The following was prompted by my reading this.

There are many natural laws that scientists have discovered over the past few centuries: Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, the four laws of thermodynamics, Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism, and so on.  These laws describe forces that exist completely independently of humans; they are true whether or not we humans understand them, or whether we even think about them at all.  This kind of law is referred to as natural law.

In contrast to this natural type of law, Alan Dershowitz says in Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights:

It is we who create morality, for better or worse, because there is no morality “out there” waiting to be discovered or handed down from some mountaintop.  It is because I am a skeptic that I am a moralist.  It is because there is no morality beyond human invention that we must devote so much energy to the task of building morality, law, and rights.  We cannot endure without morality, law, and rights, yet they do not exist unless we bring them into existence. 

I am not so sure about that.  Scientists have had to devote a lot of energy to making their discoveries, and that certainly isn’t any indication that without humans, gravity or electromagnetic forces would cease to exist.

As I mentioned in “Is Religion Good or Bad?“, there are many people at the other end of the spectrum from Dershowitz.  These are people who believe that all morality comes from God and our only means for knowing what is moral is divine revelation.  It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I fall in the middle. 

I think it’s clear to most people that science can be used either morally (think polio vaccine) or immorally (think chemical weapons).  But, religion can likewise be used either morally (think housing the homeless) or immorally (think Inquisition, World Trade Center attacks). 

Now, in order for us to even be able to speak of a religion (or a government, or any other system that humans use to impose morality) being used immorally, there must be some objective standard, outside of these things, to compare them to.  In other words, I think there must be a natural law of morality – a standard by which we can judge whether a religion, a legal system, or any other human construct is moral.  There are people in all religions, or no religion at all - and people who believe in God, or who believe there is no God - who are moral, and others in each one of those categories who are immoral.  It is not their religion or belief which determines whether they are moral; it is this universal, natural law of morality, to which anything else must be compared to determine whether it is moral or immoral. 

The problem is, discovery of these natural moral laws cannot be reliably obtained from divine revelation.  It happens too sporadically and to too few people.  Even after receiving divine revelations, people have been killing each other for thousands of years over what any given revelation actually means, so this method has not resulted in a sufficient understanding of the natural laws of morality.   

This is what we ought to be pursuing: rational discovery of what the natural laws of morality are, using observations the way science does. Here is where I agree with Dershowitz. His method for establishing what rights ought to be protected by law – in other words, determining morality - seems very promising.  As Dershowitz shows in his book, a methodical observation of the different societies throughout history makes clear the consequences of failing to define and enforce various rights.  Knowing in which cases the lack of a given right has led to harm, tells us which rights must be included in a moral, just society. 

Another avenue to discovery may be comparative religion.  Any one religion by itself does not lead to complete discovery of the natural laws of morality, because as already stated, we must be able to distinguish moral religion from immoral religion.  As I alluded to in Bonding, Bridging and Religious Appreciation, and as The Charter for Compassion is based on, real morality can be found in what all the religions have in common rather than in the differences between religions.  The things religions differ on, in general, do not concern how we treat other people.  The differences concern how humans relate to God, which need not be more than a personal/private matter.  Where other people are concerned, religions all agree: do not murder, do not steal, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, etc.  Studying all the religions and compiling that which they all have in common would produce at least a bare minimum set of requirements.  It would also be based in actual human experience, which I think gives it an advantage over ethical philosophy.  Of course, if people actually followed even just this much of what we already know to be universally moral, the world would be incredibly more peaceful, but that’s a post for a different day.  The point here is, the discovery of natural laws of morality needs to be observation-based, just as discoveries of natural laws of science are. 

Just to be clear: throughout this post I have argued only for the existence of a natural law of morality, and a practical means for furthering our understanding of what it is.  I have not been speaking about it in terms of its having some ultimate source, such as God, at all.  The source of moral laws is no more and no less divine (however you want to look at it) than the source of scientific laws, but what that source is (or even whether there is a source at all) is really of far less importance, in my opinion, than figuring out what the laws are, and then living by them.  This is what will bring about real peace. 

