SOF: Khalid Kamau - Your Voices on the Economic Downturn | Repossessing Virtue

SOF: Khalid Kamau - Your Voices on the Economic Downturn | Repossessing Virtue

Shared via AddThis

First Person: Repossessing Virtue [Speaking of Faith® from American Public Media]

First Person: Repossessing Virtue [Speaking of Faith® from American Public Media]: "Repossessing Virtue is part of public radio's ongoing series exploring the moral, spiritual, and practical aspects of the economic downturn. We've asked past guests, listeners, and other familiar voices for their wisdom and insight about the changing economic climate." there are links to several great podcast off of this page.

Podcast of Vigen Guroian - Orthodox theologian

20090220_repossessing_virtue_fp-guroian.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object)
In this audio interview Vigen Guroian, an Armenian Orthodox theologian and avid gardener who reflects on the economy from the vantage point of the Christian season of Lent — and from his work as a college professor concerned about moral imagination in education, literature, politics, and everyday life.

The science of trust: economics and virtue

Krista Tippett, host: I'm Krista Tippett. Today, "The Science of Trust: Economics and Virtue." My guest, Paul Zak, is a leader in the emerging field of neuroeconomics. He helps explain how circumstances can dampen the human inclination towards moral behavior, but he also studies how human and economic interactions are driven by trust and says that can be measured and nourished biochemically.

Mr. Paul Zak: Markets are human creations, and they reflect our own human nature. In the kind of decentralized economies we live in, it is based on trust and faith and belief, and that's a good thing. I think it recognizes human dignity. It recognizes that most human beings in most situations are moral creatures and you can trust people to reciprocate most of the time and most of our societies are built around that. Civilization is built around that. Certainly democracy is built around that.

Ms. Tippett: This is Speaking of Faith. Stay with us.

[Announcements]

Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett. In a few breathtaking months, we've culturally moved from seeing Wall Street as an icon of thriving civil society to analogizing its workings with book titles like House of Cards and Animal Spirits. This hour, as part of our ongoing series Repossessing Virtue, we'll look at what science is learning about trust, fair play, and empathy and what these qualities have to do with human character and economics. My guest, Paul Zak, is a pioneer in the emerging field of neuroeconomics.

From American Public Media, this is Speaking of Faith , public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. Today, "The Science of Trust: Economics and Virtue."

Paul Zak is a professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University and founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies. He is trained in economics, neuroimaging, and mathematics. His research has centered around a powerful hormone that also acts as a neurotransmitter, oxytocin, which has been dubbed "the moral molecule." It is a kind of physiological signature for empathy. Paul Zak's laboratory has demonstrated that under the right conditions and with the right encouragement, oxytocin drives trustworthy behavior. Only 2 percent of the population, according to his experiments, is innately unresponsive to this physiological stimulus to care about the effects of our actions on others. From those experiments, Paul Zak became interested in the morality of economic decision making, how and where trust comes into that from a neurological perspective. He intensively analyzed the Enron crisis of the early 2000s, finding it a case study for trust gone awry at every level of an enterprise.

Early in his career, Paul Zak charted a correlation between trust or lack thereof with poverty or wealth in different countries.

Mr. Zak: I've been working on models of conflict to understand why countries don't grow. So if there's a lot of conflict politically, socially, even economically, then you see a lot of disruptions and you see a lack of progress made in terms of living standards. And so I had this idea at a conference that if I am such an expert in conflict, I should be an expert in the absence of conflict. And as I started thinking about that, I thought, you know, what captures the essence of conflict is really trust. When trust is high and we can shake hands and do a deal, then my sense was that, you know, economies would grow faster. So delving into that for a couple years, I discovered that trust was sort of the big gun economists have been looking for. It's really the most powerful lever we've found to date to understand why countries are rich or poor, partially because trust captures — when trust is high, everything in the society works well. The government works well. The social sector works well. The economic sector works well. So it's sort of one variable that captures, hey, things are going good or things are going badly.

Ms. Tippett: And when you say trust, I mean, are you talking about trust in the structures of an economy, trust in markets, trust in other businesspeople? I mean, is this trust as manifest on many levels?

Mr. Zak: So it's really trust in other people.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Zak: So it turns out that trust in other people correlates very strongly with trust in government, how well all these other sectors of the economy work. And so once this work became very well known and the World Bank flies me out, you know, "How do we implement this stuff in these less developed countries?" the question I always got was, "Well, how do two people decide to trust each other?" Because the data we were using were, "How much do you trust other people in your country in general?" But the next question was, "Why would I trust a complete stranger and particularly in a tangible way? Why would I give money to a complete stranger, particularly if I'm never going to see him or her again?" And that led to this investigation of the brain mechanisms behind trust and our discovery of oxytocin as this trust molecule.

Ms. Tippett: So that is the work you're doing now, and it comes under this category of neuroeconomics, which I think is a word that many people won't have heard. So I wonder if you could just tell me, I mean, is that a new field that you've helped create? That's kind of the sense I have.

Mr. Zak: That's correct. So I started doing this in 2001 and 2002 and there really wasn't a name for this, although this name was kind of floating around in the air. And neuroeconomics really looks at the brain processes that are active that are present when we make decisions. Now you notice I didn't economic decisions; I just said decisions.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Zak: So in some sense all decisions are economic; that is, they involve trade-offs. Should I marry girl A or girl B? Should I have three children or two children? So any decision making process involves evaluating alternatives, and that's really the essence of economics. So because people couldn't report to us in our laboratory experiments why they were trusting strangers with their own money, which they do quite readily in laboratory, we needed some other way to figure out what they were doing. And so we had this idea to measure brain activity while they were making decisions, and subsequently this field has now kind of taken off and has a life of its own. But at the time it was, you know, sort of the world's stupidest idea.

Ms. Tippett: Well, say some more about that.

Mr. Zak: OK. Because economists assume that people — when money's on the line, you know, people are very thoughtful. They will take some time. They're informed. There's this sort of big cognitive process that leads to efficient decision making. But in fact, we know from our own lives that sometimes people make mistakes, even people with big brains like us, sometimes we make mistakes. And why is that? Further, I realized we're taking a shot at traditional economics that assumed that people were thoughtful and slow and deliberative and we don't see that in the world.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Zak: We see people making gut decisions, quick decisions, sometimes wrong decisions maybe for the right reasons, but decisions that go horribly wrong. And maybe some of those lead to things like financial crises. Certain booms and busts are not sometimes rational. They are overreactions or underreactions to certain environments.

So I think in the environment right now, we're seeing a gross underreaction to what looks to me like lots of bargains in real estate and various asset classes, because there's this overwhelming sort of sense of pessimism. And three years ago, there was just way too much euphoria, you know.

Ms. Tippett: But backing up a little bit, I do think even though you've been doing this work for several years and you and other people in other disciplines, I mean, because it looks like neuroeconomics draws on economic theory as well as neuroscience and psychology, endocrinology. But I think you're right, and I think that one of the kind of — there was this shock when the economic crisis hit last fall, because it did seem like we had all been functioning, to some degree against the evidence, on an idea that because we were dealing with economics, which had to do with numbers, somehow it was rational and logical. Right? I mean, many of us had suspended our judgment in different ways. And what was fascinating to me is that suddenly what we were talking about was faith in the markets being crushed and trust in the markets being crushed.

Mr. Zak: Right.

Ms. Tippett: So suddenly we were seeing that what was exposed was, you know, you could almost say the human condition. I mean how much emotion and irrationality is always in there.

Mr. Zak: I agree with you completely. You know, markets are human creations, and they reflect our own human nature. And in the kind of decentralized economies we live in, it is based on trust and faith and belief, and that's a good thing. I think it recognizes human dignity. It recognizes that most human beings in most situations are moral creatures, and you can trust people to reciprocate most of the time. Our studies find 98 percent of people are reciprocators and the 2 percent have very unusual brains, and we can talk a little about that.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Zak: But 98 percent of the time, people will do what you expect them to do. What that means is that we don't need a policeman and a lawyer in every transaction, and that's great, because now, just like these high-trust countries that I spoke of before, we can effect transactions quite readily and easily. So the cost in engaging in transactions is lower, more transactions occur, and we have more wealth creation and greater prosperity. There are downsides to that. For example, people will find loopholes and try to exploit them, which certainly people of the finance industry did. But by and large, I think having these decentralized economies that are based on most people most of the time being moral, being reciprocal, means that we can do lots of things we couldn't do otherwise. And most of our societies are built around that. Civilization is built around that. Certainly democracy is built around that.

Ms. Tippett: You wrote: "Studies across several scientific disciplines are accumulating evidence that modern free economies can only function if most people most of the time behave morally. Surprisingly, this research also shows that the freedom to exchange in markets may itself lead to a society where individuals have stronger moral values. Put more succinctly, markets depend on and promote virtue."

