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Hi.
This is David Makinster.
And this is the first of two short lectures
to supplement the reading in Weston's Practical Companion
to Ethics.
If you are taking another course for me-- such as Environmental
Ethics or Moral Issues, or something of that kind--
I may very well assign this video.
But it was not created for that purpose.
And so you may not be using the Weston book.
You may be using Starhawk or Peter Singer, or whatever.
Nevertheless, these are some very standard issues,
and they have wide applicability.
So we're going to begin by talking about deep hearing.
OK, now actually the Weston book is divided into three sections.
OK, the first section talks about why we do ethics
and what ethics is and.
The topic of deep hearing is important at that stage.
The end part talks about applications,
how we take our ethics out into the world.
The middle part basically consists of tools
that Weston has plundered from the fields of conflict
resolution and mediation.
And this is a move many philosophers
have been advocating for decades.
We don't have to reinvent the wheel.
We know what promotes constructive dialogue.
We know what tends to thwart constructive dialogue.
So why don't we simply use what people have discovered
in other fields and incorporate that
into our discussion of ethics, or various other topics?
Of course, while Weston is talking specifically
about ethical dialogue or moral dialogue, when he has to say
is applicable to any kind of dialogue,
to any kind of discussion, any kind of coming together
of different points of view with an attempt
to find a way to live in the world together.
So wide applicability for the whole field of philosophy.
Remarkable for a small book.
One student in a past year found the book so
inspirational she actually took digital photos of paragraphs
from the book and posted them to her Facebook page.
So there's a lot to be gained from the book
if you read it in the proper way.
Deep hearing.
What is deep hearing?
Well, many people would say deep hearing
is at the core of the whole notion of dialogue.
Deep hearing means that you are not simply
responding to the surface of what's being said,
and it's not simply the idea of reading between the lines.
It's a matter of being very, very present
in the dialogue, of really having what Confucius referred
to as empathy and respect, the two fundamental things that--
according to Confucius- were necessary in order for society
to exist all.
One, empathy.
You have to understand that other people are people,
that they have feelings.
They have aspirations.
They have anxieties.
They have exactly the same kinds of interior life that you do.
OK, and not only people, but groups
of people, other living creatures, nature.
We have to be able to have empathy.
Exchange self for others.
Say I need to be able to put myself
into the place of the other.
And having done that, have respect.
It matters that other people have feelings.
It matters that animals are able to suffer.
It matters that we can destroy the integrity
of the environment.
OK, empathy and respect.
Empathy and respect arise out of deep hearing,
actually being very, very present in the dialogue.
I had a friend who was for many years
a professor of religion at Smith College in Northampton.
He was also a fully doing Buddhist priest.
Much of his writing was about deep hearing
as it was represented in his tradition.
So when this became a sort of a trendy topic for therapists
and educators about 10 years ago,
he was often called on to do workshops and talk
about deep hearing.
I asked him once, Tai, when you talk about deep hearing,
do you think that you're actually
talking about the same thing that these various therapists
who come to you for instruction are talking about?
He just made a little face.
Imagine a guy who looks, for all the world, like Mr. Miyagi,
and who acts all the role like Mr. Miyagi front Karate Kid.
He just made a thoughtful face, shook his head, and said,
you know David?
I've had probably a couple dozen students
who have become therapists.
I wouldn't send anybody to any of them.
I said, why is that?
And he said, because not of them actually practice deep hearing.
For them, deep hearing is just another theory.
It's just another stance to take.
They listen until they can pigeonhole people.
And then from that point on, they
are only listening to themselves.
I thought, well, that, in fact, is very instructive.
Not simply why you might say someone
is not a particularly effective therapist.
But do we do that in relationships?
Do we do that when discussing politics, discussing religion?
I'm only listening to you long enough to pigeonhole you.
And then I'm only listening to myself after that point.
Bill Clinton was once asked, what
you like least about yourself?
And he said, once in awhile, I find myself
not listening to people.
I'm just waiting for them to be done so I can make my reply.
And so when I catch myself doing that, I hate myself for it.
