In 1987, While Teaching a Class at Mit [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] on nonviolence, Philosophy Lecturer Lee Perlman Had a Novel idea: Why Not Take the Students to a prison, to Talk with Men Who Had Committed Extreme Forms of Violence

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And who has more to say about forgiveness then these guys that I am teaching in prison? We were struggling with the idea of what forgiveness is and we kind of planned a course Jacque Lacan and he has this one line that says, "You can only forgive the unforgivable" meaning sure we can say that I understand why he did it. He came from a bad background or we can say I can live with that, but that is not forgiving. That is excusing and there is nothing wrong with that but that is not what forgiveness is. Forgiveness is something deeper. Forgiveness is when you are still and when you fully understand the magnitude and the wrong of the act and still this one is able to forgive. So we are struggling with what that could possibly mean and one of my guys who is in prison for life, said “for me forgiveness is about an act. What I did,” he said, “was actually unforgivable and I don't expect anybody to forgive me for that act. What forgiveness means to me is that you are not reduced to the only person who committed that act and that you remain open to the possibility that I can become somebody who wouldn't do things like that. You remain open to the possibility that I can change, That is what forgiveness means to me.” I don't think I would have that kind of a conversation just at MIT. I mean I was in a room with people who think in a very deep and personal and really consequential way about what things like forgiveness mean.

Preeta: How are the MIT students doing in all of this? What is their experience and what are some of the stories of transformation that they have experienced? And I want to come back to the prisoners.

Lee: It is kind of an experience that is too big to articulate because every single one of my students if you call them right now and ask them, they would say it was a life-changing experience to do this, but it is hard for anybody to pin down exactly what that is. One thing is that we are in the presence of the kind of people we never meet. I mean people in the prison are the most despised people in society and you are having a civil, meaningful conversation with them that is a pretty important experience. So I don't find my MIT students to be extremely articulative by how it has changed them but everyone says it is one of the most important things that they have ever done.

Preeta: Life changing experiences are like that, it is hard to articulate. Going back to the prisoners, obviously as you described these topics and these discussions it must be very deeply moving. I can imagine for people to have access to you, access to these new ideas, access to these thoughts. What is the impact for them of being with MIT students? These are kids who come from a very different kind of a background, just wondering how they react to that?

Lee: Yeah, I had different kinds of reactions. First of all one prison that I teach there is a room that is the college. It is Boston university classroom. It is painted with BU colors. When you step into that room you are in Boston University and my incarcerated students would often say that they are in class and not in prison. They are leading kind of normal lives. In addition, being in contact with the MIT kids it still normalizes there lives, they are not the kind of people they meet every day. At the same time, I had them write a little about the evaluation of the courses and their experiences at the end and often they say that they were kind of intimidated because MIT has a kind of mythical kind of effect on people. These people that you are bringing must be the smartest people in the world and most of my guys and women, even more, I think in the women's prison, their experiences of life isn’t thinking of themselves as the smartest people in the world. One of the experiences they had in these classes is just learning how well they can think and learn the places that life would demand but they are not people who pull all their lives being intellectuals or capable of the kinds of things that MIT students are so part of their experience is that they are intimidated by the MIT students but I think at the end they also have the experience that I am as smart as these kids and some ways I am even actually smarter so I think that is liberating.

Preeta: What kind of prisoners or incarcerated people sign up for these kind of courses. Is it kind of a rare person who signs up for a philosophy course and especially philosophy course with MIT students. And how big are these classes?

Lee: The classes are bigger than I would like them to be. I usually bring in 10 MIT students in and there are usually about fourteen incarcerated students. What kind, I only come in contact with people who are mostly interested in self-improvement. So these are really motivated people. First of all it is hard to get into the prison programs. You have to often keep trying, you have to test into it and like I said most of these guys don't have their high school degrees so I am in contact with people that are really motivated and usually the guys that have kind of real leadership qualities and are kind of leaders in the prison. They are the kind of people that try to civilize their life in prison and they are people with real positive outlooks as positive as you can get in a prison.

Preeta: Have you got any feedback from the wardens or correctional officers from within the prison?

