When it comes to our ETHICS these days sometimes it’s less speaking and more hushed whispering or worse.        .        .a shushing

Are People Really Becoming Less Ethical?

A new study questions the common view that people are less kind, honest, and moral than they used to be.  .  .

Jill Suttie from Greater Good Magazine took a look behind the not so transparent ethical curtain to give us a different look at our ethics, or lack thereof.       .        .

When we read the news, it’s hard not to get depressed about the state of the world. Stories of vitriolic politicians, unethical CEOs, and indifference to the suffering of others fill its pages, leaving us feeling like goodness and morality are nowhere to be found.

According to a recent Gallup poll, people in the United States think that morality is at an all-time low. But, according to a new study, this belief is likely an illusion, based on the way our minds work—not a conclusion based on evidence.

In the study, recently published in Nature, researchers looked at several surveys of hundreds of thousands of Americans and people from 59 other nations around the world. In the surveys, participants had shared their views on whether honesty, ethical behavior, and moral values had been increasing or decreasing in their society or country.

In every country polled, people tended to think moral, ethical behavior was on the decline. This belief held steady no matter when the survey was given, too (whether 1949 or 2019)—suggesting that people always tend to see morality as waning in their lifetime. This perception seems unlikely to be true, says lead researcher Adam Mastroianni, formerly a postdoctoral student at Columbia University.

“You might think that people are sensitive to things happening around them or in their country, and that dictates what they think about people getting better or worse (from a moral conduct standpoint),” he says. “But it doesn’t seem that way, because pretty much whomever you ask, and wherever and whenever you ask them, people give you the same answer—people are less kind today than they used to be.”

To further study this, he and his coauthor, Daniel Gilbert, conducted their own surveys polling Americans about their views of present versus past morality. They asked people to rate how “kind, honest, nice, and good” people were then compared to past years (2, 4, 10, or 20 years earlier) or compared to when the participant was born or turned 20 years old. The researchers also considered the age, political orientation, gender, race, education, and parental status of the participants, to see how that affected their answers.

In all cases, people believed that morality was in steady decline. It didn’t matter if the comparison was made between now and two years ago or now and 20 or more years ago.

“It’s not just that people think the 1950s were great, and then it got worse in the ’60s, and it’s been bad ever since then,” says Mastroianni. “People think, even in the recent past, that people treated one another with more kindness and respect.”

Some people saw more moral decay than others, though. Politically conservative participants thought morality was dropping more precipitously than liberal participants did (though liberals also saw morality in steady decline). Older people tended to see more decline in morality than younger people, too. But it didn’t seem to be because of their age, but rather because they were considering longer stretches of time (for example, comparing current morality to when they were born).

“Older people do say over the course of their lives that there’s been more decline than younger people do; but, of course, their lives have been longer,” says Mastroianni. “Young people are basically on track to look like older people when they get older—which suggests that this isn’t about the idiosyncratic experiences of individuals, but about the way that human minds work.”

Is it all in our heads?

None of this proves that morality isn’t in decline, though. Perhaps people’s perceptions are accurate, and we really are becoming less kind and ethical over time.

But past evidence suggests otherwise. As psychologist Steven Pinker notes in his books, based on hundreds of studies and surveys on societal trends over time, there is less violence and fewer wars in the world than there used to be (despite what people think), and crime is generally down. At least some research finds that people tend to be less selfish these days than in the past, and common myths about generational character differences—that Boomers are selfish or millennials are more entitled—appear to be unfounded.

Adding to that evidence, Mastroianni and Gilbert analyzed some other available surveys: Between 1965 and 2020, over 4 million respondents around the world had reported on their own and others’ moral behavior, in response to questions like “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” and “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful, or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?” and “During the past 12 months, how often have you carried a stranger’s belongings, like groceries, a suitcase, or shopping bag?”

After analyzing these responses, Mastroianni and Gilbert found that, no matter the year, people saw their own behavior and the behavior of people around them as generally good, with little personal experience of immoral behavior to back up their belief that morality was slipping. This was true 90% of the time, says Mastroianni, and was true for both Americans and people from other countries.

This is why Mastroianni thinks that people’s views around moral decline are an illusion.

“If people are far less kind today than they used to be even just a couple years ago, it should be easy to find some evidence of that shift. So, if you ask people how they were treated today, fewer people should say ‘yes’ today than they did five years ago,” he says. “But we find no evidence of that going on. In fact, we find pretty strong evidence that it’s not going on.”

