JustThinkin – Page 6 – The Blog That Goes Ping

Don’t Be Nice, Be Real (review)

I just finished Kelly Bryson’s Don’t Be Nice, Be Real, (B&N) which is by a fellow who studied with Marshall “Nonviolent Communication” Rosenberg. He’s a family therapist and has spent some time teaching NVC in other countries, and is involved with alternative communities in San Diego.

I definitely got some valuable stuff out of reading this. He teaches NVC, but he’s a pretty different person than Marshall Rosenberg, so you get his own take on it, which is helpful. His emphasis is much more on NVC in love relationships than Rosenberg’s book is. He likes to play around with cute wordplay a lot more than Rosenberg. He does even more sharing of personal stories than Rosenberg, I think, and they’re often very powerful & touching.

It was really interesting to hear story after story of somebody trying to use NVC in a variety of life situations, and it was especially useful to read Bryson’s emphasis on how to do NVC badly. Doing it out of a feeling of moral obligation, for example, or doing it with a specific agenda for what you want to get out of the other person’s behavior. Bryson talks a lot about NVC as a form of enlightened selfishness, and while I’m not entirely happy with that verbal formula, with all its Libertarian-capitalist associations, it was a good counter-perspective to viewing NVC as some kind of saintly path.

The difficulties for me were when he gets off on a rant. He spends a lot of time criticizing segments of culture in very general and entirely negative terms — he goes off on institutional religion, on Western “Dominator” society as a whole, on psychotherapy and psychiatry, and it seemed so know-it-all and judgmental (and hard to credit, because he repeats a lot of really dubious factoids, like the “rule of thumb” story) that it got hard for me to take.

But then he would drop in a story from his own life, and I was back right there with him. And the last chapter, which was about hope for creating change in culture, really was inspiring. So it was worth slogging through the rants.

Overall I’m glad I read it; I liked it; I’m not sure I would have liked it so much if I hadn’t read Rosneberg’s book first to put it in perspective.

Free Abandonware Public License

Steve Dekorte suggests that the GNU General Public License indirectly helps giant software houses to maintain their monopolies by failing to enable smalltime software developers to compete in the commercial arena, and the BSD license has the opposite effect.

The FSF considers all proprietary software, whether by bigtime or smalltime developers, equally undesirable, so this wouldn’t faze them. But it did get me thinking about different licensing possibilities.

The most interesting one that hit me (while I was thinking through this stuff in the shower) was the concept of a Free Abandonware Public License.

This would be a license which like the BSD license would allow you to use its code in commercial products, but which like the GPL was viral, and “infected” those products with certain restrictions. To wit, when one “end of lifed” a commercial product containing FAPLed code — ceased selling or supporting it — one would be required to allow people to freely copy and trade that product, as if it were “freeware.”

Perhaps it would just make free trading and copying legal; perhaps it would force it into the public domain, or perhaps there would be some intermediate option like coercing it into the Free Abandonware Public License. Releasing the source might or might not be required.

This would allow people always to have the latest version of their product for sale, but would serve the GPLish goal of creating an ever growing pool of “free” (under some definition of the word) software.

NVC, Orang Asilie

Interesting bit from Marshall Rosenberg, in which he suggests that not every culture works via domination and labeling…

That’s why in the United States we call these institutions penitentiaries. The whole idea is you have to make people realize they are evil, so you need a language that does that, you need moralistic judgment that implies evil or bad, with words like: good, bad, right, wrong, abnormal, incompetent, etc.

All kinds of words that make you wrong.

There are whole cultures that have not gone that way, where there is almost no violence. They don’t have this language.

Question: “Where are these cultures?”

Marshall: Every one wants to move there! Fortunately there are a lot of them.

Fortunately anthropologist Ruth Benedict has done a lot of research in this area. A good place to start is an article in “Psychology Today,” June 1970, entitled “Synergy—Patterns of the Good Culture”. She has written many books on the subject since the 1920s. She’s found them all over the world. When she started out she wasn’t sure she would find any. The tribe I have had some contact with is Orang Asilie tribe in Malaysia. I’ll never forget what my translator was saying before we got started. He was going over how he was going to translate. He pointed out his language has no verb to be, like [you are] good, bad, wrong, right. You can’t classified people if you take away the verb to be. How are you going to insult people? You take away ninety percent of my vocabulary! So I say what are you going to say if I say “You’re selfish”?

He responded, “It’s going to be hard. I’d translate it like this: Marshall says he sees you are taking care of your needs but not the needs of others.” He says, “In my language, you tell people what they are doing and what you like them to do differently, it would not occur to us to tell people what they are.” He then paused and he looked at me in all sincerity and said, “Why would you ever call a person a name?”

I said you have to know who to punish. Punishment is a totally foreign concept in these tribes and cultures. He looked at me and said, “If you have a plant and it isn’t growing the way you would like, do you punish it?” The whole idea of punishment is so ingrained in us that it is hard for us to imagine other options. It is totally foreign to people who haven’t been educated in domination systems culture. In many of these cultures they look at people who hurt others this way: they are not bad, they’ve just forgotten their nature. They put them in a circle and they remind them of their true nature, what it’s like to be real human beings. They’ve gotten alienated and they bring them back to life.

