There are times, living in the US, that I miss my native Britain’s robust consumer protection legislation.

From the BBC:

A Christian group has been banned from claiming that God can heal illnesses on its website and in leaflets.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said it had concluded that the adverts by Healing on the Streets (HOTS) – Bath, were misleading.

It said a leaflet available to download from the group’s website said: “Need Healing? God can heal today!”

The ASA said it had been alerted to the adverts by a complainant, and concluded that they could encourage false hope and were irresponsible.

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1. Powers of 10

And people may also regard Obama as a political genius to have sneaked this past the GOP.

The End of Health Insurance Companies Accountable care organizations will shift the focus of medicine away from treating sickness and toward keeping patients healthy.

The use of pepper spray in wartime, we should be constantly reminding ourselves, is an official war crime. It’s chemical warfare, and it’s torture.

If these policemen were soldiers, and the students were citizens of a foreign country, those in uniform would be facing prison sentences for what they’d done. Why do police forces have the right to perpetrate with impunity what are effectively war crimes against their own people? Why do we accept this so easily?

From the Atlantic:

James Fallows: Pepper-Spray Brutality at UC Davis

In case you haven’t yet seen the YouTube footage of what happened yesterday at UC Davis, here it is. The first minute has the main drama:

Let’s stipulate that there are legitimate questions of how to balance the rights of peaceful protest against other people’s rights to go about their normal lives, and the rights of institutions to have some control over their property and public spaces. Without knowing the whole background, I’ll even assume for purposes of argument that the UC Davis authorities had legitimate reason to clear protestors from an area of campus — and that if protestors wanted to stage a civil-disobedience resistance to that effort, they should have been prepared for the consequence of civil disobedience, which is arrest.

Read the rest of this article…

Related posts:

1. Giving the Chinese a hand with torture
2. GOP site calls for torture of Obama
3. Hitchens on whether waterboarding is torture

The Occupy Wall Street campaign has been widely seen in the media as a coalition of flakes, unsure of why they’re actually there, without any clear message. And while there may be a grain of truth in that there is no one clear leader articulating demands, as Glenn Greenwald said,

Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power—in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions—is destroying financial security for everyone else?

I admire Glenn’s passion, and while he’s right, I think he’s articulating the wrong emotional message. He’s articulating disgust (“oozing,” “corruption,” “crony”). The problem with this is that disgust isn’t an attractive quality. It’s offputting. People aren’t generally inspired by disgust. And when they are inspired by disgust the effects generally aren’t very positive. All racism has an element of distaste and disgust within it. Disgust isn’t the way to go with Occupy Wall Street, and the bigger challenge of facing up to our current problems.

The message that needs to be evoked is, I believe, compassion. And I think that the message of compassion has arrived.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein “got it” and today published a column highlighting the “We Are The 99%” website. We Are The 99% is a simple evocation of the fear and suffering that ordinary Americans are experiencing — at the same time as bankers take home millions in bonuses, businesses sit on record piles of cash, and politicians argue about which of the most vulnerable to impose suffering on next.

These are simple stories: photographs of people holding up a sign explaining what they’re going through right now. They’re heartbreaking, Here’s just one:

I am 22. My husband and I have lived apart for 3 years. When we were 19, he joined the Navy so we wouldn’t end up on the street. He was stationed out west, and I am stuck in the east. The military does not pay for your family to move if it is your first duty station after joining, and we cannot afford to move me, our animals, or our belongings.
We never wanted this. We are the 99%.

These are not primarily messages of anger. They can lead to anger, but they start with the engagement of compassion. These people (we) are hurting. It’s impossible not to feel that and to be moved by it (well, I’m sure there are many right-wingers and libertarians who will play “blame the victim). But for most people — most of the 99% of us who aren’t doing well, and who are experiencing fear and distress and financial difficulty — compassion reminds us we’re not alone. It reminds us we have responsibilities to each other.

The message we need to get out there is a compassionate one. This should be the message, loud and clear, at Occupy Wall Street and in the world as a whole:

We are the 99%. We are suffering. We want an economy that works for everyone, not just the few.

Don’t take the 99% figure too literally. As Ezra Klein noted, “If you’re in the 85th percentile, for instance, your household is making more than $100,000, and you’re probably doing okay.” The 99% figure is a symbol. It’s a symbol of the growing inequity in our society. The richest are taking everything. Their greed is rampant. They either don’t know or don’t care about how much the rest of us are struggling. We need to let them know, in no uncertain terms.

I am one of the 99%. I run a small publishing business. Until the crash of 2008 I made a reasonable living. Then sales plummeted and my income fell. I had to cancel my health insurance. My wife had to cancel her health insurance. We had to put the kids on a state health insurance program. That was humiliating and scary. Pressure from the health insurance industry means that kids have to be without health insurance for a month before they can be considered for a state health insurance plan. Both of our kids have health problems. That was a long month. Fortunately neither of them got sick in that month, for it could have bankrupted us. I live in fear of bankruptcy right now. If I get seriously ill, or if my wife gets seriously ill, we’d lose our house. A week in hospital would financially destroy my family. I don’t want that hanging over my children.

