The School of Life

Sophie Howarth on the agitational influence of Augusto Boal

The Brazilian theatre director, educator and politician Augusto Boal died earlier this month. He was a huge inspiration to me and his influence can be felt in many of our courses here at The School of Life.

I had the fortune to be part of a workshop around The Art of Legislation Boal led at the GLA in London in 1998. Later I learned about his ideas from Adrian Jackson, who translated Boal’s work into English and adopts his unique brand of playful agitation though his own work as artistic director of Cardboard Citizens. Earlier this year, I made a personal resolution to try and attend another of Boal’s workshops wherever in the world that might take me, as I yearned for more of the confidence to make useful trouble he inspired. Sadly that opportunity has now passed.

Boal was the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, a form of everyday theatre used in radical education and increasingly in drama therapy. The name is a variation on Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the now infamous 1968 education manifesto by philosopher Paolo Friere.  Friere is without doubt one of the great visionaries of revolutionary social education, but his books are as earnest as they are urgent. Boal, by contrast, made the very serious project of tacking social injustice seem full of humour, joy and hope. Games were in his blood and at the heart of his methodology.

Boal believed everyone could make theatre, and that it was a unique way for each of us to identify strategies for personal and social change. In his Invisible Theatre actors would, seeminly spontaneously, put on a prepared scene in a public place - a restaurant or crowded square - that would quickly engage the surrounding public. In Forum Theatre, a play about a social problem turned out to be the beginning of a negotiation; audience members were encouraged to suggest different modes of resolution for the play and even to climb onstage to help enact them. It all makes Brecht look tame.

The impact Boal made on the everyday lives of many previously disenfranchised Brazilians did not endear him to the military regime of the 1960s and 1970s, and his life was an eventful one involving imprisonment and exile.  But after the fall of Brazil’s dictatorship, Boal returned to Rio de Janeiro and used his innovative theatrical approach to engage overlooked communities as a city councillor. He started over a dozen theatere companies and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008.

Sophie Howarth is Director of The School of Life.

Laurence Shorter in search of the brighter side of life

Let’s face it; January 2009 isn’t looking to be the most joyful month in recent history. The combination of bad weather, continuing global crisis and rising unemployment are likely to get even the cheeriest among us feeling a little glum. To add to the gloom, we've just discovered that today is "Blue Monday", officially the most depressing day of the year.

If you,like us, haven't heard anyone say they feel "optimistic" recently, come and listen to Laurence Shorter talk at The School of Life tonight. We've invited him to instill a bit of hopefulness into us ahead of Obama's inauguration. He'll be talking about his new book The Optimist, which charts his ambitious, year-long quest to seek out the world’s most positive thinkers, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Jung Chang, Matthieu Ricard, California’s renowned Surfing Rabbi, and Bill Clinton. But even for Laurence, optimism doesn’t come easy. If your love life is in trouble, you are worried about losing your job, or your relationship with your parents has still not recovered from Christmas, rest assured he's been there too.

Find out more about tonight's event here. Read an interview with Laurence here.

What We Learned From Bernard Crick

"Politics is ethics done in public", argued Bernard Crick who died on 19 December 2008. The statement sums up why he had such a profound influence on all of us who struggle with how to lead good lives both in private and in public.

Theorist, activist, academic and public intellectual, Crick was a key advisor to both Neil Kinnock and David Blunkett, and is perhaps best known as the major biographer of George Orwell, and more controversially as devisor of the recent Britishness test for immigrants to the UK.

In his landmark book In Defence of Politics (1962), Crick described politics as a messy, complex and imperfect process. But he believed this is exactly why we must value it. The frustrations of compromise and the need for constant adaptability are precisely what make politics the only tested alternative to government by coercion. He urged against the temptation to reduce politics to ideology, democracy, or nationalism, encouraging all of us who want to engage in political action to learn to live with, indeed to value contingency. 

Crick’s ideas are integral to The School of Life’s politics course. Find out more here.

Read an obituary of Bernard Crick in The Independent here.

Maurice Glasman on the secret of Obama's success

Of all the astonishing things that happened on Tuesday night perhaps the most remarkable and least remarked upon was the fact that someone who trained and worked as a community organiser on the South Side of Chicago had become Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces. 

Why does that matter?

