Every society has certain books that help define—in broad terms—their cultural identity. Some include holy books such as “The Koran” and/or epic stories such as “The Odyssey” and American society is no different. The United States has a holy book (“The Bible”), a secular book (“On the Origin of Species”), and a founding document (“The Constitution”) that altogether help define American culture. One problem (other than the fact that some will inevitably disagree with my book/document choices) is that we misread important sections of each work in ways that demean others thereby weakening ourselves.
The Good Book—The standard way of reading the biblical story of Adam and Eve, and the way I was taught in Sunday school, has been that Eve was subservient to Adam because she was made from one of his ribs (the “Second Story of Creation” in Genesis 2:21-23). This gets translated into a large segment of American society believing that men are ‘first and foremost’ relative to women not only in the eyes of God but also in the daily lives that we lead. This erroneous translation has had negative practical effects (i.e., women get paid only 80 cents for every dollar earned by men) and horrific consequences: one study calculated that the number of women killed by a male partner between 2001 and 2012 was “nearly double” the number of American soldiers lost during the same time period in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s a misreading of “The Good Book” because it emphasizes the “Second Story” over the “First Story of Creation” where it shows that Adam and Eve were created simultaneously on equal ground (Genesis 1:26-28). “The Bible,” like many holy books, is filled with contradictory stories but shouldn’t we emphasize the stories that promote respect and compassion for one another instead of those that appear to highlight the judging and subservience of others?
The Survival Guide—In the late 19th Century there was, as Randall Fuller spotlights in the title of his new manuscript, a “Book that Changed America.” It was Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” By the early 20th Century, according to Fuller, “Darwinian theory had become an indisputable aspect of American cultural life…it provided an ordering principle for a society that seemed to grow more complex each year.” We translate Darwin’s hypothesis into American society by emphasizing self-interest over all else and by following euphemisms such as “if you want to be number one, you have to look out for number one.” The irony is that Darwin did not only NOT coin the term “survival of the fittest” but he argued against the idea in research he later conducted to try and prove his thoughts in “Origin.” Darwin would later write in “The Descent of Man” that “it hardly seems probable that the number of men gifted with such virtues as bravery and sympathy…could be increased through natural selection, that is, by survival of the fittest…I perhaps attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest.” He actually wrote in support of a “survival of the kindest” theory: “Those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.” Shouldn’t we read what Darwin actually discovered in his research and not simply what he hypothesized about? We have misread Darwin’s initial hypothesis as an answer for how to “order society” that he, himself, did not agree with when he concluded his research. A consequence of such misreading is that we are building a society on the misguided notion that you can be either successful OR someone who helps others…and American children are learning this all too well. A 2014 Harvard Graduate School of Education study of 10,000 middle- and high-school students found that “almost 80 percent” said that their parents and teachers taught them that their personal “high achievement or happiness” were more important than “caring for others.” Do we really want to construct and live in a society of self-absorbed achievers?
The Founding Document—President Trump has consistently made the argument that children born in the United States to undocumented immigrant parents are not American citizens. There is a ‘slight’ problem with the President’s reading of “The Constitution” and that would be the 14th Amendment, which says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” One consequence of interpreting or ignoring the 14th Amendment is that it betrays who we are as a country: a country of immigrants and a beacon of compassion and hope for the “tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” The Prime Minister of Ireland, Mr. Enda Kenny, said it best this past Saint Patrick’s day with President Trump at his side: “Saint Patrick was an immigrant, patron saint of Ireland and for many people around the globe he’s also a symbol of, indeed the patron of, immigrants…Ireland came to America because…we believed in the shelter of America, in the compassion of America, in the opportunity of America.” To misread the words of the 14th Amendment so that it divides naturally born Americans not only weakens our country but also demeans its legacy and the people who built it.
When we disrespect others because we misread the books that we believe define who we think we are as a people, we are at least ten to twelve chapters deep into our own “Paradise Lost.” If we misread and do not take the time to carefully reflect upon the great books and documents that we use to “order society,” our policy choices will seemingly appear to be always stuck between Scylla and Charybdis. America has successfully navigated its way through history, as Mr. Kenny reminded us, by following its own beacon of hope and compassion. It’s time that we not only follow that beacon again but also use its light to reread the blueprints of how and why our ship was built.
NOTE: This article originally appeared in Thrive Global.
A new study from Yale University has found that the spread and intensity of gun violence in the United States mimics and behaves similar to a biological disease. The Yale researchers conducted an “epidemiological analysis” of a group of 138,163 people over an 8 year period (2006-2014) and were able to reliably predict who would become “a subject of” or “infected with” gun violence. The central conclusion of the study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (3 January 2017), was that “Gunshot violence follows an epidemic-lik
e process of social contagion that is transmitted through networks of people by social interactions.” In other words, when someone you know is involved in an incident of gun violence, your risk of becoming involved in gun violence increases, at least temporarily.
The researchers were able to “trace the infection” of gunshot violence through a network of Chicagoans by following “chains in which one person becomes infected, exposing his or her associates, who then may become infected and spread the infection to their associates.” The authors found that such “cascades of gunshot violence episodes” continue to run through the network as long as there is someone associated with a shooter or a victim. In short, your risk of infection increases—just like a biological epidemic—the more you are simply exposed to the disease (i.e., it doesn’t matter whether you know the shooter or victim; if you know either one, your risk of being involved in an incident of gun violence is heightened).
Since gun violence spreads as a social contagion, it means that we have the capability to abate it. The authors conclude their analysis by offering insights into reducing gun violence such as treating it as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice problem. If we were to treat gun violence as a public health epidemic, it would force us to develop new strategies for reducing it other than the punish-the-offender approach. The study’s main finding that gun violence spreads like a disease through networks of social interactions means that fostering compassion throughout society can have a profound effect on reducing the number of the more than 200 people who are murdered or assaulted with a firearm every day in the United States. One way to combat violence in general is to strengthen compassion on the individual and communal levels. From explaining how to develop self-compassion to creating cities of compassion The Compassionate Achiever offers several ways to help inoculate you and your community against the social contagion of violence.
The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Your Success is now available for pre-order from the following retailers:
AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | INDIEBOUND | BOOKSAMILLION | GOOGLE PLAY | iBOOKS
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.
Send this to friend