So, if morality isn’t going down the tubes, where does this misperception come from? There could be many reasons, but two stick out for Mastroianni: our tendency to focus more on the negative than the positive in life, which media exploit by emphasizing negative news; and our tendency to remember good things more fondly, while the badness of bad memories fades with time. When we are constantly bombarded with stories of unethical, immoral behavior from a handful of bad actors, we give them more weight than our own personal experience. Similarly, if we try to remember what the world was like in the past, we may look at it with rose-colored glasses.

“If you put these two phenomena together . . . you can produce an illusion where every day the world looks bad, but every day you also remember yesterday being better,” says Mastroianni.

Why we need to check our biases

Why does this matter? Mastroianni says that it’s important to know if society is actually in moral decline or not. We need goodness and kindness to function as a society, and if those are missing, we’ll need to focus on changing that.

On the other hand, if it’s an illusion, we could be spending time trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. He points to Gallup polls in which a majority of Americans say they think government should address the moral breakdown of the country—which might be a waste of time and money and take away from other important priorities.

Unfortunately, our biases, while leading us astray in some ways, are also fairly hard-wired—and for some good reasons. Being alert to negative news can make us more cautious and keep us safer, and looking at the past more benignly can help us feel good and move on from bad events in our lives that might otherwise keep us stuck.

Still, Mastroianni worries that if we have an overall pessimistic view about people’s morality, it may interfere with trusting others, which could lead to social problems. It might make it harder for people to do business with each other or have the courage to go on dates or form loving relationships.

While he wishes our daily news diet was less sensationalist and provided more context, he doesn’t see that happening anytime soon. But one thing people could do to lessen this warped view is to try practicing a bit more humility. When comparing the present to the past or past generations to younger generations, we should be a lot more cautious about making judgments about their morality or any other character trait.

“Just because a feeling comes to mind easily—like people are less moral than they used to be—doesn’t mean that you’re actually right,” he says. “The ease of thinking something is not an indication of its accuracy.”
BE CAREFUL OF THE LENSES YOU VIEW OTHERS.        .         .
Just SEE them in a way
that they feel
R     E     C     O     G     N     I     Z     E     D

Much to ponder in this song performed by the award-winning Becky Buller.
Let your mind paint the picture your Heart needs to see that'll give you more Heart and less attack.   .   .  

MORE HEART, LESS ATTACK

Be the light in the crack
Be the one that's been there on a camel's back
Slow to anger, quick to laugh
Be more heart and less attack

Be the wheels not the track
Be the wanderer that's coming back
Leave the past right where it's at
Be more heart and less attack

The more you take the less you have
'Cause it's you in the mirror staring back
Quick to let go slow to react
Be more heart and less attack

Ever growing steadfast
And if need be the one that's in the gap
Be the never turning back
Twice the heart any man could have

Be the wheels not the track
Be the wanderer that's coming back
Leave the past right where it's at
Be more heart and less attack
Be more heart and less attack
Be more heart and less attack

I stuck my hat out, I caught the rain drops
I drank the water, I felt my veins block
I'm nearly sanctified, I'm nearly broken
I'm down the river, I'm near the open

I stuck my hat out, I caught the rain drops
I drank the water, I felt my veins block
I'm near the sanctified, I'm near broken
I'm down the river, I'm near the open

I'm down the river to where I'm going


(My thanks to Becky Buller and friends.)

Viktor Frankl, one of the great psychiatrists of the twentieth century, survived the death camps of Nazi Germany. His little book, Man’s Search for Meaning, is one of those life-changing books that everyone should read, SEVERAL TIMES

Frankl once told the story of a woman who called him in the middle of the night to calmly inform him she was about to commit suicide. Frankl kept her on the phone and talked her through her depression, giving her reason after reason to carry on living. Finally she promised she would not take her life, and she kept her word.

When they later met, Frankl asked which reason had persuaded her to live?

“None of them”, she told him.

What then influenced her to go on living, he pressed?

Her answer was simple, it was Frankl’s willingness to listen to her in the middle of the night. A world in which there was someone ready to listen to another’s pain seemed to her a world in which it was worthwhile to live.

Often, it is not the brilliant argument that makes the difference. Sometimes the small act of listening is the greatest gift we can give.

WHEN YOU HOLD SOMEONE’S SPACE; when you unconditionally accept, listen, hear, validate, affirm, you just don’t hold their space, you hold something even more sacred: THEIR SOUL.           .            .
THEY have trusted you with their whole, wounded, vulnerable Soul for the price of your offering to A LISTENING they never before had but desperately needed.        .        .

