Chris is Professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, a Fulbright Scholar, Director of the Kathwari Honors Program, and founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity & Innovation. He is also the author of "The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success" (HarperOne, 2017).
The host of iTunes top rated “New & Noteworthy” podcast, The Science of Success with Matt Bodnar, interviewed me for an episode called “The Surprising Power of Compassion.” Matt’s questions guided us through a discussion about how compassion can fuel creativity, build emotional resilience and help us achieve personal and professional goals. We took a ‘mindwalk’ with great thinkers ranging from Jean Jacques Rousseau to Charles Munger on compassion’s role in achieving success in the boardroom, classroom and living room.
The episode can be listened to at the following link:
http://redorbit.podbean.com/e/the-surprising-power-of-compassion-with-dr-chris-kukk/
Compassion, Neuroscience and Society: A Radio Interview in 4 SegmentsThe host of WS Radio’s The Enrichment Hour, Mike Schwager, interviewed me on January 28, 2016 for a show called “Weaving Compassion and Neuroscience into the Fabric of Society to Make a Better Future.” We talked about a wide range of topics and issues including education, neuroscience, self-improvement, counter-intelligence, Charles Darwin and my work with the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement on social-emotional learning. The interview is split into four 15-minute segments. Click here to listen to the interview.
Note: Scroll down when on this page to find the 4 segments of the complete interview.
Do you see gorillas? There are gorillas in the midst of the refugee crisis but all some American politicians can see is fear (see recent statements and proclamations from numerous presidential candidates, governors and mayors). When there is a focus on fear, politicians and their followers create a blindspot where facts and even dancing gorillas go unnoticed.
In a famous study known as the “invisible gorilla” experiment, psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons demonstrated that when most people fix their attention on something they are told they are supposed to see, they tend to overlook anything outside their scope of focus. Chabris and Simons asked their study participants to watch a fast-paced video of people passing a basketball and count how many times specific players within that group received the ball (click here for the 2 minute video). The problem was that at least half the observers didn’t see the person dressed in a gorilla suit dance a jig in the middle of the video; their focused or selective attention on counting caused inattentional blindness. Most people see only what they want to see or are looking for. When our politics are focused on fear, our policies are filled with blindspots where facts are overlooked. Inattentional blindness is running rampant in America’s corridors of political power.
We have a gorilla problem in American politics, especially when it comes to refugees and immigrants. There are at least four factual gorillas in the refugee/immigrant issue that some of our current and ‘wannabe’ political representatives just simply do not see because of their focus on fear.
The Sprouting Gorilla. Nearly all the terrorists responsible for the Paris attacks sprouted from within France or the European Union. The argument by some American politicians that we need to “halt” and “ban” Syrian refugees because of what happened in Paris is neither logical nor based in fact. As Francois Hollande, the French president, said in a speech before the joint session of parliament following the Paris attacks: “it was Frenchmen who killed other Frenchmen.” The November 13th terrorists were homegrown and that fact seems to be lost on Governor Christie and others who would ban even Syrian “orphans under fiver [years old]” from seeking refuge in the United States. Shouldn’t we be concerned about why and how ISIS can recruit people from some of our neighborhoods rather than with refugees, who happen to be mostly women and children, hoping to be our neighbors?
The Screening Gorilla. Refugees already go through between 18 months and two years of an intense screening process (including interviews and biometric data) by intelligence agencies. It takes some refugees much longer than two years to clear the process so the argument of making it even stricter is surreal when you combine the sprouting gorilla idea of why this is akin to climbing up the wrong tree with the reality of the extensiveness of the process. While we screen, many seeking asylum in western countries don’t make it through … alive. The image of 3 year-old Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body washing ashore in September generated a wave of civic compassion throughout the western world. Approximately half of the 4 million Syrian refugees are children. Too many politicians running for our country’s highest office and running our states’ executive branches, however, seem to be running in fear from families needing our help (I am fortunate to live in a state where the governor has followed a compassionate path on this issue). Politicians ride fear to build their own careers but statesmen redirect fear into building a stronger, united world. Do we want more statesmen or politicians?
