The Human Givens Institute
| The limits of tolerance: ethics and human nature | |||
Continued.... Return to beginning of article << who is able to take an active role in their life throughout childhood or who has the ability to work to support them. Or might it be taken into account that a particular financially secure, physically and emotionally healthy 60 year old woman who has a younger husband and the support of her family could be a more competent parent than a younger woman who is alone, mentally unstable, earns no income and often uses what money she has to buy drugs? Taking the wider view, and establishing the different competing needs and interests involved, leads us to strive to understand each situation in which we find ourselves, rather than relying on belief systems for resolving them. Operating out of a belief system means blindly applying rules without questioning their applicability. Although beliefs ‘live on’, from generation to generation, they are, in themselves, dead things, preventing the pushing outwards of mental boundaries. Ethics and emotional arousal Issues such as the ‘right’ to have a child or the ‘right’ to a homeland generate an enormous amount of emotion. But taking the wider perspective requires objectivity — detachment. This is impossible unless we are in a state of low emotional arousal. As is now well understood, the more emotional we are, the more the rational part of the brain is over-whelmed and we are forced back onto the binary responses of the emotional brain — fight or flight. Emotional arousal locks us into one-track thinking, which can have survival value in certain circumstances but, in our complex world today, is rarely helpful for dealing with difficult problems. When emotional, we think in black and white, all or nothing, terms. Misunderstandings occur. Feelings of being out of control develop. We tend to misuse our imagination, becoming so anxious about change or fearful of the unknown that we cannot meet challenges or take risks. We may worry constantly about loss of power or status; develop a morbid fear of failing, illness or death; begin to doubt our abilities and competence; become anxious and depressed. Because emotional arousal makes us inflexible, we suffer disappointment when things do not work out as we expect or as we feel they should. In effect, being governed by emotion means being consumed by our own needs. In such a state, we cannot solve ethical dilemmas. Nor, when our emotions are strongly bound up in an ethical problem, are we capable of recognising that someone who does not share our view is not necessarily the ‘enemy’ or the ‘opposition’; and that if, in fact, they are standing back and taking an objective view, they are better equipped than we are to come up with a fair solution. For instance, some pressure groups might clamour for an individual’s right to die when suffering from a debilitating incurable illness, and refuse to hear any dissenting voice. Yet, someone with knowledge who is unemotionally involved might usefully point out that many incurably ill people are depressed and that, if helped to lift the depression, they no longer want to die. Solving difficult dilemmas that have moral or ethical aspects takes time. We have to be able to be calm and enable answers to come to us. As neuro-scientist John Ratey says in his book A User’s Guide to the Brain, “If one acts before allowing oneself time to think of the consequences, there is no willpower or self control. Values and goals are automatically ignored in the maelstrom of activity.”(3) Two and a half thousand years earlier, Aristotle and Plato also taught that moral development is achieved by educating children to modulate their emotions, saying, “The moral virtues are engendered in us neither by, nor contrary to, nature; we are constituted by nature to receive them, but their full development is due to habit. So it is a matter of no little importance what sort of habits we form from the earliest age — education makes a vast difference, or rather all the difference in the world.” Knowing where to go Knowledge is not found in our conscious intellect. It is through our intellect that we refine our perceptions and come to understand. But when we understand something our state of knowing is unconscious. For instance, it takes conscious effort to learn a new skill, such as driving a car. Whilst learning we consciously think about every step required — the gear changes, signalling, judging distances, trying to analyse comparative speeds and so on. But there comes a moment when that conscious effort falls away. We instinctively pattern match to the required actions. Driving becomes automatic — unconscious. At that point, driving has become part of our intelligence. We know how to do it and might even be hard put consciously to describe all the elements involved. The knowledge only fully manifests itself when we get into a car and drive it. We have probably all had experiences when we have, perhaps to our own surprise, just ‘known’ what to do or ‘known’ that something is so. One of my colleagues has a relative who was a property developer. He instinctively knew which properties in what state of disrepair to buy, and his judgement was rarely wrong. If, in an operating theatre, a sudden life-threatening situation develops and others are starting to panic, a particular surgeon may know exactly what needs to be done, and be able to stay calm and do it. Similarly, we might just suddenly know the right life course to take, when faced with major conflicting options. This kind of unconscious knowledge, which enables us to act objectively, unencumbered by social conditioning or inappropriate emotional responses, is perhaps what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead was referring to when he said, “Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”(5) It could be that consciousness evolved to help us focus more keenly on the world and question and analyse it, to help us get our needs met more efficiently and effectively. It is certainly a tool to solve problems. If knowledge is found in the sum of the richness of the unconscious pattern-matching processes which go on in our brains, then the work of consciousness is to help the person look for more effective patterns to match to, to extend and enrich unconscious knowledge. The more successfully we do this, the more emotion serves consciousness and perception rather than controlling it. Understanding human nature To have our best hope