The Middle Way Society was founded to promote the study and practice of The Middle Way. The Middle Way is the idea that we make better judgements by avoiding fixed beliefs and being open to practical experience. We challenge unhelpful distinctions between facts and values, reason and emotion, religion and secularism or arts and sciences. Though our name is inspired by some of the insights of the Buddha, we are independent of Buddhism or any other religion. We seek to promote and support integrative practice, overcoming conflict of all kinds.
Our guest today is Margaret Wheatley. Margaret, or Meg has worked globally in various roles since 1966, such as a speaker, teacher, community worker, consultant, advisor, and formal leader. She believes that leaders must evoke people’s generosity, creativity, and community in a world that she feels is tearing us apart. A deep understanding of Systems Theory underpins her work and she has written nine books, including the Leadership and the New Science, her recent The Warrior’s Songline as well as the recently updated ‘Who do We choose to be’ Facing reality / Claiming Leadership / Restoring Sanity, the topic of our discussion today, which for me is an inspirational book on not only how to be a sane and compassionate leader in times of crisis and likely collapse but also for anyone who would like to embrace a more pragmatic version of hope that is based on action, courage, presence and responsibility rather than wishful thinking.
I first met Lenni approximately ten years ago, because she ran a meditation group in the village hall near where I lived. It was a small and very informal meditation group, just a group of people who meditated together to help keep them practising, but I found that useful as much as the others did. Soon after starting to come along to the group, I mentioned the Middle Way Society and that we were soon going to hold a retreat at Anybody’s Barn nearby. Lenni expressed interest and came along too. From that point she was a regular at Middle Way Society retreats as long as she was able to come. Sometimes we held retreats in other parts of the country, and I would give her a lift, so the long drives where probably when I spoke with her in most depth.
There was always more to Lenni than first impressions might suggest. She constantly struggled with her health, and it gradually worsened throughout the time I knew her, but she was adept at managing her conditions and not being ruled by them. There were many aspects to her life that she kept going: meditation practice, a non-violent communication group, a Thich Nhat Hanh based Buddhist group, veganism and concern for animal welfare, watching whales and dolphins, research into music therapy and ‘sound baths’, an ongoing interest in the theatre and in poetry, an Open University course that continually stretched out. She was the author of books about hedgehogs and whales, long-term supporter of her mother through dementia, loyal friend and passionate advocate for the causes dear to her heart.
Here is a recording of a song that Lenni posted on Soundcloud, of her singing The Last Leviathan. It combined two of her passions – whales and music, and she sang it for us on a retreat once. Her singing voice was another of the things that initially surprised me about Lenni!
What most impressed me about Lenni, though, was the way that she used practice to help her manage all the difficulties in her life. Having suffered a brain injury in an accident before I met her, she often told me that she could really not have functioned without meditation. She had also sometimes struggled in her relationships with people but, I think, worked on this effectively using non-violent communication practice. The Middle Way is a path of practice that starts wherever you are, working with whatever your life deals you – and in her constant practical engagement with what life dealt to her, Lenni was an outstanding practitioner.
All the time I knew her, Lenni lived in the same chaotic bungalow in West Malvern. One of the difficulties caused by her brain injury was in handling stuff in space: whether in her house, her car, or when packing. The stuff always seemed to be getting out of hand, and she would need help to keep it under any kind of control. In the last few years of her life, she also had a series of mini-strokes, and was isolated by the Covid outbreak. Nevertheless, she would defy the odds to sometimes stretch her capacities to their limits and take a trip somewhere. She continued to go dolphin-watching long after one would have thought it impossible, and last October she unexpectedly turned up at Tirylan House. She was determined to come and see it, and even just about managed to walk down to the end of the forest garden. The 88 mile drive home proved too much for her in one day, despite frequent stops, and she had to stay halfway.
That was to be the last time I saw her in person. She was finally finished off by a series of heart attacks, and died (I think) on 11th May 2023 in Worcestershire Hospital.
There are various things that Lenni was secretive about and that I never found out. One was her age, but I am guessing that she was probably no older than 60. Another secret was what ‘Lenni’ stood for. I had discussed her death with her at one point previously, when I felt I had to decline her request for me to be her executor, because I was leaving Malvern. However, she didn’t tell me that she would refuse to have a funeral – this surprised me, and will probably disappoint many of her friends who would like to say farewell. All I can do, then, is to say farewell here. I will remember her as a remarkable practitioner, as a person full of surprises, and as a courageous example of living with difficulties.
Thanks to Susan Averbach for the picture. Please feel free to share your own memories (or correct any mistakes I have made!) in the comments.
Our guest today is Dan Nixon. He’s a writer and researcher specialising in themes around attention, environmental philosophy and digital culture. A particular area of interest and expertise is the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and he’s also a mindfulness teacher. He’s written a couple of essays for Aeon and his ideas have been picked up and discussed in the Sunday Times, The Economist and the Guardian among others. He co-lead Perspectiva’s work on the Digital Ego. He’s going to talk to us today about cultivating a spirit of questioning in relation to our digital lives.
Our guest today is Andy West, a senior specialist and training officer at the Philosophy Foundation. He has written for the Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and Lino amongst others. For the past several years he has taught philosophy in prisons and he’s here today to talk to us about his first book ‘The Life Inside: A memoir of prison, family and philosophy
By David Graeber and David Wengrow (Penguin, 2021).
