Here’s the only thing better than getting to wish for anything you want: having over a thousand of the world’s most successful and creative people committed to making your wish reality.
That’s how the TED Prize works.
So when Karen Armstrong, who has written beautifully and sympathetically on the world’s religions in over twenty books, was awarded this magic prize, I couldn’t wait for her wish.
Her TED prize talk (which will hopefully be available on the amazing TED website soon) was delivered with characteristic grace and lyricism. She offered an alternative definition of the term “belief”, stating that for centuries it connoted “to commit oneself to something” rather than “to buy into dogma blindly”. She spoke of the core of compassion within all faiths, and put the challenge bluntly: “How to make the compassionate ethos speak to our torn, divided world.”
She went on to say, a bit wryly, that one of the problems with religious people is that they would rather be right than compassionate. That got laughs from religious and non-religious alike.
“How do we make the Golden Rule hip?” she asked, in an endearingly un-hip way.
It was a perfect TED moment: Here was this former nun, a somewhat reclusive scholar by her own admission, asking a group of celebrities, venture capitalists and Hollywood executives - people who do hip for a living - to help her help religion change the world
The first version of Karen’s wish is for a “Charter of Compassion” which would be drafted by a group of spiritual and religious leaders and made widely available.
There are other such documents – Towards a Global Ethic, presented at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1993 (and based off of Hans Kung’s work) and the United Religions Initiative Global Charter to name two.
That doesn’t mean Karen’s wish shouldn’t come true. It just means it shouldn’t stop there.
Here’s the question I asked at Karen’s TED Prize Lunch: “The people who understand the energy at the intersection of the youth bulge, the religious revival and the increased interaction between people of different backgrounds are the extremists. They are speaking to this energy. Religious extremism is a movement of young people taking action. The Charter of Compassion – while important – could be just another group of senior theologians talking. How do we make sure it’s more than that?”
Karen, and most of the audience, seemed to agree that that was the key – putting compassion into action, not just into words. That’s good. The TED community does action very, very well.
As this wish becomes reality, I see a serious media campaign and a powerful interfaith youth service movement being the arms and legs of this Charter of Compassion. I would love to see some aspirational goals also. How about a Day of Interfaith Youth Service happening in 5000 cities across the world by 2011? How about 100, 000 young people getting trained in the knowledge-base and the skill-set of organizing interfaith “compassion in action” projects?
Here’s one thing I couldn’t help but notice about the TED chatter around Karen’s wish. When TEDsters make positive comments about religion, they are talking about the universals – compassion, mercy, hospitality.
But in other areas, TEDsters love the richness of particularity.
Wade Davis, who lives and works with some of the most fascinating groups of people in some of the most remote parts of the world, spoke passionately about how the forces of modernity are crushing indigenous languages and cultures. “These people are not failed versions of you,” he said to a rapt TED audience, running through slides of one exotic group of people after another. “They are different answers to the question of what it means to be human.”
The TEDsters loved it.
Religious people love their particularity, too. Yes, compassion, mercy and hospitality are universal religious (and, indeed, non-religious) values and should be lifted up. But Ashura, Ash Wednesday, Yom Kippur, Diwali – these are also key, and for most religious people, nonnegotiable parts of their lives. And if the uniqueness is not celebrated, then the venture capitalists, the Hollywood executives and the celebrities of TED won’t find any friends in the world of religion.
Karen Armstrong knows this as well as anybody. Her best work is not a blending of world religions into a mush of commonality, but a careful articulation of their particularity.
How to lift up the universals of religion without crushing the uniqueness – and make it about action and not just talk? That’s not just an issue for Karen Armstrong and the TED community. That’s one of the central challenges of our times.
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