, with a population then of less than 3 million. I had my life to get on with, and I went back to London to get on with it.

That was more than half a lifetime ago: then I was a young man in his early 20s, and now I’m an old geezer heading for retirement age. And Gaddafi is still there, madder, crueller and more despotic than ever. Who else was in power in 1973, and is still there now? Not even Robert Mugabe, or Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni; in 1973 the unshiftable Silvio Berlusconi was still crooning ballads on cruise ships.

But come to think of it, there is one head of state who’s lasted even longer. When I came back to London Queen Elisabeth II’s face had already adorned Britain’s coins and banknotes for 22 years – and, like Gaddafi, she’s still there now. I wonder, if the Brits tried to overthrow the Queen, and she was hunkered down in Buckingham Palace surrounded by tank traps and anti-aircraft guns, would Gaddafi send his air force to support the Republican cause?

An idle fantasy – next year (let’s hope) Gaddafi will be gone, but the Brits will be throwing garden parties to celebrate the Queen’s 60 years on the throne; little paper flags will be waved all over the country, and hardly a protest will be heard.

The Chinese are Coming (Back)

So it’s official (or at least, we have it on the authority of ‘The Economist’): China will become the world’s no. 1 economy before the end of this decade. It’s only a few years ago that forecasters were setting this date for 2040, with China only passing Japan around 2020 – but thanks to seemingly unstoppable growth the Middle Kingdom in fact took the no. 2 spot from its old rival last year. The date of 2019, if it’s revised, is likely to be corrected downwards – it could be as soon as 2016 or 2017, depending on the relative performance of the two economies.

OK, enough numbers already. Does it matter – and if so, what does it mean, to Americans, to other Westerners, to Chinese, and to the people of the planet as a whole? There are a number of competing narratives about this in circulation, and I’ll briefly review these before offering my own view.

1. The economic historian’s view
China, as a technically advanced country with a huge population, has been an economic giant for centuries, if not millennia, and it’s only the Western industrial revolutions of the past 200 years that have eclipsed it temporarily. As recently as 1820 China accounted for 30% of the world economy (see http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33604.pdf), a far higher proportion than it’s likely to have in 2020, or even 2030 – so all that’s happening is a return to the status quo. Why worry? Be happy!

Of course, a country with 1.5 billion people absolutely should have a larger economy than one with a mere 300 million, but this view doesn’t take into account the utterly different political, environmental, and military-strategic conditions of today’s world from that of 200 years ago. In any case, the Qing Dynasty China of those days was a rigidly conservative , deeply introverted and economically self-sufficient country with almost no interest in exploring the world beyond its own borders – arguably resembling today’s People’s Republic even less than Monroe’s United States resembles Obama’s.

2. The cultural historian’s view
Another historical precedent which is often cited is the transition in world hegemony from Britain to the United States that took place in the early 20th century; what we’re about to see is an analogous transition. But of course there’s a profound difference, in that Britain and the United States shared the same language, and to a considerable extent the same political and cultural value systems, whereas China and the United States very much don’t. Even if China was an electoral democracy there would be huge differences, but the fact that it’s a nominally Communist one-party state points to a massive disjunction and discontinuity in world-views; how this plays out will determine much of the history of this century.

There are a number of different perspectives on this discontinuity, depending on whether one imagines China converging towards the West, or vice versa – or the two simply remaining on separate and distinct tracks. For such as Martin Jacques and Joshua Cooper Ramos (of the ‘Beijing Consensus’) China will increasingly project its cultural values, and even its political system, around the world, establishing some sort of more or less enlightened autocracy as the norm around and perhaps beyond the developing world. For others, such as Will Hutton, China’s authoritarian political system is its Achilles’ heel, and it will not only fail to establish any kind of world cultural hegemony but won’t survive in the long run as a unitary state without significant reform.

Whichever view one takes, it’s pretty clear that some kind of war (friendly or otherwise) for hearts and minds is under way, and we in the West can’t assume that ‘our’ model will prevail in the long run, or that China will neatly metamorphose into a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy.

3. The right-wing warmonger’s view
Talking about war, the new Republican majority in the US House of Representatives wasted no time in affirming their belief in the nation’s sacred duty to take up arms against anyone challenging its supremacy. Rep. Randy Forbes, new chair of an Armed Services subcommittee, commenting on the proposed cuts to the Pentagon budget, remarked: "Even more appalling, though, is the fact that the administration is not being honest with the threat we face with China”. According to this view, pretty widely held on the American right, China’s size and economic importance automatically make it a threat; add to that their determination to enforce (often questionable) territorial claims in the South China Sea, and the fact that they’re Communists with nuclear weapons, and the danger is as self-evident as that posed by the old Soviet Union.

Of course, if you operate on the assumption that America must always be the world’s no. 1 nation militarily, and that it has some kind of God-given duty and right to occupy this role, then war with China probably is inevitable sooner or later. (Though it’s far from inevitable that America would win.)

Understanding China
One thread that runs through all these different narratives is that we in the West don’t really understand China and what values it represents. Of the ‘experts’ I’ve cited so far only one (Joshua Cooper Ramos) is fluent in Mandarin; most people writing about China (myself included) can at the most manage everyday conversation; almost none of them could read a newspaper, blog article or textbook. Imagine, by analogy, a French or German commentator on the United States who relied on translators and interpreters for their information – how much credibility would they have? And the United States is an open society, at least as regards information, unlike China, where people can be jailed for ‘disclosing’ what in most other countries would be freely available on a thousand websites. Combined with the country’s huge size, population, and diversity, this makes it extraordinarily difficult to arrive at any kind of valid generalization beyond the numerical data that dominate discourse around China, so accentuating the emphasis on the material and economic aspects of its development, rather than the philosophical, cultural and spiritual aspects.

And then of course there’s the apparently huge discontinuity between the traditional values of beauty and harmony as perceived by foreigners as well as the Chinese themselves, and the brash, hectic, ultra-competitive and hyper-polluting reality of China in 2011. This kind of cognitive dissonance applies to many societies: France is challenged by its failure to successfully assimilate recent generations of immigrants as equal citizens, while the ’American dream’ of hard work rewarded by upward mobility seems to have ground to a halt recently. But it exists in an extreme form in China, where even the physical form of the cities has changed unrecognizably, and you see few if any of the comforting reminders of the past that abound in Western cities such as London, Paris, or Washington. The entire country seems to be hectically, frantically, blindly rushing towards a future which the Party, for all its extraordinary ability to hold onto power and maintain economic stability, can no more foresee than anyone else.

Do the environmental crisis, the rise in food and oil prices, or the lack of transparency doom China to some kind of catastrophe in the near future, or will the people’s resourcefulness, creativity and ability to withstand hardship enable them to adapt peacefully to a more sustainable model of development? We should all hope that the latter is the case – not only as compassionate global citizens, but because a troubled China will sow trouble all around the world.

But then of course, as Lao Zi says, in the end “the weak overcomes the strong, the hard gives way to the gentle”. It’s just a question of taking a long enough view – which, of course, is itself a traditional Chinese accomplishment.