musing

Musing

I mentioned in an earlier post that I belong to a master-class coaching group. The group started 100 days ago and we each set ourselves a hundred day challenge. For some this was an inner challenge, for example, be more mindful, for others it was an outer experience, like create a new business. Last night we met to complete our first hundred days and to create our next challenge.

At the end of the evening I got into a conversation with Liz. We were at Liz’s house and she had various coaching books and journals lying around, which I was browsing. The edition of the coaching journal I picked up was all about defining coaching. And all the definitions, bar none, focussed on productivity, accomplishment, achievement, goals and effectiveness.

I told Liz that this was exactly opposite to the coaching book I had just completed and that all the definitions were wrong. That they missed the point and the real possibility of coaching.

“And just what is that?” Liz asked.

“Freedom.” I replied. “And any coaching that is not that, is selling out!”

This started quite a discussion as you can imagine and I don’t think I did a very good job in explaining why I feel this way; and I’m going to have another try now.

So Liz, if you are reading this, it’s especially for you, and thanks for giving me the chance to think this one through.

We need to start with the world we live in. More and more we live in a world of moral relativism. (Let’s call that MR).

MR states that truth and reality are perceived differently from diverse points of view, and that no single point of view is the complete truth. There are no absolutes. Some people support Manchester United and some believe in God. Neither is truer or better than the other. Nothing is intrinsically good and nothing is intrinsically bad, there is no right and wrong, events have no meaning in and of themselves. There are no longer any universal moral standards by which to judge others. Your truth is as valid as mine.  There is no way of proving that the values of one culture are better than those of another. This means there are no facts, there is no science; there is no objectivity, no morality. Per se. It implies that we should tolerate all those who disagree with us. Indeed it negates the validity of the Declaration of Human Rights.

There’s an old joke about the moral relativist who is on a plane which is about to crash and he is handed a parachute …  you can probably figure out the rest.

So, are there any moral absolutes? If we look at definition of ‘absolute’ it is something that is true, at any time, at any place, no restrictions, and no exceptions.

Will the plane crash or not. Is it a question of relative truth?

So, now let’s come at it from the other direction. Moral absolutism says that some things are absolutely right or absolutely wrong, regardless of personal opinion or belief or social values or context. Killing is wrong, whether it happens in the perpetration of a crime, an accident, in self defence or in a war. Likewise some things are absolutely true. God exists.

Let’s come back to the plane crash. It’s actually a red herring. Possibly, just possibly, there are absolutes in the physical universe, like gravity. It’s true at any time, at any place, no restrictions, and no exceptions. Except of course, if you believe mathematics and physics, in black holes; or in the world of the Yaqui Indian sorcerers (read Carlos Castaneda if you want more details) where time and space operate according to different laws.

Some of you may know that I am currently studying for a Master’s Degree in Creative Conflict Transformation. Our core text is by an American peacemaker called John Paul Lederach. He describes an interchange from a role play process in a peace building workshop in Nicaragua:

“ … Truth stood and spoke first. “I am Truth,” she said. “I am like light cast so that all may see. At times of conflict I am concerned with bringing forward, out into the open, what really happened. Not with the watered down version. Not with a partial recounting. My handmaidens are transparency, honesty, and clarity. I am set apart from my three colleagues here,” Truth gestured toward Mercy, Justice and Peace, “because they need me first and foremost. Without me they cannot go forward. When I am found, I set people free.”

“Sister Truth,” I interjected hesitantly, not wanting to question her integrity, “You know I have been around a lot of conflict in my life and there is one thing that I am always curious about. When I talk to one side, like these people over here, they say that you are with them. When I talk to the others, like our friends over there, they claim you are on their side. Yet in the middle of all this pain, you seem to come and go. Is there only one Truth?”

“There is only one Truth, but I can be experienced in many different ways. I reside within each person yet nobody owns me.”

“If discovering you is so crucial,” I asked Sister Truth, “why are you so hard to find?”

She thought for a while, then said. “I can only appear where the search is genuine and authentic. I come forward only when each person shares with others what they know of me and each respects the others voice. Where I am strutted before others, like a hand puppet on a child’s stage, I am abused, shattered and disappear.”

When clients come for coaching they come with all kinds of versions of the truth. There’s their personal truth based on their own experience and their perception; there’s the social truth they inherited in family stories and neighbourhood narratives; there’s the universal truth that they learned at school in for example in science and maths.

And while I guess I am a relativist – I agree with Jean Paul Sartre when he said “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” – in other words I believe we give meaning to events and we can change the meaning – I must be only a relative relativist because I also believe that the preamble to the Declaration for Human Rights is accurate when it states that freedom, justice and peace are the inalienable rights of all members of the human family. These are absolutes. And they are the absolutes that real coaching is about. Anything else is selling short on what is possible.

PS After writing this piece, my son Ezra, who is a philosophy student at Sussex told me that just because people interpret events differently doesn’t mean that the event doesn’t have an intrinsic truth. Just that we do not know it. Similarly he said, just because there are many definitions of coaching and that we don’t agree about which definition is true, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a true definition. Just that we do not know it.

I therefore leave you with this thought from the poet Maria Rainer Rilke -

“I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

And I’m still not sure that I have explained it very well.

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