Authenticity in Individuals

I have always felt that authenticity is a quality that should be encouraged in leaders, and non-leaders alike. After all, why waste time and effort being an individual who is faker than a shiny glistening snowball in the middle of the Sahara Desert. There is nothing quite as unmotivating as finding out that a person especially someone in a position of authority to you (such as your leader) is inauthentic, and that their words mean nothing and have no value whatsoever. Authenticity refers to the quality of being genuine—in other words, you speak in accordance with what you actually believe or think. If you adhere to a certain value-system, then you act in accordance with it. For example, if you profess to be a vegan, but find yourself sneaking off to the local churrascaria every weekend to binge on picanha; then it is apparent that you are not authentically vegan. A lack of genuineness reflects a lack of authenticity, and of course, leaders who are not authentic cannot be said to be authentic leaders.

In this chapter, I will be focusing on authenticity and more precisely authentic leadership. While a person can be authentic without being a leader, an authentic leader cannot be one without being authentic. Authentic leadership is one of the more recent theories out there in the discipline of leadership and has certainly captivated the attention of scholars and popularpress people alike. As I said, we all love the very concept of authenticity—we want the items we purchase to be genuine, and we want the people we associate with to be genuine as well. That sentiment is amplified when it comes to leaders—followers crave for their leaders to be authentic leaders, as it's a lot easier for someone to follow an authentic leader.

Now back to our canine companions—I have personally never met a single dog who has been less than authentic. Yes, some are mischievous, and many are quirky characters, but they are always authentic. The love and adoration they bestow on their loved ones is always enveloped with 100% FDAapproved authenticity.

Introduction

Bodies matter. This has not been obvious in the history of philosophy (particularly in the Platonic, the neo-Platonic, Christian, and rationalist traditions), where the body has been considered at best an awkward irrelevance and at worst the enemy of the mind and spirit. Historically, where the body has been appreciated positively it has been idealized as the Nude, mostly female body or else the Athlete, mostly male body. Such bodies bear little resemblance to the real bodies of those who admire their perfection. These idealized bodies are the exception to the general view that the bodies of humans are the low and mean. Embodiment is, after all, that which humans share with nonhuman animals. It is that, therefore, of which humans are to be ashamed. “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” the early Christian theologian Paul asked in the agony of embodied existence. It is the irony of contemporary society, where nakedness is everywhere, but ought nowhere to be seen, that even the idealized semi-naked statue of the Spirit of Justice had to be covered when John Ashcroft was U.S. Attorney General (Associated Press). Even the once admired ideal body is now also that of which we ought to be ashamed.

The alienated, objectified body is fair game for mistreatment and fair game for violation. In modern Western thinking, the body is merely an instrument of the self. The body is not the self. “I” have “a body.” “I” own “my body,” as I own other things, such as my car, my house or my computer. This “thing” may often get in the way of true self-development, for it is the life of the mind or the spirit that needs to be developed to perfection. If the self—the subject—is the mind, then what happens to the body does not happen to subjects but only to objects. In the rationalist tradition (Descartes, Spinoza, and others), the body is considered merely as a machine and, therefore, could never be a site of sensory perception or knowledge. Perception is of the mind only (see, Shusterman, Somaesthetics). If the body is alien, if the body is the problem, and if the body is “lower,” then it is less important what happens to the body than what happens to the mind.

What Is Courage?

Before embarking on a journey by ship, it is after all vital to understand where the ship is sailing to. If one aims to go to Tibet, it would hardly be worth the effort to sail to Tasmania. Similarly, unless we truly know what courage stands for, it would be a bit odd to delve into an entire chapter on the topic. Most people would define courage with a synonym—some would say that courage stands for bravery or fortitude. But those are not definitions! I would define courage as a quality that allows a person to willingly pursue a course of action that could be risky, but the person does it anyway because there is a purpose behind that action.

The title of this chapter pretty much provides what the end journey is going to be.

Indeed, I will focus on courage, and talk about some dog breeds that absolutely reflect courage. While the title suggests that I will be spending a major chunk of this chapter relating the exploits of Bulldogs, today's modern Bulldog does not bear a whole lot of similarity with its earlier ancestors. The Bulldogs of yesteryear were used for bull baiting (a cruel sport), which has luckily been outlawed since. Ever since, Bulldogs have more or less become cute charismatic Churchillian dogs. However, the expression “Bulldog Spirit” while frequently used to talk about tenacity, can also apply to courage. Think about it—Bulldogs were used to bait Bulls, who are much larger animals. That itself speaks volumes about the courage aspect inherent in Bulldogs. In this chapter though, apart from the Bulldog, I will focus on discussing several livestock guardian dog breeds, who are renowned over the world for their courage.