Now, that is not the story we would tell ourselves about the reality of the economy as it started to reveal itself to us in the latter months of 2008. Do you feel that what you wrote then, you know, what you have been discerning in your research was wrong? Or was it prescient?

Mr. Zak: I'm going to stick by that. I think, you know, the news is overwhelmingly about stories in which we have failures. I think in that same essay I said even the most ardent capitalists get a small thrill when they see the kind of evildoing CEOs do the perp walk. You know, the Jeffrey Skilling, Kenneth Lay.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Zak: And we like to see people who have cheated punished. Most of our great novels and movies are about that theme to one extent or another. So by allowing individuals the freedom to engage in transactions without coercion, it also means you're allowing some people to cheat and it's that kind of hardcore 2 percent who have a brain dysfunction in this brain chemical that we found instantiates empathy, instantiates care for someone else's welfare. I'm not saying, by the way, that Jeffrey Skilling doesn't have this brain mechanism. He may or may not. I haven't studied him. But we have to allow for some cheating.

Think of this as a legal analogy, à la sort of Minority Report. If I looked into your head and I figured that in 10 years from now you're going to engage in some crime and therefore I arrest you now, which who knows? But if I allow you go through your life and if you do engage in misbehavior, then I'll try to, after the fact, capture you, punish you, encourage you not to do that again — me being as a society. As a society, we'll try to do that. But I don't want to beforehand say, "No, you can't engage in all the things in life. You can't go one mile an hour over the speed limit. Even if you have a sick child in the back seat and you're rushing him or her to the hospital, it's not allowed." So I think by having this freedom to innovate, do things a little differently, perhaps even to bend the rules, allows for greater freedom, greater prosperity, greater innovation. It also allows for cheating, and we need an appropriate regulatory framework that captures, discourages, and punishes cheaters. And I think what we found in this recession is that we didn't have a sufficiently strong framework within the financial services industry.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: Neuroeconomist Paul Zak. I'm Krista Tippett, and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today, "The Science of Trust: Economics and Virtue."

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: Before Bernard Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay were icons of a gross violation of the trust of employees, shareholders, government, and customers. But in a book he edited, Moral Markets, Paul Zak also told the lesser-known story of Cliff Baxter. Baxter was a vice chairman of Enron who protested corruption as he saw it grow internally. He resigned his position in 2001, just a few months before Enron's collapse began. In early 2002, as the human cost of Enron's excesses unfolded, he apparently committed suicide. By many accounts, Cliff Baxter had a strong moral code. His story is a contrast to generalizations fueled by high-profile coverage of out-of-control corrupt executives. But Paul Zak sees it as an exemplar of the moral inclination for which human physiology equips us, given the right circumstances.

Mr. Zak: So let's bring some science to bear in this. So I just made a bunch of perhaps interesting or outlandish claims about people having sort of a moral sense. But in the last five years, we've begun to find the chemical basis for this. And we've discovered this molecule called oxytocin that lives in the human brain, and in particular human beings, it's particularly potent at making us care about the outcomes of others. So we initially found that when someone trusts you with their money intentionally — "I'm going to give you $20 and let you control it" — that the more money someone entrusts to you, the more your brain releases this molecule and the more you tend to reciprocate. When the person says, "Would you like to give some of that back to me," even though you don't have to, you do. We've now found this substantiates generosity. If I have more, you have less and visa versa. When we give people, human beings, synthetic oxytocin we can induce them to be more generous towards strangers, more generous towards charities.

And we very recently found that when we watch and we show experimental subjects an emotionally compelling video, a video of a man whose four-year-old son has terminal brain cancer, that there's a big spike in the release of oxytocin, and people are subsequently much more generous towards a stranger. They're more generous towards charities. So somehow this molecule in our brain has allowed us to live in large groups of people where we have something in our heads that says, "This person safe, this person not. This person, I want to be around, this person I don't want to be around." So it's kind of a trust detector. And in a very real sense, it connects us to other people. It allows me to sort of emotionally mirror what other people are doing. And classically, oxytocin is associated with childbirth, reproduction in mammals.

Ms. Tippett: Right. I was going to say with maternal love and bonding. Right?

Mr. Zak: Yeah. And in mammals care for offspring. And what we've shown the last five years is that it makes us care about complete strangers. I should say, in these experiments, we've run them in a laboratory. You're in a partitioned computer station, and all these interactions happen through a computer. So you're not even getting the smiles, the open expression, the happiness. So I think what this shows is that human beings are almost unique among animals in which we can't help but care about other people's welfare, and we care about what they think of us as well. And that kind of keeps us on the straight and narrow. Not all the time; we're adaptable and this system shuts down under high levels of stress.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Zak: And so I've written in the Moral Markets book about the kind of environment that was created at Enron that put people under enormous amounts of stress, survival stress to keep their job. And so if you're under such enormous stress, then the system shuts down and you get to be in this "I need to get through the next two hours" mode as opposed to "I'm going to take care of people around me and this is a win-win situation."

Ms. Tippett: Well, and I have to say I thought that was one of the most interesting learnings. It got me wondering if the accelerating stress that's kind of been built into our everyday lives might have contributed in a very real way to some of the bad and really immoral decision making in our economy in the last few years.

Mr. Zak: I tend to agree with you. Economists talk of the cleansing effect of recessions. So recessions are necessary because they kind of cull out the companies that are not providing the best customer service, that are not making a profit, that are not providing some product or service that people need. And when those businesses go out of business, then those resources are redeployed to more important uses. The machines are reused; the people get different jobs. And so this keeps the economy kind of efficient. We don't want to kind of limp along and have high levels of inefficiency just because we love the name General Motors or love the name of some company if they can't kind of keep up with the herd. So competition drives that and that's an important part of maintaining efficiency.

But I think the same thing can happen in individual lives. I think as we get towards the end of every boom period, today or two years ago, the end of the 1990s and dot-com bubble, the end of the '80s and this kind of "me," "greed" generation, I think we do get out of whack because human beings are adaptable and we are watching what other humans are doing. We also become adaptable to this sort of yuppie, "more stuff for me" lifestyle.

So I think, from a spiritual perspective, that recessions are also cleansing. So I think it's very important that we don't shy away from recessions and we don't try to outlaw them. I think we should say, "Hey, there were excesses. This is how the excesses are corrected. And the excesses were both kind of on the macro level and even perhaps in my own life. Maybe I got a little over-excited about the extra bonuses I was getting and the bigger car. And now I want to sit down and reevaluate what's really important to me." So I think there are great analogies between the micro and the macro, and we should embrace that.

Ms. Tippett: Mm-hmm.

Mr. Zak: Having said that, the stress issues are strong. One of the pieces of advice I like to give is: Turn off your TV. Don't listen to the pessimistic news every second of the day. Get back to …

Ms. Tippett: Right. Because there's another kind of stress that's created with the things that are going wrong now, right?

Mr. Zak: Absolutely. So this is the time to reach out to your neighbors, as I certainly have when people around me have lost their jobs, and many others have as well. You know, do the things that are important. Do the things that are human and humane and get back to a sense of where we want to be as individuals and as a human species.

Ms. Tippett: Let me just ask you this, again from the perspective of your scientific research. If a stressful culture, inside our workplaces and outside it, had this power to diminish our instinct, I think what you want to say is our inclination to care morally about the consequences of our actions more, does stress also in a moment like this, in a moment where the economy is really in crisis and there are a lot of bad effects of that, does this kind of stress also make it harder for us, again, to reach out to others?

Mr. Zak: I think there's two ways to answer that. The first is that appropriate levels of stress are very good for human beings. So there's sort of this misnomer that stress is bad. Too much stress is bad, but also too little stress is bad. So there's sort of this inverted U-curve, if you can see that in your head. There's sort of this sweet spot for stress that focuses your attention. So I think that when we're in that sweet spot, when we're focused, our memory's better and we're thinking clearly and we've got to figure out what to do next, that's actually very good for human beings and actually all other animals as well. So I think this is a time when we can use that notion of appropriate stress or good stress.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Zak: And use that also to shed some of the inappropriate stress.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: Neuroeconomist Paul Zak.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: You state some true and obvious things that I think feel less obvious in our time, that merchants and market exchanges in essence are supposed to be, initially were, and often are about increasing the well-being of neighbors and complete strangers, that economies are driven by human beings. You know, markets are human inventions — these are your words — and market exchange is a social act. But, you know, I was also thinking about this in connection with this phenomenon we had in this economy that's now failed, this housing market. All these mortgage lenders, some of them working with very small firms, enacting transactions, which were risky at best and reckless with other people at worst. But I also wondered in that connection if what you have are these financial networks, these structures that had become — that people were so many steps removed in fact from the consequences of those actions, that that also kind of depersonalized this human dimension of the market that makes trust more possible.

