Karen Armstrong: remarkably modest & admirably ambitious
Recently, we had the opportunity to meet Karen Armstrong, who won the TED Prize in 2008 and thereafter initiated the Charter for Compassion. In line with her many writings on spirituality, the charter shows the resemblance between the major religious world movements that all have compassion at their core. At TEDxYouth on 20 November, a special edition of the charter for young people will be launched in Amsterdam.
In a very short period, Karen Armstrong’s ideal has reached critical mass, and it’s all been aided by modern digital communication. Around the world, more than 50,000 inviduals from all religions have signed the charter to support their shared ideas for compassion, tolerance and understanding. In the light of Karen’s new book release, we took the unique opportunity to find out a bit more about the person behind this great success.
Your relationship to TED is very close. How did you came to know the organization?
It seems astonishing to me now, really. I got an email saying that I’d won the TED Prize, and I’d never even heard of TED! ‘Who is this Ted guy?’ I thought… And now TED is so much part of my life I can’t imagine there was a time I lived without it. I was intrigued by this prize and had no idea what to expect. But they took my wish on board and sort of ran with it. They have changed my life and turned it upside down. Look at everything that’s happening with the charter… Me winning that prize was very unusual to TED because they usually grant it to highly secular people.
Chris Anderson was a little bit nervous about the way the TED audience would respond to my wish. He was rather careful of me and jumped on stage after I finished speaking and told the audience he thought some of them might want nothing to do with this at all. But it was extraordinary! The energy, commitment and creativity they put behind this wish – and not to mention the money…
TED has become a massive movement in itself. Nowadays it would be very difficult for anyone to say they have never heard of TED. These TEDx events have bloomed quite recently. I think it is about knowledge, which is so empowering. A lot of our problems come from people being deprived of knowledge and information. Having all these talks online, accessible to anybody, has made a massive difference.
Have you also been involved in TEDxEvents next to your relationship to TED?
Not yet, but that is coming. There is going to be a TEDxYouth@Toronto and I will certainly do a video for them. I think they will be writing a curriculum by and for young high school kids. This can’t be global of course, as young people all over the world have their own language. What we need to do is translate the charter into a youth idiom – that would be terrific.
You just talked about a charter for youth. What else is happening with the charter?
Well, here in Amsterdam, a lot is happening indeed. They have been really active! On TEDxYouth@Amsterdam they will launch the first (non-English) Children’s Charter. This is a close cooperation between the people from TEDxYouth (Amsterdam), Anne-Kee Deelen and Bregje Paulussen.
She was onto it immediately and Amsterdam has been one of the most active supporters in the world. Otherwise, Seattle declared itself to be the first City of Compassion. Now these are not a bunch of West Coast hippies: business people from, for example Microsoft, are translating the charter into business phikosophy. They jumped on the charter and now Seattle is the most active city in the world.
People are doing their own thing with it. I heard of a wonderful man who is writing a programme to treat prisoners with basic respect. He has an extraordinary personal history of suffering and came out of that compassionately. Educating prison staff to treat prisoners compassionately has already led to decreased violence.
It sounds pretty logical when you talk about it.
On the outside it does sound logical. But you know what? There is a certain culture within prison and people go into those jobs for an array of personal reasons that are not always laudable.
How do you keep track of everything people are doing with the Charter?
It’s great that I get a lot of support from the Fetzer Institute in Michigan who, as we speak, will appoint a fulltime person to coordinate it all. Obviously at the moment it is growing so much. The charter has really taken off with amazing speed. I have wondered why it has in this time, and I believe it has somehow struck a chord. This charter brings all those people together that were already engaged in this field of work all over the globe. Now they see a sort of network where they can all pull together.
You see, we cannot go on as we are behaving in the world now. It is utterly unrealistic to treat other peoples, other nations and other cultural or religious groups as parias in a world that is so deeply interconnected. We have seen that if one economic market goes down, all economies go down. With modern communications like Twitter we are all very connected in a very obvious way. But I also mean that politically: when something bad happens in Afghanistan it is likely to have repercussions elsewhere too. The Dalai Lama has repeatedly said it is in our own interest to be compassionate and treat other people as we wish to be treated ourselves.
We can imagine you also get to speak to people that aren’t supportive of your ideas. How do they respond and how do you react to those responses?
Basically, I am never asked to speak to those people. I do get a lot of emails and I sort of ignore them. Especially when I used to write a column about the Charter in The Guardian. Guardian readers are among the most cynical, especially when it comes to religion. They immediately pounded in horrible stuff – and then others responded asking if they were crazy. So it created a debate which I think is really good. But in general I think you just have to keep ploughing on.
What keeps you going on? It must take endurance and strength to continue pushing this message forward?
It does, but it is also rewarding. To see all these initiatives started by people when a year ago, we hadn’t even launched! Most of them are incredibly young to me. Let me tell you about a young businessman I met in Pakistan, Amin Hashwani. He belongs to the Hashwani Group that owns many hotels in Pakistan, including those that have been blown up. Amin has started a kind of peace initiative between India and Pakistan. His plan is not to go to the government as, he says, they are a bunch of crooks. He wants to go for big cities and in each he will invite at least 500 school and college principals. This February, we will talk together about how to implement the Charter in education. He’s getting a lot of media attention in Pakistan, he is terrific.
So those are a few things that are happening elsewhere. Somebody has declared April 5, 2011 as “Golden Rule Day” and I’d like that to be a big day! Religious leaders can talk about compassion, people in education can do projects and even the media can get involved! You know, once we got them on our side this might become an annual focus point!
Amsterdam’s own Rabbi Soetendorp also contributed to Karen’s Charter. He spoke at last year’s TEDxAmsterdam; you can see the video here:
TEDxAmsterdam: Rabbi Soetendorp on compassion.
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