How Slowing Down Your Judgments Lets in Some Light

July 30, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When it comes to morality—is something right or wrong—you have a trigger finger. Everybody does.

However open-minded you think you are, the closed-minded parts of you are likely to beat you to the punch every – single – time. These mind-closers include your emotions, hopes, habits, beliefs, prejudices and instincts (like that reptilian fight or flight). These sub-conscious drives literally make you jump to conclusions. It’s as if something fundamental in you were threatened.

A quick Q&A so you’re with me so far:

The next time politics comes up in conversation, how long does it take you to decide that what you’re hearing is right or wrong (2 seconds, 10 seconds, until the person has stopped talking)?
On a social issue you know little about, will you give someone you view as religious the benefit of the doubt or be skeptical right away?
If you color your politics blue, how open to persuasion are you when you hear a red perspective? Same question if your color is red and you’re hearing a blue perspective (Not open at all, tune out most of it, will hear them out, will actually talk to them some more about it)?
Which hat are you wearing right now?

Your moral judgments are likely to be rendered before you’ve “thought about it” at all. (Your “reasons” for them come afterwards, that is, when you bother to come up with them at all.) And as the “religion” question suggests, your subconscious may have judged what someone will be saying before they’ve even opened their mouths.

So if our unthinking selves are leading us “by the nose,” is it inevitable for the conversation to break down in almost every area where we share things in common?

Actually, it’s not.

But let’s begin by reiterating that your moral judgments—the decisions made in the light of your values—are the most powerful motivators in your life.

I’m writing about “following your values to a good life at work” because of how your jobs can empower you when they are aligned with this evolutionary flow.

However, reconciling what’s rational and deliberate (your work) with what’s subconscious and intuitive (your values) requires you to take one key step. Because moral judgments happen so quickly, it almost always helps when you slow them down.

Why? (1) because you can, and (2) because your reasoning faculties—some of the better angels of your nature—have a chance to inform your moral judgments, making those judgments more nuanced and constructive without losing any of their primal force.

In his groundbreaking Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (a Nobel Prize winning economist) made much the same point, arguing, among many other things, that when we “slow down” the “fast process” of moral judgment, there is an opportunity to introduce some reason into it. Indeed, many thought that Kahneman’s book was so important when it came out in 2011 that they made animated summaries of it. Here’s one of them that amusingly illustrates the downsides of too-fast thinking in several contexts, including making judgments about almost everything you value.

Two new studies, out this week, got me thinking again about not being so knee-jerk (and predictable) myself. Moral fervor grounds good work but it’s also the seedbed for dogmatism.

Based on surveys of more than 900 people, the researchers behind these studies found some important similarities between the religious and the non-religious people they tested. The most dogmatic believers said their convictions were based on empathy while the most committed nonbelievers claimed to be fact-based analyzers. But in fact, the opposite was true. In both groups, the most certain were less adept at either analytical thinking or the ability to look at issues from another’s perspective.

So where you fall on this spectrum matters.

In his book The Righteous Mind, self-described liberal Jonathan Haidt surveyed 2000 Americans and reported finding that those identifying themselves as liberal were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. “Liberals don’t understand conservative values,” he wrote. “And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.”

Dogmatic. Predictable. But, in fairness, almost everyone with a moral perspective sits on a high horse.

Haidt argues persuasively that your values or “moral intuitions” guide your behavior long before you can give your reasons for what you said or did. But he also argues for the effort to become more open to opposing views, to pause and reflect before reacting, and to break up your ideological segregation by seeking out different perspectives. (Haidt talks more about why good people are divided by politics and religion in this video clip of him speaking to Google employees.)

There are several reasons for a deeper consideration of the role that’s played by your values —including your better life and work. But for now, it may be enough to reflect on becoming less dogmatic and predictable whenever your values come racing to your defense.

A Child Expresses Your Hope That The World Is Worth Your Engagement

July 23, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

In a short article this week, a philosophy professor wondered whether the risks of living today are so daunting that you need to pause before bringing another innocent child into the world.