We’re lucky. We have a house (although it’s a struggle to pay the mortgage). I have a job (even though I just scrape by financially), My wife has work (although it’s part time and doesn’t come with benefits. But we’re the 99%. We’re the part of the majority that is one bill away from financial ruin.

That’s my story.

This post and the image below (I’ve made this image my profile picture on Google+) is my contribution. Please feel free to repost, and to bring people’s attention to We Are The 99%.

Facebook it. Blog it. Tweet it. Plus one it. Do it. Now.

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Wired magazine today carries an article, Happy Words Trump Negativity in the English Language, about a paper published in the online journal, arXiv, on the relative frequencies of emotionally positive and negative words in the English language.

The researchers took four bodies of words:

1. Twitter,
2. The Google Books Project (English),
3. The New York Times, and
4. Music lyrics

They then found the 5000 most frequently used words from each “corpus” and had them rated on a scale of 0 to 9 in terms of their emotional connotations, with 50 independent evaluations per word.

A word with a score of 1 would thus be the least happy word, a word with a score of 5 would be neutral, and a word that rated a 9 would be the happiest word.

The results pleased me.

In order, the percentages of positive words are:

Twitter 72.00%
Google Books 78.80%
New York Times 78.38%
Music Lyrics 64.14%.

There’s a surprising bias toward emotionally positive language in all four bodies of words, including news (which you might expect to be bleaker), and the casual conversational forum of Twitter, where people are generally unguarded in what they say.

It would be interesting to see if there has been any recent change in the percentages in music lyrics, which spanned the period 1960 to 2000, because other research has indicated a rise in narcissistic and violent terms in recent music. Music lyrics from recent years actually might be less positive than this study indicates.

Still, it’s reassuring to know that there’s so much positivity out there. It reminds me that for most people, most of the time, there is relative freedom from danger, and the presence of love and protection. It’s easy to forget that, and to focus on the negative.

Related posts:

1. Fake Buddha Quote: “When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.”
2. Kind words for my audiobook, “Still The Mind”
3. It’s not rocket science — the Top 10 Most Annoying Phrases

I’ve been meaning for a while to write about a fascinating study that touches on Terror Management Theory — something I mention in my book, Living as a River.

A Canadian study showed that when faced with thoughts about their own mortality, a sample of people in the US

expressed relatively more positive reactions to intelligent design theory and its proponent, Michael Behe, and “significantly greater negativity” toward evolutionary theory and its proponent, Richard Dawkins.

People, in other words, would rather believe fairy stories than believe that their lives and deaths were meaningless. But…

In one of their experiments, featuring 269 psychology students, half of the participants read a passage by cosmologist and science writer Carl Sagan.

In it, he argued that “humans can attain meaning and purpose by seeking to understand the natural origins of life.” Even if we are “merely matter,” he wrote, “we can still find purpose, but it must be one that we work out for ourselves.”

Reading that passage produced the opposite result of the earlier studies. Among those who were exposed to Sagan’s notions, thoughts of mortality produced a negative reaction to intelligent design theory and a positive one toward evolution.

It seems the study participants were still looking for meaning in response to an existential threat. But after being told by a trusted source that scientific study can satisfy this longing, they found Darwin’s concepts surprisingly appealing.

So, the researchers conclude, resistance to evolutionary theory can be traced to its “apparent lack of an existentially compelling solution to life’s origins.” But their Sagan study suggests this barrier to acceptance isn’t entirely impenetrable.

This suggests that we need better science communicators (although it would help of course if we had popular media that were interested in good scientific storytelling).

This is also encouraging for me as a Buddhist — and a rather skeptical Buddhist at that, since I place little to no faith in the concept of rebirth — that we can find ways to communicate that life can be meaningful, without resorting to improbably stories about future births.

Related posts:

1. The science of lovingkindness
2. The Dumbing of Florida
3. Frederick Douglass: The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro

Scientists have been studying the phenomenon of Group Intelligence, which “is not strongly tied to either the average intelligence of the members or the team’s smartest member.” This is very interesting. So what, you might wonder, determines group intelligence?

(T)he researchers found that when a group had a high level of collective intelligence, the members tended to score well on a test that measured how good they were at reading other people’s emotions.

So, empathy. If groups are to perform well, the individuals in the group should have the emotional intelligence to be able to read each other’s feelings. This is interesting to me as a Buddhist (who often works with other Buddhists in teams), because there are indications that Buddhist practice increases empathy.

