Belief Versus Truth (Part 3 of Reflections on Truth & Belief)

Posted on October 30, 2009 by zoeweil

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about belief. I believe what I know from my experience – that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that humans have the capacity for both kindness and cruelty, that pumpkin seeds will turn into pumpkin plants and apple seeds into apple trees, and so on – but I know others believe things that cannot be proven, and this perplexes me.

There are many who believe they will go to heaven when they die because they accept Jesus as their savior. Others believe they will be reincarnated after death. Some believe that the position of the planets determines our personalities at birth and many of our experiences throughout life.

I don’t believe these things. That’s not to say that I know that they are false; rather, I cannot know that they are true because they are not provable or knowable, and because no legitimate scientific studies have demonstrated them to be true. They may be true, but I cannot believe them on faith alone.

I often envy people their faith, but I also want people to be good critical thinkers, and I’ve seen “belief” supersede thinking too often. Belief can shut the door on deeper, more complex, more committed efforts to discover truth and seek not only rational, but also effective solutions to problems. It’s easier to follow the precepts or dogmas of a religion or the latest fad or trend in spirituality (or diet or health modalities) than it is to take a scalpel to the information and beliefs surrounding us and dissect them for truth with commitment and engagement.

We are faced with escalating challenges in our world, including human population growth, global warming, peak oil (at some point, whether past, present or future), alarming rates of species extinction, and so on. Beliefs about contraception, the causes of global warming, and faith in human ingenuity to find more oil (or replace it with new technologies), or in God’s ultimate plan, can actually prevent us from taking wise, courageous, compassionate, creative, and critically aware steps to solve our problems.

When beliefs stand in the way of truth – as they often do – we diminish our capacity to make choices that do the most good and the least harm.

I guess I have at least one belief: that we must challenge our beliefs in pursuit of truth.

~ Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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Faith & Action (Part 2 of Reflections on Truth & Belief)

Posted on October 28, 2009 by zoeweil

This is the opening paragraph of my book, Most Good, Least Harm:

“During my sophomore year in college I embarked upon a quest for inner peace. I yearned for relief from a persistent lack of purpose and meaning in my life. I began to study various philosophies and religions, hoping I would discover within them that elusive inner peace I sought. One evening, I was talking with a rabbi about my struggle to understand and experience faith. He told me not to worry about faith, that it didn’t matter what I believed. ‘What matters,’ he said, ‘is how you live and what you do.’”

Although I appreciate the power and beauty of faith, what matters most to me is what people do, not what they believe. While people’s beliefs influence their actions, it’s not necessary to have faith to do good, just as it’s possible to have faith and do evil.

Some days, I lose faith even in the capacity of my acts to make a difference. In these moments of hopelessness, I could succumb to my desires and allow them to eclipse my values. After all, when I feel despair about the possibilities for creating meaningful change, why bother to do the most good and the least harm? But I’m never really tempted to betray my values in any significant way. Even when I lose hope – or faith, if you will – my acts still represent me, my values, my ideals, my sense of self. To betray these is to betray myself.

But the wonderful thing about acts is that whether or not you have faith, good acts create a MOGO life and contribute to a MOGO world. They bring a similar sense of peace as faith, but they do so in such a concrete manner. I’ve often yearned for the faith that others experience, that allow them to endure the tempests of life with equanimity and peace, but that kind of faith eludes me. Instead I have the power of my choices to do good and bring good and which often serve as a balm against pain because goodness begets a host of positives: joy, gratitude, peacefulness, serenity, laughter, connection, and love.

Whether you are a person of faith or not, what matters most is your acts.

~ Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind


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What’s Missing in Friedman’s Op-Ed on Education

Posted on October 26, 2009 by zoeweil

Thomas Friedman’s recent New York Times op-ed, “The New Untouchables,” brings up an important point: that the failures in our educational system and the current recession are related. He ends his editorial with this:

“Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.”

The problem, though, is far more nuanced than Friedman suggests. While his essay promotes education that fosters creativity, initiative, and critical thinking — all things I agree with — there is a lack of creativity in Friedman’s own solution. We cannot go back to the good old days. Instead, we must move forward to better new days, and we won’t do that by trying to educate solely for flexible thought and innovation within current systems.

