We’re joined this week by the creative and versatile polymath Anthony McCann. As a keynote speaker, after-dinner speaker, consultant, coach, trainer, and facilitator, he inspires people to reimagine and redesign their relationships, working environments, and communities through a better understanding of proximity, power, and possibility in their lives.
His work is based on 20 years of original research and teaching across the humanities and social sciences, and also of practitioner experience in leadership, community development, and performing arts. He’s here to talk to us today about ‘The Garaiocht Manifesto’ . More an invitation than a message. When it comes to professional life, trust your humanity. The Manifesto offers a human-scale and humane set of principles for sustaining the heart of being human in the art of being human in professional life.
Wow! This is definitely one of the podcasts that I feel I’ve got most from personally. I’ve previously had a Skype conversation with Anthony, but this gave me a much fuller sense of his work and of its great value. The terms of the manifesto are just slogans unless you unpack them, but his unpacking is very effective. ‘Groundedness’ would be one of the words that emerges most to describe the overall effect.
What he said near the beginning about the difficulties of being a philosopher talking about the experiential, but ending up doing so in a way that only speaks to a few people, is obviously something I resonate with from personal experience. I was also reflecting on the tensions between that and ‘starting where you are’. Starting where I am is very much in a philosophical kind of space, although one that I’ve tried to broaden and communicate in different ways in recent years. But it seems to me that I have much to learn from Anthony about how grounding in ordinary experience can give new and more effective expressions to the Middle Way.
But there’s also something of great value to a very broad range of people here. Lots of people are caught up in the ‘intensive situations’ and excessively goal-driven modern environments that he describes, not only in workplaces but also perhaps in voluntary organisations with a ‘mission’ that’s undermined by their degree of goal-orientation. I was reflecting that this can even happen in Buddhist organisations that are supposed to be working on the basis of mindfulness: a mere abstract concept of that ordinary awareness can so easily displace the experience.
I was a little surprised that he didn’t say anything about mindfulness (especially in Ellen Langer’s broad sense) or about brain lateralisation here. Both of those discourses could be enriched by the kind of approach Anthony is taking, I think. But of course there’s not enough time to discuss everything in a podcast!
Another word that perhaps emerges to describe Anthony’s overall approach is ‘slow’: the need for slow thinking that allows contextual awareness to emerge, together with slow progress, slow attention, slow food… I’d see that as another way of capturing what I’ve been trying to say when talking about the principle of incrementality – that we can only make gradual progress.
Thanks for those kind words, Robert.
I tend to be very careful with the term ‘mindfulness’. On the one hand I’m aware of the extraction of discourses and practices of mindfulness from contexts of religious meaning and practice, and the critiques that go along with that. On the other (or is it the same hand?) I am mindful (see what I did there?) of the silos that attach to particular terms. I talk about a field of Ordinary Ethics rather than espousing particular brandings of practice and tradition because of the helpfulness of even more conversation and comparative discernment across traditions. A quick exercise one day had me scribbling down fifty different and siloed conversations about grounding practice, and I hadn’t even scratched the surface. Because of this proliferation of terminologies I tend to use as many terms (and languages) as possible to speak about this kind of work. For me, it’s a field of practice in which, most helpfully, words can connect conversations and communities, and beyond that they matter much less to me than the qualities of relationship to be found in particular circumstances. One result is that I don’t champion causes or particular tradition-communities, because I champion distinctive attitudes and dispositions, not necessarily the verbal branding, doctrines or rhetoric of people who aspire to them. For some people, terrorists are freedom fighters in need of better PR. Whether PR stands for Public Relations or Present Relationship is a bit of an issue. 😉
Yes! What you say about not espousing particular brandings or traditions is very often my practice too, but of course this is in tension with the need to engage with different ‘siloed’ discourses, because that is where people are having those discourses. That’s exactly why I’d see the most urgent task as being one of synthesis, to help people in different silos connect with the other silos. In my more recent books (including ‘The Christian Middle Way’ coming out in July), I’ve been trying to engage with a particular siloed discourse to encourage connections with other discourses. The danger with that that I’m already seeing is that of being boxed in, but the danger of being too tradition-neutral is that you’re simply excluded from most of the discourses and not seen as relevant.
In the specific case of mindfulness, I’d suggest that it’s a term that’s already been crossing traditions and climbing its way out of silos during the last couple of decades, so it’s well worth adopting for that reason if no other. Often what you were saying reminded me most of the discourse of the most grounded type of Zen practitioner – the sort who really has no truck with any of the traditional ideology associated with Zen.
And yes, ‘Ordinary Ethics’ sounds like a good term. Not ‘natural’ ethics, not conventional ethics, not any other sort of ethics, just ‘ordinary’ ethics. You start with a connection to what people feel is ethical, and then shape it from there, rather than starting with what would otherwise for most people be an automatically absolutised set of beliefs.
I’d be fascinated to see your list of fifty siloed conversations about grounding practice!