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The Science of Goodness
Shanah Tovah and Good Yontif to everyone. And for those of
us who are fasting today, a Tsom Kal, a fast that is meaningful
and not debilitating.
I am always struck by the power and the poignancy of the
prophetic reading from the book of Isaiah which we have just heard and
which is the traditional haftarah for Yom Kippur. On one level, what
grabs my attention is simply the content of the text all on its own,
which makes a very clear statement about the centrality and primacy of
moral behavior within the realm of religious life. Isaiah, speaking on
behalf of God, even goes as far as saying that the ritual dimension of
our religious observance itself becomes grotesque and criminal if it is
not linked to a parallel commitment to act on behalf of the weak and
vulnerable within society.
But in addition to the content, it is the fact that our tradition has
seen fit to give this reading such an amazingly prominent place within
the cycle of communal gatherings that we pass through each year. I think
it shows very clearly that the rabbis were well aware of the reality
that morality and religion, though very much bound together in theory do
not always end up remaining so closely linked in practice.
This gap in religious life, between the profession of morality and
actually living it out on a day to day basis, has been exploited by many
over the past couple of centuries and interestingly, by quite a few
authors over the past couple of years as well in books with titles such
as The End of Faith and God is not Great. They have argued that all
religion is profoundly hypocritical, or even more severely, that
religion itself is a kind of cultural poison that must be eradicated
from the body of human society. Of course, we have only to look at the
events of global history within the 20th century to discern the painful
truth that so-called secular societies are every bit as capable of
reigning terror and suffering upon their members as any religious
civilization has ever done.
The bottom line however, that must be grappled with by any religious
community or organization, is that the question of how to cultivate
goodness within individual human beings and within society as a whole
does not have an easy or obvious answer. And this is despite the vast
amount of effort that has been expended over the past 4,000 years of
human history in attempts to come up with one. This question is in fact
still very much alive for us today.
Classically, it has been the philosophical and religious traditions
which have made the question of defining human goodness on an individual
and collective level and charting a course for its achievement a central
pre-occupation. But with the advent of the modern period, the rise of
the social sciences has given birth to an entirely new range of
methodologies with which to explore the nature of goodness and the means
of cultivating it. And most recently, we have seen the beginnings of
interest in studying human morality from a biological and evolutionary
point of view as well.
How should religious communities respond to this expanding encroachment
on territory that used to belong almost exclusively to us by those
coming from such a different perspective?
Well, if your name happens to be Mordecai Kaplan, you
welcome it with open arms. At the core of Rabbi Kaplan’s
Reconstructionist approach was his firm conviction, that any religious
community that wishes to remain vital and relevant and effective in the
modern context, should pay close attention to the intellectual and
scientific developments that are constantly occurring within the wider
world.
In his own time, he was one of the few religious thinkers who perceived
the new insights of psychology, sociology and anthropology into the
nature of human life as gifts that would strengthen religious belief and
commitment rather than undermine it as so many of his contemporaries
feared would happen.
Similarly, in the spirit of his openness and curiosity, it would be wise
for us as well, still in the early years of the twenty first century, to
reflect on some of the trends in contemporary intellectual and
scientific circles towards understanding the origin and nature of our
sense of right and wrong, as well as the factors which may contribute to
or inhibit our inclination to act on our ethical sensibilities both as
individuals and members of the broader culture.
The place to begin this exploration is the field of psychology, and more
specifically the area of moral development which was founded some fifty
years ago by a researcher at the University of Chicago named Lawrence
Kohlberg. Kohlberg theorized that human beings, over the course of our
lives, have the potential to move through up to six stages of moral
development. He believed that each successive stage was characterized by
a person’s growing ability to use reason and analysis to identify
resolutions to ethical dilemmas in a way that the value of justice would
be most powerfully realized.
Kohlberg was convinced that exposing both children and adults to
increasingly complex and nuanced moral dilemmas, was the most effective
way to facilitate their movement through these six stages of
development. And he also assumed that there was a strong correlation
between an individual’s ability to use moral reasoning, and the
likelihood that such an individual would draw on that reasoning and take
action when they faced real-life dilemmas of their own.
Although Lawrence Kohlberg passed away in 1987, his theory has continued
to exercise tremendous influence over the field of moral development
even as the field has expanded, and even as his colleagues and students
have challenged some of the assumptions that lie at the foundation of
his approach. One of the most important challenges has come in the form
of questioning whether the ability to engage in sophisticated moral
reasoning is in fact so strongly related to a person’s tendency to
involve themselves in morally grounded action.
For example, there is an entire school of thought within the moral
development field that is convinced of the primary importance of human
emotion in the generation of moral behavior. For this school, the growth
of empathy in a person is a much more significant achievement than the
development of abilities in the area of moral reasoning.
Still other perspectives identify a wide range of
elements within what is now being called a person’s moral anatomy:
elements such as one’s values, one’s identity and one’s character to
name just a few. And there seems to be a growing consensus on the need
for a model that integrates all of the different components together
into a unified theory of moral behavior.
This debate strikes me as an important one for us to really pay close
attention to. Judaism is nothing if not a tradition that values the
ability to reason in sophisticated ways about ethically ambiguous
situations. A huge percentage of the Talmud is made up of exactly those
kinds of arguments. And a Reconstructionist colleague of mine, Rabbi
Jonathan Brumberg-Krauss has pointed out that Liberal Jews in the modern
world tend to enjoy the intellectual process of ethical decision making
as much or even more than the experience of actually performing the deed
towards which the decision making process was pointing.
