MP: Yeah. Well, I think there's been a quite a bit of discussion of that. But, a lot of...like, for example, I had my daughter, who's a teacher and a young mother, over with a bunch of her friends and first of all one of the first things they said is we didn't know if we wanted to come tonight because every time we talk about this we get really upset. And I said, "I promise you guys are going to have a good time." And so we didn't even talk about the issues in terms of how terrible it is. We just right away started talking about what they already are doing. This is a very good question for people -- what are you already doing? And it turns out most people are doing a lot already. They're recycling. They're being very careful with their carbon units. They're trying to eat local food when they can. They're riding their bikes when they can. They're conscious of the miles they drive. They're trying to have a low mileage car if they can afford it and so on. They're wearing sweaters and their thermostats are different. These daily things make a big difference.
Like, for example, one thing I do now when I go to a ... I try to buy local all summer. I just buy everything produce-wise when we have it in Nebraska from our local vendors and I buy all my meat from local vendors and freeze it and save it all year.But when I go to a grocery store, I look at where the fruit and vegetables are from all year long and I don't buy fruit that's shipped in from other countries. And it's not a lot, but it's a little. It's a little bit and I can do it real easily when I go grocery shopping.
Sarah and her friends decided that one thing they could do was have little parties and get-togethers where they trade clothes with each other, as opposed to go out and buy new clothes. And they also decided to do the same thing with books. And so there are all sorts of ways to recycle, repair, share that saves a lot of the consumer purchases that, of course, cost materials, cost energy, cost shipping, and so on and so on. But yeah, I mean, there are just really ways to be thoughtful every day and the good thing about it is not only does it not take much time or energy to be thoughtful, but it feels really good. There's a satisfaction in doing every day what one can to make things a little better.
Another thing that's very important is figuring out a way to talk to people a little bit about these issues. And when I first started to people about the pipeline and so on, they didn't really want to talk about it and nobody wants to talk about climate change. I mean, really, it's probably better if you almost never talk directly about climate change. It's probably better in your local area to approach people and say, "Well, what do you think about the water pollution in the nearby river?" or "Have you heard that we have the highest Parkinson's rate in the country because of fertilizer run-off?"
That's one problem we have in our state, by the way. Lincoln is the Parkinson's capital of the country because we have so many pesticides and fertilizers in our water system. If you talk to people about local issues, they care about those local issues and they also have the resources and community to act locally. One reason I don't choose to do something about Iraq is I don't know anything about Iraq. I don't speak the language. I don't know the culture. I've never been there. I have no local resources to help me deal with Iraq, but I have plenty of people who want to help me deal with this TransCanada pipeline.
So I think it's really important to have people working where they can be effective. And most locally,most logically they're going to be most effective locally.
Rob: Okay. You talk about engaging in altruism. You say...you cite a study that showed that altruistic people actually live longer lives.
MP: Please talk about how that ties in with your work.
MP: Actually, what we found is that older people who are involved in volunteer work or meaningful activity, they live longer and they stay more mentally alert. People whose life has a purpose live much longer than people who don't. In fact rest homes are learning from this and they're starting to give residents, nursing homes I mean, they're giving residents assignments, you know, to keep them...your job in the morning is to come and cut up the fruit. Your job in the morning is to go wake up you know Mr. so and so in room 201,etcetera, to give people a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
The original altruism research was done by Martin Seligman and what he showed is if you give college students in two different groups a $20 bill and you tell one group to spend it on themselves and then report back and keep a measure of their happiness from that $20 and you tell another group to use that $20 to do a good deed and report back their happiness, it turns out people are much happier when they give a $20 bill away than when they spend it. And they're also...that happiness is more sustained than the happiness of, say, a nice meal on the town or a concert ticket. So there's a lot of good research on that and I think that if you just think about yourself, when is one of the times you feel good? You help somebody across the street. You help somebody pick up their groceries when their bag breaks apart in the parking lot of a grocery store. You call up a friend who you know needs support and talk to that person and get them laughing. You feel good after those experiences. It's a natural feeling. We humans are hardwired for empathy and we're hardwired for altruism, so it's just natural to feel good after all that.
