There have been lots of books published in recent years about happiness. Most recently, I’ve been reading The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner. This one is a peripatetic look at happiness, from a visitor to the world’s “happiest” places.

I remember studying American History in school and being surprised that the pursuit of happiness was actually a right. My teacher said that happiness was a more like a code word for property, which was sort of a code word for money. It seemed odd to me that one of my rights was the right to pursue happiness, and that this was inextricably linked to something as dull sounding as property, but I tried to accept that I just might not be old enough to understand.

Years later, I’ve spent time writing about happiness myself, most recently in my upcoming book, Most Good, Least Harm. In the book I contrast joy with pleasure, and I explore – through an unscientific survey of a few hundred people – what brings people joy. No one told me property or money. In fact, the most common refrain was service – giving to others, taking part in doing good. Pleasure, it turns out, is fleeting and sometimes addictive, often decreasing real joy when we get stuck craving it.

Even Eric Weiner seems to question the whole premise of his book when he writes:

“A pedophile who reports high levels of happiness – say, a nine out of ten – counts exactly the same as a social worker who reports being a nine on the happiness scale. Likewise, a suicide bomber, firm in his belief in Allah, might very well score higher than either the pedophile or the social worker. He might be a ten, just before blowing himself up and taking a few dozen innocents with him. Aristotle would clear up this moral confusion in an Athenian minute. Happiness, he believed, meant not only feeling good but doing good. Thus the pedophile and the suicide bomber only thought they were happy. In fact, they were not happy at all.”

But saying someone isn’t happy doesn’t make it so, and when I came to this part of the book, I was struck by our obsessive pursuit of perceived happiness rather than with happy goodness. Given that goodness often translates directly into happiness, why don’t we see a plethora of books about goodness with its wonderful side effect of happiness? If we were good AND happy, then the world would be a better place in which everyone could more easily experience goodness and happiness, too.

~ Zoe

The 6/7th grade at the Bay School — where I taught a week-long MOGO class in December — have started a monthly newsletter, which includes a column titled “MOGO Tip of the Month.” When I wrote about this class and shared some of their commitments from their MOGO plans, at that time, none had written about starting a newsletter that included information on making MOGO choices, yet a few months later, this is just one way in which these young people are conjuring new ideas and efforts toward creating a more humane world.

We hear a lot about youth apathy, about the MySpace and Facebook culture of narcissism, but little about the dedication young people have toward creating a better world. Yet the 6/7th graders at the Bay School, along with many of their peers across the globe, are actually striving for goodness. In addition to the “MOGO Tip of the Month,” this edition of the newsletter includes an essay about making homework a positive experience, an advice column about how best to apologize and about being oneself, and a welcome back to their teacher who was away (with a thank you to their substitute). Created and written entirely by the students, these are the subjects they’ve chosen to write about, and theirs is a brighter future because of their attitude, kindness, and wisdom.

~ Zoe

I was recently asked for my opinion on an ethical quandary facing a friend of a friend. I was asked because I was perceived as somewhat of an expert on ethical issues due to my role as a humane educator, president of the Institute for Humane Education, and a writer about MOGO choices. I was surprised that someone would consider my opinion on an ethical matter more valuable than someone else’s, though, and when I took the ethical issue in question to our staff, a group of people whose moral compasses I admire immensely, we were pretty much split on it. So much for expertise.

I’ve always been bemused when an ethical issue arises in our culture, and the media call in an ethicist to offer an expert opinion. I don’t generally find such opinions to be more valid than my own or others’ perspectives. People’s opinions on ethical matters differ not because someone has studied philosophy while another has not, but because ethical decisions are often highly complicated as well as steeped in personal values, experiences, and beliefs.

This does not mean that I don’t think ethics is an important subject to study, nor that I would do away with ethicists. My life was radically shifted in 1984 by philosopher-ethicist Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, in which he lays out not only the cruelties perpetrated on animals but also the philosophical reasons for desisting in such cruelty and exploitation. The MOGO principle stems from what I learned from Professor Singer almost 25 years ago, and my own career as a humane educator is ethically driven and ethically informed. I teach people to consider what is right and good, which is a large part of what it means to be a humane educator. But I believe that ethicists are not experts. Rather, they’re deeply engaged seekers of ethical truths for a better world. Instead of looking to ethicists, each of us must commit to becoming an ethicist for our own lives and choices. Of course we can and should ask people we respect for their opinions on ethical matters, but it’s ultimately up to us to make MOGO choices through our own commitment to inquiry, introspection, and integrity – the 3 I’s I refer to regularly in this blog.