Mr. Zak: I agree completely with you. You know, when you took your mortgage out from your local banker who you saw every Friday when you deposited your paycheck …

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Zak: … it's a much different story. And you could tell him or her, "Gee, I lost my job and I may not be able to make my payment this month." I think you're right: Once we so decentralize all kinds of transactions, break them into little pieces — which, by the way, is exactly what happened at Enron — you break up decisions into little pieces and you stop having this connection to the other human across the desk and it becomes just about churning, about turning over more volume. Having said that, I think this housing market bubble did identify a regulatory failure, that this, particularly in the swaps market, of this market was gigantic and only grew up in the last 10 years and was more or less unregulated. And that was a problem. So, again, the recessions are valuable, because these bubbles can't go on forever. And you say, "Well, this isn't appropriate. This is not what we wanted. This is not what these instruments were designed to do, and therefore, as a society we need to choose to put some structure on this."

So I think a simple example of this would be, because I live in a semi-rural area, we have a lot of farmers who sell fruit by the side of the road. So we have these stands. They're not manned, so no one's there. There's a box and there's a pack of oranges.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Zak: You know, the box is screwed down to this big wooden stand. So the box is not left there for you to take away; it's screwed down. And occasionally, you know, people must steal them, but for the most part, people put money in and take a bag of oranges and there's still three or four bags out there. So if you tempt people enough, you're going to encourage kind of bad behavior. So, again, as a society and as families, we always try to find that appropriate boundary between recognizing human morality and dignity and not tempting people with a vice. And so if we tempt people enough, and I think that's what happened in the mortgage market …

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Zak: … you know, it was basically money for nothing. You know, sign people up, fake the numbers, and give people loans out. That's not appropriate. That's not the way we want to run a society, a business, and your personal finances.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: Neuroeconomist Paul Zak.

Another scientist I've interviewed in the past, Dr. Esther Sternberg, has broken new ground in describing how the human stress response works. She describes the economic crisis as a perfect storm for stress, and she has wisdom on how to alleviate stress and simultaneously improve our own health and that of our communities. You can listen to her and other wise voices from our Repossessing Virtue series on moral and spiritual aspects of economic crisis. That's at our Web site, speakingoffaith.org.

And on the Speaking of Faith staff blog, SOF Observed, we share more detail on a trust game Paul Zak describes in his article "The Neurobiology of Trust." Read more about his research on the biological foundations of human trust and share your comments at speakingoffaith.org.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: After a short break, Paul Zak analyzes Bernard Madoff. I'm Krista Tippett. Stay with us. Speaking of Faith comes to you from American Public Media.

[Announcements]

Ms. Tippett: Welcome back to Speaking of Faith, public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. I'm Krista Tippett. Today, "The Science of Trust: Economics and Virtue," part of our ongoing series "Repossessing Virtue."

My guest, Paul Zak, is a professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University, and he's the founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies. He has studied a powerful commonly occurring hormone, oxytocin, which some have dubbed the "moral molecule." His laboratory experiments have found that oxytocin generates and supports caring and trustworthy behavior in most people with the right kind of encouragement. Only 2 percent of participants in his studies appear to be innately impervious to this physiological stimulus to care about the effect of their actions on others.

Drawing on this research, Paul Zak has analyzed how trust works as a catalyst in successful human relationships and economic life. On the Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff, for example, Zak has pointed out that they key to a con is not that you trust the con man, but that he shows he trusts you. And so I asked him how can people recover when such a complex dynamic is violated?

Mr. Zak: So we studied this in the laboratory, and we find that when people are distrusted, when people don't reciprocate, when someone doesn't show they trust you, both men and women — but men in particular — have a strong aggressive response. They release testosterone, and they really want to punish that person. So we see this in the Bernie Madoff case where people are sending him …

Ms. Tippett: Or in the AIG bonus …

Mr. Zak: Sure. These guys are …

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, that public anger.

Mr. Zak: … people who don't play nice, and we like to see them punished. And that's an important part of maintaining the line between appropriate and inappropriate behavior, is that we have innate mechanisms in our brain that want us to punish people and make it fun, in fact, to punish people who don't follow the appropriate social norms. So Madoff needs to be punished. The AIG giant bonus guys really need to be punished. And that's OK. And we've now done that as a society. Most of us don't go over and try to beat up these people, but we have a legal system that kind of does that for us. And that's an important way in laboratory experiments to sustain cooperation. So if you're having an interaction and you begin to play badly, if I have an option to punish you, I can encourage you to be cooperative. So oxytocin and the mechanisms in our brain that motivate moral behaviors are not perfectly tuned to the environment that we live in. So they are blunt instruments. They are not modifiable very rapidly.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Zak: We certainly learn with time. That's the good side of it. Oh, it feels good when I play nice. It feels good when someone reciprocates and they thank me for being a good citizen. But we also have this negative side, which is important for cooperation too, which is, "Gee, if you don't play nice, I'm going to get pretty hot under the collar. I'm going to let you know about it, and that's going to give you feedback on what the right boundaries are." And as a society, we do that by enacting laws and regulations. We say, "This stuff is OK, but here's the line in which if you cross that line, even if your moral intuition is not kicking in that says this is wrong, as a group we're going to tell you. We're going to say this is a line at which this is inappropriate behavior." And that helps us.

Ms. Tippett: Mm-hmm. And so how do you analyze the character of a person like Bernard Madoff from what you know from neuroscience and neuroeconomics?

Mr. Zak: I haven't done an exhaustive study.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Zak: I have read up a lot, so let me put that caveat in place.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah. What does your kind of intuition tell you?

Mr. Zak: I think he's — a couple of things we found in our laboratory studies, which may apply to him. One is we find a lot of early trauma in individuals who are kind of morally ambiguous on their actions. I haven't discovered if he's got an early trauma in his life, death of a parent, you know, bankruptcy of a business, loss of income. So we often see traumatic events in people early in life and they have a much more kind of flexible brain system. They have this more fluid sense of right and wrong than other people do, for one. And number two, I think he was also a very insecure man, liked to be the center of attention. And, boy, it's great when people are coming to you and think you're way above the rest, you're extraordinary and you're giving millions of dollars away to charities. And then he said starting in the early '90s, he just couldn't sustain those returns that he had so he started this kind of Ponzi scheme.

So most of us would just probably take the hit and say, "Hey, you know, returns are down. We're going to try to adjust our strategy." Instead, he felt like he couldn't face up to that, and so it's this sense of not being able to meet the expectations that others have for you and you have for yourself, which generally lies in people who are very insecure and don't have a kind of good sense of self.

Ms. Tippett: So, I mean, I'm assuming he would be one of that 2 percent, you think, you could imagine, in your testing who would not have this normal innate inclination …

Mr. Zak: No, I don't think so.

Mr. Tippett: You don't?

Mr. Zak: The 2 percent are — we find a very strong developmental component, and there's many studies in animals identifying how this happens. I think this is more of an acquired issue.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Zak: I think he was under a great deal of stress and this shut the system down.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Zak: The 2 percent we find, the system doesn't work from the get-go. In fact, we recently discovered that people with social anxiety disorder have this same dysfunction. They are not getting the feedback that we would get in a social setting that tells us whether our behavior is appropriate or not. So there are some clinical conditions that we're looking at now that are associated with this. So there's this sort of "I'm born with it" 2 percent versus "I'm under stress and I've kind of acquired this" — the guys at Enron, Bernie Madoff.

Ms. Tippett: OK. You know, I want to ask you again — so trust is such an important feature in markets, in morality. Now that that is — that there's been a breach of trust, what does that do — what does that tell you about how people are going to navigate their way through this economic crisis and beyond it?

Mr. Zak: There certainly is a sense of once burned, twice shy, and I think the economy will not begin to start growing until we kind of get over that. And I think the recipe to do that is to start small. You can trust your local merchant who you know, perhaps much more than some giant corporation. So it's kind of starting small and building up that trust. And we've done studies, and other people have, on the mechanism of that and basically it's this getting comfortable with taking risk again.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Zak: And risk taking is really important. Risk taking is where advances, where innovations come from, but we have to be kind of willing to do it. And again, once you've been burned and you feel like, "Gee, I've seen my retirement portfolio go down by 30 percent; the last thing I'm going to do is put my foot back in the water."

