The Goodness of Humanity

I was listening to this CD today of a gathering I attended on New Year's, with a--well, let's just say non-traditional kind of teacher. One of the things that stood out to me today on the recording was when he said that when we cut ourselves off from another, when we fail to see the human hands that support us in the things that we touch, in the food that we eat, in the things that we buy, that it is our own humanity that is damaged. That when we let ourselves not care about them and the quality of their lives, we hurt ourselves.

I read an article some time ago, about a program where kids were given recycled computers in exchange for tutoring other kids. The author wrote a book (which I have not read), but it has a catchy title. "No More Throwaway People."

Part of a Van Jones speech used that same expression in the Awakening the Dreamer symposium I went to last week. The following is similar (if not the same) as what he said in the video clip I saw:

This country is 5 percent of the world's population. We produce 25 percent of the greenhouse gas pollution and we have 25 percent of the world's prisoners. Most of those prisoners are low-income people of color locked up for committing nonviolent crimes including drug offenses.

What ties those two stats together is an underlying ethic of disposability. We still have a society where we think we have throwaway stuff and throwaway people. We don't believe that's true.

We can only throw people away if we don't acknowledge them as people. People can only hurt others insofar as they can see those people are separate from themselves.

One of the other things on the CD was about how we tend to think of ourselves as individuals first, and people second, but that this way of thinking is wrongheaded. This came up in Stumbling on Happiness, too, the recent bestseller by the Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard. He said that we are really very alike as people; that we don't always recognize that, but we are. The things that comprise our individuality tend to get magnified and blown out of proportion.

Do you remember growing up and learning about all the terrible things that people had done to one another? And continue to do? How hard it was to believe? How it felt so wrong, so terrible? (I hope it wasn't just me that felt that way!) The Holocaust. World Wars. Murder. Rape. Nuclear weapons. What if it was so hard to believe because those things are not a true part of human nature? I know it's hard to believe, based on the record. But what if that were true? What if it's true that the only reason we have all those things is because we have allowed ourselves to believe that other people are not people as we are? And that if we change how we see--if enough of us change how we see (he said the magic number was 13%, believing a different way)--that we can change how things are?

What if?

Links:
Yes! Magazine article: Unleashing our Hidden Wealth
Complete Van Jones transcript
Stumbling on Happiness website
Carol and Carruch