The Reversing Gorilla. The front-runner in the Republican presidential campaign, Donald Trump, has called for a “big & beautiful wall” across America’s southern border to stem the influx of Mexican immigrants. It appears that Mr. Trump’s fear of immigrants has blinded him to the gorilla of reverse migration. As recently reported by both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, “More immigrants from Mexico are leaving the United States than coming into the country…All told, the number of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. has dropped by more than one million since 2007.” Immigration reversal is a fact but we still have leading political candidates such as Mr. Trump calling for constructing a wall to stop immigrants from coming into the United States. If we follow Mr. Trump’s blind lead on building a “big & beautiful wall,” wouldn’t we be building it to keep immigrants in the country? We all know what happens to walls throughout history anyway: they fall (Berlin Wall, The Great Wall, etc…). In contrast, there’s a statue from France overlooking New York that is doing pretty well standing the test of time. Our politicians might want to focus on her for a little inspiration on the topic of immigration; some might even be inspired to become statesmen.
The Repeating Gorilla. This is Yogi’s gorilla: “It’s like déjà vu, all over again.” We seem to be repeating the same mistakes with ethnic groups all over again. The United States turned away Jewish refugees on the eve of World War II and we are considering doing something similar with today’s refugees? The recent call for creating a special I.D. for Muslims (Mr. Trump) and the Mayor of Roanoke’s not so subtle recommendation for modeling America’s World War II internment camps bring back to life our national embarrassment of how we treated fellow Americans of Japanese descent. We can’t let our fears blind us to literally and figuratively walking into the same mistakes we made in the past. We need to learn from fear rather than continually learning to fear.
When politicians make decisions and policies out of fear, the results are usually outside the realm of logic. Under current law, for example, if someone is on America’s no-fly list, they cannot board a plane but they can still buy a gun. Because of their fear, some political leaders can’t see the gorillas of fact because they apparently can only see guerillas of terror everywhere (even in five-year old refugee orphans) except in their blindspot; and homegrown terrorists are very thankful. Maybe, just maybe, when more of our politicians start seeing gorillas, our world will have less … guerillas.
Words sometimes help people see and pictures sometimes speak messages everyone can understand. Words do matter and pictures can speak. There was one picture this past week that spoke to the hearts of people everywhere and made me see words that were hidden in plain sight. The image was of Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body being carried by a Turkish policeman. The words I finally saw (words that I had looked at since I was 7) make 
up the Latin motto of my state’s (Connecticut) Great Seal or coat of arms: Qui Transtulit Sustinet. I didn’t know what they meant before this past Labor Day weekend but, for some reason, the image of Aylan made me notice them more and pushed me to discover their meaning: He Who Transplanted Sustains.
The dream of Aylan’s father (Abdullah) was to transplant his family from a worn torn country into a place of peace where he could sustain and nurture his family. Aylan, as the world now knows, didn’t make it through the journey. Abdullah’s dream became every father’s worst nightmare. We can only imagine what it was like to be the Turkish policeman carrying Aylan Kurdi’s limp body in the photo that has appeared in almost every social and traditional media outlet in the world. You don’t have to be a father to feel Abdullah’s pain of loss when he not only had to identify Aylan in the morgue but his wife (Rehan) and older son’s (Galip) bodies too. The wave of refugees from conflicts in Africa and Middle East (especially the Syrian conflict) into Europe has had a severe undertow of suffering for years but Aylan’s death, captured in a single image, made it impossible for people to ignore any longer. A wave of empathy has finally met the wave of refugees (over 2,500 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea this year alone).