Does this mean that MOGO is always relative, that there are no right and wrong answers to ethical questions, and that whatever you personally decide is right? No. Many ethical questions are pretty clear, and moral relativism is often simply a way of justifying harmful decisions. But many choices are complex, especially when taking into consideration not only yourself and your family but also all people, all species, and the earth itself, and these require our commitment to MOGO. We won’t be experts, and we won’t always make MOGO choices, but the more we hold MOGO as an ideal toward which to strive, the more we will slowly but surely choose MOGO as a matter of course.

~ Zoe

The other morning I took a walk along the rocky beach by our house.  I sat on a rock for awhile watching what I thought was a seal sunning herself on a rock with a crow standing by her.  But after a very long time with only the crow moving, and not the seal, I decided that I was watching a crow by a rock atop a rock, rather than a seal.  But then the seal moved, and I realized that I’d been right the first time, only now I realized there was no crow.  The movement of the “crow” had actually been the movement of the seal’s head, which was darker than her body.  Are you with me?

We’re so sure of ourselves.  So sure we’re right.  And when we change our minds, we’re sure we’re right about that, too.  And then when we’re shown to be wrong, we blithely accept our mistake and we’re sure we’re right the next time.

The nice thing about the MOGO principle is that you never have to be right; you just have to persevere, commit to the 3 I’s of inquiry, introspection, and integrity and make choices that do the most good and the least harm to the best of your ability.  It’s quite a relief to know that with MOGO as a guide you can choose differently tomorrow based on new information and deeper reflection.  It’s also a relief to know that every person offers you the possibility to learn anew so that your choices can become even more MOGO.  And finally, it’s a relief to know that while you won’t always be right, you’ll always be good.

~ Zoe

I had a hard time falling asleep last night after ABC’s Democratic Debate. Had Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos really spent almost half the debate asking trivial, relentlessly rehashed gotcha questions to primarily Senator Obama and secondarily to Senator Clinton? I was teetering on despair. How on earth could we change anything if the level of our discourse is so inane, irrelevant, and, forgive me, just plain stupid and obnoxious?

Where were the questions on transforming education in the U.S.? On global warming, massive species extinction, and other environmental challenges? On the health care crisis? On growing anti-American sentiment and terrorism? On war?

When we finally heard a question ostensibly about the oil crisis, it was phrased thus: “What are you going to do about $4/gallon gas?” Is that the best question these supposedly highly intelligent newsmen could ask about the looming energy crisis that the whole world faces? When we finally got a question ostensibly about the failing U.S. economy it was “Do you promise not to raise taxes?” Is that the best question to elicit meaningful answers to the serious economic problems we face?

This is why we need humane education - desperately and immediately. A generation taught to be critical and creative thinkers, with in-depth knowledge of global issues, and the tools and motivation to seek out viable, visionary solutions to problems will simply not stand for the dumbing down of our politics. That generation won’t be watching embarrassing debates like we saw last night. Those newscasters among them will ask brilliant, relevant, important questions of our visionary, committed, and honest future candidates. That is, if we raise that generation.

We need to get to work – first by letting ABC know what we think of last night’s travesty and next by building a humane education movement that reaches every school, every teacher, every child, teen, and young adult.

~ Zoe

In their book Break Through, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger write: “The future is not destined to be dark or bright, fallen or triumphant. Rather, the future is open.” The emphasis on the word “open” is theirs, and every time I read it, I shiver just a little. It’s a powerful word in a powerful sentence. Open. Not destined, not predictable, not fated. Open. Ours to create.

When I read these words I realized that my attitude, and yours, matter. Our optimism and hope drive the open future. And so do our pessimism and cynicism.

We can choose our attitude — not completely, not without the influence of our emotions — but through our will and our effort, we can choose to embrace optimism and hope. And that choice then influences our behaviors, leading us toward the creation of a better future. If we choose cynicism or pessimism instead, whether to protect ourselves from disappointment or absolve ourselves from responsibility for the open future, we generally fail to bring about the future we actually want. The choice is up to us.

Mahatma Gandhi wrote:

Our beliefs become our thoughts,
Our thoughts become our actions,
Our actions become our habits,
Our habits become our character,
Our character becomes our destiny.

If we believe in our power to bring about a better future, such a future will follow.

~ Zoe

I read an interesting article in Newsweek about why it is that we won’t see cars on the market getting 50 miles per gallon any time soon. In addition to a professional interest, I had a personal interest. My Volvo station wagon, at only 167,000 miles –- barely past middle-aged for a Volvo — is making monthly visits to the mechanic these days. I’ve begun to consider my next car. My plan when I bought my Volvo in 1999 was to pass it down to my son, who would be getting his license around the Volvo’s 200,000 mile mark. Seemed like a good idea to pass along a car with the reputation as the world’s safest to my teenage boy just when he was starting to drive. I plan ahead.