Jacob Bronowski said, “Man masters nature not by force but by understanding.”  Our understanding of science has allowed us to do amazing things like master gravity by building airplanes.  Understanding the natural laws of morality will allow us to do amazing things like achieve world peace, by mastering human nature through understanding rather than force.

I just read a really wonderful article at CNN.com called Crossing Racial Lines: Meeting Friends They Never Had.  It’s about the joint reunion of the segregated high school classes of 1959 in Macon, Georgia.  The reunion was the idea of Tom Johnson, who then wrote to everyone in the classes.  One of the things he said in his letter was, ”We had lived in a separate black and white world in Macon. … It is a different world today. We no longer are separated, except by personal choice.”  As a result, the classes came together for the first time, last month.  Regarding the conversations at the reunion:

Listening to his mother and her childhood friends, Cordell said, he was struck by how segregation was “was so transparent to them at the time they were living through it. It was a way of life, so they didn’t acknowledge its existence.”

“I find it interesting how human nature teaches you to accept things that are — and some people question the reality, and other people don’t.”

This reunion is such a testament to people’s ability to improve the world.  It is easy to despair at all that is still wrong, but stories like this show clearly how far we’ve come - in less than a lifetime!  We can go this much farther again, from where we are now!  Think what it will be like when we do.  We have so much more to do, until everyone is truly regarded as equal, but if we keep believing it can be done, we will do it.

To me, there is also a strong parallel between this and war.  War is as transparent to most people now, as segregated high schools were in the 1950s.  It is so much a part of our way of life we don’t acknowledge its existence.  It just has to be, though, that someday enough people will question the reality of war and see that it is a choice that we need not make, that we will not have wars anymore.  I imagine that another 50 years after that, people will look back on war and think, ”That is so wrong, that I can’t believe people seriously ever did that”.  The wrongness of war will be as clear to them, then, as it is now, to us, how wrong it was to segregate schools based on race.

I received this last night on email.  I don’t forward very many things but this one really deserves to be.  It’s impossible for most of us to even imagine what soldiers have been through, and that makes it easy to take what we have for granted, and difficult to be as compassionate and grateful to them as they deserve.  This is an effective reminder to do more of the latter, and less of the former…

WHEN A SOLDIER COMES HOME
This email is being circulated around the world – please keep it going

 
When a soldier comes home, he finds it hard….

…to listen to his son whine about being bored.

 ….to keep a straight face when people complain about potholes. 

to be tolerant of people who complain about the hassle of getting ready for work. 

…to be understanding when a co-worker complains about a bad night’s sleep. 

…to be silent when people pray to God for a new car. 

…to control his panic when his wife tells him he needs to drive slower. 

…to be compassionate when a businessman expresses a fear of flying.

….to keep from laughing when anxious parents say they’re afraid to send their kids off to summer camp.    

….to keep from ridiculing someone who complains about hot weather.  

….to control his frustration when a colleague gripes about his coffee being cold.  

….to remain calm when his daughter complains about having to walk the dog.

…to be civil to people who complain about their jobs.

…to just walk away when someone says they only get two weeks of vacation a year.   

…to be forgiving when someone says how hard it is to have a new baby in the house.

The only thing harder than being a Soldier..  

Is loving one.  

 

A call to bring the world together…

The Charter for Compassion, Karen Armstrong’s TED Prize Wish, is now online. This is what it says…

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.

Click here to add your voice and affirm the charter.

I’ve just finished reading Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande.  Here I learned of a name for a concept I only vaguely intuited when I wrote A New Version of the Golden Rule:  positive deviance.  (Had I known this at the time, I might have called it Be A Positive Deviant.)  In the book, Gawande briefly describes how Jerry Sternin used this concept during his work with Save The Children to reduce child malnutrition in Vietnamese villages by 65 to 85% in six months (also described in more detail here, by David Dorsey in Fast Company magazine).  Gawande then goes on to show how amplifying positive deviance was used to improve workers’ diligence in hand washing at a hospital, resulting in a drop in MRSA infection rate from nine percent of patients to zero.  This stunning success followed years of trying many different things to get people to wash their hands, all of which resulted in no lasting improvement at all.  What all those unsuccessful things had in common is that the changes originated from outside the hospital worker community.