As if I needed reminding, I’d just seen A World in Disarray with Condoleezza Rice, Tony Blair, Samantha Power and others arguing about why global stability seems to be a thing of the past. As if Syria, the Ukraine, the South China Sea and North Korea weren’t enough, it was also another week of politics, of Delaware-size pieces of Antarctica breaking off, of hearing about ISIS fighters slipping into the general population.

Is this a place to bring an innocent child? And if you’ve decided to do so, what (if anything) is your responsibility for exposing her to risks that may include the very destruction of the world you’ve brought her into?

I have an extended family member whose own experience of life has been so harsh that he has refused to marry (despite tremendous interest) or have a child. I have a life-long friend who is probably in the same situation, although we’ve never talked about it. So it’s not just the risks “out there” but also how you’ve experienced them yourself which sometimes answers the question.

The philosophy professor I mentioned above is Rivka Weinberg. She posted an article at quartz.com this week called “Is it Unethical to Have Kids in the Era of Climate Change?” Before trying to puzzle my way to an answer, I thought to myself we’ll all be done in by authoritarian leaders or cyber warfare long before we’ve killed our environment but I’d still been seized by her premise.

A year ago, Weinberg had written at length about the quandary.

In The Risk of a Lifetime, my book about the ethics that can guide our decisions about procreation, I argue that when we have children, we impose life’s risks upon them. Therefore, we ought to consider the nature of those risks in advance, in order to figure out whether they are fair to impose.

It’s where Weinberg began her analysis that probably caught my eye. When we decided to become parents and have a child, my first thoughts weren’t about the risks she’d be facing but The Gift she was going to be. (How do I appreciate the wonder of her arrival? How do I care for something so precious?) Focusing on the risks that we’d be asking her to shoulder never entered my mind at the time, though it’s harder to dodge the question now.

As Emily grew up, my priority was wonder management until risk management reared its head–but not as a series of global threats. Instead, it was when I discovered one of her elementary school friends cutting off the heads of Barbie dolls in a room upstairs; when 5^th grade girls with Netflix accounts found Sex in the City during a sleepover; and when middle school boys were grinding like gangstas in our kitchen. Not to dwell on it, but there is almost nothing more shocking to a girl-power dad than walking in on your 10-year old when she’s somehow watching Samantha on her TV. That cat can never be put back in the bag.

So I tried to fend off risks that she was facing closer to home, but what did I do—what should any of us do—to make it fair to impose the rest of the world’s risks on an innocent child? Beyond the bounds of family life, what is any parent obliged to do?

As I thought about it, bringing a child into this world only becomes fair when parents confront its terrible risks along with their children. In other words, it’s an obligation that extends across generations. You assume this responsibility with a hope that is durable enough to face those risks while you actively work to reduce them. You do it so your child never has the burden of facing those risks alone.

A writer named Jurgen Moltmann has spent a lifetime of scholarship describing the kind of hope that is necessary to drive an obligation as big as that.

He was a young man from Hamburg when his activism made him a German POW during World War II. Suffering during his imprisonment and feeling responsible as a German for the War’s atrocities left him feeling desolate, with little will to live, when the War was over. Moltmann realized that he could only go on if his hope in the world was strong enough to confront the magnitude of what he’d experienced—that is, where hope and suffering reinforce one another, so your hope always knows what it’s up against and never becomes false.

This hope challenges you to respond to the world’s suffering as best you can and (in Moltmann’s words) to “be a combatant” in the battle “to overcome death with life, violence with peace, and hate with love.” In other words, your hope is also reinforced by your actions. You have work to do when you see the world as it really is but believe in it enough to refuse to be crushed by it.

Of course, work that you do to combat a risk-laden world also helps you discharge your responsibility for bringing an innocent child into it. Like Moltmann, you fight for your hope in the worth of the world, while also fighting for hers.

Sometimes we trick ourselves into believing that we’re safe from the suffering and the risks that are everywhere around us. Or because the enormity of it is too much to contemplate, we put it out of our minds altogether or lose ourselves in distraction to avoid having to face it. But bringing an innocent child into the world changes everything because (in fairness) it’s not just about you any more.

Your child becomes an expression of your hope that the world is worth your engagement while you fight to reduce its terrible risks. It’s an obligation that’s everyone’s job, but even more so when you become a parent.