(T)hey also found that the proportion of women in the group was a predictor of collective intelligence — a factor they believe was likely influenced by women’s generally superior social sensitivity.

So, their working theory is again that the helpful factor is empathy, and that women have more of it, so having more women in a team helps the team’s overall intelligence. This is just an assumption, of course, but it may be a correct one.

What else?

A group’s motivation, satisfaction, and unity were unimportant.

That’s really interesting, because it suggests that empathy is such a powerful factor it doesn’t matter if the team doesn’t care about the task they’re performing (motivation), doesn’t enjoy the task (satisfaction), or experiences conflict (unity).

But one person (a.k.a “the leader”) can royally screw things up:

(G)roups with overbearing leaders who were reluctant to cede the floor and let the others talk did worse than those in which participation was better distributed and people took turns speaking.

These quotations, incidentally, are from an article in the Boston Globe.

I think this research is very important. Almost all of us work in teams, and if we want those teams to be successful we should be encouraging individual teams members to develop self-awareness and empathy, for example via mindfulness meditation and lovingkindness meditation.

At a national level, I hope that this research will be taken seriously as well. Unfortunately some conservatives are opposed to this kind of research. Eric Cantor, for example, was recently mocking research into team dynamics as being about “soccer” (when actually it wasn’t). And empathy became a dirty word during the Sotomayor confirmation hearings. Hopefully, though, pragmatism will win out over dogma, and empathetic team-work will received increased attention. Any economy (or society) that does not embrace empathy is going to be left behind.

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3. Vegetarians “do empathy” differently

John Pappas at Great Plains Buddhist has put together some nice, jokey Buddhamas cards. I like to think of this one as “Sangha Claus.”

In our Buddhist household we do celebrate Christmas, but as you might expect it’s not a religious holiday for us — or at least if it’s religious it’s a purely pagan religious festival, with a tree, decorations, gifts, family, and feasting.

Related posts:

1. Christmas / Yule / Dies Natalis Solis Invicti for Buddhists
2. A priest, a rabbi, an imam, and a Buddhist monk were on a game show…
3. Buddhist-Themed/Relevant Blogs

Today, thanks to a wonderful series of connections, I had the great pleasure of talking with a Chumash elder, Cho’Qosh Auh’Ho’Oh. The day before yesterday I’d never heard of her. Then I was in an interview, about my book, Living as a River, with Jeff Ferrannini of “Planetary Spirit,” a radio show out of Emerson college in Boston. During the course of our discussion, Jeff told me he has a Hopi prophecy that he wanted to read out. I was bowled over by what he read me, because of its (especially the second part’s) affinities with the message of Living as a River.

“You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered . . .

Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.”

Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, “This could be a good time!”

“There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are torn apart and will suffer greatly.

“Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, Least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

“The time for the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word struggle from you attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

– attributed to an unnamed Hopi elder
Hopi Nation
Oraibi, Arizona

The “prophecy” turned out to have been a bit mangled, as tends to happen to quotations on the internet (See Fake Buddha Quotes) but the core was genuine. The first part (before the “river” section) is a message given to Cho’Qosh by Hopi elders, and this has been combined with a teaching from an Iroquois called “Uncle John,” some words by a Muscogee Creek Elder called Philip Deer, some words by Cho’Qosh herself, and even a quote by Marianne Williamson. You can read about the the non-Hopi parts of the prophecy over at Living as a River. The teachings are all very beautiful.

Here’s what happened. I spent some time researching the origins of the “Hopi Prophecy” and came across an article published by a friend, Gary Gach, in 1999, identifying Chu’Qosh as having passed on part of it (the “river”) from an Iroquois called “Uncle John.” Thanks, Gary. I tried to find out Chu’Qosh’s contact details, and came across an email address, which bounced back to me. I mentioned on Twitter than I was having problems contact her, and within minutes a friend wrote back with her phone number!

We had a great conversation, in which I felt goosebumps, and had tears in my eyes, and Cho’Qosh put me straight on the origins of the various parts of the quote.

I put Jeff in touch with Cho’Qosh, so that he could have her on his show, and she gave him a wonderful gift: a teaching.

Jeff said that Cho’Qosh described these as “three things we need for our life journey”:

1. Show up for your life.
2. Give it your best shot – (in that present moment).
3. Watch the movie – state of involved/detachment.

I’m also going to see if I can get Sounds True interested in bringing out an audio of Cho’Qosh’s teachings. It seems somehow important to help her get her message out to the world.

No related posts.

On to today’s topic: empathy.

It’s common to say that there’s an epidemic of bullying, especially in schools. The highly-publicized (and rightly so) suicides of gay and lesbian teens has brought a sense of urgency to the question of how to deal with the problem of bullying. Actually, I’m not so sure, in the absence of any hard data, that bullying has increased at all. It’s always been with us, and in some school systems (the English public schools, for example) it used to be (possibly still is) institutionalized. Nevertheless, it needs, from a simply humanitarian standpoint, to be addressed. Adults should never stand by and allow children to mentally or physically torture each other.