Yes, we have huge problems in our educational system that rewards rote learning over creative and critical thinking, skills now relegated to the heroic efforts of especially imaginative teachers who must figure out how to foster creativity and critical thinking when they are burdened with teaching to multiple choice tests that punish creativity. (Imagine what would happen if you took a creative approach to a multiple choice test – you’d be pretty much doomed).

But more than this, we have an even bigger problem with our educational system. We have the wrong goal. Tom Friedman wants us to return to the good old days by being more competitive in the global marketplace, a refrain that’s become cliché . The problem is that we have grave challenges to solve: global warming, rampant species extinction, desertification, deforestation, overpopulation, escalating slave labor, lack of access to enough food and clean water for a billion people, inequitable access to basic resources, to name a few of the biggies.

Making our kids more competitive won’t solve these problems unless we shift the goal of education to include graduating solutionaries for a better world. The good old days actually set the stage for all the problems we face today. They only appeared good because the problems they were causing took some time to appear. Were we to graduate a generation only with the wherewithal to compete better in the global marketplace and work innovatively in essentially the same systems, but without the knowledge, tools, and motivation to change pervasive, entrenched, and destructive systems into ones that are just, peaceable, and sustainable, we would not necessarily produce good days. We might, instead, cause even greater suffering and destruction.

Yes, we need to fix our schools as well as our banks. We need to educate a generation that understands the challenges we face and which has the skills and desire to face them and create a healthy, restored, and humane world. And when we do this, we will create new economic and production systems that bring both prosperity and peace.

~ Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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Distortions (Part 1 of Reflections on Truth & Belief)

Posted on October 23, 2009 by zoeweil

I’ve been a humane educator for over twenty years, and have given hundreds of presentations to students. In the early years of my career, I always gave teachers an evaluation form to complete so that I could improve my presentations. Often a teacher would have her or his class write letters to me after a talk. Some of these have found their way into my books because they’ve been such a testament to the power of humane education to inspire positive changes and actions in young people’s lives.

But this week, I had a new experience in feedback. I gave a couple of presentations at colleges in Portland, Oregon, a few of weeks ago. It turned out that the reason why a group of students was taking copious notes the whole time was because they were receiving extra credit from their economics professor for attending and reflecting upon my MOGO talk. The professor shared the student reflections (names removed) with the organizer of my talks who, with permission, shared them with me. This was the first time I had had the opportunity to read reflections, that were not written to me, from college students about a presentation of mine. In other words, they would probably be the most honest accounts I’d ever read from young adults.

Happily for me, they were really positive, which made my day; but, what struck me, and what I want to write about here, was how many factual errors there were. There were many reflections that included descriptions of things that I hadn’t said. I’ve been guilty of this, too. Even as we take notes, we are missing words and phrases and filtering what we hear through our assumptions and beliefs. We may then disseminate “facts” that are misunderstandings or misinterpretations of what we heard.

Many of us have played the game “Telephone,” in which a group stands in a circle and one person whispers a phrase to the next and the phrase gets passed around the circle until, by the end, the phrase is often incomprehensible and has little in common with the original sentence. We think we heard it perfectly and passed it along perfectly, but somewhere along the way it got distorted. Sometimes we know we didn’t hear it quite right, but we (lazily?) fail to pursue the true statement. Sometimes the phrase gets distorted by one or two people; sometimes the distortions happened incrementally. Certainly, some of us hear and attend better than others, but none of us is immune from misunderstanding, mishearing, and misapprehending.

Last year I misquoted a well known environmental advocate and author. Turns out that I had taken careful notes, but I had not clearly delineated this speaker from the one that followed, and I thought my notes from the latter came from the former. My quotes were accurate, but I attributed one to the wrong person. Fortunately, the woman I misquoted saw my blog post and contacted me right away so that I could fix my error.

This is one of the reasons I tell my students – including this group in Portland – not to believe me. Find out for yourself. How much information is distorted along the road to your ears and eyes? How many small errors do we each make that amount to significant mistakes in understanding? We must listen with open minds and not trust what we hear as “truth” until we’ve ascertained its validity for ourselves.

~ Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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Aikido Seminar: Trusting Our Bodies

Posted on October 21, 2009 by zoeweil

I’ve been practicing the martial art Aikido off and on for the past five years. Aikido is different from other martial arts because we don’t learn to attack others or harm our aggressors. An Aikido sensei (Japanese for teacher) won’t teach you how to punch or kick, nor will he or she teach you how to block an attack. Instead, Aikidoists learn to do a few related things: move out of the way and be in a safe place, blend with the attacker and face the same direction (so as to see the situation from the attacker’s point of view), and use the energy from attackers to throw or pin rather than harm them.