It takes more than empathy, however, to make a difference in the lives of refugees and immigrants throughout the world; it takes compassion. It appears that the image o
f Aylan’s little legs and shoes dangling from the arms of a Turkish policeman has ignited citizen compassion where there has only been political callousness in many of the world’s capitals. While most developed countries have been trying to keep back the waves of refugees attempting to enter their borders by walls of ignorance (strict border patrols and immigration policies with few exceptions), the citizens of European countries have decided enough is enough and have transformed their empathy into compassion.
Examples of citizen compassion have been reported from Hungary to Austria to Germany to England. National Public Radio (NPR) reported how Hungarian citizens were lining up along the road where the refugees from the Budapest train station were walking 110 miles to the Austrian border and providing food and clothing. We’ve all heard the empathetic saying of “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.” Well, one Hungarian woman, according to the NPR report, went one compassionate step further and took off her sneakers and gave them to a refugee woman wearing flip-flops. While British citizens have taken to social media with pictures of themselves holding #welcomerefugees signs, Austrian and German citizens have been lining up with their cars along their respective borders waiting to drive refugees into their countries. We should all be riding the wave of citizen compassion. It appears that European governments are now following their compassionate citizens with the announcements of new and more humane immigration policies over the last few days.
Mahatma Ghandi said “Keep your words positive because your words become your behavior.” We should all live by our words. If we did, a handshake would still mean everything in the world to more than just a few of us. Trust, which builds strong societies, would gather strength. People would feel at home no matter where they are in the world. We all would know what Qui Transtulit Sustinet means.
Some nations are beginning to build paths into their countries for fellow human beings where all can walk no matter what type, make or size of shoes being worn. When you meet a refugee or immigrant from another country, are you a shoe giver, taker, thrower or ignorer? My hope is that you and I always have the compassion to answer in Hungarian. There is, however, at least one pair of little shoes no one can ignore.
Will the real Atticus Finch
please stand up? He stood up on July 11, 1960 when Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird and he has not sat back down since, even with the publication this month of Go Set a Watchman. Many book reviewers of Go Set a Watchman have echoed the thought that “This is a story of the toppling of idols; its major theme is disillusion” because Jean Louise’s Atticus is the darkness to the light of Scout’s Atticus. However, because Go Set a Watchman was the first draft of Mockingbird, the Atticus of Watchman came before the Atticus of Mockingbird. This is important because the context of the two novels is what makes me fill with hope and keeps my idol on a pedestal even as he becomes more human; the context reminds me of the saying that darkness is not the opposite of light but simply the absence of light. The callous bigotry (the dark) of Jean Louise’s Atticus was simply missing the compassionate understanding (the light) that flowed from Harper Lee’s pen into Scout’s Atticus. Atticus represents, in raw form, how compassion can evolve.
While compassion is certainly about kindness, it is also about anger and callousness. Compassion is not the absence of anger, callousness, indifference or even hate but a way of thinking and acting that overcomes them all. Just as courage does not occur in the absence of fear or conformity but in the moment of overcoming each of them, compassion’s strength arises in conquering ruthlessness and indifference. Compassion is the courage to be kind. With the release of Go Set a Watchman we now can see the depths through which Atticus’ ‘courage to be kind’ had to evolve from. If Atticus can transform from a racist hypocrite to a compassionate hero, we all can become better people; we all can write a narrative for our own lives that is filled with compassion and kindness. No longer is Atticus “a god” or heroic figure out of reach for us mere human beings to model, but he is one of us with all his imperfections. He is still the same hero that many of us have idolized for decades but now his character is more of a human hero … a hero that we all can choose to be.
There aren’t two Atticus Finches, there is the one and only Atticus. There are many first drafts in life and Harper Lee’s Atticus represents how we shouldn’t let them define who we become but we must acknowledge that they do make us who we are. Our strengths and weaknesses as individuals help to define the character of our communities. We choose to be divided or united.
