LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR

LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR

Nico van Oudenhoven

Surely, one would agree with psychologist Steve Pinker that everybody would prefer health over disease, longer lives over shorter lives, prosperity over poverty, peace over war, safety over violence, freedom over coercion, knowledge over ignorance.

One would also readily concur with Save the Children’s main criteria for a healthy childhood: boys and girls should survive, attend school, and not be malnourished, and later in life, be working, be married, have children, and not be exposed to violence.

However, to what extent are people prepared to endorse policies and practices underlying these simple goals that extend beyond their own kith, kin, religious group, or nation?

Luke 6:31 and Mark 12:31

Both verses, taken from the 1611 King James version of the New Testament, are still inspirational.

Luke 6:31: “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise” and Mark 12:31: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

There is none another commandment greater than these”. Similar injunctions, we hasten to say, are to be found in a host of other religious and semi-religious texts.

We highlight both, as this so-called Golden Rule, or Rule of Reciprocity which served as moral guideline through the ages,  seems in need of revision and of being supplanted, as psychologist Rose Markus pleads, by the ‘Platinum Rule’. This  states: ‘We should do unto others as they would have us do unto them’. Thus, one’s own way may not be the only or best approach, but that holding one’s own perspective at bay, and feeling one’s way into the position of the other and creating space for that standpoint may be more generous.

Everybody’s experience, which is supported by  research, shows that recognising the views, values, hopes, wants and fears of others, produces better outcomes in personal relations, community life, teaching, policing, leadership, and conflict resolution.

In spite of, perhaps because of, this ever-present potential for disagreement and conflict, moral psychological research is flourishing and has become a ‘hot topic’ with an ongoing flood of publications and reports.

Established in 1972, the quarterly peer-reviewed Journal of Moral Education, for example, encourages. “…submissions including but not exclusively related to: Anthropology of morality; Anti-racist education; Child studies; Citizenship education; Cognitive development; Conflict studies; Critical theory; Diversity studies; Emotional development; Epistemology; Ethics; Family studies; Gender studies; Interculturalism; International education; Leadership studies; Moral development; Moral psychology; Multiculturalism; Peace studies; Positive youth development; Professional ethics; Religious education; Service learning; Social development; Social justice; Socioemotional development; Sociology of morality; Values education; Youth studies”. They are not the only source of comparable information.

Whose morals?

The Moral Fool, a book by philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller looks like a good starting point for the discussion.  He reasons that ethical or moral arguments — he does not really distinguish between ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’, as many other philosophers do — are often not necessary and even dangerous in resolving conflicts. The latter is especially the case when these claim to have universal validity.

He notes that ethical and moral norms change all the time and differ from culture to culture and points out, rather ironically, that such leading moralists as Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant were not beyond reproach themselves. The former judged women intellectually inferior while the latter approved of slavery and the killing of illegitimate children. Moeller pleads for leaving emotions and emotive words out and draws parallels with traffic laws. Here it is customary to speak about bad or good, rather than evil or virtuous drivers.

Political activist Surinder Mavi appears to agree with this approach. Being born and raised in India, with a stint in Canada for eight years, he became politically ‘awakened’ as he noticed that societies could function perfectly as long as basic rules such as  “like stopping at red lights” were respected. 

There is certainly merit to these views as there is indeed not a strong correlation between ‘moral talk’ and a ‘better world’ — and sadly so. Societies where there is much ado about ‘moral standards’, especially when references are made to divine intervention, often show considerable signs of moral disaster. Good laws, rules, and regulations matter; no need for values, so the argument goes.

One could, albeit partly, agree with these opinions as long as such values as inclusion, fair treatment, equality, inclusion, and diversity are and should as such be warranted by law…

…under the protection of the law.

 A growing number of countries in the Middle East are introducing laws that repeal rulings from time immemorial that permitted rapists to marry their victims so as to avoid punishment. Morocco, Jordan, and Lebanon are in the vanguard of this movement. When in 2016 the government of Turkey tried to exonerate some 3,000 men accused of rape if they wed their ‘targets’, massive protests erupted, and the proposal was withdrawn.