Community Organising was developed in Chicago by a man called Saul Alinsky in the 1940’s.  It was based on a few basic principles of political action.  The first was that politics was about moving from the world as it is to the world as it should be.  Alinsky taught that we can only act effectively if we understand that the world is a place constituted by power and domination.  In the Chicago of Al Capone and Mayor Daley’s Democratic Machine Alinsky came to the conclusion that only organised people could beat organised crime.  He created neighbourhood alliances that built up relationships, generated actions and gained power in the Back of Yards area among poor Catholics and in Woodlawns among black churches.  Community Organising was born.

In the Politics Course at The School of Life we look at different approaches to politics that can make us more powerful, more capable of resisting and forming change, building relationships with others and engaging in common action.  We look at Aristotle, we look at Machiavelli and we look at Alinsky.  From Aristotle we learn that politics is the capacity to act together with others in pursuit of a common good, from Machiavelli that it is the art of ‘Acting in Time’.  We look at issues that cause us pain and how we can work with others to change them.  That’s democratic politics and that’s the tradition of political engagement that Obama was schooled in.  Saul Alinsky taught a basic set of rules of engagement in politics that Obama would have learnt from his training in Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation.  Let’s look at how they worked for him.  The first rule of community organising is:

1.  Always work inside the experience of your people.  Through the use of facebook and other internet fora, through the use of music and video as forms of mobilisation and communication as well as the reactivation of churches and local meetings, Obama worked outside the experience of mainstream politics but within the experience of the coalition of first time white voters, African Americans of all kinds and local Democratic activists.  No-one could see them, no-one reported on them, no-one could control them and yet they were there, they were mobilised, they won the Primaries against a very well organised Clinton campaign and they understood what was going on.  The extra turnout, the unprecedented voter registration, the level of energy and engagement that was generated came out of working within the experience of his people which is linked to Alinsky’s second rule

2.  Wherever possible go outside the experience of your opponents.  By using the internet and popular culture, by working within the organisation and cadences of the Black Church, by organising meetings which the media were not invited to and were unaware of, Obama’s campaign confused and frightened both Hilary Clinton and John McCain who both began to panic and enforced another of Alinsky’s teachings which is:

3.  Power is not only what you have but what your opponent thinks you have.  By working within the experience of their own people and outside those of their opponents the stature of Obama began to grow, his strategists were seen as Machiavellian geniuses, the internet networks as mobilising millions and ‘Obama Girl’ was the pop sensation of the year.  Obama, far from appearing as an inexperienced one term Senator with no record of having run anything, ever, looked like the President Elect and Hilary Clinton was reduced to drinking whisky shots in red neck bars while complaining about the price of petrol while McCain, with forty years experience started describing himself as a maverick.  This also led to McCain picking as his running mate someone who was clearly unprepared for the job and which led to a vindication of Alinsky’s fourth rule:

4.  Ridicule is our most potent weapon.  The selection of Palin and the increasing desperation to depict Obama as a Marxist while George Bush was busy nationalising the banks meant that Tina Fey and Saturday Night Live could focus exclusively on the ridiculousness of the Republican campaign.  By trying to make the electorate afraid and angry of a softly spoken Lawyer from Harvard the Republicans opened themselves up for a degree of ridicule from which they never recovered.  The fact that they were opened up in this way flowed from the fifth rule of effective campaigning which is:

5.  Keep the Pressure On.  Obama’s campaign clearly identified ‘change’ as a fundamental idea and the thing they defined themselves against was George Bush and his economic and foreign policy legacy.  Obama opposed the war in Iraq and it gave substance to the point.  This put tremendous pressure of McCain to define what he was for, or against.  Obama’s biggest weakness was his lack of experience.  By keeping the pressure on McCain to define the change that he was about Obama forced a fundamental incoherence to emerge.  If McCain distanced himself too much from Bush he looked disloyal and dishonest while if he portrayed himself as the experienced continuity candidate there was no change at all.  By surrendering the centre ground to Obama he lost the campaign by making himself look erratic and impulsive, as the Palin pick revealed.  A principled Senator began to look like a grubby opportunist with no strategic vision for his campaign or the country.  And as Obama knew from his Community Organising training:

6.  The Price of a successful attack in a constructive alternative.  Yes we can.  Obama claimed to represent a new constructive politics that overcame division and political bickering.  When the decisive moment came, when the Banks of America lost their liquidity and went into liquidation and the chicken licken bankers assured us that unless George Bush transferred $700,000,000,000 into their current accounts, immediately, the sky would fall down on everyone’s head, John McCain went missing for forty eight hours.  Then he said he would suspend his campaign, then he said he wouldn’t, then he said he would not debate with Obama, then he said he would.  He said that the fundamentals of the American economy were sound, then he said they weren’t.  Obama, in contrast, supported the bail out while adding a moratorium on home repossessions and a cap on bankers’ bonuses for a year.  He attacked the Bush record and had a constructive alternative.  It looked like ‘change you could believe in’.  This flowed from the seventh rule of Community organising which is that in any campaign you have to :

7.  Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it and polarise it.  The target was not John McCain but George Bush.  He was the face of what Obama opposed and then he polarised.  Obama asked whose side are you on, my side or Bush’s side?  He made America choose and he made his opponent choose and poor McCain had to show loyalty to his bitterest enemy, George Bush, he had to choose Palin, he had to laude Joe the Plumber who had no qualifications as a plumber.  By polarising against the most unpopular President in recent history in the middle of a financial meltdown Obama squeezed McCain out of the mainstream and made sense of Alinsky’s final rule which is:

8.  The Action Is In The Reaction. The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.  Community organisers are taught the difference between activity, which we all do all the time and which makes no difference to anything, and action, which engages others and provokes a reaction.  By all the actions listed above Obama forced McCain to run against himself.  Obama was freed to glide on stage at enormous rallies to the strains of Signed, Sealed Delivered I’m Yours and let his ‘people’ know that confronted by those who say it couldn’t be done they could answer ‘Yes we can’.  The most liberal Republican in the Senate ran on nationalism and anti-communism, tried to demonise community organisers as Marxists, picked a running mate he disagreed with and vacated the centre ground while swinging wildly between strategies that opposed each other.  McCain had been ‘properly goaded’ indeed. 

The result is that the new Commander in Chief is schooled and versed in the tactics of urban guerrilla politics, of how to turn a disaggregated rabble into an organised community, of how to organise the defeated and win, how to increase your power through your action, how to generate new relationships through political victory. 

The Bush Administration had exposed the limits of two very big ideas that had dominated politics for the previous thirty years.  The first is the beneficial effects of free markets and the necessity of financial deregulation as a foundation of prosperity and liberty.  The lack of oversight of the banking sector, their huge power and wealth led to excessive greed and creative accounting that strained the credibility of even their partners in deception.  The huge inequalities this generated in the real world meant that the poor could not afford to pay their mortgages or other debts.  The primacy of the formal economy crashed revealing the needs of people in the real economy for food, shelter and clothes.  The State stepped in to meet the need.  For the first time in a generation Politics was more important, more powerful than economics.  Events asserted the primacy of political community to the markets, as Aristotle might have said, or ‘Yes we can’ as Obama summarised the thought. 

The second big idea was the supremacy of arms, the idea that a superiority of force could lead to a substantive defeat for the enemies of America and a reordering of the world.  That has also been defeated.  Without an effective politics of mobilisation and engagement military action alone can only generate sectarian hate and increased violence, create the conditions of dictatorship.  Democratic politics is more vital to imperial success than military supremacy.  Its not so much hearts and mind as body and soul. 

The combination of the principles of Community Organisation that guided Obama’s strategy of electoral success and American military strength would indicate that those who oppose the renewal of American hegemony had a very bad day indeed last Tuesday. 

Chicago looks like the capital of the world in more ways than one. 

Maurice Glasman is Director of The Faith and Citizenship Programme at London Metropolitan University.  He is also on the faculty of The School of Life where he teaches the Politics course.

Sophie Howarth on Culture Therapy

At The School of Life we're committed to exploring how culture can help us think through everyday concerns. Engaging with the history of ideas may not offer the quickest form of fix, but it offers a means of asking important and enduring questions about the art of living. While debate rages about the merits or otherwise of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help us live happier lives  - see Darian Leader’s ambivalent article in yesterday’s Guardian -  we agree with Hermione Eyre, who writing in the Independent last week, argued that the real reason to read Seneca rather than M Scott Peck isn’t intellectual snobbery but “just the fact that time is a great filter – the best there is for charlatans and cod-philosophical spam.” Read her full article here.