Question: What’s the tribe’s name again?

Marshall: The Orang Asilie. This is interesting. It’s not their name, it’s the name the surrounding cultures call them and it means “primitive people”.

People usually ask what were you doing there teaching them Giraffe [nonviolent communication] language when they have their own Giraffe language? It’s sad; they were doing quite well. They live in the forest where trees have great economic value in the outside world, so now logging companies are intruding on their space. They don’t know how to speak Giraffe with Jackal speaking people. They have one senator who represents 60,000 people. In Malaysia, they heard about my work and asked me if I could do something. He says “You know there are consultants who will show us how to use guns, there’s no shortage of these, to get our land back.” The senator hoped there is another way.

It is not fashionable, anthropologically or linguistically, to suggest that language can actually influence how people think and act (a/k/a the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). So it might be worth pointing out that there is no particular reason the causality has to flow in the language->culture direction for the Orang Asilie, rather than the other way round.

UPDATE: Initially-forgotten link here; thanks to Ed Hand for asking for it in comments. For the record, if you go on to read the rest of the piece, it moves into some areas where I do not find myself in agreement with Dr. Rosenberg, e.g. the worries about violence in media as an indoctrination technique and the wholesale acceptance of Walter Wink’s ideas about “Domination Culture.” But I thought this Orang Asilie stuff was interesting.

Life Update: Uke

“Work is pollution” — Bill Mollison

I’m getting better at the ukulele, without even trying.

Specifically, without the joys of the Inter Nets to distract me, I’ve done things like played the uke for fun. Without an intent to practice or get better or do anything but be happy playing with it and listening to the sounds come out, and see what happens.

And I can now switch from chord to chord (among the chords I happen to know, like G, C, D, Dm, A, F) a lot more smoothly than I could before. Enough so that I can sit there and noodle around and play a few strums on this chord, switch to that, a few strums on that chord, switch to this, and so on, and it sounds like actual music.

If I get around to recording any I’ll put it up as an mp3, but I’m almost afraid recording it will spoil the magic somehow.

Maybe it’s not magic, though.

Maybe it’s better to learn things when you don’t pollute the learning with work.

UPDATE: I’m so frustrated. For the past day or so my uke has refused to accept a tuning. It’s got the cheaper friction pegs, not the gear kind you see on a guitar, and I guess it’s the heat and humidity or something but they slip right out of tuning. I can turn it to the right tuning and let the peg go and SHOOF it turns a quarter turn and several notes out of tune. Most frustratingly of all I can sometimes get all but the last string tuned, and that one just never yields. Ah well. I hope it gets better when things dry out and/or cool off.

UPDATE 2: all is good, I noticed the little phillipshead screws embedded in the pegs that let you tighten them!

Trying To Understand Mindfulnesses

I’ve been reading a couple books by Thich Nhat Hanh, including Being Peace and The Miracle of Mindfulness. I’m trying to sort out what Hanh’s Zen Buddhism means by mindfulness vis-a-vis what Ellen Langer means by mindfulness.

It’s tough, because there is a lot of overlap:

mindfulness is the opposite of mindlessness
mindfulness involves being present in the moment
mindfulness is not about judgment
mindfulness means not holding on to theories, preconceptions, doctrines, ideas
mindfulness is about focusing on things/activities in themselves rather than as means to ends

There are differences though. The Zen mindfulness thing seems to be about transcending categories altogether, but Langer’s mindfulness is just about letting go of fixed categories; in fact, for her, mindfulness involves constantly being ready to create new categories based on new information, with a recognition that all categories are contextually bound and inadequate to capture reality fully. Hanh has an emphasis on breathing that’s not there in Langer. Hanh also has an emphasis on human connection and compassion that is not obviously there in Langer. The compassion aspects of it remind me of nonviolent communication. Zen mindfulness seems to be assumed to be something you reach in stages through assiduous hard work, while Langer assumes mindfulness is available to everyone and can in fact by elicited in experimental subjects by asking mindful questions.

I think overall I find Langer’s discussions of mindfulness more helpful to me in the context of creativity, but I find Hanh’s more helpful in connection with NVC and emotions and people.

And there’s something important with that breathing thing. Not necessarily the “following a regimen, learning to breathe a special Zen way that’s better than normal breathing” thing, but being in contact with your breathing. Breathing = spirit, literally/etymologically speaking. There is a way in which letting your mind get in touch with your breathing can help you out of being trapped in negative thoughts and feelings and into the present moment. That’s something important I’ve gotten from Hanh.

Despite them both saying they’re against judgment, I get a more nonjudgmental vibe off Langer than Hanh. (Though both are pretty great that way.)

I guess I’m glad I’ve read them both.

I’ll add Hanh to the list of people whose ideas interrelate in complex and interesting ways, including Ellen Langer, Marshall Rosenberg, Carl Rogers, Alfie Kohn, Gerard “Killing Monsters” Jones… that’s all I can think of right now. :)