Lee: Well it is a tricky business, prisons are tough places. And balancing the needs of the institution and balancing with what I am trying to do takes work and time and skill and we are not even entirely there yet so for the most part in theory all the people that I deal within prison, the administrators are in theory in favor of the kind of things that we are doing but they have real concerns like for instance there is a tension between I wanted a lot of discussions in my class but there are real concerns in the prison with boundary issues between the inmates and what can go wrong and I respect and I have to take those concerns seriously so working out the proper balance is still in progress. `

Preeta: When I was glancing at your syllabus they are incredibly sophisticated in terms of the readings and topics and intellectual, I was wondering are there also personal practices that kind of go along with these kind of head based learning and I kept the real question for me in all of this which is a personal question in my own life like how does one cultivate non-violence and love from the head from different sets of practices that you might do.

Lee: So I want to make a very strong case and we go way back to Socrates. Socrates and Plato after him, really made the case that real philosophy only happens in discussions and that philosophy isn't reading books.

I want to make a very strong case for - so if we go way back to Socrates. Socrates and sort of, Plato after him, really made the case that real philosophy only happens in discussion. That philosophy isn't reading books. Soon as you actually, you can find this in Plato, as soon  as you write it down, you have sort of calcified it. The philosophy is a living practice. It only happens between real people. And although there are universal truths, the universal truths are only discoverable in particular times as relevant to the particular times and the particular people that are discussing them. So I really want to make the case, that philosophical discussions is a spiritual practice. It is not all head. I mean as soon as you engage with another person,  your emotions and your whole being is involved. You can't engage another person without having feelings about what you are saying. Without dealing with the whole of who you are. So as long as you keep it to the level of discussion, i think, you are in the realm of spiritual practice.

Preeta: That's great. I am curious. So many more things that we could go on with. I know there are some questions that are coming in. But couple more i will go with. I am just curious- you have got other work in the prisons as well, especially with the debate team. And I am just curious - all of this work - the debate work, the teaching - how has this work with the prison initiative transformed you? We talked about the prisoners and the MIT students; changing their lives. I wonder what effect it has had on you?

Lee: I think the main stage I am in right now, is you know, in the sort of Zen - first there is the mountain, and then during Zen the mountain is no longer a mountain , and then after Zen - it is the mountain again. I think I am in the mountain-is-not-a-mountain stage right now. That is - the way - the stage of transformation I am in right now, is that this has upset me. I am not in only the negative sense but it kind of [a] positive sense. It upsets my complacency, that I feel like very much in-process right now. I feel like I am really experimenting with letting go of a lot of my suppositions. A lot of the things that I have sort of taken for granted. And I am just in the stage of openness right now. You know I don't even want to jump to the side of complete - kind of lofty compassion - I think there are a lot of social injustices that are exemplified in how our prison system works. But I am also dealing with people that have done some very bad things. And I am just kind of open to what that means to me. Do you understand what I am saying? I am struggling with even saying it.

Preeta: Yeah. I am struck by your amazing openness and curiosity to all experience. And not trying to label it pre-maturely. That is what is jumping for me.

Lee: That's the way I am feeling. I just feel like it is - I was just wanna keep taking it in. And keep dealing with it and keep reflecting on what's happening and at some point in the road, it is all kind of season and I will have some big conclusions. But right now, I like being in the stage of upset. Of not knowing exactly what I think about all these things.

Preeta: When you mentioned the lot of presuppositions that have been upset, can you say a little more about that? Like what kind of presuppositions?

Lee: Well... I really struggle a lot with... I have been on sort of both sides of issues of blame and forgiveness. What we do - how we respond to people that have done terrible wrongs. I have presuppositions on both sides. That somehow society is - that somehow it is [a] disservice to us if we don't make very strong statements in terms of punishments - for people that have done very terrible things. And then on the other hand,  it is not random, who it is that winds up doing these things. There are a lot of societal factors. So I have been upset and I am just struggling with that a lot. One of things is - I deal with some people that I know in prison have done some very terrible things and not even just randomly. In an organized way they have been involved in terrible things. And yet I find some of these people I actually like and respect a lot. So I am just trying to deal with those two sides without artificially coming down on one of them or the other.