Aikido appears complicated, and to the new practitioner, it is far more challenging to learn than the basic kicks, punches and blocks of karate. But Aikido is deceptively simple. Although there are thousands of ways to put together the basic techniques, they all arise from simple principles: blending, using the attackers’ energy to prevent harm to oneself or the attacker, and mixing and matching the same core techniques, depending upon the situation. Simple principles, however, can be extremely challenging to master, as anyone trying to live according to the MOGO principle to do the most good and the least harm to oneself, other people, animals and the environment knows well.

Personally, I find Aikido to both come naturally and be very difficult at the same time. As I watch my sensei demonstrate a technique before we practice it, I have to pay close attention, using my mind to make sense of what I am seeing. What did he do with his hands, his hips, his feet? When exactly did he enter or move out of the way? How did he execute the technique so effortlessly without using strength but rather energy? Stuck in my head as I am, I try to think my body into practice. But this is not necessarily the best way to learn Aikido, even though it is the most obvious.

A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a full day Aikido seminar with the extraordinary Konigsberg Sensei, practicing for many hours. By the end I was so tired that I had trouble concentrating on and thinking through what I was seeing Konigsberg Sensei demonstrate. And because I was so tired, I couldn’t muscle my way through anything (not that this works anyway, but even less so by the end of the day). My mind temporarily relaxed, and I found that my Aikido practice began to improve. My body took over where my mind had been, and my body had come to understand things on its own, without the intervention of my mind. This was a revelation.

I spend lots of time in my head. Although I’m a dancer, hiker, runner, ice skater, snowshoer, cross-country skier, etc., I rarely do what Mary Oliver asks in her beautiful poem, “Wild Geese,” to “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Yet, in my exhaustion during the Aikido seminar, I had a moment of this “body grace” in which I trusted my body and it did not fail.

Often, our bodies know more than we think. We would do well to trust them. Intuitions, fears, joy, excitement, anxiety – these are felt and experienced in our bodies, and so we have insight otherwise hidden behind the veils of our clever and easily manipulated minds – that is, if we dare to pay attention to and trust our bodies.

~Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind



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Desire and Will

Posted on October 19, 2009 by zoeweil

I was reading an excellent essay by Eknath Easwaran in the Blue Mountain Journal, titled “Will and Desire.” He begins:

“Desire is the key to life, because desire is power. The deeper the desire, the more power it contains. The Upanishads say:

You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your deep, driving desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.

Ah, but we are filled with such conflicting desires! And the strongest-willed among us, those who might become dedicated changemakers, leaders, visionaries, and doers, may also be those who are driven to fulfill desires that do not further a better world. What do industrial tycoons and Mahatma Gandhi have in common? Powerful wills to achieve their passionate desires.

As Easwaran’s excellent article explored, our desires are manifold and our will to manifest them a double-edged sword. He quotes the Bhagavad Gita: “The will is our only enemy; the will is our only friend.” As someone who has been accused of being strong-willed since I was a little child, I know this well. My strong will made me a challenging child to raise because I was endlessly attached to my desires and often inflexible. Yet, my strong will also became my great ally in achieving my goals and living according to my principles.

Making MOGO choices in our lives requires a strong will. Inevitably we will have conflicting desires. We may desire a certain food or product that is produced inhumanely or unsustainably. We may desire certain pleasures that have negative effects upon other species, other people, and the environment. We may also deeply desire a life of integrity and purpose and the unfolding of a peaceful, restored, and compassionate world. These desires may compete, and this is where we must harness our will.

Recognizing the range and breadth of our desires allows us to focus on those that are aligned with our values and pursue these with tenacious wills while acknowledging, but not indulging, those desires that don’t ultimately serve our greatest goals and the world we hope to create.

This is no easy task. But the very struggle can be rewarding, because when we wrestle with our desires and direct our will consciously, we create more freedom in our lives – freedom from the incessant pursuit of pleasure; freedom to create the lives we want most; freedom from advertising, peer and societal pressures; freedom to choose with wisdom and compassion.

What is your greatest desire? Your most fervent hope? Harness your will towards this end.

~ Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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Desperate to Do Something Helpful After Flight 250

Posted on October 16, 2009 by zoeweil

In my last blog post I wrote about my experience on United Flight 250 and my reflections upon what was the MOGO thing to do in the tense situation. I received a bunch of great comments on my Facebook page (where this blog is cross-posted), which spurred me to write this addendum.

Perhaps because I knew the MOGO thing was to do nothing during the flight, I think I unconsciously felt a need to do something helpful for someone once we landed. I stopped to use the restroom when we landed, and as I was about to leave I encountered an agitated woman with a 6-month-old baby in a bit of a quandary. She needed to change her baby’s diaper, but the bathroom didn’t have a proper changing table, only a shelf with no safety strap or bumper. With a squirmy child, as hers sometimes was, this is dangerous. So I offered to help. All I did was stand next to her with my body against the shelf to provide a bumper if her baby started rolling and chat as she changed her daughter’s dirty diaper. Then I held her baby so she could wash her hands afterwards. She and I both felt less stressed, albeit for different reasons.

In my book, Most Good, Least Harm, one of the keys to MOGO is to pursue joy through service. My very tiny act of service provided more evidence for the theory that doing good brings happiness. And it was just what I needed after Flight 250.

The moral of this story? Do something kind today.

~ Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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What Was MOGO on Flight 250

Posted on October 14, 2009 by zoeweil

Flying home from Portland, Oregon, on October 12, I sat diagonally across from a woman who became increasingly disruptive, belligerent, and aggressive. I’d missed the initial altercation between her and the man sitting in the chair in front of her, only tuning in when the flight attendant attempted to get her attention (she was masked and hooded with eyes closed and head down) to ask her to move her legs from pushing against the back of his seat. Apparently, she’d been kicking his seat incessantly.

Her reaction was intense and hostile, accusing the man of pushing his chair against her legs, bruising and assaulting her. She would not remove her legs from his chair. She was emotionally out of control and began yelling at the flight attendant, who calmly backed off. Then she began jabbing her neighbor in the middle seat quite hard with her elbow. She clearly knew this woman (who was also masked and hooded). At this point I was watching her attentively, and she was alternately crying, pushing the seat in front of her violently with her legs and hitting her companion.

Eventually a man came to talk to her, showing her his FBI badge and explaining that she needed to settle down or there would be trouble for her at our destination. She just became more enraged, threatening, hostile, and practically begged to be arrested, putting out her arms to be cuffed and saying, “Go ahead, arrest me – I want you to arrest me.” She said she had restless leg syndrome and was on medication for it and that’s why she moved her legs a lot (but this, of course, was no explanation for her violent kneeing of the seat in front of her), and she denied knowing the woman next to her, who was practically mute and kept putting her head in her hands and shaking her head. She also wanted the man seated in front of her, whom she was now accusing of assault, to be arrested. The federal marshal did speak to him separately (he’d been moved to the seat across the aisle). She also began taking pictures of all of us around her.

By the time we landed, she simply refused to follow basic regulations. She wouldn’t put her seat up for landing, and when the flight attendant did so, she pushed it right back. She wouldn’t store her bag under the seat in front of her, and kept taking it out and putting it on her lap.

And so when we landed, we were all told to remain seated, and a police officer came on board and escorted her off the plane. As she was walked off, she yelled at the man who’d been sitting in front of her, “Wife beater!”

The whole time I was observing this situation unfold, I kept thinking, “What’s the MOGO thing to do here? What would the Dalai Lama or Mahatma Gandhi do if they were sitting diagonally across from this woman as I was?” I thought about asking the woman if she needed help because she was clearly suffering, but I didn ’t feel that I had the skills to confront her mental illness, and I worried that I could make the situation worse. Each time she was spoken to – by the flight attendants or the federal marshal – the situation briefly escalated.

So I think the MOGO thing for me was to do nothing, which was what I did, and leave the interventions in the capable hands of the crew. I was impressed with how well they handled the situation. They remained calm, professional, and clear and found a good balance between efforts to de -escalate while still imparting the urgency of the situation in demanding that she calm down. Bravo to the crew on United flight 250.

On my second flight home I sat next to a psychologist, and I described what had happened and asked his opinion. What would he have done? It was interesting to hear his thoughts and to know that he would not have intervened either (nor did he think the Dalai Lama would). He made the point that she had some motivation that was unseen to the rest of us. Perhaps, for example, she wanted to be arrested to avoid something at her destination.