I also planned ahead in this regard. When I bought my Volvo there were no fuel efficient options for station wagons. With several dogs and often several kids piling into my car, I wanted a vehicle big enough to carry us all, and I figured my Volvo would last me until a better option was available (this was long before the Prius). Just one more fuel-inefficient car in my life I assumed. But nine years later, there is still no fuel efficient station wagon on the market, and the two small hybrid SUVs (Toyota’s Highlander and Ford’s Escape) get barely more per gallon than my Volvo. Fuel efficient, hybrid wagons won’t be rolling off the assembly lines for a few more years. Not in the U.S. anyway. It seems that people in the U.S. aren’t willing to sacrifice all the other things we want, even for fuel efficiency.

I planned to feel indignant as I read the Newsweek article. Until I realized that I wasn’t willing to sacrifice much myself. I, who implore people to live according the MOGO principle, was no different than those I often criticize. I want the safety the steel in my Volvo affords. I want the space of a station wagon. I don’t want to spend $50,000 to get a lithium battery-powered, highly fuel efficient vehicle. And I don’t want to move from my beautiful, rural Maine community to a city, even though such a move would obviate the need for a personal car.

The technology exists for 50 mpg cars. In fact such cars are ubiquitous in Japan and Europe. They’re not in the U.S. because we want our big, safe cars more than we want fuel efficiency. We’ll get it all, eventually, hopefully before we cause too much more climate change, but there’s a good, free-market, capitalist reason why I still don’t have the option I want. Car companies don’t want to lose money for their stockholders, and that’s what could happen if they put the tiny, lightweight fuel efficient cars on the market, or, conversely, the highly expensive new technologies. We might not buy them, despite the Prius’ success. And to produce the fuel efficient vehicles we do want takes investment, personnel, and time. It’s risky.

There’s a way to get what we want sooner, however. Government investment. If we make the production of 100 mile per gallon cars a national goal and priority, and if we invest in such a goal (the way we invest in our military, for example), we’ll have what we want in a flash.

Personally, I’m eager for my tax dollars to be invested in the technologies that will help us reach our best goals, stop global warming, and protect people, ecosystems, and animals. Seems MOGO to me.

~ Zoe

My husband, Edwin, and son, Forest, are rock climbers and very hardy mountain climbers and hikers. I’m a hiker and occasional rock climber, too, but there’s a big difference between us. Edwin and Forest are fearless. They walk right up to cliff edges, leap over crevasses, and sprint across logs high over rocky streams. I lie on my belly near cliff edges, climb down, across, and back up crevasses, and crawl over those same logs. I also fall and slip far more often than they.

I can’t explain my more frequent falls by carelessness, since I’m the epitome of careful. I could chalk my falls up to being less coordinated, but since I was a gymnast, specializing in the balance beam, and have been a dancer since childhood, lack of coordination isn’t the problem.

I fall more because I’m afraid. When I’m confident and unafraid, I hike and climb well, smoothly, and without mishap, just like they do.

What does this have to do with MOGO? When we are afraid, we may decline the adventure of making choices that do the most good and the least harm because we may worry we will be different, inconvenienced, less secure, or isolated from friends, family, neighbors, or religious communities. And when we fear, we may fall off the MOGO path that asks us to inquire about the effects of our choices, introspect, and live with integrity. “Not worth it,” we might say, fearful.

So how do we become unafraid?

We choose to be courageous.

Courage is not the same as fearlessness. Courage is when we do something despite our fear. I think I’m much more courageous than Edwin and Forest when it comes to rock climbing because I’m often terrified, and I climb anyway. They don’t need courage because they’re not afraid. Initially, this courage doesn’t keep me from slipping or falling, since fear still makes me unsteady. What courage does is slowly but surely supplant fear with confidence as I slip and survive, as I fall and get up again, as I reach a peak and feel euphoric.

When we courageously choose MOGO, we discover that new choices bring unexpected benefits. We make new friends, create exciting, supportive new communities, deepen our sense of self respect and inner peace, discover more joy, and often greater health. And one day we realize we’re no longer afraid.

~ Zoe

I listened, rapt, to Barack Obama’s speech on race on March 18. I could hardly believe that I was being spoken to like a thinking adult; that I was hearing nuance, complexity, and a rejection of either/or thinking in a political speech. I’ve written repeatedly in this blog about the concept of “both/and,” urging educators to teach a generation to think beyond either/ors, recognize the truths in seemingly contradictory positions, and help students learn how to create real solutions to seemingly intractable conflicts. To hear a politician speak this way was beyond rare –- it was almost unheard of in the soundbite world of politics.

