Becoming a Good Person
Last week I wrote about a youth changemakers project I am running this summer and how I think about supporting students in reducing dissonance when they identify issues in the world that they do not feel they can help solve. But how and why do young people develop strong moral intuitions that they want to act on in the first place? This week I reflect on influences on my own ethics, setting the stage for a future discussion of my experience with the effective altruism movement.
I took a class this spring called On Becoming a Good Person and Leading a Good Life with Rick Weissbourd. I won’t bury the lede: I am sorry to say that I don’t think we quite nailed down a definitive checklist. Nonetheless, we confronted some fascinating and challenging questions about how we as educators — and as human beings — might approach this work. Throughout the course we were focused specifically on the questions Where does moral education happen currently? and Where can and should this work happen in the future?
Religious institutions are a common answer to the former question and perhaps suggest opportunities for the latter. Threats of punishment and promises of reward from an omniscient god (or gods) are prosocial memetic goldmines, and social evolutionary theory explains why these ideologies would persist and expand via external conquest and internal reproduction.
Much of my own explicit and implicit moral education came through years of religious ed. and youth group in a progressive, Catholic-ish church. It was hardly the “God is watching, you better be good” that prior generations may have received in Catholic school, but rather a much more humanist emphasis on service of others, situated occasionally in the context of lessons from the Bible. I am incredibly grateful to have been a part of this community growing up and in fact think it was an impressively refreshing example of an organization that helped students with the alignment problem I wrote about recently.
When I occasionally attend masses these days, I find it hard to relate to the more — to put it frankly — “Jesus-y” moments, but I am always struck by what an incredible mechanism for constantly refreshing one’s commitment to morality the ceremony is. Seeing children in the crowd reminds me of how many of the moral beliefs I take for granted today were formed in the context of organized religion. With participation - especially of youth - in religious institutions in decline, we need reimagined if not entirely new institutions to serve this role in society.
When I lost any regular association with organized religion in college (for more on that check out “Too Smart to be Religious?” Discreet Seeking Amidst Religious Stigma at an Elite College by my brilliant twin sister!), I began to search for a place to ground the spirituality and morality that I wanted to maintain. Sam Harris’s Waking Up, Joanna Macy’s ecospirituality, Hesse’s Siddhartha, Jamie Wheel’s “recaptured rapture”, Thich Nhat Hanh’s True Love, Singer’s utilitarianism and many others periodically caught my attention and provided new frameworks and ideas to integrate into my ethical identity. This was, however, a piecemeal approach of self-study and lacked the community, ritual practice, and institutional backing that religions provide.
I eventually found in the effective altruism (EA) movement a more cohesive and actionable set of beliefs as well as a community in which to engage with them. Much of the canon of EA (to the extent that it exists) challenged my prior conceptions of what it meant to live a good life: distrust of sentimental empathy, primacy of utilitarianism, an impartiality to suffering across distance (or time), and a focus on philanthropy and careers. I do not agree with all of these principles and frameworks universally and next week will dive deeper into my experiences with and perceptions of EA, but I wonder how accepting the best of those ideas would change the aims of moral education we pursue with children.
One belief I have taken from the EA world is that our moral and societal imaginations are regularly constrained by the force of the status quo bias. We work forward personally and collectively, if we are lucky, iteratively and slowly from what we already know and are reluctant to accept the potential for dramatic phase change. How can we dream ambitiously about what the technologies and social orders of the future could enable in terms of a radical new system of moral education? Can we do this while still preserving the best of the ancient connections, communities, and rituals that have sustained humanity thus far?
I feel among my generation and the generation of students I work with a swelling wave of demand for meaning and purpose. All the talk about the rise of nihilism, depression, anxiety, and hopelessness are a sign that there is a disconnect between what we do — what we are — and what we know that we could be. What can we build to bridge this gap? What might all this energy create?
