Hasta La Gadget!

It was a three-movie day at the Marrakech International Film Festival, with all of the films set against stark, harsh vistas in which people scramble and struggle just to stay alive.

The best of those was Far From Men, by director David Oelhoffen. It’s a French film, set in 1954 Algeria during the rebellion for independence. The feature was shown after a festival tribute to actor Viggo Mortensen, the star (and one of the producers) of the film.

Mortensen plays Daru, a Frenchman born and reared in Algeria, who led Algerians in World War II against the Nazis. Now, as the war for independence rages, he lives in a remote outpost, running (and living in) a one-room schoolhouse teaching local children to read and, basically, to think for themselves.

Local French authorities show up at his door with a prisoner, Mohamed (Reda Kateb), who Daru is supposed to take to the nearby town of Tinguit. Mohamed is accused of killing his cousin; the French authorities will put him to death. Daru doesn’t want the assignment but, ultimately, is forced into it.

They set off on foot, trying to steer clear of Mohamed’s other cousins (who want to kill him) – and, instead, wind up in the hands of Algerian rebels (including soldiers who had served under Daru in WWII). The power shifts back and forth, ultimately giving Daru the chance to help Mohamed decide his own fate.

The storytelling is straightforward, with emotion bubbling under the surface. Daru deals with conflicting feelings of allegiance and loyalty about his nationality, his country and his humanity. He is a soldier who knows how to kill, but he has put that part of his life behind him and resents the fact that he must call on those skills again.

It’s beautifully shot against startling, imposing landscapes (Morocco’s Atlas Mountains stand in for Algeria). Those settings dwarf the characters, a reminder of the inconsequentiality of man’s concerns against the backdrop of the natural world.

Mortensen gives a nuanced, moving performance (in French and Arabic, impressively), and works well with Kateb, whose mournful subtlety contrasts with Mortensen’s more overt masculinity.

This commentary continues on my website.

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Check out “The New Zealand Hobbit Crisis,” available on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and audiobook. Visit my website (jhandel.com), follow me on Twitter or friend me on Facebook or LinkedIn. If you work in tech, take a look at my book How to Write LOIs and Term Sheets.  <!–
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At a time when so many seem to be questioning the value of a college education in general and a focus on the liberal arts in particular, it’s ironic that all available data indicate that worries of this sort are absolutely unfounded. Indeed, study after study has shown that the liberal arts are a wonderful investment, both for the individual and for society.

Even if many individuals seem not to recognize this point, employers all across the country certainly do. A study commissioned by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) entitled “It Takes More than a Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success” looks at the characteristics employers find most valuable in new employees. Although employers never refer directly to the liberal arts, what they describe as being most important comprises the heart of soul of a liberal arts education. Consider the following statistics:

• 93% of employers say that candidates’ demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major;
• 91% of employers say that, whatever their major, all students should have experiences in solving problems with colleagues whose views are different from their own; and
• 95% of employers agree that their companies put a priority on hiring people with the intellectual and interpersonal skills to help them contribute to innovation in the workplace.

When these same employers were asked what characteristics should colleges and universities focus on to ensure that graduates were ready for employment, the vast majority of them wanted even more attention paid to issues at the core of a liberal education. For example:

• 82 % wanted more attention paid to critical thinking/analytical reasoning;
• 81% wanted more attention paid to ability to analyze/solve complex problems;
• 80% wanted more attention devoted to improving oral and written communication skills;
• 67% were interested in more teamwork/collaboration in diverse group settings; and
• 64% wanted students to be more knowledgeable about how to make ethical decisions.

The data also indicate that what employers want translates into jobs for graduates. Even at the depth of our recent recession/depression, opportunities actually expanded for college graduates according to a report released by Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute. Yet another report demonstrated the surprising result that mid-career pay levels for individuals with technical degrees were roughly equivalent to those who had earned degrees in the humanities and arts.