As I listened, I heard Senator Obama use long sentences, some with double negatives. “Oh no,” I thought. “Some media will pull out this or that phrase and distort his meaning, perhaps even make it appear that he’s said the opposite of his intended meaning. Their soundbites will ruin this.” And that is what happened among some media, but not most. Instead, most media have offered paragraph long reprints, so that we are able to read and understand the complexity of Senator Obama’s statements. His speech has been viewed millions of times on YouTube. I’m hopeful that a trend has begun, and that other politicians will take Senator Obama’s lead and speak to us truthfully, with nuance, offering the complexity of issues, helping us not to take sides but to solve problems.

One week after Senator Obama’s speech on race, I watched the film Crash, a movie that explores the nuance and complexity of race and racism as well, which offers no character as all good or all bad, which redeems the worst racist and casts the good man in the horrifying role of unwitting race-based murderer. Like Senator Obama, the film delves below the surface of racism, revealing its origins, offering us understanding so that we might grow in awareness and through that awareness find better answers. It’s not a happy film, nor is it a hopeless film.

There’s a trend in filmmaking these days to give us brutal, unredeemed reality instead of a happy ending. When No Country for Old Men won the Academy Award for best picture this year, I was stunned, and frankly, dismayed. I, personally, do not watch movies so that I can be reminded that the world is full of cruelty, insanity, suffering, injustice, and horrific violence. I can read the news for that. I want art to give me a lens into deeper truths; I want it to offer not sappy endings and unrealistic answers but legitimate hope, vision, and understanding. As I watched Crash, there was foreshadowing of a truly ghastly event: an honest, hard-working man who lifted his family out of the ghetto, but whose young daughter still feared the daily gunshots. A loving, creative father, he soothed his daughter’s fears by telling her a made-up story and giving her his invisible protective cape that would let nothing harm her. We viewers knew what was coming. Without this protective cape, and with the story unfolding of another man –- a victim of prejudice, robbery and fear — accusing this heroic dad of enabling the crime that robbed him of his livelihood –- seeking revenge. I found myself deeply afraid, even though I knew this was just a movie. “Please,” I thought, “don’t let this movie give us nothing but more horror.” It didn’t. Which is why I found Crash, like Senator Obama’s speech, helpful in my own quest for deeper understanding and vision for ways past our prejudices and failures so that we can tackle and solve our complex and persistent problems with wisdom, compassion, understanding, and, yes, hope.

~ Zoe

I’ve written about Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus’ microcredit movement in previous posts; I’ve just finished his new book, Creating a World Without Poverty, and in this book Yunus offers us another visionary idea for ending poverty: social business. Critiquing the triple bottom line approach of social responsibility in business, Yunus reminds readers that for-profit corporations, beholden to their shareholders and charged with increasing shareholders’ investments, can only be socially responsible to the extent that doing so does not interfere with profits. Non-profits, NGOs, and charities, on the other hand, are charged with achieving their mission through their resources, but because they must raise funds continuously, their efforts at changemaking are diluted by their need to raise money.

In comes social business. Yunus offers an entirely different model for changemaking: financially viable — even profitable — businesses, whose mission is creating positive social change. Social businesses still require investors to launch, but unlike non-profits, which require donors ad infinitum, these investors will get their money back -– they just won’t get more than their original investment. Why would anyone invest in such companies? Well, why do people donate to charities — because they want to do good in the world. Imagine this scenario, however: the donor becomes an investor who sees their funds not only going toward positive change, but also setting up businesses that succeed into the future without requiring their annual donations to stay viable. This is the premise behind Kiva.org. Investors donate small sums to enable people to start businesses. The investor is repaid and can choose to reinvest, or take back their money knowing that they’ve helped a family escape poverty. They may not have seen a “return” on their investment in the form of interest or dividends, but they’ve seen a return on their investment in the form of a better world.

Yunus wants to see the social business model grow and develop so that soon business news analyzes successful social businesses, investment opportunities specializing in social businesses appear, and social business courses in M.B.A. programs become part of the business curricula. He envisions people choosing social business as an exciting career path.

What does this have to do with humane education? Every year I revise the Institute for Humane Education’s Master of Education and Humane Education Certificate Program curricula. These programs train educators to teach about the interconnected issues of human rights, environmental preservation, animal protection, and cultural issues in order to inform and inspire a generation to be engaged, knowledgeable, motivated citizens who participate in the creation of a better world for all.

Now social business is part of that equation. When I taught the 8th grade at the Bay School last month, the students were eagerly engaged in envisioning social businesses –- without my realizing that their ideas had a movement that was growing to meet them. As humane educators offer their students the most relevant information and skills for critical and creative thinking, now the vision of social business will be a viable option for those who want to make a difference in the world while making a decent living at the same time.

I highly recommend Creating a World Without Poverty, and I hope that you will spread the word about this simple, but powerful vision to your students and colleagues.

~ Zoe