Cody A. Valdes is Senior Lecturer and Senior Tutor in the School of Arts and Sciences at Sai University, where he will be leading the development of the University’s tutorial system for undergraduate students as well as its Communications foundation course. He will play a role in fostering intellectual life, international projects, and opportunities for holistic growth on campus.
He received his MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University in 2017 and his BA in Political Science from Tufts University in 2013. At Tufts he served in leadership positions in numerous programs of the Institute for Global Leadership under its Founding Director Emeritus Sherman Teichman, including its EPIIC colloquium, Empower Program of Social Entrepreneurship, Discourse Journal, Poverty and Power Research Initiative, Solar for Gaza/Sderot, and Synaptic Scholars. He later served as a Teaching Assistant for Tufts’ Department of Political Science, for which he gave lectures in the history of political thought and international relations. He has worked with Healing Minds Foundation’s team of therapists in Srinagar, Kashmir to introduce a mind-body integration programme for youth throughout the Valley. As an Instructor in the traditional martial arts with the School of Oom Yung Doe, he taught self-defense and moving meditation seminars to students and teachers at the International School of Kashmir and the Government College for Women in Srinagar.
***** MY INTERVIEW WITH CODY *****
It was my great pleasure and fortune to be able to introduce Cody to Jamshed Bharucha, who hired him at Sai University, where he is the indispensable fulcrum for my Global Challenges colloquium.
You joined EPIIC for our Global Cities year, and helped to create some of the more significant projects of the Institute - our look at corruption and oligarchy in the Philippines with the PPRI; the efforts to help ASYV with the Mango Tree Project; Sisi ni Amani, Solar for Gaza.
Why were you drawn to these initiatives? Did your efforts yield results?
For the Global Cities year (2008-9) I studied the potential impact of the 2010 Winter Olympics on Vancouver’s homeless and its Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. That same year I joined the Povrty and Power Research Initiative which had returned from its inaugural research effort into oligarchies and corruption in Guatemala and impressed me as being a serious team of very smart older peers. I sometimes wonder if my attraction to the theme of corruption as a freshman anticipated my later attraction to the theme of decline, which includes corruption in the Transparency International sense, but some other significant dimensions besides. In almost all of these efforts I was attracted by the seriousness of the issue at hand and the people I ended up working with.
How would you describe your temperament? On the one hand, I see tremendous equanimity. On the other, great restlessness.
Yes there is much restlessness. I might refer to Nietzsche’s Gay Science, section 351, or Faust:
Whatever is the lot of humankind
I want to taste within my deepest self.
I want to seize the highest and the lowest,
to load its woe and bliss upon my breast,
and thus expand my single self titanically
and in the end go down with all the rest.
I would ascribe my restlessness to the fact that in many respects I have not allowed my personality to develop along a normal and healthful course, which instinctively seeks equilibrium and ease in self-definition. I have tried to see all sides of things, which naturally makes one try to be all sides of things. My motivation has been the same naïvely expansive humanism espoused by Faust.
What are your aspirations at the crossroads where you currently find yourself? What will inform your decision? What are important and vexing political or social issues you want to engage with?
I am looking for an organic way forward. My work in Kashmir has been abruptly curtailed by the Indian government’s actions on August 5th, 2019, but the events of that day also galvanized me to engage in Canadian public life. The annulment of Kashmir’s status within the Indian federation demonstrated the utter fragility of constitutional democracy, especially where the qualities of forbearance and humanity can no longer be assumed of publics and their politicians. I would like to see Canada shore up its commitment to the letter and spirit of its federalist constitution and to respect the process of decentralized self-governance and self-determination by all of our provinces, territories, and peoples. I wish that this spirit of self-definition would prevail in our culture as well. I am not satisfied with the pseudo-multiculturalism of our cities where in fact everybody thinks and acts the same. I think it will weigh on humanity’s conscience very heavily, second only to the ecological crisis, if we press the homogenization of human culture any further.
My vision for an academy in Haida Gwaii reflects this latter concern for the future of human development. There is a rich heritage of knowledge accessible in books and the living lineages of disciplines that is more available to us than ever and yet fast slipping from our grasp. Our world is dying of thirst next to these inexhaustible reservoirs. Our minds are no longer cut out to access this knowledge – to participate in culture in the German sense of Bildung or the Greek sense of paideia. I was born around the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Internet was invented. The overwhelming trend during my lifetime has been the breaking down of barriers. Our culture has yet to propose an integral vision of a human being to its youth, i.e., a person who knows the worth of the different varietals of freedom.