Sometimes the responses from adults don’t seem to help. Sexual harassment, for example:

28 Maryland kindergarten students were suspended during the 2005-06 school year for “sexual offenses,” including sexual assault, sexual harassment, and sexual activity.

This kind of action amounts to bullying of children by adults, and is itself a failure of empathy. Yes, if a five-year-old boy pinches a girls butt, this is unacceptable behavior and should be addressed. But to suspend a child for this and to apply the label of “sexual assailant” to a young child is a failure of maturity on the part of those running school systems.

Another common, and related, response is to say we need more cameras, surveillance of computers, more police involvement, metal detectors, locker searches, zero-tolerance approaches to weapons (even plastic cutlery). Basically, create a mini police-state in our schools. The basic idea is that kids will bully, and we have to watch them every second so that we can prevent this happening, and if we can’t prevent it then we can catch the offenders and punish them. This has resulted in five-year-olds being dragged away in handcuffs for scribbling on a desk. So we’re back to bullying children again.

Here’s an example of adults bullying children (and it’s by no means the most egregious):

Shanon Coslet , a 10-year-old at Twin Peaks Charter Academy in Longmont, Colo., was expelled because her mother had put a small knife in her lunchbox to cut an apple. When Shanon realized the knife might violate the school’s zero-tolerance policy, she turned it in to a teacher, who told her she had done the right thing.

Shanon was expelled. For doing the right thing. Just because she’d technically violated a rule. Unintentionally. What did Shanon learn about empathy from this episode, do we think? Not to expect it from the adults who run her school system?

All of the measures mentioned above are external fixes. But what about the inner world? All bullying starts as an attitude. Can we change attitudes?

A much more balanced and effective approach to the problem of bullying is one that teaches empathy by demonstrating it in the classroom. A recent NYT article shows how bringing a baby into a classroom helps transform even “tough” kids.

Here’s what the program does:

Each month, for nine months, a trained instructor guides a classroom using a standard curriculum that involves three 40-minute visits – a pre-visit, a baby visit, and a post-visit. The program runs from kindergarten to seventh grade. During the baby visits, the children sit around the baby and mother (sometimes it’s a father) on a green blanket (which represents new life and nature) and they try to understand the baby’s feelings. The instructor helps by labeling them.

And here’s the effect, as perceived by the author of the article:

I have visited several public schools in low-income neighborhoods in Toronto to observe Roots of Empathy’s work. What I find most fascinating is how the baby actually changes the children’s behavior. Teachers have confirmed my impressions: tough kids smile, disruptive kids focus, shy kids open up. In a seventh grade class, I found 12-year-olds unabashedly singing nursery rhymes.

And if you want some more measurable assessment:

In a study of first- to third-grade classrooms, Schonert-Reichl focused on the subset of kids who exhibited “proactive aggression” – the deliberate and cold-blooded aggression of bullies who prey on vulnerable kids. Of those who participated in the Roots program, 88 percent decreased this form of behavior over the school year, while in the control group, only 9 percent did, and many actually increased it. Schonert-Reichl has reproduced these findings with fourth to seventh grade children in a randomized controlled trial. She also found that Roots produced significant drops in “relational aggression” – things like gossiping, excluding others, and backstabbing. Research also found a sharp increase in children’s parenting knowledge.

It’s interesting that this approach is being tried out on large scale in Canada. I’d hope it could catch on in the US as well, although I think you’d see some opposition, and you can see some of that in the comments to the article, such as this:

There is no time for this type of feel-good drivel. Teachers and principals should be encouraged to identify, remove and discipline bullies, while the non-miscreants go on learning the 3Rs.

and this, which seems to suggest that being bullied is good for children’s personal development:

Dealing with bullies on your own is a hugely important skill to learn…what do you think the real world is like? If someone pushes you, you push back. Harder. All we are doing by creating a “sanitized for your protection” childhood is raising children who are going to be ill-equipped for reality.

Fortunately the responses to the piece were overwhelmingly positive, but those are of course from largely “liberal” NYT readers. You can bet that many right-wing politicians, especially in states like Texas and Kansas, would not be in favor of any anti-bullying efforts of anything but the strong-arm kind.

There’s something beautiful about the idea of a baby being used to prevent bullying, as opposed to metal detectors and locker searches. No amount of external security measures can create empathy. But it’s worth pointing out (because at least one of the commenters missed this) that it’s not the mere presence of a baby that brings about an increase in empathy. It’s the children being encouraged to see things from the baby’s (and the parent’s) point of view that does that. You teach empathy by modeling it.

Related posts:

1. Empathy and collective intelligence
2. Is empathy declining?
3. Vegetarians “do empathy” differently