At any rate, I learned a few things. First, I learned that others behaving in a MOGO way (as the crew was doing) is enough. One doesn’t necessarily have anything MOGO to add. Second, I learned that I really lacked any skills or knowledge to intervene anyway, but that I was ready and willing to – which was good to know. In the face of the Kitty Genovese horror, when no one called the police as she was killed in a courtyard, despite her desperate cries — which dozens heard — I’m glad to know that my first inclination is not to do nothing, even though in this case it was the MOGO choice in the end. I also learned that we owe a lot of respect, admiration, and appreciation to flight crews. Yes, I’ve experienced the occasional surly flight attendant, but I was so impressed with this crew and their response, and I have a new gratitude for them, given the challenges they face.

~ Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind


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Teaching Elsie to Hug: A Lesson in Educating Our Children

Posted on October 12, 2009 by zoeweil

I’ve been training our new dog, Elsie. At first I thought she was a genius because she learned “down” after two tries. But the truth is she’s probably of average dog intelligence. She hasn’t, for example, learned not to pee and poop in the house (although her preferred spot is in the bathroom, which should count for something).

Her new “trick” is giving me a hug (see photo). She learned this in two tries, too. This is how it works: I crouch down and ask her to sit, and then I put my hands in front of her and say, “Elsie, give me a hug,” whereupon she immediately (I mean really, really fast!) sits up and wraps her paws around my wrists. Seriously cute.

But if I’m honest, I didn’t really teach Elsie this. Instead, I rewarded her for doing what she wanted to do (give me a hug) and molded her behavior through treats so that “hug” meant sitting up and wrapping her paws around my wrists rather than jumping up on me and pawing any which way she wanted while she licked my face. It’s much harder to teach her things she doesn’t want to learn, like not peeing and pooping in the house or coming to me when it means leaving behind uneaten pears under the pear tree (no wonder she poops five times a day!).

What does this have to do with topics I normally write about, like MOGO living and humane education? A lot.

Thirty-one years ago I interviewed at colleges, and I remember in particular my interview at the University of Pennsylvania. The interviewer asked me if I had any questions about Penn. I know you’re supposed to have questions, but I didn’t. So I said I didn’t have any questions, but I wanted to tell him just how excited I was about Penn because on the trip down I was going through the course catalog (the size of a city phone book!), and I couldn’t believe just how many courses were offered. I wasn’t just sucking up; I meant it. There was so much to learn at this big university. Now, in retrospect, I know that only about 20% of those courses would have been of interest to me. The rest would have left me bored, frustrated, daydreaming or anxiety-ridden by work that didn’t come at all naturally.

Like Elsie, it’s easy, rewarding, and pleasurable to learn what engages us and already comes fairly naturally. So why do we so often force students to learn so much that is painstakingly miserable for them through teaching styles that don’t come close to matching their learning styles? Why don’t we do as they do in other countries and allow young people to specialize much sooner, veering toward the arts and letters or science and math? I think we don’t do this because we believe that it’s important for every eighteen-year-old to be able to do algebra and geometry; understand chemistry, physics and biology; write a good, well-thought out and cogently-argued five paragraph essay, and know basic historical information. And frankly, though some who read this blog may be surprised by this, I think this is a good thing. Just as I think it would have been a good thing for me to take an occasional finance or engineering course at Penn. There are things worth learning whether they are easy for or seemingly interesting to us.

But we must be careful that we do not bore or intimidate our children or crush their love of learning. I think it’s a travesty when we do this, and we do it all the time. We’ve skewed the ratio of forced, unpleasant dumping of information to engaging elicitation of knowledge and new skills such that too many kids hate school, which too often translates in their own minds into hating learning. This is so sad it makes me want to cry. Every teenager should look at a big university’s course catalog enthralled by the opportunities to learn.

Elsie needs to learn to stay and to come. She doesn’t much like doing either at times (unless coming to me means a treat better than fresh pears), but she must learn it. But stay and come get interspersed between the hugs she loves so that the gestalt of her “education” is positive, and she jumps up and runs to me at the opportunity for learning new “tricks.”

Let’s do this with our kids.

~ Zoe

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Teachers Make a Difference, What About You?

Posted on October 9, 2009 by zoeweil

Taylor Mali is a poet, performer, and former teacher, and for all you teachers out there looking for some affirmation and inspiration, check this out:

(If you can’t view the above video, see it here.)

I would love to hear your thoughts on this video.

~ Zoe

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