When a community has a problem, people often seem to think that the solution lies “out there” somewhere, and they go looking for someone who can give them the answer to their problem.  However, even if this is true, it pretty much never works, because people simply do not listen to anyone from outside their community telling them how their community should do things.  The immediate reaction tends to be, “but you don’t know how things really are here – what you’re saying may have worked somewhere else but it’s too hard for us because we have this, this and that to contend with.”  In the case of the hospital handwashing problem, this was true even when it was people who worked for the same hospital who were offering solutions – because that’s all their job was.  They still weren’t part of the “community” of doctors and nurses whose hands needed to get washed.  Nothing stuck… until they found some people who did wash their hands, asked them how they managed to accomplish that, and had them share those strategies with the rest of their own doctor-and-nurse community.

In very basic terms, the idea of amplifying positive deviance is to find someone from within the community (however that community is defined by the members of that community themselves), who is successful already, figure out what they’re doing differently, and publicize the fact that it works.  In Vietnam, it was mothers who added sweet potato greens and tiny crabs and shrimp they caught in the rice paddies to their childrens’ rice and fed them several small meals a day, rather than one or two larger ones, whose children were the best nourished.  These practices flew in the face of the local culture’s conventional wisdom.  When outsiders tried to get them to change these practices, prior to Jerry Sternin’s visit, it never worked.  But it is almost impossible to argue with direct evidence, and this is what positive deviance relies on. 

So.  Why am I blogging about it here?  The answer to that is more questions:  What communities are you a member of?  What do you do differently that could serve as a positive example to the rest of your community?  What do others do that you can learn from?  These are valuable questions to develop a constant awareness of, and answer again and again throughout our lives.  We all have circles of influence, and no matter how small your circle may seem to you, you can bring about tremendous positive change if you use that influence.  The people you influence in your circle are themselves members of other circles as well, which they can then have a positive impact on.  When you pull the end of a chain, every link moves.  Where do you want your chain to go?

Click to learn about the Positive Deviance Initiative.

Nicholas Kristof has recently written an editorial for the New York Times, saying just about the same thing I said here back in February.

What he said… 

Best line: “It breaks my heart that we don’t invest in schools as much as medieval, misogynist extremists.”

I just read the following, quoted in a note on someone else’s Facebook, and wanted to share it here.  It’s a beautiful reminder of the greatness that lies within the small moments, and that it’s what we do for others that brings meaning to our own lives.

