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Praise for
Ethical Wisdom “Mark Matousek guides us through a revolution in ethical
science with deft, thought-provoking style. ethical Wisdom is
a riveting, fun, and insightful tour of life’s meaning and
purpose, essential reading for anyone drawn to the query,
“How ought we to live?”
Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence
“I don't know how he has done it, but Mark Matousek has
written a book about being good without being moralistic or
judgmental. Ethical Wisdom is a call to our higher selves.
Read it!”
– Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and Founder
of V-Day
“Ethical Wisdom is a unique delight--a fascinating,
enlightening, and adventurous romp (as opposed to the
typical trudge) through the territories of philosophy,
psychology, science, and spirituality. Mark Matousek has
pulled off a most difficult task: he has written an
intellectually rigorous and
expansive book that is also beautiful and funny and
inspiring. He offers a hand up to the landscape of our
better angels, as well as a path through the murky territory
of our darker urges and instincts.”
-Elizabeth Lesser, Cofounder, Omega Institute, Author of
Broken Open
Mark Matousek has done some magic: he has written an informed,
intelligent, humorous, insightful, and juicy book on ethics.
He covers a broad field and is up-to-date and thorough.
You’ll enjoy this book and maybe become a better person
because of it.” -Thomas Moore, author of Care of the
Soul “This broad-ranging book is remarkable for
its emotional intensity, and for its message of redemption;
it is a delineation of hope itself.” -Andrew Solomon,
author of The Noonday Demon “Ethical
Wisdom is a beautiful work. Bringing together the best of
today's scientific research with a plainspoken
forthrightness, Ethical Wisdom does what few books of this
type can do: it inspires.”
-Mark Epstein, M.D., author of Thoughts without a
Thinker “Ethical Wisdom is a unique
delight--a fascinating, enlightening, and adventurous romp
(as opposed to the typical trudge) through the territories
of philosophy, psychology, science, and spirituality. Mark
Matousek has pulled off a most difficult task: he has
written an intellectually rigorous and expansive book that
is also beautiful and funny and inspiring. He offers a hand
up to the landscape of our better angels, as well as a path
through the murky territory of our darker urges and
instincts.” Elizabeth Lesser, Cofounder, Omega Institute,
Author of Broken Open
“This book springs from the latest research on biology [and]
some of the oldest human wisdom. Both are interesting, and
together they are potent.” -Bill McKibben, author of
Earth “Ethical Wisdom provides tremendous
insight into our collective and individual psyches. A
necessary guide for human evolution, and survival, in the
21st century.” -Peter Buffett, author of Life is
What You Make It and founder of the NoVo Foundation
“As a species, we have not found a healthy way to harness
our basic goodness and avoid the seeds of human suffering.
The book you have in your hands will show you why this is
so. Engaging, thought provoking, and enlightening … this
book acts an insider’s guide to what makes us tick, and
gently prompts us to look in the mirror and at our place in
the great pond of life. A must read for anyone interested in
making the world a better place.”
-- John P. Forsyth, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology at
the University at Albany, SUNY and author of Your Life on
Purpose and The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for
Anxiety. |
Q & A on Ethical Wisdom
1. Why do you say that emotion – not reason – is
the foundation of ethical life?
Without emotional intelligence, the most rational people
in world cannot make sound ethical choices. We need to
feel in order to care, and we need to care if we hope to
make ethical choices. Empathy is, after all, the prime
inhibitor of human cruelty, as Daniel Goleman explained
during our interview for this book. Our deepest moral
reflexes occur at the gut level; in fact, all of human
morality arises from the moral emotion of disgust (this
is what steered us toward goodness in the first place).
We feel that things are right and wrong even before we
think they are, but the rational mind tells us
otherwise. It’s fascinating to learn how this process
works. Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist, calls this
“moral dumbfounding.” First, you have a gut feeling that
something is wrong, or disgusting, then your mind
creates a rational story to justify your visceral
response. This is happening all the time but we are
unaware of it. Instead, we believe our stories (it’s
wrong to burn the flag, wrong to sleep with your sister,
wrong to eat a pet) without realizing that they are just
…. stories … and utterly immune to logic. When we look
inside our minds for reasons to justify our moral
responses, we find only feelings posing as facts.