Preeta: Great. My final question is a kind of a big one. So you can take this  in whatever way you want to take... and go with it in any direction. But so much of what you just said in your last response about your openness to taking it all in, I come back to the way you described your experience in Minneapolis, about your experiences in politics and policy about the ways in which your contemplative side was not fully fueled. One way to ask this question - let me ask you in a couple ways and you can decide how you will answer - one way is just your current views about engaging with politics and policy as a model of social change. What you think of ways of engaging in more systemic ways of change? Another way is - when you were talking about your struggles with dealing with some of the incarcerated people - that you like them as people but obviously they have done terrible things. And it had shadows to me of how you describe some of the legislators. And the way in which you said sometimes the legislators were in some ways the least free people. And you know - a lot is coming up for me, you know, Beau’s book about “how we are all doing time.” So lot of different stuff. You can answer whatever you feel like answering. But I am curious about your views about systemic social change and kind of now as you are struggling more with the integration of the deep philosophy with activity in the world. What are your thoughts now, about the best ways that resonate with you of impacting our systems?

Lee: I had an interesting conversation just about a week ago with a guy inside. And he quoted to me a line from the Black Panther Huey Newton; and the line was " doing good is a hustle." And I think back in my political days, I think politics as it is normally practiced and as I practiced it, is really just an art of manipulation. I was proud of my abilities to manipulate situations to bring the most good out of them. And that doesn't satisfy me anymore. I don't blame him for to keep doing good as a hustle; but I don't want it to be a hustle for me. I really want to take a longer view and have faith that if I pursue what I pursue, as close as I can get to complete honesty, with compassion for everybody, the correctional officers, with trying to understand everybody's point of view. Not demonizing anybody. And you have to work in a system like this to not demonize anybody. It comes pretty naturally. I feel like that is the only way I want to do politics. And I guess it is just an act of faith. That that kind of political engagement is, in the long run, at least, going to be more effective than manipulation. Which clearly, in my experience, manipulation gets affects faster and gets really concrete affects. I think that's how I would sum it up for me. And for me right now, this is my spiritual practice. And that means, it is just not about, it is just not about the immediate effects that result.

It is about living my life as a person that I actually really want to be.

Rahul: That is so fascinating, Lee. Thank you for sharing. I've been on the edge of my seat. On that last answer, I was reflecting on this notion of how there are so many activist who start from the other end. They start from a place of feeling like they are being fully compassionate, fully transparent, honest, and as a result of being frustrated by their inability to achieve concrete action, they would love to have the skills that you have in actually manipulating the system to get a result in a reasonable time frame. And yet you have gone in completely the opposite direction. I'm curious whether you can reflect on the notion of the grass is always greener on the other side.

And what that means inside you're deepening spiritual practice, both philosophy and engagement at the intersection of what's is deeply true inside scaling to the outside world.

Lee: Well, as to the grass is always greener, my philosophical orientation is dialectical that my primary assumption is that on both sides of any important question there is some truth.

I don't even know if where I'm at right now is right. When I answered that guy about doing good is a hustle, somebody else said that the fact that you don't think of it that way is a product of white privilege, that you don't have to think of it that way. And I'm willing to contemplate that too. I'm willing to go back and forth between the two different sides.

I guess part of it for me though, the reason I'm on this side right now is I was involved in all the ferment of the 60s and I was very political back then. And things were accomplished and the world is a better place for some of the things, but look at the backlash we are getting. Somehow or other we didn't get through in the way we needed to to an awful lot of people. I think the foundational thing that has to be changed is the culture that underlies our politics. You can't do that from a manipulative standpoint. You can change the surface things, but you can't change the foundation manipulatively. And that is what engages me now.

Rahul: Nancy Miller from Arlington, Virginia, asks, "How does the dynamics of race and poverty enter your work? Many of the inmates and clients I work with are people of color. Many are traumatized for a variety of reasons--poor educational background and issues with addiction." So how does race and poverty figure into your work?

Lee: Well, by the time that people get to the classes that I'm teaching, they have to have dealt with a lot of those debilitating issues. Prison is distinctly not proportional in its racial composition to society. We all know that. I deal with common humanity. I deal with the ways in which we are all the same. Again, that is what I have to offer. It doesn't mean that it is a better way of dealing with it.