What kind of role models do you admire?
I admire what were called in English class ‘round characters,’ people who in their way have assimilated a high degree of contradiction. These are the true empaths of the world because some part of them really is that which they seek to understand. The cost is inner turmoil for as much time as it takes to work out an equilibrium between the opposing elements. Then again, I appreciate the qualities of truly singular and unalloyed individuals and epochs too. For example here is a couplet by the Arab poet Ta’abata Sharran that has always evoked for me the Bedouin spirit of freedom:
[He is a man who] seldom complains of whatever calamity befalls him,
But has plenty of desires, many different directions to move in and ways to go.
Qalil al-tashakki lil-mulimm yusibuhu
Kathir al-hawa shatta al-nawa wa-al-masaalik
To his Jahiliyyan verse one could counter a saying of the prophet Muhammad, and then one would have a pair of remarkable yet contrasting personalities; and one could do this with pairs like Christ and Caesar, Socrates and Alcibiades, Confucius and Chuang Tzu, Hegel and Nietzsche…
What was your experience like creating the Cambridge Reading Group on decline?
When you think of decline, how do you explain what is happening in our own country, or the world at large? What construct makes sense to you at this moment in political terms?
We gathered an eclectic group of participants not one of whom was a student of political theory. We had an ecologist, a physicist, a lawyer, a political scientist, Brendan Simms our patron and resident historian, and various others. I convened it in early 2017, less than a year after the Brexit and Trump phenomena that had suddenly made the topic apropos. The group culled some interesting insights from the texts which were documented in a summary we published on Simms’ Forum on Geopolitics website.
I will say that the tendency in the modern social sciences towards materialistic or impersonal explanations of rise and decline is, in my opinion, misguided. These scientists could take as a model Ibn Khaldun, who derives general laws or patterns of rise and decline from observable facts, yet foregrounds the human element of personality, character, and spirit in the last analysis.
You have many physical practices to balance your intellectual discipline:
Hockey - what does it fulfill for you, and why had you left it for so long?
You have chosen to dedicate yourself to traditional martial arts. Is there any eschatology involved? What informs your dedication to two disparate sports?
Hockey was an important phase in my youth but I left it when my interest in political issues began to eclipse my interest in sport, which coincided with my introduction to the IGL. I would characterize the next seven years as the steady decline of my off-ice fitness regime, until its monotony became unbearable and I went searching for something that was more mental than physical, which I found in traditional martial arts with the School of Oom Yung Doe. This form of movement concentrates the processes of mental development and self-awareness. The rigour tests one’s commitment to certain ideals and also lets one to test certain propositions one might hold about basic problems of the mind and body or mind and matter. The practice has convinced me of the intimate connection of self-knowledge and self-development, the premise of the academy I aim to create.
Your life is a life dedicated to, and is an avatar of the “mind/body” duality, a fusion that few have achieved at such a level, especially at your age.
How do you integrate the disparate parts of your life? What continuities and discontinuities are there?
If the question is the degree to which I have achieved a workable synthesis of my values and ambitions, I think I have not met with very much success. I am an unwieldy grotesque of motivations. I took especial note of Nietzsche’s early characterization of Socrates and the rest of the pre-Platonic philosophers as each being “hewn from a single stone,” single-ingredient and singular individuals, in contrast to Plato and those who followed him, who he characterized as mishmashes of all kinds of Eastern and late Hellenic influences. The latter types are forced to impose a form on their lives arbitrarily, or conform themselves to their times, or aspire to the Renaissance ideal of l’uomo universale and unify their manifold natures. Naturally, these options, if not properly mediated, introduce new incongruities of their own. I think this is one of my principal struggles in life.
If the question concerns the share of my life that transpires inside of me, as opposed to externally, that share is very much. The greatest events in my life have been thoughts, insights, internal struggles, victories, etc. I have made my decisions about what to do and where to go based on an internal sense of necessity and this has made my life feel integral, even in bad times, and perhaps made its incongruities more apparent than real.
What do you mean by the "theory and practice of existential philosophy" that you have taught? How does this relate to your work on political thought and intellectual history?