The Cab Ride by Kenneth Wesson
Twenty years ago, I drove a cab for a living.
When I arrived at 2:30 a.m., the building was dark except for a single light in a ground floor window. Under these circumstances, many drivers would just honk once or twice, wait a minute, and then drive away.
But, I had seen too many impoverished people who depended on taxis as their only means of transportation. Unless a situation smelled of danger, I always went to the door. This passenger might be someone who needs my assistance, I reasoned to myself.
So I walked to the door and knocked. “Just a minute”, answered a frail, elderly voice.
I could hear something being dragged across the floor.
After a long pause, the door opened. A small woman in her 80’s stood before me. She was wearing a print dress and a pillbox hat with a veil pinned on it, like somebody out of a 1940s movie.
By her side was a small nylon suitcase. The apartment looked as if no one had lived in it for years. All the furniture was covered with sheets.
There were no clocks on the walls, any knickknacks or utensils on the counters.
In the corner was a cardboard box filled with photos and glassware.
“Would you carry my bag out to the car?” she said. I took the suitcase to the cab, and then returned to assist the woman.
She took my arm and we walked slowly toward the curb.
She kept thanking me for my kindness.
“It’s nothing”, I told her. “I just try to treat my passengers the way I would want my mother treated”.
“Oh, you’re such a good boy”, she said.
When we got in the cab, she gave me an address, and then asked, “Could you drive through downtown?”
“It’s not the shortest way,” I answered quickly.
“Oh, I don’t mind,” she said. “I’m in no hurry. I’m on my way to a hospice”.
I looked in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes were glistening.
“I don’t have any family left,” she continued. “The doctor says I don’t have very long.”
I quietly reached over and shut off the meter. “What route would you like me to take?” I asked.
For the next two hours, we drove through the city. She showed me the building where she had once worked as an elevator operator. We drove through the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived when they were newlyweds. She had me pull up in front of a furniture warehouse that had once been a ballroom where she had gone dancing as a girl.
Sometimes she’d ask me to slow in front of a particular building or corner and would sit staring into the darkness, saying nothing.
As the first hint of sun was creasing the horizon, she suddenly said, “I’m tired. Let’s go now.”
We drove in silence to the address she had given me.
It was a low building, like a small convalescent home, with a driveway that passed under a portico.
Two orderlies came out to the cab as soon as we pulled up.
They were solicitous and intent, watching her every move. They must have been expecting her.
I opened the trunk and took the small suitcase to the door.
The woman was already seated in a wheelchair.
“How much do I owe you?” she asked, reaching into her purse.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You have to make a living,” she answered.
“There are other passengers,” I responded.
Almost without thinking, I bent and gave her a hug. She held onto me tightly.
“You gave an old woman a little moment of joy,” she said.
“Thank you.”
I squeezed her hand, then walked into the dim morning light.
Behind me, a door shut. It was the sound of the closing of a life.
I didn’t pick up any more passengers that shift. I drove aimlessly lost in thought. For the rest of that day, I could hardly talk.
What if that woman had gotten an angry driver, or one who was impatient to end his shift?
What if I had refused to take the run, or had honked once, then driven away?
On a quick review, I don’t think that I have done anything more important in my life.
We’re conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments.
But great moments often catch us unaware-beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.

Health care reform is such a huge issue right now I’m feeling like this blog is a bit incomplete without at least a little something about it.  A person’s health certainly does have a direct bearing on their inner peacefulness, and the injustices and waste that are rampant in our current system are neither an equitable nor sustainable use of resources.  That change is necessary, cannot rationally be disputed. 

BUT.  The way the politicians in Washington, D.C. are going about creating that change leaves a great deal to be desired as well.  When we humans undertake a conscious act, we are responsible for all the consequences of that action. 

On one side, some are seeking to create change of such enormous magnitude that they can’t possibly know what all the consequences will be.  This is irresponsible. 

On the other side, some are opposing that change by capitalizing on humans’ inherent nervousness in response to change, creating irrational fears among their constituents and igniting and fanning flames of rebellious anger with their exaggerated misrepresentations.  It has become more about “winning” than about health.  This is also irresponsible. 

If both sides continue in this manner then, regardless of which side prevails, they and the American people as a whole will lose something very important to good governance: control.

In a small system, it’s possible to make multiple changes at once and accurately predict the outcome of those changes.  The health care system is not small.  It is gigantic.  There are so many dependencies we couldn’t even name them all if we tried.  The best approach to improving a large system is an incremental approach.  Pick the one thing that is the most egregiously wrong with the system, and just fix that.  (I don’t know enough to say which thing that is, but others out there do.)  See what effect that one small change has, and then fix the next-most egregious thing.  And so on. 

A series of small changes is not as politically glamorous as passing one huge reform bill, but it is much more likely to result in real, sustained improvements without throwing half the country into a panic and the whole country into turmoil.

