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Why Can’t We Be Good?

This is the most fascinating book.  Needleman is a philosophy professor at San Francisco State University and the author of numerous books.  This one drew my attention, because of the book I’m writing now.

Needleman starts with a story, which you may have heard already.  Bear with me.  There are two men facing each other–a younger one standing on one leg and an older one who’s holding his hand over his heart.  “The older man is Hillel the Elder, greatest of the rabbinic patriarchs.  The place is Jerusalem, sometime in the forty-year period between 30 BC and 10 AD–during the rein of the hated Herod the Great and his son Herod Antipas.

“The story in question is from the Talmud and is given there in very few words:

“A man approaches Hillel in a nervously defiant attitude.  ‘I will embrace Judaism,’ he says, ‘on the condition that you can teach me the whole of the Torah while I am standing on one foot.’

“Straightaway, Hillel replies:

“‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.  That is the whole Torah.  All the rest is commentary.  Now, go and study.’”

This is the complete story, and Needleman wonders what that last part means, ‘go and study’?  Why study?

Needleman poses a question that might get at the core of what Hillel might have meant.  “We dream, perhaps, that once we “know,” then we can act.  But what if what we now call “knowledge” actually prevents us from acting in any humanly significant sense of that word?  What if the kind of ideas in our mind and the quality of the information we value as “facts”–what if it all imprisons us in a dream, in the illusion of free, moral action?  It could be that the way we use our mind, and the ideas that we allow to take root in our mind guarantee that we will never, ever, act from the human center of ourselves.  and if action does not emanate from one’s own authentic self, can it ever be free?  And if not free, can it ever be moral?  If we wish to be good, if we wish to be what we are meant to be, we have no choice but to question, deeply, our relationship to our own mind and its contents.”

And if that was a bit boring for you, consider this.  He compares our mind to an old, dusty antique shop full of bric-a-brac.  “Yet very few, if any at all, of these ideas, views and opinions that color and shape our experience and our very lives have ever been examined and weighed as to their truth and worth.  Very rarely, if ever, are we even aware of them.”  Hold onto your horses.  Read this next sentence carefully.  “We are, perhaps, never aware that this or that passion or decision or anxiety or fear or hope or resolute action is not ‘mine’ at all, but actually belongs to some disconnected idea, view, or opinion that has taken up lodging in my mind and is actually doing my ‘thinking’ for me.  It is not I who takes this passionately held moral stance, let us say, and am ready to sacrifice my all for it–it is an appliance in my mind that feels like me, like I, only because my real I, my real self, has never stepped forward to look at it, examine it, and decide whether to keep it and use it.”

Can you relate?  All those things you’ve trusted as truth all your life, yet you’ve never taken them out into the light of day to examine them, really examine them?

And I’ve always liked this next story, because it rings so true.  And for those of you who don’t believe in God or the Bible, I’m guessing you still are attracted to wisdom and truth.  So, this would apply to you as well.

A rabbi tells his students to place the Torah’s words upon their hearts.  “A pupil asks the rabbi, ‘Why are we told to place these words upon our heart?  Why does it not tell us to place these words in our heart?’

“The rabbi answers, ‘Our hearts are closed.  all we can do is to place these words upon our heart.  And there they stay…’

‘…until one day the heart breaks…and the words fall in.’

If any of you have ever been to therapy or to a how-to-listen session, you’ll know what I’m raving about when I say he has a whole chapter on listening–and the revolutionary effects it has on both parties.  He proves that it’s entirely possible to carry on a conversation with someone who believes something 180 degrees from you, and still come away valuing what the other has said.  IF the two both listen.  Generally speaking, you sit across from each other and after one speaks, the other must summarize exactly what the other said.  If the second person has not summarized correctly, the first must clarify.  The second person tries again, and when she has it correct, then she can say what she needs to say.  Back and forth like this.  Needleman gives a phenomenal example from his classroom, dealing with partial birth abortion.  He suggest that we are being moral when we listen.

One of the most astounding and disturbing things was an example he gave of a film he had showed in class, to show how people in an actual scientific study will abuse others because they were told to.  How many of you have seen this film?  It was an obedience study done by Stanley Milgram and conducted at Yale University in the summer of 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961.

The scientist and “learner” are actors.  The “teacher” is the one they’re watching.  The “learner” and the “teacher” are told that this is an experiment on the effect of punishment on learning.  [In reality, it’s “to study how far an individual will go when he is ordered by someone in authority to inflict increasing pain on a helpless, protesting victim.”]  They are told that the “learner” will be strapped into a sort of electric chair, that “although the shocks may be painful, they are not dangerous.”  The “teacher” sits in an adjacent room, at a panel of 30 switches labeled with increasing voltages.

I won’t type in the pages of description by Needleman, but suffice it to say, it’s riveting.  Bottom line: the “teacher” becomes disturbed by the yelps of pain on the other side and continuously asks the scientist, “Shouldn’t we stop now?”  But the scientist, cold as ice, says over and over again, “Continue.”  So the “teacher” does, even past the point where there is no longer any response from the other side of the wall.

And then.  AFTER the experiment is all over and the scientists explain what they were really doing–that the shocks were not really shocks at all, the “teacher” can’t hear what they’re telling him.  He keeps going on and on about feeling badly about that guy in the next room.  His mind is set.  He cannot let the new information in.

How similar is this situation to people who have done something horrific, and they are so convinced in their happy little worlds that what they did was out of self-preservation or responsibility, that they cannot see the truthEver?  And I’m talking normal, everyday kinds of things (yes, normal, for many families) like child abuse and wife battery and emotional abuse.

I shudder to think of it.  But then I wonder, would I have done the same as the “teacher?”  I hope not.

It’s worth thinking about.

For a brief reeanactment of Milgram’s study, go to Derren Brown’s reenactment of the experiment.

[Post image: Jacob Needleman, author of Why Can’t We Be Good?]

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