In Kashmir part of my remit has been to engage our team of therapists in a continual process of self-inquiry. To take this seriously one has to make a practice of it and live moment to moment in a struggle for awareness. The danger with developing a theory and language to speak about awareness is that these quickly replace the real thing. The point is to overcome spiritual lethargy and release blockages, and over the past year we tried this by many means: conversations about death, guided journaling, a group reading of Victor Frankl’s memoirs from the Holocaust, and physical and mental challenges to bring the problem “into the moment,” where it needs to be.
Awareness is only aroused for a reason. In our team’s case it was the ethical and professional imperative to work with clients sensitively and effectively. A therapist needs to discern and respect the existential dimension of a person’s struggles – the questions of value, priority, ethics, identity, etc. that the client must learn to resolve. Practically, we were trying to develop the intellectual acuity and self-control to not impose one’s own understandings of life and values on a person in a space where there are countless opportunities to do so. This is a principle that many teachers embrace who teach by the so-called Socratic method.
My training in intellectual history was less relevant to this work than one could have anticipated. It is true that modern existential psychology derives from the existential turn in modern philosophy of the late 19th century, but that was part of a larger crisis of faith in the West that is mostly irrelevant to Kashmir, where piety and religiosity remain robust. We had no need to study the intellectual history of existentialism. Instead we drew on our own experiences of working through these issues.
You spoke of an aspiration to create an academy on the island of Haida Gwaii. What attracts you there? You had never spoken about the profession of teaching, yet you have taught and you are skilled in explanation and mentoring. Are you reluctant to choose that path?
I have had extraordinary teachers and I have drawn from life-changing bodies of knowledge, and I want to share what has most enriched my life. The academy would challenge its students to live with the greatest possible simultaneous commitments to self-development and self-knowledge, and to exist continually at their point of tension.
I envision a holistic education as a counterpart and compliment to the narrower kind of education our undergraduates are getting, one that is at once too cerebral and yet inadequate to the goal of teaching individuals how to think, and not just how to speechify and formulate arguments for set convictions but to truly understand their convictions. The syllabus would be both typically Western and Eastern, in that it would entail an investigation into the character of modernity that would involve a serious study of the history of ideas, as well as a much more visceral and internal process of acquainting the individual with his or her own psychic process. The goal is to posit and establish a link between one’s flesh-and-blood consciousness and one’s ethical, political and aesthetic commitments, while helping one to access richer states of consciousness that one’s upbringing in Western modernity has perhaps left attenuated. Western philosophy itself has reached the point where it recognizes the necessary connection between embodied persons and their ideas, yet it utterly lacks a discipline such as the ancient rishis of India developed to purify and refine that connection and prepare individuals to liberate themselves from their conditioning and access the full range of powers of their own minds. This is why I include traditional martial arts in the curriculum — although traditional yoga could just as well serve the purpose. Western science cannot develop such a discipline, and nobody should wait for it to do so. A popular mythology of suspect provenance even holds that individuals are incapable of overcoming their conditioning, or of gaining any significant control over their psycho-mental process, and that freedom of will and freedom of thought are illusory. This is a formidable perspective that deserves consideration; but I would tempt the prospective student to consider that this is the conclusion of a dispirited kind of person, for whom the myth may indeed be true, but that there exist other possibilities for those willing to realize them. My role as an educator would be to present a student with this possibility. Our syllabus would be designed to prepare them for this work.
Haida Gwaii is an extraordinary land with a powerful energy and it is the traditional home of a remarkable people. This academy would be open to all, but I would hope to work closely with Haida youth and to find ways for non-Haida students to substantively learn from the Haida. The academy would aim to attract students from other parts of the world for a ‘gap-year’ that they could take at some point after graduating high school and before turning thirty, or as long as they retain the labile quality of youth.
People speak of privilege, admittedly often in a disingenuous way. How do you understand this concept, and what have you done with it in your life?