I'm certainly open to all those. I have an interesting story about that. An interesting story that speaks to that maybe you can't always extract from you circumstances even in the most abstract philosophical conversations.

There is a famous ethical thought experiment that is presented in every ethics class everywhere, which is called the Trolley problem. You are walking down a track, you see that there is one person working on one track and two people working on another track. You get to a place where the tracks join. You see a train that is out of control. There is switch there, You can tell that if you don't pull the switch the train is going to kill the two people on one track. If you pull the switch, the train will go on the other track and kill the one person. It is supposed to ask questions about utilitarianism, whether you are responsible to make sure that the least amount of harm occurs, whether acting is morally equivalent to not acting.

So when I teach that at MIT or Harvard or any place else like that, we deal with it on that really abstract level. When I taught that in prison, not one but a handful of guys, particularly African American guys said, "As a man of color, I just run, because if I pull the switch, I'm going to jail. If I don't pull the switch, I'm going to jail. I just get out of there.”

So even when you are trying to keep it on a really abstract level, the concrete circumstances of our lives do come in.

Rahul: That makes a lot of sense. Perhaps to hover on the center of Nancy's question, she may have been asking about the effects of trauma on the students of the class and probe into whether they may have dealt with those effects already through other things offered in prison or because it is so selective have they somehow found a way to transcend that personally. What is your experience with that?

Lee: Yeah. It is a really interesting question. A concrete answer is I've had people say to me, I teach philosophy of love, and it makes us think about the nature of love. It seems like a lovely thing to think about, but when I teach it in the women's prison especially, I'm dealing with a population of people who have been for the most part traumatized by love. Love has been an extremely hurtful thing in their lives. In many, many, many cases it has a lot to do with why they are there in prison. So I would have to consider whether or not am I really equipped to deal with the traumas that come up when I discuss those questions with these women, even though all of them have done all sorts of counseling and stuff like that. Sometimes when I get papers from them about these very erudite books they are reading, they put their own stories of their histories of love and the stories are… some of them are really horrible.

So I don't know. I do have to be aware of that. I can't just pretend that the life of a mind is detached from the rest of our lives. To think seriously about love when you come from a background of experiences that masqueraded as love and were extremely destructive. It is not a neutral thing.

Rahul: We have another question from Ian Schiffer from Madrid, Spain. He says, "Thanks Lee, for all of your work. How do you feel that spirituality can start and blossom within repressive systems? Keeping in mind the radical education that often takes place inside prisons and Paulo Friere's work in critical pedagogy, how do you recognize the lived expertise of people who are incarcerated within your classes, noting the gaps many of these students face, especially with outside students who are also included who often affirmed in their meritocratic achievement?"

Lee: I do have to deal with all those issues. I think as I said earlier that a lot of the incarcerated students report being intimidated by the MIT students. I think the wisdom that comes from experience, just cannot be repressed in a classroom like this. One thing we haven't mentioned is that one of the things that I think is so important to the MIT students is not only are they meeting and having discussions about central life issues with people from a very different background, but also you spend your whole four years in college talking only to professors who are hierarchically superior to you and equals that are exactly your own age and probably come from a pretty similar background to you. When they take classes in prison, they are with men in their sixties. They are in class with people who come from really wildly different circumstances from them.

And it becomes really… I think one of the things the incarcerated students learn is how smart they really are and how the breadth of their experience gives them a kind of wisdom that these brilliant young whippersnappers don't have. And I think the MIT students learn that too. Before I referred to our discussion of forgiveness. Well, the MIT students sat in that discussion as the learners and the incarcerated guys were the teachers in that class. Although there was mutual learning going on, but that was the major role.

I actually think there is a lot of dignity in the life of a mind itself. And I think, they experience themselves as being… they get in touch with their own intelligence in a way that they have never done before in their lives. It is a big question.

Rahul: I'm curious. You kept mentioning you have obviously encountered people who have done some pretty horrible things. In your experience, have you ever encountered a person that you regard as evil? What I mean by that is we hear how the prevalence of psychopathy or sociopathy or both  is about 1% in the general population and it is 4% in prisons and in the corporate boardrooms as well. The people who have made it into your classes and passed all the hurdles have obviously either worked through or been very successful in manipulating a system to be able to have access. So in my mind, if there ever was someone who was genuinely and truly evil they would have managed to work their way into the best part of the prison system and sounds like you are doing something that is pretty transformative and certainly helpful. But what is your reflection on evil?