The Inner Cultivation of an Ethical Life

July 16, 2017 By David Griesing 2 Comments

The long tail of summer always provides an opportunity to consider your life and work before it’s September again.

Taking a step back before stepping forward sometimes happens in the Christmas to New Years week too, but between then and now it’s easy to get caught up in your daily distractions until time-off slows you down into someone who can reflect again.

Heat, sand and ocean are lead characters in summer’s pause, particularly the ocean. Its surface moves, sparkles, crests and breaks: a skin of hyperactivity that endlessly draws your attention with its clutter of ridges and crashes, smells and spray. But diving in is something else again. Below its surface, the ocean is quiet and calm enough to leave the sand where it is. It’s a suspension of deeper, darker, blue, that doesn’t draw your attention as much as holding it.

So perhaps it’s fitting that The Dalai Lama wrote to America in the Wall Street Journal this week. (Sometimes when the mountain won’t come to you, you have to go to the mountain.) He probably knows that it’s best for him to visit at this time of year, when people are slowing down and might be more receptive. He writes because he’s alarmed by how little of our lives or work have been grounded in our obligations to love, be fair, seek justice, act generously, or respect the earth. He writes as if our connection to broader purposes had broken altogether.

Today the world faces a crisis related to lack of respect for spiritual principles and ethical values. Such virtues cannot be forced on society by legislation or by science, nor can fear inspire ethical conduct. Rather, people must have conviction in the worth of ethical principles, so that they want to live ethically.

Unfortunately, many don’t care, while others will say that they don’t have time.

The Dalai Lama knows this, of course. And there’s another thing he’s sure of. Wanting to live ethically requires “inner cultivation.” But, neither caring nor desire can be cultivated while you’re ricocheting from one demand or diversion to another. There’s simply no space for it.

When your days are like balls in a pinball machine, you work, you recover from your blows, you work again and recover some more, until it’s mid-July or the day after Christmas or you fall down broken.

When your days are like warm baths in small pleasures—amuse me/ shock me/like me, buy something/eat something/watch something—and the gratification is only interrupted when you’re pretending to work, there is no place for an inner life either.

Of course, you can be captivated by, literally be “a captive of” what’s happening on the surface in other ways too, but this part of summer always offers a chance to escape from whatever wheel of distraction you happen to be on.

A place for “inner cultivation” stands apart from the rushes of stimuli that are so easy to get lost in every day. It’s a space for wondering whether there are deeper satisfactions than the ones that you have now. It’s a time to explore whether you have the desire for anything more.

The “ethical conduct” that the Dalai Lama commends can only be found by leaving the sparkles, reflections, and wave action at the surface for the deep blue quiet that lies below.

It is where the active, noisy, and uneasy mind can find enough silence and calm to cultivate a future that can fill you out.

It is the only place where you can hear your wholehearted life beckoning.

You Are What You Do

July 9, 2017 By David Griesing 1 Comment

The story about Cowtown and Grant Harris, as told in this week’s Yeti sponsored video, plays like a bedtime story. It grabs you by the emotional lapels at those first shots of galloping horses far below. And it never lets go.

Once upon a time and somehow, improbably, up to the present, the oldest rodeo in the United States just happens to be 7 miles from Exit 1 on the New Jersey Turnpike, or 20 odd miles southeast of Philadelphia as the crow flies. It launched in 1929 to attract bigger crowds to the Salem County Fair, and with a few fits and starts during the Depression and War years, is still going strong.

The self-described “Best Show on Dirt” runs every Saturday night from May to September. Its roster includes 7 separate events: bull riding, bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, steer wrestling, girl’s barrel racing, team roping and tie-down roping.

In saddle bronc riding, the cowboy holds on with one hand while keeping the other raised towards the heavens in the hope that he can stick to the saddle for the whole 8 seconds. A smooth, rhythmic ride is what scores the best. In girl’s barrel racing on the other hand, the prize goes to the fastest. Riders enter the arena at full speed, rounding each barrel in a cloverleaf pattern before galloping to the finish line. Timed to a hundreth of a second, the Cowtown tag for this event is “Nothin’ beats pretty girls and fast horses.”

All two hours come with non-stop commentary from the master of ceremonies (“Talk about closer than a coat of paint! Let’s put our hands together and appreciate a good ride!) and banjo playing by groups like Dave and the Wranglers, as reported by an erstwhile anthropologist writing for the Times.

