Home » Posts tagged 'Book of Proverbs' (Page 3)
Tag Archives: Book of Proverbs
Take Pleasure in Taking the High Road
We all know that two wrongs don’t make a right. But does one right cancel out one wrong?
There’s a good chance you believe that it does. Research suggests that our brains are wired to think of a good deed as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card.
Psychologists call it licensing. It works like this:
You come home from a hard workout at the gym and immediately sit down to a double-helping of ice cream with chocolate syrup and whipped cream. The virtuous behavior of exercising makes you feel better about yourself, which then gives you license to indulge the less virtuous behavior of overdosing on sugar. The responsible act of taking care of yourself makes it easier to rationalize letting yourself go.
But Aaron Garvey and Lisa Bolton of the University of Kentucky have discovered that it goes even further than that.
WE ARE WHAT WE THINK
In their research, they took two groups of volunteers and gave them cookies to eat. The cookies were identical for each group, but in one group they were labeled “healthy.” After finishing their cookies, the subjects were given candy.
As the psychology of licensing would suggest, subjects who had eaten the “healthy” cookies ate more candy than the other group. But not for the reason we might have thought.
Garvey and Bolton measured not only the amount of candy eaten but also the amount of pleasure experienced from the candy. They found that the candy actually tasted better to the people who believed they had eaten healthy cookies.
Professor Garvey identified two implications from his research. First, if we do something virtuous before indulging in pleasure, we can actually make the experience of pleasure more pleasurable.
Second, if we reframe our attitude toward responsibilties and acts of virtue by thinking of them as commitments that we want to do rather than obligations that we have to do, we can make vices less attractive and protect ourselves from the damaging fallout of licensing.
THE MOST ENDURING PLEASURE
These two implications teach us an electrifying lesson in human free will. Through disciplined thinking, I can choose whether to make my self-indulgence more or less pleasurable. And that discipline takes the form of how motivated I am to choose virtue over vice.
In other words, do I want to trick my brain into getting more pleasure from healthy acts or from unhealthy acts? And if getting more psychological pleasure from virtue means that I’ll become less interested in the physical pleasure of vice, why would I ever want to choose vice over virtue?
We know from experience that physical pleasure is nothing more than psychological junk food. Enjoyments of the flesh feel good in the heat of the moment, but they leave a pleasure vacuum the instant they’re over. In contrast, emotional pleasures linger, and profound emotional satisfaction endures long after the source of pleasure has passed.
Most of all, the warm feelings we can get from family, community, and the sense of contribution to a higher purpose stay with us constantly. The less we distract ourselves with empty physical gratification, the more intense and continuous those emotional pleasures become.
King Solomon says, One who loves pleasure will be a man of want, and one who loves wine and oil will never become rich.
In a society that has increasingly debased the nobility of human emotion, people say that they love their cars, they love to sleep, they love to go to the beach, they love steak and wine. But if these are the objects of our love, what emotion is left for us to feel for our husbands and our wives, for our parents and our children, for the sources of inspiration that beckon us to moderate our lust and pursue loftier, more satisfying ideals?
The comics page can give us a chuckle, but it doesn’t enrich our minds like a good story. A jingle on the radio might get stuck in our head, but it doesn’t move the heart like a symphony. A passing flirtation may set us briefly a-tingle, but it is a sorry substitute for a lifetime of commitment.
Anything worthwhile requires investment and effort. Life is too short to squander it on fleeting pleasures when there is so much real joy for us to find.
Let the truth set you free
“James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
@realDonaldTrump 12 May 2017
This was one of President Trump’s tamer tweets, although you wouldn’t know it by the ensuing chorus of condemnation from the media.
“There’s no good motive for saying this except to intimidate James Comey,” said news anchor Greta Van Susteren in an interview with Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who emphatically echoed her indictment.
Unpresidential? Possibly. But intimidating?
ALL A-TWITTER
No reasonable person can deny that Donald Trump has made a mockery of himself and his office with his litany of derisive, degrading, and delusional tweets. There is no excuse for any public figure, much less the President of the United States, to whine that he is the victim of the “single greatest WITCH HUNT in American history,” to assert that a distinguished senator from his own party is an “embarrassment” to his home state, or to spew adolescent invectives regarding the physical appearance or psychological stability of media personalities, no matter how slanted and unprofessional their reporting might be.
There should be a code of ethics — whether implicit or explicit — governing the use of social media, which relentlessly eats away the foundations of civil society. But the misuse of modern communication in general, and of Twitter in particular, does not make it all bad all the time.
