Many people have little trouble confessing to being hard on themselves, to being “my own worst critic” or to being a perfectionist. They are, after all, merely confessing to something that our culture upholds as a virtue: the struggle against the self. People are generally less likely to admit to being more harshly critical or judgmental of others than of oneself. That would be tantamount to outing oneself as a hypocrite.
Unfortunately for the image of the self-critic, it is impossible to be judgmental of oneself without being judgmental of others. Suppose each evening you look back over your day and evaluate whether you were truthful, ecologically responsible, wasteful, ethical, or greedy, praising yourself or beating yourself up accordingly. Well then, what about all those other people out there who were less honest, responsible, or ethical than you were? Are they therefore not as good as you are?
Whether you accord them patronizing indulgence or condemnation, the implicit belief that “I am better than you are” (or worse than you, but at least better than someone) is inescapable.
Judgement is Separation
What do I mean by judgmentality? To be judgmental is not merely to draw distinctions, to have preferences, or to make comparisons. It carries a moral judgment, an assignment of right or wrong, good or evil, to a person. This assignment can take many forms. Words like should and shouldn’t, responsible and irresponsible, right and wrong, ethical, moral, justifiable, valid, shameful, or other synonyms for good and bad usually appear in articulations of judgment.
Judgment is separation. At bottom, judgment says that you choose differently from me because you are different from me. It says, “If I were you, I wouldn’t have done what you did.” “If I were a corporate CEO, I wouldn’t destroy the environment and lie to the public about it.” “If I were that wealthy, I wouldn’t spend my money on sports cars and McMansions.” “If I were that fat, I wouldn’t be on my fourth trip to the buffet line.”
I am better than that. I am not so ignorant. I am not so irresponsible. I am not so lazy. At least I have an open mind. At least I consider the evidence. At least I got an education. I paid my debts. I eat responsibly. I work for it. At the very least, I make an effort. What is wrong with those people?
Someone Else’s Shoes
This is the essence of separation: If I were in the totality of your circumstances, I would do differently from you.
A substantial body of experimental evidence shows that this statement is false, that in fact if you were in the totality of his circumstances, you would do exactly as he does. As I shall explain, to align ourselves with this truth is perhaps the most powerful way to magnify our effectiveness as agents of change. It is the essence of compassion to put oneself in another’s shoes. It says, you and I are one; we are the same being looking out at the world through different eyes, occupying different nexus points in the universal web of relationship.
It is also very hard to accept. I might be able to see how I might resort to theft if my children were hungry or how I might senselessly vandalize public property if my childhood had filled me with rage, but what would it take for me to massacre seventy-seven people like Anders Breivik did, shooting them one-by-one as they kneeled before me weeping and begging for mercy? What would it take for me to take a chainsaw to a three-hundred-foot-tall redwood? I confess, it is very hard to put myself in the shoes of a torturer, an abuser of toddlers, a trafficker of sex slaves, a murderer. Yet let us not pretend that we are better than these people. Judgment toward them reflects only our lack of understanding, not any fundamental difference in our core being.
Situationism vs Dispositionism
I am articulating here a position known in social psychology as “situationism,” which says that it is the totality of our internalized and external situation that determines our choices and beliefs. In contrast, most people in our society hold the view of dispositionism, which says that people make decisions by the exercise of free will based on relatively stable dispositions or preferences. If someone does a good thing, says the dispositionist, it is probably because he is a good person.
The situationist says no, that is an error—the “fundamental attribution error.” A lot of careful research has shown that people (in our society) consistently attribute situational influences to dispositional qualities, and consistently underestimate the effect of conditions on people’s behavior. Someone says a mean thing and our first impulse is to think she is a mean person. We might later learn that she had a toothache and change our judgment, but the first impulse is to make a dispositional judgment.