Ms. Tippett: You know, you said a moment ago that you think a moment like this is a moment to reflect and to be refreshed in a way and to ask some important — to be renewed and to ask some important moral questions — and that's what I'm hearing from many different directions. But I wonder if — I mean, you also have the cold eye of a scientist, and I wonder if your science would suggest that when the economy is moving again, let's assume that things get on to a more stable and prosperous ground again, do those kinds of questions recede or could you imagine a long-term effect of the kind of reflection that's going on now?

Mr. Zak: From the way the brain is organized, I would think that we're going to have — so the brain sort of habituates to environments, and we've habituated now to a kind of a fearful, pessimistic environment. And when we are in a euphoric setting and we're getting double-digit returns every year in the stock market or some other market, I think we also acclimate pretty quickly to that.

Ms. Tippett: Mm-hmm.

Mr. Zak: So I think history will repeat itself.

Ms. Tippett: All right.

Mr. Zak: I think we're not going to learn from this unless we can sit back, unless we take this opportunity to sit back and reflect and make fundamental changes. So for the people who do that, for the people who are looking at that, saying, "Gee, I was selling mortgages to people who had no income at all. Probably not the business I want to be in. Maybe I should use my skills for something else," and/or "I don't need a bigger car than my neighbor. What I really need to do is spend more time with my family or volunteer at a charity once a week." I think those are the kind of fundamental changes that now is the time to do. And if you can set up those habits, then you will see permanent change, but I think this is the time to do it. And if you wait three years from now when the party is back on, the financial party is back on, there will be less incentive to change.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Zak: So pain is a great time for growth.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Zak: So pain is a great time for growth.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: Neuroeconomist Paul Zak.

I'm Krista Tippett and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today, "A Science of Trust: Economics and Virtue." Paul Zak is trained in economics, neuroimaging, and mathematics, and is based at Claremont Graduate University.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: Virtue, I think, is a word that's important to you. You've talked about virtue as part of economic life. There's some place where you talked about Aristotle taking magnificence — that magnificence is one of the virtues that he cited in life. Talk to me a little bit about how you think about that for yourself.

Mr. Zak: I think magnificence is my favorite virtue of Aristotle's. Wouldn't it be great to say, "You were magnificent today"? I try to do that with the people around me. I try to recognize magnificence when it occurs and let them know how special they are. But I think this is also a time in my own life to focus on things like generosity and compassion and understanding and to use this as a bit of a teaching moment, not only for myself but certainly for my children and those around me, to think about how we can do better, how we can help more, and the value of doing that. And again, when everyone is employed, and we're not talking about people losing their houses and such and such.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Zak: For example, we adopted a dog recently that was going to be put down by a family who had lost their home and they had to move, and they had a number of pets. Not a healthy young dog, but an old not-so-great dog. And we sat as a family and said, "We like this dog and we don't want him to be — we don't want the family to have the pain of having to put this dog down. Let's take it in and let's try to help them and let them come and see their dog when they can." So I think, you know, all those little lessons don't always occur when you're buying the bigger house and the bigger car and you don't have to think about it. So I think we have tried, my family and I have tried to explicitly think about how we could reach out more to help others around us.

Ms. Tippett: You know, and I want to ask you if in addition to what is happening in the economy right now, is what you are learning about economics and morality through neuroscience and neuroeconomics, is your research challenging or supporting or possibly changing some of the assumptions about market economies that we've held in this culture in recent years?

Mr. Zak: I think we're of two minds on market economies. I think most of us have our retirement money in stocks and bonds, and so we understand that as the economy grows the stock market goes up in value and we're happy about that. On the other hand, there is this underlying sense that interacting in markets somehow degrades our dignity, is not something we should be doing. It's not our best purpose as human beings, and that thought, which is associated with Marx, for example, predates that, goes back to Aristotle and perhaps before. It's in Confucianism. So I think we are starting to take some shots from that by using this interdisciplinary approach in which we're identifying the legal aspects of an innate sense of morality. We're identifying the economic aspects. We're identifying the religious aspects. So by having this kind of conversion evidence, I think we are taking a shot on economics as bad, sort of a necessary evil.

I think what we're saying is that this is a human endeavor, and humans throughout history have traded with each other, and they trade because it can make both parties better off. And to the extent that I sell you something that you need and helps you, that in fact is a moral act. Even if I'm getting paid for it, it is still a moral act because I have thought about how to make you better off, how to increase your welfare, your happiness. And I think that is a different take. That's not a unique view of the economy, by the way, but it's a view that we haven't heard much about. And so I think if we think about being magnificent as customer service agents, being magnificent as managers, if we think about doing the very best in terms of teamwork to serve those around us, serve the people we work with, serve our employees, then we have a very different view of what the economic endeavor is and why it creates prosperity.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: Neuroeconomist Paul Zak. In addition to magnificence, Aristotle's other virtues include courage, temperance, liberality, magnanimity, pride, good temper, truthfulness, wittiness, friendliness, modesty, and righteous indignation.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: Do you think you live differently because of what you know through your work?

Mr. Zak: What a wonderfully unfair question that is. I do. You know, I've started to realize that I have more control over my own happiness and the happiness of those around me than I thought I did. In fact, none of us are too busy to take care of those around us, and I think in a very real sense our research shows us that we are our brothers' keepers and sisters' keepers. We can't help but be concerned for those around us.

So I'll give you a quick example of that on how this system works. This doesn't happen so much anymore, but it used to be when I was younger that we'd have these kids who fell down some abandoned well somewhere in Texas and it would be a big media event. And presumably, you know, millions of dollars would be spent to get this kid out of the well. And you think, "Well, suppose instead of spending a million dollars to save this child, instead of doing that, let me spend a million dollars and vaccinate every child in West Virginia, Louisiana, and Mississippi against the standard childhood diseases. I probably could save a lot more lives by having an extensive vaccination program, and I'll just take that kid and I'll just cap the well and he'll stop crying after a while and we'll forget about him." Well, come on. No one can do that. We just can't do that. We're not able to do that because we're empathic creatures. Because we feel that cry. We can't ignore it. And that's the system that we're characterizing in our brains. And as long as that system's intact for the most part, I think it keeps us on this fairly virtuous path most of the time for most people. Again, if I stress you enough, I can get you off that path. And that connection is stronger and when it's one to one and in person.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Zak: In our experiments, people who are empathically engaged not only gave more money to a stranger in laboratory, they also gave more money to charities when given a chance. And I should say that also in these experiments, they're not the most pleasant experiments. So these individuals are getting paid, you know, we're jabbing their arm with needles and we're putting drugs into them to turn on and off parts of the brain. So they're really getting paid $40 to $50 to endure some pain and sit in the lab for a couple of hours, and yet they still voluntarily choose to give up that money to help a stranger, to help a charity once we've engaged these brain systems regarding empathy. That's pretty amazing to me. And these are hungry college students.

Ms. Tippett: So you're learning about this innate moral inclination. Is there something in your research that also suggests how that can be strengthened? Are you thinking of spraying oxytocin over large urban areas? I mean …

Mr. Zak: Absolutely. Put it in the water supply. So I think it's getting back to this one-on-one relationship. If I see my customer, if I see the people I work with, if I have that personal interaction from a scientific perspective, from a neuroscientific perspective, I'm getting much more feedback on what I'm doing, how it affects people, does it help people, is it appropriate. When I'm doing all this electronically — again, à la Enron, just to pick our favorite nasty company — then everything is easier to kind of ignore the pain you may be causing by behaving inappropriately. So I think it's that one on one. It's the going to the farmers' market. It's understanding that millions and millions of people own Wal-Mart stock, and if Wal-Mart is going to survive, they're going to try to provide the best customer service and products they can. And that's a good thing; that's something that people want. And if you want a different level of product and customer service, then you'll go to a different kind of store. So there's this fine line between economies depending on other regarding behaviors, what we might call virtuous behaviors, and competition. And the competition can sometimes drive us to behave in nonmoral ways, immoral ways. And that's, I think, where we can get out of whack.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: Paul Zak is professor of economics and the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California. He edited the book Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy.

Paul Zak's field of neuroeconomics is young and not uncontroversial, but the importance of human emotion as a force in market economy seems more generally acknowledged in the wake of the recent economic downturn.

George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, two leading economists, co-authored the book Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism. They write,

"Just as families sometimes cohere and at other times argue, are sometimes happy and other times depressed, are sometimes successful and at other times in disarray, so too do whole economies go through good and bad times. The social fabric changes. Our level of trust in one another varies. And our willingness to undertake effort and engage in self-sacrifice is by no means constant."

Akerlof and Shiller continue,

"The idea that economic crises, like the current financial and housing crisis, are mainly caused by changing thought patterns goes against standard economic thinking. But the current crisis bears witness to the role of such changes in thinking. It was caused precisely by our changing confidence, temptations, envy, resentment, and illusions — and especially by changing stories about the nature of the economy. And we know not what is yet to come."

