The Socrates Express
- Автор: Вейнер Эрик
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
- Жанр: География, путевые заметки
Электронная книга - «The Socrates Express». Краткое содержание книги:
We contemplate for the same reasons we travel: to see the world from a different perspective, to unearth hidden beauty and find new ways of being. We want to learn how to embrace wonder. Face regrets. Sustain hope.
Eric Weiner, *New York Times* bestselling author of *The Geography of Bliss* , combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pilgrimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from philosophers around the world, from Marcus Aurelius to Arthur Schopenhauer, Confucius to Montaigne. Traveling by train (the most thoughtful mode of transport) he traversed thousands of miles, making stops in Athens, Delhi,...
Had he lashed out, the experiment would prove less useful. Preoccupied with my indignation—you bit me!—I’d lose sight of my own culpability and my heart would harden. Parker’s steadfast refusal either to retaliate or relent lays bare my capacity for violence and, once exposed, enables me to consciously reject it. We can only rebuff what we can see. Parker, the little bugger, helps me see.
It is not enough to reject violence, Gandhi thought. We must find creative ways to convert our adversaries into friends. Most violence stems not from an immoral impulse but a failure of imagination. A violent person is a lazy person. Unwilling to do the hard work of problem solving, he throws a punch, or reaches for a gun. Clichéd responses all. Gandhi would take one look at my Parker predicament and urge me to think creatively. Experiment.
So I do, and I’m happy to report that, after a few failed experiments, Parker’s Full Gandhi episodes have subsided. Yes, he’s still prone to bouts of recalcitrance, but these don’t last long, for I’ve discovered that, unlike the Mahatma, Parker can be bribed with bacon-flavored treats.
Is that cheating? Perhaps, but I prefer to think of it as creative fighting. Parker gets what he wants, and I get what I want: to go home. An imperfect solution, perhaps, but a good one. Gandhi once compared his nonviolent movement to Euclid’s Line, a line without breadth. No human has ever drawn it, and never will. It is impossible. Yet the idea of the line, like Gandhi’s ideals, has value. It inspires.
Kailash and I sit on a bench outside Birla House in silence. It’s the comfortable silence of two people with a shared history. Neither of us feels compelled to fill the vacuum with words.
Most Indians don’t appreciate Gandhi, Kailash tells me. They appreciate the money his picture graces. That’s about it. “People say Gandhi was a coward. They think, ‘If the other person is stronger than me, I have to be like Gandhi. But if I am stronger, I can do what I want.’ ” This is, sadly, a common misperception. Gandhi’s nonviolence was a weapon of the strong, not the weak.
What about Kailash? What does he think of Gandhi?
“Gandhi is very wise,” he says. “He has a clean brain.”
I smile at the word “clean.” India, Gandhi once said, must “be the leader in clean action based on clean thought.”
When I first read that, it stumped me. What did he mean? How are thought and action “clean”?
By clean thought, Gandhi meant thought free of “veiled violence.” We might act peacefully toward someone, but if we harbor violent thoughts, we are not clean. He once prohibited his followers from shouting “shame, shame” at those they disagreed with. Gandhi would not look kindly on those who today disrupt the meals of politicians they don’t like. Such protesters may not physically harm anyone, but they have merely “put on the cloak of nonviolence.”
My thoughts are about as clean as the Delhi air. Too often I accede to the wishes of others to avoid confrontation. I register my discontent by silently seething. I fight covertly, uncleanly. I appear docile but am belligerent. Gandhi was not passive-aggressive. He was aggressive-passive. His actions appeared aggressive, or at least assertive, yet scratch beneath the surface and you found no animus. Only love.
In his autobiography, Gandhi recalls the time he wrote a note to his father, confessing to stealing and cigarette smoking and meat eating. Hand trembling, Gandhi handed his father the slip of paper. The elder Gandhi sat up to read the note and, as he did, “pearl-drops trickled down his cheeks, wetting the paper,” recalls Gandhi. “Those pearl-drops of love cleansed my heart, and washed my sin away. Only he who has experienced such love can know what it is.”
Such love is rare, and not often directed inward. As someone who is often brutal to himself, I found it heartening to learn Gandhi also wrestled with bouts of self-loathing. During outbursts of anger, he’d sometimes punch himself on the chest, hard. He outgrew this self-harming and, toward the end of his life, advised a friend, “Do not lose your temper with anybody, not even with yourself.”
Most of us don’t battle an empire. Our fights are more quotidian but, for us, no less important. Fortunately, Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance also works for marital spats, office tiffs, and political brouhahas.
Let’s examine a simple dispute from a Gandhian perspective. You and your partner are going out to dinner to celebrate a milestone. You want Indian food, she wants Italian. You know for certain Indian is the superior cuisine, while your partner is just as certain Italian is the better food. There is a conflict. What to do?
The quickest solution is a “forced victory.” You could compel your partner to dine with you at Bombay Dreams by bundling her into a burlap sack. There are downsides to this approach. Alternatively, you could insist on Indian food, period. No further discussion. Let’s say your partner agrees. You’ve won, right?
You haven’t. The uneasy calm over dinner is illusory. No one likes being bludgeoned into submission. “What appears to be the end of the dispute may be just the opening in another chapter in the conflict,” says Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution. And by resorting to “veiled violence” you harm not only your partner but yourself, too.
Conversely, you could “appease” your partner by agreeing to Italian, yet spend the entire evening seething. This result is simply another form of violence—worse, it is dishonest, “unclean” violence. Better to fight for your principles than pretend you don’t have any.
You could suggest a compromise cuisine. Japanese, for instance. But that means neither of you gets what you want, and meanwhile, the underlying conflict festers. Gandhi was wary of such compromises. He was all for give-and-take but not when it came to one’s principles. To compromise on principles is to surrender—“all give and no take,” he said. A better, more creative solution, is one where both sides get what they didn’t know they wanted.
Gandhi would suggest taking a step back. Examine your position, keeping in mind you possess only a portion of the truth. Are you sure Indian food is superior? Maybe Italian cuisine has merits you’ve yet to appreciate. Examine your attitude toward your partner, too. Do you see her as an opponent or enemy? If it’s the latter, that’s a problem. “An opponent is not always bad simply because he opposes,” said Gandhi. He had many opponents, but no enemies. He strived to see not only the best in people but their latent goodness, too. He saw people not as they were but as they could be.
Get creative, Gandhi would advise. You could, for instance, make your case for Indian, emphasizing how it would be good not only for you but for your partner, too. Maybe she hasn’t had Indian in a while or maybe there’s a new dish at Bombay Dreams she has yet to try. You make your case gently, for your aim, as Gandhi says, is not to condemn but to convert.
It’s now midday, and the Delhi sun has grown stronger. I ask Kailash about altercations he’s had. I’m sure he’s had his share. Elbow room is India’s scarcest commodity. Like Schopenhauer’s porcupines, India’s 1.3 billion souls are constantly calculating the ideal distance from one another. It’s an imperfect science. Sometimes you get pricked.
When attending the Franciscan boarding school my wife and I had enrolled him in, Kailash got into occasional fistfights with the other boys over a stolen pair of socks or T-shirt. Now that he’s a homeowner and landlord, Kailash needn’t worry about stolen socks. Money doesn’t liberate us from disputes, though. It shifts them to pricier arenas. And so it is with Kailash.
He tells me about a dispute with a tenant. He asked her to turn off the light outside her shop after she closed for the day, since a neighbor was taking the light as license to park his car there, blocking the entrance to Emma’s Stationery Shop.