In a world where the media has grown increasingly untrustworthy, unfair, and unbalanced, the power of social media to circumvent inaccurate or misleading reporting should be warmly welcomed. But that power is so easily abused that it routinely invalidates its own effectiveness as an alternative information source.
Which brings us back to Mr. Trump’s tweet warning that James Comey’s own words might be subject to verification.
Was that intimidation? Was it coercion?
FOR THE RECORD
Well, let’s see. Mr. Trump did not say that he had any tapes. He did not even say that he might have tapes. He did not threaten Mr. Comey with reprisal or retribution of any kind. He did not suggest that Mr. Comey should in any way distort or omit the truth.
What he did do was raise the specter that Mr. Comey’s statements might come back to haunt him if found to contradict anything Mr. Comey himself had previously said.
Come to think of it, this might be the most cogent message Donald Trump has tweeted since he launched his campaign to run for president. By what twisted logic can it now be suggested that confronting public figures with the truth is a form of intimidation?
Has our moral compass spun completely off its axis?
The humorist Charles Marshall wrote, seriously, that, “Integrity is doing the right thing when you don’t have to — when no one else is looking or will ever know — when there will be no congratulations or recognition for having done so.”
That is a universal truth. But it’s all the more relevant in an age when everyone carries a camera, when anything and everything we do could end up on YouTube or the evening news. If there is any upside to the ubiquitous presence of recording devices lurking in every shadow, it is that we have to consider the very real possibility that someone is always watching, and that anything we say or do might be used against us.
King Solomon said, Curse not the king even in your thoughts, and curse not the rich in your bedchamber; for a bird of the air shall carry your voice, and that which has wings shall make the matter known.
More than ever, there are flies on the walls, and the walls have ears. Rather than worrying that we might be overheard, wouldn’t we be better off making sure that nothing leaves our mouths that we wouldn’t want repeated or retweeted?
The Fool in the Mirror
The Green Generation has arrived! We recycle; we favor alternative energy; we’re environmentally conscious. Clearly, we are on our way to saving our planet.
Or maybe we’re not.
But at least we feel really good about ourselves.
That’s what Remi Trudel discovered. The Boston University marketing professor ran a study in which subjects were asked to sample four different beverages. With a recycling bin placed nearby, people more often took a new cup for each beverage; when there was no bin, more people reused the same cup.
Paradoxically, the opportunity to recycle increased the production of waste. In other words, environmental consciousness increases environmental carelessness.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that people who buy hybrid cars typically increase their driving miles. From the perspective of human psychology, it seems that conservation is a zero sum game: if I save here, I’m permitted to indulge there.
Professor Trudel suggests that, for most of us, recycling is more about making ourselves feel good than about being responsible custodians of the environment. If I save a plastic bottle or aluminum can from the county landfill, I can go on consuming with less guilt. The result is that we become like the dieter who justifies an extra helping of dessert because he used Sweet’N Low in his coffee.
HOW GREEN IS YOUR VALLEY?
Mike Adams of Natural News takes it a step further. If you sift through a recycling bin, you’re likely to find all kinds of containers for chemical products that potentially do more harm to the environment than the boxes and bottles in which they are sold. We don’t mind releasing pollutants into the ecosystem in the form of scented laundry detergent, antibacterial soap, and perfume. Why? Because we assuage our collective conscience with the knowledge that those plastic and cardboard containers will be turned into packaging for more toxic products.
For decades we’ve been warned about the evils of polystyrene cups. But many paper cups are not biodegradable; they may cost more to produce, while requiring more raw materials, use more energy, and produce more greenhouse gases. But, hey, paper feels more eco-friendly.
All this is the natural, if maddeningly irrational, consequence of our national obsessions with feelings. Motives are important. Fairness is important. Perception is important. Results are largely irrelevant.
That may explain why Al Gore, at the time he accepted his Nobel Peace Prize for chiding the American people for their environmental irresponsibility, was simultaneously living in a mansion that guzzled 12 times as much energy as an average American home. Presumably, he reasoned that the benefit to the world from his advocacy far outweighed his own environmental rapaciousness.
This kind of inconsistency is not limited to environmentalism. Repeatedly during his campaign and presidency, Barack Obama promoted increasing capital gains taxes in the name of fairness, even though empirical evidence showed that such increases actually decrease tax revenue rather than raise it. For decades, California lawmakers relentlessly raised corporate taxes on the most successful businesses, eventually driving many of them out of the state and plunging the economy into chaos.