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: The book Animal Spirits was recommended to me by American Public Media's chief economics correspondent, Chris Farrell. After producing this program, I sat down with Chris to better understand the place neuroeconomics has in the wider world of economic theory and to ask him what it means to view economic recession as cleansing when it disrupts so many lives. You can watch my conversation with Chris on our Web site, speakingoffaith.org.

On another note, for the next few months, through Ramadan, we'd like to invite Muslim listeners to illustrate the complexity and diversity of the Muslim world, as it is often called, with your voices and stories. What do you find beautiful in Islam? What hopes, fears, and questions are on your mind as you ponder the future? Tell us how these things find expression in your daily life and in your religious practice, including the upcoming observance of Ramadan. Find the "Share Your Story" link and much more on our home page, speakingoffaith.org.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: The senior producer of Speaking of Faith is Mitch Hanley, with producers Colleen Scheck and Nancy Rosenbaum. Our online editor is Trent Gilliss, with Web producer Andrew Dayton. Kate Moos is the managing producer of Speaking of Faith. And I'm Krista Tippett.

source: http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/neuroeconomics/transcript.shtml

You can listen to this interview at the following URL: http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/neuroeconomics/index.shtml

Economic Crisis, Morality and Meaning

Krista Tippett, host: I'm Krista Tippett. Today, "Repossessing Virtue." With Quaker author and educator Parker Palmer, we explore human and spiritual aspects of economic downturn and life beyond it. Of recent upheavals in the economy Parker Palmer has written, "At some level, most of us knew they were coming. Who doesn't know that an economic system that encourages us to live beyond our means and refuses to regulate greed is one in which our avarice will come back to bite us?"

Mr. Parker Palmer: I think there is a new awareness that what got us into this mess is not only the lack of regulation of the lesser angels of our nature, but the fact that we have those lesser angels and that they have enormous power. You know, we're at one of those interesting points in history where self-interest and idealism converge.

This is Speaking of Faith. Stay with us.

[Announcements]

Kate Moos, managing producer: I'm Kate Moos, managing producer of Speaking of Faith. This week, we bring you a rebroadcast of Krista's December 2008 conversation with Quaker educator and author Parker Palmer, with his reflections on the economic crisis.

Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett. Coverage of the unfolding economic crisis is often framed in terms of predators and victims, greed and gullibility. Yet in a global economy, to take a phrase of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, some are guilty while all are responsible. For myself, I've been longing for fresh thinking and language about that. To reflect on what has happened and why in human and cultural terms, to summon practical wisdom and collective courage to live beyond this moment differently. This hour, we explore such ideas with a wise public intellectual of our time, the Quaker author and educator Parker Palmer. He works with people from all walks of life at the intersection of spirituality, professional life, and social change.

From American Public Media, this is Speaking of Faith, public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas.

Today, "Repossessing Virtue: Parker Palmer on Economic Crisis, Morality, and Meaning."

Parker Palmer is best known perhaps as the author of seven books, including Let Your Life Speak and A Hidden Wholeness. He worked as a community organizer and sociologist in early adulthood. He became Quaker in midlife and spent 10 years as a dean, teacher, and writer-in-residence at the Quaker retreat center Pendle Hill. Parker Palmer's 1998 book, The Courage to Teach, broke new ground in exploring how the inner life of educators shapes teaching and learning. He also founded the Center for Courage and Renewal, which explores this principle with K through 12 teachers across the U.S. The program has since expanded to include retreats for people in other professions such as law, medicine, and business. In fact, just after the Dow Jones experienced a historic drop this past September 29th, one of those days, in other words, when we all realized our collective economic reality had changed, Parker Palmer was beginning a retreat with leaders from the worlds of business, philanthropy, and financial services.

The conversations of that weekend have been much on his mind as he makes sense of the economic present. He's also reflected on experiences in his early life that formed his attitudes towards wealth and identity. Parker Palmer's father was a successful businessman.

Mr. Palmer: I grew up in a very affluent all-white upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago on the North Shore, but my dad had grown up in a blue-collar family in Iowa and came to Chicago at age 19 to get a certificate in accounting. He never went to college. And he raised my two sisters and me as if we were somehow a blue-collar family who had landed accidentally in this very well-off suburb, and that had very practical implications. It was as if we had parachuted in from some other planet and just happened to land in this place.

When I was 12 years old, Dad announced that this would be the last summer we would take a family vacation, because when Park, as I was called, turned 13 and my sisters in turn, we would need to go to work for the whole summer and we would need to save our money and we would need to learn some values. And, by the way, no, we weren't going to join the country club where all of our friends were lounging at the pool and their fathers were playing golf. In fact, Park would be caddying for their fathers …

[Laughter]

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Palmer: … rather than enjoying the perks of that life. So people asked me in later years, 'Didn't you feel deprived?' and I said on the contrary, I felt like a grown-up at an early age. I felt responsible, mature. That kind of formation really — and that's what it was, it was a kind of spiritual formation — gave me eyes to see the emptiness of materialism and of affluence, and I felt larger as a result of some of the loving demands that my father placed on my life which translated into material terms.

Ms. Tippett: You know, you and I have spoken before about your experience of depression, which came in midlife, and I have to tell you something interesting as this economic crisis has unfolded. You know, we've had these days and days where the stock market continues to fall and continues to fall, and the experts express such shock. And I will say right here that I don't understand much of this, which I don't think makes me that different from most of the people hearing the news, but somehow it hasn't seemed counterintuitive that it continued to fall, because one thing I do know is that it was at such an artificially elevated level.

Mr. Palmer: Mm-hmm.

Ms. Tippett: And what I kept thinking of was actually my conversation with you and you talking about how in the middle of a depression, a psychological depression, you had a therapist who said, "Parker, could you think of your depression as a friend, which is bringing you down to earth, ground on which it is safe to walk?"

Mr. Palmer: Mm-hmm. That's a wonderful connection. And in fact, I have had some of the same thoughts, Krista, the parallels between psychological depression and economic depression. I finally learned, with the help of this therapist, that depression didn't need to be pictured as the hand of an enemy trying to crush me, but rather the hand of a friend trying to press me down to ground on which it was safe to stand. And through that realization, I understood that part of what took me into depression was that I was living life at artificial heights, at untenable elevations, so that the elevation involving a kind of inflated ego or a free-floating spirituality or a detached sense of "oughts" and in that sense a false ethic, or simply living intellectually in my head more than in my feelings and in my body, that all of those things put you at such altitude that if you trip and fall, which you're inevitably going to do …

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Palmer: … you have a long, long way to fall, and it might kill you.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Palmer: But if you are in fact on ground where it's safe to stand, you can fall and get up and fall and get up again, which most of us do every day. And, yes, I do feel that we all knew at some level, if we took a moment to think about it, that there was a huge amount of artificial altitude, elevation, inflation in this society, that housing prices were ridiculous, that stock prices were way beyond value. And we now know in fact that a lot of that was a purposely contrived illusion.

Ms. Tippett: But in which we all happily colluded, because they were many of them pleasant illusions.

Mr. Palmer: Yeah, exactly. I'll give you a quick example. I spoke at a recent retreat I did with the CEO of a very, very large publicly traded firm. This was on the day after the Dow Jones first fell to its new all-time low, a year to the day after it set its all-time high.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Palmer: And I said, 'Help me. Help me understand what's happening here.' And I think this is a very interesting parallel. He said, among other things, all of the markets in which the U.S. operates primarily are what he called mature markets. He said 25 years ago they were not mature markets, they were markets in which real growth was possible. And during that 25-year period, stockholders became accustomed to rapidly rising rates of return and they kept demanding that, despite the fact that these markets were maturing to a place where no more growth is possible. I know what that means. I'm almost 70 years old and I'm starting to shrink.

[Laughter]

Mr. Palmer: I'm not growing anymore. But he said when shareholders continue to demand the same kind of growth in a mature market that they experienced before it matured, there are only two possible ways to create the illusion of growth. One is to cook the books. That's the Enron answer. And the other is to gobble up some portion of a competitor's market, claim it for a while, telling your stockholders that this is real growth, knowing all the while that sooner or later another competitor is going to gobble it back up from you. So you create the illusion of growth by in effect sort of eating your young. And those were among the market illusions that all of us bought into because why? We enjoy feeling fat and happy even if we really aren't? Because of the same reasons I guess that I allowed myself to get so inflated in various ways that a fall was inevitable.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: Quaker author and educator Parker Palmer. I'm Krista Tippett, and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today, "Repossessing Virtue: Parker Palmer on Economic Crisis, Morality, and Meaning.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: Of recent upheavals in the economy, from financial services to housing to retail sales, Parker Palmer has written this: "At some level most of us knew they were coming. Who doesn't know that a society in which the rich get richer while the poor get poorer is a society that will some day have to pay the piper? Who doesn't know that an economic system that encourages us to live beyond our means and refuses to regulate greed is one in which our avarice will come back to bite us? Who doesn't know that at every level of life, from personal to global to cosmic, what goes around comes around?" He continues, "The problem is not that we don't possess a capacity to know these things. If we didn't, we wouldn't have all the colloquialisms I just used. The problem is that the knowledge we need, like the seismic shifts that create eruptions, originates underground. It comes from a place within us deeper than our intellects."