2. Do men and women differ in how they make
ethical choices?
When it comes to moral life, females gravitate toward
care and connection and males insist on rules and
fairness. For a woman, it is generally less important to
be right than it is to maintain harmony in the group.
For a man, rules are rules and fair is fair, and he’s
frequently happy to go down fighting. Both orientations
are necessary – Mars and Venus can learn from one
another. Men can become too mental and rigid, women too
heartful and squishy, in how they make their ethical
choices. When a fight breaks out among a group of boys
playing a game, the player who’s left in tears is
expected to suck it up and get out of the way so the
game can continue. When the same thing happens among a
group of girls, the game stops and all the players
gather around to comfort the injured party. Neither side
is right or wrong, they’re just different orientations
to what it means to be a good person. And when it comes
to issues of sex and love, intimacy, fidelity, and so
on, our moral propensities are even more antithetical!
Though we strive for gender equality in our politically
correct, post feminist world, our ethical lives are not
immune to mammalian biology.
3. You talk about there being a “moral organ”
hard-wired into the brain by evolution. How does it
work?
Our brains have evolved to be sensitive to five basic
areas of moral concern. First, we care about harm and
care, and the protection of innocents. We are wired to
care, wired for empathy, and wired not to do harm if we
can help it. Second, we are concerned with justice and
fairness. In order for live together harmoniously,
groups operate on systems of reward and punishment for
behavior that’s helpful or harmful to the majority. This
is how we maintain the illusion of living in a balanced
world where people receive their just deserts. The dark
side of this justice-fairness coin is, of course, the
need for revenge. Humans require revenge in order to
keep the peace (if that sounds contradictory, that is
because it is). When society does not at least
approximate revenge on wrongdoers through laws and
punishment, individuals take it in their own hands to
exact lex talionis – the ancient call of an eye for an
eye, tooth for a tooth – in the form of personal
vendettas. On the positive side, we are programmed for
reciprocity. The brain has a built-in exchange function
that keeps tracks of assets and debts, favors received
and favors owed, in our dealings with others. The Golden
Rule – Do unto others as you would have others do unto
you – is a direct result of our need for justice and
fairness.
Next, we care about in-group loyalty. Tribal psychology
is deeply pleasurable to our brains. On the plus side,
this leads to kin loyalty, taking care of our own, and
important feelings of belonging and group identity. On
the negative side, having an “Us” always creates a
“Them.” Us versus Them is our greatest ethical
albatross; without this tribal mentality, we would not
rape, go to war, or commit genocide against one another.
As Eckart Tolle explained to me in our interview, Us
versus Them enables us to turn other people into
concepts. It is much easier to murder a concept (Commie
–Faggot – N-gger) than to harm an actual human being.
After this, we care about authority and respect. Humans
live in hierarchies where leaders dictate the trend of
the group. When leadership is positive, we rise en masse
to reflect the benevolence of those in power. When the
powerful are corrupt, however, we become oppressed and
morally shrunken. Remember what St. Bonaventure said.
“The higher a monkey climbs, the more you can see of its
behind.” Our authority-respect reflex cuts both ways –
big time.
Finally, we care about purity and sacredness. Humans
need the ideal of sacredness to help us survive in world
that is sometimes brutal and confusing; our need for the
sacred (which expresses itself for many in faith) is, in
fact, part of our survival mechanism as a species. It
helps us band together for the highest good, to turn off
the Me switch and turn on the We. This has been the
province of religions, of course (without which our
species could never have created civilizations). But you
don’t need God to be good.
4. Is it true that gossip is essential to
ethical life?
As a writer, I found this part of our ethical story
especially fascinating. Apparently, human language
evolved as a replacement for physical grooming. And the
very first function of language is what we call gossip –
or minding each other’s business. The move from picking
each others’ lice to talking behind each others’ backs
came naturally to our nosey species. The ability to talk
about one another helped groups maintain the peace.