There’s also very good reason to believe that integrating the arts and sciences leads to creative breakthroughs that would not be possible when either was excluded. Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest academic honor society, reporting on a study published in the Journal of Psychology of Science and Technology notes that “90 percent of Nobel Laureates in the sciences say the arts should be part of every technologists’ education. In fact, 80 percent of them can point to specific ways arts training boosted their innovative ability.”

The problem with the liberal arts, therefore, isn’t with the academic content of what’s being taught in colleges and universities. Rather the problem is that the liberal arts are woefully misunderstood by most segments of society. To a large extent the fault for this situation lies with academics rather than with the general public. As Carol Geary Schneider, president of AAC&U, so provocatively said a while back, the academy has fostered a “conspiracy of voluntary silence” when it comes to the liberal arts. We’ve been fearful of promoting the liberal arts and liberal education because they sound soft and they’re easily misunderstood.

In the state of Washington where I work as the Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Evergreen State College, a group of academics and our allies came together two and a half years ago to break the conspiracy of silence about the liberal arts. Leaders from thirty three institutions of higher education representing two- and four-year, public and private colleges and universities formed the Washington Consortium for the Liberal Arts. Our mission is as simple as it is important; we were formed to “promote the value of a liberal arts education to the people and communities of the state.”

I am thrilled to be able to say that our efforts are paying off. Phi Beta Kappa, itself an organization that recognizes and supports these same values, will grant its Key of Excellence Award to the Washington Consortium for the Liberal Arts on Wednesday, 10 December in a ceremony at McCaw Hall in Seattle.

Phi Beta Kappa took particular notice of our work with employers throughout the state, our outreach to college and high school students, and our efforts with the media to more holistically present the value and power of the liberal arts.

With the recognition associated with receiving an award from such a high profile organization, our efforts have been raised to a new level. Most importantly, this should help us educate prospective students, their parents, legislators and the general public about the significance of ensuring that the liberal arts are broadly supported.

“Works break through the boundaries of their own time,” wrote the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. “They live in centuries, that is, in great time, and frequently (with great works always) their lives are more intense and fuller than are their lives within their own time.” Like other great religious works, the Bhagavad Gita has lived an especially full and intense life, from the time of its composition some two millennia ago right up to the present.

In its latest incarnation, this work of classical India has become an item of high-level diplomatic exchange. During recent state visits, the new Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, has presented translations of the Bhagavad Gita to the Chinese President Xi Jinping and to the Japanese Emperor Akihito. Then, in September, Modi brought a special edition of the Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi, covered in homespun khadi, to the United States, and gave it to President Obama at a White House dinner. But Modi did not return to India Gita-less. During his visit, Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawai’i, the first practicing Hindu in the United States Congress, gave to Modi her personal copy of the Gita. This was the same copy, she noted, that she had kept with her when serving in Iraq, and on which she had taken her Congressional oath of office in 2013. What is going on with all the gifts of the Gita?

The Bhagavad Gita took birth as part of a larger composition, the great Sanskrit poem Mahabharata. The battlefield discussion of Krishna and Arjuna, two central figures of the epic, at the onset of a cataclysmic war touched on central themes and tensions within the story. Krishna’s teachings drew on ideas and disputes of classical India, restating and reformulating them into an innovative synthesis. In the course of their discussion, Krishna also revealed himself to be the Supreme God. The complexity of Krishna’s message and his reconciliation of multiple religious pathways made the short work rich in significance and susceptible to multiple interpretations. His self-revelation as God gave the work special religious authority to some.

Although a great work of religious literature speaks within and to its own time of composition, Bakhtin’s statement emphasizes that it cannot be closed off in that epoch. Its fullness is revealed only in “great time.” In its continuing life, the work comes to be enriched with new meanings and new relevance in new settings. Different aspects of the work may come to the fore. In medieval India new hearers and readers found ways that the work spoke to their concerns. For Vedanta commentators like Shankara and Ramanuja, the Gita addressed central theological debates. In the hands of the Maharashtrian bhakti poet Jnanadeva, Krishna’s Sanskrit dialogue with Arjuna proliferated into a greatly expanded devotional Gita in vernacular Marathi. Later it traveled abroad. In 1785, the Gita became the first Sanskrit work translated into English, and it provoked widespread excitement among English Orientalists, German Romantics, and American Transcendentalists. Henry David Thoreau borrowed a copy from Ralph Waldo Emerson to read at Walden Pond.

