Grappling with what it means to be human (for mediators)

As mediators we need to grapple and tussle with what it means to be human. This means wrestling with fear, courage or lack of courage and ongoing self-interrogation.

Dr Cornel West, in his lecture, ‘What it Means to be Human’[i] references Plato’s ‘Apology’: the unexamined life is not worth living. In the Greek, the unexamined life is not the life of a human.

The Latin word ‘humando’, he says has its roots in ‘burial’ or ‘burying’. We are beings, he says, on the way to death. We cannot talk about what it means to be human without wrestling with the various forms of death, what it means to be on intimate terms with various forms of death. Social death, psychic death, death of assumptions, death of learned ways, death of our addiction to the way we think or even don’t think.

Mary Ellen Pleasant, known as the mother of human rights famously said, ‘I’d rather be a corpse than a coward. I’d rather be dead than afraid’

This doesn’t mean we are never afraid. In fact, fear can keep us alive. In freediving we learnt that fear can preserve life but that panic can kill us. As mediators we work to develop a quiet, still center that can help us to find peace and be peace amidst the chaos. We all continue to have impulses that shift us from this center and so we learn to be comfortable with and flow with the universal pattern of order-disorder/chaos-re-order. It is our work to build the courage to be in the disorder/chaos phase for as long as it takes for us to see what needs to be seen and hear what needs to be heard in order to shift into a phase of a new order or a re-ordering. As mediators we develop this courage both for ourselves and for those we serve. [ii]

Plato’s work, West says, is a meditation on and preparation for death.

Philo-sophia is the love of wisdom or the seeking of wisdom and West says it is indelibly connected to learning how to die.

West says when his first years come into his first class at Harvard he says: ‘Welcome to my class, you’ve come to learn how to die’

‘But bother West’, they say, we though this was philosophy class. We thought we’d read some text, get a grade’

‘No! This is paidea. This is deep learning. This is not just the acquisition of skill and knowledge’, West says. ‘This is self-interrogation and social transformation.’

West says that the corporatization, rationalization and commodification of this age make it difficult for any real paidea to take place. The latin root of the word education means to lead out of ignorance.

He says that students come in so pre-professional or professional and cant wait to make their move or their next move.

No! He says we need to learn how to think first. We need to learn how to laugh first. We need to learn how to play first.

Du Bois talks about getting caught up in the dusty dessert of smartness and (money)

In many ways, that’s where we are. We want to be the most skilled, have the most knowledge in the room.

‘Let them be smart!’, West says ‘You be wise!’

The fetishization of smartness tied to richness-‘how spiritually empty, how morally vacuous’, West says

And he says that in this way, we re-inforce the worst of professional culture: conformancy, complacency, and when its time to really act, cowardliness.

He says that careerism and opportunism can be so overwhelming. Thank God for Socrates, he goes on. Thank God for all of those willing to start with ourselves first.

Self-examination and self reflecting mean that when we give up a dogma, a stereotype, an assumption, a way of thinking, a learned way of seeing, that is a necessary death.

That’s the start of deep education or paideia

[i] http://www.youtube/Arkb3ppKm5w

[ii] For further reading on this pattern, I recommend the Richard Rohr’s ‘Wisdom Pattern’ (Franciscan Media) 2020

Sheena Jonker

ADR NETWORK SA

sheena@adr-networksa.co.za

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