of acting ethically, as individuals, as members of a community or as members of a profession, we have to begin by gaining a better understanding of ourselves. We need to understand the processes of human conditioning; how ideologies restrict understanding; how the brain/mind/body system works; how to further refine perceptions; how emotional needs can be met without trespassing on the freedoms of others; and how best to use the resources given to us by nature to do so. Quite simply, we need to study the science of human nature, and the advances in knowledge about behaviour, biology and the brain that have accumulated in the last few decades. In the process, we have to face the absurdities of selfish consumerism, human egoism, the blind certainties of dogmatic science and fundamentalist religious belief, including the grand unifying pessimism inherent in determinism (as expressed in the selfish gene theory), the simple ‘cause and effect’ ideas of some evolutionary theorists, and reliance on scientific reductionism. Post-modernism (which asserts that all opinions are of equal value, all thought is equally relevant and that there are no boundaries, no rules, no hierarchies, no objective reality, and which infects the arts, education, social policy making, and philosophy) also needs challenging. Facing up to this may be more urgent than we realise. In the heady optimism of the mid-1960s, Idries Shah struck a sober note quite at odds with the naive but fashionable notion that to resolve any conflict, ‘all you need is love’. He said, “Tolerance and trying to understand others, until recently a luxury, has today become a necessity. This is because, unless we can realise that we and others are generally behaving as we do because of inculcated biases over which we have no control, while we imagine that they are our own opinions, we might do something which will bring about the destruction of all of us.”(6) His words are all too apposite now. Developing an internal monitor As a complex society, we will always find ourselves struggling with major ethical dilemmas, as there are multiple variables to everything. There are, however, three ethical safeguards in working from the human givens approach. First, professionalism and practice are based on the requirements of individual circumstances, rather than dogma and theory. It cannot be said too often that circumstances alter cases, and that what is appropriate in one instance may be inappropriate in another apparently similar one. Second, it focuses attention on looking largely at patterns and processes rather than content — the needs that have to be met in a situation to improve it, rather than the minute details of what maintains it. This is a mental posture which usefully helps keep us detached, vigilant, and focusing outwards, so that our own emotions do not become muddled up with those of patients/pupils/clients/colleagues or whomever we are concerned with. Thirdly, it is understood that uncertainties or vulnerabilities within us can easily be triggered, through pattern matching, by an event or emotional story we read or hear. When this happens, inevitably we are no longer impartial or objective in our responses. For instance, a counsellor who is fearful of breast cancer, because of a raised family risk, may find herself being overly reassuring or, conversely, unwilling to address the concerns of a client in a similar position. If people are unaware of this unconscious pattern-matching process, they may misinterpret the reason for their own reactions — perhaps assuming it is a legitimate response to the situation being considered, rather than the result of their own aroused emotions — and thus make avoidable errors of judgement. On the Human Givens Diploma Course run by MindFields College, we stress that we are first of all responsible for ourselves. We have to behave ethically towards ourselves if we are to behave ethically towards others, and we are behaving unethically towards ourselves if we allow any single need to dominate at the expense of others. For example, the development of any addictive behaviour, (whether workaholism, substance abuse, gambling, shopaholism, sex, or lust after money, information, gossip, power, attention or status) cannot but interfere with our personal and professional relationships. If our own needs are out of balance, or we have so many emotional demands on us that we have little spare capacity left, we cannot reliably behave ethically towards other people or be effective therapists, managers or teachers. Over the last 50 years there has been a partial breakdown in the ethical and moral systems (legal, educational and religious) that society once relied upon to maintain stability. Paradoxically, the breakdown process has to happen. Reliance on rigid belief systems eventually makes us too inflexible — and therefore too vulnerable — to survive in a rapidly changing world. New ideas and information can only permeate a society if it does not rigidly exclude such inputs. While very many people are growing and flourishing, others are not adapting well to the rapid way the world is changing. Some appear unable to take responsibility for their actions. They have become fodder for the cult of passive consumerism. Consequences include the development of the ‘victim culture’, with people becoming obsessed with ‘rights’ and blame; the massively increasing numbers of people suffering mental disorders — now affecting a fifth of the population; — loneliness and a worldwide rise in suicide rates. It is now enormously important, therefore, that we develop and learn to use well our innate resources, to steer ourselves and our society through the labyrinthine complexities of modern life.
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This article was first published in 2002 in Volume 9, No, 2 of the Human Givens journal.
IVAN TYRRELL is an experienced psychotherapist. He teaches effective counselling skills at MindFields College, was a founding member of the European Therapy Studies Institute (ETSI) and co-developer of the human givens approach. He is a Fellow of the Human Givens Institute. .
For more information on ethics also see: > The interview: 'Knowledge beyond words: confusion and ethics'
For more information on ethics also see: > The interview: 'Knowledge beyond words: confusion and ethics'
For more information on ethics also see: > The interview: 'Knowledge beyond words: confusion and ethics'
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