That's not what I ought to be doing.
I've known people who actually have
had been in on meetings between Bill Clinton and his advisers
and so forth.
And they've said the most remarkable thing about him
was that he did really hear every bit of what everybody
was saying on most occasions.
So I'm just giving these as examples, OK?
When I pull in political examples, religious examples,
whatever, I'm not proselytizing for any particular point
of view.
I'm just using them because they're good examples.
Well, if you are only listening long enough
to pigeonhole someone, long enough to label them,
you're not practicing deep hearing.
Deep hearing means a few things.
Mindfulness, you are actually very present.
You're attentive.
You have opened yourself up.
If you've got this internal monologue going,
all this judgment going on, you're
not going to be able to hear what's being said to you.
And if you can't hear what the other person is saying, how can
you hope to communicate?
There's a wonderful passage in book one of Plato's Republic
where a sophist named Thrasymachus
has an absolute meltdown temper fit.
He's calling people names, mocking
their physical appearance, just he's
so angry with the way the conversation has gone.
And Socrates, rather than replying in kind,
getting angry in kind, he says, you know, Thrasymachus?
I'm really very happy that you're
saying what you're saying.
Because I think, for the first time in this conversation,
you're really telling us what you feel.
You're telling us what you really think.
Because, of course, that's what's important.
Do we tend to be judgmental of others?
Yeah, we do.
We do.
And part of that is just a sort of normal human tendency
toward narcissism.
And the other part is that it's been
very trendy to think of truth, belief,
whatever as being a totally personal matter.
I can guarantee, if you were locked in the closet
when you were two years old and let out when you were 30,
you would not have discovered profound truths
about the world and about other people.
No, we find the truth by interacting with one another.
The traditional view was that truth, reality, the world,
was part of the commons.
It's part of what we shared.
We have a common language.
We can't have a common language unless we
have common experiences.
We can't have a common language unless there's
something for that language to be about.
We share the world as part of the commons.
And that's how we are able to understand each other, how
we are able to work together, how we are able to have
relationships, able to have institutions.
The degree to which we throw up a fence and say, nope.
What's in here is private property.
You can't come in without my permission,
this is mine-- which is the trend
has been in modern thought-- that
makes it impossible to communicate.
Taken to an extreme, we basically
could not talk to each other at all,
because we would have no words to use,
no common points of reference.
The fact is, yeah, there are parts of our experience
that are very private.
But there are parts of our experience
that we share by virtue of our humanity, OK?
Not simply with other people.
The more we know about neurology,
the more we know that, in fact, the difference between many,
many, many different animals and human beings
is a matter of degree, not a strict matter of kind.
Here's the border, here's human, here's non-human.
You take a look at, for instance,
the neurology of a chimpanzee.
The chimpanzee has the cognitive abilities of small human child.
Cows, pigs, pigs are smarter than dogs.
Don't know if you knew that, but in fact pigs are
much more intelligent than dogs.
So what's the difference?
We share a lot of things.
You can communicate not only with other people,
you can communicate with your dog.
You can communicate with your cat.
There are limits, but there are also infinite possibilities.
For those possibilities to be explored,
we have to be able to really be present for the other.
OK, I often talk to my stepson about how
he handles-- he's very good with animals,
but how he handles the cat, how we handles our parakeets.
So you have to really be attentive to-- sometimes
the cat wants his space.
He doesn't want to play.
You have rear really good intentions
about wanting to play with him, wanting him to be happy,
wanting him to know he loves you.
Sometimes, he just wants you to leave him alone.
And you have to be attentive to that, OK?
It's a matter of being present for the other, of deeply
sensing the other, OK?
Being mindful in your life, remember
we talked about Plato's chariot before in a previous video
lecture.
The chariot of the self is pulled
by three horses-- reason, appetite, and passion.
You keep reason tethered out in front,
because it's the only one that can steer.
It's the only one that can weigh consequences, consider
alternatives, and keep you on the road
rather than simply smashing the chariot to bits.
Ethics ought to be, simply, an extension
of that in matters of value.