S  O
do you agree
disagree
or do you have a better
two minute spiel.          .          .
Maybe what the World has been trying to tell us
not just NOW, but especially NOW
is that I really don’t care what you think
or what words you use
or how you arrange them
so much as
HOW DO YOU LIVE
how have you Verb’d them up for
O T H E R S
or maybe
N         O        T
Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst
I don’t think you can tell the meaning of life in two minutes
IT JUST TAKES A SECOND
of your Caring Catalyst Self
to a Caring Catalyst Other.          .          .

The line has stuck with me for well over

T W E N T Y     Y E A R S.     .     .

and I suspect for the rest of my life as a father;

Did you hear it?

Is it one of your favorite lines, too,

in the SHADOW  OF  FATHER’S  DAY.          .          .

“YOUR   FLAWS   AS   A   SON   ARE   MY   FAILURES   AS   A   FATHER.”

S E R I O U S L Y:

Have you ever thought,

“IF I WAS A BETTER PARENT,
maybe my children would be better,
not suffered as much”

Yes, I have suffered many little deaths
along the way as any dad would/does.     .       .      
Children always have a way of ripping your heart out
without a scalpel and tramping  
on your aorta;
watching it as flutters,
sputters blood
and seamlessly stops beating
by either what they say/do
or don’t say or do.      .     .
But my father’s heart has never stopped loving,
never stop caring,
never stop giving,
never stopped worrying,
and I believe it’s what makes me who I am
and who I want to continue to be.           .          .
It’s hard work;
it’s an endless job
from which I will never retire
and of which I will never seek to do so.         .          .

Now for that
MISSING PIECE. . .
completing 
t h a t
puzzle of
UnSMOTHERED
L O V E

Tony had a perfect life — until his wife Lisa died. After that tragic event, the formerly nice guy changed. After contemplating taking his life, Tony decides he would rather live long enough to punish the world by saying and doing whatever he likes. He thinks of it as a superpower — not caring about himself or anybody else — but it ends up being trickier than he envisioned when his friends and family try to save the nice guy that they used to know. Golden Globe winner Ricky Gervais stars in the comedy series, which he also writes and directs.  Mind you, THIS IS NOT PRETTY; GRIEF seldom is and what it is during this three season hiatus is downright PROFANE at times; UGLINESS at its worst and yet deep within its TRUTH.  I have shown a clip or two from this show before which makes these series of clips a little different, a little difficult and hopefully, a little more digestible for that which is most distasteful for all of us…dare I say, ENJOY.     .     .     ?

Hmmmmmmmm.          .           .
Maybe like Tony, there’s been some things in our lives that make us feel like him, that
“NOT CARING is a Superpower; CARING ABOUT STUFF; THAT’S WHAT REALLY MATTERS!” but we’re not a NETLIX episode or series that we can turn off or on or yes, put on PAUSE.           .           .

WE ALL COME WITH EXPIRATION DATES
which means we’re one DATE closer than we’ve ever been before
BUT THE GOOD NEWS
is that we can be more kind, more loving, more compassionate than ever before because knowing
THAT WE WILL EXPIRE
also means not so much postponing the DATE
but living lovingly today.          .          .
IF DEATH IS INEVITABLE
LET’S MAKE SURE OUR LOVING IS, TOO.        .        .

SHE MAKES THINGS GROW

All ground is fertile
and she proved it
by taking what had no life
L I V E
She makes my soul her soil 
when she digs deeply
and prunes, sharply 
The ache is more of a yearning
Ahhhhhhhh
than a moaning Owwwwwwl
She makes things grow
out of nothingness
an Everythingness
hardly without notice
but never unnotable 

This is a poem I wrote a little over a week ago.  Its title is the one for my sixth chapbook that I just finished as a result of the SPRING poetry challenge that demanded 15 poems in 10 days that couldn’t exceed 15 lines.  It had a different theme of the day where one or two poems could be written on that given theme.  The theme for this poem on this particular day was EMERGENCE  