Rob: Now, you talk about a difference between altruism and moral...between empathy and moral imagination and you mentioned moral imagination earlier. Can you talk a bit more about it?
MP: Yes, there was just one more study before we move away from altruism and happiness and that was a study that David Brooks reported in the New Yorker that found that joining a group that meets once a month produces the same increase in happiness as doubling your income. Now that's a pretty profound study, you know. I'm sorry I don't have the reference for the study. I read about it in a David Brooks New Yorker article a couple of years ago, but I bet people could find it if they really wanted to look into that particular study.
Yeah, I write about moral imagination as...from my point of view I have a very simple value system- good is that which increases the moral imagination; evil is that which diminishes it. And the moral imagination is the ability to understand the world from another point...person's point of view, to care about that other person's fate and to intelligently and willingly engage in helping that person have a good life or that animal have a good life for that matter or that tree. I contrast it with empathy on the most elementary level and actually Damasio was the neuropsychologist who has done the research on this. There are two different parts of the brain that light up. If you see someone fall down and hurt themselves, skin their knee, you almost feel a twinge in your knee and you feel kind of a knee-jerk empathy with that person. Or if you hear someone called a bad name, you know a racist term or something, you feel a kind of an empathy with that person and you feel bad right away. That's good, of course. That's a very good human adaptive response.
Moral imagination implies creativity on your part, implies an active search for understanding, and it implies active engagement in helping other living beings have good lives. And so, for example, when I talk about what diminishes the moral imagination, in my opinion pornography does because it reduces full and interesting human beings to objects. In my opinion hate speech is evil because it reduces the moral imagination of people to ugly stereotypes and it diminishes their interest in taking care of other people. A good example of that right now is all of these children on the border that have piled up from Central America. And there are two very different conversations about these children going on in this country. One of them is these are children, they're the age of my grandchildren, and they're on a border thirsty and traumatized and alone and they need help. They need people to figure out what they can do for these children and their families so that they're neither in this country illegally with no resource nor sent back to a country where they most likely will be recruited into a gang or killed by different groups that are operating in the area. So there's...that's one conversation. The other conversation is a kind of talking about these children using terms like "illegal aliens," as if they're not really children like our children, but some kind of pestilence that has arrived on our border that must be eradicated. And that kind of conversation about children implies to me a diminished moral imagination.
So all of my writing...if you think about Reviving Ophelia as an example, one of the things I tried to say in that book is I am going to make a big effort to understand teenage girls. When I do feel like I have a really good grasp of teenage girls and how they think and how they see the world, I am going to write about that and explain it to readers so that they too can understand teenage girls in a more nuanced and empathic way and then act on behalf. And that book was really successful by that measure because after Reviving Ophelia, you know, it was a big hit book...I'm very grateful it allowed me to stay....this is my ninth book, The Green Boat, but the other thing I'm very grateful for about that book, I was aware of at the time and still am, is all over the world actually groups formed to help teenage girls. Groups formed in this country. Groups formed in other countries. Everything from older pilots wanting to teach teenage girls to fly airplanes to... I know a pediatrician in the northwest who quit her job to start organizations to empower girls. That's what I wanted that book to do. I wanted it to inspire people to action.
Rob: Now you talk about how the first human rights movement began with a small group of people in England in 1787 and 12 men got together and it ended up leading to the abolishment of slavery in England. Then you mentioned Rosa Parks' story...now she really wasn't alone at all though the story tends to be told that way,she was a part of an organization in a group. And then you say, and I love this quote, "Grassroots groups can foster mass movements, and mass movements can lead to paradigm shifts, which can create systemic changes. If many of us are acting together now, we may have just enough time to transform ourselves into a sustainable world culture." And I'm kind of picking up on what you said about people getting together and really this is such an important part of what you say in your book -- it's about people connecting"
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