We need to have that steed of reason tethered out
in front, particularly because we can become
very passionate about our values.
We need to be thinking about what we're doing
and we're saying, not just judging without thinking.
OK, it's a question of balance, just as that chariot analogy
talked about before, a question of balance.
It's not that you should have no feelings,
you should have no appetites, you should have no desires,
you should care about nothing.
Quite the opposite.
If you care enough about your own life and about
your relationship with others, then you
need all the more to think about, how can
I best embody that caring, rather than
simply lurching ahead, thinking that these two wild horses are
going to take the chariot where it needs to go.
The enemies, if you will, the antithesis of deep hearing
are dogma, and what I'd like to say
is the handmaiden of dogma, rationalizing.
Dogma means that you've got a big emotional investment
in a belief.
But you don't have an equal rational investment.
I really want this to be true, so much so then I'm not willing
to consider that maybe it isn't.
It's just too emotionally traumatizing for me.
Or I'm just to ego-involved with this belief.
Or I think that there's something sacred
or wonderful or exultant about this belief.
As Bertrand Russell said-- we're going to be reading Russell
later-- as Bertrand Russell said,
the fact that someone feels good on account of a belief,
or even behaves better because of the belief,
is no indication that that belief is actually true.
And in the end, if we don't care about
whether the belief is actually true,
we're going to go off course.
We're going to go off the tracks.
Dogma means that you have already
decided what the answer is before you've
conducted the investigation.
OK, that makes dialogue impossible.
In my ethics course, I start with a dialogue
by Plato called "The Euthyphro."
Euthyphro can't make any progress
on the issue they're discussing, because Euthyphro's ego is
steadfastly in the way.
He has to believe that he already knows the answers.
If, like Socrates, you're not willing to say, I don't know,
let's figure it out.
Then guess what?
You're going to be stuck in dogma.
Now, dogma can go at least two directions.
One is to really be invested in a belief
that you haven't held up to scrutiny, that you don't
have good reason for believing.
The other is to the automatically be skeptical,
to say I will not believe no matter
what evidence you give me.
That is also a dogma.
Disbelief, extreme skepticism, can itself be a dogma.
So as the old aphorism puts it, there
are two kinds of foolishness.
One is to believe something you have no reason to believe.
And the other is to refuse to believe something
that you have every reason to believe.
OK, the goal is to have reasonable beliefs.
To have reasonable beliefs, you have to say, you know what?
There is a role for belief.
There is a role for skepticism.
If either is held primarily for emotional reasons
and not held up to scrutiny, it becomes a dogma.
And it is a barrier to further investigation.
It's a barrier to communication.
It's a barrier to everything we need
to do collectively, to do together.
Rationalizing is, as I say, I like
to call it the handmaiden of dogma.
Rationalizing means that you are going
through the motions of actually reasoning about your dogma.
But in fact, you're cherry picking your evidence.
You're willing to accept things that basically
set the bar of evidence so low for the things you want
to believe and raise it so unreasonably
high for the things that you don't
want to believe that, in fact, all you're doing
is pre-judging the outcome of the investigation.
It's not a real investigation.
You're going through the motions.
Rationalizing is not the same as reasoning.
It's not the same as being rational, being reasonable.
Rationalizing means you are simply creating the appearance
without the reality of applying reason.
OK, people do that constantly.
People do it particularly when they
have an emotional investment in some political view,
some religious view, some relationship issue or whatever.
If I can filter my evidence, if I
can fiddle with my standards of logic,
I can guarantee that I'll get where
I wanted to go at the beginning of the discussion.
That is not dialogue, OK?
Diversity.
OK, we hear that term a lot.
We used to hear the word tolerance a great deal.
Now we hear the word diversity.
For a long time, you would see bumper stickers that said,
"Teach tolerance."
Those have kind of gone by the wayside
and been replaced with celebrate diversity.
The reason for that is-- although I
think the intention of the two was probably
the same-- the reason for that was that people got
sick and tired of the word "tolerance."