That is no accident. Dispositionism and its attendant judgmentality is encoded into our Story of the World. In your shoes, I would not do as you did, because I am different from you, separate from you. Moreover, situationism says that the “I” is bigger than the individual, that the subject, the actor and chooser, is the individual plus the totality of his or her relationships. The self has no independent existence. Abstracted from its relationships to the world, the self is not itself.
Would You Press the Button?
Decades of research, going back to the Milgram experiments of the 1960s, belie our sanctimonious belief that if I were that CEO, that politician, that brother-in-law, that ex-spouse, that teacher, that addict, that inexcusable person, then I wouldn’t have done what she did.
Ask yourself, what kind of person would deliver painful, even life-threatening, electrical shocks to an innocent subject as part of a psychological experiment? Surely only a very bad person would do that. Surely you wouldn’t do that! Well actually, as it turns out, “you” would. Or at least nearly everyone did in Stanley Milgram’s lab when the right conditions were present and the right excuses, the right story, was available. “Surely it can’t be wrong if a Yale scientist with a white coat is in charge.” “The subject did volunteer for this.” “I’m not the one responsible, I’m just following instructions.”
More broadly, the thought that anything monstrous could be happening in a laboratory, decked out with the regalia of science, at a prestigious university, was so dissonant with the prevailing Story of the World, with society’s consensus about legitimacy and propriety, that one volunteer after another turned the knob up to max and pressed the button.
Closing our Eyes
The question in the background was how to explain the fact that the Nazi Holocaust was carried out by bland bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann and legions of quite ordinary people who had led commonplace lives before becoming SS officers and concentration camp guards. How to explain the “banality of evil”?
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If we are to let go of the War on Evil, we must be able to reframe evil in a way that motivates some other kind of action. Because one cannot deny that some very horrible things are happening on Earth. These things must stop. I am not suggesting, here, that we close our eyes to what looks like evil. We need to open our eyes even wider to the situation—which is the story that immerses us—that generates evil to begin with.
The Good Samaritan
The situationist perspective is, in one form or another, widely accepted in social psychology. A 1973 experiment by John Darley and C. Daniel Batson offers another example of the power of situation. You might know the Good Samaritan story from the Bible. A man has been beaten by robbers and lies moaning by the roadside. A priest passes him by. Then a Levite (who might be a priest’s assistant) does the same. Finally the Samaritan stops to help.
In telling this story, Jesus asks his questioner which one of these three proved to be a “neighbor” to the beaten man. He doesn’t say the Samaritan was good, but today the story is called the Good Samaritan, implying that what distinguished him from the priest and the Levite was his moral disposition.
In the experiment, a group of seminary students (modern-day priests and Levites in training—the experimenters were not without a sense of humor) were told they had to go across campus and deliver a lecture on the Good Samaritan story. They were divided into three groups and, one at a time, given instructions. Those in the first group were each told, “You’d better hurry up, you’re late for your interview.” The second group were told, “You’d better hurry up, your interview starts in a few minutes.” And the third group were told, “Well, you might as well head on over. Your interview doesn’t start for a while, but we’re done here.”
Why We Blame
On their way to the lecture venue, the students walked past a man (actually a confederate of the experimenters) sprawled in a doorway, groaning. The students practically had to step right over him to reach their destination. Did they stop to help? As you might expect, it depended on which group they were in. Only 10 percent of the first group did, but 60 percent of the third.
Why did those in the first group step right over the “injured” man while those in the third group stopped to help? Obviously, it wasn’t because all the good people happened to be in the third group. Maybe the Bible story should be called “The Samaritan who wasn’t in a hurry.” And maybe we cannot blame the people we like to blame. Maybe the problems of the world cannot be met by conquering evil.
Not only our personal judgments but many of our social institutions, the legal system in particular, are based on dispositionist assumptions. We assume that ordinarily, people are responsible for choosing their actions, and distinguish between an act committed under duress and an act voluntarily chosen. But duress is just an extreme example of a situational influence. Are we to be blamed for the sum total of the experiences that have made us who we are?