Meanwhile in the Times Higher Education Supplement, Matthew Reisz commended those brave academics willing to present their scholarly research in a more accessible form. His article I Can Help You Change Your Life explored the options open to academics who actually want to engage readers - and perhaps even "change lives”. The problem, as he acccurately explained it, is that “the main qualities needed by writers of self-help books - empathy, worldliness, an ability to cut to the chase - are neither particularly associated with academics nor encouraged by the structures of prestige and career development in universities. And then there are the ways that authors establish their authority. Scholars underwrite their views on macroeconomic policy or Chinese history by referring to their awards, prominent positions within faculties or PhDs from elite institutions. Self-help gurus may also mention their professorships in psychology but, along with the gravitas, they also need to get across that they understand people's everyday problems.”

Reisz picks out Laurie Maguire, Shakespeare specialist at the University of Oxford, whose book Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way; Or, All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Shakespeare is discussed on our Play course at The School of Life. When she went though a personal crisis in 1999, Maguire read her way through "the entire self-help section of the local bookstore and quickly realised that I had read it all before: in Shakespeare." The 16th century "saw the beginning of self-help literature" in the work of writers such as Machiavelli and Castiglione. As well as being a cultural icon, she suggests, Shakespeare too was "a self-help guru" and "life coach".

On the same shelf as Maguire’s book in our shop, you’ll find our own faculty member Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life and Ilana Simons’ A Life Of One’s Own: A Guide to Better Living Through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf. As Simons explains: “You can probably name a few novelists or artists whom you call smart confidantes or friends. You draw on their writing for guidance at difficult crossroads--for sympathy or advice. After all, literature isn't only valuable because it's entertainment, but because it delivers memorable insight about life outside the book. We know more about love because of Shakespeare, about jealousy because of Tolstoy, about self-esteem because of Charlotte Bronte. Literature moves us for what it says about events outside of their plots.”

Sophie Howarth is Director of The School of Life

Find out more about The School of Life's bibliotherapy service here.

Alan Dein on his cultural hero Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel died on October 31 2008.

I first discovered the work of Studs Terkel in 1980 when I studying Politics at City of London Polytechnic. One book, ‘Hard Times’ (1970) an oral history of  the great  American depression of the 1930s looked the least dull of a typical reading list stuffed with texts on economics, politics and constitutions.

It proved to have a deep significance for me. Firstly, it was the first time that I had encountered the concept of oral history, as I read (and I also seemed to be able to hear) the authentic words of real people, both well known and perhaps more importantly ‘the ordinary’, the voices of those who never reach our history books.

It also fired from then on, a life-long infatuation with Studs Terkel, the grand master of oral history. Although I’ve never actually met him in person, we’ve communicated via letter, through conversations with colleagues, and even by a short video message that he once recorded for my colleagues at an Oral History Society conference. In fact he’s completely unaware that I’ve recently completed a BBC Radio 4 feature about the life and times of America’s most remarkable writer, commentator and broadcaster.

For us living in the UK, it’s the books that have made Terkel a respected name. His great breakthrough here came in 1974 with the publication of ‘Working’, with its poignant sub-title ‘People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do’. When Terkel visited Britain to promote the book, he was greeted as a visionary, someone who could unlock people’s minds, and share their thoughts, hopes, fears and most importantly, their feelings with a complete stranger. The only person here who was doing this kind of work was Tony Parker (later to become Terkel’s close friend and his biographer too), but Parker’s efforts, although extraordinary, tended to focus on the lives of the disenfranchised and the marginal – prisoners, recidivists and sex offenders.

But in the States, particularly in Chicago, Terkel was, and is, a legend. Through his radio show on WFMT which ran for 52 years, he quite simply became the voice of Chicago. Anyone – actors, activists, writers, poets, educators who happened to be passing through the Windy City, were invited to be interviewed by Studs Terkel in his downtown studio. I don’t think anyone ever refused to talk to Terkel, and when you listen to the Terkel archive (http://www.studsterkel.org/), there’s no doubt that the conversations are meaty, politically charged, and very honest.

It’s ironic that Mr Chicago, Studs Terkel, was not even born in the city, but on the East Coast in New York City. His love affair with Chicago began when he was barely in his teens, watching the diverse cast of characters who would book into his parents rooming house. That’s where he fell in love with life, real people and in particular, the worker, and even more importantly, the labour agitators committed to battling big business.   

It’s amazing that Terkel kept hammering out books – he had four new ones published while in his 90s, including observations about dying, about faith and an illuminating autobiography.