I have misgivings about the ascent of the concept of privilege in our culture. In its current usage it carries strong materialistic and individualistic overtones and implications that put it in direct contrast to what would otherwise be its counterpart in traditional culture, namely an expression of gratitude for the fact of one’s existence and for the endless bounties and harmonies of the world, including the blessings conferred on us by other people. It is extraordinary that the etymology of kufr, the word for the cardinal sin of Islam, disbelief or apostasy, in pre-Islamic Arabia denoted extreme, arrogant ingratitude. That this concept should have been adapted to express rebellion against God suggests the centrality of gratitude to at least one of the world’s major spiritual traditions. It would be found to have a central place in the others as well, I am sure. But modern culture characteristically perverts the sentiment by foregrounding privilege in its stead, actually rendering gratitude taboo. A privilege is something one enjoys for oneself or which others aspire to enjoy for themselves. It is spoken of as if it did not entail a proportionate duty, or the possibility that its possessor would choose to distribute its fruits. Gratitude is an attitude that actually encourages one to possess one’s advantages lightly by continually placing them in a higher perspective. But today the weightiest expression of civic morality, exercising power in a position of public trust, is reinterpreted as a privilege, as if it were not a sacred duty and a burden. This is why I think that the ascent of this concept points to a decay of our understanding and practice of power. The ethos of the modern world naturally sees only material advantage to the individual when it speaks of privileges. It is striking that this ethos has found an outlet in the progressivism of our day. To be sure, the fault lies primarily with our leaders and with those who have been given every opportunity to become valuable members of society but failed to wield their power with wisdom. Seemingly without fear of posthumous reproach and incapable of resisting conspicuous emolument, they have contributed most decisively to this breakdown in public trust. But I think it is important not to admit a way of speaking about privilege and access to resources that fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of power and sees only people who win and people who lose. The empirical reality might suggest that this is our world, and the hustlers themselves might think they are triumphing over such a world, but it is imperative to sustain, not the illusion, but the proper understanding of what power is for. To reinterpret power as mere privilege is to reproduce the social corruption that one decries.
I underwent a phase when I thought the cosmos was basically devoid of any compelling reason to abide by a sense of morality and duty or to aspire to anything. Then I realized that my life was something given to me on trust, and that I had to steward and develop myself for the sake of what I understand to be life’s imperatives. From this realization there was a relatively sensible road via Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau and Hegel back to the conception of civic responsibility that is motivating me today.
As to what I have done with the opportunities given to me in my life, I have tried to do them honour by brooking no slackness or half-measures from myself. That said, I have been on a winding path whose inner logic I have had to follow, and which often took me very far from ‘active duty.’ There was a seven year gap between my work in Kenya and my work in Kashmir during which I mostly lived the life of the mind, although I did some teaching. While I was working in Kenya, I realized that I would only be able to do as much good in the world as I had made good in myself. I resolved that I would acquire some substance and wisdom before I attempted to help others again. I also had the crisis of faith to which I just referred, which compelled me to search for a greater understanding of myself anyway. This led me into teaching and further formal study. My curriculum vitae has exactly mirrored my intellectual life since then.
You are a voracious reader, eclectic and yet disciplined to an extraordinary degree. How do you choose? What works had the most impact? What are you reading that has surprised you?
How do you understand the breadth of your intellectual curiosity? How have you explored it?
I try to read the right book at the right time. Usually I have an instinct for what would further my understanding. But there are times when I try something out prematurely or when I push my interest in a certain batch of books too far, when a sense of discipline detaches from a sense of pleasure and tries to carry on austerely. There should always be pleasure in reading.
When I was a teaching assistant at Tufts I was deeply impressed by the majestic scope of Hegel’s philosophy of history. I gave myself a comparable syllabus – I wanted to comprehend the world’s peoples and civilizations and especially their literary, religious and philosophical achievements. This elided with my specific interest in the problem of decline in history that I was contemplating at the time and that I continue to study. Because we have far more sources and translations available to us than 19th century philosophers of history did, the syllabus has grown to ridiculous proportions; but this fact is also a principal consolation of my life. I admire the emission of the 15th-16th century German humanist Ulrich von Hutten: ‘Oh century! Spirits wax strong; studies bloom; it is a joy to live!’
You live the life of the mind in both some of the most abstruse and sophisticated ways of thinking and argumentation. How does that translate into working with non-literate societies? Across cultures?
I do not have any interest in the abstruse way of communicating practiced by our campus philosophers and academics. I would think that good rhetoric is an obligation for the learned, especially for those with a ‘postmodern’ understanding of the nature of their work as entailing not the discovery but the creation of knowledge. I could no longer pursue my studies in academia because these kinds of contradictions were too pronounced.
My work with our team of therapists in Kashmir has been so challenging and rewarding because to present oneself as a coach among a team of highly trained individuals, one has to be what one wants to communicate. This had nothing to do with a language barrier, but with the basic fact that actions speak louder than words, and that people are greater arguments for ways of being than their arguments.