S  E  E  D  S
even in the most soiled of hands
have no chance of growing
no matter how warm the wish
or fervent the prayer
b     u     t 
BRING WHAT YOU HAVE
(who you are)
TO WHAT YOU’LL SERVE 
(who you love)
AND WHA-LA
You have a magical garden
S U R P R I S E
There’s no secret to a HAPPY MARRIAGE
I can’t give you the 12 STEPS TO SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIPS
But showing up each day
with the goal to be a
BETTER ME
for a
BETTER HER
has never failed me
and it has failed me horrifically
WHEN I HAVEN’T BEEN A BETTER ME
or at least not given it a better than
half of a chance.        .         .
OUR BEST TIMES
HAVE BEEN OUR ROUGHEST TIMES
(an ohhhh, there have been some severely rough times)
because soaked, shaken and jostled about
we’ve always ended up stronger, more invincible and
     C      L      O      S      E      R
SHE MAKES THINGS GROW
especially when I’ve given her 
some-not-always-wanted-manure
and yet
that served as some of the richest fertilizer
to some of the
greatest growth
that could never really been imagined
.      .      .only experienced
37 Years ago, 
on June 9, 
the day after we got married
we were laying by the hotel pool we had all to ourselves
talking about the future;
we both assumed we’d never see 50 years together
because of our ages
and then
like now
have never been bothered much by how much time we’ve got
because of the time
WE  HAVE
(and so the message that I usually include in each wedding ceremony
I conduct, is the message we’ve always taken to heart)
.          .        .Marriage is
HARD WORK
but it’s the best job 
you’ll  ever had.          .           .
I may have seemingly had The World to give
but Erin’s always had the grace to
bring me HomeWe’ve been able to show each other
what we could have never seen alone.     .     .

SHE MAKES THINGS GROW
Pssssssssssssssssssssst:
Take it from a Drain
who’s been transformed into a
f      o     u     n     t     a     i     n.  .  .

]]> http://thecaringcatalyst.com/she-makes-things-grow/feed/ 0 5921 http://thecaringcatalyst.com/the-story-of-my-life/ http://thecaringcatalyst.com/the-story-of-my-life/#respond Mon, 05 Jun 2023 11:00:44 +0000 http://thecaringcatalyst.com/?p=5919

So here’s the deal, this is the week of Erin’s and my anniversary.
37 Years
on Thursday
(and counting)
All three of my Blog posts this week will center around
ANNIVERSARIES
RELATIONSHIPS
OTHERNESS
that can never be achieved as a Solo Flier.     .       .
And though you may feel like getting an extra order of hotcakes
(with all of the syrup flowing)
just grab another cup of coffee
or a cold glass of iced-tea
and spend some intentional moments
with ONE
who makes moments Momentous.       .        .
AND FOR THE RECORD:
THERE’S NEVER ENOUGH SYRUP.     .      .
KEEP IT FLOWING

With a wide-reaching spiritual message in books like “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” he drew on his own experience with grief and doubt.

By Sam Roberts

Rabbi Harold Kushner, a practical public theologian whose best-selling books assured readers that bad things happen to good people because God is endowed with unlimited love and justice but exercises only finite power to prevent evil, died on Friday in Canton, Mass. He was 88.

His death, in hospice care, was confirmed by his daughter, Ariel Kushner Haber.

Several of Rabbi Kushner’s 14 books became best-sellers, resonating well beyond his Conservative Jewish congregation outside Boston and across religious boundaries in part because they had been inspired by his own experiences with grief, doubt and faith. One reviewer called his book “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough” a “useful spiritual survival manual.”

Rabbi Kushner wrote “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” (1981) after the death of his son, Aaron. At age 3, just hours after the birth of the Kushners’ daughter, Aaron was diagnosed with a rare disease, progeria, in which the body ages rapidly.

When Aaron was 10 years old, he was in his 60s physiologically. He weighed only 25 pounds and was as tall as a three-year-old when he died in 1977 two days after his 14th birthday.

“Like a lot of children who feel they’re going to die soon, he was afraid he would be forgotten because he didn’t live long enough, not knowing parents never forget,” Rabbi Kushner told the alumni magazine Columbia College Today in 2008. “I promised I’d tell his story.”

The book was rejected by two publishers before it was accepted by Schocken Books. It catapulted to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list and transformed Rabbi Kushner into a popular author and commentator.

“It was my very first inkling of how much suffering was out there, all over the world, that religion was not coping with,” he told The Times in 1996.

His thesis, as he wrote in the book, was straightforward: “It becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don’t hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world.”

Rabbi Kushner also wrote:

“I don’t know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don’t understand are at work. I cannot believe that God ‘sends’ illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don’t believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best

i“‘What did I do to deserve this?’ is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is, ‘If this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?’”