So I asked Parker Palmer about this insistence that most of us knew our economic life of recent years was not sustainable. Why, I wondered, do we suspend this kind of knowledge? And how did we suspend it in this particular economic moment, bringing on a crisis that threatens to be all-encompassing?

Mr. Palmer: It seems to me that one of the commonest features of human life is what I sometimes call secrets hidden in plain sight, things we know but don't want to know and thus find systematic ways of evading or ignoring or denying. And I suppose the fundamental answer as to why we do that is that if we knew these things we would have to change our lives, and we don't want to change our lives.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Palmer: And the same is true, I think, on a societal level, on an institutional level. Change is painful, and we don't want to know what we know because it would take us right up to the edge of change. And a lot of this kind of knowledge is, in fact, I think secrets hidden in plain sight.

I'll give you a quick example from another realm. One of the breakthrough studies recently done in what makes schools successful on behalf of kids is a factor they call "relational trust." They found that if a building is full of people who trust each other, you're going to get great outcomes for kids even if that school is unfairly deprived of the resources it needs. Because if people trust each other, they will come into community, they will generate abundance, they will love the kids and love each other, and good education will emerge. If a building is full of people who don't trust each other, you can throw a lot of money at them, state-of-the-art curriculum and teaching technique, and not much good will come out the other end. Well, this is a breakthrough study done by two scholars from a notable university …

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Palmer: … and you have to say, well, duh.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Palmer: Who doesn't know that?

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Palmer: Well, we don't know it collectively, because trust building is hard to do. It requires an investment of the heart.

Ms. Tippett: Another kind of investment.

Mr. Palmer: Yeah. It's a lot easier to try to get a grant or beg the feds for more money or bring in the latest dog and pony show from the curricular experts. A lot easier to do that, because it's all arm's-length stuff. But when we're challenged to invest ourselves, we shy away from that challenge because it means taking risks. It means making ourselves vulnerable. It means trying to speak the truth. It means a whole lot of things that we don't want to do. And so we're being looked at, we're being seen into, by these great and fundamental forces that challenge us to change, and those forces are forces of the heart. They're forces that involve us coming closer to our own reality and closer to our responsibility for one another. Obviously, the same thing applies in this economic situation.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Palmer: I actually see an opportunity in this economic crisis for people to become more mutually resourceful, one with another.

Ms. Tippett: Right. Something that struck me as so ironic and is really coming back to me as I listen to you, I mean, when you talk about investments like knowing ourselves, like investing in relationship trust, what is communal, you know, those words don't settle very well in our culture. They can easily sound squishy and abstract and touchy-feely and not as real as something like economics, as facts and logic. But I think one of the great ironies, or, again, you know, to use the phrase used a moment ago, one of the great secrets hidden in plain sight of what's happening now in the economy is the economic concepts and theories, what it was presented as fact and logic was as fanciful as Narnia. I mean, we have been dealing in a world of illogic and illusion presented as fact and logic, and I wonder if we take that seriously, if some of these concepts that you're talking about of the heart and of community, of trust, of relational trust, can we begin to see some of those things as more real.

Mr. Palmer: Well, yes. I think that that's absolutely an opportunity here. And let's probe a little bit on that one, because the astonishing fact is that we have a lot of facts backing up the reality and power of the emotional, the intuitive, the nonrational, as well as those objective empirical factors that we're so dependent upon or that we constantly turn to. You know, the emotional component in any workplace is very real and very powerful and often works to our disadvantage.

Let me give this example from corporate life and the world of high finance and indeed the world of government itself. There are a lot of people working those territories who knew, not just instinctively, but factually, what was going on. There were people who actually understood the mathematics behind these bogus subprime mortgages. What was it that kept those people from saying the emperor has no clothes?

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Palmer: Well, I can name at least two emotions. One is fear of what happens to whistleblowers in our institutions and our society, which is that they get marginalized at least and they lose their jobs and all future opportunities in that line of work at worst.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Palmer: And the other emotion of course is the emotion called greed, which is that somehow I have not only a right, but an absolute need to claim more than my share out of this, and if someone else suffers I really don't give a hoot. Let the devil take the hindmost. Now, those have to do with the inner dynamics of a person's life, and it truly baffles me as to why in this society we continue to think that all reality and all power in terms of what drives human affairs lies in these external objective factors like policy and institutional arrangement and money when in fact there is an equally real and powerful set of drivers of human history that reside within us in the dynamics of the human heart. Which to me is not a vague and abstract phrase or a sentimental phrase or mere metaphor; it's actually something that you can work with, that you can discipline, that you can form, that you can focus, and you can deploy to good or bad effect in the world.

Ms. Tippett: Quaker educator and author Parker Palmer.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: I've spoken a lot over the years with people who recall how in the 1960s, 1970s, as American culture grew more diverse than it had ever been before, an expression of tolerance was kind of compartmentalizing, leaving your ethical values, your religious values, your spiritual sensibility, kind of checking it at the door of common spaces, like our places of work. Do you think that the realm of business, because I know you've worked with a lot of people in many kinds of places of work over the years, do you feel that what we're seeing now in terms of the economic meltdown is kind of the end of one phase? Is there some kind of evolution taking place where this inner life also assumes a new place in our working lives?

Mr. Palmer: I believe that, but I believe that in the world of business what you can point to at the moment is not a large-scale grassroots movement. You can rather point to the harbingers of a new awareness, kind of straws in the wind. I would say that in academia this awareness of the power of religion, the power of spirituality, the power of the inner life, has rather been forced upon people, because if you're a historian these days or a political scientist or a sociologist, you really can't do much work without coming to terms with the relevance and fundamental power of those factors in moving all of the systems that you're looking at. And, you know, academia is struggling to take off the blinders. So in the business community, I think there is a growing awareness that a lot of the literature that has had to do with business ethics and a lot of the education in business schools that's had to do with ethics has been frosting on the cake. And I think there is a new awareness that what got us into this mess is not only the lack of regulation of the lesser angels of our nature …

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Palmer: … but the fact that we have those lesser angels and that they have enormous power. At the same time, once you see that, you also start to see the possibility that the better angels of our nature that Abraham Lincoln talked about and tried to invoke and evoke as the Civil War came to a close, that those angels are real too and that we have some very fundamental groundwork to do in our culture about the notion that you can educate the heart as much as you can educate the mind. I have real hope, and part of the reason for my hope is that there is at least one other very hard-nosed field where these lessons have already been taken to heart and rather thoroughly implemented and that's the world of medical education.

Ms. Tippett: Right. Right.

Mr. Palmer: There is absolutely no question that the best medical educators — and there are lots and lots of them in this country — now understand that …

Ms. Tippett: The human spirit is a factor …

Mr. Palmer: The human spirit is a factor.

Ms. Tippett: … that must reckoned with.

Mr. Palmer: Exactly. And that a doctor who is heartless, who treats patients as objects or machines to be fixed and repaired rather than as human beings whose full spiritual, psychological, and mental powers need to be invoked in the healing process, that such a doctor is not a real healer.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Palmer: There is clinical evidence to that effect. Well, if it can happen in medicine, which is a notoriously hard-nosed, show-me-the-facts field, I believe it can happen in business as well. And at this point, you know, we're at one of those interesting points in history that I've always been fascinated with where self-interest and idealism converge.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: Parker Palmer. We're calling our ongoing exploration of the economic crisis "Repossessing Virtue." As part of that, we're asking several of our former guests how they're experiencing our economic present in moral, ethical, and spiritual terms. Religious historian Martin Marty sees all crises as moral crises. Esther Sternberg, a scientist who researches stress, reflects on our economic present in biological terms. Swiss banker Prabhu Guptara says that a whole industry was created that should never have come into being. And all of them see the economic downturn as an opportunity to revisit fundamental questions of how we conduct our lives.

Hear physician and author Rachel Naomi Remen identify some of these questions.

Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen: The thing that interests me about this are the questions that are coming up in the minds of people. People haven't thought about these things quite in this way, and the questions are very interesting questions. You have questions like this: What can be trusted? What can be trusted? What will sustain me? What do I really need in order to live? These are questions that you ask yourself almost on a daily basis these days because of the economy, but what's so interesting to me is these are profoundly spiritual questions. These are the questions one asks to one's self just before you initiate a spiritual search.

