Challenging ourselves

I’m very grateful for the comments posted to my last Equinox entry. They’re so thought-provoking and full of wisdom. One of them has inspired today’s entry: Freeman wrote, “we must address issues and actions from a place of selflessness and love for all involved. We should not ask ourselves ‘what is best for us?’ (for the answer to this will come unbidden), but instead, ‘what is best for all beings and the environment, including those who will be here generations after us?’”

How can we challenge ourselves to choose what is best for others even if doing so means sacrificing the satisfaction of some of our desires? I think one of the answers to this question is both simple and wonderfully positive: doing good for others is, itself, satisfying. This is hardly news, but in our materialistic culture, where we are bombarded by countless messages that things will satisfy not only our deepest desires but also our deepest needs, it is easy to forget that things don’t bring joy, but generosity and kindness often do.

The truth is that living a life in which MOGO is a guiding principle often offers the deepest satisfaction and the most profound happiness. When we forsake a desire for a thing or action that causes harm in order to satisfy a desire to live peacefully and joyfully, we may find that the challenge of choosing what is best for others turns out to be the greatest opportunity for ourselves.

Equinox

Tomorrow is the equinox, when day and night are of equal length across the planet. Day and night are always of equal length at the equator, but for the rest of us, because of the Earth’s tilt as it circles the sun, we only have two such days each year.

I like to pause at the equinox to consider this moment of balance. MOGO is a balancing act. It isn’t always simple to know what does the most good and the least harm, and even when we know, it’s not always easy to act on this knowledge. What does the most good for the natural world, other species, and other people may conflict with what, in the short term, does the most good for us as individuals. And what does the most good for one species (usually humans) may be harmful to others.

In the long term, the MOGO choice is often quite clear, but our short term needs, desires, and passions often eclipse our wisdom. As Dr. Edward O. Wilson has written in his book Biophilia, “To choose what is best for the near future is easy. To choose what is best for the distant future is also easy. But to choose what is best for both the near and distant futures is a hard task, often internally contradictory, and requiring ethical codes yet to be formulated.”

As we all know from personal experience, when we only choose what is best for the near future, we endanger our distant future. We must extend this knowledge. We need to find the balance between the near and distant future in all aspects of life, government, and commerce. But what would it mean to formulate ethical codes that consider the future? What would economic and political models look like? How would our daily choices be affected? How would our personal life goals shift?

How do YOU find a balance?

Promoting Heroism

In the Fall/Winter 2006-07 issue of Greater Good Magazine, authors Zeno Franco and Philip Zimbardo describe the concept of the “banality of heroism.” Philip Zimbardo is famous for his Stanford Prison Experiments conducted in 1971 in which participating college students were randomly assigned the role of prisoners or guards. Similar to the “blue eyed/brown eyed” classes taught by third grade teacher Jane Elliot in the late 1960s, these experiments revealed how quickly humans can become either perpetrators of cruelty or, conversely, powerless yet enraged victims of persecution. From these experiments, and others like them (such as Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority studies), the concept of the banality of evil was born, explaining a host of atrocities.

In the Greater Good article, however, the authors invite readers to consider the reverse: how might we promote the banality of heroism and the heroic imagination. They write: “Our society needs to consider ways of fostering heroic imagination in all of its citizens, most particularly in our young.”

In the context of MOGO, it might be phrased this way: “We need to discover the key to inspiring people of all ages to want to do the most good and the least harm.”

In Humane Education programs and classes, one component is offering accurate information so that people have the knowledge base to make informed, conscious, compassionate decisions and solve problems wisely. But they must also have the motivation and inspiration to choose MOGO, or in Franco and Zimbardo’s words, have their heroic imagination fostered. Humane education employes another component – instilling the 3Rs of Reverence, Respect, and Responsibility in order to inspire recipients to become ordinary heroes. What we revere, we tend to protect. If we can offer people, especially young people, opportunities to experience reverence for others, whether people, animals, or the natural world, they will naturally seek to protect those others. This reverence leads to respect and responsibility as we grow older, are exposed to more relevant information, and are provided with opportunities to make wiser, more compassionate choices.

Reverence-building activities can be as simple as watching a film or reading a book about an ordinary hero, hearing a story about someone who faced persecution but chose not to hate the perpetrator (such as Nelson Mandela), spending time outdoors with a magnifying glass, visiting a sanctuary for animals who’ve been abused and later rescued. These are the kinds of experiences we need to offer children so that ordinary heroism can take root. They are not hard to incorporate into curricula, or give our own children as parents, but we need to make such education the norm, not the exception.

You can find other ideas for reverence-building, and for incorporating humane education into your life, in my books: Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times (for parents) and The Power and Promise of Humane Education (for educators).

Claude and Medea

I’m delighted to announce that my newest book, Claude and Medea: The Hellburn Dogs, is out. The first in a children’s series for 8-12 year olds, Claude and Medea become clandestine activists in New York City and solve the mystery of a rash of Manhattan dog thefts. In future books, Claude and Medea will rescue slave children from a garment district sweatshop and stop a polluting factory from belching out toxins in a Harlem neighborhood.

You can order a copy at our website.

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