How do we make the world a better place if we don’t acknowledge our weaknesses and foibles just as much as we celebrate our strengths? Atticus is based on Harper Lee’s father, Amasa Coleman Lee, a man who “was a Deep South Southerner” and segregationist until middle-age. Mr. Lee evolved into an advocate for integration in the last half of his life so much so that his words of “Equal rights for all, special privileges for none” became one of Atticus and Scout’s most famous quotes in Mockingbird. Atticus is the literary parallel of Amasa. Just as the first draft of Atticus in Watchman does not define who he becomes in Mockingbird, Amasa’s first part of life did not define who he became in his daughter’s eyes (I and my fellow Atticus idol worshippers are grateful for that). Watchman is simply the first draft of Mockingbird and not the toppling of Atticus.
Atticus has been standing for our moral conscience for 55 years and now is certainly not the time for him to sit down or topple over. We need him to walk … to walk beyond Maycomb and into the Springfields, the Charlestons and the Baltimores of our country.
Pope Francis and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (his nickname is Nino) both made headlines this month for their perspectives on science: one used science to support his argument and the other disregarded science to espouse his religious beliefs (HINT: justice appears to be blind to science). While the Pope’s scientifically supported and informed encyclical on climate change made a bigger media splash than Nino’s graduation speech that included a discussion about the start-date of humanity (which disregarded all scientific evidence), the juxtaposition of both comments in the media gave me hope that we (American society) have started to turn the proverbial corner towards a constructive rather than polarizing dialogue about science and religion.
The Pope used science to explain why and how we are where we are in terms of humanity’s effect on Earth. Pope Francis states on pages 18–20 of his encyclical Laudato Si’ (Praise Be):
“A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level
and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events…It is true that there are other factors (such as volcanic activity, variations in the earth’s orbit and axis, the solar cycle), yet a number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity…Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.”
Pope Francis, similar to the Dalai Lama, sees science and religion as complementary to each other; a complement that can inform society.
The Nino sees religious ideology and doctrine as overriding scientific evidence. In contrast to the Pope, Nino excluded science in his graduation remarks to make a religious argument for when and where we, human beings, came from. In his speech, according to The Washington Post, at an all-girls Catholic high school in Maryland, Scalia said:
“Class of 2015, you should not leave Stone Ridge High School thinking that you face challenges that are at all, in any important sense, unprecedented,” he said. “Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so, and I doubt that the basic challenges as confronted are any worse now, or alas even much different, from what they ever were.”
Nino’s start-date for humanity of 5,000 years is very close to what creationists believe was the beginning of all life on Earth. Creationism, which isn’t a part of Catholicism, denies all scientific evidence from evolutionary biology, archaeology, chemistry, physics, etc. … to make the claim that Senator Ted Cruz and some other important leaders do that the world is only 6,000 years old. The first sprig of the human family tree sprouted, according to evolutionary biology, approximately 6–7 million years ago with homo sapiens evolving about 200,000 years ago. I was under the impression that justices were in the habit of weighing all evidence when making decisions.
The Pope uses science to explain the world as it is and Nino excludes science to explain the world as he sees it. While Pope Francis and Justice Scalia share the same religion (Catholicism), they significantly diverge in opinion when it comes to the role of science in public discourse. Both men are Catholics with a capital C; okay maybe one is a ‘bit’ of a bigger C since, after all, he is the leader of the Holy See. Both are leaders; while one is the head of the Catholic Church, the other is a Supreme Court Justice. Both men may have started their religious lives on one Catholic path of understanding, but that path has significantly diverged in the forest of science.
The Pope’s respect for science will be useful for handling and possibly overcoming the effects of both El Niño and the Nino. The Pope’s ideas about how to ‘take-on’ climate issues such as El Niño have the byproduct of ‘taking-on’ Nino’s ideas about diminishing science’s informative role in society. A person does not have to choose between a religious life and scientific thinking. Society becomes stronger when we combine science with the humanities and weaker when we exclude one for the other.
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