There is in fact something intellectually seductive about moral
argumentation that is completely distinct from engaging in moral
behavior. And in fact, we can also find stories in the Talmud about
rabbis who were so wrapped up in their studies that they neglected other
important responsibilities in their lives. I would not want to advocate
doing away with experiences that strengthen our abilities to think about
morality, since this clearly plays a significant role in our overall
moral development, but I do think this raises a question of balance for
us in the Jewish world between the development of our cognitive muscles
and the development of our affective ones.
A more recent arrival to the discussion of the nature of human morality
is a group of natural scientists, mostly biologists and neuro-scientists,
who are taking a completely different direction in their exploration of
what makes us tick in a moral sense. One critical idea that is being put
forward from these circles is that our moral sensibilities may be
hard-wired into our brains by way of our genes and that they are a
product of evolution as much as our physical and mental capacities are.
This genetic/biological perspective is a most challenging one for many
of us, as it goes to the heart of how we perceive ourselves as human
beings. In many cultures around the world, it is the human ability to
reflect, consider, imagine and choose between options deliberately which
defines the boundary between the human and non-human world.
The new evolutionary perspective on morality blurs this boundary in two
ways.
First, it takes what we thought represented the pinnacle of human
consciousness and nobility, namely moral behavior, and argues that it
belongs more naturally in what we think of as the more primitive realm
of instinct. One important voice for this perspective is Harvard
professor of biology and psychology, David Hauser, whose recent book,
Moral Minds, theorizes about the existence of what he calls a universal
moral grammar, that is a set of principles or a genetic tool kit that
structures and limits the range of possible moral thinking and behavior
across our entire species.
Coming at this question from the other side of the biological coin are
scholars such as noted primatologist Frans De Waal, who has written for
many years about the behavior of various species of apes and monkeys. In
his most recent book, Primates and Philosophers, De Waal makes a
forceful case for the presence of what he calls the building blocks of
moral behavior, namely empathy and reciprocity, among Chimpanzees and
other members of the ape family.
He points out that this group of animals has long been known to
demonstrate something called targeted helping behavior, that is, an
altruistic act geared to the specific needs of another individual even
in a novel situation. The most famous example of this behavior may be
the incident that occurred at the Brookfield zoo in Chicago in 1996 in
which the female Gorilla Binti Jua rescued a three year old child who
had fallen 18 feet into the gorilla enclosure and was knocked
unconscious.
Binti Jua walked to the boy's side while helpless
spectators screamed, certain that the gorilla would harm the child.
Instead of harming the boy, Binti picked him up and, cradling him with
her right arm as she did her own infant, carried him 60 feet to an
access entrance, so that zoo personnel could retrieve him. The boy spent
four days in the hospital and recovered fully.
This story and the many others like it seem to indicate
that at least some of the other species with whom we share our planet
possess in rudimentary form the ability to discern and act in a morally
deliberate way that is not radically dissimilar from our own human
experience. De Waal does acknowledge that there is another point of view
among biologists that is rooted in seeing the natural world as red in
tooth and claw, thus maintaining a clear human-animal distinction.
He refers to people who champion this perspective as
veneer theorists, due to the fact that human civilization is viewed
as a veneer that barely covers over our primitive animal instincts the
lie just below the surface. For De Waal, this view is not easily
supportable within the context of evolutionary theory or given the
similarities he and other scientists have documented between some animal
behavior and human culture. He sees us instead as being on a continuum
with our primate cousins, and understands our own human moral tendencies
as natural extensions of our genetically inherited patterns of thought
and behavior. Not as a late innovation that is diametrically opposed to
what came before.
How might this perspective fit into a classical Jewish
understanding of human nature? Traditionally, our sources have taught
that we each are born with something called a Yetzer ha ra -
literally an inclination to evil, but it can be more accurately
translated as a passionate-impulsive drive to do whatever we may feel
like in the moment. But as we mature, we also develop what tradition
calls a yetzer tov which can best be understood as a moral
sensitivity to others which tempers our yetzer ha ra.
As the rabbis described these two parts of the human
soul, they viewed the yetzer ha ra as the animalistic part of us
and the yetzer tov as the angelic or divine part of us. But what
if we share both the yetzer ha ra and the yetzer tov with
at least some of the other species on the planet, and it’s just that our
versions of each are in a more developed form? How might it change our
relationship to the entire notion of living a moral life? Is it possible
that we might find ourselves inspired to stretch a little further in an
ethical direction if we knew that gorillas and elephants and dolphins
were every bit as capable as we are of extending comfort and concern to
an individual they can see is clearly in distress?
In the end, the proper distinction between human and
non-human life may not be the presence of a moral sensibility per se,
but rather the ability to extend that sensibility to those who are
beyond one’s immediate circle of concern or perception. And this brings
us back to the words of the prophet Isaiah. He reminds us of the moral
potential we carry within us if we can only find the will to use it. We
all have a role to play in unlocking the chains of wickedness, in
freeing those who are oppressed and in breaking the yoke of servitude.
May the wisdom or our tradition and the insight of contemporary
understanding help us to move a bit further towards embracing that role
in the coming year.
Amen.
Rabbi Steve |