Courage is something that humans could do to improve themselves. Far too often, you will see leaders (and followers, it must be said) wilting under strenuous or high-pressure circumstances. They lack the courage to do the right thing, and they often end up behaving in ways that are contrary to how they ought to. Think about the individuals who agree to engage in unethical activities just because their supervisor or boss tells them to.

There is not yet a spy literature of Cold War II comparable to that of the first. There is not yet a John Le Carré or even an Ian Fleming. This conflict is not couched in the allure of dangerous operations behind enemy lines, the subtle psychology of propaganda campaigns or the agonised dilemmas of those caught in the middle. A silent but significant minority repudiate the logic of cold war, especially when it diverts attention from the multitude of pressing issues that face humanity and is driven by security concerns that require a diplomatic rather than a military response. To adapt Karl Marx's well-known aphorism, if Cold War I was a tragedy, the second is indeed a farce, although a dangerous one. At its heart is the struggle to control narratives, to shape popular perceptions of reality.

This is an age-old endeavour, but in Cold War II the misrepresentation of situations is exacerbated by the decline of high modernist ideals of fact-based journalism and impartial scholarship. Western media act less like ‘watchdogs as to their own government's foreign policy. Rather, they act as a handmaiden.’ Jacques Baud even goes so far as to argue that Western societies are governed by fake news. He argues that the refusal to conduct impartial investigations of critical events, such as Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons in Syria or Putin's attempts to destabilise Western democracies (notably in the Russiagate case in the United States), shapes the foreign policy of Western countries. Having worked for the UN and NATO, he witnessed at first hand

He notes how ‘suppositions become certainties and prejudices become realities’, with the sad outcome: ‘We do not understand war, so we cannot understand peace.’ The prejudices generated by fake news rebound to generate ‘the terrorism that is killing us’. It is not only terrorism that is generated but cold war as a form of international politics.

Communication and Its Various Forms

There are several kinds of communication that one could discuss in this chapter, and I will do so at length in this chapter. On the one hand, we have the nonverbal variety, where one understands the message being conveyed even without any sound. The other kind of communication is obviously of the spoken variety, where language and sound play their respective parts. Then there is the written aspect of communication, which is what is being used here in this book, after all (at least until the imminently inevitable audiobook, when the medium of communication would shift to the spoken kind of communication. David Tennant would make an excellent narrator, I think, but I digress. Back to the chapter!).

As always, a definition of communication would be helpful before we get deeper into the topic itself. Communication involved the transmission and reception of information, and that information can be received or relayed via different means, be it oral, nonverbal, or written. If there is information that needs to be shared with others, then communication is the way to go about doing so. Now since this book is about how we can learn and improve our own leadership from dogs, I am not going to focus too much on the written form of communication. Sadly, dogs are yet to master the art of writing—there are no canine equivalents of William Shakespeare or J. K. Rowling. Yes, dogs are amazing in the art of listening (well, some dogs are experts in selective listening, like mine when she doesn't want to go back home from the dog park), and that is a huge part of communication too. But as far as the written aspect of communication is concerned, dogs are sadly a nonstarter there. So, let's begin with the nonverbal aspect of communication, which one must admit, dogs are experts in both relaying as well as understanding.

Nonverbal Communication

This form of communication is perhaps one that dogs are masterful practitioners of; many a dog can simply stare into their human's eyes and let them know exactly what the dog is conveying.

Introduction

In this chapter I argue that the human violence against Earth has been in part a function of philosophy's love with the trope I term “Divine Child,” at the expense of the trope “Earth Creature.” I suggest the need for a new natural philosophy and look briefly at three clues that may help in the task: the philosophy of Albert Schweitzer, Daoism and somatic practice.

In her now classic God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Phyllis Trible explicates the Jewish myth of the creation of humanity. She points out that a careful reading of Hebrew tells us that Adam, formed of the dust of the Earth, was a gender undifferentiated human being. Gender differences come later when the undifferentiated human being becomes male and female. She translates:

The undifferentiated human being formed from the dust—ha-adam—she calls the Earth Creature. But this Earth Creature is formed by receiving breath from God and so is born of God—at once a creature of Earth and a child of God. The Jewish myth tells a story that encapsulates the self-identity of humanity—connected with the divine through reason, consciousness and moral sense and with the Earth through physicality, embodiedness and animalism. “Earth Creature” and “Divine Child” become tropes recurring throughout the history of philosophy.

In my reading of philosophy, the weight has been placed by far on the Divine Child. Philosophers in the West since Socrates—and in large part in Eastern philosophy—have been enamored with the human as most-nearly divine and above the material world. They have also often despised creaturely existence and have sought ways to transcend the limitations of physical embodiment. The means used toward transcendence have moved between the life of the mind through higher thought and learning and the life of the spirit through meditation and self-abnegation. In religious and nonreligious garb the human task has been to transcend the humanly animalistic. In many cultures to call someone an animal—dog, bitch, cow, pig and rat—is to humiliate and disrespect.

