The School of Life

Roman Krznaric on How to be a Muslim, a Hindu, a Christian and a Jew

There is an intriguing thesis at the heart of Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. The Harvard psychologist argues – contrary to popular opinion – that humankind has become progressively less violent over the past few thousand years. We might feel surrounded by terrorism, civil wars and gun crime today, but murder and warfare is in fact on the decline. And the reason? One of Pinker's key explanations is the rise of empathy as a force for social change: we are now more likely to look at the world through other people's eyes, and consequently take action on their behalves.

What I find missing in Pinker's worthy tome – and books which make a similar argument, such as Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization – is a clear steer on how we can expand our capacity to empathise in everyday life. How exactly can we get better at it? And how can we integrate it into the way we approach the art of living? An answer lies not in the musings of psychologists or all those neuroscientists who have become obsessed with finding the empathic hotspots in our brains, but in the ideas of one of the great empathic adventurers of the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi.

His philosophy of empathy is embodied in what is known as 'Gandhi's talisman':

I will give you a talisman. Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? Will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away.

The talisman contains a moral framework that each of us can choose to live by: to consider the perspective of the most marginal members of society when making decisions on ethical issues, and to ensure they benefit in some way. Gandhi challenges us to imagine ourselves into the lives of people whose everyday existence might be vastly different from our own. Beyond this, the talisman is a guide to confronting our existential difficulties. When we feel paralysed by doubt or entangled in personal problems to the extent that we don't know what to do, we can find liberation and direction through an act of empathetic imagining. The talisman may provide clarity in our state of confusion or indecision. 

Gandhi lived out his empathic ideals. He worked as a nurse in South Africa as a young man: during the Zulu rebellion in Natal, he nursed Zulus who had been flogged and left by the British, whose regular nurses refused to attend them. His experiments living on ashrams were also an exercise in stepping into other people's shoes. 'Our ambition was to live the life of the poorest people,' he said. That's why he tended goats and cleaned toilets, alongside leading the resistance against British rule in India.

But his great originality was to stress the importance of empathising with one's enemies. During the growing conflict between Hindus and Muslims in the years leading up to independence in 1947, he declared, 'I am a Muslim! And a Hindu, and a Christian and a Jew'.

The half million deaths that occurred during partition in violence between Hindus and Muslims showed that the moral challenge of empathising with one's adversaries was too great in that turbulent moment in history. But I still think we can learn from Gandhi's approach. Trying to look through the eyes of those whose views we don't agree with – whether it is a nasty boss at work, an argumentative sibling, or a neighbour who does not share our religious creed – has the potential not only to challenge our own prejudices and forge social tolerance, but can create new and nurturing human bonds in our lives.

Roman Krznaric is hosting The School of Life's Curry With Gandhi on 25 October. His new book, The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live, will be published by Profile Books in January 2012. He blogs on empathy at www.outrospection.org

Lawrence Krauss on Cosmic Connections

"Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand.

It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust.

You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time.

They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode.

So, forget Jesus.

The stars died so that you could be here today."

 Lawrence Krauss, Professor of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona University, will lead our next sermon on Sunday 16 October, to show how each of us is connected to the cosmos in ways we’d never imagine. From the stardust we’re made of, to the atoms we breathe, to the curving of space time that governs the way we make our way through traffic jams, to time travel itself. Ordinary life just isn’t that ordinary.

For more information and to book tickets please go to: www.theschooloflife.com/Sermons/Lawrence-Krauss-on-Cosmic-Connections

Rachel Heller and Amir Levine on Attachment Styles

How would you react to the following scenarios?

• You call your date/partner and after the first ring, you're transferred to voice mail.

Do you barely notice or do you assume s/he is purposely ignoring you?

• You're sitting in an experiment room and suddenly you notice smoke seeping out of the computer? 

Do you assume everything's under control or do you immediately alert those around you to  the imminent danger?

• Your spouse buys you your favorite brand of coffee on the way home from work.

Do you feel gratitude or are you more likely to take this gesture for granted?

What all these scenarios have in common is that your response is likely to vary depending on your attachment style. 

Attachment styles were first discovered by Mary Ainsworth in the context of the infant-parent bond.   She devised an experiment by which she observed children playing in a room with their mothers.  The infant's response to a series of separations/reunions from their mother determined their attachment style. 