Ms. Tippett: Listen to all of these perspectives online at speakingoffaith.org and add your own. What moral and spiritual resources, what virtues, do you bring to approaching the economic crisis in your own life with colleagues at work, in your family, in your religious or other community settings? We'll be selecting some of your essays to record and presenting them within our broad collection of wisdom and lived experience, "Repossessing Virtue." Look for that series and the Share Your Story link on our home page, speakingoffaith.org.

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: After a short break, Parker Palmer on how spiritual traditions might distinctively inform and enrich our common life as we move through and beyond economic upheaval.

I'm Krista Tippett. Stay with us. Speaking of Faith comes to you from American Public Media.

[Announcements]

Ms. Tippett: Welcome back to Speaking of Faith, public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. I'm Krista Tippett. Today, "Repossessing Virtue: Parker Palmer on Economic Crisis, Morality, and Meaning."

Parker Palmer is an author and public intellectual. He works with people from all spheres of life at the intersection of spirituality, professional life, and social change. We've been exploring human and spiritual aspects of economic downturn and life beyond it. Parker Palmer believes that now as much as ever before, Western culture must acknowledge that the inner world, the inner life of human beings, is a source of reality and power.

I think for the rest of our time, what I'd like to talk about is not narrowly speaking the realm of business, but how this realm of spirituality, spiritual traditions — which you — you're Quaker but you speak about these things very broadly and you're always in conversation with many different kinds of people — how this can be an edifying part of our individual and communal discernment in terms of what has happened to us economically and how we move forward from here. And, you know, just in terms of community, you've often used this word the "art" of community, and I do think that is one thing that our religious traditions at their best have cultivated across the centuries and bring us back to. I've also been, just for myself as I watch this very frightening thing unfold in economy, I'm wondering do we all need to start preparing to help pick up the people around us who fall — who fall through? Because, you know, as much as you and I can have a beautiful conversation about the virtue that might come out of this, there is going to be such real suffering around us.

Mr. Palmer: Yeah, there already is, isn't there?

Ms. Tippett: And there is, yeah. Yeah.

Mr. Palmer: Yeah, there already is. When you realize how many American families are in default on their mortgages, how many jobs are being lost, how many kids are not going to be going to college in the fall …

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Palmer: … because the money isn't there, you start to get a measure of the suffering that's already happened. And that's going to have downstream consequences for who knows how many years. It's going to be more than one or two. And so, absolutely, it falls to all of our communities, I think, our religious communities, our educational communities, our civic communities, to finally take small steps towards measuring up to that great definition of a great society, that a society's greatness is not to be measured by how well the strongest in its midst can do, but by how well it takes care of the weakest in its midst. And we have a lot of people who have now been weakened by forces beyond their control, sometimes by bad decisions of their own making. But those decisions were often made in the midst of smoke and mirrors that were created by powerful institutions and individuals in our society. So there is this collective responsibility.

Ms. Tippett: Right. As a Quaker, the concept of nonviolence is important to you, and I wonder how you think about violence and nonviolence as a very kind of ordinary part of our economic life and how is this concept of nonviolence coming to you in terms of thinking about where we've gotten to in our economy and again how we move forward out of this.

Mr. Palmer: What I learned early on from some great teachers is that violence is not just a matter of dropping a bomb on someone or shooting a bullet at them or hitting them in the face. Violence is done whenever we violate the identity and integrity of the other. Violence is done when we demean, marginalize, dismiss, rendering other people irrelevant to our lives or even less than human. Violence is done when we simply don't care or don't look hard enough to evoke our caring for another.

So for me, living a nonviolent life means, first of all, doing what's within my reach so that every day in every way in every relationship I have, I'm trying to ask the question how is it that I am called to honor the identity and integrity of this person? Whether that's a person less powerful than I am or a person more powerful than I am. Sometimes that's as simple as being called to listen to this person's story. Sometimes it's a more complicated matter of finding a student, as happens to me from time to time, who can't take a next step in life, because they don't have the $500 they need to make that experience possible and knowing that I do have $500 that I could live without and finding a way to make a gift that doesn't impose a burden on that person. I just think there's a thousand different ways that we can practice nonviolence in this fundamental sense of honoring the other's identity and integrity without having to be Rockefellers or Fords or big-time philanthropists in the world, and without having to have traditional political power. Now, I think it's urgent that we keep working with each other to reframe politics as a very local act, as simple acts of relationship building and community building that empower people, because there's more power in coming together than there is in hiding out all alone.

Ms. Tippett: Quaker author and educator Parker Palmer. I'm Krista Tippett, and this is Speaking of Faith from American Public Media. Today, "Repossessing Virtue: Parker Palmer on Economic Crisis, Morality, and Meaning."

(Sound bite of music)

Ms. Tippett: You know, the terms "scarcity" and "abundance" are also words, concepts, you've reflected on across the years. These are more spiritual terms, a way in which language can take us out of our boxes of just talking about poverty and wealth. So reflect with me on how you're thinking about scarcity and abundance and how we imagine those things and how we live them as virtues for this time we're moving into now.

Mr. Palmer: Well, I told you a little bit of the story of growing up in an affluent suburb with a father whose not only attitudes, but behavior and way of forming my sisters and me was very countercultural to that affluence. And one of the things that he gave me eyes to see, even when I was young, was that just because you had a bank account full of money and a larder full of food, didn't mean that you had abundance or experienced abundance, because a lot of people in that community, I started to see at a young age, were running scared. They were running scared that as much as they had they needed more. And beneath that was the fear that if their bank account ever emptied or their larder ever ran out, there would be no one there for them. And they were right, because they weren't in that constant daily act of reweaving community of mutual aid, mutual knowing, mutual assistance, which is itself the abundance that we seek.

I think the story of human greed is very simple. It's the story that you can never have enough stuff. Once you go down the path that stuff is where my meaning lies, you can never have enough of it. But what we're really looking for, I think, is the kind of abundance that comes from knowing that we are willing to feed one another, knowing that we are in those generative relationships where when you need my support, I'm there to offer it as best I can and when I need yours, the same is true of you.

Ms. Tippett: But no one wants to — you know, that's not a place — and I think this is humanly understandable — that we want to go. But I think of the post-war years in which my parents grew up, the point was not to be needy. And that is understandable. I think that one thing I've come to appreciate very much about spiritual traditions having a role in human life and therefore in our culture, is that they take mortality and finitude and frailty seriously and assume that they will be there, that those things are part of life. And our culture and I think our economy colluded in this, not for everyone, but for many people, in recent years in this illusion that things could just get better and better, that you could be safe from need.

Mr. Palmer: Yeah. Isn't it amazing that we do have a tendency to buy into the illusion that if we can just keep making more money we'll never die?

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Palmer: It's very odd, the power of that illusion over our lives. You know, I think you're absolutely right, that many of us, certainly of your age, of my age, grew up in a time when need was not cool.

Ms. Tippett: To be avoided at all cost.

Mr. Palmer: Right.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Palmer: Self-sufficiency …

Ms. Tippett: Right. Self-made man, the American ideal. Yeah.

Mr. Palmer: Exactly. That's the model. That's where you need to be going with life. But the truth of the matter is that underneath that patina of self-sufficiency, there has always been profound need. That's why we sell so many antidepressants and tranquilizers in this society. There is huge need underneath that illusion …

Ms. Tippett: Our affluence, yes.

Mr. Palmer: … of self-sufficiency. And there's as Leonard Cohen song of fairly recent vintage that has a great lyric in it that actually simply updates in more contemporary musical terms what the spiritual traditions have said for a long time. The lyric goes like this: "Forget your perfect offering. Ring the bell that still can ring. There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." And it's in those cracks that we connect with each other. It's in the brokenness that we connect with each other and that we generate very mysteriously the abundance called hope that actually can make us move our feet and move our hands and move our minds towards something better in very practical terms.

Ms. Tippett: You know, you note that there is a core message in all the great spiritual traditions and that is "Be not afraid." Wouldn't that be folly now not to be afraid?

Mr. Palmer: I actually think it would be folly not to hear that message properly.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Palmer: I think what the message says, and it's actually one, Krista, as you know, that I've thought about a lot.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Palmer: "Be not afraid" is something I've thought about a lot in my life. When I first heard that biblical admonition "be not afraid," I really found it very condemning of me because I have fear in me. I always have and I suspect I always will. I know I always will. At age 70, you know certain things about yourself that you can no longer pretend that you can go to a workshop and change.

Ms. Tippett: That you might outgrow it. Yeah.