I've known many people-- the first time someone verbally
objected to this in one of my classes,
it was a woman who identified herself as a lesbian.
And she said, you know, I'm really sick and tired
of the term tolerance.
I'm not doing anything to anybody else.
Where they get off saying that they're being tolerant of me?
If I were barging into their living room or something,
or if I we're grabbing them by the color and haranguing them,
I'd be doing something to them.
We're talking about my private life.
It's none of their business.
Who are they say they're being tolerant?
And you know, I totally understood that.
Although I think the people saying teach tolerance meant,
essentially, the same thing as the people who now say
celebrate diversity.
Tolerance makes it sound like you're
putting up with something.
OK, believe me, if you think you're putting up
with something with people who are different from you,
people who are different from you
feel they're putting up with you.
OK, that's not a positive attitude.
Celebrate diversity means, you know what?
It's actually a good thing that we
have different points of view.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the German 19th century philosopher,
once said, "Cultural ***, like biological ***,
is likely to breed idiots."
What did he mean by that?
Well, if you have siblings having offspring,
the genetic code of each is so much like one another
that the defects, which would normally remain expressed,
will combine and be expressed as birth defects, OK?
If you have offspring with someone
who's genetic background is very different from your own,
the likelihood of whatever flaws are
in your genetic code, whatever flaws
are in the other's genetic code coming together and being
expressed as a birth defect are far, far, far, far less likely,
OK?
Well, Nietzsche was using that as an analogy
to what happens when your institutions, your beliefs,
your values, only feed upon themselves.
You only talk with like-minded people.
You only look at people like yourself.
The flaws in your own beliefs, in your own approach
to the world will just combine and recombine
and recombine with those who have similar beliefs
and have similar flaws, until finally they become disastrous.
When you have cross-cultural pollination,
there are things we can learn from other cultures
that we wouldn't necessarily have seen on our own.
And there are things other cultures can learn from us
that they would not necessarily have seen on their own.
The idea that we can come together and celebrate
our diversity, treat it as an asset
rather than as a barrier, or an obstacle,
or a problem, that's the idea that fuels real dialogue.
Now, you may have been wondering why
there's an elephant on the board here.
Actually, there isn't.
There's a picture of an elephant.
There's a parable that comes from ancient India
that I like to tell at this point.
You may have heard it, or you may have heard some form of it.
There's a King in ancient India who
has seven blind wise men in his court.
He keeps hearing stories about this marvelous creature called
an elephant, but he's never seen an elephant.
So he sends six of his seven blind wise men
out on a journey to discover what an elephant is.
The seventh, the wisest of the wise men,
he doesn't want to do without him for even a day.
So he keeps that fellow at court.
So eventually, the six blind wise men
who are out on this journey encounter the elephant,
encounter an elephant somewhere in the remote regions
of the kingdom.
One feels the trunk.
One feels the tusk.
One feels the ear.
One feels the leg.
One feels the side, and one pulls on the tail.
Hurriedly, they journey back to the king.
And the king says, did you find an elephant?
Yes, sire, indeed we found an elephant.
Well then.
Tell me, what is this elephant?
The one who felt the trunk said, sire, the elephant
is a great serpent.
And one felt the tusk said no, the elephant is
like a great sabre.
The one felt the leg said no, the elephant is a mighty tree
trunk.
The one who felt the ear said no, the elephant's
like a great palm leaf.
The one who felt the sides said no, the elephant
is a craggy cliff.
The one who pulled on the tail said,
sire, they' are all wrong.
The elephant is a rope leading up to heaven.
The king said, how do you know it leads to heaven?
Because, sire, when you pull on the rope, the heavens open.
Don't think too much about that.
OK, so the king turns to the seventh blind wise man
and says, what do you make of all this?
The seventh blind wise man says, sire, I
believe they are all speaking true,
insofar as they are all saying what they experienced.
But they are all speaking a deep falsehood
when they assume that their experience is
all there is the matter.
If you can find a way for them to combine their experiences,
then you may have a better idea of what
the elephant was actually like.
OK, that's the end of our discussion on deep hearing.