Grant is fourth in a line of cowboys named Harris to run the Cowtown Rodeo. But while he was born to it, he grew to become a champion bull rider out West when his father decided to sell the place. The stamina and skills that win rodeos on a competitive circuit are far different from those it takes to run a business with rosters of weekly competitors, stalls full of livestock, a couple dozen employees, and a village of buildings sitting on hundreds of acres. Should he leave a job he was good at to become the CEO of a rodeo?

It was the first time that Harris had to grapple with his statement: “What we do is what we are. I don’t know how to do anything else.”

Harris not only returned to run the institution that his dad was leaving, he also had to adapt the Rodeo to changing customer tastes. When he got involved, Cowtown’s weekly competitions were seen on TV, but as Americans left its farms for its cities, Harris needed to keep the crowds coming. And succeed he did. First time visitors are always surprised at the length of the lines, the enthusiasm of the crowds, and how red-and-white signs for establishments like Russ’s Electric of Pennsville, Farmer’s Bank of Mullica Hill, Pole Tavern Equipment identify the regular viewing boxes that are filled with locals.

Today though, at 62, Harris faces another quandary. It’s about what will become of his life’s work. His daughters Courtney and Katy grew up in saddles right next to him. But they’re grown now, and as we learn from the clip, Courtney marries a cowboy and moves out West, while Katy stays closer to home, marrying an electrician named RJ. You can see how capable his wife Betsy is—what a working partner she’s been—but how are they going to carry on? Should they sell their land and business to developers when the interest on what a sale is likely to net would be more than the Cowtown Rodeo clears in a year?

Each Harris family member has to decide given how each has lived. Because what we’ve done and will continue to do is who we are.

After some bare knuckles truth telling—in the form of Harris counseling RJ that he and Katy “would have a difficult time growing together in their marriage” if he doesn’t get involved with the Rodeo’s operation—the family decides to stay put, with Katy and RJ continuing the tradition. Harris says that he needs no more money than he has already. But in the family members’ tear-filled eyes, there is a deeper calculus than that.

Nothing else we can imagine doing could ever bring us more.

Some of this story is about passing on a legacy. Who will care for the garden I’ve grown? Who will go on meeting the needs that my work has met? Who will fill my shoes and my reputation when I’m gone?

Some of this story is about furthering a legacy. How much is the work that you’re offering who I really am? Does my talent, skill, and experience “fit” this role, or would it be more fitting to do something else? What does my head say? My heart?

And finally, some of what Cowtown is about is good storytelling. Long before Yeti made videos like this one, it was selling coolers that people thought improved their status so much that they reportedly were stealing them out of one another’s boats and trucks. (Particularly in the South and Midwest, “if you’ve got Air Jordan or Lululemon money, but prefer to unwind by bass fishing and deer hunting, you can say it with a Yeti.”)

That was the first good story that Yeti told. But over time, the company also came to see videos like Cowtown as a way to connect with customers whose passions it shared. And it seems to be working. Since Cowtown (its latest) launched a couple of days ago, it has had 53,000 views on YouTube, which doesn’t include people like me who caught it in a social media feed.

Now I can’t wait to go and live part of this story too.

One Way That Conviction Works

July 1, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As a kid, I loved Otis Redding’s songs, especially “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” I still can’t say too much about that voice, those arrangements. Listen for yourself. Silk degrees.

After his groundbreaking performance at the 1967 Monterrey Pop Festival (“resplendent in a teal-green silk suit”), Redding hosted a bash at his Big O Ranch in Georgia. The local newspapers crowed: “Otis is having a royal barbeque.” He was all of 25.

But it was less upbeat for some in his guests. The Black Power movement was on the rise and many of Redding’s inner music circle were white, like R&B producer Jerry Wexler. “People were talking a lot of trash,” Wexler recalled. “What is whitey doing here?” For his part, Redding wanted everyone he loved to be around him as he moved from his mostly African American fan base and into pop’s mainstream. Redding did what he could to un-ruffle feathers across the divide he was straddling, but his guests could still recall the tensions decades later (from a new book about Redding by Jonathan Gould).

