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Symbiosis — Blueprint for Peace
Here’s a beautiful spread from Cosmos Magazine on cooperation in nature. If natural enemies can make peace with one another for mutual advantage, shouldn’t human communities be able to recognize how much more we stand to gain by setting aside our petty differences… or even working through our substantive differences?
It’s largely a matter of will. We have to want to resolve our disagreements more than we want to be right. Some earlier thoughts on conflict resolution here.
Thanks to Rabbi Yaakov Feitman for his article in this week’s Mishpacha Magazine.
Groupthink: Blinded by “I’m Right”
Crossword puzzles. Sudoku. Word games. Logic problems. These are common recipes from the diet books for the mind. Go traveling. Take up knitting or gardening. Learn Italian. Drive a different way to work. Get an advanced degree. Anything and everything that piques cognitive activity belongs in our catalogue of mental health activities.
“That’s all good,” says Barbara Strauch, author of The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind and New York Times health and medical science editor. But the most intriguing advice Ms. Strauch has heard is this: “Deliberately challenge your view of the world. Talk to people you totally disagree with.”
It makes sense. Nothing kicks the brain into overdrive like having to defend your point of view against attack, or the desire to dismantle an argument you find unsound or wrongheaded. What’s more, Ms. Strauch asserts that the brain is actually primed for questioning assumptions, since reexamining our beliefs provides the opportunity to revisit, or more deeply contemplate, why we believe the way we do.
“Confronting things you disagree with may not make you change your mind,” she says, “but it will perhaps give you a view that is more satisfying to the middle-aged brain.”
And who knows? Sometimes we may even discover that we’ve been wrong.
The True Rewards of Giving
Would most people rather save one person or save the world? The answer might surprise you.
University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic asked subjects for donations to save a little girl from starvation. To one group he gave no other information; to the other group he added that this girl was one of millions of other starving people. Logically, that extra bit of information should make no difference, since the girl being saved is the same.
But as one of my mentors likes to say, human beings are psychological and not logical creatures. Case in point: subjects in the second group donated about half as much money as those in the first group.
Building Character and Acquiring a Civil Tongue
Older readers will remember Johnny Carson, the legendary host of the Tonight Show whose 30-year tenure preceded that of Jay Leno. But not so many remember Mr. Carson’s predecessor, Jack Paar, and fewer still will recall why he left the show.
In the opening monologue one night, Mr. Paar uttered the expression “W.C.,” a mostly-forgotten anachronism meaning Water Closet, yet another anachronism meaningbathroom. The censors bleeped the term as profane. Mr. Paar quit the show in protest.
The story strikes as comical, and we can’t help rolling our collective eyes at the overzealous censors who couldn’t tell real profanity from the merely indelicate. But when it comes to values, we can’t escape the inevitable objection: who gets to decide where to draw the line?
Yonason Goldson 