Inspired by Terkel, I’ve been working as an oral historian for over 20 years. I always recommend his books to anyone who’s genuinely interested in understanding other peoples lives, and as a human response to the swill perpetuated by American popular and political culture. It’s heartening to see that so many of his works are now back in print, and that Terkel has just about won every award going in his massive career.

Studs Terkel always used to sign off his radio programme with the catch phrase "Take it easy, but take it." Remember in the 1950s, Terkel, like many of his left-leaning contemporaries were hounded by McCarthyism. His TV show Studs Place was kicked off the air, but Terkel didn’t give up. He turned to radio, and broadcast Jazz and Blues, and interviewed the musicians well before the Civil Rights era.

Basically what he was saying, and what he still believes, is in a culture where the past is either forgotten or distorted, there is another path - take what life brings your way, but also take up the stuff of life that makes you believe.

Alan Dein is one of The School of Life's experts. For a full list click here.
Studs Terkel's oral histories form an integral part of The School of Life's work course.
Working is available in The School of Life's shop.

Susan Elderkin on Norman Lewis

Our bibliotherapist Susan Elderkin recommends Semi-Invisible Man: The Life of Norman Lewis by Julian Evans if you are planning a holiday. "It's perfect for getting travel juices flowing. Lewis was quintessential traveller, voraciously hungry for new places, especially difficult and seedy places that others steered clear of but where he always found wondrous things."

David Gale on not having all the Penguin Classics

I like to read, me. If I don’t do it daily I get a rash and if I don’t go to a bookshop (usually a charity shop) every 48 hours I feel unsettled. I have a lot of books on my shelves and I hope I will be able to read them all. I have calculated that I will be dead long before I succeed in so doing. It is not as if I have stopped collecting in order to read what I’ve got. I add to the collection every few days, transferring my allegiances from the last crush to the next pash in a coldly fickle moment. I would like to read all the books that I would like to read but I’d need a parallel life in which I simply circumambulated my capacious library whilst drinking real ale and swimming.

The pathology of plenitude is upon us. Too much stuff, too little time. What to do? Give up, obviously. Try not to think about box sets. Abstain from secondary stimulants such as magazines designed to induce purchase. Dip toes in the weir of nonchalance. Say ‘I know enough already.’ Or ‘I will stop now and let culture swim before me until I am just a figure at the bus-stop as culture rolls towards the horizon leaving flared trousers in its wake.’

Thanks to the ever-rewarding Things Magazine I learn that Penguin have issued the Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection, comprising 1,082 titles and retailing at $13,315.84. With an Amazon discount of 40% this works out at a trifling $7,989.50.

I am not remotely tempted. Were money no object I would not part with the requisite sum. Besides, I read at least seven of them at Uni. But as Completions go, this one is up there with The Assembled Nouvelle Vague, Its Antecedents, Its Tendencies and Its Divers Spawn, a 60 DVD set (I made that up). Certainly the owner of the Penguin set would never need to go out again. It would, on a personal level, be the End of History.

I suppose one might just buy them in order to feel better in some disturbed way but still keep going out. Much as the life of the Duc des Esseintes, the aesthete ‘hero’ of J-K Huysmans’ ground-breaking 1884 proto-virtual-reality novel of the Decadence ‘Against Nature’, has its cosy charms (the Duke purchases a chateau and lavishly decorates each of its rooms in a different style: one simulates a boat, another contains a collection of perfumes with which he composes an aromatic symphony etc) (it’s a Penguin Classic) (he never goes out again), I fear the sickly perfume of atrophy would soon drive one out to the nearest All Bar One. (’”Mine’s a pint, squire!” barked the Duke thirstily.’)

No bugger who buys the Classics Collection will ever read it. We can speculate on how nice it feels to have it though: “Now that I have the Classics Collection not only is my library complete but I am. I have sealed the fissures through which dripped the contempt of the cultured. Like the taxi-driver I am fatly equipped with the Knowledge even if I do not, as yet, appear to know how to get to King’s Cross. I can, however, at any time that I choose, immerse myself in the canon and fire my firm self through the firmament of cultivation. It is as if I had a warm puppy in each trouser pocket, where the puppy is the good feeling and the trousers are the garments of the mind. And now, if you will excuse me, I am going to kill myself. For I am finished here.”

Read David Gale's blog here.