…in the absence of law.

Florida, July 2017. Five teenagers see a man struggling in a pond. They do not try to save him, but video-taped his distress. They think it’s fun.  The 31-year-old goes under and dies. According to local authorities they did not break the law as “In the state of Florida, there is no law in place that requires a person to render aid or call to render aid to a victim in distress”.

…when the law needs to be ignored

A homeless man who stole cheese and sausages from a supermarket in Genoa was acquitted by Italy’s highest court, which ruled the theft of small amounts of food by the hungry poor is not a crime. The man, a refugee from the Ukraine, was caught taking five dollars worth of food; earlier he was sentenced to six months in prison and ordered to pay a €100 fine.

…when the law is flawed:

Canada’s crime rate keeps on dropping. However, the number of people incarcerated has touched all-time highs. Although the total of white adults in prisons is declining, the rates of indigenous people are surging: some 36 per cent of the women and 25 per cent of men sentenced to custody are Indigenous—a group that makes up just four per cent of the national population.

…when the law needs updating:

In August 2017, the Indian Supreme Court declared the practice of ‘Triple Talaq’ ‘unconstitutional’ and ‘un-Islamic’. This custom, common among Muslim citizens, permitted a husband to divorce his wife by pronouncing the word talaq (Arabic for “I divorce you”) three times. Hitherto, wives did not need to be consulted, nor had they access to a similar procedure.

Philosopher Roger Scruton would ardently differ with Moeller. He sees as an undeniable  given that emotions and deep-seated feelings of moral indignation, if not fury and outrage, are needed to bring in new laws or change old ones. Reason and rational argument certainly do not suffice to bring about change.

Without passion and anger, the death penalty would not have been abolished, or kept on the books, for that matter; slavery would have lasted even longer, human rights would be still in the making, and child labour yet looked upon as coming in handy. Strong emotions, or so it seems, are useful to get things on or off the ground. Young people who acting on perceived injustice by engaging in activism seem to reach better academic and financial outcomes later in life.

Primatologist Sarah Brosman and Frans de Waal: “When capuchin monkeys noticed that their partners received higher rewards for the same task, a grape instead of a slice of cucumber, they refused to repeat the job they did before without any fuss. Their response was not a sign of greed; it was a case of innate ‘inequity aversion’”.

The beauty of the CRC

The manner in which the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) is dealt with at the international level forms an illustrative case as to how systems of laws, rules and regulations can be kept alive instead of becoming stagnant. All countries of the world, barring the US, which is not a signatory to the Convention, regularly submit country reports to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child as to how the CRC is being implemented.

In most cases, these reports are accompanied by accounts by the local NGO communities.  This Committee, comprising 18 independent specialists, reviews these reports and issues findings and recommendations which are also made public. In addition, there are so-called ‘Optional Protocols’ that aim at refining the CRC and keeping it relevant.

Furthermore, in most nations, a wide variety of activities are at play at local and even grassroots level; sometimes by NGOs in tandem with, sometimes in opposition to governments, not seldom with emotions reaching high-fever temperatures. It is also a subject that continues to spawn specialised courses, Ph.D. studies and related projects worldwide. All with the ultimate effect of making things better for children. [Similar observations could be made on Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; still lacking is a UN Convention on the Rights of Nature].

It is often inviting, if not justified, to be cynical about the distance between ideal and reality, between good intentions and implementation. Essayist Pankaj Mishra observes, “High-minded legislation, as is the case in India, which enshrines far-reaching guarantees of equal rights and an absolute prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, is rarely accompanied by a necessary change in hearts and minds”. 

Still, as witnessed in ever more places, rights are increasingly used as a force for protecting and creating fair and equitable spaces for people. Young people, everywhere, know when their rights are trampled upon, such as in South Africa, where teenagers who live in residential care centres say such things as “I felt disrespected as a human and as a child, because we have the right to be heard”.