On October 13, 2009, KWTX reported:

The Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, N.C. will celebrate Halloween by burning Bibles that aren’t the King James Version, as well as music and books and anything else Pastor Marc Grizzard says is a satanic influence.
Among the authors whose books Grizzard plans to burn are well known ministers Rick Warren and Billy Graham because he says they have occasionally used Bibles other than the King James Version, which is the sole biblical source he considers infallible.
 According to the church’s Web site, members will also burn “Satan’s music such as country, rap, rock, pop, heavy metal, western, soft and easy, southern gospel, contemporary Christian, jazz, soul (and) oldies.

There is little I find more ominous than people burning books.  “There, where they have burned books, they will in the end also burn human beings.” (German: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.”)—Heinrich Heine, from his play Almansor (1821).  Read more at the American Library Association’s website page on book burning, and at this site by the Florida Institute of Technology – Evans Library Instructional Programs Team.  I’ve taken the following quote from the latter:

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
- On Liberty, John Stuart Mill

Can’t say it any better than Mill.

This post is dedicated to T., who suffered extreme emotional abuse at his schools.  May we all live to see the day when no more kids are allowed to be damaged mentally, emotionally, or physically by their peers (or anyone else).

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

This post is a response to the following quotation, from the article Coming Out in Middle School by Benoit Denizet-Lewis (NYT, September 23, 2009):

A middle-school counselor in Maine summed up the view of many educators I spoke to when she conceded that her school was “totally unprepared” for openly gay students. “We always knew middle school was a time when kids struggle with their identity,” she told me, “but it was easy to let anti-gay language slide because it’s so imbedded [sic] in middle-school culture and because we didn’t have students who were out to us or their classmates. Now we do, so we’re playing catch up to try to keep them safe.”

It really bothers me that someone who has responsibility for the safety of children could allow herself to be this passive about it.  What makes it especially irritating is that she prefaced what she said by commenting on what a difficult period of time middle school is in the lives of many young people.  Knowing this, she should have felt it was more incumbent upon her, not less, to be proactive in making the school a place where students at least feel safe.

I am also very bothered by her reasoning that derogatory language, toward any group, only matters if there is actually somone of that group present.    Having no students who were “out” is - it should be obvious - not the same thing as having no students who are gay.   

Even if there was not one gay student in the school - whether “out”, or not - all the students should be taught that words matter.  When a student speaks in a way that dehumanizes an entire group of people, silence is not an acceptable response; silence is tacit approval.  It doesn’t matter what the characteristic is that identifies the group.  This is true for race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, political affiliation, or anything else you can think of that defines a group in any way. 

If we are serious about making a priority of education, the most basic prerequisite to learning is that students feel safe in their school.  Until dehumanizing language is eliminated from schools, there will be students who don’t feel safe, and therefore will not learn to their full potential.  We don’t have that potential to waste, with our economic, political, and climatic conditions the way they are. 

Eliminating dehumanizing language is not impossible.  There are already rules and systems in place regarding speech that is prohibited for students to use in schools, e.g. profanity.  As one student quoted in the article points out, he would definitely not be allowed to say, “That’s so black”, so why is “That’s so gay” overlooked?  Stopping this kind of language will only require that teachers and administration apply the same consequences that are already in use against those other types of speech.  If anti-gay speech is as embedded in her school as the quoted counselor perceives it to be, that makes it all the more important to act quickly to curtail it, not something to just give up on.   Habits are hard to break, and there will have to be a focused effort for a time.  Once a new status quo is established, however, it should require much less effort to maintain it.

The overall message students must receive is that the dehumanization of groups is not acceptable, period.  This message is not conveyed when schools make exceptions, prohibiting dehumanizing speech for some groups, but allowing it for others.  Doing that is, in fact, a further form of dehumanization of the groups for whom it is permitted, because it says that they are worth less than the groups for whom it is prohibited.  It is time to raise the bar on our standards.

On a positive note, the article also describes an extracurricular club called the Gay-Straight Alliance which is in a rapidly increasing number of schools across the country, and works to promote a tolerant atmosphere in the school.  The GSA clubs are just one of the many great efforts of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN).  I’ve added a link to their website to my sidebar, under Education.