Infants with a secure attachment style were able to use their mother as a secure base from which to explore the environment and derive comfort in times of stress. Anxious infants were too preoccupied with the mother's whereabouts to be easily soothed and Avoidant infants were too seemingly indifferent toward her to use her as a secure base.

A couple of decades later, researchers Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, both then from the University of Denver, set out to discover whether these three styles of relating in infancy continued into adulthood.  Their groundbreaking study confirmed that adults too fall into three attachment styles that influence the way they interact with their romantic partners:

• Secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving

• Anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back

• Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness.

Every person, whether he or she just started dating or has been married 40 years, falls into one of these categories (or more rarely into a combination of the latter two). Just over 50% are estimated to be secure, around 25% are avoidant and 20% are anxious.  The remaining 3-5% fall into the mixed anxious-avoidant category. 

During the past two decades since Hazan & Shaver's seminal paper, hundreds of scientific studies in a wide range of countries have carefully delineated the ways in which adult behave in romantic ties.  Understanding these styles is an easy and reliable way to understand and predict people's behaviour in romantic situations.

One of the most fascinating aspects of attachment research is the discovery that people with different attachment styles perceive situations in different and often opposing manners: They pay attention to different aspects of situations, they interpret them differently; even their brain activity is often remarkably different.

Gaining insight into adult attachment styles is akin to a having a road map to romantic behavior, not only others' but also your own.

And in case you were wondering:

If you interpret the transfer to voicemail as a rejection, you may well be anxious

If you alert others to the smoke hazard, it's likely you're anxious or avoidant but not secure

If you're unimpressed by your partner's coffee gift, it's more likely you're avoidant.

[Of course, in reality, no one criterion determines your attachment style but rather a combination of factors.  To discover your attachment style, go to: http://www.attachedthebook.com/compatibility-quiz/ 

 

Rachel Heller, M.A and Amir Levine, M.D are authors of 'Attached: Identify your attachment style and find your perfect match' (Published by Rodale). Visit www.attachedthebook.com

Charles Fernyhough on our internal dialogues

We are fans of thinking, here at The School of Life. There’s nothing we like more than to take the phone off the hook, switch off the computer and come over all pensive. We find we can think anywhere: walking down Marchmont Street, lazing in the bath or crushed together with fellow thinkers on the Piccadilly Line. There’s nothing you need for a good muse other than to be conscious, not too intoxicated, nor in immediate mortal peril. Thinking is an eminently versatile pastime.
 
But what is it, exactly? Which bits of your mental life does the term ‘thinking’ usefully describe? We have certain ideas about what this under-examined activity involves. When know when we are doing it, for example, and we can always report (presumably accurately) on what we are thinking about. Above all, thinking seems inextricably linked to language. Imagery, music and memory play their parts, but thinking is nothing so much as a conversation with oneself.
 
I would argue that thinking comes to have the qualities that it does because of the particular story of its emergence in childhood. Here, the best theory around is that of the Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky. Vygotsky argued that the thinking we do as adults bears traces of its emergence from social interactions early in life. Our dialogue with the self is an internalised version of the dialogues we had with other people, back when we were small.

To my mind, this raises some fascinating questions about the phenomenology of thinking. If thinking is an internalised dialogue, it should have a lot in common with social dialogues. How are we to find out? For a long time it was assumed that describing the emotional, perceptual and cognitive minutiae of conscious experience was best left to novelists and poets; it could not be the business of replicable, verifiable scientific inquiry. That has changed, though, not least because of the rise of phenomenological approaches to cognitive science (see Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi’s recent book on the topic, for example). Psychologists and philosophers are now asking questions about the subjectivity of consciousness that would have raised jeers a decade or two ago. This is a research programme we can all get involved with. What are your thoughts like? Are you a word-thinker or an image-thinker? Or would you say that your thoughts happen in some non-symbolic medium, a pure language of thought?
 
I will be saying more on this in my New Generation Thinkers essay on Radio 3 today. There is much more on the developmental stuff in my book The Baby in the Mirror and its associated blog, The Ladybird Papers. Start ruffling those brows now.

Charles Fernyhough was involved in developing The School of Life’s family course which will run on 15 and 16 November. Find out more HERE.
 
Charles discussed children’s thinking on Radio 3 at 11pm on Wednesday 5th November. You can listen again HERE. He is The School of Life's expert on childhood.