He was making the case that dark corners of the universe endure where God has not yet succeeded in making order out of chaos. “And chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless,” he wrote, “because by causing tragedies at random, it prevents people from believing in God’s goodness.”

Unpersuaded, the journalist, critic and novelist Ron Rosenbaum, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1995, reduced Rabbi Kushner’s thesis more dialectically: “diminishing God to something less than an Omnipotent Being — to something more like an eager cheerleader for good, but one decidedly on the sidelines in the struggle against evil.”

“In effect,” he wrote, “we need to join Him in rooting for good — our job is to help cheer Him up.”

Rabbi Kushner argued, however, that God was omnipotent as a wellspring of empathy and love.

Image

Harold Samuel Kushner was born on April 3, 1935, to Julius and Sarah (Hartman) Kushner in the East New York section of Brooklyn. His mother was a homemaker. His father owned Playmore Publishing, which sold toys and children’s books, especially Bible stories, from a shop at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street that he hoped his son would take over. Harold felt he lacked his father’s business sense.

“The only thing worse than competing with my father and failing would be competing with him and outdoing him,” he said. “Going into the rabbinate was not a way of saying, ‘I’m rejecting what you’re doing.’ I’m affirming it.”

He was raised in Brooklyn (the family moved to the Crown Heights section when he started elementary school), where he was a passionate Brooklyn Dodgers fan. After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1955 and a master’s there in 1960.

He had planned to major in psychology but switched to literature after studying under Prof. Mark Van Doren, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. On a lark, but armed with a solid religious upbringing, he enrolled in an evening program at the Jewish Theological Seminary. By his junior year at Columbia he had decided to become a rabbi.

After Columbia, he enrolled full-time at the seminary where he was ordained, graduated in 1960 and received his doctorate in 1972. He studied later at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He volunteered for two years in the Army’s Chaplain Corps at Fort Sill, Okla., where he became a first lieutenant. Returning to New York after his discharge, he served for four years as an assistant rabbi at Temple Israel in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island.

Rabbi Kushner married Suzette Estrada in 1960 and moved to Massachusetts, where he became rabbi of Temple Israel in Natick, a suburb of Boston, in 1966. He served as the congregational rabbi there for 24 years and remained a member of the congregation until he moved into a senior living residence in Canton in 2017.

His wife died in 2022. His brother, Paul, a rabbi in Bellmore and Merrick on Long Island, died in 2019. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren.

Among Rabbi Kushner’s other books are “How Good Do We Have to Be? A New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness” (1997), “Living a Life That Matters” (2001) and “The Lord Is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the 23rd Psalm” (2003).

He also collaborated with the novelist Chaim Potok in editing “Etz Hayim: A Torah Commentary,” the official commentary of Conservative Jewish congregations, which was published by the Rabbinical Assembly and the Jewish Publication Society in 2001.

Rabbi Kushner often said he was amazed at the breadth of his readership across theological lines. In 1999, he was named clergyman of the year by the organization Religion in American Life. In 2007, the Jewish Book Council gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.

In his books, other writings and on-air commentary, often as a radio and television talk show guest, he became a font of aphorisms embraced by clergy of all denominations. Among them were: “Forgiveness is a favor we do for ourselves, not a favor we do to the other party,” and, “If we hold our friends to a standard of perfection, or if they do that to us, we will end up far lonelier than we want to be.”

“People who pray for miracles usually don’t get miracles, any more than children who pray for bicycles, good grades, or good boyfriends get them as a result of praying,” he wrote. “  But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of what they have lost, very often find their prayer answered.”

He explained that his book “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough” was intended to be “an examination of the question of why successful people don’t feel more satisfied with their lives.”

“Drawing on the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, it suggests that people need to feel that their lives make a difference to the world,” he wrote. “We are not afraid of dying so much as of not having lived.”

Psssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:

One out of One of us dies. . .even Rabbi’s  I first fell in love with this book even before I opened up the cover to the first page just by the Title: WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE  Did you catch it?  W H E N not IF   We live in a world today that not only defies DEATH, it actually believes it doesn’t exist; that a drug, a therapy, an intervention, even a prayer, eliminates the possibility of it in our lives.

Rabbi Kushner showed us that DEATH and GRIEF are real; they are not to be cured, but HEALING is more than possible.          .          .
NOW THAT IS A LITTLE HARSH.         .          .
T        R        U        T        H
SOLUTION TO LIFE AND DEATH:
LOVE
THE
DEEPEST