ReligionDispatches.org

Karen Armstrong accepts the TED Prize. Photo: Andrew Heavens.

Can small acts of everyday compassion really make a difference? Karen Armstrong thinks they can. An acclaimed author of works on religion that give sweeping syntheses of the big questions, such as the History of God (monotheism) and the Battle for God (fundamentalism), Armstrong was a 2008 TED Prize winner along with author/philanthropist Dave Eggers and cosmologist/educator Neil Turok.

Winners of the TED [Technology, Education, and Design] Prize are granted “one wish that would change the world” and an 18-minute “speech of their lives” with which to launch it. Armstrong’s wish came in the form of a call to action, the Charter for Compassion, a document signed by religious luminaries and ordinary people, that would urge others to “look at their tradition, reclaim it, and make religion a source of peace in the world, which it can and should be.” Since its launch the Charter has partnered with dozens of well known interfaith foundations and corporate groups.

Conceived by Armstrong as a way to make the language of compassion a part of our everyday lives, last year people were invited to share their thoughts on compassion from a variety of secular and faith perspectives. Since that time the “Council of Conscience,” a group of intellectuals and activists who oversee the Charter, began crafting from the responses the wording of a call to compassionate action. Several drafts and conferences later, the Charter was unveiled in November 2009. Those who sign on can do several things: they can sign the Charter (over 30,000 have so far); they can create an event related to the Charter in their hometown; and they can share a story on the site. Backed by luminaries like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Tariq Ramadan, and lesser known but equally effective workers like Tho Ha Vinh of the International Red Cross, the Charter certainly has the right endorsements. But can the Charter do what Armstrong hopes? Noted scholar of religion Laurie L. Patton sat down with Armstrong to discuss the Charter’s possibilities, and Armstrong’s work more generally, for Religion Dispatches.

In the Charter for Compassion, you’ve started a movement via the internet in which we restore compassion to the center of our everyday practices. In addition, people pledge to give accurate and respectful information about each other’s traditions. This movement is impressive in that it seems to combine the best of education about religion with the best of a commitment to a different kind of spiritual practice that both embraces and transcends particular traditions. How has it been working so far?

This is going to be a very long process. I do not expect people to turn themselves around immediately! And in many ways, compassion is counterintuitive to our Western culture, which is very quick, in the media and politics particularly, to point a finger at others’ failings without taking the time to check out the details and form an accurate assessment. There is a lot of education around the issue of compassion still to be done and we will be addressing this need in our Web site in the New Year. Each week there will be more issues to discuss, refinements and questions answered, and I hope to write a piece weekly about such topics as the compassionate interpretation of scripture, the importance of acquiring accurate information about other people, and what it means to “love” our enemies.

There has been a lot of interest in the Charter. One of the things that made me want to undertake this project was the fact that wherever I went in the world, East or West, I found that people were hungry for a more compassionate form of religion, are unhappy that their faith has been hijacked by extremism, dogmatism, or intolerance, and want to make a difference in the world. But so far not as many people as we hoped have actually signed on to affirm the Charter. This is just a first step. We hope to send the Charter, with all the signatures, to five world leaders whose nations are currently embroiled in conflict. We want to make this a grassroots movement that will compel our political and religious leaders to take notice. 

As you write in The Great Transformation, you are interested in the Axial Age religious leaders because you find their more practical ethos of compassion a way of healing the contemporary world. My guess is that this intellectual commitment also led to your idea of a Charter for Compassion. And yet compassion during the Axial age was primarily a local, village, or kingdom-based affair. How might we re-think the question of compassion in a global digital age?

What we call the Axial Age occurred in four different regions—India, China, Greece, and the Middle East—from about 900 to 200 BCE, during which time all the major world faith traditions which have continued to nourish humanity—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, philosophical rationalism, and monotheism, for example—either came into being or had their roots. Each tradition is wonderfully different; each has its own genius, and each its particular flaws or failings. But they do bear a strong family resemblance.

And each one puts compassion—the principled determination to put oneself in the shoes of another—and the Golden Rule (“Do not treat others as you would not wish to be treated yourself”) at the heart of the faith. This is the litmus test of true spirituality; it is what brings us into relation with what we call God, Nirvana, Brahman, or Dao. And this intellectual commitment certainly drove me to the project of creating a Charter for Compassion, written by leading thinkers in all the major faiths, in order to make this ethos a dynamic force in our polarized world. The fact that this principle was formulated independently by the great sages of all these faiths (the rishis of the Upanishads, the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Prophets and Priests of Israel, Socrates, Aeschylus) indicates that this is the way human nature works; people have found that by living compassionately—“all day and every day,” to quote Confucius—they have activated aspects of their humanity that normally lie dormant, escape the prism of selfishness, and gain enhanced capacities of mind and heart.

Of course, the Axial Age took place in much smaller communities than our present global community. But in each of these regions, there was a broadening of vision. People’s horizons were expanding as a result of the large scale empires that were being created at this time; they were being taken out of the small confines of the village and being herded into large kingdoms; each one of these traditions took root in a burgeoning market economy, where people became conscious of their trading partners in distant parts of the world. And the Axial Age spirituality was largely a response to this new broad vision. People had to refine their view of humanity as a result of this. And most importantly, each of these traditions developed in a time of violence and warfare; society had become more aggressive; merchants preyed upon one another; kings fought to expand their territories—and the new technology made these wars more deadly than ever before. In every single one of the Axial regions, a revulsion from this violence was a catalyst of religious change: the great Axial Sages developed the compassionate ethos largely in response to this new threat. They were determined to mitigate the violence of their time, which seemed about to ricochet out of control.

Now we have this same problem writ large. The violence of our time could easily escalate out of control: it could be only a matter of time before a small terrorist group acquires a nuclear weapon. We are witnessing war on a global horrific scale—and actually seeing conflicts nightly on our television sets. We are also aware now that humanity is tightly bound together—electronically, financially and politically—as never before. We cannot live without the other. One of the major tasks of our generation is to build a global society where people can live together in harmony. If we do not achieve this, we are unlikely to have a viable world to hand on to the next generation.

So we have essentially the same challenge as the sages of the Axial Age. But we have to work hard to achieve it. Each of the sages almost sweated with the effort to make their spiritual insights speak effectively to their violent societies. They were creative; daring; willing to cast old sanctities aside and innovate. Religion is hard work. If we want to make the compassionate voice of religion a dynamic force in our world, we have to make the same gigantic, creative effort. And this will not be easy. But our global communications can enable us to work effectively together. That is one of the things the Charter is trying to achieve.

Your work on the Axial Age, The Great Transformation, is actually is quite different from Karl Jaspers’ work in one crucial respect. Your book is primarily ethical in its motivation, whereas Jaspers’ was more historical in its impetus. Can you tell me more about this ethical impulse for revisiting this idea about religious history? Do you think a better knowledge of history can help us be more compassionate, as you seem to suggest in some of the Charter’s prose?

Tags: axial age, belief, charter for compassion, desmond tutu, early christianity, history, interfaith, karen armstrong, ted

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