Things Change
Similarly, contract law assumes two parties entering an agreement of their own free will, based on an understanding of their own interests and preferences. A contract encodes a kind of force: it says, “I will allow you to force me to carry out what I have agreed to herein.”
In everyday interactions, we understand that sometimes “things change,” and don’t hold someone to a promise if their situation has changed a lot. We recognize that the person who made that promise cannot be separated from their life circumstances, and when these change, they change. The person who promised, in a sense, no longer exists. A contract is an attempt to deny this truth.
Clearly, situationism has immense implications for the nature of choice, free will, motivation, moral responsibility, and criminal justice.
No More Other
Situationism is also an understanding to which we have direct experiential access. Have you ever had a moment of understanding where another person is coming from, when all of a sudden we inhabit their world and everything they’ve been doing makes sense? No longer is that other person some kind of monster, an other. I can understand a little bit of the experience of being her.
With this insight, forgiveness arises naturally, and it is impossible to hate. It also shows us that whenever we do hate someone, we are hating ourselves too.
This was an excerpt from chapter 25 of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.
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So much complication when we allow our minds to rule. From a spiritual angle our insane minds cannot make a right decision to save our earthly lives..literally. Take the mind identity out of all the above and you remove judgements, blame, evil, guilt and the need to forgive. For each situation ask yourself if your decision is based on Love or fear. Will it contribute positively to our existence? Remove the mind identity and you remove the separation syndrome that most have. We would understand that we are not existing in a state of aloneness and that we are interconnected and interactive as we move through our physical lives. If we can know (remember) that we are all ONE then we would be incapable of doing harm to each other and the environment. Perhaps The Good Samaritan title should be The Samaritan of Love.
To position this as a binary of dispositionism or situationism misses something very important which comes out of Milgram’s and Batson’s research, and is implicit in the story of the ‘Good Samaritan’. A small minority of human beings are able to rise above the compulsion of the situation and thus exercise choice and responsibility (in the true sense of uncoerced ‘ability to respond’). This is not because of a natural disposition, or because they are in some way better human beings than others, but because life experiences have taught them to *pay attention to what happens*. Milgram was fascinated by the small group who refused to carry out the instructions of his experimenters, and gave a great deal of thought to what it was about them that made them different. They were in every other respect a very diverse group, but they had all developed the ability to step back from the situation they were in and see it in terms of personal responsibility.
This is what Yeshua ben Maryam was trying to convey in the story: the Samaritan was sufficiently present and attentive to notice the injured man – he didn’t see him as extraneous to his own narrative, but had a narrative which allowed him to see everything that happened as a test, a personal challenge. That’s why he could be flexible with his priorities, while the Rabbi and the Levite doggedly held to their plans: as soon as he saw the condition of the man, it was ‘all change’. Such atttentiveness, responsibility and flexibility is learnt. And maintained from moment to moment. Indeed, a point that seems to be mostly missed by religionists and their opponents is that the Gospel is not a teaching of morality *but a teaching of vigilance*, underlined by numerous arresting examples (such as this story). To try to maintain a constancy of awareness is to know oneself in a permanent state of ‘there but for the Grace of God’; it is not a position from which to be able to judge others.
Another important point here is that the story was told in response to a question from a lawyer: “And who is my neighbour?” Something that is often missed by liberals who would like to claim the Galileean as a warrior for social justice (and of course by conservatives who would like to claim him as a proponent of self-responsibility) is the emphasis he places on the *neighbour*. He does not advocate for abstract groups: ‘the poor’, ‘the oppressed’, ‘the marginalised’ – he advocates for the needs of the *specific person* who comes into one’s life, the person whose body we have to step over. This is the γείτων, the geitón, of the New Testament. The neighbour presents us with concrete responsibility, rather than an intellectualised responsibility. The Rabbi and the Levite – and indeed Batson’s subjects – are not preoccupied by selfishness, but the greater cause, the ideals, they feel tasked to serve. So much so that they miss what is in front of their eyes.