I grew up at a time when you could hear what people were calling “soul music” on the same radio station (WAVZ) as the Beatles and Glen Campbell. (Today, it’s hard to imagine that kind of musical or audience diversity at any point “on the dial.”) But back then it was possible to think that the venues where you could see these performers would have the radio’s audience. That wasn’t even close to being true.

As the Sixties wound down and the Seventies got started, I went with a friend to see the Temptations at the Oakdale Theater. It had gently elevated seating-in-the-round, with a tent overhead and open to the summer breezes down below. Sitting almost anywhere gave you an immediate 360, so it took no time at all to discover that we were the only white boys in the house. As the Temps got going—“Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” “I Wish It Would Rain”—maybe the audience was just as surprised to see us, but before long it seemed that everyone had switched to pretending that we just weren’t there. I’d never been a minority before, and it almost felt like I was crashing somebody else’s party. But the next couple of times, there was no doubt about that at all.

Five or so years later, a college friend went with me to see Patti Labelle (and her group Labelle) at Assumption College. I was thinking a good-girls-from-parochial-schools kind of environment. Moreover, Labelle had Top 40 hits with lyrics like “Gichie, Gichie, ya ya dada/Gichie, Gichie, ya ya here…” that they sang in costumes straight out of “Star Trek.” It would be fun, but hardly high-risk entertainment. Still as I settled in, it gradually dawned that once again I was one of only two white boys in the house.

But who cared? Patti was on fire as the set got going, and my second memory of the night was her telling us that fans always brought her drugs after a performance (figuring she had to be “on something” to deliver like that), but what she wished they’d bring her was a good hamburger, “because working this hard makes you so damn hungry.”

Everyone laughed, and the girls slid into a Gil Scott-Heron number called “The Revolution Will Not be Televised.” It’s an angry song, with some spoken word delivery that foreshadows rap. It’s also long, building in momentum and rage as it goes along. A minute or so in, Patti had the room in her hand. But just then, people starting turning around and looking our way, talking loud, leaning over—what are you doing here?—as we clutched our armrests in the middle of a long row. This’ll be just like shooting fish in a barrel, I thought.

And Patti thought so too because she put “Everybody settle down” into the song’s narrative a couple of times, and when no one did, she stopped the music altogether, which left some of the outcries hanging in the air above us. I don’t remember what she said next—maybe “we’re all in this fight together”—and tempers began to cool as the house lights came up. With all eyes looking from Patti to us she said: “Everyone is welcome here,” and that was the heartpounding end of it.

More than a decade later and this time in Philly, I either hadn’t learned or didn’t want to because I was making a beeline for The Rib Crib, a take-out joint one neighborhood away. It was a Friday night, the middle of summer, there’d be a big crowd on a main street, the place was practically “an institution,” and Fran would be with me: what could go wrong?

This time it was Charlie Gray who came to our rescue. Once inside, we were packed like sardines, the only “out-of-towners,” and the crowd in front of and behind us started getting rowdy about whether we belonged. “What are you doing here?” “Go back where you came from.” It was already loud in The Crib but our being there took everything up a notch and Charlie noticed.

Technically, we weren’t the only white people this time. Our shoulders were touching autographed pictures on the wall: Charlie with Al Martino, Charlie with Frank Rizzo, Charlie with Sylvester Stallone, so we recognized Charlie as he tried to break through the crowd towards us. A booming voice preceded his big heart, telling everybody just how welcome we were, how honored he was to have us, what could he do to make us more comfortable, maybe some sweet potato pie on the house, and just like that everyone went back to looking forward to their ribs.

Otis, Patti and Charlie tapped into their power and declared what they stood for when something important to them was at stake. They already knew what to say and how to act because surely they also knew already what it was like to be “different” in a suddenly hostile place.

Your experiences clarify what you value most; how you’ve lived and worked determines your priorities. And it’s with both in mind that you’re able to care for yourself and others the next time around. That’s why Patti and Charlie never hesitated when it came to standing up for me.

I loved great food and music enough to put my pride (and maybe my safety) in the hands of strangers. But it was always about more than the risk. By stepping outside my lines, maybe, hopefully, I would gain enough clarity and power to find my generosity too.