Lee: Yeah, that gets to the real root of some things. So for me the main dividing line is how genuine somebody is and how much I feel like they are being entirely real with me. There are guys who have done terrible things, but I feel a realness about them. I'm sure of it. And they are really struggling with these things. And then there are other people. The people that come closest to what you are calling evil are people for whom they can't ever get out of their manipulative mind. It always feels like manipulation. And some of those people are the most charming people in my class. In some ways, some of the more charming guys wind up giving me the creeps more that the people that are just plain.

One of our class discussions on forgiveness, one of the guys who had taken a life said to one of the students, "Do you think I'm evil?" And she, taken aback, said, "Well, yes I do." And this guy said, "Thank you. Thank you for being so honest. I know how many people are thinking that but almost nobody will say that to me. And now we can have a real conversation."

But of course, by doing that to me he demonstrated that whatever is that has gone wrong in his life, I wouldn't call it evil. But, yeah, the hardest people are the people that I feel still come from a spirit of manipulation. Reality is a game to be manipulated. And some of the people I have the most trouble with and I struggle the most with being kind and compassionate, I think some of the sexual offenses that are most challenging.

Rahul: Yeah, that is quite understandable. Nancy Miller again from Arlington says, "How do you engage the inmates? How do you get them to talk and reveal aspects of themselves in an open and honest way? Same for the MIT students." She also wants to get a copy of your love, non-violence, and forgiveness courses because she teaches mindfulness and meditation in jails and detox centers in the Metro DC area and the topics that you teach come up frequently in her discussions.

Lee: For the courses, just email me at Lperlman@MIT.edu. And I actually find incarcerated students and there is some gender disparity here between the way men react and women in prison, but I find them easier to engage in a lot of ways than MIT students. They are much more comfortable with discussions. They are much more comfortable with being wrong, so they are more willing to speak up. They kind of argue and fight with each other in class in a very free way. And they are willing to back off when they are wrong. I find MIT students tend to have a more perfectionist constraint on their speaking and so they are very careful. They don't want to say anything that doesn't seem brilliant. So I find the incarcerated students quite easy to engage.

There is some difference between the men and women students on a kind of broad average. Which is the incarcerated women students tend to be a little less self-confident for obvious reasons given their backgrounds. So they don't speak up as easily. But even there I think it doesn't take a lot.

I don't have any specific method. I try to approach it with an air that anything is welcome here. It is my job to reign it in if it is getting too tangential.

Rahul: I had another question that sort of dials back into this topic on non-violence. I'm just curious to understand what you evolving understanding of that has been, particularly given that my exposure to the topic is from the Sanskrit ahimsa and non-violence is a very poor translation for that because it is sort of a double negative. But ahimsa is a completely different way of being which is overwhelmingly positive that there is no space for the negative. Just curious what your experience of that has been going from the political strategies to ways of being to what you are actually teaching and able to teach in class.

Lee: I think that for me, my understanding of Gandhi's thought, the central concept of Gandhi's thought, was not ahimsa. But his central concept was the term that he coined which was satyagraha, which is usually translated as "firmness in the truth." From satya, meaning truth, which comes from "sat"-- which means being. So it is a conception of truth in which in a certain way we live in the world as it is, as it truly is, without trying to fabricate it or romanticize it or pretend it is something other than what it is.

In a way ahimsa is a goal all in itself, but it is also a goal that served satyagraha. That is when you don't manipulate a situation or introduce violence to try to wrench it out of its natural path then you will see that world as it is. To me that has come to be the central concept and it is how I integrate philosophy with action. To me it is all a search for truth, understanding who I truly am, who we truly are together. What the situation we find ourselves in without trying to manipulate it, which requires an acceptance sometimes, and a willingness to impose on the situation what you want it to be, but to see it as it is. I think for me that is the central concept right now of non-violence.

Rahul: That blends so perfectly with my next question which is understanding what you think the role of mindfulness or meditation has been in prison,