Gossip was the first line of defense against physical
aggression. Before you attacked someone, or burned down
his house, you could always ruin his reputation! Because
reputation management (caring what others think) is so
important to us – and critical to ethical conduct – NOT
wanting to be talked about becomes a critical concern
for people concerned with status. The fear of gossip
keeps us in line. There are many dangers to how gossip
is used – hypocrisy, first and foremost – but its
importance as tool for moral life cannot be denied.
5. How can you possibly suggest that human
nature is essentially good when there is so much evil in
the world?
There are always aberrations to every rule. To say that
people are essentially good is not to suggest that we
are perfect. The most virtuous person has his or her
moral blind spots, just as the most evil individual has
– if you look closely enough – areas of sometimes
surprising virtue. Still, it remains true that the ratio
of good to evil deeds in the world holds at close to
zero across the globe at any given moment. It is much
easier to destroy than it is to create. How could we
have survived to this point as a species, living at
close range in such multitudes, if our prevailing nature
were not positive? Nature made us expert cooperators,
reciprocators, helpers, nurturers, and returners of
stolen wallets, in the vast majority. This does not mean
that we’re anywhere near perfect (remember what Annie
Lamott says, “Perfectionism is the voice of the
oppressor”). But we are born to strive, and to reach,
toward goodness. We are magnetized by goodness, beauty,
and truth. I have been practicing Buddhism for 25 years
and find in that philosophy a far more accurate
interpretation of human nature that we find in
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all of which contain
some version of Original Sin. Buddhists talk about
“Buddha nature” existing in every human being – a
fundamental radiance of mind, awakeness, consciousness,
the potential for love – and evil being a deviation; a
result of ignorance, not a bad human nature, except in
extreme cases of psychopathy. We inherited a fairly
horrendous view of human nature from our Western
religious traditions, and saw this negativity ratified
by the work of Sigmund Freud, who, almost single
handedly, came to define what we believed about the
human psyche. Freud’s pronouncements on human nature,
which I include in the book, are enough to put anybody
on Prozac. Of course, the positive psychology movement,
in tandem with what we now understand about the brain’s
built-in “moral organ,” are turning that negative
picture around.
6. Apparently, this five-part “moral organ” can
even explain how and why Democrats differ from
Republicans? How does that work?
Jonathan Haidt has developed a genius theory about this
that makes a lot of sense to me. The first two
categories of moral concern – harm/care and
justice/fairness – are focused primarily on individuals,
while the last three – in-group/loyalty,
authority/respect, and sacredness/purity – are focused
on community. Liberals tend to care most about the first
two moral areas because liberals are individualists,
first and foremost. If what I’m doing isn’t hurting you,
a liberal says, it’s none of your business.
Conservatives, on the other hand, give equal weight to
all five of these ethical spheres. Because conservatives
are more pessimistic than liberals about human nature,
they believe that individuals need to be reined in for
their own good, taught to respect authority, and
chastened by regulations concerned with sacredness and
purity. In other words, when Lou Dobbs is fulminating
against illegal aliens, he is – in his own mind –
defending something that he holds sacred (the Homeland).
Learning to recognize these five primary areas of
ethical concern can help us to appreciate, if not agree
with, the beliefs of the other side. As Haidt points
out, most of the world is conservative, not liberal.
It’s an elite thing to be a liberal; most of humanity
believes in putting tradition, group loyalty, and
fidelity to leaders before individual satisfaction.
Once again – as in the differences between men and women
– both sides can learn from each other. Conservatives
can lighten up, give individuals more credit, and try to
understand that it’s their disgust reflex talking (not
reason) when they harangue against same-sex marriage,
for instance. And liberals can dial back their contempt
for conservative values, including traditional notions
of sacredness, long enough to get a handle on what the
other side is trying to defend. Our polarized,
hyper-partisan world would only benefit from attempting
to understand the other side, regardless of our
cherished position.
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