Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it. (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 78)
I have a crush. Yes, yes, we’re both spoken for, but it’s ok. It’s just a mind-crush. A crush on ideas… revolutionary ideas. The kind of ideas that Irshad Manji is able to articulate oh so well to a nation and a people that are hurting. Hurting for connection. Hurting for belonging. Hurting for recognition and respect. She calls it, Moral Courage.
As we find out in our podcast this week — The Tao of Diversity — we are all lovers of the Tao. What is the Tao you may ask and how did a Muslim, Protestant and Jew find their way to this mystical place of ancient wisdom… together?
The Tao — or the “way” — is a concept of flow in many respects. It’s not a blunt tool to chip away at the truth. Nor is it a soft touch that gently lifts a scent in a breeze, letting the truth blow away in the wind. It is neither assertive nor meek. It is just like water. The same water that carved the Grand Canyon, and yet slips through our fingers without substance.
Powerful and malleable.
Ok, shove me in the shallow waters before I get too deep, as Edie Brickell croons. I won’t wax philosophical on the perplexities of Taoism, although I do love me some Asian philosophy to balance out Nietzsche, Kant and Marx. However, when I listen to Irshad speak about Moral Courage, I cannot help but to imagine myself in the flow. It just feels right. It feels honest.
In a world that is so divided along numerous fault lines, Moral Courage is surprisingly simple and shockingly revolutionary. Moral Courage doesn’t have an agenda. Well, it does. The agenda is to listen and to learn. This is very different from the message to sit down and shut up. It goes beyond an agenda to a vision; a vision to speak truths, even into disagreements, which results in authentic inclusion and engagement. And how we engage makes a difference.
There are boundaries of course. You cannot force someone to engage, and it is not a prescription to change someone’s mind. But it is a call to curiosity. Curiosity reflects sincerity, not sarcasm, as Irshad notes. And curiosity is, curiously, revolutionary.
When you approach a person with curiosity and a willingness to listen and learn, you create an impression. Like water carving stone, it may not be immediately noticeable. However, each time you engage the “other” with this curiosity (adding a dash of humility into the mix also can’t hurt) you humanize others with your point of view. When you do this, according to Irshad, the “other” has to be that more intentional about demonizing someone else they encounter with a similar viewpoint.
Moral Courage instructs us to not only engage and proactively challenge ourselves with various viewpoints, but also to actively listen instead of emotionally respond. These are truly the skills of leadership that allow true diversity, including viewpoint diversity, to flourish.
Moral Courage dispenses with homogeneous categories and identities to focus on our unique individual experiences, without shame. It sees every human as always evolving and works to build a community that rejects static labels, with the ultimate aim of replacing tribalism with pluralism.
And that, is truly revolutionary.
In the Hold my Drink — navigating the news and politics with a chaser of civility — and Counterweight Podcast — Episode 22, The Tao of Diversity: A Revolutionary Guide to Moral Courage, David Bernstein and I speak with Irshad Manji, author of Don’t Label Me and Founder of Moral Courage. She shares with us her revolutionary methods for creating community and “honest diversity”. Moral Courage reaches beyond our differences to build on our commonalities. It welcomes disagreement and seeks engagement to produce actionable steps towards an enduring diversity. All discussed with a chaser of civility, of course, and a cucumber vodka concoction (milk + protein for Irshad).
Hold My Drink welcomes all people with all kinds of beverages to join us as we discuss what it takes to imagine a new American identity, together.
Find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or watch the conversation unfold on YouTube, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
What Irshad is reading
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen E. Fields, Barbara J. Fields.
The Overweight Brain: How our obsession with knowing keeps us from getting smart enough to make a better world, Lois Holzman
What is Tao? Alan Watts
What David is reading
White People Don’t Have a Monopoly on Hatred, Common Sense with Bari Weiss (Substack)
A Biden Appointee’s Troubling Views on the First Amendment, Substack, Matt Taibbi
The Campaign of Lies Against Journalist Jesse Singal — And Why it Matters, Quillette, Jonathan Kay
What Jen is reading
The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Watts
Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times, Irshad Manji
White Fragility is Not the Answer: Honest Diversity Is, Heterodox: The Blog, Irshad Manji
Irshad Manji is the winner of Oprah’s first annual award for “audacity, nerve, boldness, and conviction.” As founder of the award-winning Moral Courage Project, Irshad equips people to do the right thing in the face of fear.
She discovered her mission through a deeply personal journey. In 2004, Irshad released The Trouble with Islam Today, an open letter to her fellow Muslims about why religious reform is more necessary than ever. When her book became an international bestseller, The New York Timesdubbed Irshad “Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare.”
In 2007, Irshad turned the book into an Emmy-nominated PBS film, Faith Without Fear. And 2011, she published Allah, Liberty & Love, which shows how Islam can be modernized for our time, the most pluralistic era in human history.
Along the way, Irshad drew key lessons in morally courageous leadership. For example, when do you step up for the sake of honesty? When do you step back for the sake of humility? Combining her reflections with cutting-edge research, she realized that moral courage is needed by anyone who seeks to have enduring impact.
Irshad thus became the world’s only professor of moral courage — first teaching at New York University and now lecturing with Oxford University’s Initiative for Global Ethics and Human Rights.
In 2019, Irshad came out with her third book: Don’t Label Me, a provocative new take on diversity that makes us all rethink how we see one another — and ourselves.
Her overarching message: Whatever your vision of progress, you will need to win over many holdouts. That requires listening to people who disagree with you, not labeling them. Curbing your ego demands exercising moral courage. Irshad teaches these skills through Moral Courage College, the program she is building to help educators become hi-impact leaders in social and emotional learning.
African by birth, Canadian by citizenship, American by immersion and universal by reach, Irshad inspires fresh perspectives on success, leadership, inclusion and integrity.