In colonial India of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nationalist writers and political figures revisited the Gita. They promoted it as a central work of an emerging Indian national ethos. The new battlefield was the British Raj, and they found in it strong advocacy for engaged social and political action, karma yoga. The form that action should take, however, remained a point of heated contention. This is where Mohandas Gandhi comes into the picture.

Among all leaders of the Indian independence movement, none were more devoted to the Bhagavad Gita than Gandhi. He called it his “dictionary of daily reference” and his “mother.” He spoke and wrote widely on it throughout his career. But he also had an interpretive problem. In the course of the Gita Krishna persuades the reluctant warrior Arjuna to take part in a battle of cataclysmic proportions. He advocates violent warfare, as an instrument of divine will. Many Indian nationalists accepted the call of the Gita for righteous struggle, even it that might require violence. Among the devotees of this Gita was K. S. Hedgewar, founder of the Hindu nationalist organization, the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS), who saw the work as the basis for creating a more disciplined, masculine, aggressive Hindu community.

Gandhi, by contrast, held no commitment more important than his principle of non-violence. The battlefield, Gandhi argued, must be taken as an interior one, where the forces of good and evil are locked in never-ending struggle. When Krishna tells Arjuna to fight, he is telling him to overcome any self-interested inclinations and to carry out his own righteous duty, Gandhi based his own authority as an interpreter of the Gita on his personal endeavor “to enforce the meaning in my own conduct for an unbroken period of forty years.” Gandhi also claimed that the Gita was not a Hindu work, but rather one of “pure ethics,” which a person of any faith might read.

In his ceremonial gift to Obama, Narendra Modi sought to align himself with the Gandhian side of the Bhagavad Gita. Along with the book, it was reported, the Indian Prime Minister presented the American President with a rare photograph of Martin Luther King Jr., laying a garland at the cremation site of Gandhi, the Raj Ghat in Delhi. In 1959, King visited India to learn what he could from Gandhi’s followers, and the strategy of the American Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s drew heavily from the Gandhian practice of satyagraha, or disciplined non-violent resistance, developed in South Africa and India. To complete the circle, Obama and Modi had themselves photographed visiting the new Martin Luther King Junior Memorial in Washington.

All this was adept deployment of the Gita in political rhetoric by Narendra Modi. Siding with Gandhi’s interpretation of the Gita allowed him to place India on the moral high ground of non-violence. Following the guiding philosophy of the Buddha and of Gandhi, Modi asserted, “we believe in non-violence.” And by bringing King into the picture, Modi was able to highlight the intertwined threads of dialogue that tie together the two post-colonial nations: the Bhagavad Gita, Thoreau’s civil disobedience, Gandhi’s satyagraha, and King’s dream.

Astute diplomatic symbolism aside, the larger question is which Bhagavad Gita will prevail during the Modi Raj. The Prime Minister’s personal background leads back to the Gita of RSS founder Hedgewar, who read the work as a conservative, exclusivist, Hindu work. Modi is a long-time member of the RSS and leads a conservative Hindu nationalist party. During his time as Chief Minister of Gujarat, he presided over horrific communal riots in 2002, and many accused him of abetting an anti-Muslim pogrom. But the past is not destiny. If he were now to embrace Gandhi’s non-violent and non-sectarian reading of the Gita, more than simply giving it away in other countries, one can imagine a different style of governance altogether. This remains to be seen. Whichever reading prevails, though, the long-ago battlefield dialogue of Krishna and Arjuna recorded in the Bhagavad Gita is sure to live on intensely in the political discourse of contemporary India.