Review by Robert M. Ellis
This extraordinary new book is an extended implicit application of the Middle Way, as well as a highly innovative mould-breaking theory of history. Its authors (one now deceased) are an archaeologist and an anthropologist respectively, who were struck by the increasing misfit between the gathering evidence of complexity in the early history of human beings, and the dogmatic assumptions through which it was being routinely interpreted. One of those dogmas is Hobbesian – that life for earlier humans before the state evolved, was ‘nasty, brutish and short’, and the other, opposed set of assumptions stems from Rousseau – that early humans were noble savages and we have declined into a sick civilization. The thing I found most striking and inspiring about this book straight away, then, is that engages in the two phase critique of the Middle Way rather than a reactive flip, following the complexity of the evidence and seeking new ways of interpreting it that do it justice. The result, too, is an inspiring theory that provides a source of hope – that is, that the historical evidence shows that humans do not inevitably have to adopt top-down ways of thinking and living their lives, but are clearly capable of living together in ways that are much more open, consultative, democratic, and ‘free’ in the concrete ways that actually matter.
At the same time as putting forward this inspiring and ground-breaking historical theory, this book synthesises an impressively wide range of evidence from all of early world history: including evidence of Paleolithic life from around the globe, and discussions particularly of Sumeria, Egypt, and the Pre-Columbian Americas. Amongst the epiphanies for me regarding the Americas were that there were non-Aztec Republics in Mesoamerica, that the Native American groups around the Great Lakes had very sophisticated ways of reaching decisions through discussions (giving no real power to chiefs), and that the Native American groups in the north-west and in what is now California had totally contrasting social systems that constantly played off in reaction to each other: self-indulgent slave-holders versus ascetic egalitarians.
Graeber and Wengrow argue, with constant reference to very varied evidence, that the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ actually took 300 years, and had nothing inevitable about it, being sometimes deliberately ignored or reversed. They also argue that when agriculture did start to support cities, this did not immediately mean that they had to be organized in a top-down authoritarian fashion. Irrigation, for instance, was often managed co-operatively, and the evidence seems to be that many early cities were organized by citizens’ councils rather than by kings. When the harsh rule of kings did occur later, it was often initially developed elsewhere, in the highlands, rather than the cereal-cultivating river valleys. Many of the distinctive characteristics of particular cultures, including the technologies, forms of rule, and ways of life they adopted, were not due to an inevitable ascent on an evolutionary ladder towards the modern world, but rather in a ‘schismogenetic’ response to neighbouring groups that they wanted to differentiate themselves from.
I finished this book generally slightly more sympathetic to two kinds of views that I have previously considered naive: one being anarchism, in the sense of the conviction that humans could manage without the ‘state’ as we currently understand it, and the other being the view that Native North American groups have a superior insight (compared to cultures originating in Europe) as to how to live in harmony with their environment. What made the difference is simply the amount of evidence that challenged my previous assumptions. Whatever the practical difficulties of recapturing that situation, it seems clear that people in the past have lived effectively without the current authority and bureaucratic power that we currently associated with the ‘state’. The assumption that we always had to have the state in this form began to seem to me an unnecessarily top-down assumption – the application of a dogma that didn’t actually fit the evidence. Similarly, with the view of Native Americans that I’d previously regarded as an idealization, I can now see that there is actually a lot of good evidence that supports the view that they lived (not perfectly, but) in better harmony with their environment than we have managed (at least in the eastern and central parts of North America). This is particularly, it seems, because they developed a state-like urban civilization at Cahokia and associated sites, but then consciously abandoned it, leaving behind river-valley farming and consciously limiting their numbers to those that could be supported by hunting, gathering, and a little small-scale gardening.
Sacred cows of history are systematically slaughtered throughout this book. You may reconsider your view, not only of all the issues I have already mentioned, but of the origins of farming, the role of women, the origins of ideologies of liberation in the West (which seem to owe a lot to the critique offered by Native Americans), the pivotal role of ‘civilizations’, and the origins of kingship. If there’s an assumption about human history you don’t yet realize you have, this book will make you re-examine it. Personally, I’ve found it immensely valuable to provide a new perspective on aspects of the book I’m currently writing, which is called ‘A Systemic History of the Middle Way’, and incorporates cultural history along with biology and developmental psychology. The Middle Way is a response to absolutization, and one can hardly trace the history of one in any sense without the other. What this book has helped me to do most is to make a clear case that there is no inevitability about absolutization: one can see this in its social expression as power hierarchies as well as in the development of human psychologies. We did not adopt power hierarchies with their attendant dogmas as a matter of course with agriculture and urbanization, any more than we must inevitably adopt metaphysics as a necessary set of assumptions in our thinking. It may seem just as unthinkable to be without either – but all you have to do is to consider the evidence, and open your mind to new possible interpretations of it.
We are not locked into the power-relationships that have brought us the current world crises, any more than we are necessarily locked into the absolute beliefs that are used to justify those power relationships. There are always grounds for hope, because we can always start to adopt the Middle Way of judgement in response to whatever particular set of conditions start to confront us, however many previous mistakes we have made. Now I see further grounds for hope, too, after reading this book: in the past, people have thought and acted in all sorts of ways that we now may consider unthinkable, yet for those people they were normal. We should never limit our understanding of what is possible.