[Laughter]

Mr. Palmer: Yeah, right. So I have that fear. When I listened more carefully to the words "be not afraid," I realized that they didn't say you can't have fear. They say instead you don't need to be your fear. And I think there's a big, big difference. That if you learn your inner landscape well enough, you realize, yes, there's a piece of turf in there called fear. And you can choose to stand there if you want, but there are other places in that inner landscape where you can stand as well if you work at it. You can stand in a place of hope. You can stand in a place of fellow feeling. You can stand in a place of appreciation of beauty. You can stand in a place of being aware of your own mortality, mindful of the simple fact that you are going to die, which, as you cultivate it, kind of relativizes a lot of other things.

You can choose where you stand within yourself if you know your inner landscape, where you stand as you move toward other people, the news of the day, the events of your own life, the situation of the moment. Those are actually choices that you can make. They're not always easy, but they're impossible if you're not reflective about your own inner dynamics. Once you become reflective there comes with that the possibility of making choices and then the next frontier is the courage to make good choices about that, to move from a place in yourself, and the way I like to say it to myself is to choose to move from a place of myself that is more likely to have life-giving results for me and other people than death-dealing results. There's no perfection in that. You screw up. But you can also stand in a place of self-forgiveness, which is also somewhere in there, and cut yourself some slack and try it again.

(Sound bite of music, Leonard Cohen's "Anthem")

Leonard Cohen: (Singing) Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in.

Ms. Tippett: You told me when we spoke a couple of weeks ago that you had this retreat right as the economy started to falter, and there were people there who were leaders, were business leaders, and part of the dialogue that's taken place in this immediate period is a blame game, right? And it's easy to fall into characterizing this as predators versus victims and the greedy leaders versus the innocent. You said to me that it had been very important and instructive for you, that you saw the human dynamics of this crisis differently. And so I'm just curious about what you learned and how that changed your perspective even as you thought about the ethical and moral and spiritual implications of this economic crisis.

Mr. Palmer: My perspective on these leaders and their work in the world?

Ms. Tippett: Mm-hmm. Or what you heard from them, what you learned from them that shifted your perception, you know, as you started to make sense of it for yourself.

Mr. Palmer: Well, they came into that retreat, I thought, very anxious, some of them. And even on the edge of a kind of, not clinical, but just situational, existential depression …

Ms. Tippett: Yeah.

Mr. Palmer: … as they were watching their world fall apart and surely thinking about the stockholders back home with whom they'd have to be dealing next week or in the case of one person the multimillion dollar cuts that this person was going to have to make in their operation along with lots and lots of staff. These are heavy burdens on a thoughtful individual.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Palmer: And so I saw this anxious kind of defensive closed-down set of hearts really open to each other during the course of this weekend. And I will read just very briefly a couple of lines from a journal that one of these leaders kept and gave me permission to publish in the article that you mentioned earlier. This person says: "Arriving at the retreat, my heart was agitated. As I leave, it is still. Arriving at the retreat, I was blaming. As I leave, I am accepting responsibility. Arriving at the retreat, I was angry. As I leave, I have a sense of peace. Arriving at the retreat, I was focused on my own distress. As I leave, I am seeing beyond myself again. Arriving at the retreat, I was running from my pain. As I leave, I am allowing it to live in me. Arriving at the retreat, my angst was palpable. As I leave, I have hope about the present and the future."

Now, I just want to say that I don't know what this person will go ahead and do ethically, but I recognize in those words the foundations for ethical action, which are the foundations, for example, of a stilled heart or the foundations of no longer blaming, but accepting responsibility. And you know what's interesting about the economic ecology, or any ecology of our lives, is that there's always someone to blame, no matter what place you occupy in the ecosystem.

So what I've just read to you gives me hope, because in the short period of about three days, people carrying huge burdens given circumstances that allowed the heart to show up, the soul to show up, that allowed that shy soul, shy even in the most powerful and well-to-do people in our society to come out and speak a word of truth. And when that word of truth takes us back to the ground of our own being, back to our own responsibility, back to our own culpability, back to our own possibility of doing something life-giving rather than death-dealing, then I think we've taken at least a baby step towards what we all want, which is a society that works well for everyone. And we've made a contribution to it.

(Sound bite of music)

Kate Moos, managing producer: Parker Palmer is founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal. He speaks widely and lives in Madison, Wisconsin. His most recent book is A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.

Read Parker Palmer's essay on his recent conversations with business leaders and his own reflection on the economic terrors of our day. It's called "Trusting Our Deeper Knowing," and you'll find it on our Web site, speakingoffaith.org.

During the past year, we've created a space for listeners voices and stories to be told and heard online and on the air. We're calling it our First Person Initiative. And for the next few months through Ramadan, we'd like to invite our Muslim listeners to illustrate the complexities and diversity of the Muslim world, as it's often called, with your voices and stories. What do you find beautiful in Islam? What hopes, fears, and questions are on your mind as you ponder the future? Tell us how these things find expression in your daily life and in your religious practice, including the observance of Ramadan. Find the Share Your Story link on our home page at speakingoffaith.org.

(Sound bite of music)

Kate Moos: The senior producer of Speaking of Faith is Mitch Hanley, with producers Colleen Scheck and Nancy Rosenbaum. Our technical director is John Scherf. Our online editor is Trent Gilliss, with Web producer Andrew Dayton. Krista Tippett is the host of Speaking of Faith. And I'm Kate Moos, managing producer.

source: http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/rv-palmer/transcript.shtml

You can listen to this interview at the following URL: http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/rv-palmer/index.shtml

The Hidden Benefits of Helping

The family and community of Mor Gregorios and St. Mary the Protectress Orthodox Church hope you are able to join us this Sunday for the Divine Liturgy.  The celebration starts at 10:30 AM.  We are located at 1000 South Michigan Street, Plymouth, Indiana.  Fellowship and lunch follows the Liturgy.

The Mor Gregorios Community needs your help to continue to help those we serve.   We need volunteers to assist at the community center and we need financial support.  The principle program of the Mor Gregorios Community Center is the employment program.  Volunteers help folks file their unemployment claims online, and file their weekly reports.  Help is also provided with job searches, interviewing skills, and resume preparation.

We can make a difference in the lives of our friends and neighbors.  To find out how call the Mor Gregorios Community Center at 574-540-2048, or email us at monastery@synesius.com.

Without your help these important programs can not continue.  If you want some reason why you should, here are some benefits of helping;


(Adapted from Helping You is Helping Me by Virgil Gulker (World Vision, Inc., 1993), pp. 29-38. Used with permission.)
 
 

   1. Volunteers get a kick out of helping others. There is just something about helping others that literally makes people feel good. In a study published in Psychology Today, the main sensations reported while volunteering were: “high”, “stronger, more energetic”, “calmer, less depressed,” and a “greater sense of self worth.” Volunteers are often excited about helping others and sending the message that people care.

 

   2. Volunteers gain a sense of impact or significance not always available through career or other responsibilities. While family and work responsibilities provide a deep satisfaction, there is often something missing in our experience of life.  Volunteering just a few hours a week to help others can make a real difference and provide a much needed sense of accomplishment. Volunteers can find fulfillment in an opportunity to share high level skills or more often, just being there for someone.

 

   3. Volunteering Enhances Employability. Volunteering provides the side benefit of a valuable work experience. It is a real opportunity to provide invaluable help while broadening your network of potential references and employers.

 

   4. Volunteering helps you to discover what color your parachute is. “Discovering the color of your parachute” is the process of exploring your vocational strengths and interests. For those entering the workforce or exploring a career change, volunteering is an excellent opportunity to field-test your interests and discover new abilities.

 

   5. Volunteering helps turn negative life experiences into strengths. When you consider how you may be able to help others, don’t simply think about what you may be good at, think about what you have been through. People in tough circumstances often need to talk to others who will listen with real understanding and speak to their concerns with conviction and authority.  Your failures and negative experiences may hold the key to your effectiveness in helping others.

 

   6. Volunteering can provide a break from preoccupation with your own problems. Working with the less fortunate allows you to change your whole frame of reference and begin to focus on what you have rather than what you lack. Volunteering often allows you to move beyond your own problems and sense of dissatisfaction to focus on the needs of others.

 

   7. Volunteering provides an advanced degree in the school of life. Volunteers often tell of invaluable lessons learned from those they are helping. Sharing in the sufferings, failures and triumphs of others who are in need can provide you with a more profound and diverse perspective on life.

source: http://www.urbanministry.org/wiki/hidden-benefits-helping

--
Posted By  Very Rev. Dr. Theodosius Walker  to  Peace - Justice - Orthodox Christianity <http://orthodoxpeacejustice.blogspot.com/2009/07/hidden-benefits-of-helping.html>   at  7/30/2009 02:04:00 PM

------ End of Forwarded Message