 “We teachers used to beat our children as a disciplinary measure, but not now anymore. Besides, the children know it is against the rights of the child and will tell us so when we’re rough with them.”

Teacher at a Special Education Primary School, Matagalpa, Nicaragua.

Values matter

Values matter, even when they are not permitted. Professor of Law and Philosophy David Luban mentions that there are ‘seven do not mention values’ at Chinese universities, among which ‘Western-type constitutional democracy’ and ‘freedom of press’.  

Mahatma Gandhi defines the seven values in terms of the absence of the following sins:

>Wealth without work

>Pleasure without conscience

>Commerce without morality

>Science without humanity

>Knowledge without character

>Worship without sacrifice

>Politics without principles

To which his grandson Arun added an eighth:

>Rights without responsibilities

 For the so-called ‘hard right’ in the US, and possible elsewhere as well, acceptance of customary ‘enlightenment values’, such as reason, facts, science, open-mindedness, tolerance, secularity, modernity, is suspect. Doing so would lower one’s guard against ‘evils’ like evolution theory, concern about global warning and human equality across racial and sexual and religious lines. According to historian Gary Wills, this is “why they have to oppose in every underhanded way these values as they can the influence of younger people who are open to gays, to same-sex marriage, to feminism.”

Do we need empathy?

To many this would sound like a trivial question, as it is at the core of almost any educator’s effort to instil feelings of sympathy, compassion and understanding in the boys and girls on their watch. It seems the most crucial ingredient in any attempt to remove barriers to a deeper understanding of other persons that make people feel indifferent or hostile to those who hold dissimilar beliefs or whose childhoods were rooted in different conditions. It has now become generally accepted wisdom that ‘empathy’ is vital for mankind’s survival and that of the world they inhabit as the ever-rising spate of publications and statements witnesses.

Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen in The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty warns that the notion of evil should be replaced with “empathy erosion” and that a high degree of empathy is what makes for good people and good societies.  In his The Empathetic Civilization, economist Jeremy Rifkin sees that the only way for our species not to submit to war, environmental degradation and economic collapse is through the enhancement of “global empathy”.

Former US President Barack Obama, on the occasion of Pope Francis’s visit to the White House, stated that “it’s the lack of empathy that makes it very easy for us to plunge into wars. It’s the lack of empathy that allows us to ignore the homeless on the streets.”

 Psychologist Paul Slovic, who was literally stunned by the ubiquitous ‘psychic numbing’ in the face of a long history of mass murder and genocide, calls this lack of empathy a fundamental deficiency in human nature. His solution is to nurture people’s capacity to combine reasoned judgments, decisions, and actions with the capacity to experience affection and empathy.

Selfishness and altruism

The thinking of Peter Schwartz, journalist, and retired Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Ayn Rand Institute, runs counter to all that could be argued in favour of a more altruistic, empathetic humankind. In his view, altruism declares reason impotent as it sees truth coming from the heart rather than from the ‘brain’.

In his In Defense of Selfishness, he unabashedly champions that being selfish — caring about one’s own life, and only that — is the right thing to do. That what sustains one’s own life is good, that which harms it is bad. It is only under the code of rational egoism that facts, not feelings, constitute the foundation for ethics.  

Schwartz sees no reason for governments to be involved in such activities as setting up public parks, libraries, unemployment insurance, income or to be involved in education, medicine, agriculture, or housing.

The presence of a police force to offer protection against criminals; the judiciary to uphold the law to adjudicate in conflicts; and the army to shield the country from outside forces should suffice.

Capitalism, which is rooted in egoism, is a good thing, as it is the only viable option for a society to flourish. It is in a dictatorship that people are enjoined to forsake their own interests and supress their personal desires.

“Be selfish: ‘It’s good to be selfish. But not so self-centred that you never listen to other people.”

Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy

Indeed, when Schwartz’s ideas are lifted to the level of foreign policy, they start sounding more familiar, as it is commonly accepted that nations should act in their own interests first. ‘America First’ is against this backdrop not an altogether unexpected slogan.

 “Volunteering is linked to health benefits like lower blood pressure and decreased mortality rates. When we engage in acts of generosity, those experiences of positive emotion may be more enduring and outlast the specific episode in which we are engaged.” Older adults who volunteered to help children with reading and writing tended to experience less memory loss and maintain greater physical mobility”.

Nicole Karlis

Philosopher/neuroscientist Sam Harris predicts the irrefutable progress of science, including the behavioural disciplines; he is convinced that the powers of empathy are growing and humanity as a whole is benefitting at any point in time, this regardless of the growing capacity to do each other harm, inflict collateral damage, rapid climate change and racism.

Biologist Edward Wilson sees a similar outcome, albeit via a different route: “The increasing interconnection of people worldwide strengthen their cosmopolitan attitudes. It does so by weakening the relevance of ethnicity, locality and national sources of identification and also homogenizes humanity in race and ethnicity intermarriage.”

Historian Yuval Noah Harari, following development through the ages, comes to similar belief in this kind of wisdom — hence the title of his book Sapiens – Empathy, he states, benefits the interests of the entire human species and should be the guiding light of politics.

The thinking on selfishness and altruism has been constantly under revision during its long history of arguments and counter arguments, with their roots in many disciplines — biology, anthropology, philosophy, economics and theology among them. It will continue to do so. The opposing views of the psychologists Daniel Batson – ‘People are intrinsically altruistic’ — and Robert Cialdini – ‘People are intrinsically selfish’ add to the momentum and retain much of their traction.

“As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”

Charles Darwin

In an editorial, the medical journal The Lancet frames the discussion in terms of international development: “As there are many meanings for social security, there are many meanings for solidarity. It is not simply reciprocity or fostering pro-social interventions by government.

It is cohesion. The sum will be greater than the parts. In creating a better world, sustainable development goals must also be solidarity development goals. Goals that can only be met by revisiting the fundamental values of promoting unity, harmony, and collective security—in solidarity.”

Do young people need values?

Yes, they do; they call them ideals.

In The Educated Mind, psychologist Kieran Egan distinguishes five modes of understanding of people and things around us that develop during the course of a person’s life span. Children start with ‘somatic’ mode of understanding to be followed, as they are getting older, by ‘mythic’, ‘romantic’, ‘philosophic’ modes when reaching adulthood.

And if they ever get there: the ironic mode. He differs from other child psychologists by treating these modes not as stages that individuals have to go through but rather as faculties that should be retained. Thus, a mature adult may still experience a sense of good and evil, wonder, amazement and ‘oneness’: the ‘mythic mode’.

They may also, and this is important, harbour ideals, look up to persons as models for inspiration, identification, and guidance: the ‘romantic mode’. Both modes give people direction and meaning. There are enough shining stars in the worlds of sports, music, literature, science, cooking, arts, rights and even of politics who could be appealed to.

Young people, in particular, need values, morals: ideals still matter, or they should. Young people, in particular, need to see bright colours in their dreams. They also need to believe in ‘good people’, which is still harder to do.

One way or the other?

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff seems to have cut the Gordian note for us. He states that people are ‘wired’ for empathy and refers to the brain’s mirror neuron circuitry and related pathways that are activated when people act or when they see someone else performing the same action. They fire even more strongly when they coordinate actions with others: when they cooperate.

The mirror neuron circuitry and associated pathways connect people both physically and emotionally with others, allowing them to feel what others feel. They provide the biological basis of empathy, cooperation, and community. People are born to empathise and cooperate. Empathy is a natural state, but it must be nurtured, monitored, modulated, and enhanced, lest it shuts off.

Nico van Oudenhoven is the Senior Associate International Child Development Initiatives [ICDI] See: ICDI.nl; Leiden, South Holland, Netherlands

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