This collection of essays deals with the central problem of humanity: interpersonal violence; perhaps more accurately, nonviolence as an antidote to that central human conundrum. Few of us have the luxury of beginning at the beginning, and the essays in this book were written after I had been a pacifist for 21 years. They were previously published in various forums between 2004 and 2021, during my time teaching philosophy at the State University of New York, Cortland. The essays are an exploration of the realms of human rela-tionships, ethical considerations and the pursuit of a more compassionate and nonviolent world. I examine various forms of pacifism and discuss the interplay of philosophy, autobiography, ethics, common views of violence, historical perspectives on war and the tension between historical determinism and the possibility of nonviolence. The essays converge on a central theme: the transformative potential of intentional nonviolence. My exploration extends beyond theoretical musings to practical applications, encompassing personal relationships, social structures and our relationship with the Earth. In sum, I invite the reader to consider intentional nonviolence not just as a means to some other end but as an intrinsic good, capable of fostering a better world— one rooted in love, compassion and the pursuit of a shared humanity.

In the opening chapter, I address the question of whether love is inherently nonviolent, challenging assumptions and looking at the complexity of human loves, which often involve elements of violence. In her work, Iris Murdoch emphasizes the need for a moral philosophy centered on the concept of love, a notion often neglected by contemporary philosophers. In the first chapter, I build on Murdoch's idea and propose that a more loving world would be less violent. I explore the connection between love and morality, acknowledging challenges posed by issues of justice, fairness and happiness. I introduce a hypothetical case of a woman driven to violence out of love for God, family and country. I discuss the varied expressions of love, from affection to romantic and altruistic love, acknowledging their intertwining nature. I analyze the tension between transcendent, perfect love and its imperfect, human expressions.

Homer is in a sense the bedrock of Greek culture. Greeks are brought up in the charms of mythical narration, whose resonances are then gradually transformed through the cognitive channel of history, archeological findings, and geographical location. Exposition to the Homeric Epics starts early in the form of brief story-like adaptations in elementary school, modern Greek translations in high school, and study in the original of classical Greek and Latin texts in the Humanities Departments at the university. I still remember with fondness the reading and the analysis of these distant texts by our erudite classics professor in the oak-paneled amphitheatre and my dread when I had to recite extracts from Homer and Virgil as part of the oral exam at the end of the year. Then came my exposition to European literary modernity when I pursued my higher studies and research in contemporary literature and theatre abroad. Inevitably, the earlier tense experience with the classics softened in the course of years, filtered into sweet memory and resting com-fortably—albeit half-forgotten—at the back of my mind.

It was almost by miracle that I rediscovered this hidden treasure some 40 years later. After an exhaustive academic year, protracting well into the summer, we decided to take a week off in mid-September to enjoy the still warm Ionian Sea on the coast of Epirus in western Greece. Among the region's attractions was a visit by boat up the Acheron River to the Oracle of the Dead (Nekromanteion), both well-known sites from antiquity. The prospect of the visit was a real thrill for me because it meant a double journey back in the time machine: the first as a walk down my personal memory lane and the second as a speculative return to practices and experiences of antiquity related to the underworld.

I decided to take the trip as a totally physical experience and leave any intellectual research for later. The boat was of medium size, accommodating a small group of 10–15 passengers of mixed age and origin. We actually boarded at the mouth of Acheron, heading up to its springs.

Basic Matters

It was not a journey that I expected to find myself on. When I first encountered Tamburlaine the Great, at age nineteen, I dismissed Marlowe's poetry as self-conscious and narcissistic. Yet here I sit, many years on, having written the DNB essay on Edward Alleyn, the actor who brought Tamburlaine to life on stage at the Rose Playhouse, and the author of many essays on Philip Henslowe, the owner of the Rose. All I can think about is how much I missed when I initially encountered Tamburlaine. Then again, it has taken many readings and re-readings, research in ancient books and manuscripts, together with the energy of live productions, to bring me to a different place. It has also taken the realization that texts don't stand still, nor do lines of poetry, whether in production or in our thinking. But then, revisionary thinking is one of the gifts of a life spent teaching and immersed in scholarly pursuit.

Few would quibble with Tucker Brooke's quotation: “the real significance of blank verse began with Tamburlaine.” But really, Morris makes the more important point: “it's dramatic blank verse,” the way poetry works on stage that matters. And this is precisely what I have come to admire about Marlowe's poetry. It is not only the way it has held up over time, but the way it holds up the plays he wrote. In retrospect, Marlowe has never received enough credit for showing his contemporaries how to make verse stage-worthy. It is a more complex issue than shortening lines and liberating them from rhyme. It is different from merely being “dramatic,” a term implying that language does its duty on stage. Fortunately, Morris widened the group of plays under consideration to demonstrate Spenser's influence. All the same, while he identified repetition as a rhetorical tool that Marlowe employs, he stopped short of examining exactly how Marlowe uses this device as part of the scaffolding for his plays, or, more specifically, how repetition creates interactions among characters that an audience will experience, both audially and viscerally.