But at least they can sleep at night.
IF WISHES WERE FORCES
The worldview that values feelings and good intentions over results inevitably fosters a terrifying ideology of utopianism. On October 11, 2002, former President Jimmy Carter received his own Nobel Peace Prize, in large part for his role negotiating a treaty in which North Korea agreed to suspend its nuclear weapons program. On October 16, just five days later, the United States announced that North Korea admitted to having a clandestine program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
Many observers continue to wonder how anyone could have believed that the North Korean leaders could be trusted to honor their commitments. But the idea of peace was just too good to let go.
Social conscience, environmental awareness, world peace — these are all noble ideals. But the mere desire to make our planet a better place will not make it so. Indeed, lofty dreams untethered from reality typically produce much more harm than good.
And yet the dreamers continue to dream, unperturbed by either logic or history.
King Solomon ponders: What use is wealth in the hands of a fool when his heart has no desire to purchase wisdom?
The real challenge is to get the fool to recognize the self-destructive consequences of his folly. In literature, the Knight of Mirrors forces Don Quixote to see his own madness, but the tragic hero quickly returns to the comfort of his delusions once the looking glass is taken away.
So how do we speak truth to power, when power shows such persistent disdain for truth?
The French battle for ethics
What is the world coming to?
It’s truly a sign of the times when France – of all nations – is leading the way in ethics reform. This is the country that for decades has destabilized the world by selling weapons to and buying oil from any regime willing to do business; it’s the culture that embraced casual illegitimacy centuries before the institution of marriage began crumbling elsewhere around the globe; and it’s the government that has recently taken the war on terror to its beaches by banning Muslim women from wearing “burkinis,” apparently based on the presumption that modesty leads to suicide bombings.
Then there are the endless tales of cronyism, kickbacks, and embezzlement among the political elites. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy gave himself a 170% raise shortly after taking office.
But there’s a new sheriff in town – President Emmanuel Macron – whose justice minister François Bayrou introduced sweeping ethics legislation last week into a system that has shown little interest in ethics.
Among the list of proposals we find:
- A ban on nepotism in appointments to government positions
- Increased scrutiny over the use of public money
- Stronger penalties for political corruption
- A public bank to finance and control political party funds
These are all worthy and admirable steps to restore a measure of integrity to a morally dysfunctional system. But they also demonstrate how imposing the battle for ethics really is.
THE EYE OF THE LAW
There are two ways of looking at legislation in general. The more common perspective views legality as the border-crossing of culpability. On one side of the line are things I’m allowed to do; on the other side of the line are things I get punished if I get caught doing.
And there’s the rub. It’s only illegal if I get caught, the conventional thinking goes. When that attitude becomes the accepted norm, inevitably the gray area of ethical ambiguity starts to spread like nuclear fallout, leaving in its wake countless casualties of radioactive rationalizing and moral mutation.
But what if instead we look at the law as an expression of civil values and responsibilities? Then we come away with an entirely different mindset, one in which the law is something to be upheld, not circumvented. And when that viewpoint takes hold, everything else begins to look different.
Imagine if the narrative inside our heads sounded like this:
- I don’t cheat on my taxes because I’m a member of a society that values honesty, not because I’m afraid of the IRS.
- I seek out the owner of a lost wallet because I empathize with his distress, not because the law might punish me if I don’t.
- I trip the fleeing purse snatcher and return the handbag to the little old lady not because there’s a Good Samaritan law, but because I see myself as a good citizen.
THE LETTER OF THE LAW
Really, laws should only be necessary as protection against miscreants and as a guide to morally ambiguous conflicts of interest. Instead of searching for loopholes that allow us to pervert the intent of legislation, we should seek to glean the spirit that guided those who designed the law and contemplate how we can contribute to a more civil society.
King Solomon says, The performance of justice is joy to the righteous, but ruinous to the workers of corruption.
There is no greater joy than the feeling that comes from benefiting others through selflessness and service, from the sense of integrity that swells in our hearts when we know we’ve honored the values of society without being goaded by the fear of punishment that haunts the unscrupulous day and night.
So kudos to the French for their efforts to re-establish basic ethical standards in government. But to have any hope of real change, we must return to seeing the law as a foundation for moral conduct, not a snare of reprisal to be skirted at every opportunity.
After all, wouldn’t you rather live in a world where others think more about what they can contribute than what they can get away with? Isn’t the best first step to start thinking that way yourself?
Yonason Goldson 