When I first read Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale,” I took it simply to be a poem written out of admiration for a nightingale's song, a poem celebrating a momentary encounter between bird and poet in an English garden. However, I knew that that did not account for the perplexing effect of the poem, a certain sense of tumult that arises from it. Why these clashing chords of anguish and happiness, weariness and exultation, despair and serenity?

When I reread the poem on a later occasion, I did so much more slowly in the attempt to allow for the rhythm of the work's unfolding, where the ode itself begins with a strange sense of an inexplicable slowing down.

Keats's ode begins with the lyric poet's expression of a simultaneous sense of heartache and drugged numbness. The expression “a drowsy numbness pains” begs the question of how a loss of sensation and loss of awareness can be painful, and it seems that the experience being described is not so much one of drifting into sleep but one of being put to sleep by what the poem calls “some dull opiate,” some drug, and calls also “hemlock’” a poison. With this, the question became for me: does the heartache or piercing sadness attested to derive from an anaesthetizing predicament that cannot be avoided?

In thinking of this sense of undergoing an anaesthetic, I recalled a memory from my childhood when I injured my mouth in a playground accident and was taken to a dentist who decided that to stitch up the injury he would need to “put me to sleep,” as he phrased it. It sounded alarming to me, since I had only heard of animals being put to “sleep,” a euphemism for mercy-killing them. The dentist clamped a chlorophyll gas mask over my nose and mouth, and as I began to lose consciousness, I had the harrowing feeling of fervently wishing I could resist what I could not resist, the helpless imposition of being plunged into oblivion.

I think T. S. Eliot's notion that the “experience of a poem is […] both of a moment and of a lifetime,” from our first encounter, which “is never repeated integrally” to the poem's survival “in a larger whole of experience,” bears a special parallel to the way an actor prepares for a role, progressing from the read-through, to rehearsals, to performance.

For me, Richard's monologue has an immediacy, an exhilarating appeal at the moment of delivery, for both the character in greeting the audience at the start of the play and the actor charged with giving life to an illusion. Theatre is, after all, a medium of the moment, the presence of the actors and their audiences inhabiting the same space and time. Or as one of my actors once observed, “If Godot doesn't show up for the characters onstage, he doesn't show up for us in house either. The joke is on both of us.” But what Robbe-Grillet has called “presence” in the theatre coexists with something not there, or not physically there or of the moment. Harold Pinter speaks of the latter as “the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.” We go to take out a bottle, a purely mechanical act, but as we approach the cabinet, we know that a weasel is living underneath, unseen but there. I tell my theatre majors this is a good way to imagine subtext, the deep and personal inner dialogue an actor devises to complement, sometimes even enhance the words there in the script. That subtext expands the present moment, the dialogue heard by the audience, the character seen by them, into the character's past, the sources, and the backstory that, while unseen, are there before the character even speaks. “The ‘why’ he says what he says,” as an actor friend calls it. And if the actor builds the character from real-life experiences, consciously, and sometimes not, this visionary moment of the playwright's art coexists with a real-life story.

With the end of Cold War I in 1989, a new paradigm of international politics took shape. This was a world without the challenge of a communist superpower and its associated conception of world order. Instead, the world order associated with the Political West appeared to triumph, but the fruits of that putative victory contained some deadly toxins that would corrupt the triumphant order itself. It remains to be seen just how lethal this will be, but we can already see one of the outcomes in the form of Cold War II. As described in this book, a whole culture is associated with cold war as a form of international politics.

The inter-cold war paradigm, what we can call the postcommunist model, was characterised by a number of key features. First, the interpellation of the Political West, variously presented as the liberal international order, rules-based international order or Atlantic power system, between the Charter International System and the practices of international politics. The Political West effectively usurped the privileges and prerogatives that should properly belong to Charter institutions, above all the UN, its agencies and the whole body of international law that it has spawned. Second, this entailed the displacement of the fundamental Charter principle of sovereign internationalism, where states meet as normative equals and unite in various multilateral formats to resolve problems of mutual concern. Instead, the ideology of democratic internationalism was advanced, which introduces not only sovereign inequality but also an inherently didactic, if not outright interventionist, dynamic into international affairs. The allegedly more advanced societies bring enlightenment, by book or by crook, to the more backward. Third, the absence of a peer competitor encouraged neoconservatives to forge a grand strategy based on permanent US dominance, requiring the imposition of constraints on potential competitors. In the first instance, this applied to Russia and was then extended to China. At the same time, the rise of economic neoliberalism from the 1970s provoked the radical transformation of social orders into market states, with wrenching domestic consequences.